And time and memory dance

I hope Einstein is right. And Billy Pilgrim. And Frederick Buechner. Right with regards to time, that it's relative and panoramic and bendable.

Billy Pilgrim (as recorded by Kurt Vonnegut in "Slaughterhouse-Five") clues us in on the Tralfamadorian view of time, where they "can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance... It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Children have a more useful concept of time. Our girls have said "Yesterday" or "last year" to describe the same memory at different times when they were younger. Buechner nails it by explaining, "It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity."

This might hold still for adults: I have memories from when I was three years old--my parents bailing out a sailboat they had after a storm, or the inside of my nursery school classroom--that are more vivid and clear than things that happened last week. Our memory alters time.

Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. - Buechner, "The Sacred Journey"

Neither time, nor our memories are fixed. It's more like they're dancing. Yesterday, our eight-year-old daughter Ava and I set out on our bikes to a cemetery a couple miles up the road, where I recently learned my great grandparents were buried. All the Valliant relatives I've known were buried in the Oxford Cemetery. This great grandfather, Jeremiah, died in 1919, decades before my dad was born.

Ava and I had to explore the cemetery to find the grave, an ancestral scavenger hunt in play. We both lit up when we found it, not far from where we parked our bikes, though we'd walked the long way round and come back to it.

"It was cool to meet my great great grandfather today," Ava told me later in the evening.

"Meet." I didn't correct her. It was the perfect word. Time and death are grown-up ideas, not useful or relevant to an eight year old.

Swirling toilet bowl vortex

Occasionally, the toilet gives us a useful image. Time and toilets have a lot in common. Picture the swirling vortex of the toilet flushing. Looks a little like a galaxy.

That swirling toilet bowl vortex has inside it all those things you want to get done in a day, a week, a month, a year. And those things are constantly disappearing, going away down the drain. It's inevitable. Most of them go that route.

Seems of late, I have been focusing on what we choose to pluck from that vortex and actually accomplish. Knowing that most of those things I want to do are going to get away, what are the ones I REALLY want to make happen? Let me make sure I save them from the toilet of Time (capital  "T" Time). Our lives are all about the choices we make and what we prevent from being flushed. That is what we're left with.

I'm not necessarily sold on milestone birthdays. We seem to be fixated on multiples of 10. Why is 39 or 41 any less a big deal than 40? But I'm not immune to reflection and an age like 40 gives a good reason to look back and look forward, and thereby also look at the now.

In my 20s, I sidekicked myself into shape, rediscovering running, lifting weights, making the time to play any sport I could play. Then Anna came along. Fitness slipped until I amped the running up to marathons and beyond and trail running. I spent most of my 30s in great running shape.

Last year's ankle injury brought with it general lethargy and loss of fitness rhythm. And 2012 finds me 20 pounds heavier than my fighting weight. So I will pluck my fitness from the swirling toilet bowl vortex. Forty ounces to 40, comes in under six weeks now, so I am in the process of taking back the gym, taking back the roads, trails, playing fields, etc.

It's a funny thing, fitness. When I've had it, other things follow suit. I'm more productive, more creative, have more energy, am more fun, happier, you get the idea.

Looking for suitable toilet bowl galaxy illustrations is also a funny thing. It drives home the fact that Mario, of Super Mario fame and a favorite of our daughters on Wii, is a plumber. Given our toilet of Time metaphor, maybe Mario is that existential hero our time needs. Combating the swirling toilet bowl vortex as it tries to flush down those things we want to do with our lives. Thanks, Mario. We needed that.

A decade of Anna

"Anna" is another word for "life-changer." At least that's been my experience. I can still remember the shirt I was wearing to the hospital, ten years ago today, when Robin had her. I've written here before about her hearing my voice. If you'll indulge me to quote myself, it serves as an introduction, the first time I met Anna:

"When our daughter Anna was born, her left arm was a little slow to get moving. The doctors weren't overly concerned--this can happen to a C-Section born baby--but they noted it, and I went with them as they rolled her down the hospital hallway into a room to check her vitals and her arm. She didn't care for being prodded and was screaming (those who know her can attest to her lung capacity) over the doctors and nurses, until I talked to calm her. When I spoke she fell immediately quiet and moved her head and unfocusing eyes toward my voice. She stayed quiet while I spoke and the nurse commented that she knew and responded to my voice (read to your babies in bellies). Homegirl (Anna, not the nurse) had the keys to the car from there. I knew from that second, and holding her looking out our hospital room window that night as she slept that there was nothing cooler than being a dad. I've thought so countless times since."

All the moments and milestones since and my mind hangs on that moment the longest. A decade moment. A lifetime moment.

