I love coming home from class. Usually my mind is brimming with new thoughts and ideas, and tonight was no exception. And I enjoy so much Dr. Clay’s teaching style. He speaks gently, slowly, and seems to suggest things more than to hammer them home in any way. I remarked to my father, who visited my class tonight, that he floats ideas (to use a familiar expression), but that with him, the image is real. I see us all standing in or around a body of water, and Dr. Clay sets ideas adrift: he gives them gentle pushes, and they come floating our way or not, and one can do with them what one will. Lovely.
But I also love coming home from class because the pressure is off. All the reading, writing, or other preparing I had to do for class is complete, and I can turn my mind and busy-ness to other things. And that is what I did.
Tonight I went through two file-folders of papers, cleaning out what I no longer need, making piles of things that should go to different places, and throwing things away. Much of it was writing I’ve done over the years, not related to my book. Hand-written essays or musings or whatever, many of them incomplete. And much of it was about or related to the children.
There were lists of things I wanted to work on with them in a schooling kind of way, but these were for when Everett was maybe eighteen months and William three. “William– recognize alphabet; Everett– play with play-doh.” I know, I know. Why write that down? But I did.
There were attempted efforts at coming up with schedules for our day: “8-8:30: Mommy, clean up breakfast; boys, make beds, brush teeth; Emma Grace and Mommy, get dressed.” I know, I know. Why write that down? But I did.
And then there are the lists of things the children did or were doing, written on innumerable but handy scraps of paper, so that I could transfer said activities or successes to their calendars- back in the days when I kept one for each of them. I didn’t bother writing months or years on these scraps; just days of the week. So they look like this: W (meaning Wednesday) – William training wheels off; Everett wears cape to mall; Emma Grace bouncing in jump seat. Why write that down? Because I wanted to remember. I still do.
Which reminded me that this was a hope and reason for this blog– that I would use this easy venue (easier and faster than sitting with pen and paper) to record events significant and not so very, to store the fleeting preciousness of them. This is so fleeting, after all. They are so precious.
What to say about today, then? That William could scarcely get his nose out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix today, that he ate two apples in a row while reading, that before he went downstairs for his rest he was very deliberate in coming to find me and give me a kiss, and that that made the others follow suit. That before I picked him up from his Discovery class, I stood outside the classroom door and watched him working– watched him laughing with his friends, watched him looking for Alaska on the map, watched that familiar sandy head and those pale bright eyes and those dear hands….
And Everett played very happily for a long time on the floor of the red room all by himself with his Playmobil things. He left a submarine attached to a pirate ship, and the ship is moored to the soldier garrison we gave them for Christmas. He has made himself a magic wand out of a Playmobil lance, and this evening had his Gran-Sue help him write a letter to his friend Clay, inviting him to matriculate at Hogwarts. He held a serious conversation with his father and me this evening, talking about how many people get divorced but that we won’t, talking about how he feels when he gets angry, talking about telling the truth and not getting a spanking.
And Emma Grace wore her new light blue velour pantsuit to Discovery today along with her yellow boots and winter coat. She learned about Jacob and Esau today, and made drawings mounted on popsicle sticks of herself and her brothers; she was very excited to show these to them. She has been revelling in the last few days over a very tiny dictionary I found. It used to be mine, and I gave it to her. It is about an inch long and has real definitions inside. She calls it her “little book,” and often asks me if it was mine, and if I gave it to her. Of course the answers to both of these questions are “yes,” but she likes me to repeat it anyway. And I do….
In college I had the privilege of playing Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. In the third act of the play, Emily dies in childbirth and then in spirit form goes back to observe herself in life. She chooses to revisit the day of her eleventh birthday, and is soon overcome by the wonder of everyday life.
“It goes so fast,” she says. “We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed…. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it– every, every minute?”
The answer to her question is “No– Saints and poets maybe– they do some.”
I am neither saint nor poet, but I am trying to realize it anyway.
