Wordless Wednesday
This is the way we play
Saturday. Early rising. Long drive. Poolside. Laptop open.
“Are you writing your next novel right here?”
“Erm. Kind of. Well, yes, actually. I’m trying.”
Saturday evening. Barely awake. Stroll uptown. The whole family.
Burger Badanga at the Chainsaw. (Fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity)
Free face/arm-painting.
Also, burgers, beer, pop with unlimited refills.
But really it’s all about the football.
England v. Italy.
Not the hoped-for outcome.
“I always feel sad for whoever loses.”
“Wow, Mom. Someone always loses.”
Sunday. Early rising. Ritual stop at best early-morning coffee & breakfast joint in town, City Cafe, aka “the bagel place.” Long drive. Poolside. Laptop.
The kid is fast and strong. The mother is plain worn out.
Stop for falafel and chicken shwarma. Eat under tree. Long drive home.
Followed by deep nap.
Followed by must get up and do days’ worth of laundry, run errands, and think up Father’s Day supper.
Meet “Vanna,” above, our new front yard dwarf cherry tree. “Stella” is in the back yard. Two apple trees, as yet unnamed, await planting.
Neighbour we’ve never met stops to tell Kevin: “I’ve been walking by your front yard for the past ten years, and I just want to tell you how much I enjoy watching what you’re doing here.”
I think: Kevin’s dad, enthusiastic gardener, would have been so proud.
I call my dad.
Supper: hot dogs, bacon, fixings, roasted asparagus, kale slaw (“You shouldn’t call it that! Nobody’s going to want to eat it!”).
After supper: playing in the back yard. Kevin: Gardening and soccer-ball juggling. Albus: Trampoline and soccer. Fooey: Trampoline and soccer-ball juggling. CJ: Soccer, soccer, soccer. Me and AppleApple: catch, with tennis ball and baseball gloves.
The long late light. The best part of summer.
“Should we be responsible parents and tell everyone to go bed?”
“Do we have to?”
The dogs
Suzi dog
The dogs keep staring at me. Why? What is the matter with you, dogs?
They are pacing my office, stopping to watch me with hopeful, expectant, crazed eyes, and I have no idea what they want from me. Is it a tornado? Impending inland tsunami? Are they hungry, bored, thirsty, in need of a pet?
In tandem they place their little paws on my leg and raise themselves up and grin, staring manically.
I pet them, briefly, while they grin and stare, but it only makes them jealous of each other. “Go on, get down.”
They retreat, but only to my feet.
It’s unnerving. It’s like trying to read the newspaper while someone reads over your shoulder. You know they’re there, reading over your shoulder, even if they’re doing it quietly. I can see you, dogs! Good grief. What the hell?
The dogs.
Twice, recently, Suzi has had brief episodes of behaving like a regular dog: she’s played fetch with a ball. She performs this dog-like trick just long enough to make us think it’s repeatable, and then, less than a minute into the game, she stops cold and ignores the ball, which thunks sadly to the floor, instantly forgotten.
“But Suzi,” we say hopefully, momentarily believing in her dog-like potential, “look, it’s the ball, don’t you want to chase it?”
Suzi gazes off into the distance, pretending never to have been involved in such indignities. Was it an hallucinatory episode? “No, but really, she was chasing the ball and bringing it back to me! You saw her, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
DJ dog
Suzi is the smaller one, a neurotic ball of nerves and need, and DJ is slightly larger, and essentially untrainable, although she can perform spontaneous backflips when her dinner is being served; and the dogs seem to be getting old, suddenly, and that worries me. We don’t know how old they are, as they came to us having been rescued from an over-crowded pound in Ohio. I have pangs, thinking about them being old, perhaps older than we’ve guessed. I look for new grey hairs around their muzzles.
I check the Weather Network. No signs of tornado or tsumani. I open the back door. They show no interest in going out. Apparently they just want watch me, anxiously.
Um, okay, dogs. (I’m fine, I think. But you’re making me wonder …)
If you’ve loved
I’ve got work to do. It’s quiet work, the kind that doesn’t produce anything that can be seen, or displayed, held or sold. It’s the work of a mind that is continually rehearsing the immediate future, at the expense of settling into presence.
You’ve probably noticed that our family’s schedule leaves little breathing room; this is not a complaint, merely an observation, because it is also absolutely of our own doing. It’s a choice — to live at a pace that tries to accommodate four children’s varied interests and our own, to do the jobs we’ve chosen, to be and to express who we are. But it would be disingenuous not to be brutally honest about the consequences: it can wear a person down. There was a moment, last week, when I was pretty sure I’d reached my limits.
The weather was gorgeous. I was wearing a “business casual” sundress. I’d been up since 4:50AM. I’d taken the bus to Toronto and back for meetings at my Canadian publisher’s offices. It was now 5:15PM, and I was standing beside a carshare car, and it would not open. The keyless entry system appeared to be broken. The carshare company wasn’t answering their help hotline. Kevin and Albus were on their way to a soccer game in Stratford. I had children waiting for me at home, to take them to the school’s fun fair and to soccer practice. And the car would not open.
All my advance planning seemed suddenly fragile. One error could cause a cascading series of tumbles. It could all fall apart, just like this, and my stomach was in knots of anxiety.
This could be my breaking point, I thought.
But then it wasn’t.
I ran home, used the land line to get through the carshare company, rented a different car to which I sprinted in my business casual-wear, a full kilometre, thinking, okay, this is what I’ve trained for. We were late for soccer practice, very late for the fun fair, but that was all. And being late, well, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of anything. Fooey even won a cake at the cakewalk. Perfect bedtime snack.
I could take several different lessons from this.
I could stop trying to squeeze so much in. Or I could stop worrying in advance about things going wrong. I can’t seem to do the former; so how would the latter work?
Lay out the plot, make the plan, write it down, then let it go. Stop rehearsing. Be late sometimes. The stakes aren’t really that high, in the grand scheme of things. None of these items on my to-do list are as important as I’m making them out to be, in my own mind. Do we have food to eat? Yes. Do we have a roof over our heads? Yes. Do we have each other? Yes!
Privilege can warp perspective. I’m so privileged that I don’t even notice all that I’m able to do, without a second thought: let my kids participate in multiple sports, rent carshare cars, own a pretty sundress, buy tickets to the fun fair. I’m inventing needless anxieties. Maybe it’s a way of distracting myself from settling into the work that I need to do. I’m beginning to suspect that distraction is the easy way out. It’s the enemy of presence.
A few years back I wrote a song with lyrics that went like this, in part:
Say it simple, say it best
If you’ve loved then you’ve been blessed
If you’re loved then you’ve been found
Fall to earth
Fallen
And have no fear
*
Hashtagthismoment
Enjoying the peace of this photo. Or maybe it’s the pause. The moment suspended.
In a rush. Monday morning. Dog can’t decide whether she wants in or out. Need to get on bike and get to a school meeting. Still not getting enough sleep.
I’m tempted to put all of the above into hashtag form, but I don’t know why. Maybe hashtags are kind of like miniature poems? Or maybe I should just sign up on Instagram? Here’s how it would look …
#inarush #Mondaymorning #dogatdoor #biking #meeting #moretiredthansleepcancure
:::
Just have to add a postscript. Goes like this.
#bikechainblues #argh #greasecoveredhands #foreverrushing #notquitelate