Nearing 100

As I approach the hundredth posting for this blog--well, actually, I have very little to say on the subject of the blog itself. It is what it is. I've tried to write about being a mother without describing the details of every purchase I make, or the cute habits of my son, or the beauty of motherhood and so on and so forth. I suppose that I've been semi-successful.

I've also chosen, as a major theme in these postings--wandering, both in the mind and on foot. La flanerie. By making a point of getting "lost" in some lesser-known part of San Francisco, and getting "lost" in my thoughts here on the electronic page, I've hoped to give the practical, motherly parts of my brain a rest, and to reactivate the impractical writerly parts. I suppose that has only been marginally successful to date.

Be that as it may...I'll switch subjects and talk about Rilke.

And about childhood. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke says: if you're a writer and you feel you've run out of subjects to explore, go back in your thoughts to your own childhood, and describe what that was like. Everyone has an endless amount of material to explore when they go back far enough, he says.

I've never felt how true this was until now, after months of observing my own son. Just watching him play reminds me of what life feels like when everything is new.

He has a way of clasping his hands together, before reaching for some object or set of objects and embarking on a new project--clasping his hands together and pursing his lips a little, as if in eager anticipation of discovering something--that reminds me of just how new everything is to him, and how much fun.

One way that his imagination is catching fire: like all babies I suppose, he's endlessly combining two or more unrelated toys and making some new, unlikely toy out of them. A stainless steel bowl and a miniature piano; a cloth bird and a spoon. Just to see how two things go together, or don't go together--isn't that half the fun of being alive, even for adults? And yet we forget this, so comfortably ensconced do we become in our predictable daily routines.

Kids wander. In every sense of the word. They are the best surrealists.