I watched you eat your first strawberry today, rather I watched you gnaw it into submission. The strawberry never stood a chance against your gums and your burning desire to taste anything but the milk of your mother. Your pudgy hands held it tight and still they did not wrap all the way around it and your cheeks and lip slowly turned red and the juice dripped out of the side of your mouth and down you chin and onto your pants and you never stopped staring at me. I wonder about that stare. At times I will look at you and you will look back and your grey eyes don't break from mine and what are you thinking? Who is this man? I wonder what your memories are like.
What do you know. Do you know how much I love you? How when I lay still at night and think of you and your mom, you tucked against her body, your fat little hand resting on her breast, do you know that I fight back tears. Do you know that? Is that what you know? Is that all you know? Is that enough?
And still you stare at me. And the wind works through the new leaves on the tree above us and your mom is talking to me, and yet I am not longer there. I have pulled back and the moment has broken apart and it is no longer my life, but it is the life of your grandpa who you will never know and your grandma who was always young and now seems old. And I see your hands quiver as you suck on the fruit and I see your hands quiver as you let go of mine and go into the world and I see your hands quiver as you bring life into that world and I see your hands quiver as your life ends. And still you stare at me.
This is small, this moment. You won't remember it, and likely, if I had not written this, I would not remember it. Your first strawberry. But these moments, more than any other, seem to hold the eternities and maybe being able to hold and understand these moments, not momentous ones, is what separates the gods from us. Maybe the gods understand it the joy and peace the mundanity of the eternities bring.
