not so much about ravioli

i was enjoying my trader joe's ricotta spinach ravioli and was thinking about blogging how fabulous it is with one of their heirloom tomatoes for a classic tomato-basil-olive oil combo (and i am now anyhow) but then what's really more interesting than the tomato-kalamata olive oil combo (which again, is quite "delish" as owen's learned to say) is that owen isn't eating any of it. he's pushed his plate aside to play with skarloey and then jumps off his highchair to go get red car and mr. the king and is having cross-dialogue between thomas & friends and cars and then tells me, "mommy, owen wants something else to eat." and i say, "what would you like?" and he says "the station" which means he's done eating here and wants to go back and play with all of thomas' friends, including the station house and cranky the crane and the sodor bridge. and his play amazes me. and i burst into tears. because really it's all too much--right now owen is just right before my eyes becoming this brilliant strategist, this creative genius and just watching him is amazing and i find myself keeping a running list of phrases that surprise me (yesterday, after waking up from a nap he looks at our bedroom wall and says: "that wall is kind of olive green." and i say, "why yes it is!" and he revises his statement with confidence: "mommy, that wall is olive green.") and i want to capture it all on video because i don't want michael to miss a moment (while i was cleaning out the kitchen junk drawer he was sorting his own "junk" and had made piles of like things--three plastic lids lined up: two tupperware, one sippy cup; two mickey mouse icons: one balloon weight, one metal watch case cover; and six plastic forks and spoons in a row). and i know that's the hardest part of it all. it's not me here, walking the dog while owen toddles, jumps, spins behind, ahead, in the bushes ("that's where bees live mama.") because i've figured out how to make coffee, feed the dog and get strawberry and oatmeal going. it's that michael misses it. and then these pictures from bergen pop up on my screensaver slideshow (on my laptop in the kitchen--where our phone used to go) and they're the "now" part of the "here, now" pictures that are my favorites. and i can't stop crying because i remember how after mommy ordered her lemon drop martini and daddy ordered his beer owen ordered himself: "eplemost" (applejuice -- the good kind in the glass bottle, not that icky sugary stuff packaged for kids in the green box) and then said "tusen takk" when he got a green straw in his glass. and it all seems so ridiculously fabulous and yet it all seems to come at such a high cost. the "there" cost. and i want to say all these things at once: how much fun i'm having deciding what train we'll get next as we flip through the "thomas yearbook" and notice that rosie is a new lavender train and no, we don't yet have annie & clarabell; how wonderful it is to have six different melons to choose from at trader joe's and how nicely the orange flesh melon--a not-too-sweet cross between a cantalope and honeydew--cleans up the tomatoey-olive oil left over from my 5-minute ravioli meal; and how we still get the teeniest trace of ocean mist when we set off for our morning walk and how this reminds me of virginia woolf and how i'm looking forward to reading now that i'm actually getting a little bit of evening to myself. and these are the things that make the "here" doable, make "here" where i want to be right now. but then, "here" all seems flat without michael here. and i know it's that the last few days of twelve or twenty days are the hardest. how, just like when owen changed our lives it wasn't the stuff like missed movies and fancy dinner dates but how you'll never ever be able to go to the bathroom alone again or the unbearable guilt and failure you feel when you don't write five pages a day while he's napping. so it isn't about figuring out how to walk and chew gum while he's gone, but just walking and chewing without michael. and now this post has spun out of control, partly because i want to say it all, always, and still be able to do it all, and owen has run in, suddenly dropped his trains and screamed wildly with the joy of figuring out exactly what it was he had wanted: "mommy! owen wants carrot cake!". and as kurt vonnegut would say: so it goes.