everyday life

One phone call from our knees

A song I love by Mat Kearney came on while I was running yesterday, and one line was stuck in my head all day:

I guess we’re all one phone call from our knees.

The song was referring to a phone call bearing bad news. And I thought of the phone ringing in the middle of the night when Matt’s dad got his heart. I thought of while my mother’s best friend and her mother were dying, and about how every time the phone rang I would startle, and pick it up with icy dread in my stomach. To this day when the phone rings after about 8:30 in the evening my heart lurches, and I assume someone is in the hospital.  One call.  One moment.  One fleeting choice.  On our knees.  Or worse.

I thought more broadly of the decisions, choices, and coincidences that shape our lives irrevocably. As Dani Shapiro says in Devotion, “I had tuned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance” – each small choice we make takes us to where we are. A job interview taken, a second drink agreed to, a leaning into a kiss rather than away, walking a different way home. If you imagine our lives as a line etched into space, moving backwards and forward, going through forks in the road, there are some spots that would be luminous in the retelling, glowing with the importance that we did not know they had until after the fact.

Some of the big forks in the road announce themselves, with neon lettering and loud honking sirens: who to marry?  where to go to school?  what job to take?  But I believe that many of the choices that actually create our lives, and, perhaps more importantly, who we are, are small, surprisingly imperceptible in the moment.  And then, over years, the ramifications of each choice make themselves known.  Our lives echo with the decisions we make, with the steps we take, forward, back, left right.

It is the phone calls in the night and the emails out of the blue that are on my mind today, the innumerable small snowflakes of life’s decisions that build into the immovable, permanent icebergs of our lives.  I’ve written before about this, more focused on the the internal experience of these shifts, of this gradual contouring of who we are.

” I am thinking about my personal mythology, about the moments of my life that shaped who I am today. Some of them are big, I know, like the births of my children, but many of them are small. In fact I think it is true, this notion of destiny taking shape in silence. Often the true shifts that change our direction irrevocably happen invisibly to others. This is the terrible, wonderful privacy of this life: nobody can know our internal terrain well enough to walk it without guidance.”

It occurs to me now that being brought to our knees need not always be a tragic thing: one could spin Mat’s lyric around to say that one small phone call, one event we may not have controlled, could bring us to a position of communion and worship with this world.  I imagine he meant the more obvious and negative meaning, but I like my interpretation, which just says to me that both good and bad changes are always a single moment away.  The veil of our glorious, ordinary lives can be pierced, for good or for bad, in every second.  Which just brings me back to the same persistent theme that tugs at me every time I sit down to write: what we have is this.  Right now.  And only this.

Her own library card.

Grace has strep. Again. Putting aside my worries about what the since-January roller coaster of strep-mono-strep means, I enjoyed a day with her yesterday. She feels basically fine but could not go to school until she’d been on the antibiotics for 24 hours (this time I was more forceful with the nurse and asked that she not prescribe the antibiotic that could kill Whit if he ingests it – so Grace is on zithromax). Grace’s one request for the day was to go to the library and get her own library card.

So, just after 9:00, we walked into the doors of the library. Up to the third floor we went.

Grace filled out her very first form. Other than her zip code, she knew it all herself. This was the first time she ever signed her own name. We talked about that for a while. Admittedly, her signature looks an awful lot like her regular writing at this point.

As you can see.

Grace had a specific book she wanted to look up, and so she did. I marveled, again, at how intuitively children seem to interact with computers (most of all with Apple products, in my experience). As she searched for the book she wanted, I walked up and down the aisles, my finger trailing along the book spines, seeing so many familiar titles. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Tuck Everlasting. Terabithia. The House with the Clock in its Walls. Little Women. The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Phantom Tollbooth. Jacob Have I Loved. A Wrinkle in Time.

Oh … I could have spent all day there. I was seven again, and falling into a new world every time I opened a book, discovering the magic of fiction, beginning what has become a life-long love affair. I could practically remember where I was when I read each of the books, on my stomach on the floor by my childhood bedroom’s bay windows, curled on the off-white couch on my grandparents’ screened-in porch, on the creaky backyard swinging bench at my other grandparents’ house. I finally stopped exclaiming “Gracie!” and making her look at the book that was triggering my memories at that moment, because her eye-rolling reaction showed me I was just interrupting her personal agenda.

On our way downstairs, we stopped on the second floor for me to grab a book, and we had an impromptu lesson on the Dewey Decimal System. I was surprised that I remembered anything, but it came right back, and Grace seemed fascinated. All of my library love flooded over me as I stood in the silent, sunlit stacks, pointing to small white labels with typewritten numbers, explaining to Grace in a whisper how knowledge itself is categorized.

Grace checked out all by herself. I’ve decided on a general rule of four or five books at a time, and she also picked out two Star Wars books for Whit.


And she proudly carried her stash out into the day. I couldn’t help welling up with tears, looking at this so-old-and-so-young face, knowing that her own library card, signed in her own hand, is in her pocket. I felt as though she had just gotten her own personal key to the grand carnival of knowledge. She walked out of that building having had her own independent introduction to this universe, whose neat Dewey decimal categorization, as she would someday learn, belies its sheer complexity and depth.

