Shhh, let the story unfold…
Imagine someone is telling you this grand, epic story, and you keep impatiently asking but what happened next or how did it end? Yesterday, we started with toddler apocalypse, out of a good morning came chaos trying to get ready to go to another toddler’s birthday party, I DON’T WANT TO through streams of tears and anguished cries, one hour of this and both of us saw our nerves fray into thin whispery strands barely hanging together. But this is a special day I kept saying, today we’re having dinner, we’re going to ask Evan to be your godfather.
Later that night, Evan and Nina came bearing a clarinet, a real one, that he had bought for its mouthpiece and was going to turn into a lamp, but decided Tin might like it. Like it? He was crazy over it. Marline was here too; we has asked her to be Tin’s legal guardian when we adopted him. We popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and everyone was about to cheer when I asked Evan if he knew that Marline was the legal guardian for Tin and that we felt good knowing that if something happened to us, she would be there for him to love and raise him as we would. I said we would like Tin to have you as a mentor, a man who can show him what it is to be a man, teach him about music, and be his godfather. That’s when we all started crying – tears all the way around the table. When we composed ourselves, he said, “I’d be honored.”
So here’s the story, a little boy was born in Gary, Indiana, and then he was adopted into a family in New Orleans, Louisiana, and he channels Louis Armstrong, and the first instrument he recognized was the clarinet and the first musician he wanted to hear again and again was Evan, and we asked Evan to play at his first birthday party, and he said he would do it for free because he had been adopted and he was flattered, and then Evan started coming around, bringing a butterfly kite (or bagash kite as Tin called it then) or a book or a stuffed alligator that is now called Evan, and something in the way they connected, these two souls, made it all seem so natural and organic. Then I was walking on the beach in Nantucket with a dear friend who had a child alone and she had said, the best thing I did was ask a man friend of mine to be her godfather, and I said, oh, and that would be Evan and then I talked to Tatjana when I returned home and she said of course, it would be Evan, and there we were, Tin walking around with his big clarinet that Evan had just brought, all of the adults that will care for Tin being very sentimental at the table with glasses of champagne, and we toasted to Marline’s, “This is what makes life beautiful.”
If you think about it, how often I rush to fill in the details of my own story instead of letting them unfold organically, you realize that the universe provides a better story than the one we were about to write for ourselves, so shhh, don’t be in such a hurry to get to the end, let the story unfold… .