Take me to the River

My husband makes great coffee and recently got an espresso maker. I thought nothing of this until after this morning’s cup, I found myself scrubbing in between shower tiles with a toothbrush. Coffee is a gentle wakeup; espresso is dangerous. Some religious faiths even forbid the use of coffee (although chocolate is considered kosher) and I in some ways understand. Our ancient, resurfaced-but-peeling, leprous-looking shower probably needs a bit of scrubbing, but everything in moderation. The toothbrush action seems just a bit OCD to me. I stopped, grabbed a load of laundry and ran downstairs before I could react to the dust on top of the commode or the potential for reorganizing my underwear drawer. I know this madness and it must be fled.

Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway says “We live and die by time,” my favorite Rasta character in Neuromancer says “Time be time, mon,” and one of the visiting CEO’s at the Stern School of Business “Business and its Publics” lecture said “Time is the currency of love.” I hold all of these simultaneously true. Time IS the currency of love and I want to spend more of it with Connor and Papa Zook, but it takes leaving that living and dying by time and recognizing it for what it is: like a river of water that you can’t use all at once, but might still think about managing now and then.

It has taken a decided act of unclenching, though. Of all of the seasons of “Friends” reruns I saw, my favorite line is when Ross turns to Monica (I don’t miss the obvious here) and merely says “Oh, unclench!” I laughed so hard, tea came out of my nose. Although born dreamy and distracted by nature, when I decided to go to graduate school, I focused on getting organized. I taught myself order, systems, files, lists and excel spreadsheets. I have had to admit, though, that this is like the compensating mechanism of someone with a disability: I try to order my world against chaos by making lists of lists so I don’t let details slip and go back to the slightly unfocused and irresponsible character I was as a teenager with great potential but too little application. I think its because I realize how precious time is that I must learn to let it go.

Dan and I have talked about this irrational fear we sometimes get that something will happen to Connor. Some random act of fate, stupidity or life’s grind can take a child from you so quickly. I have a new horror that, like in all action-adventure movies, now that I am deeply happy and delight in my life, I will lose the most precious thing in it. I think of Eric Clapton who lost his two-year-old to a fall and my stomach twists. I cannot imagine surviving such a loss and don’t know how people do it. When I think of such things, I hold that little body close to my heart and soak in the joy of his being, the boundless energy that makes him want to jump out of my hands, and the smell of him, lest tomorrow they will be gone. Time will take him from me one way or the other; even if he survives to old age, he will morph and change and unfortunately lose that wild sense of wonder that he has now in leaves, sunlight on the wooden floor and my favorite earrings. He’ll lose that effortless baby charm and become grown. I’ll lose my baby and get a curious little boy, who I will lose to the teenager that I will give up for the man. I wonder how his eyes will look at 27. One thing I’m damn sure of is that I’d better give it time and pay attention because it goes way too fast.

I get Connor back at 3pm today and will enjoy all the hours between then and his bedtime. Sure, come Monday, I’m back on the lists again, but the deal I’ve cut and the balance I’ve made is that the lists cover the holes in the dam that keeps my life deep and rich. Without them, there’d be no water-sports with the baby, no teeming fish-jokes and no productive spinning of the turbines that keep this whole show powered. Still you can have too much damming up of your energies, that leads to too much damning of those around you for not being the perfect addition to your tightly clenched world. And that’s just too OCD, that way madness lies, and is to be fled.