There are times when my thinking is rather focused on a specific thing, because that thing requires attention. Yesterday, my attention was focused for much of the day on two wonderful little boys. They are my grandsons, ages two and a half and thirteen months.
Little boys are active. They move, almost constantly, and often unpredictably. When they are frolicking on a couch, for example, someone must guard the edge so no one flies off onto the floor or the coffee table. It is remarkable to be how entertaining that activity can be. And how tired I can feel after a day of such activities. I mean, it isn't that physically demanding. Mostly, I stood nearby, arms to my sides or out in front, watching, and hoping I don't have to suddenly grab a falling body to prevent injury or just crying due to a startling sudden movement that wasn't planned or controlled.
They weren't on the couch the whole day, of course. They played some on the floor. We have a variety of toys. We also have books, although I was only able to get the attention of the older grandson for a book, and only once. He played and wandered as I read, but he kept coming back to make sure I continued. I have seen him sit still while his mother or father read him a book four or five times straight through, but not yesterday.
I made pizza for dinner. It was what I call a quilt pizza, because different patches have different contents. My daughter and son-in-law don't eat dairy, so we had a soy cheese on their half of the pizza, and my son-in-law likes pepperoni, and doesn't like olives or mushrooms. So about a quarter of the pizza had pepperoni, half had soy cheese, half had real mozzarella, and three quarters had mushrooms and olives. All of it had green peppers and vegan sausage (Gimme Lean brand. I love that stuff.) I made the pizza in a jelly roll sheet. I used a large can of crushed tomatoes, which was probably more sauce that was necessary, but I didn't want to save part of a can, and one smaller can wasn't enough. That is one of my limitations as a cook. Maybe I have inherited my mothers aversion to wasting food. Not to her extreme, but in some ways.
I have noticed that I don't identify people by name in this journal. There isn't a good reason for that. The data gods, or other hackers, could find the names of most people I refer to here. Facebook, for example, will give names to my wife, my children, my in-laws at all levels, and my grandchildren. Probably, with some careful looking, they could find the names of my siblings, my grandchildren, my nieces and nephews, and even some of my more distant relatives, like cousins, aunts, and uncles. Why do I leave them out here? I'm not sure. I started this as a kind of journal. Not a diary, because I think of those as being daily exercises, and I never expected to write here daily, but just a place to record what I thought about when I took time to write. Like I used to do in journals. Maybe I want to be the star of my own record of my life. But that kind of silly. Even in my own telling, I was not the star of my birth story. Maybe I will record my life story here, if I ever feel that reckless. I've written my life story a few times over my life. The first was kind of a class assignment. Mormons are pretty big on genealogy, and I took a genealogy class in college. One assignment was to write a life story. I was young, just married then. And still Mormon.
I could take recording my life history as a project here. It has entertained me in the past to review my life, with all its errors and adventures. I use those terms rather loosely, like when my grandson asks for an adventure, so my daughter takes him on a walk to the library. It is certainly something I think about. I often wonder how much I am like other people, and how I am less like most people, and I don't really know how to find out, except to share my story and read those of others. But I don't think most people do that, so I' not sure how far that would get me.
On the other hand, I am not bothered by the idea of being different. My brothers are all the same height, about three inches taller than I am. I am a full two standard deviations from the mean, making me a rare event, by a usual measure, just in height. I know that, which probably puts me outside the normal range for that sort of knowledge, too. But I eat every day, drink water, breathe. I also wear jeans on weekends, and drive to work. So I fit with the normal population is some ways. And love my children and grandchildren, which is wonderful, and also quite normal, which is good.
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