It all changed in an instant

Driving home today, I heard a segment on NPR dedicated to SmithMag's popular Six Word Memoirs. You know the idea - derived from Hemingway's famous six-word novel (For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn), the principle involves an attempt to convey a meaningful idea, or, better, an entire life, in six words. Many of the examples, unsurprisingly, feel a bit incomplete, but a few do deliver, and it's worth scrolling through the website for a few minutes, just to gain a sense of what's possible, in an extremely condensed format. Or, if you're feeling flush, you can always order the recent published collection, which is named for one of the memoirs featured in it. It's called It All Changed in an Instant.

Can it all change in an instant? Well, it certainly seemed so last night, when I walked out of my criticism class shortly before 10 p.m., exhausted, with Diderot on my mind, only to find myself in one of the loveliest snowstorms I've ever seen. The whole world was transformed, as inches of fluffy white fell on trees, and sidewalks, and cars. The beauty of Joyce's famous closing sentences in The Dead; the sudden transformative power of a haiku.

Parenting, though, rarely involves such dramatic changes, simply because we're so consistently present in our children's lives. Cleo's a lot bigger now than she was in November, but she's not much larger than she was yesterday, and so L. and I don't register the growth as sudden, or as surprising. Still, every now and then I am surprised at some new talent or interest that seems almost to spring out of nowhere. For instance, she's been holding small objects for months now, and has long been interested in tugging at or hugging the bottle as she's fed. Still, the seeming confidence and maturity that she exhibited two days ago when I let her have a turn struck me as simply breathtaking:

It doesn't, generally speaking, all change in an instant. Things evolve; things age. But those slow, organic processes that form the common pace of our lives only throw into high relief, I suppose, moments of real change. And, too, they form the staid extended narrative against which the six-word memoir gains its force. We live much of our lives at the pace of a novel. It's exciting, then, when action occurs in compressed form.