Get into the groove
Since July we have been living what passes for a charmed life considering we’re still in a global pandemic, meaning primarily that both our kids have been in full-day summer camp. Tomorrow is the last day.
Every morning for the past six weeks I’ve left the house with just Ilya — Keith drives Raffi to his camp, which is in Bay Ridge! — and walked .9 of a mile to his preschool. We did this same walk every school day of the past year, too, but we also had Raffi with us, meaning that I had to cajole and corral Raffi and sometimes tow his scooter with one hand while I pushed the stroller with the other. Doing this commute with just Ilya is almost meditative by comparison. He’s at that golden age just past two, still content to lie back in the stroller and let experience wash over him, occasionally removing his paci to point out a doggy! or a bird! or a truck! Soon he will be agitating to get OUT, to WOK, and we’ll have to start letting him go on his scooter and everything will take twice as long. Raffi, at this age, could make the three block commute to his first daycare take twenty minutes. Maybe Ilya will remain chill, but I doubt it. He’s already figured out how to loosen the straps.
For now, though, he’s a perfect companion — just present enough that I can’t listen to a podcast, but not a constant stream of too-loud awkward questions and complaints like his brother. We see the same things on our walk every day, but it’s different every day, too, because of the tiny fluctuations in the weather and the foliage and the flowers and the people and dogs who we pass. My world has become so small. I can anticipate every bump in the sidewalk. They repaved Washington and somehow blocked a drain in the process so now there’s a big lake that forms on the west side of the intersection when it rains. The extremely tall maple trees to the east of that intersection are always losing branches in storms, and their leaves are already turning yellow. I read in an article about climate change that maples are not going to last much longer in this part of the Northeast in general. Raffi talks about winter being a time of snow and snowball fights primarily because he’s been taught that in pre-K. It only snowed once this past year. Someday relatively soon we will sell or give away this stroller and then I’ll forget what it was like be constantly pushing a stroller up and over the edges of curbs, finagling the stroller through the entrances to shops. Ilya calls the deli where we occasionally buy after-school Pocky “CHOCOLATE” and the playground “SWING” or “SLIDE.”
It’s the coolest day since spring today. I don’t really have anything I’m supposed to do at this exact moment. I want to eat the entire internet, read every book, write down every idea I’ve ever had. I should pay bills, file invoices and claims, look at outerwear to buy for the kids so they can spend more time outside when the weather cools off, as much time as possible outside, even in the cold wet days of fall. I try to think about something I would usually look forward to, or even anticipate with excited nervous fear, and there’s just nothing there. The last five months have banished the last vestiges of Raffi’s toddlerness; he is five now, long and wire-thin, a kid. All I know about the immediate future is that my children will continue to grow up. Sometimes I wish this summer would never end. Other times, I wish to skip ahead and be far in the future, even if it means sacrificing these final months of Ilya’s baby-chub, his first ventures into three-word sentences. “I did it!” he exclaims, climbing to the top of a play structure, beaming, radiant, happy enough for us all, for now.