Glimmery

On Sunday OlderKid and I went to the playground while YoungerKid and Peter slept in the car. (They were exhausted from a full morning of orienteering--more on that in a minute). While we were playing--okay, while OK was playing and I was slumped on a park bench--a chatty little girl about OK's age and her dad showed up. The girl was talking non-stop to someone named Kristin, and after an embarassingly long time I finally realized that this Kristin was not, you know, real. The dad was clearly long familiar with Kristin and her imaginary-ness as he was happily serving Kristin and the girl custard, cheering them as they went down the slide, etc. OK, like me, was initially clueless. After a fascinating session of cross-play, in which OK dangled daringly from the monkey bars yelling things like "Hey, look at me! Do this with me!" and the little girl yelled back things like "Wait for Kristin! Kristin wants more custard!" OK had finally had enough. From the top of the climbing gym he looked over his shoulder at the little girl, who was struggling to persuade Kristin to climb up the rungs with her and said down in a voice of cutting scorn: "Hey--YOU'RE JUST ONE PERSON!"

Zing.

On Friday afternoon I saw only part of a Pam Houston lecture (sorry, Pam, but the 5 pm daycare pickup deadline is pretty much written in blood) in which she discussed her writing process and described the feeling of experiencing a moment she wanted to write about as a "glimmer." I don't know that I really like this term, and apparently she doesn't either, but she's absolutely correct about certain moments just having that feeling about them--that they ought to be written down and put in a story or retold somehow. It's partly intellectual--even as I was apologizing to that poor imaginative girl's father, I was already thinking about how symbolically apt OK's comment was on so many levels. But it's emotional too; the put-down made my heart hurt, and not just because of its blunt pragmatism.

And maybe it was because of Pam's lecture, or maybe it was because of the turn from September to October (thanks, Green Day), or maybe I'm just always like this, but this weekend seemed to have a lot of these glimmer moments. Like Sunday morning, when we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the park to check out the collapsed rock cave and found ourselves being hustled into participation in an Orienteering Race. Four waivers of liability later, we had numbers pinned to our shirts, a compass and a contour map in hand, and we were off into the woods. Everyone handled the excursion characteristically. YoungerKid took the entire course at an all-out run and fell frequently but without complaint. OlderKid shuffled dreamily down the path and also stopped frequently, not to fall, but to draw pictures all over our map. I spent a long time turning the compass around trying to make North line up with the directions on the map before I remembered that I'm not very good with compasses. And Peter brought up the rear and solved everyone's problems, including pointing out that we had been walking/running all this time in the completely wrong direction and were now off the map entirely. Like I said, symbolically apt.

We weren't the only people reading the race on different metaphorical levels; a "Pathfinder" youth group from a local church was there, and I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't literally expect people to use compasses to find their way to him. Still, looking at my family there, wandering around in the autumn woods with the leaves changing but the air still heavy and warm like summer, laden down with equipment we either didn't know or didn't care to use, I felt especially full with the significance of it all. Make a note of this, I thought to myself. And so here it is.