Declan is 28 months old today. It’s kind of hard to believe that’s all the time it has been. Mysterious coos and babbles have given way to complete sentences. Once unable to roll over on his own, he’s now the “sultan of somersaultin'” (named so by Dan). Frenetic waves have transformed into deliberate, dramatic hand gestures that accompany mini-lectures about space.
As a family, we’ve also been through a lot in that time. We lost a couple of Dan’s older family members. Dan nearly lost his eye. We lost our dear companion Samson. Even one of our cars and a laptop died (actually, Dan murdered it with ginger ale). And we’ve had horrible luck with landlords.
We had a terrifying bout with lead paint and for our trouble, got kicked out of our conveniently located (although rented) home by a man we had thought had more decency. Then the short-sighted landlord of Dan’s business helped put an unceremonious end to his nearly 20-year run.
But we also bought a house in a part of town where we have no baggage and the neighbors are cartoonishly friendly. We’ve forged new friendships with other new parents and enjoyed an awful lot of days just spending time on our own as a family. I’ve been able to do some writing work that I feel matters. We’ve learned a whole lot about space and physics, which tends to put things like craptastic landlords and life, death and illness in a very different perspective.
Tonight we’ll have cowboy-style Tuvan Throat singing, tomorrow we’ll go to a funeral for a man who has contributed a great deal to the cultural life of the city. Time, as they say, marches on.
Life soundtrack: Rufus Wainwright, I Am Sam soundtrack, “Across the Universe”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007