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Remembering These Moments

It’s our thing we do when Daddy has to leave for work early during Peak Season: we drive home from pre-k the long way and drive through the neighborhood around the corner that always has the most awesome Christmas lights.

Yesterday evening was the last time we’ll ever take that particular drive.

Not that we won’t ever look at Christmas lights again — just that it won’t ever be just the two of us driving home the long way from pre-k to look at Christmas lights.

I realized we were experiencing a Last Time Ever, so I took special note of every detail.

I snuck glances back at Connor’s face while I drove, to see his entranced expression (even though we’ve driven this route almost every evening). I drove slowly around the one cul-de-sac where nearly all the houses have fantastic light displays, and Connor requested we sit for a moment in front of the best one, with the LED icicle lights above the front door that change colors in patterns. Sitting there, while Pandora played The First Noel, Connor and I noticed the details of the display: the lighted snowmen at play in the yard, half-buried in snow; the twinkling snowflake lights along the walk.

Finally, once Connor said it was OK, we continued our drive toward home, past more houses with more lights — then, surprisingly, one more house had their lights up! And it was a huge display, right on the corner of the neighborhood and the main road, with lighted figures in the back yard and the front yard and lights along the fence and on the front porch. It was amazing and beautiful and a total surprise.

I wanted to drive more slowly down the main road toward home, but the speed limit is 35 mph and people would get seriously irritated if I went 20 instead. So, we rolled past more houses with even more lights, until finally we pulled into our own driveway.

A five-year-old has little to no understanding of the importance of these moments to his parents. I tried to explain to him that things will never be exactly the same again, that we’ll never drive home from pre-k and look at Christmas lights like this again… but he only understands that this weekend is Christmas. He can’t think ahead to when he’s in Kindergarten, and will take the bus home, and will already be home when I get home from work.

Unless we enroll him in Latchkey for Peak Season, in which case maybe I’ll pick him up from school and we’ll take the long way home again…

atheism, politics 2 Comments

Neo-McCarthyism and my Subconscious

I’ve been having an increasing number of dreams involving my family’s safety.

In one dream, my son and I were being hunted and herded to small boats on a river. I lost my right shoe in the confusion, and I worried that my son would try to go back for it. Instead, I convinced him to continue basically hiding in plain sight with me, often playing possum, in hopes of avoiding being sent down the river in open boats in the freezing rain.

In another dream, I decided to do a frivolous Facebook Live video from my home, and within hours someone had identified where I lived from the scenery out the window, broken and entered, and made his way up to my bedroom merely to prove he could and to engage me in conversation. My mother walked in, saw him, screamed, and sprayed him with air freshener.

Up until recently, I felt plenty comfortable blogging and posting photos and whatnot. Over time, I stopped identifying others by full name on my blog, to respect their own privacy, but I was fine with sharing my own thoughts and activities — within reason, of course. My civil liberties were intact, though, and I don’t do anything controversial enough to get me doxxed or worse. With the incoming administration, though, I smell McCarthyism — or something very much akin to it — brewing on the horizon. I’m not a Muslim, or an immigrant of any sort, but I am an atheist. Is that a red flag in Trump’s America?

I’m probably deluding myself if I think I would garner any sort of attention for just being a middle-class atheist in the Midwest… but I suppose stranger things have happened.

Either way, I’ve been active online for so long that I’m searchable for years back. Even if I archived and deleted my blog, my Instagram, my Flickr, if I closed my Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, if I cancelled my Gmail and got rid of my Google account entirely (and in today’s ultra-connected society, I’m not even sure all those things are feasible), I’m still out there, online, archived, searchable.

As an American citizen, living in the Land of the Free, even my subconscious shouldn’t be having to worry about such things.