“No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”
Call me Ishmael.
“No,” Alice said, “I call you Daddy. And Mommy is Mommy.”
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Almost true. It was a bright hot day in April and the clocks were redundant.
We were outside. Running bare foot in the grass. Again. It was barbecue weather at breakfast time so we had taken the happiness diary to the garden. Alice was happy about skipping ropes, experimenting with a new ice-cream flavour, sleeping twitching dogs, saving the chips till last and the fact she wasn’t scared of spider webs, only spiders.
“No spider web, no spider.”
Philosophy.
Aversion therapy.
“Alice,” I said, as I put pressure down through my toes, into the grass, connecting with some kind of universe. “What does walking on grass feel like to you?”
She was running in tight concentric circles.
“It feels like grass,” she said. Why wasn’t she getting dizzy? Why do they never get dizzy? “Look what I can do.”
Certain sensations resonate through your life. Perhaps there aren’t any words to describe the feeling because when you are three and running on grass you don’t have the adjectives, just impressions and tingling and the freshly cut smell of dopamine hijacking your hypothalamus. Perhaps you can’t describe the feeling because the feeling is a memory of time long ago.
I fell down a wormhole and was three again, running on grass. I could feel everything, but had no vocabulary to describe it.
“Tell me about birds, Alice.”
She looked up at the sky and pondered creation. “King bird, black bird and duck.”
“What’s a king bird?”
“It is pink and purple.”
“Like a parrot?”
“No,” she said. “A parrot is pink and green and lives in Mexico.”
She stuck her nose into the grass.
“Ants,” she said, intoxicated. “Must be a nest. Maybe. Maybe not.”
She followed the ants as they wandered in those same eccentric circles she had been making herself only moments earlier.
I asked her how many ants there were, perhaps hoping she would count them and I could rest. Or read a book. Or just sleep.
She watched the ants scuttle around. “A lot.”
“How many is a lot?”
She counted on her fingers. “One, two, three, four, five, six.” Then said, “Six. Six is a lot.”
“Six?”
“Yes.” Then she changed her mind. “No.” And she counted to five on her fingers. “Five is a lot.”
Was this why children think their parents are nineteen?
Curious faces jittered nervously from behind rustic wooden shutters.
The ants had stirred a memory. “Do you remember yesterday,” she asked. “When that ant walked on your hand?”
‘Yesterday’ was her all encompassing word for the past, and very rarely referred to the day before. Sometimes it was weeks, months, even years previously.
“No, I don’t remember that.”
“Oh.” She said, upset. “You don’t remember the ants? Why?”
“You ask interesting questions,” I said. “My synapses don’t fire like they used to.”
“Every part of me then will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on forever.”
“Daddy, ants are like your memory and the food they carry are your synapses and sometimes the ants get lost on the way to the nest and they take your memory, which is a crumb of toast, with them to the wrong end of the garden. But your head is your brain and your brain doesn’t talk with the ant which has your memory because your ant is at the wrong end of the garden?”
My heart raced.
“Your ants get lost a lot, Daddy. You need more ants.”
So we planted seeds, dug holes, knocked over plant pots, got soil in our hair, in our clothes and on the sofa – even though we were in the garden. We watered the seeds, watered our clothes, watered the neighbours dog, watered the other trees, watered some bikes, watered a car, watered a gate, a frog, some weeds, a trampoline and finally, we watered our shoes.
And made a lot of ants.