Month: February 2014

A few weeks ago, I took Whit to his nine year pediatrician appointment.  As we waited to go in, I thought about the fact that it had been two full years since I wrote close to the surface after his seven year appointment.  Two full years and two minutes, simultaneously.

Whit and his pediatrician had a lengthy discussion about physics, the universe, how many dimensions there really are, relativity, and the potential for a quantum computer.  Incidentally, I love that Whit’s pediatrician casually quotes Richard Feynman in appointments with nine year olds.  This explains a lot of why Whit (who recently heard mention of Einstein and said, “I know Einstein!  He’s my favorite!”) so adores Dr. E.

I listened to them talking, and then watched as Dr. E listened to Whit’s invisible but extraordinary heart, and thought once again of the ways that at every edge science bleeds into mystery.  In the world of the intellect, both the tiniest things – electrons, spinning one way and the other and communicating mysteriously across light years – and the largest ones – the existence of multiple universes – bump up against that which we cannot fully grasp.

My father is a physicist who is fascinated with poetry, art, and Europe’s great cathedrals.  He understands this ineffable border, the slippage between logic and magic, the imperceptible and always-shifting line between what we can know and what we can’t grasp.  As I’ve written before, my father’s unshakeable faith in the rational mind is matched by his profound wonder at the power of the ineffable.  Who I am is indelibly shaped by having grown up in the space between those things.

At the outmost limits of science, where the world and its phenomena can be understood and categorized with equations and with right and wrong answers, there flits the existence of something less distinct, barely discernible. The finite and the infinite are not as distinct as we might think, and the way they bleed together enriches them both.

Whit reminds me of my father in many ways, most of all in the way he understands and esteems equally concrete math and science concepts and the most intangible notions, of memory and love and existence.  That he relates to the former is easily demonstrated by his fascination with the periodic table or his comfort with his math homework.  It is harder to explain how I know the latter to be true, but I do: now and then he will say or do something that evinces to me his familiarity with the shades-of-gray territory of the unknown that I myself walk so frequently.

Whit and I left the pediatrician’s office and walked back to the car.  He held my hand.  Even his hand, as solid as anything I know in the world, gripping mine back, contains that which is known and that which is not.  Blood beating through veins, bones, cartilage, and chewed fingernails, but also the pulse of life itself, the ultimate mystery.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten carsick.  Quickly and very.  I may have mentioned the week-long safari Matt and I went on the summer after we met?  By lunch on the first day I was throwing up behind the Jeep.  I spent a week nauseous and vomiting all over Kenya.  It was very romantic.  I’m lucky he stuck around, frankly.

I very rarely get seasick, and I am always fine on airplanes and trains.  But, oh, cars.  My nausea is immediate and often powerful.  I’ve been wondering what this carsickness is about, and what it can teach me.

Is it another manifestation of my need for control?  Because if I am driving I’m fine.  It’s true that I’m an irritating passenger, with opinions about how and where and when to drive (“that’s a lot of wiper,” said under my breath when I deem Matt as having too aggressively paced the windshield wipers for a drizzle, is one of the comments I’m roundly mocked for).  So maybe it’s about not being in control, and that literally making me sick.  I’m not sure, though.

Maybe it’s connected to how I have always disliked rollercoasters.  The truth is that I have slowly been getting over my fear of rollercoasters, mostly because I’ve started riding them with Grace and Whit.  Of course we’re talking about the rollercoasters at Story Lane, or other pretty tame rides.  I’m still not comfortable on any kind of real rollercoaster.

A few years ago, when we were at Disney with the children, Matt goaded me into going on Rockin’ Roller Coaster with him at Hollywood Studios.  I was so tired of being mocked that I agreed to try it.  We got into the car, me fighting a wave of panic, and I asked why we had a harness over our shoulders.  Oh, no reason, he said dismissively.

That ride was among the most terrifying few minutes of my life.  As the ride came to a screeching finish, Matt looked at me and burst out laughing because, as he said between guffaws, I was literally green.

Perhaps, as I noted a couple of years ago, the swooping up-and-down movement along the tracks is simply too close to my own internal topography, which is already a kind of roller coaster.  I climb to outrageous joy and plummet to tearful heartache every single day.  Hell, I do that every hour.  Just inside my own head and heart.  Maybe it’s too overwhelming to also have my body do this.

Or maybe my propensity to get carsick is simply the universe pushing me to be still.  The surest way to get sick, for me, is to distract myself.  If I read, if I look at my iPhone, if I turn around and talk to the kids in the back seat, even if I engage too much with the radio: boom.  But my only chance at not being nauseous is to sit still, look out the window, and pay attention to what’s outside.

I’m not sure what the root cause of my carsickness is.  Maybe it’s just the way my inner ear is constructed.  Or maybe it’s some mysterious amalgam of all of these factors, whose precise components can’t be discerned.  I don’t know.  But I do know that for now, I’ll turn off the music and look out the window and watch the horizon, and hope that that is good enough.