We went immediately home and she pulled on yoga pants and got into bed with her books. Is this child a mini me or what? A day of reading and libraries is a great day. She can stay.

Things I do not want to forget

Easter morning.  Always, they are walking away.

The way Whit’s shoulder blades feel like little wings, jutting gently out of his back, with its clearly articulated string of pearls of a spine.

Grace kneeling on the floor by her orange-canopied American Girl doll bed, tucking Samantha and Julie into bed next to each other. The way she earnestly changes them into their pajamas before bed and back into clothes in the morning.

Reading picture books to Grace and Whit over breakfast in the morning, sitting between them at the little square kitchen table, the way just the offer of reading is able to defuse the rowdiest sibling argument.

Whit dragging a kitchen chair over to the island and standing on it, stirring a bowl of cookie or brownie batter. His careful cracking of eggs into the bowl.

The way Grace’s face lights up when I take the time to turn, look at her, and join her in singing along to a song on the radio.

The “ghostie dance” that Whit demands that I do every night, to make sure that no ghosts bother him while he’s sleeping. Similarly, the way my patented “sweet dreams head rub” can help either child back to sleep when nightmares wake them up.

The view from my office, the beloved square of the world that I gaze on for hours a day. Today the big tree across the street is covered in pale green blossoms, and casting faint shadows onto the slate mansard roof of the house across from us.

Hearing Grace and Whit talking to each other through the heating duct in the wall between their rooms. They figured out this was a way to communicate, an in-wall tin can telephone of sorts, and hearing them stage whisper to one another from their enforced personal “quiet time” makes me both laugh and cry.

The afternoons that we dance to Miley Cyrus in the kitchen, when I gave in to an all-too-rare giggle and abandon myself to the sheer joy that both Grace and Whit seem to inhabit hourly.

What’s in my bag?

Becca at Drama for Mama tagged me in the “What’s In Your Bag” meme. I confess I’ve enjoyed voyeuristically reading everyone’s posts with photographs of what they carry with them every day. I love minutiae like that, and think it tells a lot about someone.

So, here we go. First, my bag:

I just last week made the seasonal swap from a black snakeskin bag. Today’s 40 degree monsoon is proving that to have been a bit optimistic. But anyway. I love this bag because it stands up on its own, the shoulder strap is long enough, and I love the color. There are also internal pockets that are perfect for my iphone (when it’s in there) and a pen and keys.

Now, the contents:

From top left, generally clockwise:

1. Black velvet Tom Ford sunglasses case. Haven’t needed them in a couple of days because of the aforementioned monsoon.

2. My cord bag. This carries all the various charging cords I need, plus my two extra-juice things for my iphone (a mophie juicepack and a fabulous little extra-charge thing that I call my elephant dock because it has an elephant sticker on it), plus the USB cords to connect everything to the computer.

3. Hairbrush. Notably, the handle is curved because this got boiled in the Great Lice Infestation of September 2008.

4. My blackberry. For work. Not checked very often.

5. Purell. A remnant from our recent airplane trip to FL visit Grandpa-heart-transplant (where germ avoidance is extra important). I don’t usually carry it.

6. Cherry chapstick. This is the closest I get to lipstick. Seriously. I am a total addict. The “cherry chap” is always with me.

7. Pen.

8. Black nylon pouch containing more lip balm (but why? I really only use my cherry chap), pressed powder, hand cream, and breath strips.

9. My wallet. Big enough to be called a clutch. But it has my whole life in it!

Notably absent is my iphone. Just like Becca, that’s because it’s mostly in my hand. Or in my jacket pocket. Or in my jeans back pocket. Always close at hand.

Now, my turn to tag! I look forward to seeing and reading about the things you carry, ladies:

Denise at Musings de Mommy
Kathryn at Marbury v. Madison Avenue
Jo at Mylestones

First grade open house

Yesterday morning, I went to Grace’s class’s “open house.” This was basically 30 minutes for the parents to sit in teeny chairs or kneel on the linoleum floor (oh, 35.5 year old self – NOT nice. getting up: hard) and have the children show us their latest work. There was pride and sheer delight on Grace’s face as she showed me her journal, her drawings of the Iditarod, and other pieces of work. Totally worth the sore knees.

I have a dream that everyone recycles. Good dream, this one. She recently asked me, totally seriously, “Mummy, can we start composting?” with the same kind of enthusiasm previously reserved for questions like, “Mummy, can we go to the American Girl store?” I told her I’m thinking about it.

This is the “word of the year” that she selected for herself. Good choice, Grace. My daughter is an old soul. And wow do I adore her.

I am special because I make cupcakes. I’ll take it.

Finally had to creakily get up off the floor and go sit in the circle time area.

A valiant effort at spelling “mononucleosis.”

Oh, and this bozo? Showing off his new sneakers for our trip to Florida. He was wearing his pajamas when I asked him to try them on. Moments later he showed up, interrupting Grace and my Harry-a-thon, prancing around buck naked in his sneaks. Ah, Whitty.