OF Birthdays . . .

. . . and living in the now

Baby Dean is not too sure
about this new world he’s landed in!

My friend Becky Munro wrote a lovely song about the inevitability of change.

She’s right, of course, but today my oh-so-articulate response is: Nuts to that!

I want to freeze time, halt the inevitable march of days and weeks and months and years. I want to hold this gorgeous moment in my fingers, squeeze it, feel its honey’d beauty run over my palm and drip onto the waiting earth.

If you ask me why I’m feeling so fiercely determined to stop time, I’ll tell you. Today is my grandson’s second birthday. Every minute of his two years with us has held its own magic. Not only the obvious—the soft sibilant sound of sleeping newborn, the milky smell of baby breath, the crow of excitement when he discovered something, the jubilant belly laugh, the first time he said, clearly and unmistakably I love you Nana—but also the other times, the tantrums, the days when all the grown-ups in his life desperately needed some sleep but he just . . . didn’t, the inevitable illnesses when all prohibitions on junk food and television went out the window because he was so miserable and we’d all do just about anything to make him a little less miserable.

(Some may doubt me, but I maintain that he said his first recognizable words at the ripe old age of ten months when, exhausted from illness, he sat in his mom’s arms and watched part of the movie Frozen, and when Elsa says, “Watch this!” he mimicked “Watch this.” Proud Nana? Of course, but I have the video to prove it.)

Every day, every moment brings new revelations, each a marvel in its own right, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to hold onto this moment.

Truth be told, I’ve always been this way. I love our community here on Lopez Island, but I also miss our family and community in Oregon so deeply it’s a physical pain, at times. And, like Rhett-the-dog (as Dean calls him), I feel a little despondent whenever anyone who is visiting leaves. If you walk through the doors of our house, you become family, and that means I don’t want to let you go. When the folks who painted our house were done, I immediately missed the sweet crew – hearing their cheerful chatter and the marvelous voice of Chris Ann singing along to her music . . . Everything was too quiet, after they finished.

And all of that is true in spite of the fact that I’m an introvert who desperately needs regular alone time! You can imagine how much more I miss my children (and now, grandchild) when they leave after a visit. The sigh of relief is tinged with grief. Always.

In the spring I miss the pounding rain and howling winds and quiet snows of winter. (“It rarely snows on Lopez,” we were told when we first moved here, and every year since there has been at least one and usually two pretty significant snowfalls.)

When we took a winter vacation to warmer climes for the first time last year, I was unable, for a while, to adjust to the change in temperature, the temporary relief from the constant to-do list, but as soon as we were home I missed the easy cadence of our vacation days.

A real photo, believe it or not.
Coulda been a postcard artist with this sky to capture!

Instant nostalgia, that’s what I suffer from.

But Dean is teaching me there’s no time for that. Yesterday had its share of marvels, but now is beautiful, too. And I don’t mean “beautiful” in the sense that everything is perfect; in any given now there are a few and sometimes many reasons to feel upset, anxious, unhappy. I mean that this moment is what I have, and it is enough, and more than enough.

This idea is so axiomatic it’s in songs (“Que Sera Sera”) and aphorisms (“C’est la vie”). As an interesting aside, Americans seem to eschew the thought that life is what it is, and will be what it will be, the good, the bad, and the ugly, etc. in favor of a stubborn determination, a la Eleanor Roosevelt, that “Life is what you make it.” That sentence could be an exhortation to work with what the universe hands you, but many take it as a challenge to mold and remake the world to fit their needs. We are a nation of bootstrap-pulling individualists!

(Another long aside: Did you know that “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” was actually intended to be ironic, to refer to an impossible task? Because, of course, you can’t actually pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; you need help. So when someone insists there should be no government handouts, people just need to learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, well, they’re being “ironical” without even meaning to. Check out this New York Times article on the subject. The moral of that story: we all need help, and we all need each other. But I digress.)

Dean seems to know intrinsically that the best way to live in the now is to grab your cake with both hands, have a cuppa joe with your family, curl up with a good book, catch a drink with a good friend (I love that photo in the montage, below, though I think his parents were less thrilled with it), gaze up in wonder at the sky, and . . .

. . . hang on for the ride!

Back to the day at hand. I end with this reminder to myself, from the Buddha:

“Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”

Today, I’m going to make everything I do a celebration, not only of Dean’s birth two years ago, but of who he is right this very minute.