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Family Friends Living

The Texture of Tuesday

There is a terrifying calmness to the math of mortality. Especially when you’re in your 70’s approaching 80!

Sahil Bloom shared a realization that acts as a quiet sledgehammer to the soul: “You’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.” When you live away from them, visiting a few times a year, the calculus is brutal.

But there is a second, more subtle layer to this reality that we often miss. It isn’t just about the number of times we visit; it is about the nature of the time we share together.

When we live away from the people we love, we fall into the “Trap of the Big.” Because the investment to visit is high—a six-hour flight or a three-hour drive—we feel the need to justify that investment with an Event. We visit mostly for milestones, for holidays, and for planned long weekends. Maybe we schedule time to go on vacations together. We curate our presence around those highlights.

The problem is that life does not happen in the highlights. Real intimacy is not built on Thanksgiving dinner; it is built on the mundane friction together of a Tuesday afternoon. Or a Sunday morning.

Sahil wrote about a moment that shifted his entire perspective. It wasn’t a grand celebration, but a quiet spring evening in the backyard. Dinner was over. He was drinking a glass of wine. His son was chasing his parents around the grass.

“In that moment, I had a realization: This was it. It wasn’t big or glamorous. It was a little thing that meant everything.”

This brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s suggestion: “Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

There is a specific texture to life that only exists in the small moments. It is the texture of going for a walk to ask your dad for advice on a random problem. Or the texture of watching a a young mother playing dinosaurs with her 2 year old daughter on a Wednesday morning. It is that ability to be present not just for the celebration of life, but for the living of it.

If we are lucky, we get those big moments. But if we are intentional, we can also get the little ones. And in the end, the little ones are the only ones that actually fill our jar.

Categories
Creativity Writing

Dropped Call

Note: I’m attending a creative writing workshop and this is a recent fictional piece I’ve written.

I put the phone on my leg briefly so I could check myself in the mirror before opening the door and heading into the supermarket.

I put on my hat. Opened the door. Oops. I heard the clunk. A clunk that would haunt me for the next hour.

Was that my phone? Where was my phone anyway? I looked at the usual spot on the center console where I kept the charging cable so I could keep the phone charged up. But charging wasn’t my worry now. I stood up and patted my pockets. No phone.

Then I dawned on me. I had put the phone on my leg and it must have slid off as I opened the door and got out.

I got back in the car and looked down the right side of the seat. I couldn’t see the phone. It must have slid further behind something. Too bad Find My Friends can’t give the thing legs or something so it could pull itself out of whatever it had gotten itself into down there!

I seemed to recall some memory about an admonition on flights to not move the seat if your phone fell down. Something about how moving the seat might cause the battery to explode. Wonderful. Last thing I need is a front seat explosion in this damn car.

Fortunately, my car was a four door so I might be able to see under the seat from behind. I gave that a try. Still no dice. Or, rather, no phone. Nowhere to be found.

If I could call my wife I’d ask her to call me and then I’d be able to hear the ringer and maybe find it easier. But I couldn’t call my wife without my phone. Duh.

Maybe I could ask a stranger to call my phone. How would I feel about somebody coming up to me in the parking lot and asking me to call some strange number? Would I be a Good Samaritan? Probably not. Anyway, there weren’t a lot of people around. It was late and the parking lot wasn’t very well lit.

Oh, maybe I should just drive home and then my wife could call my phone. So that’s what I did. When I got home I came up the stairs – empty handed. Where are the groceries she asked? Oh, I wasn’t able to get the groceries. I lost my phone. Whaddya mean you lost your phone? Well it fell on the floor and I can’t find it. Can you please call it for me? But wait until I get back downstairs and into my car.

So she did. She waited, I went downstairs and got in the car. She followed me down, then she called. By now she was standing right outside my car door looking at me like some goofball. I heard the ringing. It wasn’t coming from behind the front seat. It was coming from down below me – sort of in front. I had to get out of the car to look. I got down on my knees and stuck my head inside – and there it was, under my seat. Blinking and ringing away.

Hello I said. Reunited we were.