Bit by Bit

Over the past few days I found myself pondering the wonder of the little increments that take us to big places, that move us forward or on or toward whatever is in the future, away from the past, and that we store them all, letting most of the bits go by unnoticed until these milestones come about.

First there was the weekend away, which was something to get ready for. So much coordinating from rooms to food to travel to time. Finally it was time to go, and then inch by inch, mile by mile, beautiful wildflowers and mountains and bits of familiar landmarks, we're there. We're unloaded, settled in our rooms, have located the ice and the swimming pool and the exercise room, figured out how the TV works (closed captioning never did work). Then blink, the weekend is gone. The car is re-packed. Badly. We start the journey home, and minute by minute, mile by mile, the weekend that took so much planning and forethought is now a memory and the distance between the hotel doorstep and the back door step is history, and I am home again with all that comes with it: new tenants, deadlines, money issues, food issues, people headed to work and school...

Then there was graduation. Here is this young man doing his pteradactyl imitation in the procession, making that tassel bob wildly, marching right past my nose just the same way time has marched past me and let him grow up from that tiny, tiny human being--his father had a hard time believing could even survive the night on his own, he seemed so small. I still remember when he read his first book. I still have it: Jog, Frog, Jog! The date is written on the inside cover. He wanted to try his hand as a public speaker at the age of six. Then there were art lessons, and driving lessons, and ASL lessons and high school's finished. In between, football games, squabbles with friends, personal dedications. Somewhere in there he morphed from a kid whose mind seemed to be riveted on computer games, to a driven young man riding his bike down the road with the lawn mower attached to the back, trying to earn money to get to Australia. Wow. He worked his way through two of those trips overseas, through which I was amazingly calm and very jealous. Cell phone, contacts, a snakebite, volunteering in Lousianna. His humor grew from bad jokes to cracking up entire rooms. All this went by, and I hardly noticed it.

I look out my front door and there's an oak tree in my yard that he and his brother used to jump over. It's taller than the house now. My goodness, how does this happen? Why do I feel like the same person that watched them jump, when they've done so much changing, become such sterling, wonderful young men? It's hard to fathom.

Because as I type we are hurtling toward the next big "event." The future travels, the new people, the sweetheart. And I wonder what events are left for me, if perhaps I should be creating them. These boys fill such a large part of my days, and I miss them so when they're gone. We're moving toward more permanently "gone" to places of their own. So now is probably the best time to be spending those little moments wisely as they slip off into the future. Because the days will continue to pass, noticed or unnoticed. And while I'm hugely content and satisfied with the way things are now, we can only live here in this moment for a short time until it becomes part of something bigger, past present and future all tied together.