I have said before that I have enjoyed every year of our girls' lives more than the previous year, just watching them grow and learn and seeing who they become. That's true still. But your child hitting double digits gives you pause. Fuck "gives" you, it MAKES you pause.

My life over the last decade has been co-defined. Many of my greatest moments are moments Anna made--things she said or did or thought or spoke.

I have cried more, been more emotional over the last decade. Many of the tears are the good kind, but that depth of experience, of experience shared with a soul/person in your care, growing and changing and looking to me/us for opinion, answers, solace, laughter. Perhaps I neglected to read the "free tear duct fill-up with birth of baby" sign.

Over the last decade, I have watched more kids movies than I ever thought possible. I have learned the names of toys and books and TV characters because, well, that's how I roll.

Over the last decade, I have seen myself, outside myself. Anna is a morning person, like me (Ava prefers sleep, like Robin). Anna and I share some of the same hang-ups, same tendencies, same inclinations. I'm not sure what to say about recognizing yourself in another, but it is an experience without parallel.

Over the last decade, I have gained a respect, admiration and sense of wonder about my father, my parents, and how the hell they raised and dealt with us (me, really, my sister was much easier) and seemed to always be in control. We, as parents, certainly do not.

I think it's fair to call the last ten years, the decade of Anna in our house and our lives. Over that time, she has given me a new identity, a new responsibility, a new perspective and a new name: Dad. I think it is my favorite of my names.

Happy 10th birthday, Anna! Can't wait to see where you/we go next.

The abstract pirate

I went through a Buffett phase. Not a "Cheeseburger in Paradise" Buffett phase, but a "Gypsies in the Palace," "Volcano" phase. I bought the box set, listened to everything and read his novels. We've seen him in Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

I still dig Buffett, but more in an island-vibe way, a waterman soul way; as someone who could happily live life in and on and around the simple, small water town. His music is a perfect arrow in the quiver of the various music that should be enjoyed thereon.

The song that reeled me in was "A Pirate Looks at 40." The simple articulation of being out of time, of standing outside what society deems financially/occupationally important. I wrote the line, "My occupational hazard is, my occupation's just not around," on my ceiling in college (part one).

That song is in my head again as we start 2012, looking ahead on the year, as this is the year I am scheduled to turn 40. It's never an age I've given a lot of thought to.

I can remember a New Year's Eve, when I was probably 17 or 18 and thinking about New Year's Eve leading into the year 2000. Thinking that I'd be 27. Wondering what that would look like. Remembering that my mom was 27 when she had me. Would I be married? Would I have kids at that point?

It was all abstract. When things/images/concepts are abstract they can never be specific. But when they move to specific, they never go back to abstract. They supersede it, take it over. With Robin, I no longer wondered what my wife would look like. When the girls were born, I ceased to wonder what kids would look like or what their names would be.

My looking forward or back at life has never really been age sensitive, but life event sensitive.

I am glad and thankful that the abstract future has revealed the life I now live. But I still feel like Buffett in "A Pirate Looks at 40." Maybe more so.

The New Room

Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you? --Charles Simic

The office in our house is largely second-hand, cast-off or leftover. It's my favorite room in the house.

Our girls call it "The New Room," because it's been assembled and arranged more recently than the rest of the house.

Maybe our lives are the same--overlapping circles of being cast off or jettisoning parts and people and coming together with new-to-us stories and people who are their own cast-offs. But the way we come together, the intersection of it all makes it, us, new.

We watched Toy Story 3 last night. We'd seen it in the theater but the girls wanted to see it again. There's a montage in the beginning, home movies that show Andy and his toys growing from elementary school to college age. Aside: despite getting older, I often feel like the toys who stay the same over time, I rarely feel like I've grown up.

I'm a sucker for storylines or songs or photos that show kids growing older or father-daughter relationships. My heart swells to the point where I'm 2.4 seconds from sobbing over that shit.

Anna is eight and cares about brand names, while Ava at five is concerned only with colors and cuteness. Their vocabulary and expressions, body movements seem to change daily. It's awesome. It's gut-wrenching.

This passage of time stuff. Most of the time I am cool with it. I can embrace it. I love my life more at 38 than I did at 28 or 18, and I dug it then.

It makes my existence to watch and be a part of the girls growing and laughing and beaming happy. At the same time I follow the thread to us being kids and my parents going through this and my parents being kids and their parents going through this and I know/knew their parents and three out of four of them are dead now and... Fuck!!

I'm not often taken in that direction, but that's where thinking leads sometimes. Logical-emotional-existential thinking when you're sitting in "the New Room," looking at your bookshelf that once held your Betamax tapes of Star Wars and your old little league games.

Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you?