Weekend Update

There is a scene in the movie, Ordinary People, between Donald Sutherland’s character and Mary Tyler Moore’s character where he says to her something along the lines of “You can’t see things except for the way they affect you.” Her response is “no, I can’t and neither can anyone else.” It is one of my favorite exchanges in the movie and such a true sentiment. If that weren’t true, I likely wouldn’t even have a blog. I write about what interests me, not really considering whether anyone else would be interested in reading it. I suppose that there are worse reasons for writing.

Speaking of writing, I recently discovered the very first draft (thirty pages only) of the novel that I continue to write and discovered that it is actually older than my oldest child. My novel turned four in October. Four years. In that time, I managed to have two children and get a new job, but haven’t been able to finish this novel. Still, I haven’t given up. The trouble I have now is that ideas are coming faster than I can write them. That rarely happens and I certainly am not complaining. Just need to set aside more time to write.

Friday evening I went to bed as usual around 8:30, as Jeff and I are sleep-sharing (like time-sharing, only we don’t travel and one of us is always with the infant). I awoke from a sound sleep just before 1:00 a.m. (Jeff generally comes to wake me up at 1:30 or 2:00) and went to check on them. Jeff was holding Sully and he looked up at me and said “He’s warm.” We took his temperature and it was 102 degrees. Jeff packed Sully’s diaper bag and took him to the hospital while I waited at the house with Jude. Just after Jeff left, Jude awoke and I went into his room to comfort him. It was agony waiting for Jeff to call, but it just wasn’t practical for us both to go to the hospital. Finally, he called. There was nothing to worry about. Sully still had a good appetite and wasn’t dehydrated or listless. They arrived home shortly afterward and I held onto him as he slept. I just let him sleep there the rest of the night, as I did not want to set him down. There isn’t any other feeling in the world like holding a sleeping baby, feeling the complete trust that the baby has, just watching him sleep. No one ever told me that I would have that feeling. No one ever told me that I would wake up in the middle of the night, concerned because the baby is not crying, would stand over him just to make sure that he is still breathing. Sully continued to have a fever until Sunday afternoon and seems just fine now.

Sunday morning Jeff had to work so as he got ready, I heard a fire truck siren. I told Jude so we could go to the window and watch the truck drive by, but the truck did not drive pass. We looked through the other living room window and right across the street from us were two fire trucks and three police cars. A car apparently slid off the road and hit a tree. As I fed Sullivan, Jude and I observed the firefighters and policemen at work, removing the windshield from the car. As we watched they also removed the top of the car. I felt a bit like a ghoul, watching someone else’s auto accident, especially when it became evident that it was a fatality. Fortunately, Jude is too young to fully understand what was happening and there wasn’t anything that we saw that would lead him to think that the person in the car had died. He was fascinated with the firemen and their hoses, then the tow truck that came to move the car, so he paid no mind to the ambulance. Of course for our neighborhood, this was just something that happened on a Sunday morning, something to be immediately forgotten as we continued on with our days, but I couldn’t help but think that it was a life-altering event for someone sitting at home waiting for him or her to return.
Song of the day: “Asleep” from The Smiths because it is a perfect song for a cold, miserable winter day and because it is the prettiest song I know about death. Runner up song of the day: “Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel” from The Barenaked Ladies.