ephemera

That's the word for all of these plateaus of being you are continuously reaching and tumbling off of. Ephemera. It's the language of transition. Methexis in Greek. The participle which divides and generates a relationship based on division. Think of the transitory state of all the still photos that go into creating a movie. Each frame is both an image and a division; the consistency of the whole relies upon movement and divisions the way an utterance relies upon the word and the word the sentence.

Your childhood is ephemera. Not because it's not precious, but because it's too precious. There is an archival issue holding onto the change itself, but it's precisely what we're trying so hard to capture. Your first words, your temporary fascinations, your first jump on the trampoline, your first forehead dent, the last day you were still small enough to wear your yellow dress, the cuteness of you wearing your mothers tank top as a dress, your fish and shark and bunny rabbit imitations, the sign language which comes and goes, your love of black olives, tattoos, lotions, toothpaste, and anything you can sit in, stand on or wear.

A participle is a non-finite verb. It is not affected by categories; not yet tied to mood, structure or gender. And while you are also not tied to any one mood, structure or gender, at the very least the participle anchors itself in language while we struggle to capture the individual frames in this paper flip book animation of your becoming. It's a beautiful tragedy to experience what can never truly be captured: the film role of these moments put together which keeps us continually in awe, in love and continually on the edge of our seats. 

It's difficult watching these precious moments scattering into time as quickly as we can weave our narrative nets to capture and rein them back together into some semblance of a story about the awesomeness of your childhood. But Sava, sweetie, it's not this. It will never be this--these blog postings, the photos and the memories. And it's precisely because of the ephemeralness of being. What we're trying to net is your wildness, the attitude that brings up such deep and tender emotions one moment, and leaves me wanting to shout obscenities at god the next. It's in the flashes between the words and the photographs. The furled brow or the new expression that flashes across your features. Your various state of undress. The foodstuff in your hand, sauces on your person. The anxious expressions of the household animals in your presence. The various odors we must track down. It's the orchestration of these occurring in harmonious simultaneity. Then it's over to make way for the next image we'll foreshorten into a story about this or that. And if there are gaps in our archive you'll have to be patient and remind yourself that it's the result of our absolute engagement in these flashes of perfection.

Soon you'll be talking and reading and borrowing the car, but for now it's transition after transition after transition. Soon enough the moments become minutes, the minutes decades and the memories become photographs and coins at the bottom of a box--concrete ephemera to fill the once of absolute wonder and movement, the dance of letting go and holding on and letting go.

It's exhausting to be in multiple frame-rates at once: watching the reel, capturing the breaks, playing the father, the employee, the student, the husband, the tenant, landlord, the co-curator of the Miss Sava Lue sort-of archival project, the exhaustee and  translator/bodyguard in your junior explorations. . . .

But I know it's important to try.

Love,

Dad