more normal than not

One row of boxes on the mail route runs along a shallow ditch.

We had a heavy rain the night before, so the ditch was full of water…and when I pulled over to deliver the mail, I noticed two ducks swimming in the shallow water at the side of the road.

They were having a big and peaceful time swimming around down there.

Traffic blowing past…and these ducks were oblivious…happy in their personal bit of water.

I watched them for a while and then drove on…but it got me thinking.

It’s good to have something that gets me thinking.

I should be thinking while I’m doing something that’s become a rote activity.

I should be thinking while I’m on automatic pilot.

The ducks, down in the ditch, had so many options to swim around in. There were lakes, streams, other small ponds close by….all of them just a short flight away…but these ducks were down in the ditch and just as happy and contented as they could be.

Now, there were two or three angles I could attack this from.

I could tell myself that it was kind of sad that these ducks had “settled”…that with such a broad range of bigger and more exciting options out in the world, they’d flown down into something as mundane as a drainage ditch and fooled themselves into thinking that it was alright to be happy there.

Or, I could approach it from the “bloom where you’re planted”angle and celebrate that these ducks seemed so happy.

I suppose that I could just say something like, “GET AWAY FROM THE ROAD, YOU STUPID DUCKS!!!! YOU’RE CROWDING THE MAILMAN!!! YOU’RE TOO FREAKING CLOSE!!!”….but that would be a weird overreaction.

The reaction that I settled on…without a lot of thought or deliberation…was that it was a good thing to see these ducks so contented…and then I wondered if maybe they wouldn’t be contented wherever they ended up swimming?

It would be like us, sitting proudly by the edge of an infinity pool in some fine hotel somewhere, looking out at the ocean and the horizon beyond, enjoying the luxury of our surroundings….but….

maybe later, finding ourselves just as happy to be sitting in a lawn chair with our feet cooling in a fifteen dollar Wal-Mart wading pool.

These ducks! Maybe they were teaching me something!

Maybe happiness wasn’t a matter of hitting the “right situation”? Maybe it was a matter of hitting the situation “right”?

Maybe…and I’ve heard this before, but like a lot of things that I hear often, I discounted it…maybe…maybe, it’s what I bring to wherever I go that is going to determine what my life is like?

That’s easy to think about or say…harder to consistently put into practice.

My situation is a changeable thing….malleable and potentially disappointing.

I know that…I’ve seen that. Sadness comes from a lot of different and surprising angles…it can blow your legs out from under you before you can whistle “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.

My attitude is the only thing that I have a snowball’s chance of having any control over.

My reactions are my own.

Those ducks were happy and swimming…having fun in that ditch.

I could learn a thing or two about having fun from them.

I should learn a thing or two…..

 

I’m always driving these days.

It’s what I do…drive the mail around…drive these pieces of paper with numbers and letters all over them and bring them to people who might want them.

It is what I do.

It’s what allows me to identify myself as a “mailman”.

Always driving….always listening to music.

The other day, I heard a song that got me thinking.

What I was thinking was that the right song, in the right place, should do everything that needed to be done to get the world on track.

If enough of the people in power heard the right song, in the right context….there’d be no more wars, no need for possesions….all the people, living life…in peace.

When this song came on, I pictured Obama with a boombox, for some reason….

 This is from an Israeli radio station ad…who would have thought there’d be a picture out there like that? I hope they don’t track me down…I never ask permission….

Anyway…I thought of Obama…going for a big meeting with Putin….that Iraq/Iran guy/guys….Afghani….who else? All the folks we worry about…all of them…in one room for a big meeting.

Obama strides confidently to the front of the room…his boombox in his hand….silent, smiling with his eyes… but with a serious and determined look on his face…

He’s by himself…no Secret Service agents…no bodyguards…just a boombox and a plan.

When he gets to the front of this large room filled with allies and enemies, he calmly sets the boombox down on the stage in front of him and presses “PLAY”….the he retreats about 10 paces and waits, head down, for the song to begin.

When the song starts, this is what the room hears….

“Why Can’t We Live Together” Timmy Thomas

The song starts slowly, so the first moments of the exchange are quiet, Obama doing a highly choreographed interpretive dance, each movement a subliminal plea for peace in the world…

Then the vocals kick in after a minute or so…and Obama is lip-syncing perfectly.

IT’S PERFECT…AND THE AUDIENCE GOES WILD!!!

IT’S AN AMAZING AND HEARTFELT PERFORMANCE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!

