Posts by Dan Szczesny
This full-circle turn of events was on my mind recently during a visit to Manchester City Library with Little Bean. Our mission was signing her up for her first library card, an event, I confess, I had thought about since literally the day she’d been born.
The column is about nothing. And that is everything.
For example, on the day after Christmas, as my car crash was happening, I clearly remember wondering how firmly utility poles are fastened into the ground. I wondered if my Rav 4 would split the pole in half when I hit it, or I’d just wrap around it like a pretzel. I remember wondering if the airbags would go off and what that was going to feel like. I recall feeling relief that I was alone in the car.
Ever since a visit to Frost’s house in Derry, N.H. a few weeks ago, our evening reading sessions have involved a variety of the poet’s poems. Little Bean likes his nature or animal poems the best, though as accessible as Frost can be, there’s still quite a bit of explaining that needs to follow for a 6-year-old to wrap her head around the poet’s use of symbolism and analogy. But it’s fine. Our studies have given me a chance to brush up on my own connections to the poet.
The point is that on that evening when we darken the house lights and switch on the holiday lights there will be a glorious, fleeting moment when nothing else matters; when the connection between our parents’ lives and our lives and the lives of the kids of our children to come are all on display.
A couple days earlier, we had received word from a friend in the area that there were some busted down, haunted boxcars sitting on the tracks near the Hannah Duston Memorial Historic Site in Boscawen. Of all places, this seemed to be the most likely haunt for ghosts.
We are about three weeks into Little Bean’s first grade when it occurs to me that I am no longer aware of the person she’s becoming.
As you read this, we are now several weeks into Buddy’s life. Sadly, the second caterpillar did not make it out of his pupa state, leaving Buddy as the sole resident of his mesh cage. We change his water each day, and bring him a new fresh flower now and again. He’s still unable to fly, but some days we find him on the mesh nearest our living room window, soaking in the sun.
We are halfway up Mount Washington – the Cog Railway car chugging uphill at a tremendous three miles an hour – but Little Bean is disappointed for an entirely peculiar reason.
My daughter has found a lucky rock.
We were on a pilgrimage, a sacred quest, seeking last-minute grace and connection on a day of rebirth. In less than 24 hours, a 250-year-old sugar maple – a creature born before America had presidents and the oldest known of its kind in our country – would come down.
We came upon a dead porcupine recently… freshly dead most likely, the poor fellow well preserved but still soft, his brown and tan quills swaying in the forest wind.
Still, wind on Mars is neither an angry backyard bug nor a path toward her being an astronaut. What I hope it is though is the beginning of knowledge, of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “happy talent.”
The answer is not to work harder no matter what, not to push through despite your emotional and physical exhaustion. Rather, we’ve attempted to turn to our Lazy Brain in an effort to set new expectations, to create an environment appropriate to the time in which we live.
Something powerful can happen in these moments, especially now in a new year. In particular, coming off a challenging time, our catalog of memories in these days of isolation is what we have available to build upon. And now, as it was then, the potency of food memory is available through small, personal moments; a warm kitchen in a small town, as the snow falls outside our window, eating simple food with people you love and who love you back.
Twenty-twenty comes screaming to an end, a confusing, raging inferno of a year. This was a year that will be talked about only in hushed whispers by future generations. This was a year of forced mindfulness, where each day, sometimes each hour, appeared to signal some new cosmic shift – like being blindfolded, without a seatbelt, on a roller coaster.