Relishing the simple moments
Every few days a poem crosses my Facebook feed and it makes me stop and think.
Today is was a poem called “Great Things Have Happened,” by Alden Nowlan, the late Canadian poet and novelist. The poem begins with a question about the greatest thing that’s happened and the answer was The Moon Landing.
But the poem corrects that notion, offering instead a simple moment many years ago when the poet and his friends woke early in the morning, in a strange city, to eat cinnamon toast as they listened to the sounds outside on the street below them.
People posted their own plain and resonant moments: walks in the woods, late-night conversations that turned into love – simple things we all have experienced but that when retrieved from our memory, are big and bursting with life.
This one came to mind for me:
When my children were in grade school, we were friends with four other families in our neighborhood. We adults would get together for dinners or bonfires every few weeks, 10 adults with, mostly, our growing children in common.
We were thinking about a progressive dinner, one of those hours-long events in which the group visits the home of each couple for a different course of the meal.
“Let’s do it on scooters,” I said, and there was general happy agreement. This was in the time of the Razor scooters and all our kids had them. And here’s where that memory sticks.
As we were headed out to begin the evening, our son (he was about 8), came around the side of the house riding a scooter and carrying another; they were the wheels for his dad and me. He’d surprised us by using masking tape to attach flashlights to the handlebars of each.
“You need headlights,” he said.
He’d thought of our safety, then found the tape and (perhaps most remarkably) found two working flashlights in all our chaos.
As he and his sister and the babysitter waved from the front porch, off we scooted. By the end of the night we’d been eating (and drinking wine) for five houses and five hours; we were tipsy.
I never conquered riding with both feet on the scooter, but I was safely on the sidewalk. And I had my headlight. I think the other adults were a bit jealous about that.
Big events in my life: I watched the moon landing from 10 inches away from the TV on the family room floor of our house; was at Cape Canaveral for a shuttle launch 15 years later. I reported on the inaugurations of several presidents from the steps of the United States Capitol. I’ve been around long enough to live through big events, large and small.
As I recall, we adults were causing so much noisy, ridiculous merriment as we scooted through town that we attracted the attention of the local police. Nothing bad happened.
But those scooters. That headlight. By the end of the night the tape had surrendered and my flashlight was sagging, lighting the path on the sidewalk ahead of me.
My son is 27 now. When I see him at Christmas I’ll ask what he remembers about that night. His own memory may be foggy, if he has it at all. But I have it, cradled right there in the part of my memory that holds all the really big, important things.
As poet Nowlan says, we were “half-tipsy with the wonder of being alive.”
They are gifts – these plain, simple moments. We all have them. What’s yours?
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.