the great escape
Diane and Luke and I spent the day making this shell of a house into a home. My roommate Harsha is in India until just after the wedding and left a desk and a chair here, but has otherwise vacated his room, so the house is entirely ours. We are beginning to populate the spaces with our presence, or more precisely, Diane is, since she above all has purview over what makes this house a home.
We’re shuffling rooms around a little bit. I spent a large part of the day moving furniture and other heavy items whilst Diane cleaned and Luke tried, but tried, to get his hands on the candy jar that is several shelves up in the dining room. Luke, ailing a little bit, took a long nap and after he woke up went for a long walk around the neighborhood with me. In the meantime, Diane cooked an amazing turkey roast dinner, complete with white wine and tiramisu. After dinner, Luke sauntered off into the living room to watch his movie and she and I stretched out the experience, talking and being close. I lose myself in the expressiveness of her eyes, perfectly framing her very worthy insights. She is so lovely.
The world is so big to Luke. I thought about this on the way home from Diane’s parents’ house a few minutes ago. I remembered car rides with my family, trusting my parents implicitly and absolutely, to the point where my mind could wander free and settle on details of a road sign or a constellation of streetlights. Especially at night, the world had a sleepy-eyed bustle to it that seemed larger than life. The unimportant details disappeared in the darkness and the choice of what to fix my attention upon was more easily made. Paradoxically, it felt more safe. And even in the daytime, I would notice the corner of a building every time we passed it on some familiar route and I would often know every shrub and restaurant and curve by heart, but my mind did not have the constraint of having to remember the exact driving itinerary, the schedule of the day or the obligations that awaited us when we arrived. Destinations and narrow routes floated in a vast ocean of unknown.
I suspect it is much the same way for Luke. I notice trappings of it when we go on walks, especially ones to unfamiliar parts of the neighborhood. He is quite the chatterbox now, constructing nearly full sentences (he had a repertoire of only about 20 single words as recently as July), but when we venture off a well-traveled street, he becomes quiet. He searches for something familiar to rest his mind upon. I help him, pointing out a friendly pine tree or a yellow fire hydrant or a manhole, and he repeats my designation. The act of finding something recognizable, “understandable,” makes the place familiar, and every time we pass through that location he points out his “anchor,” moving from one to the next. He takes the familiar and uses it as a tether into the unfamiliar, like a jellybean trail in a forest.
He prayed for the first time over dinner. We do “praying hands” before each meal, clasping our hands together and issuing a prayer. Luke will usually mimic and participate, though he almost always peeks, but earlier he fussed a little bit while I prayed. I didn’t think much of it until a few seconds later when Diane and I observed him clasp his hands together, close his eyes, head bowed, mumble for a few seconds and then say, “In Jesus’ name, amen.” We were overjoyed in our approval; Diane cried a little bit and I was emotional, being very proud of him. In retrospect he probably fussed because he wanted to pray himself. Milestones…