A New Sky over the Salt Marsh: Here Comes the Curve Ball

Last week, I wrote this little post about…well, the joys of both work and pleasure and, well…just read here, because I’m fast discovering I’m inept at paraphrasing myself.

I now submit to you the epilogue, a.k.a. What Really Happens When I Listen to My Own Malarkey. I’ve promise truth in blogging once or twice before, so here’s my tale.

Tuesday morning, as the small people and I were getting ready to leave for school, I again noticed the pink hues of sunrise hitting our window and recalled my former musings.

Once in a while, believe it or not, I actually take my own self seriously.

So, as the small people were standing right by the door to our marshfront deck, in various stages of donning shoes and footwear, I said, “Dear, sweet offspring, suspend your toils momentarily; harken to the call of the sun and gaze upon it while you may.”

I love how I sound in my mind.

They did, so I went around feeling rather Thoreauesque that morning, having remembered to share the wisdom of all my years with the small people during the time of day, no less, when remembering to bring my Diet Coke with me to work is often a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

After my classes, I came home and noticed that my eldest had left a paper he needed for school sitting on the arm of the couch. The paper was a reading log he had meticulously kept over the last couple of weeks so that he could earn the privilege of a round of table football at school. The reading itself had been easy, as he was deep in a couple of Roland Smith books he was really enjoying, but maintaining the log took effort. When I picked him up from school at the end of the day, I handed him the sheet and asked him if he wanted to run in and see if it was too late to turn it in to the librarian.

As it turned out, the table football event had already taken place earlier that day. I started in on my diatribe helpful advice about how important it is to put everything in one’s bag right when one is done with it, but he stopped me.

“Mom, I put it in my bag last night when I finished reading, but I took it out just to double-check that it had both our signatures in the right spots, and that was when you said to go look at the sunrise, so I set it on the couch and forgot it.”

So basically, my Walden moment I was bound and determined to share with the next generation distracted him and ultimately led to him setting down his log and thus missing the reward he had spent two weeks working toward. Instead, he and the other students who either hadn’t done the work or who had mothers with similar proclivities had to spend their table football time reading.

This seems to be my lot in life, one which I am now passing on to the small people in a grotesque, misapplied version of “the more, the merrier.”

I groaned at the thought of another moment that had played out so differently in real life than it had in my mind, and apologized for all my pompous carpe diem crud that distracted him from his prize.

He shrugged, paused for a moment, and then said, “That’s okay, Mom. I think it was worth it.”

Come again? He’s ten. I was rendered speechless.

He paused again for a moment and said, “Besides, today, I almost felt more like reading my book anyway.”

Someday, when I have Alzheimer’s and think my son’s the cable guy and LCB’s my mother, I think I’ll still remember that small person I once lived with, the one who, every once in a while, chose a book over a ball, the one who was once gracious enough to say that all of it was “okay.”