Trying to Make Notes 6/25/2023

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

And again, we’ve come to the conundrum. I put fingers to keyboard today without the faintest clue as to where they may end up. I had some ideas at one point in the week but looking back on them, what I had was the equivalent to being in the kitchen and having sugar or salt. Sure, there is plenty of potential but unless you have a plan for them, there really isn’t much to be done.  I am desperately grasping right now to try and find what I was going to do with those teeny snippets.  I feel like I had a place in mind to go with them, but I can’t for the life of me recall it.  So here I sit looking at salt or sugar and hoping some sort of recipe comes to me but all that is hitting me right now is how much I’d prefer to order out. I suppose that would be a little something called plagiarism so, I keep looking and will hope for the best.

I read something recently about how though it’s important to savor those special moments especially with our families, that it’s also hard to know what is actually a good prospect for a moment to file is away in the memory banks.  We’re often so busy doing the work of living that we miss those special times, not seeing them until we look back on them. Then we are forever having the cases of hindsight being 20/20.  Take for instance just recently, my family went out for a night of fun bowling and playing games at the arcade.  My daughter is a sucker for an arcade and is absolutely giddy at the mere mention of going to one.  She played game after game being rewarded with only a paltry amount of tickets.  It is certainly something to behold to watch a child go and buy the most cheap and very nearly worthless tiny bits and bobs of a toy after playing a small fortune in games.  She surveys the gigantic stuffed animals and huge involved play sets though when she realizes she’d very nearly have play games for the rest of her life to be able to have enough tickets to buy them, she is oddly content to settle for small little whatnots that may or may not have enough quality to survive the ride home.

After her first round of games, she ended up with some cheap plastic trinkets, a plastic baton with metallic streamers and some furry tiger ears.  She proceeded to wear her tiger ears while we went to bowl and insisted that she was harnessing the power of the kitty as she called it.  She did a pretty good job walloping that ball down the lane. Well of course minus the one time she got carried away and her ball managed to jump into the neighboring lane, but I digress.  In the lane next to us, there was what seemed to be a young couple on a date. I noticed on more than one occasion they were chuckling at my child shaking her fist in the air at a single spare pin or when she would attempt to spread to me the “power of the kitty” so that I could bowl better.  I couldn’t help but imagine this couple in a few years with an animated little miniature player of their own.

I couldn’t help but feel like maybe, this evening of aimless entertainment should be something that I should be marking down.   I feel like one day, decades from now, I am going to want to remember watching my daughter plop in the most disconcerting of fashions, a heavy neon pink bowling ball in the middle of a lane and it taking a good ten minutes to barely roll all the way down to pins that it barely has enough force to stir much less knock down.  There is no way for it not to be endearing though. To watch her excitement when she does well. Even the lane on the other side of adults had to give her all the high fives when she made a strike.  Then there was the inexplicable moment when my child began to make the gesture like she was throwing cash around and began singing about money. Don’t ask me what that was about because I haven’t the foggiest.  I do know that all the folks who were congratulating her found her money dance hilarious to the point that a few of them very nearly fell off their seats.  So, my daughter is amusing if she is anything.

I probably should jot down these moments. Where total strangers are smiling at my child being her typically adorable self, I should probably write it down as a remember when type of scenario for days in the future.  But I’m too busy discussing bowling techniques and which arcade game to play next with my daughter. We’re too wrapped up in getting kitty power with tiger ears and trying to get the claw game to grab extra tickets (which I am convinced that it is incapable of doing).  I am too busy living these moments to think about jotting these times down for posterity.  I am torn as to whether I should be noting all these beautiful occasions or just trying my best to embrace them as they come.  I don’t think I can truly live my life if I am too busy trying to document it.  It is indeed a difficult fence to straddle. I want to remember all these fun times but, it is hard to make notes when you’re trying to bowl with kitty power.  Only so many notes can be taken.