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Tbrady

Tracy McArdle is the author of Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa and Real Women Eat Beef. She spent twelve years in New York and Los Angeles as a publicity executive at such companies as Turner Broadcasting, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures Entertainment before moving home to New England to wr...

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The Bulldozer

Tracy McArdle

Today I was reminded how little wonder there is in my daily life.

It was a non-descript moment, 11:08 a.m. on a Wednesday moring.Wednesdays are my day at home, and while I usually entertain visions of napping, hiking, or visiting some fantastically fun children’s outing type place with my young son, I usually end up doing laundry, washing dishes, buying groceries, paying bills, and looking up to realize it’s four o’ clock, there’s no plan for dinner and it’s not as nice as it was a few hours ago….sound familiar?

But today we stopped at the nursery down the street.Spring has leaked slowly (ever so slowly) into our corner of the Northeast, and I was determined to buy some annuals for the planters I bought yesterday, an exuberant splurge on the way home from work.I was also determined they not sit empty in the yard through the summer and into October.

As I stood pondering the pansies (large or small petals?Purple or yellow?How much neglect would it take to accidentally kill them?) I heard the unmistakable groans of a large piece of machinery.My son, who just turned 15 months, was transfixed. He froze, his mouth opened and his eyes wide as silver dollars. There it was, right in front of him in its full glory, a life size actual replication of the yellow machine in so many of his books, the big yellow fantasy creature of his tiny dreams – a real, live bulldozer.

Actually, having become somewhat of an expert on these machines due to my vast number of hours logged reading about them in his picture books, I recognized it for the standard size front end loader that it was.

The expression on my son’s face was hard to describe, and I felt a wave of bizarre envy wash over me.He was fascinated, excited, joyful, curious, surprised and delighted all at once.He was – forgive the sentiment here – full of wonder.

The bulldozer’s operator was kind enough to beep the horn and wave, small actions which fueled my son’s excitement to the point I thought his face would burst with unedited pleasure.How long would it be, I wondered, before he was unable or worse, I guess, unwilling to demonstrate such pure feeling?At what point in our development do we learn to take things for granted?When do we start to feel self conscious about feeling so deeply?When do we learn the art of boredom?Is the aging process so devastating to our innate sense of wonder as to render it hopelessly atrophied by the time we’re old enough to read about what it must have been like?

Waving to the operator, I tried to think of the things in my adult world that had the bulldozer effect on me.The occasional perfect scene in a movie, the ending of a really good book, the first endless kiss of a lover, the cardinal alighting on the birdfeeder after a summer storm, a hearty laugh shared with a true friend, the first night you hear the spring peepers, that rare day when you lose track of time in joyful leisure rather than time-sucking tasks...

Remember to wonder.It’s what made us human in the first place, remember?