Fall

In the house I grew up in on Snug Harbor, we used to keep family photos in an old, tattered shoe box. The shoe box was so old the cardboard that had been used to construct it had long ago lost all structural integrity. It was more 4 floppy sides and a bottom than an actual box, yet it still somehow managed to hold contents...in this case, old photographs.

These were the pictures of me and my brothers taken when we were kids. Pictures of me running around naked, filling a Scooby-Doo inflatable swimming pool with yellow well water from a garden hose, Aunt Jackie dressed up as the Easter Bunny, Josh with an empty cardboard ice cream container on his head we pilfered from Carvel to complete his Headless Horseman Halloween costume (possibly one of the greatest homemade costumes of all time).

In the background of a very unmemorable photo (so unmemorable I don't remember anything else in the picture) is our TV set. Captured in time, Jimmy Carter is giving a speech. Thinking of this made me wonder what the days were like then, when I was 10 months old. What did my parents talk about on a daily basis? What were the conversations like when they came home from work and turned on the nightly news? What was important to them? What was Jimmy Carter saying? Was it historic? Was he--ironically enough--counselling the country to conserve energy in much the same vein we hear from our leaders today?

I wonder if Sam will ever wonder the same thing about his parents. What our everyday life was like--aside from raising Sam? What were the things that Elise and I talked about, stressed over and dreamed about? Current events, sports teams, events that happen in our lives now that seem so important but that we may never think to tell him about years from now.

Fall has always been my favorite season. But this fall seems more relevant than many. Someone once said that the events that will change your life forever often go unnoticed at the point in time in which they actually happen. You wake up that morning as you do any other day without knowing that it will be on that day that a life-altering event may occur and you often go to bed at night blissfully unaware that one of the many things that happened during the normal course of that day will go on to shift the stream of your life irrevocably. For whatever reason, it feels as though there are many pivotal, seminal moments occurring around me.

I don't mean the election. Though it will no doubt go down as seminal and pivotal. I would have felt this way regardless of who emerged victorious. I mean events like Granddad, runs to the end of Betz Rd., picnics under the turning leaves on EWU campus, cars ('nuf said), baked Cheetoes, a trip to Denver.

These are the things I want Sam to know about us. That's the reason we write this blog. So that thirty years from now when he dumps out a box of old photos (or, more likely, opens a long forgotten file on his computer) and sees a photo with our president speaking from a plasma flat-panel in the background, he will know why this is important to us. And if he is born in one place, but grows up in another--just like his dad and just like his mom--he will know and understand why we made the decisions we are making in much the same way Elise and I know and understand why our parents made the decisions they did. So that the events that are seminal and pivotal to us today always remain so.