Peddling

It's so cold today that the exhaust from the cars doesn't even want to dissipate: all those puffy chains just hang there together in the air. Dazed. Much--the dazed part--like the kids, who succumbed to the thing they hate: an undershirt under a turtleneck under a Norwegian sweater under a winter coat. With a scarf. No arguments from either of them this morning. The new car has heated seats; Liam turned on his knees and rested his cheek against them while the car was warming up. The rest of him was warm from layers. I smiled; the new car makes me feel safe. I don't know how else to say it. The heavy sound the doors make when they close--the color, the curves, the seats--the quiet hum: I feel like I've passed to the next level in a game and reached a checkpoint.

Let go. Breathe. Progress saved.

I imagine disaster scenarios in any moment of extremity. I imagine--when I run out without my jacket to turn the car on--what the progression would be like if I didn't have a warm house to return to. How I would die, and how it would feel. Maybe this mindset is created: too much Man vs Wild on the tube. I keep the whole thing to myself--I don't lecture the kids about survival techniques (except for the one about punching a shark in the nose; what are the chances either of them would ever need to?) But it's also experience: things happen, and once they happen to you you're changed because now you know they can happen. I don't let the kids see how thin the safety net is--everybody's safety net. I don't care who you are. It only takes a few bad turns.

Today I took them to see The Pursuit of Happyness. I thought I knew from the trailers what kind of flick it was: hard times--impossible times--then a big break and happy times. But it's not that at all. It was entirely hard times--entirely the pursuit, with blow after heartbreaking blow, and not until the final three minutes of a 2+ hour movie did the big break come. When it did finally come, it was earned--it was no gift of chance. Not the kind of movie I'd have taken them to see. Not yet.

They've never been more still in a theater. "Will we ever be poor like that?" Liam asked more than once. "No," I said. Though we were, only we had family that had spare beds, and a safe place to reboot, and free schools. "What happens if I'm that poor when I grow up?" Maisie asked. "Then you'll come to me," I said. "What if you're dead?" "You'll go to Liam, or to your own children. And if they ever come to you and you have money, you'll help them without making them ask you." That's the hard part--that last bit.

Hard times are a bit like cancer: you don't want to look at it--not on the corner, not on a movie screen--because there's enough of the arbitrary about it to make you feel vulnerable. I held the car key in my pocket on the way out of the theater. "I love our car," Liam said.