Capturing the Day

The first day back is blurry, everyone is tired, heads bob and kids collapse on chairs and in couches like a narcoleptic convention.

But the next day is better, everyone adjusted, and dinner is festive.  We are laughing at something, even a day later I barely remember what:  the spicy chili that came out too hot, tricking daddy into tasting it, a story from school, a funny email.  And I am haunted by the Anna Quindlin column from long ago where she laments not living in the moment enough.  She recounts a moment she can’t remember or forget:

I did not live in the moment enough.  This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. 

But the truth is we are trying and realizing you can’t because time doesn’t march on, it sprints. 

I can sit and stare and record all I want, but in the end it’s tomorrow.  And January brings our Anniversary and a quick MLK Day trip to Deep Creek, which becomes my birthday in February which turns into Spring Break in March and Passover in April and then Spring arrives and we put away the ski clothes and gloves and June zips by with the end of school, a quick trip and then they are off to camp for 7 weeks.  And when they return in August it’s a race to the beach and Deep Creek and then back to school.  The Jewish Holidays invade and then there is the push to Thanksgiving which turns into a business trip and then a blur until the year ends in a sunny place and we begin planning for the new year.  And we sit here with photographs wondering what it was like. 

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”