When the cheering dies down, and the people are listening again…..they realize something.

They, as a unified group… for the first time bonded by their shared amazement at the spectacle they are witnessing….grow completely silent.

They listen as they realize that Obama isn’t lip-syncing….he’s doing his own vocals…and he’s doing it live!!!

They all stare open-mouthed as this brave man sings a song of peace for the whole world’s benefit.

A funky song of peace….

When the song ends, the room is silent.

The leaders of the world…free and not so free….stare at each other for a quiet moment.

Many different colored eyes meet in recognition.

The leaders of the world….men and women…realize almost simultaneously that they’ve been changed forever by this man and his brave performance of a pertinent classic soul song.

They stare at each other…and then, from off in the corner where the guy from Syria sits, a single clap begins, and then another….and another…..and….

The quiet Norwegian is up on his chair….screaming his head off.

People are hugging, dancing…and then Obama is on their shoulders, and they’re parading him around the room.

And then, because he has the boombox again, while he’s riding on his new friend’s shoulders, he turns up the volume even higher…and once more hits “PLAY”…..

Humor me. Close your eyes and imagine….Chaka singing…the President smiling….the leaders of the world carrying him, cheering…and loud funk music playing to set the mood.

It could happen.

It should happen.

Who am I kidding?…it won’t happen.

But wouldn’t it be cool if it did?

All of our children are in the house now.

Zoe is home from college…so when I hear a door open early in the morning, and the sound of padding feet, I can never be sure that it was Nate getting up earlier than I expected.

It could be anybody.

Now, the difference between one of the bigger kids getting up and Nate getting up is that when the big kids get up, it’s usually as temporary a thing as they can make it.

When they finish with their business, they always go back to sleep.

They don’t want to wake up early any more than I want them to wake up early.

They want to sleep.

When Nate gets up, it’s often a different thing.

Nate gets up with NEEDS.

Nate gets up to seek me out and find a reason to stay up.

Usually, it’s only some cuddling, maybe some juice…a cartoon…

His needs aren’t profound. He’s not an early morning demander.

No…that’s not the truth. He’s demanding as heck…he lets his needs be known without restraint. It changes the atmosphere to have him up with me.

It’s really not a big deal when he gets up, though…it just makes me feel like I missed my “window” somehow.

I missed that little chunk of quiet….the cars on the road outside the only noise in the house other than my typing…. and the fans… and the gentle whirring of the hard drive that I can hear if I really listen closely.

My window closed.

Now, Sparrow gets up early a lot of the time…and she has some NEEDS. She isn’t shy about voicing an opinion. She wants…and she wants it now…right now.

Jenny usually helps her with those needs….she’s not old enough yet to be pacified with a cup of apple juice.

I lived by myself for a bunch of years before I got married and we had children.

I lived in some pretty quiet places.

If I had heard other feet padding around, it would have been pretty terrifying.

It was just me…just me, all the time.

I suppose that I had a lot of open windows of opportunity that I didn’t take advantage of back then…but there was no one to blame except myself. There were no outside distractions.

It was just me.

Solitary.

Nobody closing windows…just me, sitting, feeling the breeze on my cheek, telling myself “tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow….you’ve got plenty of time. Formulate a plan, work it out in your head…and maybe if the weather holds, tomorrow might be a good day to start…”

These windows that I didn’t act on were no different than one that was closed.

I don’t think that I planned very far ahead, sometimes.

I was like the grasshopper in that story of the grasshopper and the ants….not getting ready for winter because he was too busy playing.

Except, somehow, I don’t remember a lot of playing…just that I let opportunity pass by like there were always going to be a million tomorrows.

Now I listen for the sound of padding feet…and it’s an expected part of my morning.

My quiet disappears with the sound of a door opening.

With the sound of a door opening, my window closes.

Maybe that’s what I was waiting for all along?

I wouldn’t trade this for what was.

Quiet is overrated, anyway…who needs a peaceful, quiet morning when I can have Bob the Builder?

Sometimes this baby is a ticking time-bomb…can you believe it?

 

 

 

We have a 6 month old baby who sleeps inbetween us now.

She has her own bed…a “co-sleeper” that’s attached to the side of our bed….but she ends up sleeping between us most nights.

This little baby is cutting teeth.

Sparrow is a beautiful, mostly placid little baby. She has a smile that appears like an everyday rainbow and melts hearts. She’s like an X-Man in that regard…superpowered and ready for action…..”Heartmelter”.

