Dear My Darling Public
Today started like any other day off in the summer. I got up to the sound of the ear-piercing cry of the obnoxiously energetic baby my sister babysits. What happened to me next comes as a frustration to me because I don't babysit. If fact I took a seven to six construction and landscaping job because babysitting is such a muscle-twisting pain in my ass. My lovely sister decided that she needed to accompany my mother and other sister to take my other sister to the doctor for her physical, leaving me alone with this nine month old potato sac of love and energy. At first he was, admittedly, a bit adorable because of his incessant need to climb on top of everything in his path be it the couch, the other couch, the end table, or even me, and leave a trail of slimy saliva in his wake. And, for the most part, you would imagine that this sort of behavior would be limited to those obstacles that seemed climbable, but, alas, you would be wrong. This little guy, apparently feeling like he was going to be spider-man for the next hour and a half, began an ill conceived attempt at scaling the wall next to the couch. Now, I know that it's just bad guardianship to encourage a sprouting, sponge-minded infant to accomplish something that is physically impossible, but something about getting on the floor and holding him to keep him from falling as he attempted the impossible made me feel like I was helping mold his mind in a way that might some day facilitate a sense of self-perceived greatness in him rather than a sense of low self-esteem.
Anyway, after his trial and error attempts at gaining superhuman climbing powers, I decided that I, the grumpiest babysitter in all of nannydom, would also act upon my occasional desire to perform the seemingly impossible and put this energizer bunny of a kid to sleep. I picked him up and drew his head just on my shoulder as I seated him securely in my arms, and began walking around, slightly bouncing my step, and singing Mary Lambert's part in Same Love by Maclemore and Ryan Lewis very softly into his ear. This, as I should have known, didn't work at all, and by the time I got up the stairs and in to my parents' sitting room, he had already soiled himself. Now it was time to change his diaper, a task I had performed with both of my sisters when they were babies, but they were, for the most part, calm babies. This little bundle of energy decided that, while I was unchanging him on my parents' bed, he was going to have the worst case of restless leg syndrome in the history of mankind. It took about thirty minutes just to take the one peace baby suit, undershirt, and dirty diaper off. At this point you would think that most living things would just be happy to no longer be clothed, but no, not wonder-baby. No, this little guy took this opportunity to get up and jump off of the edge of my parents' bed, which is quite a drop. I caught the little bugger before he even got into the air, and when I put him back on the bed so I could put the next diaper on him don't you know he takes a leak right there all over my parents' sheets. It took a bit longer to get the new diaper on him, but when I finally got it on I set him on the ground for a few seconds as I removed the sheets from the bed and threw them into the laundry room.
By this time the rest of my family had come through the door and were all running over to make stupid faces and annoying sounds at this poor thing. I immediately went down to the basement to practice my bagpipes and, after having played all my basic pieces, I made my way to my room to listen to Maclemore and Ryan Lewis (I might love them a lot.) and read a few more pages from The Country of the Pointed Firs. Now, I find this book to be metaphorically symbolic through the lens of my upbringing. Earlier in my crazy life, I was almost always surrounded by people four or five decades older than me. It was listening to their stories and political views that almost completely molded me into what I am today. The best thing was that almost every story they told you had something more to it. It had a sort of nostalgically expressed truth that couldn't be expressed by any other kind of person. Likewise, in Sarah Orne Jewett's American epic of one woman's return to her beloved Dunnet Landing, Maine, The elderly of the landing, be it Captain Littlepage or Mrs. Todd, hold a conventional wisdom that is completely untapped by the younger generation. They see themselves as the last of the mariners or sea faring folks, a tradition that they claim to have been lost with the new generation.
In some ways I do feel like good traditions have been completely lost with the new generation, but I also know of a greater number of absolutely disgusting traditions that are, by the grace of God, disappearing with the next generation. The biggest of these disappearing traditions, if I do say so myself, is intolerance. I feel that I've dedicated most of my life to this horrible sin because it is something that I've faced in my life. To make a long story short, for anybody out there that has ever been disenfranchised and alienated by the majority of their age demographic for having a foot fetish (or any fetish for that matter), I feel your pain deep in my heart. I actually watched one documentary that described the act of having a foot fetish as an outward expression of selfishness and low self-esteem. Hearing things like that from television-psychologists on top of my peers regarding my foot fetish as creepy and unnatural drove me up a wall. I never let it give me a complex though. I instead used it as a point of reference to remind myself that intolerance is absolutely intolerable.
As I did my daily lap around the block on my thirteen year old skateboard with the Northwestern Pennsylvania sun setting behind my back and the wind blowing through my hair , I pondered this in my head. Now, the rout I usually take puts me into the line of sight of a few people that I see but never speak to, almost as if they only exist as part of the landscape of the subdivision. Although, I can't help but think that they think of me in the same way, but that's just another classic example of my tendency to over analyze everything. Just remember. People can't for the life of them guess what you think, so you have to destroy your standards of engagement.
Yours Truly
Thomas F.
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