Late

Tonight we had dinner at my in-laws'. We got a late start, and by the time we left it was way past Milo's bedtime. Andrew sat in the backseat for the drive home to attempt to keep Milo awake. (In our experience, if he falls asleep in the car, he has a harder time falling asleep in his bed.)

Andrew did everything. He sang about five green and speckled frogs. He tickled. He poked and made faces. But the heavy eyelids were winning, and every blink seemed like it would be the last before sleep set in. Just a half mile or so from home, we lowered the windows all the way and turned up the radio.

And as we turned on to our street, the wind blowing in my hair, "Stayin' Alive" playing loud and proud for all the neighbors to hear in an attempt to keep my baby awake for a few more minutes, I thought to myself, "This is what making a memory feels like."

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Procrastination is a fine art.

When I was sixteen, I was invited to attend a summer program called Missouri Fine Arts Academy. To be invited, you had to, you know, be into fine arts and all. And I played the violin. And I wasn't half bad, either. At MFAA (that's what we in the biz called it) we not only practiced our own craft—the program was not just for instrumentalists, but also for vocalists, dancers, painters, and all those artsy types who had been rejected by the popular kids at their schools—we also had to, I mean got to experience other areas of fine arts.

I took some kind of 3D art class. We could sculpt with clay or create wire things or do papier-mâché. I decided to make a nearly-to-scale model of a violin with papier-mâché. I made a chin rest and a bridge, and painstakingly cut out f-holes. I toiled over the scroll and spent way too long just getting the curves of the body to look right. At the end of MFAA, I had almost finished it. Everything was painted and actually looked like a violin (to my astonishment). But it was still in pieces. And it had no strings.

My plan was to take it all home, get some wire for the strings, and assemble it. Then I wanted to hang it on my bedroom wall. I thought it would look really great against my tulip wallpaper. “I'm going to finish this project,” I told myself. “This isn't going to be like all those other projects I start and never finish.” Like the quilt square from summer camp when I was ten, or all the photos I never put into albums.

And of course, what did I do? I put the almost-finished violin in a box on my closet shelf. And I never looked at it again. It's still there, I imagine. And my mom wants me to come clean out my old stuff so she can finally rip down the twenty-five-year-old tulip wallpaper. So perhaps I'll take that violin, get some wire and some glue and put the damn thing together.

Or maybe I'll move it to a closet shelf in my own home and think about it again in another ten years.

And maybe I'll actually get around to typing the rest of the stories from our vacation one of these days. I promise it won't take me ten years.