everyday life

A Pebble For Your Pocket

One recent weekend morning Grace, Whit and I were puttering at home (I know!  What else is new!?).  I was doing laundry and they were in Grace’s room, next to mine, and they started to bicker. Suddenly, without a plan, I called, “Hey, guys!  Let’s get in my bed and read.”  Why not get into bed at 10:30 in the morning?  My bed is, after all, a refuge for both of them and, in truth, for me.

To my surprise, Grace and Whit agreed.  I thought at first we were going to read Harry Potter and then, out of blue, I noticed the stack of library books on the edge of my bureau.  A Pebble For Your Pocket, a book of “mindful stories for children and grown-ups,” by Thich Nhat Hahn, was sitting on top.  Ah, thank you, universe, I thought, grabbing the paperback before clambering into the middle of my bed between Grace and Whit.

As I opened the book I hesitated.  I thought, for a moment: I wonder if they are going to go for this.  Well, one way to find out, I thought as I cleared my throat and opened to the first story, called “Who is the Buddha?”  Just as it had in the library, a gossamer veil of quiet descended on the room.  It seemed as though all of our breathing slowed down.  I felt as though something brushed past me in the dark, touching me so barely I might have imagined it.  The last time I felt this sensation was in May, in the ER with Grace, and I described it thus: “I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.”

I think that feeling is grace.

We read two stories and put the book away and the current of our day took us all with it.  It wasn’t until the next morning, when Grace and Whit were sitting at the kitchen table working on their classroom Valentine’s, that either of them mentioned Thich Nhat Hahn.

“Mum?”  Grace was looking down, concentrating on the glitter she was shaking onto a card.  “Can we read more of those pebble stories?”  I run upstairs to get the dogeared library book, and then, sitting between them on our battered wooden kitchen chairs, read several more stories.  As I read I remembered the first time I read Thich Nhat Hahn.  Peace is Every Step was an important book for me in college, a reminder of what mattered, what I wanted, to keep breathing, to live here.  As you can tell, I’m still working at this, still learning the same lesson, and I keep flubbing it.  Over and over again.  But what is there to do but to keep my eyes open, to take a deep breath, to love this life of mine, in all its flawed, real, glittering beauty?

The hermit is inside of you.  In fact, all the wonderful things that you are looking for – happiness, peace, and joy – can be found inside of you.  You do not need to look anywhere else. – Thich Nhat Hahn, A Pebble For Your Pocket

The clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.

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An old post about snow that seems utterly apt after this weekend of snow and then, today, blindingly clear blue skies.

I have been thinking for days about writing a post about snow, and, lo and behold, it’s snowing again!  It’s so great with the universe comes through like that.  Of course, it’s been snowing almost non-stop since December 26th, so possibly it’s a coincidence.  When I look out my office window, whose four panes frame so many hours of my gazing out at the world, it looks like I live in a snow globe.

People always write about the “muffled” quality of snow, about its quiet, the silence it lends to the world.  For me this is absolutely true when it’s snowing.  There is an outside-of-real-life feeling when the sky is mottled with moving white snowflakes.   Maybe it’s a vestige of childhood snow days, maybe it’s the way movement in the outside world is slowed down to a crawl.  Something just floats over me, a gossamer cape of wonder, a reminder to breathe and watch.  The snow globe is a good place to live, insulated from the real world, the rough jolts of life somehow less jarring, muted.

And yet when it’s no longer snowing, but the world is covered with snow, I don’t find it muffled at all.  It’s the opposite: I find it sharp, its clarity in such high definition that sometimes it hurts.  Pam Houston’s words always come to mind: “When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.”  There’s something wide-awake, hyper-saturated and, as she says, precise, about life with clear skies overhead and snow underfoot.  Emerging from my swaddled time in the snowglobe, everything seems purified, clarified, washed clear by the white everywhere.

Today I knelt on the floor by my office window and watched the flakes fall.  This afternoon they were huge, big clumps of snowflakes dropping out of the pale steel-gray sky.  Watching them, I remembered the passage in Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how “each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”  I looked up into the sky, straining to see as far as I could.  I thought of another time that I instinctively knelt, when, just like today, “…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.”

