Loving People
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
His snoring filled the car, the same air exhaled and pulled in again by a little nose hiding under honey blonde hair. His mother buttoned his coat on him before he climbed in the backseat and the top button was left undone, enough room allowed for his head to slump comfortably on his shoulder. The billowed coat was too warm for the weather, but made a soft pillow for his fat cheek to rest. We were always cautious with our children.
When our first daughter, Annie, was only a few days old, we took her for a photo shoot at a small studio inside a department store. We brought her into the store in a baby carrier. She was swaddled tightly in a blanket, wore a knitted cap snug over her ears, and underneath those items was her full one-sie. Laid across the carrier was one last blanket. Annie’s young parents didn’t think her pink cheeks unordinary until a security guard stopped them at the door to joke that the baby was overheated.
Those people – the couple – are different now. On weekends, I am often along with the boy and the two girls, too. We are not as dependent on each other – loving people, still, with individual aspirations and goals. Our decisions are of the sort that are central to the children.
In college, long before I had my own family, I used to write about children at the apartment complex where I lived. Then I had the time to read stacks of books – philosophy and fiction, primarily, written by the age’s best thinkers and authors – and I’d read them during breaks at a part-time job in a steamy dry cleaners. Somehow I managed to come away thinking that a child’s perspective was most important to me both in viewing the world and in philosophical thought. I considered them wiser than all the professors, experts and college-educated people you come across at a decent-sized university. I respected their honesty and freedom. I loved being young and I knew exactly at 16 what I had. In my early 20s, it was the same.
And when I graduated college, I did not celebrate in the way that most young men do with their first jobs – a negligent and worthless display of expense, though it might have once seemed that way. I was temporarily living with my mom then and filled a closet with toys 10 years ahead in anticipation of my childrens’ arrival (and my wife’s), looking forward to the day my son in particular would be old enough to imagine the battles between superheroes on rooftops and sword fights among space aliens in the stars.
I listened to Charlie sleep in the backseat. We were parked for about 45 minutes outside his grandmother’s house for our overnight visit. He nodded off somewhere on the car ride here, sleep overcoming his anticipation, and as we pulled under the tall trees and the acorns shed on the asphalt popped under wheel, I decided to kill the engine and listen to his snoring and soft music while he rested up for a full night together.
His mom told me before we left that he missed his nap, so I sat and watched over him – writing what you see here – outside his Grammy’s house in the dieing light. When he woke, we would crack the boxes of toys open in the closet and turn back time to my original wishes to be a father before my own childrens’ lives ever began.
After awhile – after his nap – Charlie was alive again and we stepped on our own acorns on the long sidewalk to the front door, the two of us, excited and happy for possibilities to seem real again.
