Question of the day

At breakfast:

"Mom, when was love invented?"

"Probably when people were invented."

He mulls this for a second.

"I think maybe love was invented when Jesus and Crisis were born."

Why we can't sleep at night

Medication seems to leave tracers. In the case of the steroid treatment I just started, it's insomnia -- just can't get to sleep at night. So the other night, exhausted after a week of this, I decided to lay down with my boy and make myself try to sleep early and catch up.

And we laid there. And he kicked and swirled around, burrowed into my arms, twisted around, asked to play the alphabet game ("astronaut"... "baby"... "chinchilla"..), wanted to know how much food we'd have to take if we went camping for a whole month, and I finally smoothed his little head and said "shhhh..."

And, well, that didn't work, so we laid there for a minute and I finally said I was getting up so he could go to sleep, so he'd have energy for school tomorrow.

"Mom?" he said sleepily.

"Yes?"

"I know why I can't sleep."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I can't stop looking at you -- you're so beautiful."

God bless the little children. I tried to see this through his eyes -- not eyes clouded by IVs and exhaustion and over-googling terminal illnesses, but the eyes of a little boy in bed on a Tuesday night: What in this world could be more blissful than laying there, gazing at your own mom, who in your mind is probably as radiant as some biblical-era Madonna? It's got to be a place where all is, indeed, well. Where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. And I was there, with him, in that luminous place. Not just there, but providing the shine itself, even though I thought there was no light left.

So here's a shout out to the universe for frame-shifting moments like these. Thank you.

Question of the Day

Mom, Can you
text-message
from heaven?

Before Staying Overnight at Grandma's

My son says:

"When you're here,
and I'm there,
and you're dreaming—
will you come and locate me?"

Jack and "The Man"

For my son's last day of school, we took him out for lunch. He picked his favorite diner—J&S Hamburg, a downtown institution. This small, white, cinderblock building has big strawberry shakes and regulars who hang out and give my son quarters for the M&M dispenser. Jack's loved the place since he began having opinions on such matters, and as a mom, it's perfect. Nothing too fancy. People are charmed, vs. affronted, if a kid stands up and shouts "Hi! I'm Jack!" They let him spin on the stools, instead of shooing him off for scaredy-cat liability reasons.

But things are changing. For one, they just banned smoking. And secondly, the end times have arrived. The demolition next door is in full swing. Developers are razing a former auto dealership in order to build a four-story complex of apartments, offices and storefronts, including a new home for our beloved diner. J&S will be bulldozed, to make way for a parking lot.

We're collectively sad about this. "Can't we have any small buildings?" I ask, rhetorically.

After we pull in, Jack darts over to the construction zone, where a yellow scooper truck is biting a tangle of steel beams. Jack turns to me, and quotes SpongeBob:

"Smells like big business."

***

Inside, before we leave, the waitress congratulates Jack on "graduating" from kindergarten.

"I'm a first-grader now."

"How nice!" she says.

"Why can't we have any small buildings?" he asks her.

She thinks for a second, then gets this nonsequitor. "I know," she commiserates. "All the buildings are big." She assures him that the new J&S will be nice. Jack says he likes this one. They're at a standstill.

"But you can take that with you." He turns around and points to a black-and-white picture on the wall. It's a vintage photo of diner, maybe from the 1930s.

"Yes, we can," she says. "And we're taking the grill too."

"What else are you taking?" he asks.

"I'm not sure," she says.

"The plates?"

"I don't know," she says.

"The radio?"

"I don't know," she says.

"Everything that's detached?" he asks.

She blinked at him. "I don't know."

"But you are taking the picture," he says, clarifying the situation, content to nail down at least one fact in this ever-changing world.