Another thing about snow: it is practically impossible (at least for a hack like me) to take pictures that capture the falling snow.  Hello, metaphor.  You just have to watch.  Pay attention.  Inscribe it on the vellum of memory.  What you see is what you get.

Originally written January 19, 2011, during another season of snow.

Tears at hockey

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From a more placid moment last week

I recognize that things are moving fast most of the time in our family, and that I have a lot of things I’m trying to do, but most of the time it feels like it hangs together.  Usually we even fit in time for some quiet reading and a walk around the block and a few minutes of downtime.  That and hundreds of emails and writing and running and packing lunches and laundry and cooking and … well, writing that makes me tired.  Still, most days, my life – and that of my family – works.

Except when it doesn’t.

Last Monday was one of those days.  I had forgotten that Whit had hockey even though it was a holiday, so at the last minute I had to move my mother’s planned dinner-at-home visit to late afternoon.  We were running late for hockey, and I was snappy and frustrated.  By the time I got Grace and Whit into the car, hockey pads mostly (but not all) on, and headed in the light snow to pick up Whit’s teammate for practice, I was on the verge of tears.

It can turn so fast, can’t it?  Just the night before we had had a wonderful celebration of Whit, dinner at his favorite restaurant, a homemade cake (triple chocolate, which had required my going to three stores to get the ingredients) and presents.  I’d sat at our dining room table, watching the faces of my family in the flicker of candlelight, feeling calm, grateful.  My boy was eight.

But now I stood by the side of the hockey rink, fighting tears.  It was freezing, and in my rush I hadn’t brought a hat or gloves.  I jammed my hands into the pockets of my down coat and pressed my forehead against the cold plexiglass between the rink and me.  I watched Whit skate, feeling my breath coming fast and a tightness in my chest:  I am trying to do so much all at once.  Because of this, I do everything badly.  I am just so tired.

I drew a ragged breath and fought to control the tide of sorrow that rose inside me.  Suddenly I heard Billy Joel in my head: this is the time to remember, ’cause it will not last forever…  I shook my head, new emotion churning around the self-pity.  I felt both chastened and annoyed; I was reminded of my own desperate wish to be here now and of the simultaneous weight of my expectation that I can do so all the time. Is my constant sense of failing to be present getting in the way of my actually being present?

I don’t know.  I don’t think so, because I know I was far less here before I started thinking about this.  But it certainly makes me excruciatingly aware of all the ways and times that I fall short of the engagement in my life I so badly want.

I looked at Whit, his little figure blurred by my tears.  I want so fiercely to fully live these years, to pay attention, not to miss a thing.  But still, so often, I fail.  I allow my own exhaustion or aggravation to occlude the beauty of this ordinary, flawed existence.  It makes me weep to think of all that I have already missed.  I don’t even want to blink, for fear of missing anything else.

For the rest of the night, all I could hear was this:

This are the time to remember
Cause it will not last forever.
These are the days to hold onto
Cause we won’t although we’ll want to.
This is the time, but time is going to change.

 

A love letter to LEGO

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I love LEGO.  I always have.  This, above, is our old train table, which years ago was requisitioned to be a LEGO table.  As you can see, Grace’s half seems to be winning, but what you can’t see is the four large bins of LEGO pieces, all full, stacked to the side.  One of the drawers under the table is also full of LEGO pieces.

I show this mess only to demonstrate my family’s passionate commitment to LEGO.  I have no idea how many pieces we have, but I do know that a couple of years ago Matt decided we ought to sort them by color.  This effort, with fully four of us working, took a whole weekend.

That was a coupe of years ago.  Suffice it to say there are more now.  Even Grace has gotten into the swing of things, with a strong interest in LEGO Friends (the plethora above mostly came through birthday and Christmas presents this past year).  While I am generally opposed to the “girl versions” of ANY toy, I like that she’s playing with LEGO at all, so I’ll let it slide.

Several years ago I observed (and wrote) that watching a small child work on a LEGO kit is an excellent metaphor for parenting in general: you watch them do it wrong, and you have to sit on your hands and not jump in to correct them, even though you know the pain and undoing-and-redoing that lies ahead for them (and you).  These days, Whit flies through the kits on his own, and presents us with huge ships and rockets and vehicles he has made on his own.

