The Same Boy

The question is already asked: "Where did the time go?"  Gabriel is only five now but the time has done what it intends to do.  I never quite get in the moment as often as I could or ought and I'm looking ahead, wondering what a particular bout of rebellion or rambunctiousness will amplify to when he is older and bigger and I am forever pondering the butterfly effect of a moment that got away: I'm impatient for a moment or inattentive and there is that erosion of the connection that sends him down a path that reflects so badly on me.  Robin Williams used to raise that self-doubt by contrasting two futures: one where is child is accepting a Nobel Prize and at the other extreme asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

There is probably no advantage in looking back rather than behind.  The ideal is to be in the moment and absorbing the opportunity as it is.  There are the easier moments that are still and captured. Looking at his awed, rapt face as it is bathed in the blue glow of the screen in a darkened theatre and he is transported and transfixed one of those few times (to date) that he has had the experience of a movie.  The uncertain but committed buy-in to the excitement of the first New Year's Eve he stayed up for.  There was the sense that this was a Big Deal, and he threw himself into it, but he was in no way certain why.  The tentativeness as he rushed to the video of the countdown was subtle, undeniable but amusing.

The routines are harder to get that stillness and contentment within.

A few days back, Friday, he and I were together for the day and there was little that I could interest him in doing out of the house.  All he really wanted to do was put together Lego and, to my surprise, he was not quite engaged enough in that to finish it all the way through.  He would recruit me for long stretches of the construction and it was more likely out of his disinterest in the task than a desire to include me in something other than sorting through the pieces for him.  He was not interested in any of the outings I've normally gotten him to leave home for and the lone exception, a trip to the playground was clearly scheduled for, "The middle of the afternoon."  No earlier.

When we finally got outside and headed to the playground, he dawdled and played in the snow, stopping regularly to kick and stomp at it wherever it captured his imagination more than the destination did.  After a few hours of cabin fever around the Lego, the delays in the walk taxed me a little.  After stretching the distance between us a few times and never prompting him to catch up, I managed, somehow, to flash back to the same walk years earlier -- I somehow make that sounds like decades, when it is just 2-3 years -- when he did the same thing, but was only able to call it, "No." He is the same boy.  I waited and watched as he Godzillaed a few mounds of snow to dust and moved on to the next.  When he finally caught up, I rested a hand on my head and reminded myself that he's the same boy. At the same time I suspected that this particular fascination with the snow would get buried in maturity and expressed differently, if at all, as he gets older.

At the playground there were reminders again. We were alone but he was untroubled by the solitude or the cold and he took to the same routines as in previous years.  The swing captivated him but he graduated out of the bucket and into the big swing.  I pushed him for 30-45 minutes as he struggled to pump himself into motion.  Godzilla was not able to crush the snow down sufficiently to give him the room his feet needed to pump.

In that rhythm, standing behind him and taking his guidance on how many hands to use and how hard to push, I ceased to look ahead or back and I just settled into the task of pushing him just right each time as the snow seeping into my shoes.