Patterns
As I walked past my sleeping son's bedroom, the play of light on his ceiling recalled a private, childhood wonder. I would lie in bed late at night, watching light from rolling city traffic transform itself into a set of inexplicable images that would form slowly on one part of the ceiling, move steadily across the top and then glide off down the wall in a jazzy sort of slow motion before slinking off into the night.
Those evening light shows created many a transcendent moment before I fell off to sleep, enveloped and tingled by the bebop mysteries of urban night. The patterns seemed to defy the logic of intuitive physics, though I knew it was just a fortuitous placement of venetian blinds. Part of what made them precious was their ethereal nature. As soon as they appeared, they began to disassemble and disappear. They made sense, and they didn't. They were part of the natural urban flow, yet they felt slightly beyond order and control.
These memories took me, in turn, to a similar experience from a youthful of country summers. As my buddies and I were hauled from one activity to another in the Leventhal's trusty station wagon, we'd make up stories about cloud patterns we could see. Our imaginations soared, there in the country, there in the day.
Urban or rural, a constant, universal childhood joy is the simple opportunity to manipulate for your own ends a world designed for something else. Having, but not really having, control over the external environment feels a perfect relation to the natural order of things, whether those things are clouds, fields, cluttered urban lots or light patterns on ceilings. And, in the endlessly funky arcade of the child's mind, there is always the wish for more. The perfect, never ending game; the wish that it would go on forever, the wish that it would always remain. Just so.
But as we were taken down those country roads, we would lose sight of the clouds; patterns would become harder to discern with the dark. As soon as the game began, it would begin to end. The delicate balance between the kids (giggling at each other's cloud plays) and the delicate balance between the kids and the sky (the amount of available light), none of these could last.
As the sky darkened and it became harder to wheedle shapes and stories out of it, the magic of the moment would surely and sadly slip.
Today, I think a lot about kids being bumped from one fragile activity to another; from one fragile friendship to another; from one fragile age to another. Bumped and bumped until adulthood. Until they confront the last patterns of the night; abstract, deep, frightening.