Distance

So it's about 3 in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and a faint shaft of December sun is falling towards the window, and, Cleo, you're in Washington, D.C. with Mom, Aunt Tasha and her family, and Omi and Papa. Meanwhile, I'm in Baltimore, where I spent most of the morning working and playing Santa. I'll see you in about an hour, when you come home on the train - but, still, it's strange to think of you there, and me here. Strange, at least, until I realize that this whole blog is predicated, in one sense, on that basic fact of distance: of us here and friends and grandparents there, and the sheer, stupid gulf between late 2013 and whenever it is when you, too, might read this.

Occasionally, though, distances collapse, and we live entirely in the noble, seamless present. Yesterday was such a moment, for after sending my grades in I had no immediate work to do, and an almost raw desire to spend the day with you. So that was us, sharing a cinnamon roll and printing photographs for Mom's present in the morning; that was us, too, looking up Caldecott winners from previous years at the Towson Library, and wondering, with Mirette, at what it must be like to learn to walk the high wire. That was us laughing in the rain as you tried to hold two umbrellas while I tried to hold you, and that was us at the Science Center, meeting friends from school and engaging in massive pulley-driven tugs of war.

I recently came across an interesting, if uneven, book called Strong Experiences with Music, by an Alf Gabrielsson. It consists in large part of oral accounts of allegedly moving moments, in the anonymous voices of the largely Scandinavian interviewees who experienced them. And while a number of them are worth reading, I'll just point to one, as an illustration; it's a young man talking about his experience at a Mike Oldfield concert in Sweden:

"The first notes almost made me faint… I felt that I disappeared for a moment and then woke up as if in a dream, but all the time aware of the music. In some way I was floating above the audience… It was like a dream, I was floating and the group was playing only for me."

Surrounded by a crowd, and the noise of the concert, he thus somehow rose, and felt both closer to the band, and further from his friends.

It's 3:30 now, and I see that flakes of snow have begun to fall.  You're a half hour closer to home, now, too, but at the same time you're even further from the time that we spent together yesterday. One tries to live in the present, but the present is constantly receding. One wants to be there, but is stuck in the here.