Today, as I was
yelling up the stairs for my small people, once again, to come down and get
bundled up, I started thinking about how my kids see our day from their side,
especially our perennially turtle-ish older daughter. She is often wandering in
the vastness of her own mind, writing songs and creating little worlds of her
own on every available surface of her room. I think it would be absolutely
fascinating to read her ongoing biography from an omniscient point of view, to
delve deeply and at length into what she is thinking while the rest of our
lives happen around her. Because I’m a writer (or trying to be) and no salient
point or poignant vignette springs to mind for today, I have given myself
license to begin her biography…
Claire
had a messy room but a very neat dream life. Her bedside table had a setup, (it
always did), with folded tissues for beds, empty Altoids boxes for mini-rooms
and books for risers, dividers and sometimes even for reading. She had plenty
of Scotch tape in her desk, and many glue sticks as well (one never knew when
things needed to be connected artificially after all.) She had a habit of
shoving many different things under her bed at once and then announcing that it
was clean, which it was, to anyone who didn’t bother looking under the long
drape of her comforter.
We find our protagonist on this particularly
cold winter day lying on this same comforter, thumb in her mouth and two
fingers tracing circles on her earlobe. She was, as usual, supposed to be doing
something else. She stared up at the ceiling lost in thought as words floated
by her; words like, “get dressed,” and “brush your teeth,” and “What are you
doing up there?” Although she could hear these words, she wondered why someone
would bother repeating anything so unnecessary. She did, after all, get dressed
and brush her teeth every morning, eventually. Slowly, her mind shifted back to
the epic story she was writing in her head that would be set to music, much
like “Peter and the Wolf.” It didn’t bother our young hero that she did not
know either how to write music or how to play any specific instrument yet.
These minor inconveniences were easily overcome with some imagination, and that
she had in spades.
Much to her dismay and the interruption of
her reverie, her mom showed up and insisted on her actually enacting some of
the requests that had floated up the stairs to her. After brushing her teeth,
she wandered back to her room and proceeded to stand with only undies on for a
full five minutes in front of her closet door. Her thumb in her mouth and her
head angled to the side so as to be able to get the perfect position for
standing ear rub, she contemplated her epic, and then also wondered why the
moon had been so bright last night. Questions swam through her mind; “was the
moon that bright in China as well last night? Can my friend Hannah see the same
moon where she is?” Her questions led her to her bookcase, where she pulled out
a book she knew she would need at some point and so had rescued from Goodwill.
Still clad only in undies, she sat on the floor of her room reading about the
moon, pausing every couple of minutes to suck her thumb and rub her ear, or as
she would later learn to call it “philosophizing.”
She heard irritation in the footsteps on
their way up the stairs to her so she quickly put the book back and opened a
drawer in an earnest attempt to stick to the schedule, or at least look like
she was sticking to the schedule. Her mom walked by and peered in with raised
eyebrows for good measure and then wandered off to hurry some other dawdler
along. Finally dressed, she headed down the stairs to confront the barely
controlled chaos of packing lunches, assembly line style and the inevitable
craze that comes with the last five minutes before heading to school. This world was a loud one, much busier and
less contemplative than the one she had just left in the comfort of her own
room and mind. Nevertheless, our brave hero forged on, stepping into voluminous
snow pants, a jacket, hat and mittens steadily but oh so slowly. The last one
of all her siblings to the car, she heard an exasperated sigh from the front
seat as she stepped over mountains of backpacks and legs to find a seat.
More to come…
Wouldn't we each like to live In Claireville!
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