At Least It Was a Bugatti

Some days the rubber just does not hit  the road and all the long days of work and blood and sweat and tears are just gone. Comfort is somewhere to be found in that I guess.

Learning to parent is learning to fail with grace.  Despite best efforts of patience, calm and consistency, the under-slept and overwrought side of myself occasionally comes out and wants to decide the moment with my child.  I forget that it is a team effort--that two of us are learning together about life, growing up and becoming independent of each other.

Such moments thankfully are few and far between.  And thankfully they don't seem to linger too much in memory or imagination for either of us.

In the Garden of Wonder and Delight

The aquarium is a favorite place for all of us. 

Colorful tropical fishes, monstrously big ugly fishes, jellyfish, belugas, dolphins and more...I happily suspend my land limited imagination and enrapture myself to Captain Nemo's world while my daughter typically runs around and squeals in delight, no matter if she is visiting the mighty beluga or the gift shop.

In dreams, water is often considered to represent the mythical, the magical, the unknown.  

In waking, the aquarium is a wonderful place to be affronted by mythos, by magic and by unknowingness.  

There I'm happy to be humbled, not only by the diversity of life on the blue planet but also by the paucity of my own imagination for it.

"To be no part of any body, is to be nothing."

Reaching Backwards and Forwards

My child sleeps peacefully and I whisper to her the concluding words from Mark Doty's exquisite poem "On Broadway":

In the same way Ezekiel turned back to the benevolent stranger.

  'I will write a poem for you tomorrow,'

he said.  'The poem I will write will go like this:  

  Our ancestors are replenishing the jewel of love  for us.'

It is me who remembers into the past of grandmothers and grandfathers to accept this gift for her and simultaneously I postulate far into the future of adolescence to give it to her when she can consciously know and appreciate it. For all of my backwards and forwards reaching, she effortlessly embodies this jewel of love right here and right now.

Driving late at night at high RPMs with everything adjusted and tuned just right, the valve train on my car's engine sings to me the song of Aurelio Lampredi, Vittorio Jano, Edoardo Weber, Nuccio Bertone, Marcel Ghandini and a whole host of others who collectively have contributed to the immediate pleasure at hand.  It is a beautiful thing.

My child sleeping peacefully tonight is a beautiful thing.

Little more action, little less conversation!

 

Who needs Italian cars when you can dance like this?!

O Souverain, o juge, o père

I'm a believer in the Taoist notion of "right mindfulness", i.e. check up from the neck up, think before speaking, get behind your words, live intentionally, let actions speak for themselves, it's not the size of the tool it's how you use it, WWJD, yes we can, etc etc....

And if I cannot get together the right mindfulness, I at least hope to be good, to be kind and to be just.  I hope that I might set an example for my o-so-quickly growing daughter, if not myself.

And then, if I can't even muster up the basics of goodness, kindness and justice, then I'll follow the dictum:  Fake it 'til you make it.  In other words, act like I've got it together until I actually do have got it together, and I'll give it all I got anyways, because really I'm never going to have that time again and if I don't give 'er (to borrow from my Canadian friends' vocabulary) I'm just going to be spinning around in the confusion.

I find that parenting sometimes requires me to fake it till I make it.  So many new and unexpected twists and turns of delight and mystery occurring that I don't fully comprehend, nor can I direct the outcome. This is a good thing, despite the feeling that not all my tires are on the ground at all times.

The Maestro, Fangio provides the example here.  With grace, eloquence and a measured strength behind the wheel, he maintained control and composure even in the midst of some pretty turbulent moments during his Formula 1 racing career.

I hope that I too might keep it on the track with such attributes for the many successes and failures I am sure to share with my child in the years to come.  Thank you Fangio for the example, and thank you my daughter for the opportunity.

Asinine Obfuscations & Obstreperous Assertions

'Amazing' is generally used as a term of approval, e.g "Amazing Alfa, dude!" whereas 'danger' is used as an acknowledgment of the possibility of injury, pain or loss.  Long long ago, the dictionary revealed these definitions after I penned this:

Where I was to write I love you

I wrote

Amazing!  Danger!

instead.

It was no mistake.

Not much has changed after all these years.

The Dancing Frog!

Given moments like this,  I just want to be able to look at my child in the eye and let her know I did the best I could at any given time and made the best choices I possibly could.  True dat.