This Second

This second is never enough. This second swallows toothpaste. This second speeds. This second is a second chance. This second is ten seconds too late. This second wants to run away with the dish and the spoon. This second is a hot pepper in cold milk. This second needs a minute. This second breaks her heart. This second takes more than this second to read. This second happens. This second didn't do it right this second. This second wastes time. This second is Dylan Thomas reading Auden. This second once read Charlotte's Web and killed a spider in the same day. This second just left lefty in left field. This second listens to violin and mandolin. This second pretends.

This second is your life.

This second fell in love. This second mixed past tense with present tense and takes a sip. This second isn't second best. This second is about one second from full blown rage. This second ran a ten minute mile. This second loves to hear itself talk. This second surfs and gets stoked. This second exceeds expectations. This second laughs last. This second is a grasshopper on the window of the 48th floor. This second is fresh cut grass and daisies. This second is pregnant. This second once made a promise - and broke it. This second, that second, and the other second lived happily ever after. This second hates meatloaf and white chocolate. This second thinks vampires are overrated. This second doesn't believe in multi-tasking. This second is a lot like Dane Cook, but funnier. This second is on first. This second framed Roger Rabbit. This second once spent a month waiting for the hour it could spend one minute with Sting. This second is when, now, and then.

This second is this second is this second is all we have...

Momminy's Birthday

A letter from Taylor to Momminy:

Dear Momminy,

Happy Birthday! To celebrate your special day, I'm going to sleep in this morning until almost 11:00. I'm going to count from 1 to 10, skipping over 8 (someone ate my 8). I'll sing the ABC song (sort of) along with Leap, my toy frog. You and I will be sure to dance to "Viva" at least five times and also, my new favorite, "Bus" (short for wheels on the bus go round and round).

Today it is sunny and mid-60 degree weather with lots of pin oak leaves to pick up and swish through. Gigi is coming to visit! We must take a walk (maybe to Cotswold Starbucks for venti chai and banana bread). We will watch Classical Baby Music Show, especially "Sun" and "Baby Steps", which are my favorites. And I'll even take a nap in the afternoon for at least an hour (I've been doing such a good job with my naps in the past couple of weeks, don't you think?).

Most of all, we will have lots of FUN on your birthday!

"Yuve You, Momminy"

Taylor (21 months)

P.S. Maybe, if you get a present, I could help you open it (even though it isn't "me's", it's yours).

Maiden Voyage

Today's Fiction Free Write:

Mimi Maiden didn't fear being alone. She feared being forgotten.

In the heart of Cambridge, Mimi sat at a table that wobbled in the corner of a coffee shop. It was the second day of her first trip to Boston. She loved being in a new place. In fact, her lifestyle bordered on nomadic. New places meant new cities to explore, new people to meet, and new adventures to be had.

Mimi talked to strangers.

The music student she met at breakfast told her that the coffee shop was a favorite of Yo-Yo Ma. Perhaps he would shuffle in with his cello in tow. Mimi wondered what he ordered. Had other famous people sat in the same chair where she now sat? Were there great and famous people among the crowd of coffee drinkers tucked into seats around the room at that very moment? It was possible. And the possibilities - in each destination, in a chance meeting on the street, in the world of the person she might meet there - made new places exciting.

A man in rumpled pants paused at the door of the coffee shop. The middle buttons on his dress shirt strained against his protruding belly. He puffed and sighed, pushed the door open, and walked out to the corner. A gust of wind lifted the gray strands of hair from the balding crown of his head. With his index finger, he pushed his spectacles above the bridge of his nose and looked to cross the street. Mimi thought he might be a professor - a troubled, fidgety Ivy League professor caught in the depths of his own mind - like her father. Preoccupied. Distracted. Perhaps he drank coffee to spike his already high-powered brain with caffeine energy to fuel his ongoing research for the next major publication or the cure for cancer or the economic theory that would solve poverty.

One had to be great to be an Ivy League professor, but greatness was difficult to tolerate in a father. Although Mimi followed her father into academia, she vowed not to neglect her family in the process. Mimi’s father had been distant, surrounded by books and ideas and an ego impenetrable to the simple interests of a young girl.

When she used to go to Lucy’s house in the afternoons, Mimi saw how a father might be in the world beyond the pressures of tenure. Lucy’s dad set up the paint sets and showed them color charts, art books, and stencils. He even sat at the newspaper-covered table with them and took a brush to exercise his own creativity. He admired Lucy’s work - and Mimi’s - telling them they could be the next great painters. He said they could do anything they set their minds to do, anything in the world. It was good to hear that from a grown up, from a dad. Mimi’s mother often told her the same thing in a vague way, but Mimi longed to hear it from her father. He reached the pinnacle of a profession that was also his passion. She wished her father would tell her that she could do anything. She wanted him to believe in her, in all of the possibilities that were her future. She wanted him to convince her that she could be great.

