Connection is the Whole Point

Connection is he whole point, said Berit, which I agree with. Which sentiment she may have even gotten from me at some point in time, though I can't claim to be the only person in her life who holds that view.  But we spent our week connecting with others.

On Monday night, Gwen  showed up with Rowan (2) and Jade, ages six and two. Griffin and I took a night walk on the beach with them. Upon entering the beach, we found a crowd lining a path from a sea turtle nest to the ocean. We might have stayed and watched the event, but when the sea turtles would hatch was unclear, and we're just not what you'd call patient people. So we walked the beach, following a couple with a high intensity flashlight spotting 3-inch wide hermit crabs. I flicked one and it bolted for Griffin's feet, making him scream like a 15-year-old boy.

We played in the surf and sand on Tuesday. Crazy wind and waves and we we found ourselves in a rip current being pulled outward. We dug for coquinas, pulled them out of the sand and dropped hem back on it to watch them dig their way out of sight.  I napped for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and in the evening Gwen put the girls to bed early. We got make your own pizzas at Lowes.

Wednesday morning we hung with Gwen and the girls as they got ready to head out on the road o Connecticut. Rowan continued to help Griffin with the 550 piece jigsaw puzzle. After they took off, we spent a little time at the beach before heading down to Calabash to eat fried shrimp at The Seafood Hut. As John F-D told me, "Failure to eat fried shrimp in Calabash borders on criminal activity."

Thursday was our big day. In the two weeks prior to this vacation, Griffin was in a theater camp. The show was Legally Blonde, and G and his opposite, Risa, ended up dating. Well, the show ended on a Friday night, and on Saturday, Risa and Griffin were each bound for family vacations.... Both on the North Carolina coast.

So yesterday, we drove to Southport to catch the ferry over to Bald Head Island where Risa's family is spending he week. This is the part where we decide that connection is the mos important thing and, rather than burrow ourselves more deeply in the sand, we take the opportunity to spend a day with a family we've never met.

Ocean Isle Beach, Day One

I'm too tired for this. I should be writing in the morning. That's the only time that works for me. Instead, here I am trying to fill minutes as I drink my tea and wait for Berit and Griffin to come back from getting ice cream. Rowan is not doing sugar, and I am supporting her in that by also not doing sugar. Mostly. This isn't easy, but it is likely the best thing for me. There is agave in my tea, and I just ate a handful of cherries, so it's practically ice cream anyway.

Ocean Isle Beach is the sleepiness beach town on the face of North Carolina. One of the southernmost points on the Outer Banks, Ocean Isle is a stone's throw from its polar opposite across the South Carolina border - Myrtle Beach, which I imagine we'll visit sometime this week to mix it up.

We got in yesterday, utterly wrecked from the red eye from Colorado. Intact after about eight hours of sleep-deprived travel, we fell into our beds and slept into he mid-afternoon when I got up and persuaded Griffin to leave his laptops to walk to the beach with me.

"Think about the ocean, Dad. Billions of years old with all the creatures that have lived in it during all that time. Do you think it's more ocean or more pee?"'

Griffin and I go back and wake the girls before heading out for an epic food shopping spree at Walmart. It was a mistake. There's a Lowes Foods closer, but somehow I've mistakenly goten it into my head that we have o go to Walmart to shop. It took us at least an hour and a half, but we got out of here with a bunch of staples for the week, headed back to 47 Anson Srreet and ate pizza.

Today was a beach day. We swam, rode waves, played a little ocean Marco Polo, and walked the strand. Griffin became obsessed with finding the telltale air bubbles beneath the receding waves and digging up a hermit crab.Then he noticed one of the birds with a small clam and realized that it was clams that they were chasing beneath the sand. We became fascinated with digging these coquinas up and then putting them back on the sand to watch them burrow back underground with their invisible foot. Six of these - Butthole, Butthole Junior, Jethro, Clem, Goldilocks and (unnamed) came back to Anson Street with us to die in a block of hardened sand in an Altoids tin.

Tonight I bought a pound of roadside shrimp which we ate with quesadillas. 

Early Lessons Today - Snow, Isogashii

I'm up this morning at the clomp clomping of boots and the slamming of Evol burrito microwave door. I check the watch; it's 6:30. So I go out into the kitchen in my underwear.

Griffin is up and getting ready to head out to walk to the bus stop. Greg doesn't have a period one class this semester, and so he's not giving Griffin a ride to school. Griffin tells me he stayed up until midnight reading his book (Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson). Pam and I spent years throwing books at Griffin and missing and along comes Ms. Gance, nailing him in one shot. I tell Griffin I'm giving him a ride.

7:05 am: First lesson of the day.

Even if you aren't going anywhere, wipe that pile of snow off of your windshield, because if you don't it will freeze in the sun there, and when it's time to take Griffin to school the following morning, you will be faced with trying to remove and de-ice those shenanigans without the aid of an ice scraper, because you gave that to Rowan.

I start the car and put the defrost on full blast, find an old license plate under my workbench and proceed to scrape the crustified snow off. I come into the kitchen and Griffin is just standing there.

"What are you doing?" I ask him. "You could at least be making your lunch." He points to the teapot.

"I"m making hot water to pour on the windshield." Smart kid. Griffin pours the tea water on the windshield, works like a charm, and we're out.

7:40 am: Second lesson of the day.

People are too busy and in too much of a hurry. As I'm driving back from Griffin's school, this guy pulls around me fast to cut back in right in front of me so that he could turn right in just a few hundred feet. I swear he saved .001 of a second doing that, and I know he felt like an idiot because he kind of waved sheepishly at me after having done it. I avoid my impulse to pull into the King Soopers parking lot after him to inquire as to the nature of his problem, choosing instead to ruminate on it myself.

My favorite thing about studying Japanese were the written characters. It's pretty complex, having three separate character sets - hiragana, katakana, and kanji - but also really cool. The kanji are pictorial characters that came from Chinese, and you can sometimes see in them their etymological origins. The Japanese character (kanji) for "busy" is isogashii. When you look at its component characters, isogashii literally means "to lose one's heart." When I'm busy, I lose my heart. Boom. Right?

So I try to bear that in mind. I make time to take Griffin to school if I can, and when I come home, I take some time to make Rowan and I some eggs and toast. When Berit wakes up late in the morning and I'm here working, I stop for a few to talk or stretch with her. I'm grateful to my company for allowing me to work from home. They've made this possible for me to do my job and still be present for the kids. That's my real work. I also prioritize things like exercise, meditation, and  yeah, writing. This is how I'm taking care of myself, and today I'm recommitting to daily writing. We'll see how it goes.