Many afternoons, when Suzannah and I are on our way to pick up Isaac and need to make a quick stop at the grocery store, we drive through a particularly busy intersection in our town. There are all kinds of things in this area -- restaurants and pharmacies and grocery stores, pizza places, fast food joints, apartment complexes.
And there's the dancing pizza guy.
At least, that's what Suzannah and I call him. He wears a neon green shirt and is presumably paid to advertise for the pizza place on the giant sign he's holding. But he doesn't just hold the sign, doesn't just wave at traffic. He dances, really dances, like he should be a member of a high school hot squad. As far as I can tell, he doesn't listen to music, doesn't have headphones. He just moves, grooving with his giant sign advertising large pizzas for five dollars. When the flow of traffic starts to move in the opposite direction, he pauses for just a moment to adjust accordingly, and then he's at it again.
"He actually makes me want to buy pizza," Matt said not long ago. Suzannah loves him. And mostly, he just makes me smile.
It's the little things.
I went book shopping this afternoon. We'd planned to all go to Seattle Children's Museum, but at the last moment Matt offered to drop me off at the Elliott Bay Book Company while he took the kids to Seattle Center. I really love watching our kiddos play at the Children's Museum, but also, I've been pretty low on energy and in rather desperate need of some recharging.
The last time I was the bookstore, just two weeks ago, I wandered around in a daze and didn't buy anything. Today I had to whittle down my choices so we can still afford things like dinner and clothing for our children, which is more my side of normal, and I wound up with Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's brand-new memoir, and Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon's latest novel. Both signed first editions. Sweet.
And then I sat in the cafe and sipped a pumpkin spice latte and read Cloud Atlas, which I loved when I read it in 2005 and am enjoying just as much now, possibly more. And even though it's hard to feel anything but disappointed when wonderful books are made into movies because the movies inevitably fall short, I'm pretty excited to see this one next month. Or maybe I'm mostly excited about the idea of a night out with my husband.
When my family picked me up two hours later, the kids were bubbling over with stories about how they were pirates at the museum, and Suzannah told me a couple of jokes that made absolutely no sense (but that made them more hilarious than most jokes that do, of course), and then we all went out for pizza, and then we all went out for pie. And when we finally arrived back at our cozy little house in our quiet little neighborhood tonight, the kids were so happily worn out they didn't even fight bedtime.
The big things are hard, and mostly, these days, I kind of feel like whoever's in charge of the big things is not doing the most wonderful job. (As Anne Lamott would say, "If I were God's West Coast representative..." or as I would say, "If I were the one in charge, here...")
But the little things often feel pretty okay, and tonight I had new books and good pizza and a couple of glasses of nice wine and chocolate pie. And maybe there doesn't need to be any grand metaphor in any of that. Maybe it's just enough to live inside this one tiny moment for now.
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