Half In, Half Out

Sometimes when I come into my empty house, I hesitate at the front door: do I really want to bust the stillness of the place, the quiet of it? It's like a life existed there while I was gone and hauling in my noisy brood or my bags of groceries seems an insult to the peace that's settled in.

Sometimes -- most times -- I just barge through the door and hurl my crap on any available surface, start clicking buttons (answering machine, email), and survey the to-do list of a house suddenly a hot mess: call that one, put away that thing, find it, sort it, fold it, do it. I become a whirling dervish with a paintbrush in one hand, a sippy cup in another, an agenda tucked in one pocket, a permission slip in the other, good intentions everywhere but strewn all over the place.

Sometimes -- lately -- I am half-way in the house and half-way out. While I'm running the business of all of us, I'm also running for the hills: seeking a fantasy life on the road (in an RV!) writing that book about bumper stickers or learning to surf and home-schooling somewhere in Mexico or settling into a small but funky pre-war apartment in a big city where all my kids wear high tops, off the grid, on the grid, a part of the motherfucking grid: who knows, could be anything, could be anywhere. I am a first-class daydreamer.

(I know this because when someone is not where they are supposed to be, I can conjure the gore of the tragedy in full on 3-D and go swiftly to the phone calls I would make (and the words I would say) and the clothes I would wear and wait! -- there you are at the door, on the phone, come back to life! It's a small and pleasant jump to the good kind of daydreams which serve an entirely different purpose.)

I could chalk up this recent rash of not writing here or anywhere underwhelm/overwhelm to the season because seriously, man, the smell of new pencils and falling leaves and the sound of corduroy pants woosh-wooshing is like crack to me -- the high being the infinite possibilities of new beginnings; the hangover being exams. Which is a really lame metaphor and long-winded attempt to explain what is essentially either writer's block or distraction or maybe just being busy with being busy or maybe feeling guilty about sending one of my kids to school in pants plucked from the hamper. Not sure which. Not sure that it matters.

What matters is that the Red Sox won last night (and me and The Kid were there YO), R was caught on the receiving end of a note that read "Mrs. Teacher has a big butt", B has woken me up twice in the middle of the night in the last five days to tell me she can't find her retainer, and the GFYO is officially obsessed with Scooby Doo in what might be considered an unhealthy way. What matters is that the economy is in the tank, Tina Fey is a blessing to humankind, and my neighbor with three kids just shipped out to Afghanistan. What matters is that I sat down tonight (thanks Carolyn and Suzan) with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to say and managed to spend a good forty minutes being all oversharey and loquacious. (Which is an awesome word by the by.)

What matters is all of this and none of this and exactly what is wordless in between, the split second between the foot over the threshold and the foot out the door.