little moments

the only thing warm is the tip of my right ear, my right shoulder and my right little finger- they are in the path of the sun- the rest of me is pretending that it's warm enough to be outside.  i'm sitting here with jude- who just asked me "who was the first person who ever found food?" i told him adam and eve.  he told me that wasn't true- that they weren't the first people- that no one in his school believes that. i told him it really only mattered what he believed, that people often think of the bible as just stories to make a point- but if God is really God - he could make the world in 7 days or 700,000 years- evolution and the bible can co-exist, it's no less amazing if we evolved from something else.  i think he had moved on to eating his apple (no really, he was eating an apple).

i love those little moments with kids.  their questions are so random and yet perfectly timed- it's organic.

i still remember those moments in my childhood.  they always happened obliquely.  they never follow, "how was your day?" they happened in dressing rooms or during commercials  while watching TV together, or in the car on the way to pick someone up from soccer, or when you're just hanging out on the stairs and you mom walks by with the laundry.  that is when i randomly asked her if everyone who gets cancer dies from it.  when i asked her exactly what she was worrying about herself because that week she'd had a biopsy and was waiting for the results- but i didn't know any of this.  a random question- floating through my 10 year old head- a question that Someone knew i was going to need answered before the next week. the next week when i would find out my mom had cancer.  she told me later that it was a preview- like she was finding out ahead of time what the biopsy results would be- why else in the cosmos would i be asking that question on that evening of that week?  God knows what little ears need to hear.  and that i couldn't have asked it after i'd been told- it would have been too scary- too real- too close.  but that next week when we were told she had cancer- i remembered.  the laundry basket, the blue carpet, the banister posts, the birds on the silk painted wallpaper over the landing of that glamorous wrapping staircase, and that not everyone who has cancer dies.  i held onto that for a long time.

most little moments aren't so poignant, so significant, so necessary.  but they are the naked times that we share things- bear our burdens- explore the questions of life.

it's why it's so important to be still.
to be present for each other. 
to really listen.
to follow up. 
to engage.
to savor it- because the little moments, the questions, the sun on his hair, the reflection in his eye, the freckles i now notice on his nose- those are the same things i'll miss when they are grown.