Then naptime is over and the child's mother comes to claim him. She is very young and sweet.
I was thinking about my children yesterday. How they grow into adults. How these babies become men in their own right. The closeness that you think could never go away, does.
Charlie just turned 30 on January 5. The twelveth day of Christmas. He is back in grad school and UPenn. He is married. And he lives far away. But last night, in my dream, I had the gift of actually feeling again how close that mother and baby bond was.
And now I am 65. I have grandchildren and medicare. This is the dusk period of my life...the sunset. I didn't used to be this old and I'm not sure quite how to do it well. There is an image I have of someone who awakens early every day, has good routines and habits, meditates and exercises daily, lives in small neat chunks of measured productive days. That was my grandmother, Dorothea. My other grandmother, Emily, laughed at naughty jokes and adored listening to Queen for A Day.
I am more like those birds yesterday, who swoop and then land, in random patterns, making big flaps and then disappearing. But I think that if I stayed in this spot and got to know that mountain it would be a way of grounding, a way of having a constant in my life. But the fact is that we are here for another two months or so, and then I will not be seeing this mountain.
There is another place in this state that I have loved and that is the Black Mesa on the land of the Santa Clara pueblo. Once I brought home a photo so that I could have it on my wall to look at every day and at first the inner vision of the mesa and the photo kind of meshed. But gradually it just became a photo and a story to myself. Yes that is the mesa I love. But the experience of it faded.
I am thinking that God must be like that. If I can find a way to stay near, God will be real to me. I wonder if this is true?
