Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
“All things change, and we change with them.”Please note that this blog spans a broad period of time. The intervening years have brought many things into my life, including divorce and remarriage. As such, some older posts reference a relationship which is no longer active. In context, however, the portrayal is accurate.
For many reasons, I have chosen to let entries such as this one remain in the overall continuity of the site.
We’re sitting by the edge of the pool, reading while Julia does her swimming lesson.
Sam: “What are you reading?”
I hold the book up for him to see.
“What’s it called?”
“‘Insomnia'” I tell him.
“Is it good?”
“Not really,” I say. “But it’s interesting.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about an old man who can’t sleep — that’s what ‘insomnia’ means — and he starts to see things.”
“What kind of things?”
“At first he can’t tell if he’s just hallucinating or not, but he starts seeing these waves of colors everywhere — around plants and objects and people. These glowing waves of color that only he can see. Eventually, he realizes that he can see people’s auras.”
“What’s an aura?”
That’s a harder one to answer and I have to think for a minute. I point to the lights over the pool, glowing. “See how there’s a glow coming off of the light that isn’t the bulb, but it’s actually the light spreading out from the bulb? Some people believe that people have something like that, a light that shines out from us. Some people say they can see them, other people’s auras.”
“Kind of like your shadow, only with light instead of darkness?”
My son. “Yeah, except a really bad person or an angry person might have an aura that is dark or part of it is dark. Some people say that the different colors of the aura tell what you’re thinking or how you feel or what kind of person you are.”
He considers this. “And that’s what the book’s about?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“Is any of that stuff true?”
“I don’t know, really. But a lot of people believe in it…”
—————–
I tell him about when he was a baby, back in California. We live in Santa Barbara which was (and, I suppose, still is) kind of a Mecca for the spiritual and mystic and lunatic fringe. I used to take Sam around with me everywhere, pushing him in his stroller up and down State Street. We went in bookstores and comic shops and record stores and everywhere.
It was my early days as a father and I was learning a lot. After only a few months, I’d already made the assumption that this very small little person I was spending all my time with was probably going to be my best and closest friend for the rest of my life. Or, at least until high school.
One afternoon, we were in a record store and I noticed that there was a woman staring at us. This was fairly common. Sam was a very cute baby, very engaging and charismatic, and I was used to strangers being drawn to him and telling me how cute he was and so on.
I was used to it . . . but I was also bothered by it. It put me into Batman mode pretty quickly, especially when a stranger would try to touch him or even ask if they could hold him. I gave off some pretty strong don’t-fuck-with-my-kid vibes in those days. I probably still do.
Anyways, there’s this woman in the record store staring at Sam. She hits my radar screen and I glance over and nod vaguely, moving up the aisle. She approaches and kneels down to look him in the face.
She seems friendly, dressed in that retro-hippie look that about 75% of Santa Barbara favors. Friendly enough, but there’s a touch of the maniac in her eyes and all conscious thought for me ceases.
She stares at my son for a long moment. Without looking up, she says “He’s very beautiful.”
I’ve heard that before. “Thank you.”
She stares for a while longer and then her face splits into a warm smile. She looks at me: “Indigo.”
This is a new one and Sam has green eyes, so I cock my head to one side. “Sorry?”
“Indigo,” she says, smiling and nodding. “His aura.”
Okay. It’s a rare event when I have nothing to say.
She smiles at me, gazes into his face for another long moment, and then wanders away.
I take a breath and head up to the comic book store. Better the freaks you know…
———
I tell Sam all about this, sitting by the pool at the Y. As I’m telling him the story, I have a flash of memory that kicks me back to a few years ago when Sam’s teacher came to the completely lunatic conclusion that he was ADD and therefore needed to be medicated immediately.
It was quite a battle and we had to put him through tests and counseling and evaluations in order to establish everything we already knew: He was a pretty good kid with a heightened emotional life and a very different kind of thought process than most kids.
So, rather than pump him full of Ritalin, we found him a different school, which made all the difference.
There was one point when his mother and I were battling over the issue of medication. She was open to the idea, if the evaluations and counselor recommended it.
I, on the other hand, was adamant that I didn’t want to drop a pill in his mouth and disrupt his personality just to make him fit in better. Even if all the tests came back positive, that Sam was chronically ADD, I was willing to open every other door besides medication . . . because the precious things about him were too precious and I couldn’t bear the thought of a pill blurring the emotional and creative features of the little boy I love so much.
I was online, doing a lot of research on ADD, Ritalin, misdiagnosis, over medication, and so on, when I came across a description of Indigo Children.
It was a nice break from all of the doom and gloom I’d been reading, but it didn’t help at all in the battles with Sam’s mom or the school. I don’t know how impressed they would have been by the general premise of aliens, hypereality, and the indigo shift in human evolution.
———–
All of this came back to me sitting at the pool with Sam: Auras and indigo children and a crazy woman from a long time ago.
Writing this, I remembered another piece of the episode in the record store. Before she left, the woman asked me what his sign was. Unfamiliar as I am with the ins and outs of astrology, I told her I didn’t know. She asked me his birthday and, after I’d told her, nodded and said “Leo.”
Not sure if that was good or bad, I replied “Well, I just call him Sam.”