Sheer Joy

Today was Captain Kindergarten's big day.  The cast was to come off.  And it did, it came off.  And another one came on.

The doctor said his arm needed a couple of more weeks to heal.  A little, tiny something in me thinks that if the Sidekick's cast had come off, that the Captain's would have too.  A little, itty, bitty something in me says that the Captain just can't help being like that for his Sidekick.

The new cast for him is green.  It got him some attention at school today and he was pretty darned pleased with that.  The Sidekick's new cast is pink.  Today I used her crayons to color flowers and hearts on it.  Her Dad wrote on the bottom of her casted foot that a person can see coming at them as she is pushed along in her wheelchair, "Make way."  That's why I like him so darned much, you see?

Oh - and in all the driving I did to and from Baltimore, I got me a whole heck of a lot of NPR time in.  My favorite story is this one.  It's about a Japanese man who got the itch to create a Japanese-Yiddish dictionary for all the Japanese folks out there who are captivated by the history and culture of the Jews...all ten of 'em.  He spent twenty years on the dictionary and here's why according to the story:

"Yiddish was full of puzzles for me," Ueda says. "That's what I love about it. Reading sentences in those strange letters — it's like deciphering a code."

And this is what his wife had to say about it:

"Every day, he would sit down to work on his dictionary right after breakfast. He never took any time off," she says. "But for him, this wasn't work but sheer joy. So I thought, this is the way things had to be."

Oh the coolness, the absolute radness, of living a life in a state of sheer joy.

I wondered about him writing his dictionary and what that meant about me as I drove to and from Baltimore.  And I kept thinking about it as I was running today.  And I decided I was pretty darn good with my effort at sheer joy being a wholehearted plunge into motherhood.

But I also thought, I'm going to write fiction again someday when I'm wiping bottoms less and sitting on the couch more.  Even if it's just so I can pat my unpublished books before I go to bed at night and feel all warm and cozy in my heart.