Binkytowne

5:20

If he is walking in the door and I am walking out, we will make eye contact. Maybe flash a half-hearted smile. I know he wears glasses and he has brown hair but I couldn't pick him out of a lineup if my life depended on it. I never really see his face.

If he's already sitting in the waiting area I avert my eyes, looking straight at the heavy wooden barrier between here and everywhere else and the heavy metal doorknob. Sometimes the door sticks and I fumble for a second before sweeping through and away, leaving five to ten pounds of my burden behind.

Usually I stare at the owl on the bookshelf. Yesterday it was the flower shaped design in the middle of the oriental style rug that floods the huge library. It has green and black alternating petals, both lined with white.

He sits with his feet propped up on the leather ottoman. The soles of his shoes are well worn. He always wears a tie. He would say there is a reason the flower held my attention today. I have no idea what it is. Other than that I am desperate for spring, obviously. Only when I ever I say obviously about anything, he challenges me to explain what the less obvious explanation is. I try not to say that anymore.

5:20 drives a silver Honda. So do I. They are paralleled parked next to each other across the busy street. I run past here a lot so I know the traffic will eventually slow and my window will appear when I can run, my big green bag bouncing on my shoulder to the other side.  

 

Because That's How We Roll

 

Keep Your Red Roses

 
Somewhere here, buried in my work drawers between the extra barettes, mints and peacock blue, tiny post it notes that are too small to be of any use to anyone, I keep a photograph.

One summer during the late '90s I had a shitty camera, but somehow as I was whizzing by in a car, as night was turning to morning, I snapped a photo of the Italian countryside and a full field of sunflowers in bloom. Growing up in the midwest the most plentiful thing I had ever seen a field of was corn, and believe me, there was no comparison. It was one of most incredible things I had ever seen.

When I got married a decade later, I did so in the fall and I chose to carry sunflowers. Because of the colors, of course, but also because they reminded me of that morning and moments of complete wonder.

My son knows nothing of any of this.

One Friday evening my son sat on the couch playing with some toy or another and he very non-chalantly announced: I'm going to be in an art show. Sure enough, in his backpack I found a note from his teachers letting us know he'd been one of the two children selected from his kindergarten class to be presented in the upcoming district art show.

His painting was of three sunflowers. 

It was all very busy at the art show. Relatives came, there were snacks, the little one ran madly through the stacks and needed to be chased and held and chased and held some more. I went back the following week when I was alone. I stood as still and as somber as if I were in the Uffizi. The bursts of yellow and the green stalks and his signature scribbled in green colored pencil. 

No one tells you how a school art project will make your knees feel weak and like your heart is too big, so full of pride that it can't possibly be encompassed in your tired, forty year old, thought-you'd-seen-it-all chest.

But it is, and you haven't, not by a mile.