Slowing the tide: a Thanksgiving swim

Some moments resonate with us for years, and some years pass us like a moment, with their fleeting details lost.

As parents, our weekends arrive tightly book-ended and, however we try, our days-off cannot resist the momentum created by our days-on. We plan ahead our family moments only to rush up to them, to have them and move onto the next.

We once waited weeks for prints of family photos. Then one day. And now an instant seems too long. It sometimes feels like we’re rushing today’s moments so as our future moments can come better into focus. And years that are lost, get lost faster. And the blur keeps moving onwards.

A four-year old on my shoulders was once held in arms. A seven-year old was once so much like the four-year old. Or was she?

And then there are moments that come up on us and stay, repeating and resonating. Moments that follow us, lingering and brooding and easily triggered. Moments that pull us backwards and by doing so, slow our tide. On the day after Thanksgiving we had such a moment.

As both a luxury and cheap vacation we rented a night at a local Hotel with an “outdoor pool.” Those two words aroused a kind of highly acute state of madness in our daughters. And that was before we had even got in the car.

Once up to their waists, the water appeared to contain some strange substance that entered directly into their blood and nervous systems and created some uncontrollable happiness. They bobbed around yelling and laughing, uncontainably. They became a single giggling loop of energy passing its flow back and forth in some kind of mad closed circuit.

After a time I broke free from my parental role of giving rides and playing shark and I swam a length underwater. As I surfaced I could see the wake of steam that followed me as the cold morning air churned with the warmth of the pool.

The girls stood agape as they noticed a quiet rain begining to fall. We watched the rain lose its hesitancy and fall fuller and more evenly. The girls lost themselves watching the rain bounce and dance on the surface of the water. The cloud cover pulled a veil over us, darkening the morning and the downpour fell more forcefully on us.

For a moment we held our breaths and listened and absorbed the moment. Each silent drop of rain combined with a thousand of their sisters to bury us in its noise. It was there. It was then. We had our long single moment.

And now and then our silence in the rain visits me. It slows my pace as it stretches out its hand to pull me back from the irresistable forward pull of the future.