Like the little children

I didn’t know it was raining this morning until Henry pointed it out to me. It must have started just after I let the animals out. I heard it in the fan over the stove but thought it was wind. Then Henry told me, “It’s raining, Umma.”

I said, “It is? Let’s see.” We looked out the dining room windows that are about floor to ceiling and low enough for him, and then went to the front and stood out on the stoop while Sam retrieved the paper. In the back, it was hard to see it was raining. In the front, the whole length of the wide strip of street jumped and popped with rain.

I said, “Doesn’t it smell good?”

Then the thunder rolled over, and Henry asked, “What’s that, Umma?”

Life with a three-year-old grandchild is pretty amazing.

At 10:30, when Henry left to spend the day with his Uncle Ian, it felt like it should be 1:30 at least. But neither Donny or me let him go easily. This is the first time he’s gone to spend the day with his uncle. All morning Henry was getting mad at me (in that toddler way) for anything I said that had a hint of non-togetherness. He wanted me and Grandpa to go with him.

Once his uncle arrived, he warmed to the idea, and it was me who was saying, “He’s just getting over a cold. If he’s not feeling good later or wants to come home early, it’s okay.”

Ian says, “We’ll be fine.”

Yeap. We’ll be fine.

Oh how like Henry I am, and how often we forget what a kid is really like when we hear, “Be like the little children.” There’s a combination of precision and wonder, an “it has to be done the way it was done before” firmness: his routine, his chair, sometimes his “way.” (One night I let him wear my Twin’s ball cap while we watched the game and the next he had to have “his” hat.) Then, on the other hand, there’s a little anxiety about the unknown and a way you have to warm up to it. Then you’re fine.

After they were out the door, I told Donny, “This will be good for him.” I meant, “this will be good for us too.”

Donny wondered if Ian knew how to work the car seat. I said, “He’ll figure it out.” Donny hollered through the door anyway: “You okay with the car seat?”

“Yeah, man,” Ian says.

I pick up Henry’s toys and start the second half of my day, not noticing until then that it’s only 10:30.

The thing about affirmations that I've never gotten

It’s windy – every few minutes. Like a snorer – there’s quiet in between rattles. I’m in the cabin facing the freeway fence. The green tarp (heavy with continued yard clean-up) is trying desperately to fly out from underneath the twig pile. The flag is waving in one direction – south. The wind chime knocks against the exterior logs of the cabin. The maple tree’s new little shoots quiver and the thinner of the tall trees sway.

I have the Fahrenheat on but might not have needed it if I hadn’t left a window open a crack yesterday. It was beautiful in a whole different way then: warm as summer, green with fresh rain. I sat for an hour with the door open.

Today Donny visited. I tell him I need a break. “I need so much patience to get through my day,” I say. He tells me how much worse other people have it than us.

I pause. “I’m not saying things are so bad; only that I need a break.” He lies on the floor to ease his aching back until he gets his next phone call. Then he’s off.

For a while I wonder about what we said to each other, and the feel of two trains passing in the night washes over me. What does a person hear when you say the simplest of things? Did he hear an admission of impatience as, “Things are so bad?”

For a minute, (okay, a little longer) I make up the story that he’s using the word impatient against me. Impatience is not generally one of my “beating myself up” words. Hell, most of the time I wonder why the whole world isn’t bursting with impatience.

I’m talking about the kind of patience that has you walking through your day like you’re spending the whole of it sitting with a toddler learning to put on his shoes. Anne Lamott calls it “the emergency room” – treating people as if that’s where they are. You sit with those toddler-like or emergency room-like situations out of love and respect and because it’s the right thing to do (at least half the time). You’re okay with it, but gee, there are times you long to sit at your window with no needs to meet staring back at you, and let’s face it: we all need those moments.

I know I need a break as soon as I’m sitting like a kid in a classroom at the end of the day waiting for the bell; when I’m ready to bolt from my chair; when I’m watching the clock. Then, I admit to it even if the impatience feels childish, as if I can’t abide being thwarted. “It’s time to move!”

I’m not saying it’s a virtue not to bolt or that it would be better to run when the urge strikes. I just figure a kid would forget about it the minute she was released. I’ve got to work at it. Take a break to slough off the feeling. To excuse myself for feeling the way I do. That’s what the kids don’t have to do. They’ll sit wiggling and toe tapping in their chairs and leap from them with glee. They know they’re being thwarted. We adults see toddlers and emergency rooms and have to take a deep breath, plant our butts, still our feet, and call on patience to still our minds. “Here Patience! Come girl!”

You want to never feel the sting of wanting release, of wanting to run off…free! You want to be free right there – right where you sit with the shoes or the socks or the crisis or the minutes ticking by. But you don’t feel free. You sit as still as if you’re hand-cuffed and breathe deeply and call yourself impatient and go somewhere after to shake it off.

I discovered a lot of acceptance for my experience of life through A Course of Love. I’ve been on that acceptance path a long time. “Okay. I’m impatient. Big deal.” I admit things like that all over the place, just as I did to Donny. But I’ve been realizing lately that acceptance has made me a little lazy or maybe imprecise about my words. What if I’m accepting being impatient when I’m really calling on grace?

You could replace “impatient” with “I call on grace,” if that’s what you do. Maybe that’s the thing about affirmations that I’ve never gotten. Maybe they are meant to tell you what you really do rather than to fake you out.

Change is good

Watched Joe Mauer get his first hit of the season yesterday. Missed his first home run today. But I saw this cool column by Tom Powers about my hometown boys (The Twins) and our ballpark, the new Target Center.

Target Field replaces the old Metrodome, which, bless its heart, at least didn’t have a corporate name attached to it. I could go on and on about this kind of thing, but I won’t except to say the corporate sponsor was probably needed to replace the old dome with the new open-air stadium. One with no retractable roof. In Minnesota. I suppose we would have needed a half-dozen corporate names in front of a stadium with a retractable roof. I can see it now: The General Mills, 3M, Kentucky Fried, Univac, West Publishing Target Field.

Anyway, this blog isn’t about the new ballpark. It’s about the unexpected (and a little bit about my continual revere on the rising of the sun).

Powers begins his column by saying:

“Imagine a world where nothing ever changes. A world where people do the same thing at the same time in the same place day after day.”

(I have to admit that there are days in which that would be a pleasant imagining to me.)

Anyway, he goes on to say, “That was the Twins world at the Metrodome. And it was mind numbing.”

The Twins opened Target Field with the loss of an exhibition game against the St. Louis Cardinals. But it was before-the-game chatter that Powers reports. One of our pitchers, Matt Guerrier saying, “It was tough going to the Dome. It was bam, bam, bam. Nothing ever changes. We stretch at this time. Do something else at the next time. Today, it was raining. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“The chain was broken,” Powers says. “Ooooh, this is what it’s like to live dangerously. … The Twins were like little kids wondering what the rain was going to do to the rest of their day. The answer was that it would bring changes. Batting practice was canceled. The pitchers didn’t have to shag balls.”

You get the drift.

Everyone concerned couldn’t seem to work up a care in the world about the loss. They were giddy with change, with living dangerously, with being like little kids.

I haven’t been a big fan of a ballfield without a roof as backup for bad weather. I’m not a big enough fan to want to sit in the cold or the rain. But the giddiness was infectious and the sentiment heartening.

Change is good.

Quotes by Tom Powers, “Rain? Ooooh. Now what are we gonna do?”, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1B.