A Collection of a Million Moments

Friday night the kids and I had a great night at Mo' Betta Gumbo in Loveland, drinking moonshine (I know, right?) and eating catfish and jambalaya. These days when we are together, a regular refrain among us is "Dad would have loved this". Or "Dad would be rolling his eyes". Or, "remember when Dad..."

That's why we have to spend a lot of time together. Just us. Remembering. Reclaiming. Rebuilding.  

After dinner we walked across the street to the new corner arcade to remember Roy.

Roy loved to play pinball. Of this, we were all aware. One of his favorite t-shirts was the one from Pin Ball Jones that the kids bought him for a birthday or father's day.  

I, however, am the only person in his life that knows how he spent lonely Sunday afternoons in college avoiding the looming window reserved for studying by heading to the dorm rec room or a local bar for an hour or two of pinball.  

The kids and I are the only people in his life who were invited into that lovely mix of flashing lights and pinging ricochet's, that satisfying flip of levers that saved the ball from sliding into oblivion and sent it skittering again into the field of sensory overwhelm.  

I loved to watch him play. The way he stood at the machine, leaning on one hip, one foot tucked behind the other. The tug on the sliver nob that launched the ball. That little nudge of the machine to get the ball out of a danger zone. It was youth.

I also love to remember how he would watch me play. Standing behind me at the machine, flinching ever so slightly when I missed an important flip. Chuckling at my frustration as the ball repeatedly slipped by those flippers. Ready with another quarter to slip into the slot.  A million moments.

I came home from that evening and settled into my reading chair with "A Gentleman In Moscow." And there I found one of many many lovely scenes.  An unlikely child's caregiver had become for her the curator of those moments about her mother.  

And I reflected on the extraordinary gift of knowing someone. Really knowing them. Knowing them over years of daily routines and habits, joys and sorrows, frustrations and victories.  Knowing the quirky habits and the beautiful responses to life that made them who they were.

As the young woman describes to the Count how she invokes emotion into her piano playing, she explains:

"He (her teacher) says that before one plays a note, one must discover an example of the composition's mood hidden away in one's heart. So for this piece, I think about my mother.  I think of how my few memories of her seem to be fading, and then I begin to play."

The Count was quiet, overwhelmed by another wave of astonishment.

"Does that make sense," she asked?

"Abundantly," he said.  "As a younger man, I used to feel the same way about my sister. Every year that passed, it seemed a little more of her had slipped away; and I began to fear that one day I would come to forget her altogether.  But the truth is:  No matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely."

Does everyone feel that way when they grieve? That sense that something vital has slipped away and will be irretrievably lost? I know I do.  And I find extraordinary comfort in this unexpected emergence of memories.

While we were living the dailyness of our life together, I had no idea that I was becoming a repository of knowing Roy. That I was storing up a lifetime of small moments that I will bring out at the right times and share with our children. And that our children also became repositories and will share their moments with me in a circle of love and healing and remembering.

Not extraordinary things. Not mysterious hidden things. Just the myriad of details about who he was and how he lived his life. Kind of like pinball. Nothing earth-shattering or life-changing. But a treasure nonetheless. A collection of a million moments.