Ridonkulous

Sad tale of passing time...

She is getting older, that is for sure. While I was waiting to watch Magic Schoolbus with her six years ago. Sand.

Just get this bit of work done and I will join her.

But it's already gone. The show is over, as I hear again the last credits. I almost could have made it. But no.

Gone.

She came with me to the grocery store. She had been talking for a couple of weeks about wanting to try "Lucky Charms" cereal but I wrote it off as a flight of fancy. We don't eat that kind of thing. But she did want to have it. Her mother made her cry telling her when she asked for the -nth time that it would make her fatter. 

Her mother later apologized for hurting her feelings.

So I took her with me to the store. “Go ahead grab a box,” I said, after she said she no longer wanted it because it would only make her fatter. I agreed with her mother in principle, but the sentimental side of me was not about to deny her that one thing. In fact she could have asked anything and gotten it. No one asks wonderful things from me any more.

The toy aisle at HEB store was back then a minefield. She had her eyes on every Barbie and every possible Barbie scenario. Beach Barbie. She would look at them and plot them out and ask for them in perfect title and order. With a full narrative delivered on the slow walk down the aisle.

“No no no,” was always the answer. Occasionally on special days she might get one. Maybe three or five times total. For all the asking. It seemed it would go on forever and therefore periodic denials were in order. But no. That, I have come to understand, is not true.

Now she asks for nothing. None of them do. The days of play are gone.

The closet with all the toys in the family room is as it was five or eight years ago, but these days it is a ghastly sarcophagus. That which once reassured me from a distance. Squeals of delight and imaginations on fire. Art supply animals. Play sets. Hot Wheels races. They are all still there but have not been touched for years. They are, I think, kind of embarrassing. Not enough of an anachronism to remove, but something from which to aver one's eyes while passing.

Yet I hear the cries of the old and wonderful scenarios as I pass by…if I look and listen carefully, which is why I seldom look and listen. An animal farm. A veterinary lab. A beautiful dollhouse. A Barbie vacation. As if new. But it is now all silence. A reminder in the room that we all ignore.

The most sorrowful haunting.

(2014) - “Every move is a fire,” grunted the man charged with reconstructing the girls’ bunk beds. He could not make the provided hardware re-connect the beds as they were originally joined in Virginia. The movers arrived after the 18 wheel truck carrying our lives as they were, a snapshot from early June, 2014, Springfield VA. Ende. They spilled out of a nearly wrecked car, a kind of ordered comedy. Liquor was strong on their breath as they somehow unloaded the entire trailer in the Texas heat without stopping for a moment. (If you do not know Texas Gulf Coast June you will not understand this part.) A black man among a team of black men was charged with reconstructing the beds as per our contract. He was a wistful philosopher, understanding that attempting to reconstruct one’s previous life after a move, after pulling one’s foot from that flowing river, was impossible. I had never really put it down to a fine point until his pithy poetic statement. For sure, each move is a fire. Your entire world, your customs, your patterns, your positions, all are burned up. There are two sides to the “starting over” coin. But eventually both are shadows of sorrow.

So she has a thought in mind about Lucky Charms and she brings it up. It is hardly a minefield on the Barbie aisle.

Go ahead and get one, I respond. Take your pick. She hardly smiles, recalling her mother's admonitions. But she does take one.

Lately her flights of fancy have only been with the language. This or that is "ridonkulus." Something delicious is "delinquent." The word "like" is much over-used.

I endlessly correct her and am intolerant with her employment of slang. I am a word man. But today I realized that her ridunkulous employment of neologisms is rather endearing. It is a remnant of that little girl who wanted Barbies in the danger aisle. 

Rather than squashing it because it is annoying - and it is - I understood that this is what is left of the little girl I loved. And who is nearly gone.

—-

We depart the tomatoes in the produce section and she thrusts her arm through mine and we walk together to the check out. I realize as the children grow older that we lose the tactile psychological salvation. That innocent feeling of having someone loving you because you are you - and thankfully oblivious of your faults. Arm in arm because they want to remain part of you. The first thing in the morning, before all else, is a hug. 

That is gone.

On the way to the car I put my arm over her shoulder and she put hers on my waist. Ha ha we laugh. Walking arm in arm with my wonderful child. Knowing this could be the last time. As a depressive most will not understand the pain that goes with pleasure.

But today my dear reminded me of the girl who picked the first flowers of spring and laid them on the kitchen counter. A tiny bit of magic.