Anything Can Happen

At four, my twin boys discovered the solar system and were quickly obsessed with planets. One claimed Jupiter as his own personal favorite (because of its size) the other, Saturn (because of its good looks). They drew planets constantly, checked all the planet books out from the library, watched planet videos, and slept with a couple of plastic orbs salvaged from a broken solar system mobile that had previously been destined for the dump. A short time later they became enamored with dinosaurs and found that these could be adopted, cheaply and in great numbers, from bins hidden in the corners of discount store toy shelves. For a while the two obsessions overlapped and became interwoven, resulting in scenarios in which Diplodocus and Neptune frolicked in the waters of the bathtub and dined on cheesy crackers side by side. My boys did not find these sometimes literal bedfellows to be odd at all, nor did they find it at all odd for extravagantly distant time and space to collide with their own quotidian. In their play, Stegosaurus and Triceratops bravely marched off to preschool, while Jupiter and Saturn refused to go to bed without a story and a song. 

For a child, everything is so novel that nothing is surprising. The news that we are all living on precarious land masses dotting a sloshy blue orb that hurtles in spinning arcs around a massive inferno of a star, and that other orbs, all stark and terrifying in the most extreme ways, hurtle around the star too, and that millions of years ago our sloshy orb was dominated by giant reptilian creatures whose time on Earth makes our own history look insignificant, is no more surprising than the fact that there are peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. And nothing is too majestic or sacred for a child’s imagination to revert into the diminutive form. Jupiter may be a frigid, colossal ball of gas where storms rage for centuries, but it also looks really cute with googly eyes stuck to its big round orb. And Spinosaurus may be spiky, reptilian, gigantic, and not remotely appealing in human terms, but he also needs a tubby from time to time and gets a little nervous about going to the bathroom by himself. 

My mind is not so keen to welcome these truth-splotched absurdities into my reality. To be honest, the more I learned about the planets, the less I wanted to think about them. Each one managed to create its own brand of colossal claustrophobic anxiety in my mind—Mercury, tiny and hot, Venus, volcanic and hotter, Mars, desolate and, well…desolate…and the others— suffocatingly cold and literally poisonous gas giants, orbiting ominously in the distance. Then there are the dinosaurs. For one thing, they’re terrifying. Even the plant eaters, and even the little ones. Also, despite their impressively long and presumably terrible reign, we have memorialized them largely by diminishing them into cute childhood mascots, which I imagine ghost dinosaurs find pretty weird, if not offensive. I myself find it pretty weird, and a little disturbing. I guess what bothers me about thinking about these things is that I can’t quite rectify my own existence with theirs. Where does my life even begin to make sense or even matter at all when juxtaposed with the epic reign of the dinosaurs, long since come to an end, and the centuries-long raging storm of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? That’s what gets me—the more you think about the fact that you’re riding one of many spinning balls in some great expanse, and that you are not even the most bizarre creature to ever dominate your particular ball, and that most balls just exist for their own sake, and not to support life as we know it at all, everything seems completely absurd and nonsensical. It makes you realize that anything can happen. I find this epiphany to be terrifying. My children, on the other hand, their brains blissfully incomplete and almost visibly sparking with new neural connections, find it exhilarating—anything can happen!

At the time that the dinosaur/planet convergence was at its peak, I was regularly having trouble sleeping. Work was frustrating, our bank account was low, one of our cats was dying, and I was plagued with worry about my children concerning both matters personal to them and general to the world I put them in. In the early hours of the morning, I would awaken panicked, sure that there was no way I’d be able to get myself out of bed and through another day in a couple of hours. Anything could happen, which I took to mean that everything terrible would. I would think of Jupiter, of Saturn. Of their stark, cold, poisonous surfaces. Of the deafening white noise that must surround them. Of the dinosaurs, here, and gone, and for what reason? And given all this majestic terror, for what point was I worrying myself over my credit card bill, my inadequacies with my work, a small cat whose end-of-life struggle I could not reverse, a future I had no hope of manipulating to my satisfaction? I could find no reason for all of the chaos, and certainly no point for my own life, which seemed defined by a constant struggle of wanting more of I wasn’t sure what while getting less of pretty much everything. 

At this time, my twins often woke in the night and would sleep with me, snuggled in on each side, in the early morning hours. And one dark dawn, as I was lying between them, paralyzed with fear for what the next day would hold, I heard one of them murmuring softly. At first, I thought he was whispering in his sleep, but I then realized he wasn’t talking, but singing—James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes,” a regular lullaby at our house—and that he was wide awake. It was an anomaly that he wasn’t sleeping—my children, like me, would rather stay up late and have fun in the giddy relief of the night than wake up early and face the ponderous hours of the dawn—but that he was instead singing while his brother slumbered peacefully, nestled into my back. It was a mundane anomaly, but one that meant something, 

maybe something miraculous: Somehow time and space had converged in this tiny island of refuge, where my child awoke in the uncertainty of the early morning not to be comforted, but to comfort me. And I thought in that moment, anything can happen, and I was not terrified. 

My children do not face the unknown with the attitude that the chaos of life is inherently working against them. They don’t expect life to make sense, or to have a narrative flow, or to be all good or all bad, or even to have much of a purpose. They accept all possibilities, witnessing the awful, wonderful, glamorous, and mundane absurdities of life not with judgement, nor with disinterest, but with pure wonder. What if I, like my children, were to wake up willing to act as a pure witness for whatever new marvel life had to offer—the long ago reign of an unfathomable beast, an austere sister planet shining in the distance, a world full of pain and death which still seems determined to foster hope and life, and in the middle of all of it, a child singing at dawn? What if I, like my children, learned anew every day that even when life proves spectacularly disappointing, still, even then, it provides something to marvel at? Perhaps then I could face the morning if not singing, then at least willing to stand. If not happy, at least hopeful. If not fearful, then at least courageous. 

Perhaps not. Shortly after the lullaby incident my boys began drawing pictures in an oddly medieval style in which flattened-perspective dinosaurs were approached by impressively stylized flaming meteors. Their explanations of these compositions were nonchalant: “This is a stegosaurus, a brachiosaurus, and a parasaurolophus. And this is a meteor.” The moment they’d captured—the exact instant of a meeting between Earth and the heavens—was also oddly medieval, and marvelous. Certainly these drawings were conversation starters. What would become of the dinosaurs? Would they be obliterated? Mortally wounded? Simply carried by the explosion, unharmed, to the county limits? Maybe they had a meteor blaster hidden just off the page. Maybe it wasn’t a meteor after all, but a spaceship that would carry them to the moon. Anything can happen. There were so many possibilities, and I wanted to hear my boys tell me about all of them. But my mind lacks flexibility; it denies that which might be frightening, awful, or unfathomable. It claims blindness to the terrors, and, in an effort to escape them, is blind to the marvels as well. Fearful of the fiery light of the meteor and of the nonchalant mortality of the dinosaurs, all I said was that these were some great pictures. Then I went on with my day, quickly forgetting all of the questions I was too afraid to ask.