The stars ring with whalesong and time

In which our Hero sees that sometimes if you’re going to put your ear to the ground, you’re going to get burned

It’s been a week of being reminded of what I’m made of. A friend I’ve lost touch with had surfaced in an interview online, and catching up vicariously, I paused at the mention of an influential book that had started a journey. The book doesn’t matter, and to this story, neither does the person. What matters is that that’s a book that I very much liked at the time we’d been closer, and one that I know we’d discussed. Which creates the possibility, the distinct idea, that maybe I did that. What if I was the one who planted the seed that grew into a tree that was cut into a board and built into a shed to house the design of a plane to carry a birthday visitor to a little girl in Iqaluit.

Which is to say that so much has been done since my touch that I am in no way able to claim to be responsible. And yet maybe that’s how far my touch happened to go.

School has started up which seems to have, for various reasons, prompted my cousins to check in with me. Moonbeam is starting university and having hilariously overblown worries about it. Mouse is dealing with the hurts of friends and the weight of them. And Willow was tipsy after a campus party and wanted company so that she wasn’t completely alone while she waited for her bus.

But each of those women stopped to thank me for my influence on their lives and I don’t yet know how to take that kind of remark all that well. I have certainly been supportive for them, but I know that they’d have found their way without me, and probably with a lot less teasing along the way. I try to factor in that I don’t know how they received what they got from me, but I feel no more direct a connection to what they got from me than with the friend to whom I might have recommended a book so many years ago.

Willow expressed dismay that her increasingly busy life meant that we weren’t as close as we used to be. I pointed out that it doesn’t make us less close, it just makes us close people who don’t talk as often, and that right now her job is school. It seemed to comfort her to think of it that way. I certainly don’t feel that my affection is somethat that lasts only as long as I’m getting something out of it. Besides, she’s growing up, things were always supposed to change.

But in responding to her, I told her a truth: that I’m fairly satisfied with my life. I’m not a super-anything, but I have that comfort that my regrets are balanced by things I consider achievements. I’m happy she got someone to talk to, that I was able to be there for her.

I’m proud of the fact that I did take time to play with these kids, when they were kids, without any thought to what the impact might have been. It’s simpler than that. I just like that my priorities made playing with kids important. That counts. It rarely counts as cool as writing a book or leading a company or making a bajillionty dollars. But it counts, and I know this thing about myself as a result.

After listening to the Mouse tell me about her situation, I closed by saying that what she’s dealing with is a riddle that everybody faces. And that if she figured out a solution, that she should tell me so I stop getting it wrong too. She seemed a little surprised at the idea that I’m in the same boat as her, which means I probably haven’t been doing nearly as good a job with her as I thought, but it registered now.

If it is a new idea, then I’m a little sorry to break the image she has of me, even if it’s the right thing to do. I think, though, and I hope that it’s more a case of an abstract idea she already knew becoming more real.

Capping my little week of reminders was the insignificant yet cheerful observation from Hollywood that his barbecue technique is largely made up of tricks he picked up from me. Of course, he was telling me this as he pulled some more of our lunch off the grill. I told him and I’m telling you, Gentle Reader, that I don’t know how to make half of the things he cooked for us to eat.

But as much as he’s figured out ways to do a lot better than me at a bunch of these things, I laughed in horrified recognition as he lifted a foil-wrapped ear of corn from the cooking surface of his barbecue to his ear. It’s a horribly trick he’s picked up from me, because corn will tell you when it’s ready. On the other hand, it does make consistently good corn.

There are worse legacies than roasting a good ear off corn.