The Last Time

I have to admit, I'm a little intrigued by the dead birds.  And the dead fish.  And all the other animals that seem to have decided to pack it in this week.  They, the people who name such things, have dubbed it the aflockalypse.  Is this really the beginning of the end of the world?  Hmm.  Probably not.  I really believe that the Mayans ended the calendar on 12-12-2012 because it had to end _sometime_ and they got tired of chiseling the dates into the stones.

But it does make you wonder.

There's actually a pretty thin line separating me from the naked guy with the crazy hair wearing a sandwich board proclaiming 'The End Is Nigh'.  I exist in a permanent state of impermanence.  I expect that whatever is there now soon will be un-there'd.  Yes, it's a somewhat taxing and depressing way to live, but the good news is that I'm rarely surprised when things DO end.  But that's just the big stuff.  What about the little things?

I was at a friend's house recently when he announced that he had to give his little girl a bath.  Bathing the kids was a routine that I both loved and despised.  Some days it was just a mundane chore; others, it was a welcome respite from the cares and worries of the adult world - you know, the one where you can't splash around.

I invented a tub game called squirty telephone when we first moved to London.  The children, having left families and friends and cherished toys back in the US, were miserable.  On the first or second night, while giving them a bath in the Savoy's commodious tub, to distract them from the misery brought on by having moved a quarter of the way across the world to a rainy, grey city where everyone seemed to be in a terrible hurry and the food was lousy, I hit on the idea of pretending that the hand shower was a telephone.  Making a ringing noise, I put it to my ear and turned on the water, and squirty telephone was born.  For the next two years I had to soak my head every time I gave them a bath.  We finally moved into a house that has no hand shower and they soon gave up baths.

I honestly can't remember the last time I gave them a bath.  It just stopped without warning.  I suppose I thought I would be bathing them indefinitely.  As much as it was a pain in the ass sometimes, I miss it.

The children have stopped waving to me from the front window.  I don't know when, or why, they just have.  I don't remember the last time they did, precisely because I didn't KNOW it was the last time.  If I had, I'd have made a special effort to remember it.

A facile philosophy would suggest that you should live your life as if every day is your last.  That's just not possible, I think.  Life does, in fact, get mundane.  Routine.  Even boring at times.  You take things for granted.  You assume that your children will always be children.  That your friends will always be around.  That the things and the people that you love will always be in your life.

And then, swiftly and without any warning at all, they are gone.

When was the last time you gave your kid a bath?