Time Capsule

Dear Zoey,

I have been thinking a lot about time lately. Always. Now and Then. This is who I am, your mother who trips out on the tick tick tock. I don't know why, and one day, this might annoy you. See what I mean? One day? Isn't that strange? Silly, a thought from today, when gas costs $2.96/gallon?

I am a month away from turning 37, and I feel it. The mid to late 30's. I buy moisturizers and face masks, pick at my skin with a mirror magnified 10x. My pores, they are huge. Zoey, this is what I look like a month before I turn 37: I look tired. And dry. This, too, is funny, because one day you might read this and think but I look so young! You won't remember me when I was a month away from turning 37. I will be older, dryer, shortersmallerslower, a month away from ten years+ maybe, who knows? This is the youngest I will ever be, the oldest I have ever been, and I would hate to spend it thinking I am old when years from now we will both look back and marvel at my youth. Is am are was were be being been: we are all just a string of verbs of being juggling the weight of helping verbs: have has had, do does did, shall will should would, can could and ought. I have Mrs. Hudson to thank for that, my 7th grade English teacher who wore her long gray hair in a small little bun. One time I got my period all over my chair in her class and I left it there for somebody to clean up. She is probably dead now, Mrs. Hudson. QED, although that was geometry and something I never once understood much less bled for.

Headlines for July 30, 2009: New Poll Finds Growing Unease with Obama's Health Plan. Iranian Police Use Force Against Graveside Rally. The Dow Jones is up 164pts, Jackson's Mom to Keep Kids, Rowe Gets Visitation, Pregnant Women at Front of Line for Swine Flu Vaccine and Now? Now the Dow Jones is up 167pts.

We are all of us 6 minutes older than when I started this post.

Zoey, today you are at daycare, and I miss you. We have started this thing we do at night; I am hoping to make it a nightly ritual. Together we lay in your bed and we each say something we loved about the day. So far you have talked about your new bathing suit, swinging at the park, pink bubble bath with hearts that smells like flowers, throwing rocks into the stream (never the same stream twice!).

When I was in the 5th grade my school buried a time capsule under the playground. I don't remember what I put inside and I don't know that it was ever unearthed. It could still be there beneath the monkey bars, more than 20 years of kids swinging over a box of 1983.

I wonder, wherever you are, whenever this will be read, what was something you loved about today? And the funny thing is, funnier than iphones and $128 Hudson jeans, funnier than the median home price in Marin being $800k, than an $11 movie ticket, than a half gallon of milk costing $1.49, funnier than today's top Billboard song I Got a Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas, funnier than the fact that I am 45 maybe and you are 12, or maybe I am 52 and you are 19, what is funny but not funny ha ha or even funny strange is that wherever you are reading this, whatever the time, whenever, whyever, evermore, that without a doubt something I loved about the day forever is you. Thinking of you, smiling at you, remembering you, arguing with you: you. You are my favorite moment of all time.

With love from your Mother a month from 37,
Me
p.s. Here's a snippet of what life was like Once Upon a Time Called The Other Night For No Reason. May you always bounch back from the crap thrown at you, laughing and stopping not only to smell the roses but to inspect possible deer poop.