I Did Not Fail To Notice

It’s cold. There were specks of snow in the air today, floating like tiny frozen particles of dust, and a pale round distant disk of sun, and the sidewalks are slick with ice. I set my feet down carefully with every step, and I’m thick and muffled with multiple layers of clothing, and my glasses are fogged, and I am oddly out of my element and detached from the world. In fact, my most intense encounter with reality outdoors is the sting of cold when bare skin is exposed. “How cold IS it?” asks my northern European Bestie in a text, and I begin to suspect I might be overreacting, but I’m just not used to this. Anyway, one feels what one feels, and I feel cold.

But the apartment we are renting is deliciously warm, and our hosts left a box of chocolates for us, and we’re at the very beginning of a month-long stay. I have a little work station here, and I’m going to try to do some writing, perhaps making a bit of headway on the book I committed to and then left dangling. Earlier today, I asked my daughter, an excellent writer, if she’d given any thought to what she’ll write about when she finally gets a chance to sit down and do so. She’s the mother of a two-year-old, working as an editor, and in a very different stage of life—I get that—but I hate to see her neglect her gifts and proclivities, so her answer made me sad: “There’s plenty of writing in the world,” she said. “I like what I’m doing. I make money. I pay the rent.”

But that’s the way it is during those years. The kids are in the thick of things right now, fully immersed in the practical matters of working, feeding, and raising a family. Needs come at you fast and furious, and it’s hard to find the space for creative exploration that may yield nothing. My daughter is disciplined, modest, and not self-indulgent enough to proclaim herself a writer and make the paid jobs secondary, despite her talent. (And she’d be rolling her eyes at that sentence. “Yes, my mother thinks I’m very talented, and she’s completely objective.”)

It’s interesting to be here on her turf observing all this. The primary purpose of this trip has been to have time with Felix, our two-year-old grandson, but it’s also, of course, a glimpse into the life she and her husband have created here in Oxford, and it inevitably triggers memories for us of the years when she was little, when she lived with us, and we even believed she was ours, ours in some way that implied scripting and control and proved entirely unfounded. I’ve been feeling very reflective lately anyway, surprised and humbled by how fast it all goes by, trying every day not to lose the thread of it or miss what it meant or insult the wonder by not stopping to notice.

My friend Diane sent me a poem from The New Yorker called “Poem for Grown Children” by Kathleen Driscoll that was so poignant and appropriate, I read it twice with tears:

The children are now inside their own homes,

asleep, curled around their beloveds. But all so young

yet, they do not think we will ever die.

The entire poem is amazing, and that’s just three lines. But it seemed especially touching to be reading it here, while getting to know a grandchild who will remember us only as two sweet old people he saw now and then, very long ago. Meanwhile, we are dodging coughs and sneezes, and our frailties and ailments are becoming more assertive. I suppose we are as ephemeral as the snow specks.

But I read a story last night to a roaring, stomping dinosaur and helped put him to bed, and we had Pad Thai and dumplings delivered to the door to enjoy with his parents, then walked home in the chilly night on diamond-frosted streets. Yes, the streets were truly sparkling, and from houses and pubs came shouts about the soccer match, and there were little bursts of steam from the engines of cars, and fragments of smoky cigarette talk among people much younger and oblivious to cold. We descended a narrow staircase to our little basement flat, with its welcoming warmth, and the comforting thumps of tail and paws from the dog upstairs whose exuberance is palpable even through the ceiling, and there’s that enticing box of bonbons at hand.

It’s a good life I have been given. It’s strange, though, how the experience of being cold brings back memories of growing up in such a climate. A distinct image comes to me of my father on a bitter winter’s day wearing an insubstantial overcoat and thin leather shoes, striding against the wind, and I am struck by how brave he was, how insufficiently provisioned, but how determined and brave he was, always. He didn’t have the luxury to contemplate as I do all the vanished moments and what he might yet capture. He was still getting up on cold dark mornings, doing hard physical work well into in his sixties, and then he was abruptly dead, never having seen a wedding or a grandchild or a happy wrap-up to anything.

Now I play with his great-grandson, and I think sometimes about the stories in that little boy’s DNA, but mostly, I see Felix as a time traveler, and I want so much for the world he is entering to become more gentle and more sane. On the other hand, after two days here, I notice that I’m laughing more, and I’m duly impressed by machines and vehicles, attentive and curious about how things work and why they sometimes don’t. I find poo humor hilarious and indulge in it often. I want to decorate a tiny Christmas tree, and pull off people’s socks, play hide and seek and musical statue, and rescue imaginary cows who get stuck in the mud on a California ranch and need to be pulled out with a chain and a tractor operated by a boy named Felix.

It’s the same old story, as Mark Nepo says:

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how life makes a duet of grief and wonder.

And on we go, through all the seasons, full of love and good-byes and hopes and risk. Monte and I are drawing near to the end of the part in which we’re present, but the story goes on, and I am a woman who has stomped with a Felix-a-saurus and walked through a meadow of frost, and even when I was cold, I did not fail to notice it was lovely.