The Curious Question of Is: pt.1

Strange and mystical verb that: to be.

Is.

There really is no hard and fast definition for this verb, and yet we use it a million times a day.  We live on the edge of a mystery, but manage to forget that fact often enough, we can stay functional.  Or reasonably so.

Gordon, I will try to stick enough pictures in this to keep you happy; but I hope you read the words, too, because I’d like your thoughts on the matters I am about to flog to death.  Dick, don’t worry, no dogs or horses and not too many pictures.  I write for an audience that bounces all over the place in age and interest; it’s astounding that any of you stick around at all.  But how I love it that you do.

So what I want to write about, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot the last year, is being.  I am.  You are.  We are – what?  Caveat: I’m not going to go wandering into religion here.  I’m just talking about this earth, because I’ve lived here all my life, after-all.

What other reason would we have for taking pictures,  even when the taker (read:hat) is more interesting than the taken – but that we want to look at our images later, when we have time to think, hoping to figure out what we and our lives are like from the outside?

I found myself asking Kris, as he drove me to his house from the airport, “Do you get it that now you’re an actual grown-up?”  He gave me a sidelong glance.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Too much, sometimes.”  I mean, he owns his own dental practice, lives far from the rest of us, has a beautiful, capable wife who pays actual bills out of an actual bank account, and two kids.

“You are the real people now,” I told him.  And only understood it as the words came out of my mouth.  The real people: the ones in the trenches – the ones bringing up kids, dealing with school and jobs and trying to balance everything for everybody’s good all day long.

Dad, liking Lorri.

I used to be one of them.  But now, I’m  – like – really not.  I’m one of the peripheral people now—the frame around the real picture.  Like I was when I was a kid. And I guess that’s what got me thinking.

Are you still here?

Here is one thing I know about myself: that I would bring home an odd sea-creature of a ball to give to an almost two year old person just for fun.  The ball has a complex nature: it lights up and

expands like a puffer fish.  Weird, huh?

But not as weird as Laura, who is stuffing it up Scooter’s shirt.

to be continued (which is litotes on steroids):