Archive for the ‘Piece of Mind’ Category
Both girls are at the table for breakfast, observing the temporary but appreciated comity that comes each Sunday morning. The peace lasts between them but not in the house as the younger one, whose bowl has run empty of cereal, begins hammering the table with her toddler-sized spoon.
The racket it creates in the all-wood dining room is tremendous, and it sounds as though a half-dozen full-size workmen are in the room with hammers in hand and nails in teeth pummeling sheet rock across bare walls. That is merely the sound of it. The real culprit has tangly golden hair and wears a pink nightgown with a single stretch of ballerinas across the chest. She’s backlit by the windows on the front of the house and the thin, baby tree that’s the same age as her, but taller and more reserved.
One holler from her father and she drops the spoon. She goes back to eating, which, with cereal, is an activity that involves streaking milk across the table top. Her sister, the oldest, cleans up her bowl without any real notice of the younger, not so much as even a laugh to encourage more outlandish behavior.
Surprisingly, the peacefulness breaks in a confrontation with the house’s only boy and his younger sister. The fight involves a card game that involes arranging cards in a particular order on the floor and when the little girl screams, the boy tells him the fight occured because he doesn’t want to share. Fair enough, the house’s proprietor thinks, as the house temporarily still again. It is quiet enough that the dog can sleep and a car door far up the street can heard closing. The weather looks beautiful today and the light comes strewaming in on the chairs at the dinner freshly pushed out from a brief breakfast. These children are just now gaining their energy for the day, so the volumes will rise and the pace for confrontations much faster, and that is the most threatening fact to parents who are responsible for discipline.
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Tags: Kids, Sunday
2:30 A.M.
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Silent lightning common to the high plains in the summer fills the northern sky with reptetive, strobe-like flashes. Without the usual threatening soundtrack, the storm is beautiful but restrained, as if the jagged bolts were caged or holding back for another early morning.
I find this private show waiting for me after raising the curtains to investigate. About 2:15, the activity in the window caught my attention. Something outside was so brilliant and seemed so close, I had to check. What I thought might be a police car stopped up the block with its emergency lights on turned out to be lighting strikes shocking the living room with sudden light.
The storm is maybe 20 miles off and harmless where I’m standing even if the noise was turned on. These quiet flashes are a natural phenomenon that occur on July and August nights over the farm houses and wheat fields. Here it can be seen just above the treeline and rooftops. Segments of the sky fill with stuttering white light. Then another place in the sky has its turn to flash.
How the dogs know to be frightened is remarkable. Sounds only they can hear apparently has sent them to stirring in the garage. Whatever it was must have drawn me awake, too.
After watching a short time, I decide to go to bed and let the storm run its course. While I sleep, the beauty can dance around the bedposts and I can wake up, late maybe, to a soft rain.
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Tags: Rain
Summer’s End
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Someone said it in the hall today just as I was looking out on the greenery in full view outside a nearby window.
“Summer is almost over.”
I was in two worlds at the time: the one that allows me to walk hazily between the cubicle rows and glaring computer monitors back to my own square space, and this other place that is not deliberate enough to be called imagination or day dreaming or even an inner-dialogue. Caught on a plain between both mentalities, those words shocked me awake.
Summer is almost over almost as quickly as it began and soon the flourishing Cottonwood that I’d just begun to notice was soon going to whither to a skeletal remains of this beautiful tree. Am I that old already … that the time passes imperceptibly and before I know it, entire seasons have passed before I notice them come up around me?
My daughter, who only yesterday was a baby swaddled to near death on her first trip out with us is now almost six years old. Six years old next month and well into kindergarten. She can read and write and apologize for her mistakes, which means she can recognize ours, and we’re no longer perfect for her. But how we rank in her small world of personalities and acquaintances is still near the top, though that might change soon.
Another six years from now, our near-teen daughter will have no trouble finding issue with us. I had no idea my parents were when I was her age or how clueless they probably felt. I am still getting used to my friends being adults, and that has been a bigger reality struggle for me than my own adulthood. I had a professor in college once tell me that I possessed a wisdom older than my age at the time and I sometimes wonder if that is not the case now. If maybe age and wisdom have balanced or if now, in fact, I am in debt to intelligence. I haven’t stopped reading or trying to educate myself.
I read now more than ever before, but scholarly thought is more forced, less natural. It’s an effort to wonder about god. Now I have my own children to observe – to see the world through – without casting a vision onto others’. My circle of good friends has diminished, so I have to rely on myself now to shape my own perception, the way it should be. A simple statement made off-handedly in my presence set these thoughts flooding. If anything, that is a comfort. Overthinking is one habit that apparently doesn’t dissolve with age.
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Tags: Summer
I’m a Boy
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Lying on his stomach, stretched out length-wise over the pillow, the boy I’m looking down on is me. His hair is cropped in a bowl shape, and in the faint glow of the night light, its blondeness shines and reflects back white. At that age, we would have been twins though not identical, matched because of the similarity in hair and facial structure – the bubble-blowing cheeks – the blue eyes, the pursed mouth, and the attitude – all boy, all racecars and superheros, all sports and karate moves, just a whirlwind of flourishing kid with frantic arms and jumps from stairs, wrestling matches in the bed covers and couch cushions, and instant tamtrums at any loss and yet easy-going and loving, what I hope could be confused with a good soul. That was more than an hour ago. He’s fast asleep now in the same place, in this blue glow, and I’m about to join him in the dream world where I’ll be waiting one day for good, after my days are extinguished while his light still burns.
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Tags: Kids
Dogged Night
Monday, August 18th, 2008
Tonight, mojitos on the couch with the sun dieing – in fact, already dead. Purple light on the house fronts, sky baby blue, dog curled up at my feet, one ear lifted and held in place by the chair arm. The cusions especially soft, nearly damp at twilight and the dew settling in on the thick grass blades.
All the colors outside are beginning to swirl, one large gradient across the whole neighborhood. Locusts sing and buzz. The lightning bugs moved out in July and left room for out of season June Bugs. The cat scratches on the back steps and ventures farther into the house where children lie quietly, noy yet asleep. Outside, dogs bark along the fence rows, one distant and one near. The sound takes me back to the window I used to sleep by as a child. No air-conditioning in the house, just the wind blowing in over my body and the thin sheets. I could hear the screen in the window bend and groan some nights, but never give way.
In the span of a no more than a couple minutes, the sky has turned gray about to fold over to black. Last night, the moon was close, a perfect peach circle in the sky streaked by billowing clouds. Now even the colorful flowers in the window baskets have gone muted, dark, shadowy. The barking I heard and remebered by has become the music of the night. Dogs are passing the tune over the fence-bound prisons to other dogs. This music is a reminder to their owners to let them in – to set out bowls of cool water and heaping dishes of gravy flavored pellets.
For them, the night ends the daily depression of gnats and flies buzzing at the ears, of drinking bowls once filled with cold water gone lukewarm. Under shade trees and in the shaows of play structures, they rest and dream of the moment the fence gates open to let them around to the garage or a child to pass to be accosted with barking.
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Tags: Twilight
