Spent the weekend with my son. Wife was out of town attending her sister's baby shower which, wouldn't you know it, turned into her sister's labor and then her sister's giving birth. So a day trip turned into two days but my wife still managed to fit this entire series of events into a weekend excursion.
So, while I was home with my son, we made some trips to the beach. The first trip was rather dismal; we didn't have a stroller (it had a flat tire) so we were left to walk, or I was left to carry, my son over the sand dunes to the playground, where the dog was tied up underneath one of the slides. She barked furiously my son and I as we passed overhead on our way to one of the blue plastic chutes. Later my son got hungry and insisted on stuffing both fists with goldfish. He staggered through the sand, slipping and inevitably falling, leaving little goldfish-strewn impact craters the size of baby fists. The dog and the son competed for these half-buried morsels, leaving both with shell and sand encrusted mouths.
Saturday night I was trying to get the baby son to eat something and he simply refused, shaking his head back and forth while making his negation sound, a bleating cry that will soon turn into "no." I got so frustrated, just for one moment, that I took his little head in my hand and forced that last piece of gooey cereal bar into the corner of his mouth. This had a devastating effect. He broke into hiccuping sobs, his little shoulders shaking, his little hands spread helplessly on the plastic highchair table, great swollen tears rolling down his cheeks. I felt awful. It took me a long time to calm him down.
The next day was better; I took him to the church nursery in the morning and then went into the sanctuary. The sunlight through the stained-glass windows had a strange magnifying effect on all the objects within. The elaborate carvings on the lintels, the heavy iron crosses that had been implanted with electrical bulbs, the mahogany pulpit, all these things seemed as if they'd moved toward me in space, as if some invisible hand had chosen to highlight them. That strange visual distortion brought out even more clearly the watery light of the interior, and I thought that the beauty of that morning was the perfect setting for a man who has lost everything to find peace. I started imagining such a story. It did not have to be so different from my own life. The stout minister in his white, rope-belted cassock with his white cropped hair seemed like a testament to the folly of ambition, as if he'd once been the man of my story and was now on the other side, happily ever after.
Later that day the baby son and I went back to the beach. A cool wind fluttered down from the north, turning the ocean a rich blue and sending the waves in at oblique angles. The sun glittered in the cinnamon dunes; my son staggered and shrieked in his playground paradise, following a horde of bobbed little girls who teased him, dragged him across the playground, and popped him on slides in the course of their ever-changing games. He bore all this with a glad grave expression, occasionally breaking into ecstatic shrieks, which caused the girls to snatch him bodily up and stagger a few steps before dumping him unceremoniously on his bottom (he didn't mind). Eventually these play-maddened children found a gray dog the size of a toaster and proceeded to bury the good-natured animal under a pile of sand until its owner, with shouts of vexation, dug it out. My son laughed when the dog, blurred by a cloud of shining dust, shook its coat.
Oh, one last thing. I was thinking that there's nothing more boring than a boring woman. A boring man becomes rather intriguing by virtue of his sheer unwavering consistency. A boring woman, however, bores you from a thousand different angles.
