I surprise myself every time I reference my baby and someone asks about her age. Good gracious, she’ll be ten on her next birthday. And then we attend events like our church staff Christmas party tonight and hold actual babies and remember how intense those years were and how quickly they’ve passed. I miss those days and I love the ones I’m in now.
We were walking out the door, Chris and Ames and I, when we received the call that our flight out of town had been canceled. There would be no time to make it up north to fly out of Alaska in time for all of our other travel. No hiking in the desert for Ames’ thirteenth birthday, no celebrating our wedding anniversary in a new city. We will rally, but today feels bad.
I remember this date not because of Pearl Harbor’s story, but because of my own personal history attached to it… my grandfather never failed to remind me of this date, quizzing me year after year. This is my first Pearl Harbor anniversary without him. I remembered, Papa.
I was nearly thirty-seven years old before an artificial Christmas tree darkened my doorstep and lit up my living room. We decorated her tonight. She’s doing the job we need her to do this year and for that, we are grateful.
I spent the same amount in pizzas tonight that I used to spend on groceries in three weeks. This is not a brag. Those pizzas were costly and I can’t be making decisions like that every week. It’s just that now, there is enough money to move around between allocated areas. There is not as much stress as there used to be. This is what I wish to remember.
Happy December. May I finish this year stronger than I started it, saying real things and loving folks as best as I can.
Tonight began tech week. Our run of seven Nutcracker shows begins this weekend. We were in the theater, all six of us, until 10pm on a school night. I could not stop crying, the tears starting over each time I saw my kid or someone else’s kid present their hard work on stage. This is something else.