“For my next trick,” says Joseph Cornell, or Vladimir Nabokov, or Wes Anderson, “I have put the world into a box.” And when he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of shards, refuse, bits of junk and feather and butterfly wing, tokens and totems of memory, maps of exile, documentation of loss. And you say, leaning in, “The world!”
The eternal question
A few weeks ago I lost a bottle of Hendricks. Today I figured out where it went. Which leads me to the eternal question: is it better to be right or to be happy?
The other day Lily had her shirt pulled up and was grabbing her belly. After a bit she came over and said, “Mama, I think my stomach is fat.”
I didn’t even look at her stomach, I just looked her straight in the face and said, “Nah, I don’t think so, but you know what is the best part about your body? How fast it can run and how high it can jump!”
“I can run very fast,” she said.
“I know,” I answered. “Show me!”
And off she flew.
Things that go bump
Ben has so many fears. Some of them come from being a six-year-old boy, like his fear of the dark. Some of his fears come from being a particularly anxious six-year-old boy, like his fear of elevators.
And then there are the fears that come from his father dying when he was four. His fear of abandonment, his fear of waking up in the morning and realizing someone has gone in the night, his fear of being alone.
Ben and I are so similar and sometimes when I talk about him, I realize half-way through I’m also talking about myself. I’m not afraid of the dark though, which gives me hope that in time he’ll conquer his little-boy fears. The big ones we’ll work on together.