Instead, Mimi's ache for possibilities led her to new places, to seek greatness in simplicity, to explore the world around her until she was certain that if any person could rise from obscurity - from the millions of people doing millions of things - then she, too, could rise.

Addie In The Storm

Today's Free Write - Fiction:

Addie saw the good in people, until she didn’t. Her corn silk curls clipped back from blush-kissed cheeks and eyes like gray-blue pearls, she walked the way a girl might walk who knew there was somebody watching. Shoulders back. Hips swaying a bit more than usual. Thin smile. And her sister Myra envied every last look from every town boy they’d known growing up on the red dirt farm her parents inherited from grandpa Mooresby.

That was before.

Myra sat next to her mother on the porch swing, cross-stitched an orange cat under the lettering Welcome Home on a pillow for her daughter. She actually sucked in her breath when she looked up to see Addie stride up the porch steps. “Well, if it ain’t miss big city come home to the farm.” She dropped her stitching needle, grabbed her sister up in a hug that nearly smothered the pretty girl. “We need to get some meat on these bones. Mama, look at this skinny sister of mine. She’ll blow away on a summer breeze.”

All Addie could think was with the plum-pit of regret in her belly and the words ‘he’s gone’ tied round her ankles like an anchor there was no chance of blowing away. Her sorrow weighed twice as much as she did.

Addie watched her mother. Watched her tears come and her mouth gape open to speak. To bring comfort or criticism. But no words came.

That was the thing about a homecoming. Sometimes it was just the showing up that mattered most. Even when there was nothing anybody could say to make it better.

Liver In The Moment

When a day in your life goes from normal to crisis, you gain perspective in the moment.

For me, that day was Valentine's Day 2009 when a phone call changed the course of the evening from a family celebration to the night my dad was given the gift of a new liver. My parents made the four hour drive overnight to Duke Hospital where my dad had a liver transplant. Now, nearly three months after surgery, he is making great progress in his recovery.

Amazing.

But with perspective comes the challenge of keeping it. In a crisis it seems easy to stay in the moment - each second counts and requires your full attention. Time slows down. The trick is to stay in the moment when your life returns to its new normal, when routine makes it easy to daydream about the past or anticipate the future instead of enjoy the time as it passes. I know, it's so much easier said than done.

I guess the best we can do is to try to make the most of the normal days before we encounter a crisis and remember the wisdom gained when a crisis comes along.

Here are a few of my thoughts from a post-crisis perspective:

Be an organ donor.

Love the ones you love.

Live in the moment.

Stands With A Fish

Two weeks! My daughter will be one year old in two weeks! My jaw is on the floor. I can't believe it. But, alas, Taylor is growing up as fast as everyone (really, everyone) said she would. I blinked. They said not to blink, but I blinked. And now she's almost one year old already. Wow.

Taylor's latest antics include trying to eat elusive Cheerios, lifting her leg Karate Kid style while laughing, babbling everything from "dada" to "tree" (still no sign of "mommy" - saving the best for last, right? Right?), attempting to walk, and standing with toys in both hands - usually toy fish. Her other standing routine (at least for the past week) has been to pull up in the corner of her crib during naptime, grip her stuffed dolphin (a mammal, not a fish), and scream-cry until her poor dolphin is soaked with snot and tears. That routine is getting old, fast (just like Taylor).

This time last year I was a week from my due date and couldn't sleep. I didn't know whether I was having a boy or a girl. The baby curled in my pregnant belly kicked and hiccuped. A couple weeks after that, my life changed forever when Taylor Jane raised her hand through my c-section ("Hey, world! I'm here!") at 2:24 a.m. and made her grand entrance into the mad world.

Happy New Year for Old Resolutions!!

It's the first week of 2009 and I already get the sense that this year will bring many changes. As I see it, change is the only constant. I'm curious to find out what will happen with each passing month in this new year.

Most importantly, I'm invoking the carryover rule for all resolutions from last year. Everyone has another whole year to keep their resolutions from last year. Hooray! Isn't that wonderful?! Now, you can stop feeling guilty about the things you didn't finish before December 31, 2008. You have another 365 (well, technically 360) days!! Am I just creating the ultimate form of procrastination or what?

It's a happy new year for old resolutions. I'll toast to that!

A new year brings with it the awareness that time keeps on passing -- another day, another week, another year. This is life. This very moment. And this very moment. Second by second. Get busy doing whatever it is that you want to do.

What are you waiting for? Next year? It will be here before you know it...