Never Just A Car Ride

It’s been said before, and it’s one of the things people notice the most about him – Lex has a vivid imagination.

What most people do not have the opportunity to see is that it is also non-stop. From the time he awakes, to the time he hits the pillow there is an onslaught of scenarios, actions, events, stories that occur, one after the other with nary a break in between. 

A simple car ride anywhere is never just a car ride. The moment we are seated, “What are you driving? I’m driving an off-road armored Special Forces truck with a turret on the top. Let’s pretend you are driving a school bus and you don’t notice there’s a Special Forces truck behind you so you just drive along until all of a sudden you hear a siren, but you don’t know where it’s coming from and then you look in your mirror and you see it and you say, ‘Oh my god! It’s a Special Forces truck!’ and you wonder what’s going on, and when I finally honk the horn you pull over and all the kids in the bus start yelling out the window and pointing…”

All without a single breath.

 A simple game of catch after dinner is stalled until he gets into his full Red Sox uniform. Then, just as the first pitch is about to be thrown, “Hey, let’s pretend that you and I are Red Sox, and he’s Baltimore Orioles and after a few pitches when I miss the manager comes out and takes the ball from him to change pitchers just like the real games, and then we’ll switch and I’ll be the pitcher and you’ll hit and he’ll be the outfield and then we’ll do it again.”

Doesn’t matter what it is – dinner, sitting on the couch, having a snack. Even now as I type this:“Hey dad, let’s pretend you give me this sugar pouch, and I say, ‘This is good, what’s it made out of?’ and you say, ‘gunpowder’, and I say, ‘What?!’”, it just doesn’t matter. Anytime, anywhere, his imagination has a story to go with it.

It’s never just whatever it is. Why should it be?  There’s so much more out there!

His Bedroom

His Bedroom

Originally uploaded by mellex02

I was asked tonight about my flickr photostream. I don’t use it much anymore, so when asked, I visited to see what was still here.

I’d forgotten that I had uploaded all the pics from my last trip home to/from my dad’s apartment last year. Our last clearing out, our last visit, our last goodbye. I found that some of the photos were really quite striking (at least to me), this being one of them.

His bedroom. Where we stayed when we went there to clean out. I look at it now and the photo has so many layers of meaning I wouldn’t know where to begin.

This was HIS bedroom. This was his bed, his sheets and pillows. This was where he looked out the window and watched the cedar waxwings on the bushes outside. It is where he could not sleep in the end, needing to be more upright to breathe.

It is also where WE were as a family during a time of loss and sadness — the three of us: father, mother, son snuggled together in sleep and solace. Together because I needed us to be as I struggled with my sorrow. My lonliness. My need to feel my own family as close as possible.

When I took the photo I knew why. I knew what I saw in that room of rumpled bed clothes and shadows and emptiness. I wasn’t sure at the time that it had all been captured.

Now, over a year later, seeing it again I am sure that it did.

This was His Bedroom.

Too Young to Look Back?

He is seven-years-old, and while abandon makes an appearance once in a while, more often than not thought-out, thought-full, brain-engaged and processing is the common mode.

He is seven-years-old, only seven-years-old, and yet he is full of nostalgia, needing to keep mementoes like a plain white pair of socks two sizes to small, or a pair of his first “big boy underwear” because, “They remind me of when I was little.”  Forget about his actual baby things, which he routinely asks to go through, “Wow…were my feet really that small?”  If I was to try and discard said pair of white socks, he would collapse in a heap of genuine, distressed tears, “But they are memories!  Memories!”

Now we add another To Young To behavior: A real sadness about growing up.  Horrible, deep sadness about getting too big.  Too big to hug, to snuggle, to crawl into mom’s lap and curl up for comfort.  Real, intense, soulful grief at the idea of losing his ‘youth’ – his small youth. Even his babyhood. He possesses a real sense of loss over what changes as he gets older. Even in his short time on this earth, he understands he is losing things as gets older, and doesn’t seem to care much about what he gains (well, he cares, likes what comes with becoming a ‘big boy’, but does not relish what is lost in the process).

