The Long Answer to “How Ya Doin’?”

Distracted, spacey and almost content. Uninteresting but talkative.
I’m learning how to write while young boys scatter legos, flip through glossy instruction booklets, sing the repetitive songs dancing in their thoughts.
Learning as in haven’t learned it yet but I’m working at developing this valuable skill.
To assist today I opened a window to Pandora.com “Blackbird” station. I used to rely on powerful lyrics with acoustic guitar to train my scattered imaginings to form understandable sentences then march through my pen and line up in neat rows from left to right. I love singing along, but my creative juices aren’t listening just now.
I really want a few hours sitting alone on a wooden rocking chair at dawn (yes, I’d have to stop time), sipping a steaming decaf cappuccino, enjoying a breakfast of butter drenched English muffins, crisp turkey bacon and warm liquid chocolate with marshmallows, watching fog lift off the Smoky mountains. I watched a lot of Folgers commercials growing up.
I wouldn’t want to stay in that scene too long. I’d get bored. I’d miss a particular brand of relaxed chaos.
In reality, at this moment a seven year old neighbor boy plants his tennis shoes and tosses his scooter in our flower (weed) bed and stares in to our front window. He and my son (who stands on our couch) are in a serious conversation through the grey mesh. My son’s telling him how mom won’t let neighbor boy play on son’s Gameboy Advance until son drinks his nutrition shake. They lament this in half sentences. Son goes outside and gently kicks a fruitless squash plant, a low jungle of large leaves growing from the rotting remains of last Halloween’s black painted pumpkins that threatens to take over our front walk.
Not sure why I’m inside on a beautiful sunny autumn afternoon. But I’m content to sit on a soft white chair in our living room, interact with my children when they need to show me how their lego structure looks now, look up every so often at reminders of winters inevitability, bright red and yellow leaves high up in a far yard and do my best to ignore sibling squabbles that will right themselves much better without my assistance.
I can’t claim any great productivity today, unless you count working a few minutes each on a couple writing projects, reading to boys in the morning, making lunch, giving hubby a shoulder rub, sipping decaf, eating chocolate, making plans to go to the apple orchard tomorrow or reflectively listening to Tracy Chapman, John Denver, James Taylor, The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.
Some days are meant for pajamas…

and dancing!