Memory of the Sun

This is my Bear, at around 17 months old, listening to music, hanging out with his mother, learning to talk and climb.

This is my son, when he was the sun, the true center of my world – the most important being in my universe.

Today he is approaching the halfway mark of his eighth year and there is a new 17 month old in our house.

Each milestone met, each word learned, I am simultaneously remembering and forgetting that first baby.  That baby that disapeared into the long limbs of childhood in a cloud of dirt and magic dust never to be seen again.  That baby that grew into a boy who reads bedtime stories to me, sings songs to his brother and recites poems.

What I wouldn’t give for one afternoon, chasing that chubby toddler through the leaves in Central Park, lifting him high above my head and kissing his plump cheeks with no thought of  possible embarrassment. No fleeting glimpses into how his teenaged years will look.  No fear that one day he will ignore my calls.

To hear his little voice and mispronounced words and feel his small body curled on my lap.  To be filled with the certainty that I know him as he was in 2003.

It’s a hard truth.  The mind is not limitless.  There is no Rolodex, no card catalog, no filing system to pull from.  It is ever changing and altering.  The more you recall something, the more likely you are to embellish it – the less true it becomes.

That’s why we need  journals and outgrown favorite t-shirts.  Scribbled crayon drawings and tiny handprints rendered in paint.  It’s why we need photographs.

They are our sign posts.  Solid proof that a baby who loved ducks and James and the Giant Peach and pretended his stuffed dog was a baby existed.  Reminders that he gave big slobbery kisses and woke us by smacking the bed next to our slumbering heads.

The sweetest things always pass too quickly.