Pure Moments

As we are driving toward the laundromat, I catch sight of a man with short, silver hair sitting on a bench outside a nondescript sort of industrial building. He has his arms on his thighs and his head hangs down with a slight tilt to the left. His hands are clasped between his knees, and he is swaying. We stop at a red light and I watch as the sway takes shape. He is dancing, really. Tapping his feet. Rocking back and forth to music, and for a moment, his movements perfectly match the sound coming from the car stereo - a fusion of Indian guitar and Irish lilt on CBC Radio.

We arrive at the laundromat to find a few dozen people congregating outside the plaza Dairy Queen. There is a line out the door. We toss our clothes into four dryers, plug them with tokens, and go stand in line for ice cream. I have the Turtle Waffle Cone Sundae. Darklin has a dipped cone. We sit together and read while all around us, people are talking, licking cones and slurping milkshakes. In the story I'm reading, a man has a stroke and I feel more alive, suddenly, than I have in weeks.

I remember things I've seen in the last few days that I meant to jot down.

A boy with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a green violin resting on his thighs sits on a bench, smoking a cigarette. A drunk with long, stringy, gray hair and broken glasses squats before an open guitar case, strumming something tuneless for tips. I toss him a toonie and he bursts into song as though automated. I am paralyzed for a moment. Would it be rude to walk away while he's so earnestly belting out this song, which I do not recognize, which isn't very good? I decide it would be, and I smile as he slurs his way through a few more bars before thanking him and telling him I got my two bucks worth, thanks, but I have to go. The gladiolas in my front garden are about to burst into bloom. The red gerber daisy in the vase on top of the television has wilted - in fact, wilted last night while I watched it go eerily from upright to bowing lower and lower until it touched the outside of the glass. It expired. That's the right word for it. It tried with all its might to remain upright, but failed.

Piles and piles of clean, folded laundry wait in various corners of the house to be put away. I like the smell they give off, like sunshine and clean sand.

My son has learned to use my hair wax, and leaves the top off every time. I should yell at him to please put the damned top back on, but I don't. I smile at his mild case of vanity, newly developed since I gave him a very 'now' haircut after living with his hair hanging in his face and past his shoulders.

"The girls'll be chasing you now, for sure." I said, after teaching him how to brush it all to one side, beatnik like, and finger through it with the hair wax to give it some texture. He grinned and blushed. He knows. My love for him got too big for my chest just then, and threatened to come right out my eyes, so I tickled him and laughed.

I had a friend once tell me in response to my typical existential angst, my whining that 'this can't be all there is' that life is not a series of pure moments. It was a sentence that stayed with me like the lines in my palm. Life is not a series of pure moments.

It is, however, peppered with pure moments, like a sunlight dappled forest floor. They come, and I think this is the secret to happiness. Knowing they come. Noticing their arrival. Being with them, and letting them go as we move on as we must into the next muddy paws on clean floor moment, the out of coffee moment, the runny nose, the worry, the mildew, the mistake, the ennui.

They come, and I've made it my mission to be ready for every one.