Matching Tracksuits

A warm day in early March makes us all think that perhaps we’ve turned the corner, that maybe we’ll leave behind all the cold and dark of winter for the year now and begin thawing.

Granted, as someone in South Carolina, I can hardly complain about the cold, about true cold, but this year, we’ve had a few doses of true cold, of temperatures in the single digits, and we’re all tired of it.

And so today, we got out as often as we could. Before the Boy’s nap, we headed out to play Red Light, Green Light, one of the Boy’s favorites, even if he doesn’t quite understand it. Call “Red light!” and he trots up beside whoever his opponent is and only then stops, most often with a smile.

Afterward, we head to the backyard for some exploring. That usually, no always, means wandering and wondering about the two backyards, ours and our absent neighbor’s, going to all the same places we always go — our little hideouts, our little lookouts.

The trees, we discover during our walk, are eager for spring as well.

After the exploring, it’s time to swing. Those two activities are the staples of our backyard adventures, with the order changing. Yet there has been a change in the last year: the Girl has taken over our role of pushing the Boy. But in true Girl fashion, she turns it into a game in and of itself. When the Boy accidentally kicks her, she moves into position to let him do it again — after she fusses just a few moments — and then begins performing. Only a slideshow can do the performance justice.

After a few minutes, it’s time to switch. And that reveals another change: the Girl is far more patient these days than she was a year ago, a month ago. Well about some things.

“Is it my turn, Daddy?” she asks.

“No, let him swing a little longer,” I reply, and she does. But eventually, it’s time to be fair. She gets in the swing, her legs flopping over the edge, and the Boy heads off to find things to toss into the drainage ditch we call our stream.

He prefers sticks, but I collect them all to divide between our fire ring and our smoker, the better going to the latter.

By and large, I manage to convince him that spiky balls — Sweetgum seed pods — are far better for tossing. They carry farther, and the far more numerous.

The Girl, though, takes out her Explorer’s Notebook, which is also her Drawing Notebook, and begins making notes of all the “extraordinary” (a new favorite word) discoveries we made, all the poisonous trees and plans, the Wild Cat, the imaginary creatures — all our near-misses.

After the Boy’s nap, we head to a local park. We were going to go to the small park by the small local airport, but the Girl was eager to go exploring more, somewhere new, and the Boy, to our surprise, was eager to change our plans.

We head out for a walk, making our way to the observation deck.

And back.

We end with some time on the playground.

Some things just don’t change.

She built patiently, planning each move, checking, pulling apart, rebuilding. She had a vision — at least an evolving one — and she worked to fulfill it. In her typical fashion, she took a break from building to organize all available components, presumably because she was tired of the try-and-search method. She made the structure as symmetrical as the available components would allow.

And it was another example of what amazes me about our daughter: she can be so incredibly hyper that you’d think she couldn’t focus on anything for more than two seconds. Yet she brings home perfect grades from school, can sit and read for hours, loves to lose herself in painting, and has developed a recent fascination with building (more Legos are high on her Christmas wish list).

The Boy, on the other hand, had only one thing in mind: knocking it all down. In fact, he joyfully did just that to the Girl’s first attempt, causing much consternation on her part (read: a minor breakdown) and much laughter on his part, until, the sensitive soul that he is, he realized that he’d hurt L.

Yet he did it again. It’s what being two is all about. But it cost him: his newest car went into time out, causing him much consternation (read: complete breakdown).

Finally, he got the car back, L had the structure rebuilt, and after a quick photo session — that the Girl herself requested — it was time.

Before E came alone, we warned L that, although she would certainly love him to death, there would be times that little brother would be positively infuriating. “You’ll make something,” we explained as an example, “and he’ll come along and destroy it.” Occasionally, though, it’s just what they both want.

F. Boyle, in his homily during the vigil Mass yesterday, spoke of being haunted by our former selves, of casting a backward glance over our shoulders at our younger selves and feeling shame, feeling disgust, or framed positively, feeling we’d grown. It reminded me of my own past, in more than one way. Just this week I was glancing through old journal entries, thinking to myself, “My my, how could anyone put of with my arrogance?”

It was around that time when I first read Bill Brown’s “Strangers.” I’d worked as an intern at a poetry review just before graduating college, and one snowy afternoon in Poland a couple of years later, I received a package of recent publications from the editors. Among them was The Art of Dying.

Strangers

Seventeen split my tongue
like a pet crow’s, shrill,
mimicking, irreverent,
ignorant, and shamed.My glances were foul
balls, my hopes were
shooting stars, I was
batting zero.

I ate spaghetti
with a pitchfork, picked my teeth
with an ax, wrecked more cars
than a test dummy.

I measured out love
with tweezers, was as humble
as a chainsaw, and when my sincerity
was challenged,

cracked open my heart
like a coconut, the pure
sweet insides for all
to taste and marvel.

My hands were foxes,
my thoughts shot blanks,
my smile was as sweet
as plastic grapes. My dreams were strangers
who stood on a dark bridge
hiding their eyes from
the sun.

I was angry at my dead
father, I was hunting
Jesus on the cover
of record albums.

And one of the strangers
on the bridge? It was just
me three years older, tongue
sewed together,

mouth clamped shut,
army-mummed, staring down
on seventeen, wonder where
the hell I’d come from.

So as Fr. Boyle spoke, I thought of that poem, thought of the “I” who first read them, how much more like strangers I was compared to him than Brown’s speaker could ever be as a twenty-year-old looking back at his seventeen-year-old self. So many changes that I’m almost embarrassed to meet myself in my journal entries. So full of myself, so sure I was so painfully intelligent, so superior to so many.

And then, out of the blue, I thought of a band that I’d once had a flickering interest in, a band that I bought one single album by and decided instantly that I didn’t really like them at all, began wondering why I even bought the album as the band — the Sugarcubes — never really received much airplay. A little research and I found the “hit” from the album I bought was a little number called “Regina.”

A few clicks on Spotify and I was listening to it again, wondering why in the world I’d bought an album that, as far as I could tell, didn’t have a single redeeming song on it, an album that is to me today a laughable piece of trash. Undoubtedly one of the worst albums ever recorded. But when it came out in ’88 or ’89, I thought it was decent. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it. Part of that was, I guess, not wanting to have the feeling that I wasted money on a CD that I’d never listen to again.

All these things were tumbling around in my head this afternoon when we went out to the park after essentially an entire weekend in the house. A sick mother, a semi-sick daughter, a recovering father, and a boy with a seemingly endlessly running nose simply need to stay inside and rest, but that is ironically tiring. So off we went this afternoon for a little time in a new park. I found myself wondering how I’d view my forty-year-old self in another twenty-five or so years. Would I see myself as I see my late-teen self? My early-twenties self? It seems both likely and impossible.