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For example, here.  This picture provides another shot of the LEGO table, and also a punch in the gut gasp when I see him without his front teeth.  Though Whit loves an elaborate LEGO kit, he also spends at least as much time making things up, building ships and spacecraft that he designs in his own head.  Personally I think this imaginative, free-form play is probably even more valuable than learning how to follow the technical manuals.

Our passion for LEGO is also evidenced in our the three visits we’ve paid to Legoland.  Something about Legoland is sheer magic for the children and for me.

And then there’s just that it’s such a wonderful company.  This story here, about the letter a boy wrote to LEGO after he lost a minifig, and their totally awesome response, brought me to tears.

And finally, there’s the reason for this love letter.  My father-in-law sent Whit a large LEGO for his birthday.  FedEx showed that it had been delivered, but nothing had shown up at our house.  I called LEGO, distraught.  I explained that my son was a huge LEGO fan, that he was turning 8, and that he was desperate for the Excavator.  I think we can all agree that LEGO was in no way at fault here; they had shipped according to when they promised, and according to all records, the box had been delivered.  Yet the man on the other end of the line told me he would re-send another Excavator, and he would do so with expedited delivery, with no additional charge to us to to Whit’s grandfather, just to make sure that my eight-year-old had the set he so longed for to open on his big day.

I just wanted to publicly demonstrate and declare that my family has always been, and will always be, unshakably and immensely devoted to LEGO as a product, a concept, and a company.

 

Oh the places you’ll go

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A couple of weeks ago, we had one of those empty Sunday afternoons that I have come to prize above all others.  But in the moment, I was not prizing anything.  Everybody was cranky, pissy, annoyed.  The sky was spitting rain.  I asked Whit and Grace what they wanted to do, because the only thing that was non-negotiable was that we had to get out of the house. They didn’t want to do anything.  They certainly didn’t want to do anything together.

Fine.  I made an executive decision.  Whit needed some more Rotten School books to read anyway, so off we went to the library.  Luckily the main branch is open on Sunday afternoons.  We rode up the elevator to the third floor and I watched in wonder as the library worked its magic.  Extraordinary.  They were almost immediately calm, engrossed.  We had just been talking about the Sheep in a Jeep picture books and Whit wanted to see them, so we headed to the picture book section.

These days, we don’t usually set up shop in the picture book section.  But that day we did.  We found Sheep in a Jeep, read it, and then Grace and Whit both turned to the shelves.  Whit pulled out a stack of Dr. Seuss books, and Grace found several old favorites to revisit.  We sat together at a small round table and leafed through books.  I looked up.

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And instantly found myself blinking away tears.  Oh, the places you’ll go, my newly-minted eight year old.  Yes, the places you’ll go.  I can imagine them, can see them beginning to shimmer on the horizon, those places, away from home, away from this moment, away from me.  You’re going, and I am waving, and I couldn’t be prouder.

We stayed at the library for a long time.  I personally adore picture books and am glad to see that Grace and Whit still wanted to immerse themselves in them.  There was no scoffing about “baby books” or impatience or frustration.  There was just the quiet, suffused with contentment, the flipping of pages, the whispers of parents and squeaks of babies and mumbles of toddlers.

Then we went to the playground outside the park to play for a bit before heading home for dinner.  The rain had stopped and the sky was a thick, dense plane of gray cloud.  Grace and Whit played together, laughing, making up games.

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I sat on the swings and watched them play.  They leapt from rock to rock, chased each other around the deserted playground, and made up games together.  I’ve written before about my intense pride when I watch my children playing in creative, unstructured ways, about how I’m probably more thrilled by creative play than I am by conventional accomplishments.

I swung and watched them, and before I knew it my cheeks were wet with tears again.  How much longer will they want to spend a Sunday afternoon with me, at the library, at the playground?  Sure, not long.  The familiar awareness of how short this time is gripped me, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  Somehow my keen sense of the fleeting nature of this moment is both immensely familiar and, still, so powerful that it brings me to my knees.  My nostalgia for this time in my own life – even as I live it – is nothing short of overwhelming.

I swung back and forth, watching them laugh and jump, unable to hear what they were saying to each other, feeling tears run down my face.  Oh, the places they’ll go.  Oh, the places they are already going.