I exhaust myself. Outside, the fence is in the foreground,
while behind it, an oak’s leaves trail and shake in the slight breeze. I keep a
tendentious watch on nearly everything. I can hear upstairs, the whirring
blades of the fan, generating enough white noise to get the boy to sleep and
enough noise to dull the plaintive sound of the cartoon that’s playing
downstairs, briefly distracting the girl too from bothering me, so that I can
sit here and fill an electronic screen with words.
And,
why? Why choose words over being? Why structure a day around quieting everyone
else enough so that I can sit down for a few scant moments and offer something inconsequential
to the world? But there is that animal pride again. For the assumption that the
“world” might be listening as opposed to, I don’t know, five to ten people, is
already written into that statement and there you see already why I’ve
structured the day around this quiet. It’s a kind of nascent pride. A belief,
like any other belief, though fervent that I have some purpose that is achieved
by sitting in front of a screen stringing together words that is somehow not
achieved by building a train track and gently helping to tug Thomas, who is
over large, across bridges, underneath tunnels and round the tight curves with
the help of my son or daughter. The natural place to start then, I guess, is
with questioning the utility of being to the world as opposed to being in the
world, but I don’t know how to question a feeling or presence to the world that
beats so insistently. I can distract myself from it sometimes, often times, if
I’m honest, but it never goes away entirely.
Next to me is a remote controlled car that has just run out
of batteries, up on the couch where the boy left it. On the ground, is an orange
car with silver racing stripes, also remote controlled, though it’s also
actually out of batteres. It’s lying sideways on the carpet, but look, I’m
interrupted mid-sentence here by the girl, who is scared of an episode of the
show that I’ve got her watching, and so I’m up, and down the stairs with her,
telling her that she doesn’t have to keep watching, and I can see her vibrant
brown eyes light up as she says, “I can take it.” But I follow her down anyway,
and fast forward for a bit, so she won’t be watching a show when the babysitter
arrives. As if I need to worry about what someone I’m paying, or S is paying,
thinks of my parenting. Anyhow, I’m fast forwarding and telling the girl that it’s
past the scary part where Plum gets sick, or maybe it isn’t because I don’t
know. And I don’t ask her about Plum, or how she might get sick or any of the
other questions that I could ask. I just fast forward to a random point and
then stop and walk back upstairs, past the two bags of charcoal and clippers on
the landing, which I know S wants moved downstairs, but if I get up to move the
charcoal downstairs and the clippers then the thread of thought will be snipped
again, and I’ll be having a conversation about Plum or remote controlled cars,
which is precisely the thing I’m trying to escape.
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