Day in the Life: Dreaming of Gelato; Savoring Soft-Serve

Chronicling life is really hard. Because from a writing perspective, I feel like these weekly chronicles ought to be witty, themed, lively — but sometimes–most times–life doesn’t happen in themed weekly installments peppered with side-splittingly funny mishaps and poignant take-home lessons, it just sort of evolves uneventfully. Sort of like how our heavily anticipated metamorphosis-in-a-jar ended with a pitifully small cocoon that yielded a frenetic grey moth. Not at all what we hoped for or imagined at the outset, but fascinating and good nonetheless.

This week was just sort of an uneventful evolution of days. We fed the ducks (twice). (Insatiate little creatures, aren’t they? Impatiently HONKing for more all the while.) We played at the park every day. We walked three out of five mornings. We exhaled a huge sigh of relief for the innocence and naivete of youth when an unsuspecting Henry found his parents in a rather (ahem!) precarious position one morning, and, never one to let things slide by without inquiry, asked with crinkle-nosed curiousity, “Did mom go poop?” (Don’t ask; we don’t know why he did.) No, Henry, as long as I have my wits about me, that is maybe the only thing you never have to worry about me doing in front of your father.

There wasn’t a whole lot we did in front of the father this week; Nate worked an inordinate number of hours. And, as a result, Henry ate too much Chef Boyardee and watched Dragon Tales too many times, and went out in public like this:

While his too tired mom wore too many “hats.” At the end of one too-late night, an over-worked and too-long-gone dad walked through the laundry room door with the left overs of his too-big serving of pasta from the Cheesecake factory, and gave it to his too hungry wife, who could not have shown too much excitement and gratitude for REAL food!

“For me?” I asked, a smidge incredulous.

“Yeah, wasn’t that charming of me, sweetie?”

“Yes!” I rejoiced, as I removed the plastic lid. But one bite was all I needed to be sure that I didn’t want anymore. Cajun has never been my culinary cup of tea. “Shucks! I don’t really like that,” I lamented, wishing I did.

“Yeah, I didn’t either,” he came clean, instantly lowering his status on the charm-o-meter. “I mean, which Cajun thought it would be a good idea to sprinkle dirt over their food, anyway?”

His comment was hysterically funny to me, partly because it was late at night and the tired jollies were setting in. And partly because lots of things he says, that wouldn’t be funny to anyone else, are funny to me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because we’ve spent the better part of eight years (courting and married), evolving together. And our life, and our love, have become an ongoing dialog — humorous because of allusions to our shared past, meaningful down to the minutiae because of this accumulation of common experience, familiar to the point where without a word, we know — she is fragile, he is tired, she’s overwhelmed, he’s discouraged. The accumulation of uneventful days, in weeks that are neither themed nor witty, amounts to an intangible that is very significant. An intangible which, when asked on our Friday night walk,”If you could be doing anything right now, what would it be?” made Nate answer, “tonight, I’d want to be right here with you guys.”

I was thinking more along the lines of eating gelato on an evening stroll through Venice (hence the picture at the top of the post,) but One Dollar Hot Fudge Sundaes, after a walk in the muggy darkness of a southern evening, made for a pretty delectable, (and much more affordable,) plan B.