Life These Days: A Sprinkle Bun

The other day, I was sitting in my car, in the parking lot of one of the kids’ after school activities and from the comfort of my own car, and hiding behind my book, I saw another parent, who I’ve seen also has three kids, opening up his trunk.

His trunk was shockingly parallel to my own. It could’ve actually been mine! Was I in  the wrong car? Overflowing with snacks, flattened paper towel rolls unrolling hither and thither, balls, umbrellas, green T&T bags flapping in the wind, clothes for various seasons, probably having been there long enough for a younger child to have aged up into them, the sound of a child crying from the inside, the grunt of trying to heave up and cram the stroller in there. I don’t actually know this family, and yet, strangely, I feel very much like I do know this family.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.

I was in the shop yesterday, and at last I caught Jon at the right time. I have the Pilot E95S in the now-discontinued burgundy, but I’ve been itching for a friend for her, in the form of a black E95S, which I now have, at long last, finally acquired. I immediately inked this one up with Sailor Sky High and I can’t tell if I regret the bright blue choice. Too peppy? Too optimistic for a serious pen? They are both Japanese, so maybe not. I don’t know. Analysis paralysis extends to all aspects of my life, and contemplations of this trivial sort are a delightful distraction from more consequential thinking.

But of course, I love it! The pen, that is. The closing mechanism, the small size, how it fits in my pockets, I can just whip it out for a little doodling, which is the perfect amount of scribbling and nonsense for my limited brain power.

Last week, Junia had a strenuous day of appointments and car napping and errands, and so we both had a sprinkle bun, which is a metaphor for life. Is it? Maybe not. The good stuff is in the grind and the swing and the tramp of it. The friction that creates the pearls, that agitation that unearths the real treasures. The cookie crumbs and foot crumbs are everywhere, but one day I will miss the piles of laundry and the rampage through the house looking for the overdue library books and the piles of dishes in the sink and the demands for snacks immediately following a clearly not pleasing dinner and the thousands (thousands) of socks and the shocking news of a presentation for tomorrow for which assistance is required and for which several weeks of preparation in class has been given, and the tiny hands and the soft cheeks and the gurgling and the giggling and all of it.

It’s all a balance, and every part of it has its own tiny glory. I placed an order for Mindwave stickers, which are these sheets of Japanese stickers, and which are notoriously difficult to count and sort through because the lines on the invoice and the numbers on the sheets (if they are even on there) don’t always match and if you order too many of them (what is even too many?) it can get tedious, and sometimes I, as the person who is ordering, don’t take that into account when I see those little anthropomorphic pandas drinking coffee or tiny little humans making Japanese exclamations while in various body postures. Jon, who received this order at the shop called it “an insane order” which is both foreboding and very exciting. “One of the worst orders I’ve ever seen,” he says. Yum!

Yum! This is the way to get through life, to celebrate these small joys: a new pen, bananas on the stairs left by (presumably) the child that doesn’t play Mario Kart whose brain (so they say) is a sponge, once again beating Jon in the Wordle but I can’t gloat too much because I just placed an insane order of stickers, and enough Japanese stickers to get us through any life emergency and into the next millennium.