Across time

It's June 1, 2014. This is my 487th post. Cleo will turn 5 in three days, and I will compose my last entry, following a native internal logic that tells me that she is about to cross a meaningful threshold, and that I need no longer represent her in this way.

Meanwhile, time distends. L. left for Cape Town yesterday, and so the contours of my afternoon began to stretch, as if elastic. If you really immerse yourself in the pacing of a four-year-old (and, honestly, what better to do with this brilliant Saturday afternoon?), familiar pacings yield to new ones: it might now take 45 minutes to eat that plate of food, as the slices of cucumber must be rubbed unthinkingly on upper lip, and family stories must be solicited, and considered. Mud puddles that would normally be skirted become an hour's entertainment, and there's really no point in leaving the playground before she declares herself done. For what lies at home, on a day like this? Only rival play options, or thoughts of a distant wife, or a book that is merely an alternative to the one that I read as she plays.

And even texts, on this confusing day, threaten to challenge any notion of stable time and place. In the late morning, as L. packs, Cleo and I draw up a card, wishing her well on her travels. When, and over what ocean or continent, will she open this card, and its accompanying gift (which alludes, in turn, to a future trip)? We seem to write for a recipient in some cloudy, unknowable future.

Then, later in the afternoon, Cleo and I sit down to read a small trove of colorful books that I wrote when I was myself a child. In 1978, when I was just turning 8, we were in Italy, and I seem to have passed much of the time composing brief narratives and collections of poor original jokes and games:

We leaf through them; Cleo seems truly interested, and I am both fascinated and occasionally puzzled, or softly embarrassed. An ambitious tale about a crew stranded on an island after a pirate attack reveals a stultifying interest, for instance, in numbers and lists: the members of the crew are enumerated, and food supplies detailed. In another book, we encounter an unseemly interest in precise sums of money: this cost this, and that cost that. And why, in a book of riddles about animals, is the pictured elephant so emphatically well endowed?

But, regardless, there is something magical about the moment. My 4-year-old daughter is looking at, and listening to, the thoughts of a 7-year-old me. Or, to put it differently: a younger me is writing, in the past, to a fully aged Cleo, in the future. Or is it the present?

It is, let's say, a present. A gift, across the years - to parallel the gift that L. now carries, and perhaps considers, as she traverses a broad ocean.