Nov
11
The Halloween decorations have been packed away, and while I am not ready to festoon my house with glittery Christmas flair, the stores are certainly ready for me to do so. Every display window is suddenly jammed full of ho-ho-ho, every object less about the thing itself and more about the moment it promises to deliver. I’ve been budget-crunching for long enough that I’ve mostly stopped lusting after what I cannot have, but the holiday crush, ah, it’s something else entirely. There is so much stuff everywhere, my god, so much stuff. It’s all so tempting and well-lit and offered through a whirling cloud of nostalgia and I tell myself it’s the twinkling pretty paper on an enormous calculating machine that can break you if you’re not careful but jesus it still presses my I want buttons one after another. It seems custom-designed to make me grab for all sorts of things that are just out of reach.
Money money money money. Time time time time. Time is money or money is time or maybe the two should have nothing to do with each other but they’re standing there with locked hands nonetheless. Red Rover, Red Rover. A school course description catalogue arrived in the mail a while ago and I left it on the table for a night before folding it, unopened, into the recycling. There’s no money right now, or maybe the more important fact is that there’s no time, or maybe it doesn’t matter which there isn’t enough of.
I miss writing, not for deadlines or assignments, but for the pure joy of it. There’s not much time for that lately, either.
There are plenty of other things, though. So many good moments lately, laughter and silly rituals and conversations I wish I could capture in amber. Store them away preserved, intact, for some future day when I can draw out just a microscopic amount and be flooded all over again with this exact time in our lives.
I’m trying to keep that in mind as the decorations and ads and pitches get into full swing so I can stop myself from fretting over not having custom-printed holiday photo cards or a rented snow-dolloped cabin in Sunriver or that inexplicably satisfying weight of department store bags on my arm. We have our family, our little unit who loves each other. That’s more than enough. It’s the real happiness all that stuff is trying to sell.
The imbalances, I think, will work themselves out. Today is temporary, which is both the joy and sorrow of it all.
Nov
8
It’s fascinating to see how little kids latch on to, then ultimately discard, certain toys or types of play. Most Areas of Interest among the pint-sized members of our household seem to have a situational shelf life. Transformers, for instance, were something I thought Riley would be dragging around until his college years, but the moment his Transformers-obsessed friend at daycare left the school Riley forgot all about his robotic buddies and they sifted to the sorry pile of forgotten detritus at the bottom of the toy box. Which is a little sad in a Toy Story way, I suppose, but frankly I was glad to see the back end of those maddening plastic Made in China crap-chunks since he was constantly asking for help in order to switch a guy from a truck into a blender or whatever and considering my spacial relations/engineering skills those requests were pretty much on par with “Can you just translate this Cyrillic real quick and then maybe do some partial differential equations?”
Legos, much to the dismay of my vacuum cleaner and the soles of my feet, seem to be a long-standing thing for Riley, and god knows he shows no sign of ever being sick of making those irritating pshew pshew pshew sounds as he runs around shooting invisible elk, but everything else interest-wise seems to ebb and flow. Today it might be volcanoes, tomorrow it’ll be rockets, next Tuesday it’ll be something else entirely.
I try and remind myself of this fact so I don’t give in too much to whatever his current Thing might be (the broken-limbed abandoned Transformers are a good reminder, after all) but sometimes I kind of can’t help it. My brain knows that right now he loves pretending to be a veterinarian so it’s a good time to talk about it and use it as a school subject at home and maybe arrange for a tour through a vet office, but it would be silly—RIDICULOUS—to go to Toys R Us and buy an overpriced veterinarian costume, since it’s surely just going to be stored away, unloved, in a closet after a week or two.
Oh, but still.
What’reyougonnado.
(PS: I feel I must make mention of how Dylan, in stark comparison, has One True Love That Has Never Died. A romantic, that one.)
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