Presents

Simon and his mom are storytellers. Whether they're naturally skilled or they've just had a lot of practice, I don't know, but they can go on and on (and on) about events that happened ten, fifteen, twenty-five years ago, every little detail fresh as the morning sun, including who was wearing what, which album was on the turntable, and the last names of everyone within a fifty-mile radius of whichever little town it was, located just so on the Michigan mitten. I always thought I had a good memory, but those two are savants.

In my family, we're recorders. We write, photograph, videotape, audiotape, scrapbook, and compose, but once our stories are poured into those external molds, we tend to tuck them away for years, decades even, and very rarely talk about the past with one another. It's not a shying away from anything so much as a matter of practicality and efficiency. We were all there together, weren't we? So why then would we need to discuss it? (That's not a defense but simply an explanation. It's just how we are.)

Example: Every time we'd come home from a ballet recital or band concert my dad had videotaped, my brother and I would beg to watch it immediately, eager to see our performance, to see ourselves rendered two-dimensional and caught forever the way we were only just then. "Why do you want to see that?" my dad would say. "You were just there." Eventually, we understood the reasoning, adopted it as our own, and stopped asking.

We're recorders, then, but we're also projectors. All four of us to varying degrees worry about how things are going to turn out, both big picture and little. The time we don't spend telling stories of yore, we spend constructing worst case scenarios, Plan Bs, contingencies for every possible variation of and deviation from the official Way Things Should Be Done. The future is a giant unformed blob, and if you're not looking straight at it (because, say, you're looking at the past), how will you know when it's about to swallow you up? Again, not defending, just defining. (Simon, on the other hand, is not afraid of the blob because even a blob is simply a friend he hasn't met yet.)

When Simon and his mom get together, they start "Remember when..."
When my family gets together, we start "But what if..."

Tomorrow our remaining parents (RIP, Simon's dad) are flying in for the big birthday bash (aka "Fishtravaganza!," care of HeatherB), and although I'm very much looking forward to having more people to boss around their helping hands preparing for the party, I'm most excited to have the two sides of the family--Wombat's family--circle around a common goal. There's no drama, no rift aside from distance, but that doesn't make our togetherness any less important, especially for an occasion like this.

Besides, I think the fact that the very family Wombat helped create will be here to celebrate him means that we're all, in a way, celebrating ourselves, our familyness. We made him who he is, but he also made us an "us."

Yes, I'm excited for the balloons and the cake and the gifts and the music and the friends, but of course it's about more than that, this milestone marking a year of so much change, so much upheaval, and so much settling down, nestling down, snuggling in. I'm looking forward to the party (where "looking forward" is sometimes code for "fretting," "freaking out," and "fingernail biting"), but even more than that I'm looking forward to being able to look back on the day. Simon and his mom will tell its stories for years to come, and maybe by the time Wombat turns thirty my dad will let us watch the videotape of the event, his very first birthday, even though we were "just there."

You clever, close-reading, word-savvy English majors already know where I'm going with this, don't you?, so I might as well just say it: The greatest gift Wombat will receive on his birthday will be the present. *rimshot* So come on everybody--Mom, Dad, Mom-G, Simon--let's wrap it in a giant bow and all give it to him together.

wrote Leah at 8:15 AM | Comments (4)