Another weekend in Seattle. My son was lovely this weekend, his spring break starting on Friday afternoon with his last after school science club meeting (he’s starting golf on Mondays after the break). We only had three days together but the same small pile of things came over from his mom’s house: the bag of Lego trains which would be disassembled and reassembled several times, swim trunks, craft books from the library, skateboarding items, golf clubs (despite the wind and rain for the weekend), stuffed bear, box of science projects. Once he got to the apartment everything had its place and we settled into games of Sorry, cheeseburger lunches, afternoon activities, and more games of Sorry.
He’s taken to swimming in a way I never thought possible – he’s starting to float on his own, kicking and laughing, and I took the time to swim laps in the YMCA pool next to his learning area. Back and forth, slow side strokes and backstrokes and my awkward strange looking crawl, stopping after each one and marveling at how much he was enjoying his time in the water. Forty minutes later we headed up to the lockers, dried off and put on our street clothes, and headed home.
It’s amazing to watch him after a burst of physical activity like that. The car ride home was quiet, listening to the last innings of the baseball game on the radio, and then back at the apartment, he immediately started asking to play with me – Legos, Scrabble, Sorry – with increasing urgency. I asked him if he wanted to take a little break and he said no, no, no, I don’t want to. We played a game which he lost and he completely broke down in tears. I hugged him and said he was just tired, he just needed a break, but no, he didn’t need a break, he just cried and cried and hugged and hugged.
We took a break for about twenty minutes, him in my arms convulsing every few seconds, then curling up, then putting his hand over my face and saying “Fwump” the way I taught him to when he was two, then putting his hand on my head and saying “Chomp”, then stealing my nose the way the girlfriend had taught him to.
On Sunday morning he woke up around five and asked if we could take the train to Maine in August when we went east like we had last year when we had gone to Philadelphia. I said I would talk to his mom about it but we’d definitely take the train again someday. He went back to sleep.
After skateboarding on Sunday, we made a tugboat out of kitchen sponges, a couple of hours before his mom came to pick him up. We added felt portholes, and my son was meticulous in cutting the edges of the sponges and the felt to be neat and tidy. He wanted the tugboat to look like a real boat, albeit one with pastel colors of green, blue, pinky purple, and pale orange, with pink and black portholes and small black felt life rings hanging off the side. The sponges smelled of bad chemicals so he insisted on washing them in the tub first, which meant we couldn’t test out the boat because it took too long for the sponges to dry off after the cleaning. He didn’t mind. He wanted to do well making the tugboat, and he was happy with the result. He could wait until he comes back in a week and a half, when the glue will be dry, and when he will be able to test the boat properly at bath time.
The last thing we did before his mom came over was to play a game of Sorry with four people – well, my son, me, and two of his stuffed bears. I did my best and made sure my bear partner did his best as well. I lost myself in the game, in the simple order around the board, keeping track of which bear’s turn it was, and I saw my son doing the same, patiently explaining the rules of each card to the bears (“they don’t know the rules as well as we do, Dad”) but I noticed that his bear occasionally made a sub-optimal move if it was to my son’s advantage. I did my best to remind him that Teddy almost certainly would want to win, but he waved it off and said Teddy wanted his best friend, my bear, to win. Sure enough, Teddy did win, which upset my son a bit so he made the bear take a nap.
Then he went off, the small pile recollected and placed in the back of his mom’s car, and I took my ex’s brother out for dinner. He’s a critical care doctor at a trauma ward north of the city, and despite having one of the biggest and most generous hearts I’ve ever encountered, his work and his upbringing keep him under a cloud. I focused on him and tried to remind him of how much he meant to me and to others, and how lovely he really is despite his own reluctance to see it himself. It was a good dinner, classic Italian done very well, and we parted with a big brotherly hug.
With too much time on my hands, I’m also trying to focus on each act – each game with my son, each meal prepared, cleaning the apartment, laundry, the paragraph I’m reading, the paragraph I’m writing – and make each act as pure as it can be. The acts right now are particularly good for that because each is completely ephemeral; they will be repeated, they will have to be repeated, so no matter how well I do each one, the effect will be instantaneous and just as quickly disappear, and I will have to focus again the next time just as much. The outcome of each act individually is irrelevant, but still important when viewed through the eyes of my son, my ex’s brother, through my own eyes. I did pretty well at that this weekend, although my quickness to congratulate myself probably is an indication that I know I could have done better but I’m giving myself some credit for doing so under difficult circumstances. At least, my soul feels like it deserves some credit, no matter how well or poorly I actually pulled off the effort.
I have a few big things on my mind and in my life right now, but I find that those things mostly involve patience and understanding. You can’t really focus on patience but you can do it well. Part of focusing on patience is endowing the smaller parts of life with, well, not meaning, but valuing them for their presence, the way that each task can bring you through each day with a kind of small purpose which nevertheless always needs to be renewed.
So tonight I’ll fly back to Maine, again, just as I’ll do again in two weeks. I’ll be a good traveler – it comes naturally but it’s always good to be considered about it. My sister will pick me up in the morning. I’ll be the best brother I can be for our quick ride home Then I’ll put the things in my shoulder bag in their proper places back in my room, I’ll take the dog for a walk and I’ll read and I’ll write and I’ll live my small life the best way that I can, while I practice patience and understanding (practice being the key word, complete with occasional errors and with infinite room for improvement) and while the big things move at their own pace.