Diapers. Legos. Destiny.

Tonight, the world is shaking.

Across this tired planet that I call home, principalities and powers are stirring, fighting, flowing. World greats are thinking, speaking, pushing. Powerful events are taking place, their effects rippling to the corners of every continent. Big things are happening in the high places of the world.

And meanwhile, I am changing the diaper of a two-year-old.

Oh, children.

I’m not going to lie; I’ve had moments of supreme irritation with the shenanigans of the members of younger generations. They’ve got their quirks and immaturities, to be sure. But the thought that’s overwhelming me as I straighten out Jaelyn’s little pink dress and wrap up her soiled diaper for disposal is not that I’d rather be out in the great battle of life than taking care of her. Instead, it’s that yesterday, I was her.

And tomorrow, she will be me.

As I help Jaelyn up and lead her across the hall back into the childcare room, I realize that what I have on my hands is a bundle of promise.

A person.

I think about who I am, where I’ve come, and all that I have ahead of me; I think about my passions, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my nightmares. I think of the awesome immensity of life bearing down on me with all its brilliant promise and anticipation as I step over the threshold into adulthood. I think about the burning desire I have to seize the world by the throat, to stand apart, to make a difference. I think about the precious opportunities I’ve had to prepare to take the one desperate shot at life I’ve been allowed.

And I realize that just a breath ago, I was Jaelyn. Totally dependent. Helpless. Vulnerable.

As she sits on my lap and begs me to play my dangerous lap games with her, I look into her laughing blue eyes, and I can see seventeen brief years into the future.

Jaelyn, a woman. Standing on the threshold of adulthood, overwhelmed with the immensity of life and all its brilliant promise and anticipation. It almost takes my breath away to come to the startling realization that that moment is only an eye blink away.

Jaelyn is my tomorrow. The world’s tomorrow.

But now, she’s in my hands. For these two and a half hours, I literally hold the future of the world in my lap.

I look around the childcare room and see the children playing. Today, blocks and puzzles and those evil little mini-Legos that are almost impossible to clean up. Tomorrow, the world.

Oh, I am insufferably proud to be a babysitter. I play patty-cake and I-spy and this-is-the-way-the-cowgirl-rides with the very destiny of this world. It’s a dangerous game.

“Miss Bowwwwwwck,” booms little Joshua. “Can hold, Miss Bowwwwwwck?”

I can’t help smiling as I pick him up and roughhouse with him. He’s tough. Laughing, he lets me turn him upside-down and wrestle with him and tousle his hair.

Tomorrow, Joshua’s going to be a man.

“Hello,” a high-pitched voice reaches my ears from underneath the plastic yellow picnic table in the room.

I look down and see my one-and-a-half-year-old cousin Titus lying on the carpet beneath the table, looking up at me and repeating over and over, “Hello, hello.”

“Hello, Titus!” I reply. “Whatcha doin’?”

Titus’s name means hero.

Foreshadowing?

Oh, I love those children. I love them, their whole generation, even when they’re pushing my buttons to the max and when I’m setting my teeth because what they’re saying—or doing—or playing—is driving me batty.

How could I not?

They are my future!

Tonight, the world is shaking. And part of its future is here in a Red Oak church building in a little childcare room.

With blocks.

And puzzles.

And evil little mini-Legos that refuse to be cleaned up.

Sun Terror (the End of Fun)

“Alfred!” I cried in agony, stretching out my hand to my fellow sufferer. “Help me!”

Even as our fingers neared each other, a frothy wave came crashing upon us, washing us through briny torture, separating us once again. Through the salt in my eyes, I could see Alfred staggering up out of the water, spluttering out, “Bertha!”

I would barely make it to my knees, cough the water out of my lungs, and lunge for him—only to be swept away for the hundredth time. Again and again, Alfred and I fought to reach one another. Again and again, we tumbled in the waves.

Had an observer—a prospective savior—happened upon us on that day at the beach in Oxnard, California, several years ago, he most likely would not have looked twice. He would have kept on, holding his fishing pole or the leash of his dog, and left us locked into a horrendous cycle of brackish ruin, making placid footprints in the damp sand on his way.

Poor doomed Alfred and Bertha.

Why on earth my brother Scott and I chose those names, I cannot say. What I remember to this day, however, is that those hours in the sun playing our self-invented game “Alfred and Bertha” were the most fun I had spent at the beach in (it seemed at the time) my whole life. Oh, how hilariously funny Scott and I were. How witty our games! How sophisticated our senses of humor!

If only we had known what real torture was only hours away, waiting to seize us with true agony.

That night was the fatal night. July 12, 2004.

