Me, to Dumpling: Why are you being such a brat today?
Rooby: Mother! Don’t call her that!
Me: But she is being a brat.
Rooby: She prefers the term nuisance.
Publications, podcasts, teaching things—oh my!
No room for procrastination during a pandemic—we’re either doing what work we can or simply surviving. But I’ve been trying to keep track of the things I’ve been doing over here:
Baba.
Rooby: I can’t find this other clip from my sewing kit.
[We look. Don’t find it.]
Me: Well, I guess it just got lost. In the future, try to keep all your things together in one place and put them all away as soon as you’re done using them.
Rooby: Or maybe Baba opened my sewing kit and stole it.
Me: It’s highly unlikely that Baba would ever do that.
Rooby: How do you know?
Me: Because I know him. And that’s not his style.
Rooby: But you don’t know everything about him. He could have some dark things in his past.
Thinking.
Rooby: Are you stressed out?
Me: A little, but I’m also trying to take this time to think.
Rooby: What do you mean?
Me: I just mean that having everything we’re used to change so quickly and not having anywhere to go is a good opportunity to reflect on—
Rooby: The inevitability of death?
Sticks.
Rooby, on the walk to the bus stop: Oh, stick! I’m interested in sticks.
Me: I know you are.
Rooby: I learned something about sticks recently. Short sticks are “twigs,” and long sticks are just “sticks.”
Me: How do you know when a twig becomes a stick? Like, what’s the longest a twig can be before it’s a stick.
Rooby: Hmm. [Looks around. Points up at a large tree branch.] That one there.
Me: That’s a twig??
Rooby: Well, now it’s a branch, but it used to be a stick, and before that a twig. The stick emerged from the twig.
Me: Interesting.
[We walk.]
Rooby: I don’t know if that’s really true. I just made it up. Tree, twig, stick, branch.
Tiny deer.
I came home last night after five days in Fort Worth, TX, where I was at an absolutely fantastic conference, the British Women Writers Conference, to give my first keynote lecture.
R had just gotten in bed and was still awake. I gave her all the TCU horned frog paraphernalia I brought home for her, and she showed me the latest tiny animal she’d added to her collection of tiny animal figurines (a duck), a collection initiated by my mom’s giving her a couple of tiny animals she’d found around the house (two deer).
“I lost my favorite one, though,” she told me. She was “moving them to a new house” (i.e. from one tiny box to another) and they spilled onto the floor and she found all of them except her favorite, the “deer lying down.”
“You know why that one is my favorite?” she asked. I did not. “Because it’s the only one with spots on its back that stick up. I like to feel the poke of them.”
Love.
R: I love you, Mama.
Me: I love you too, sweetie.
R: Even when you don’t look like you do.
Nail, Head.
R: [talks in long stream about something from YouTube]
Me, on autopilot, while looking at my phone: Uh huh…
R: Mama, sometimes I feel like even though you’re saying “Uh huh,” you’re not really listening to me.
Me, putting the phone down: R, you just hit the nail on the head.
R: What??
Me: When we say someone “hit the nail on the head,” it means they got something exactly right.
R: Oh!
Me: And you know what I admire about you? You are very good at telling me what you’re thinking and feeling, even when it’s something about me that is a little critical or might be hard to hear, and you’re good at doing it in a way that doesn’t hurt my feelings.
R: Thank you. [Finishes monologue about YouTube.] Ok, now do me!
Me: Do…what?
R: PUT THE NAIL IN THE HEAD WITH ME
Books.
Rooby: I realized something about books.
Me: What’s that?
Rooby: If you read them really, really slowly, they kind of make no sense.
Birds.
Me: Listen to those birds fighting!
Rooby: Maybe they’re just having a really annoying conversation.
The Procrastination Salon 