Geiger Counter
Now, or never?
My daughter was sick a few weeks ago. She missed several days of school, shattered her prior screen time record, and sneezed on everything in our house. After several feverish days, and nights during which violent coughs shattered the nocturnal stillness and gave our home the aural qualities of a 19th century consumption ward, she was exhausted.
The doctor said what doctors say: “It’s probably a virus. Drink plenty of fluids and get some rest: here is a bill for $800,000,000.” But I saw the hope fading from Hadley’s eyes as she waited for something or someone to make her better.
That evening, she tried to kiss me. Out of instinct I stiff-armed her.
“Oh, sorry Hadley,” I said. “You don’t want to give me your germs, do you?”
“Sure I do, dad,” she replied, her little nose red, her lips chapped, her face flush with fever. “Because if you take them from me, I won’t be sick anymore.”
It wasn’t the right time to explain that certain things, like love and sickness, can be given away without actually depleting your own supply, so I did what any halfway decent parent would do and puckered up. I can’t say it was the most pleasant kiss I’ve ever received, probably due to the mucus, but it might have been the most beautiful one, when I look back on it through the years.
As I leaned back, I saw she was smiling, and that hope had been rekindled in her by my nonsense, which is the greatest kindler of hope I know.
“There you go, honey,” I said. “I took your sickness from you. You’ll start to feel better soon.”
What do you know? She did get better, forgetting all about my selfless paternal act. Almost immediately. And I did get sick. Almost immediately. And when I went to hug her as I suffered through my affliction, I noticed she shied away, and I wondered if she had learned anything from my kindness.
Lao Tzu wrote that living in the past leads to depression, living in the future leads to anxiety, and living in the present leads to peace.
It’s an idea so fundamentally true that it defies cliché. But time is a daunting companion. I’m writing this in the present, yet you will read it in the future, when my writing of it will be in the past, for me. This thing, made of wood pulp and ink and random sentiments, is not quite as fixed in time as we like to think all things are. Perhaps that’s why writing is so thrilling, because in the middle of each word you stand in the past, the present and the future, as your fingers race to keep up with your mind and the letters spill out onto the computer screen.
Our everyday lives are no different, not quite as locked to the temporal realm as we often think.
Yesterday morning, my daughter wrote down a cake recipe for her puppy’s first birthday. A few minutes later, when I saw the dog had confiscated the notebook and was playing with it, in fact, devouring it, I mentioned: “She has the recipe, Hadley. Don’t you want her cake to be a surprise?”
Hadley looked at me with complete sincerity and replied: “Dad, she can’t read. It’s fine.”
Then she made the cake, placing little dog bones on top of it when it was cool. Her dog, a petite corgi she got for her birthday in April, has only existed for a single year, which to me is no time at all. After the cake and presents, which included several chew toys and some salmon treats, the puppy hopped up on the couch and started to fall asleep. You see, the dog is very sick – anemic - and a series of veterinarians, try as they might, have not been able to figure out why she is so ill.
I was proud of my daughter for making a cake for her dog, and for being so excited when she opened her presents. And as she started to nod off, Hadley walked over to her, sitting down in that violent way five-year-old children do, and pressed her face up to that of her dog. The dog, named Frida, its muzzle smelling of cake, opened her eyes, unraveled her pale tongue, and started to lick my daughter’s face, so healthy and robust after recovering from her own recent illness. As she did, Hadley gave her a big, weirdly passionate – some might say inappropriate – interspecies kiss. Then she looked her puppy in the eye, and I heard her say: “There, I took your sickness from you. Soon you’ll start to feel better.”
That moment was linked to another one, only a week earlier, and it will be connected to moments in the future as well. We know this, that our moments do not exist in a vacuum; that they interact with those that surround them. The only question is where those connections lie. That, of course, is something we can only know in the future, as we look back on the present and the past.
Tonight, as I write this, my daughter sleeps, and the puppy sits in a cage at the emergency veterinary clinic, weak and unsure of her surroundings, her life seemingly drained out of her by some invisible hand. Blood is drawn, test results are reviewed, people sigh and have no answers. Each a little moment connected to others, only experienced for a second and then behind, but not exactly gone.
I do wonder if everything that has ever happened - the good things, the bad ones - has always happened, and will always happen. And it us who move along the line, from one moment to the next, searching for meaning, wondering what will become of us and the ones we love, mistaking our passage for the passage of time itself.
