Big Hit

Every morning each of us stars in our own movie.

“Awake! Woo-Hoo!” blinks on your marquee, you’re 12, it’s May, the birds are singing, you are waking up for the first time in your life in your own room with your own bed, your own chest of drawers, the breeze wafting over you through the screen window.

Or “Dread!” when you have a task with high expectations, and you’re afraid you’ll tank, publically, decisively, unforgettably.

Or “Pulling Threads” when the dream you dropping out of was so bizarrely lovely that you can’t help trying to follow the songlines back into the darkness, despite the certainty that they will dissolve long before you find the treasure.

Transitions from sleep to waking run on our big screens every morning and evening. Each of us can be our best interpreter/ critic. “Rave reviews!” could be the headline.

Matteo frequently transitions from sleep in my arms. I used to go down to the crib (he’s back in the crib, his “nest”), rub his back and ask him if he was ready to get up. The answer always came back, “no.” Then it would be fifteen minutes or more, with several more visits, and non-conversations.

Now I rub his back, give him 15 seconds, to come to consciousness, and crane him out the crib, into my arms, his arms around my neck. He rubs his face back and forth in the nape of my neck as I carry him upstairs to the living room. There we slouch on the couch.

Up until last week, I had the limitation of not being Marin, and he’d rutsch himself off me protesting, into a fetal ball on the couch. Marin would enter the equation, bringing “juice and nurse” (milk). He’d ooze up on her lap, and feast.

But with all the swimming, Monday Wednesday Friday, where he’s hanging off me for an hour at a time, he begins to accept my role as a valid hug giver.

So now we can count on slumping in the dim light seeping in from the kitchen for a little. He lays his face on Papa’s cheek, then turns it to warm the other, slowly re-ascending from the depths. I slip my hands down to cup his two little feet in my two little hands.

I realize that one of my first memories as a kid is being reprised. My Dad, Sterling, was a truck mechanic, and he worked the night shift. He’d sleep during the day, and I guess I’d nap with him. Because I remember playing outside with my neighbor Barry one afternoon, when a sleepy Dad came out to find me. Apparently I’d escaped from the nap. He told me he was going to tie a string from his to my big toe. I seem to have remembered it, so I suppose I thought he was actually going to do it. I must have been three, four years old.

Today, a new movie, on a familiar theme, and a big hit, at least with Papa.