Like a bottle cap blocks fizz from bubbling over, I wrote in my journal back then (at eleven years old, I was inordinately proud of my figurative language), something blocked our happiness by the end of the day.

We all have horrible sunburns.

The Sunburn I suffered over the next few days well deserved a capital s. Anguish burdens the word sunburn in my mind—because of that Sunburn.

Why do we call it sunburn? That wrathful blanket of searing torment that cuddles the shoulders and the back and refuses to be removed by any hand, no matter how skillful—it seems to me that sun terror or death by sun are better terms for the matter. (Actually, ultraviolet overexposure is pretty good, too.) But sunburn? How cursory, how incomplete, how trivial. No. The truth of the matter is that I almost died by Sunburn seven years ago.

(And Aloe Vera! That sniveling, sneering, lying messenger of false comfort, that bringer of icy stickiness that subsides into sickly warm slime—it doesn’t even deserve a paragraph in this blog.)

You ask, Dr. Montgomery, for a blog depicting something that stopped me in my tracks. In return, I give you the Sunburn.

First there was fun.

Then there was Sunburn.

Bernie Tivanticus, un-Teddy Bear

It almost isn’t fair to call him a teddy bear. Actually, calling Bernie a teddy bear is something like taking a glance at the Great Wall of China and saying, “Nice fence.”

As I fondle this one of my oldest, most special friends, my stuffed bear Bernie, I remember days when I fondled him with much smaller hands. I remember wandering around the house with Bernie comfortably settled over my shoulder or on top of my head—other teddy bears can’t do that—and I remember life as it was when Bernie first came to me, when I was a little girl growing up in southern California. I can still hear the song of the waves in the morning and the crunch of salt under my sandals, and I remember the way the sun used to plunge into the ocean in the evenings with a shower of glittering diamonds that hurt my eyes when I looked at them. I remember the less beautiful parts, too—things like feeling awkward and insecure and in-between and immature—but Bernie never minded those things. He’d keep sitting on my shoulder, calm and comfortable as ever, as kind as if I were one of those perfect girls my age in my treasured American Girl catalogues.

Bernie’s lived a long life, and a colorful one, since those first days at the beach so long ago. When I grew a little older and (in my eyes then) quite a bit more clever, the space beneath my bed became the animal kingdom of Varamath, where all my stuffed animals resided in orderly society despite the dastardly felons who at times attempted to disrupt the peace. (An old, almost unwanted Christmas teddy bear and a cheap stuffed bulldog fair prize were the criminals, if I remember correctly.) None other than Bernie held the position captain of the queen’s guard. He valiantly defended the safety of the queen and the kingdom of Varamath on the whole against villainous bears and bulldogs alike; and in fact, he was so esteemed in that country that he signed the honorable Constitution that I wrote, and the Amendment that came after it. His name at that time temporarily became Tivanticus. I considered myself extremely clever.

Now years have gone by, and Varamath is gone forever (though I still have that ridiculous “Constitution”). My home is no longer minutes from the sparkling Ventura waves. I am an adult. I have grown up and away and out of a good deal that I once held dear—and yet Bernie stays with me. He has survived rakings through my stuffed animal collection for multiple de-junkings and deep cleans and a life-shaking move from California to Texas, and he is not leaving me anytime soon if I can help it. My excuse is that I’m keeping him for my future children, but even I don’t believe that when I say it. I’m keeping Bernie for me, because Bernie is mine and always will be mine.

At nineteen years, am I too old to be unable to endure parting with a stuffed bear? Arguably so. I am probably also too old to keep a stuffed bear in a special place in my closet where he can always look at me and I can always look back at him for a friendly wink, and I am most definitely far too old to bring a stuffed bear onto a university campus to show my friends right after I read them a paper I wrote about him.

But I don’t care. Bernie never was just a teddy bear anyway.

Epilogue

For those of you not in my Writing and Publishing Nonfiction class (ah yes, my multitudes of readers!), this is a very slightly tweaked version of a paper I wrote for the said class, according to a writing prompt calling for a paper about any object that had significance to the student. The day the paper was due, I really did have Bernie on campus with me, stuffed inside my purse; and when I finished my turn reading my paper aloud to the class, I took him out and showed him off. The others in the classroom were generous enough to say awww and laugh with me. Hats off to them!

One final note: please don’t anybody judge me for my un-teddy bear. It is my personal belief (and here I know I’m treading dangerous waters as a nineteen-year-old, but I think most will agree) that we all have our sentimental little memories, whatever form they may take. It took a prompt for a nonfiction paper to push me to reveal mine.

What’s your Bernie?