But…this little baby is teething and when she eats it hurts.

It is hard to sleep when someone with sharp new teeth is biting you.

When Sparrow is awake, sometimes it’s hard to get her to calm down. She’s usually pretty calm…so we wonder what’s bothering her when that happens.

We know that it’s probably the teeth coming in…but we always wonder anyway.

So we spend a lot of time carrying her and singing, cooing…trying anything to get her to be happy again.

So…with that in mind, I must say….

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!!!

You know…I was just thinking about carrying Sparrow….and then I started thinking about carrying all our kids….all our kids who, for the most part, are pretty easy-going young people.

They are pretty easy-going…but each of them had their moments when they were bawling their heads off for some reason and we were desperately…tiredly….trying whatever we could think of to get them to sleep….so that we could go to sleep.

That must be an equation somewhere…..COMFORT=COMFORT….”You scratch my back…and I’ll”… fall asleep and leave you alone for a minute or two so that you can fall asleep, too….

But…I guess that I’m digressing…flying off on a related tangent…circling the point….droning on and on about droning on….

What I was thinking was that most of us….hopefully most of us…have had someone to carry us while we yelled our head off at some point in our lives.

Now, it could have been when we were infants…it could have been when we were entering puberty.

It’s kind of hard to say.

Usually, though, it’s when we were just little, tiny babies.

Someone carried us like we carry Sparrow now…trying everything to comfort us that they could think to do.

That’s easy to forget when we enter adulthood…when we mature…when we’ve picked more appropriate and socially tolerated ways to “red-faced scream”.

Somebody carried us…someone held us and took care of us.

That’s pretty wild when you can stop long enough to think about it a little.

And even wilder…how about the situations where the birth mother couldn’t take care of the baby for some reason…and someone else steps in to hold and comfort?

That’s wild! It’s hard enough when the screaming baby is “your own”…but I guess that when you make that decision, to love and protect…that baby is really your “own” from the minute you first hold it.

So…to all the mothers…but especially to my wife….and the mother of our children….please do have a really great Mother’s Day !!

These things that you do…everyday, every night…are huge.

These “little things”….are huge.

We love you.

 

I got home from work slightly frazzled yesterday.

Some days you feel like you just survived it all.

You’re happy that it happened…survival is a good thing to shoot for…but the day didn’t roll as smoothly as it might have… and you’re tired and ready to relax.

Nate came out to meet me when I pulled into the driveway…and that’s always a mood lifter.

My daughter also came out to meet me…swinging her hair a little for some reason…but I must have been stuck in my residual survival mode still because after a quick greeting, the best I could muster was to ask her to carry in the big box of cloth diapers that came that day.

I did think that it was nice that she came out to meet me, too.

I remember thinking that she looked cute…kind of “summery”.

When I got inside, Jenny whispered in my ear “did you see Zoe’s hair? She had it cut again for ‘Locks of Love’….did you notice?”

DANG!!!

I did notice that something had changed…but I must have been too tired and not fast enough on my feet to comment….even if I’d figured out what was different, I didn’t comment on it.

DANG!!! DANG!!! DANGIT!!!

I better get some rest…get some sleep. I’m missing stuff.

Zoe got her hair cut for “Locks of Love”.

“Locks of Love” is a program where they cut off at least 10″ of your hair to make wigs for people with cancer.

I think that this is the third or fourth time that Zoe has done that.

I have enough hair that if I grew it out, they could make a wig for a really small child. No one asks me if I’d like to be a donor. No one wants my “widows mite”.

Zoe has a lot of hair. You could make a heck of a wig out of some of her hair.

That’s why she was swinging her head…so that Daddy could notice when he got home from work…and frazzled Daddy missed the boat.

That boat floated on by me while I was bent over by the river…. complaining about having to tie my shoe again (metaphorically…my shoe was tied all day, actually).

Locks of Love is a great program. I can only imagine what a comfort and a thrill it must be for a person who’s lost their hair to treatment to get a wig made out of some nice hair…maybe it lifts their spirits a little? I don’t really know…but I hope it would.

I’m proud that my daughter knows what that program is….that the program even exists…and I’m proud that she’s participating in it.

Somewhere there is a kid…or maybe an adult…with a nice head of blonde hair thanks to Zoe.

That’s pretty cool.

Maybe she’s helping to make a hard time a little easier for someone out in the world?

That’s pretty darn cool, too.

So…in answer to the question “did you notice?”…yes, I noticed.

I noticed…and I’m proud.