adjective: (among several other definitions)
[as] experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person. "I live vicariously through you".
SO this being my first 'blog' ever, please allow me to forego any typical openings to which you may be expectant of or are used to.
Recently I had the chance to take a rapid drive for a short visit to my paternal
Grandparents, weeks before they planned to move another ten hour drive away from us. I took with me my three children, my oldest of whom is fourteen and brimming with all the good strong boy-ness he ought to be, but that I rarely have glimpsed in the past year.
I nearly derailed the trip in the first two hours as the youngest (five months) wailed a keening pitch and her sister, 2 years 5 months, wailed to suit. The moment passed, and regrettably, I proclaimed to my son "what kind of crazy person does this?? I can't even find the GAS TANK, and I'm taking my kids out for an eight hour DRIVE??" The two year developed a fever and by the time we arrived had come down with a decent head cold. My son texted to his step-dad "she's losing it", or someting to that effect... but we continued on and made it. He is, sadly, used to my temper and whirling fits or yelling and foot stomping, childlike and coping skills absentia that I sometimes have. Later his auntie described it as 'went hulk on ya did she' - entirely accurate, as it stands.
Anyway, we made it, and got into very good visiting with their Great- Grandparents, learning some stories I'd never heard, seeing some video footage of my parents I'd never watched (and how slightly disconcerting to think of my dad as an awkward, swarthy, young man, pre alcoholic and full of the stuff he could have been), eating some very regular, very good homemade breads and pie and chicken dinner. My son got to help my Grandpa in his shed, hearing some stories about tools and mostly just watching my old Fader-Fader putter and verbally sort his shed for moving day. My eldest daughter got to help bake cupcakes, and admire the old glass jar of peppermint candies Grandma always, always, had. The baby, well, she's a baby. They be.
And me? For a moment, when I took a short walk to the rail hill and back, where 'someone musta tossed an apple out the train because look, an apple tree way out here!', I lived vicariously through my son. And felt a shiver of a ghost.
As we wandered through the scrubby grass from last year, not yet ready to green up, dried from droughty years, he stood upon tall rocks and grabbed up rail pins, tossing them back down. The cold wind gusetted us, and my little two year old (who had elected to come while the baby played with Grandma) snuggled her face into my shoulder hiding it from the blasts. But my son, impervious to the clime, scrambled up a pile of toppled boulders and began heaving out a cord (later I saw was barbed wire!!) buried into the hillside, abandoning it with a shrug and running across the tracks to the dirt hill shouting "Mom, hey Mom, watch this, watch!" I took still frame shots with the camera, not watching the lens but watching him, my heart filling with a deep love for this lithe young man, gleefully playing with not a whip of care about where he had to be or who he had to meet or who he had to be or how he had to act... just being.
I turned just as leaped face forward, back to the hill, down a twenty foot glide of loose dirt, his right hand held up behind him with a rail pin still clutched from his clamber up the hill. He ran down, taking great dusty billowing leaps - two - three - bottom, a silent whoop of delight writ into his face as his long legs and body guided him and supported his soul in its journey of boyhood. His black hood draped around his face and the bearing grin that lit his features spelled shades of another, lost, Holmstrom who as a young teen also siphoned the rare delight of bounding uninhibited through natures heaves.
Then that ghost was gone, and my gallivanting lad ran across the tracks towards me - "Did you see that Mom??!" - to mount a rusted old stationary bike abandoned by the
road - "Hey whats this? Cool!" - and pedal
as though he were in some race of his life. He leaped off the bike, momentary slightly tangled his trouser leg on it, to grab a long pole off the ground and, for no explicit reason other than he could, turn it upright and try and insert it into the ground, end up.
I watched him, snapping a few shots here, there, watching him with a deep pool within me - oh what a beautiful thing I am seeing, what a gift this lust for life, this carefree tossing about and playing, just as when he was a small boy in a big garden...
...while it was not me jumping in the dirt, riding the stationary bike, or later, vaulting over my Grandparents fence, I felt in my bones and it reverberated in my soul, that life within him, that energy, felt it so much that it could have been me doing that, and I had instead the chance to see from my son the pure enjoyment of doing and being and not worrying - rare to see from a boy already so careful in his existence in daily life. So exquisite because it is far better to witness it within him. A reminder to be in each moment, and more, why I love my children so - for while they do not remain as such for long, the occasional visit to my own childhood moments as brought to me by kids helps remind me.
Live Vicariously. Love deeply. Laugh Hard.
