Fragile Firsts
Austyn sat up in bed organizing her lovies who were joining us for the night. Turtle-Turtle, Rocky Bear, Dumbo, Puff Puff, and her newest acquisitions from an extended family exchange--Katty and Dog -- were neatly lined up on and around the pillows that formed a retaining wall on the far side of the bed. “You hafta be good,” she whispered to them. “Santa is seeing who’s nice and naughty and he’s coming in his sleighhhhhhh!” The last word taking off like a team of reindeer from the roof, its one syllable stretched to capacity inside a whisper-shriek. I was laying with my back to her, feigning sleep while cataloguing every single word as the Times Square Ticker in my head ran around and around exclaiming, “It doesn’t get better than this.”
Then she snuggled up behind me, cupped her hands around my ear and whispered, “GG, Santa is bringing you a huge rainbow present. You’ve been so good.” I rolled over trying to make my eyebrows escalate to the top of my forehead like hers, then we hugged and kicked our feet in unison as the covers flew off the bed. All my pea-sized brain could think was, “Please don’t let this end.”
I was as happy as any mortal can be. And yet I was sort of sparring with sad.
I squeezed my eyes and tried to put it in a place where the feel of it couldn’t leak out. I wanted to remember it all. How she smelled. How her eyes danced. How her hair looked curling out from under the Santa cap she’d worn to bed. I wanted to remember her voice and her tiny teeth and the way her mind would not stop racing over, under, around, and through this idea of a chubby guy in a red suit with a huge white beard and a sack full of toys. She was swimming in the anticipatory thrill of the season-- busy elves…flying reindeer…Jingle Bells….snowmen (if only on TV and in blow-up form in neighbors’ yards)…sugar cookies with purple icing…CHRISTMAS LIGHTS!
This is the wonder year. The one and only Christmas, Austyn will ever be two. Santa (the good Lord willing) will come back— and he’ll keep coming— and she will believe for years. But it won’t ever be like this again. For the first time, Christmas is a thing. Santa is a man and flying reindeer and elves that live on shelves somehow make perfect sense. The magic poured down on her like hurricane rain and she romped in the make-believe puddles as all she couldn’t absorb pooled around her feet. With my golden ticket, I watched wistfully, glad to be granted the privilege of a ride on her “aha.”
Discovery moments are the moments that come with no constraints.
Early in my coaching career, I asked a peer who’d been there many times, “What’s the best part of going to the Final Four?”
“The second you realize you get to go,” he said.
It sounded ridiculous. But he wasn’t wrong.
There were eleven minutes and some change left to play against Colorado when I looked up at the neon scoreboard suspended above half court in Boise, Idaho and knew. It was an “it-doesn’t-get-better-than-this” moment. Our horses were running and the Buffaloes couldn’t catch us. I knew we were going to the Final Four.
Tons of amazing stuff followed. Hugs, hats, nets, trophies, police escorts, record crowds. But nothing that happened after, ever eclipsed the instant I figured it out. And almost as soon as I grasped it, I could feel it slipping away.
That’s part of the juju, I suppose. Firsts burn so hot you can’t really hold them in your hands.
We carry buckets of memories of our firsts around with us in time capsules. The first time we drove a car solo. The first time we served an ace. The first time we got in a fight. The first time we flew in a plane. The first time we saw the ocean. The first time we made love. They live in mental drawers where they don’t turn sepia, nor do they grow stale. From there they tease us with their “firstness.” They have cornered rarified air.
Hence my happy-sad. The stubborn glorious innocence of discovery is unrepeatable. As clearly as I can see it, I know it changes shape.
I tried with every inch of my sinew to put Austyn’s awe in a bag. I hoarded every facial expression. Every gasp. Every one-finger touch of the ornaments on the tree. Every, “GG LOOK! It’s Santa!” Enthusiastically, I accepted every invitation into her wonderland. Her uninhibited awareness was far too big to keep to herself.
As she ripped into her first package on Christmas morning, she exclaimed, “LOOK guys, LOOK!”
Her mom volleyed back, “Whoa! What IS it?”
To which Austyn replied without missing a beat, her bewilderment still at a ten out of ten, “I don’t know, but LOOK!”
I yearn for her abandon, the kind that gets hard to get to under layers of living years. But my gloves are tightly laced. I’m fighting to be in the moment while fighting to not let it go. The egg doesn’t easily separate from its yolk. Maybe the two are supposed to live together—the awe and the ache. Maybe the fact that we can’t make it last is what makes it so precious as it’s happening. Maybe bliss and torment are more like twins than distant cousins.
Regardless, I greet it all with open arms, grateful to be reminded that little can compare to the fundamental, fantastic, fragility of firsts.