This spring break, we decided on a loose theme: old-fashioned toys. Just a tilt, really. A mother’s attempt to pass the increasingly cyphoned-out time by hand.
A deck of cards.
A backyard trampoline.
A jump rope.
And one very modern electronic toy, immediately sacrificed to a Ponderosa.
The stick flip is a small handheld game that beeps and keeps track of how many flips you make. It was launched by my preteen on day one and lodged straight into a spring pine. Clean shot.
It’s still up there.
The speed with which we lost it makes me want to grab at the metaphor: how many flips? We stood there looking up at it as if it had made a decision we now had to respect.
There was the trampoline too, that feeling of being in a backyard where time is both endless and already gone. I watched him do the front flip over and over, plus the silly little jumping moves he only does when he knows I’m watching through the house-sit patio window, as if none of it costs him anything yet, made of a tender future.
I didn’t say much that was emotional. Saying something always ruins it.
We brought a deck of cards from the dollar store to Sedona and played under Midgley Bridge, which is where he wanted to go. We’ve been there many times. Once, he brought a remote-control boat down there, and it ran out of batteries and later broke for good at Bootlegger. There is probably a lesson in that, too, but I am tired of lessons, especially as an educator in the spring.
Something about Sedona is really helping my happiness lately. I’m crushing hard. Can’t stop thinking about her. Joy is still available, even in a rich town, even when you’re not.
We also went to Sunset Crater and Wupatki for my son’s first time, and we loved the old ball courts, the blowhole, and the turned-black land. I found myself thinking about a kind of time blowhole, and what sort of journey you’d have to survive to arrive at a fountain of time spurting back at you. A windy tongue telling you, in many languages, that you had more time. Maybe you could lick the tongue if you wanted. Maybe wring it out like a bath towel. It may have its own constraints and apply only to certain things, such as time spent on dishwashing.
At home, or homes, we’ve also been reading The Secret History of Food. Or really, he’s reading it, and I’m catching pieces after remarks that some of the content may be …well, secret for a reason. His love of food reading began years ago with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book we insisted on buying before a long drive home from some Colorado bookstore I can’t even remember now. I only remember the insistence. The need to visit bookshops in new towns.
A book, it turns out, is also a kind of old-fashioned toy.
No batteries. No updates. Entertainment for hours. You can hold it, flip it even.
You could flip any old stick, too, I guess, without needing to quantify the number. You could also log every sunset you’ve ever seen, one for every time you got to see one.
We’ll all be trapped in the great Ponderosa in the sky one day anyhow, with the grieving below trying to get us down, wondering why the wind and rain won’t do it.
Maybe part of the joy is just looking up into the tree and laughing.
