Dear Evan:
This weekend, you and I laid on the floor of our upstairs living room and played Lincoln logs. We built a house for your Rey and Finn Star Wars action figures, plus a garage for Rey’s speeder, a tiny stable for a tiny Lego horse and “campfires” (which of course became deflector shield generators) out of the leftover logs.
I wondered: How much of this will you remember?
You’re almost six years old. You won’t remember the specifics. I hope you have a hazy good-feeling memory of playing with your daddy, but beyond that? Lost moments, I think.
I remember a few things from my early youth:
* Walking across a field under dark, about-to-rain skies on the way home from preschool, so probably in Houston.
* Eating Apple Jacks cereal very early morning at a school (maybe the same?). Notable because we rarely ate sugar cereal at home.
* Finding a toy monkey with what I think was real fur (maybe rabbit?) during a yard sale in the courtyard of our townhouse. (Again, I think in Houston.)
* For my birthday or Christmas, I got a little handheld music box — you held it by a handle, and turned a lever on the side to make music, and could watch the gears through a little window — and I remember your uncle Ben and I dancing around a dark living room in the pre-dawn hours like swans (so it must have been “Swan Lake”).
* Later, in Arlington, giggling in the bedroom, supposed to be asleep, with Ben and other kids (including one with a terribly burned arm — I remember marveling at the twisted smooth skin) while our parents watched “Alien” in the living room.
My memory gets better from there on (at least, for now), but it’s a fun game to think back on those fragments and hold them for as long as I can. I hope that someday, you have good fragments, fragments that warm your heart, about us playing on the floor or going to the library every Saturday or sneaking away for donuts. (You always eat a sprinkle donut, half a dozen donut holes, a jalapeno sausage roll and half my jalapeno sausage roll.)
I love you so much,
Daddy
