Part of Parker's nightly bedtime ritual is to say a prayer. Parker really enjoys this. It's a time to reflect on the day and think about the things we're grateful for. Sometimes Parker gets off on a tangent, for example, for the last month she's said "Dear God, thank you for this day, thank you for my Paba...." and then she'll pause and wait for her dad or I to say, "What's a Paba"? To which she responds gleefully, "It has wings on it's nose and flaps on it's toes and a knot on it's toe". This was cute at first but I'm trying to redirect her back to what a prayer should be about.
The other night, Parker started in on a line of questioning beginning with "where is God?". Being that I wasn' t prepared to answer this question in terms a two year old could understand I reverted to some very cliche' answers. I told her that God was in heaven which made her in turn ask where heaven was. I told her it was up in the clouds and that God could see down from there and watch over us. She asked me "what is heaven?". I thought for a moment and thought well, heaven can be different things to different people, perhaps each persons idea of paradise is what they will experience when they are in heaven. So I proceeded to tell Parker that heaven is place you go when you die and it's filled with jolly jumpers where you can have lollipops for every meal. She asked me who was there and I told her other people are there. She then said, "Will you go there with me?" I felt like crying when she said this because the idea of being apart from Parker, even after death broke my heart.....I knew that even though Parker will grow up some day, she will always be my little girl. I had this flash that my heaven very well could be having my Parker as a two year old forever.
After my answers seemed to satisfy her we proceeded to say a prayer. Parker said something to the effect of, "Dear God, thank you for this day....and thank you for heaven and please help us not to die, but if we die we'll go to heaven and there's lots of people there and I can have lollipops and go in the jumpers!". As she said this her eyebrows raised up and she got very excited. I felt a little worried that I hadn't explained things properly, but I didn't know what else to say at the time. Hopefully as she grows she'll accept amendments to the image of heaven I created.
RE: Market freefall – Congress can’t pass a bailout bill. Total losers.
I miss letters. Not that I ever received too many of them but I miss my address scrawled out on the envelope. The twenty-three-cent stamp voided with grill marks. The folded looseleaf and lines of blue script. Chatty paragraphs from pen pals or long-distance friends updating me on their lives. I's dotted with stars; T’s crossed with squiggly lines looking like a worm moving across a wooden stick on the beach; the vague scents of foreign places; the one-way conversation. I don't remember the last time I've received a letter, and I don't remember the last time I've written one. It seems like a relic of a bygone century now, a time when we'd condense months of information and thoughts and emotions into a few pages a maybe a picture. A time when my mailbox contained more than wedding invitations, birth announcements, introductory letters from mortgage brokers and credit cards, and that awe-inspiring color now known as “Netflix-Red” sitting in my mailbox. Between cellphones, email, Skype, text messaging, Gchat, Facebook, Twitter, myspace, and oh yeah, Blogger, it's still not difficult to remain detached from people who were once a large part of my life. We're all within reach now more than ever but it still takes an effort to remain connected. Remember those hand cramps you’d get from writing a lot? These days our hands are so out of shape I bet I couldn’t write a half a page before feeling the fatigue and strain in my left hand.
