spynotes ::
  April 15, 2006
Action is his reward

I dropped AJ off at the movie theater in a room full of screaming boys, all waving their ketchup-dripping, foil-wrapped hot dogs in the air, like some kind of anarchic military salute. He will then watch a movie with his friends � only his third time ever in a movie theater and I�m already become superfluous.

It�s not that I feel bad about the fact that he�s doing some thing without me. Far from it � I welcome his gradual acquisition of independence. But up until he started preschool, there was very little of his life that I didn�t know just as well as my own. And even in preschool, I still know all the books he reads, all the music he listens to. His frame of cultural references is a subset of my own. But here is a movie he will see and I will not. If we are a Venn diagram, our two circles, once nearly on top of one another, are slowly drifting sideways. The shared area in the middle will always be getting smaller. It�s as it should be, but it also makes me a little sad.

I suppose I�m thinking about these things today in part because, thanks to my father�s fascination with modern gadgetry and the crazy expense of traditional phone calls to Thailand where my brother lives, our whole family is now Skyping regularly and we had our first ever conference call this morning. It�s strange to think of all of us sitting at our computers scattered across half a globe and talking not quite like we were in the same room � you realize when engaging in this type of conversation, how much you rely on visual cues in everyday conversation. My brother had just returned from vacation in Viet Nam. He was telling us about his travels, about China Beach, about the small limestone islands that look like haystacks, about teaching a worker on the boat in which they traveled on for two days how to swim. My father was talking about a recent concert with his choir in an eighteenth-century church. I was asking a lot of questions and watching a bluebird sitting on a branch a few feet from where I was sitting. We are each in our own world now. Our Venn diagram overlaps are entirely based on these conversations.

While AJ was at the moviews, I had meant to drive to a new coffee shop near the theater that roasts it own beans and provides wireless for free to work for a couple of hours with regular infusions of caffeine and possibly pastry. However when I was packing up to leave, I couldn�t find the cell phone.

My cell phone is not much of a factor in my life ordinarily. I try to use it as little as possible, mainly because I find it more irritating than useful. But I didn�t want to be inaccessible while AJ was at the movies, just in case. And so I was forced to return home where I could be near a phone and also had time to fret about what had happened to the thing. I remembered where I�d last seen it. I called the phone to see if there were any messages or whether I could hear it ring. I called the stores where I had shopped yesterday and came up empty. I dumped out my purse, a shiny red airline bag, for the third time. No phone. And then suddenly, just when I thought I�d exhausted all options, I remembered removing AJ�s Spiderman umbrella from the bag yesterday � Spiderman�s head, which serves as the umbrella�s handle, does not quite fit all the way inside the bag, so it always looks like he is trying to climb out. After the third comment on Spiderman while shopping, I decided to take it out and leave it in the car. What if the phone had fallen into Spiderman�s capable hands? And the webslinger came through for me. Thanks, friendly neighborhood Spiderman! And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to make a call.

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