I sit on the couch with my daughter, teaching her to crack peanuts with her fingernails
her hair still wet from the dip in the pool on this 95-degree Sunday.
Joe Castiglione calls balls and strikes on the radio.
1-0 for the good guys.
My son and wife are in the kitchen, cooking cupcakes from a recipe in the back of a children’s book called
Cupcake.
Later, wife and I sit on the back porch while Clara draws chalk robots in the driveway.
Kathryn makes herself a salmon burger and me a salami sandwich because she knows how I feel about fish.
Salmon and salami look like the same word but couldn’t be more different.
A butterfly drops out of the sky from nowhere.
She rises then drops then rises then drops and makes me wonder if there is an intended flight pattern.
Because nothing is random.
I say it’s a Monarch. Kathryn disagrees and calls yellow swallow tail.
“Chutes and ladders dad?”
1-1. Tie game.
Sure, Clara.
The cupcakes are done baking.
We apply the homemade buttercream frosting, which Kathryn and Ben also whipped up together.
3-1, bad guys.
Ben tries to sneak a handful of sprinkles into his mouth.
I pretend not to see him.
Never mind that the Sox are on the radio because we can’t afford cable.
Never mind that we were in the backyard instead of on vacation.
Forget that the book was from the library because we aren’t buying books for a while.
And pay no attention to the patchwork inflatable pool that has seen better days thanks to our friend the raccoon.
None of that stuff seems important today.
Why does it ever? Why will it tomorrow?
Today, like every day, is a gift.
Today, unlike every day, I am accepting it.
Still 3-1.
8 Comments
What a great post and so so true. I had a business that went bust a few years ago and in hindsight it was one of the best things that ever happened to me, I realized what was really important and it was not the career or the money it was the moments with my wife and daughter that I often missed because of trying to get ahead in life.
Thanks for sharing this Erik. It really puts a lot of things into perspective for me. I’m on the edge of vocational transition moving from retail into who knows what with no education. For me it’s scary.
The way you paint such a beautiful picture of the simple (and most important) things makes me know that whatever happens, I’ll be okay.
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love this
I only work in the afternoon these days.
Long hours = bad decisions and prompts a lack of prioritisation, I learnt this trick from ‘the four hour work week’ by tim ferris
it works very well
join elance
do some work
sit in the garden
grow vegetables
make your own cider
the future is ‘hippies with laptops’
It’s been a loooong time since I stopped by here. Glad I did. What a great post. Truly magical. It felt like an old fashioned Sunday. The part about why the radio, why the library, why the backyard is the best illustration of turning lemons into Lemonade I can think of. In the end, it’s not the stuff. It’s the stuff life is made of. You’re following a dream & a passion, and it will pay off. Just remember: This too shall improve. From what you’ve described, it’s pretty good already.
i usually read this on my reader erik, but had to stop by the actual site to tell u how much i love this post…miss ya
This post has stuck with me. It’s so artistic. Your voice is uniquely expressed in this post. Hope you keep writing prose-y poetry like this.
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