Bring a Torch, Jeannette Isabelle

I come home tonight to this, Kathleen Battle pouring out into the night--did I mention it's a full moon?--and Liam on the couch staring at the tree. He's been waiting on me; we had a date at the toy store. I ran into traffic, and now it's too late. But he doesn't brood: he puts on Kathleen Battle's Christmas disk, opens the door, and waits. When I apologize, there's no recrimination. "It's OK," he mumbles into my shoulder. "Being with you is my best thing in the planet."

Who's in charge here? No, seriously. I love home.

I remembered tonight that somebody told me once that our lives play out in nine-year cycles, and that my latest nine-year cycle began in 1997 with the birth of my child. Which would make 2006 a whole new deck of cards--er--kettle of fish. Oh, it's numerology, or astrology--one of them--and you find meaning in it or you don't. Mostly I don't, though these seeded comments do tend to cling to the corners. But I begin to think that the whole game--the whole mishegas--is in the meaning: in the reaction, in the switches and the triggers, and the chaos and silences, all of them internal. "What am I supposed to be doing?" I hear myself ask out loud, in the empty car on the Merritt Parkway. Like somebody's going to answer. I'm so much more whole than I was in 1997, even though life dished out some nasty curve balls. It's good for the heart sometimes to look back as if it all played out purposefully--as if we did that then because we knew about this, here, now. It's why old people love their photo albums, I think. The evidence. The story. The absolution.

I didn't get the job--just a lovely letter. It was OK after ten minutes; the commute--that commute would've killed the three of us, and everything I love most about what we have. But it's definitely a controlled calm I'm feeling--a sharp, focused calm. Thinking, thinking.

Thanks for the nice thoughts, you lovely, dear people.