Pieces of the Whole

Its hard to describe your position in life to anyone outside of your small sphere of peer-validated existence.  As a child I would wonder about adults; watch them in their strange ways laughing at things that had no inherent humor or creating great distress out of simple issues.  Strange creatures - overburdened with their rules, dogmas, lists, running around talking about stress, work, responsibility...what is this stress?  Why do you talk about it so much?  What about responsibility, why does it have to be like this?  Surely we can just live!  We can thrive and be playful and remember that life is about every day, not to get sucked forward by the vacuum of hopes or backward by the towline of regrets.  And there you are, so small and with so few words, heart as open as the sky while all of the strangeness of the adult world just pours into you.  It washes into you, sloshes around strangely, settles, ferments, comes back years later in the most unexpected of ways.

And there I am like Vonnegut's  Tralfamadorian human, strapped to a cart on a track that moves only forward, eyes fixed ahead.  And again, grown up and looking down and my son who is looking back at me with that unease that accompanies trying to process sillly grown-up behaviors.  What was I going on at him about?  He is holding a half-eaten popsicle, his light-brown khaki shorts stained in three places with cherry-red juice.  I had raised my voice to make a point, a point about not spilling popsicle juice on his pants, a point i had certainly made no less than twice prior since the beginning of this popsicle.  Then somewhere inside the static of my head i hear the voice reminding me that I have become that large and confounding grown-up, for whom the sanctity of ones clean pants has taken such precedent that he will get flustered, will lecture his four year-old, will assume a pedantic posture, his four-year-old meanwhile staring up at him with such innocence, such lustre in his eyes - he is loving that popsicle!  And here we are at our stations in life, I twenty-seven inches from him, yet worlds away.

"Daddy?"  he makes a psychic strafe away from all the smoke and bluster of my lecturing.
"Yes, Isaiah?"
"Um, in Beauty and the Beast, Belle's dad-"
"Wait just a second, did you hear what I was saying?"
"Dada?"
"Isaiah - did you hear what I was saying to you?"
"What?"

By now he's done it.  By his mentalist-ninja trickery he has lead me into a forest of confusion in which he is quite comfortable but I merely run like a blind fool.

"About your popsicle.  Are you going to be careful like we talked about?"
"Wait, when we talked when?"
"Isaiah don't do this."

He holds his hands, palms up, high out and forward into the air while shrugging his shoulders and giving me that look that says, "Look, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here guy!"

I grab the popsicle and start gnawing on the edge in the rapid-fire way of people with sensitive teeth.

"Hey!"  He lunges for it, I swing around.  He grabs onto my arms and, while pulling at one of my hands, reaches with the other for last nub of his popsicle.  "Are you going to be careful?" I intone.
"Dada!  Yes!"

Ah.  Finally.

We find ways to connect.  We take family walks and the sky is beginning to slide into its grey tones.  The fall is seeping in, leaves are crisping.  Then we walk by the old woman, she must be in her seventies or later.  She has her huge purple winter coat on, sitting at the bus stop eating something out of that white wrapping paper, all by herself.  What could I say to her?  What could we talk about? No one deserves this fate, this woman - perhaps this grandmother, taking her meal alone at the bus stop.  I want her to go back to her family, to be surrounded by friends, grandchildren, a fireplace, people who love her and still hug her frail old body.  Its a childish hope, but I am learning that it is a path to a home i am on my way back to.

When I write this blog I try to think of tiny pieces of the whole that will inform something greater for you, dear reader.  But inevitably I arrive at this feeling of how could I possibly tell you?  How could I explain fatherhood, love, weakness, despair, bliss,(the unspeakable bliss!), loneliness, the wanting to give up but going deeper and finding uncharted beauty in the staying with it!  The dreams of youth lost outshone by the glory of life gained, the simple wonder of loving another and being loved by them, and allowing yourself to be filled with love so that when it is pancake breakfast sunday and everyone is throwing mushy little bits of cake at each other, and in the morning light streaming in through the windows you can see that dog hair is sticking to the kids' faces from the syrup, and they are shrieking in amazement, you remember to do it.  do it.  just do it.

smile.