Silence and slow time

Most days I have a long to do list. I have to do now lists and to do soon lists and to do someday lists.  I usually have someplace to be or something to get ready for that precludes leisure time.

But having a toddler precludes checking off to do lists.  While time spent rearing a toddler is not exactly leisure, neither is it all work.

The baby lately has learned how to get out of her restraining devices: the car seat, the stroller buckle, the straps on the bike trailer, the high chair belt.  We constantly are in a battle to get her to sit down.  And I am losing.

The other day I had nothing on the "to do right now" list, so I quit my exercise run and let her out of the jogging stroller to walk.  She walked almost a mile. It took over an hour.  We stopped to feed ducks. We stopped to wade in the bay.  We stopped to throw gum balls - the spiky seed pods from the gum tree a couple blocks from our house. We stopped to chatter about Halloween decorations and to touch  - gently! - someone's eclectic witch decor.  She patted fake grass, which keeps sprouting up here in drought land.  I fear it is loaded with bacteria. (Aren't you supposed to spray artificial turf with a bleach rinse or was that just in Guam, the MRSA haven?)

Baby was awfully cute. I enjoyed watching her.  I thought about taking pictures, but I'm trying not to let her see me with my phone too much.  And already there exist exponentially more photos of her than there ever were of her older siblings, who were babies when you had to buy film.  Film was cheap, and I took plenty of photos, but I only sent the doubles to the grandparents and sometimes godparents. No one on the internet saw photos of my cute babies, and I still wonder if any one really wants to, even on Facebook. I like to see pictures of people's cute babies, but I don't like to spend hours looking at other people's lives, and sometimes I catch myself wasting time doing just that.

Oh such mixed feelings about media!  I like to tell my little story here, and I know my mom likes to read it.  I like to illustrate it with photos, and I know she likes to see them.  But how stealthily the internet steals time!  Time that could be spent admiring a phase that is altogether too fleeting.  Captured by a cheap camera and perserved in cyberspace does it collect meaning - like art, like Keats' Urn? (The phrase "silence and slow time" echoed in my memory as we walked along the Bay, but I had to google to aid my memory of its source. Sad. And good.)  It is Fall here at last, and while it's not the golden autumn of the Midwest, the shorter days and cooler evenings are reminders of change and aging and loss and death.

Perhaps I am spoiling Baby by letting her out of her restraints. I'm not teaching her to mind me or to respect limits. But she won't want to explore like this forever. Time won't always be slow.

On a lighter note, we just read John Updike's A Child's Calendar.  I could love this book with its delightful illustrations by Trina Schart Hynan providing an appealing subtext about a biracial family who appears to celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, judging by the  December illustration. Updike's poems read well and have enough action to keep my 3 and 5 year old's attention. But I realized while reading this, along with other kids' books about fall, that there exists in children's literature a prejudicial preference for a New England/Midwest year: cool spring, warm summer, colorful fall, snowy winter. What about all the kids who live in the south and west? Where's the book about the year in the desert and the subtropics? How do they identify winter if they are looking for snowmen?  Palm trees and live oaks don't turn color.