The Aquarium

We went a few weeks back, during the seahorse exhibit.

Since the exhibit was about to close, it made me wonder where the creatures went when it was over. And what kind of transportation must have been necessary to move such fragile animals.

Grady now says, "Go, Tuna, Go!"

Visiting a Pumpkin Patch

Out off Clayton Road. We got there late in the day. He loved it. And so did we.

Altogether, we ended up with four pumpkins - one huge, one medium, one small and a white pumpkin, which we took pity on.

He slept Sunday night with the little pumpkin until quite late.

Times are good.

Towers and such.

The things that hold his interest are the things that hold the interest of all two year olds.

Sticks.

Blocks.

Benches you can jump off of.

Leaves you can drag your feet through.

Tire pump that "fix de weels".

Sometimes just for a minute. Other times, off and on for hours. So even when he's not building, he's building. And I realize, it's not just towers now, but towers that are reaching for things I can't see, never will see, toward his future. He's reaching out for it. Curious about it. But not worried about misusing it - which is too conscious, too adult-like.

It helps me remember, even as I stick the check for a $1000 in the envelope for his education fund, that he has his own foundation he's making and he's always trying to make it just a little taller than he can reach. And that is good.

A good thought.

I was reading a book called FEAKONOMICS today. The author asserted that Adam Smith thought people were basically good and generous. Then he proved it with a story about a guy who left bagels in company kitchens along with a donation box. According to the story, the man's friends, all economics experts, laughed at him and told him people would rob him blind. Certainly, some people stole bagels (ate them without making a donation) but far and away most paid.

This made me feel good about the world my son is growing up in.

Some day, he may ask...

...what was life like before me?

Me, I dreamt of making plays, movies and more. And, I can say, when he asks, it's still my life. Only now it's better because he's at the center of it.

What would your answer be?

He said.

Plip plop.

He said, I want to wear plip plop.

Then he put on his mother's flip flops.

Which are now plip plops.

139 Days.

I have been gone a long time. Something like 139 days.

My promise - mostly to myself since no-one but my beautiful mother-in-law looks at this blog - was to use this space to capture the things that struck me about raising a boy and being a dad.

Pretty simple, really. But somehow undone.

During the time I've been away, I've occasionally come to this page and looked at my pitifully small output and asked, why am I not putting down what's going on? Why am I not writing about my son's explosion of language skills? Why am I not recording the wonder and vulnerability I feel while watching my son run through the evening grass? Why, when my son runs naked through the living room flapping his arms and making monkey sounds, am I not committing the innocence such a scene awakens within me to paper?

It's more than laziness. Or passive aggressive neglect. Or a schedule that doesn't permit it (this I know for sure since I still find time to surf the internet and click on links to stories about celebrities who get angry when their acting job is interrupted by an audience members cell phone).

In truth, it's because I'm realizing how little I'm living in the moment of my own life.

Always planning, searching for the next thing, worrying about tomorrow, playing electronic yatzee, twittering, updating my status on facebook.

Not that there haven't been moments of complete and total engagement with the world I live in with my son and wife. Certainly, there have been.

But there's also been a lot of fiddling with my camera only to feel a tug at the side, look down, see the boy and hear a completely new wrinkle of consciousness erupt out of him like a thunderstorm on the plain - to which I wonder: How'd you learn that? Followed by the question: What else have I missed?

It goes further since I also find myself trying to figure out if any given moment that is startling to me is also startling to him and if it's a moment he will remember the way I remember certain moments with my own father (building a tower of blocks on the porch with him; the morning he told me my mother had gone to the hospital and would be bringing home a baby brother soon; watching him sleep one afternoon on the couch - etc.). Happy to remember those moments, quietly sad to know that I had forgotten them, even a little more melancholy to think I will lose them again at some point in the future. And knowing with certainty, that I will never really know what those moments will be for him.

It's an absurd train of thought to be sure.

But there it is and I consider it an important part of the experience of living. Not just the surprise of it, but the contradictory feelings of loss and renewel that arrives with that surprise. And the even more contradictory understanding that by following that train, I make my moment with Grady more vivid for myself while also standing outside of it.

Until, of course, I feel a tug at my side and look down and it starts, wonderfully, all over again.