Day 616, March 10, 2022

 The Marvelous Cycle

Twenty-seven years ago, the coffee shop, Rao’s had just opened. It was a noisy, fragrant, gem of a coffee shop where they roasted the beans in the building and there was the constant grating sound of beans being turned into grounds, but it was novel, our own version of the coffee shop in Friends or Fraiser. I remember because, during the Caesarian birth of my twins, the anesthesiologist was talking about the cup of coffee he had bought there. Simultaneously, my daughter shifted away from the newly incised opening, and my son emerged first, and them my daughter. Luckily, it was not a surprise twin birth, we had learned about the twins eleven days earlier, so we were, at least were a little, prepared.

Twenty-seven seems at once, not that long ago, and an entire lifetime ago. I was attending the same university where I now work. I was teaching English classes, eating Chinese food, and yes, drinking cappuccinos and lates in the sensual extravagance of air scented with roasting beans, the rain-like rhythm of pits spilling into metal vats, the texture of burlap sacks. I drank from overly wide coffee mugs that were the style then. I can’t quite remember, but I think this was before the time of live edge counters and tables being in style. They had a particularly delicious greasy cheese scone. A savory thing, nothing like the idealized scone from an Irish tea house, but, it was everything a body craves, besides that. 

My son is now the age he remembers me as… or maybe a little older. My son, buckled into the child seat attached on the back of my bicycle, calling, “Faster, faster, faster!” We careened across the college campus and he laughed so gleefully as I pedaled with the fury of a young father trying to impress his child. It was so easy to impress the kids then. Speed is relative. Recklessness is relative. It is hard to fathom how pleasing it was to be a young father, how it suddenly imbued life with meaning and purpose. I do not think I realized it in the moment, but that’s what it did. Between bottles, and diapers, and crayons, and scissors, another sibling, and lessons, and forsaken hobbies, and special songs that played over and over, and special movies that played over and over, and books that we read over and over. Between all those things, and trying to be a student, a professor, everything else one is supposed to become, squeezed between those things were meaning and purpose.

My father marvels that he has a son my age. I marvel that I have kids the age they are. It is a marvelous cycle. Like the ways eras of music come back into fashion, but as oldies, or vintage, or classic. Or how young people dress ironically like people in another era dressed, except we did it seriously. It is like remembering how chunky laptops were and that if we sat in coffee shops using a laptop, we did it without the benefit of the internet, and with batteries that were lucky to last more than an hour and a half. One can almost remember what it was to be so young, even if in the moment, I never felt young, or innocent, or lost. Maybe lost. But I felt quite old and mature. Or, I didn’t feel young. The only thing that would make me want to be that age again is to do the things I didn’t do, or didn’t take note of. So, I try an do and take note of those things now. And someday, I’ll marvel at the kids who are the age I am now, and I, will be older still.