Half Cleveland Dad

Discontent

This spring I’ll have lived in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years.  I’ve always been discontent here, so I raise my eyebrows a bit and say, hmmm!, when I picture the number 10 in this context, but I'm accustomed to being rather chronically discontent, and out of place, and I'm aware of my failure to answer the if not here, where sorts of questions regarding Cleveland, Ohio, so it would be inaccurate to say I'm surprised, because, if nothing else, I know I'm still here.  I'm getting a clue, though:

 

The other day Sweet Potato and I were walking around the neighborhood in the snow.  She was watching her feet and listening to her crunchy steps, but stuck up her mitten and said lets hode heands, dad.  Then I was holding hands with a two-year old, walking through the snow, singing Happy Birthday and Twinkle Twinkle, and I had to admit to myself, this is the best my life will ever be.  It wasn’t a Proustian revelation or anything, but more of an admission, or settling.  My general discontent settled a bit with acknowledgment that, yep, this was a dreamt-for moment; a sudden, sweet pool along a crooked, tentative rivulet. 

 

I did thumb through a little Proust after our walk, and Remembrance of Things Past made a new kind of sense.  I used to think it was about love and art, but now it seems like an enlightenment tale:  life is suffering, and suffering is desire, and desire is whining about how you can’t always get what you want, but when you do get it you whine about it even more, until you leave it all behind in order to really think about it, based on a hint of transcendence you get from a chance sense-memory, and then you develop your hint into a meditative practice based on writing that eventually floods you with understanding and compassion for everyone, the result of years sequestered not in a mountaintop hut but in a cork-lined room. 

Fog, Reality, Death, Swinging

A thaw after a chilly week made for a foggy couple of days.  Sweet Potato and I went out to see what there was to see.

I think Sweet Potato's anxious expression over the dead possum had more to do with her earlier observation, daht possum has reao shahp teet-th; izzy gohn-eenta bite us?, than a soul-opening encounter with the concept of mortality, although, walking back to the car, she first said, I'm dead ... and you're dead, too.

A neighbor once surprised a possum in his yard, and it flopped over in simulated death -- it played possum.  So at first I thought this possum might only have shorted out.  But it was too cold.

The day before this, Sweet Potato bent over a flower pot in front of our house.  Look!  Lookaddat!  It was her small beanbag bear.  It's Beah!  She felt bad that he'd been outside for many days.  He'd been buried in a snowdrift, and was grimy with the thaw.  I said I'd wash him.  Noooo!  I wandta seep widt him in my bed!