Posts tagged "Dad"
8

Playing Pretend

Yesterday evening, my wife and I were going about our business in the usual way. She was checking her various social networks and I was pacing around the kitchen trying to remember why I was in the kitchen in the first place. Our 18 month old boy, Cash, was being uncharacteristically self-contained and quietly toddling around the room. Out of the corner of my distracted eye, I noticed he was sort of traversing a pattern, from one specific place to the other.

I stopped what I was doing and discreetly turned my attention toward my son. This is when I got the rare privilege of witnessing what I’m sure is a first for him. He and his mother had gone grocery shopping earlier that day, like they have so many times before. Now, between our kitchen and living room, I was watching him pick out invisible items from an imagined shelf that apparently existed on the broadside of our refrigerator and carry them over to a little makeshift shopping cart (a little plastic stool which he’d flipped on it back so he could place things between it’s three legs). Once he’d gotten a few “items” and placed them in his “cart” he would push the thing around our house and babble to himself contentedly.

I was witnessing my son’s very first game of make-believe.

Holding back my emotions was like plugging a hole in Hoover Dam with your thumb. It sort of worked, but there were a lot of leaks and it hurt a bit. I was overcome with feelings at what I saw, because, this little game signaled the beginning of something so important: his imagination.

Cash going on an imaginary shopping trip were his first steps of a journey taken by the likes of Maurice Sendak, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, C.S. Lewis, Ridley Scott, and a million other geniuses. People who bring us stories like “Where The Wild Things Are”, the recent Avengers film, the vast worlds of The Lord of The Rings, and the much anticipated 2012 film Prometheus . Watching my boy find his imagination makes all the sleepless nights and worry that I have experience and will experience so worth it that it’s hard to put on a blog post, or even squeeze into a multi-volume uber-novel.

All of us involved in a little one’s life get the joy of witnessing firsts, but I think “first time playing pretend” is a pretty special first. I am bursting with pride and privilege to have witnessed anyone’s first bout of make-believe, but especially so because this is my boy.

And for Cash, if he ever happens upon this posting, I’ll say this:
We may not be able to fix a kitchen sink or re-build a car’s engine, but we are the dreamers of dreams, son. That’s important. We challenge reality and ultimately change it, hopefully for the better. Don’t ever let anyone tell you to stop pretending, because imagination is the raw material by which the fabric of our humanity is woven.

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Dad was right-T.S. Eliot

I’m reposting this poem because it reminded me of something my father used to say. “Nothing good ever happens after midnight”.

RHAPSODY ON A WINDY NIGHT

by: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

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      WELVE o’clock.
      Along the reaches of the street
      Held in a lunar synthesis,
      Whispering lunar incantations
      Dissolve the floors of memory
      And all its clear relations,
      Its divisions and precisions,
      Every street lamp that I pass
      Beats like a fatalistic drum,
      And through the spaces of the dark
      Midnight shakes the memory
      As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
       
      Half-past one,
      The street lamp sputtered,
      The street lamp muttered,
      The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
      Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
      Which opens on her like a grin.
      You see the border of her dress
      Is torn and stained with sand,
      And you see the corner of her eye
      Twists like a crooked pin.”
       
      The memory throws up high and dry
      A crowd of twisted things;
      A twisted branch upon the beach
      Eaten smooth, and polished
      As if the world gave up
      The secret of its skeleton,
      Stiff and white.
      A broken spring in a factory yard,
      Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
      Hard and curled and ready to snap.
       
      Half-past two,
      The street lamp said,
      “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
      Slips out its tongue
      And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
      So the hand of a child, automatic,
      Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
      I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
      I have seen eyes in the street
      Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
      And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
      An old crab with barnacles on his back,
      Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
       
      Half-past three,
      The lamp sputtered,
      The lamp muttered in the dark.
       
      The lamp hummed:
      “Regard the moon,
      La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
      She winks a feeble eye,
      She smiles into corners.
      She smoothes the hair of the grass.
      The moon has lost her memory.
      A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
      Her hand twists a paper rose,
      That smells of dust and old Cologne,
      She is alone
      With all the old nocturnal smells
      That cross and cross across her brain.”
      The reminiscence comes
      Of sunless dry geraniums
      And dust in crevices,
      Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
      And female smells in shuttered rooms,
      And cigarettes in corridors
      And cocktail smells in bars.”
       
      The lamp said,
      “Four o’clock,
      Here is the number on the door.
      Memory!
      You have the key,
      The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
      Mount.
      The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
      Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
       
      The last twist of the knife.
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