Too Young to Look Back? Apparently not. And while I often wish him a life full of more easy, child-like abandon, I appreciate his depth, his reflective-ness, his affection, and I marvel at his sense of his life as a whole. So I snuggle, hug, pull him into my lap and reassure him that it will be a long, long, long time before these things are lost. If ever.  “As long as you want hugs, snuggles and to curl up in my lap, you can have those things,” I tell him.

For in truth, I want them to remain as much as he.

Besides, tomorrow he will awaken and stand, hands on hips, face in a snarl as he declares he can make his own breakfast because, “Do you know how old I am? Don’t you know I can do this myself?”

And I will be the one to look back. To miss what is lost, while being awed at what is becoming. Because I am not too young to.

Who Ate My Clover!

I have no idea what this was. As I sat and watched, it seemed to start from his (her?) very bottom. In a wave it rose from his hind legs, a shiver that ran up through his stomach to his spine and hind legs, stretching them both up, up, up to his neck, elongating, to his head pulling up until –
Well…this. Had it sound it appeared it would have been ‘Gyack!’
Yawn? Gag? Opera? Some high-pitched call that only other rabbits can hear? Beats me.
But it’s funny

Truth, Tooth, and Fairies

Here’s the truth: our seven-year-old son is a very bright, very intuitive, very imaginative child. He grasps concepts and connections beyond his years.  His inner world has no bounds. 

Here’s another truth: if he sees an ad or commercial for anything princess or fairy-related, it’s “girly” and he will shoot it down with anything handy that will serve as a weapon — finger, paper towel tube, pencil.

And here’s on more truth: The Tooth Fairy, The Easter Bunny and Santa are all real.

He just lost another tooth. I wish I had a photo but he’s very self-conscious about the space left behind. After losing two teeth (now three) it is still traumatic — “It’s like parts of my body are falling off!”.  But all that is soothed by visits from the tooth fairy, who somehow knows exactly what to leave as balm to his wound, and who was kind enough to leave the first two teeth behind as “momentos” of his growing up.

At seven years old I figured this savvy, sarcastic, wry, perceptive and often literal child would have made the leap to the real truth. But his truth still holds strong and I think speaks volumes to the truth that a child’s comprehension and love of fantasy is strong. And it is important that they have that fantasy. It is crucial to their eventual understanding of the actual world.

Dragons are not real. There are none. Ogres, Phoenix, Gryphon are fantasy.  That’s the truth. He knows it.

But  for now, he grows up, loses teeth, and the tooth fairy will come to make it all okay.  “Is it a he or she?” he wants to know.  “Good question,” I tell him. “What do you think?”

Because after all, we all have our own truths.

Mr. Magorium’s Emporium Wisdom

Watched Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium this weekend. My father would have loved it — its delight, its message, its demand that we not forget or abandon the child within.

More importanly for me was a surprising message from Magorium that felt like he was speaking right to me — or moreover — that my father was speaking to me through him. He said:

When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He’s written “He dies.” That’s all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is “He dies.” It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with “He dies.” And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it’s only natural to be sad, but not because of the words “He dies.” but because of the life we saw prior to the words.
I’ve lived all five of my acts, Mahoney, and I am not asking you to be happy that I must go. I’m only asking that you turn the page, continue reading… and let the next story begin. And if anyone asks what became of me, you relate my life in all its wonder, and end it with a simple and modest “He died.”

Suddenly, I took a deep, full, liberating breath. It was important on a number of levels — the words themselves, of course..but the fact that my father so loved Shakespeare, the theatre, and would have loved this film made those words all the more potent and effective.

And finally, I truly feel in the deepest part of my understanding, that I have let go.

He lived. With wonder, with depth, with compassion. And he died.

…….