My body is way fancier than me.
It simply HAS to have the latest flu, while it’s still pret-a-porter, before those knockoff hags get their greedy little paws on it and shovel it everywhere. But I’m not a heartless Cruella DeVille about it, I share it freely with my family. Why, just last weekend we were all in the car for a Saturday drive, zombielike and gently wheezing, simply dizzy with designer disease. How jealous the people passing us looked in the grocery store parking lot, with their clear vision and sinuses, as we blearily opened and closed our eyes for several minutes trying to remember where we were planning to drive next.
Where we drove next was a tiny store by the water in upper Brooklyn that sold blind boxes - limited runs of small custom figures, each one wrapped in opaque foil and placed in a little cardboard box. The idea is that you don’t know what you’re going to get - a general illustration is on the outside, but the exact figure that you unwrap could be one of many options. It’s like a pack of baseball cards. Or children.
It didn’t occur to me until I first saw my entirely newborn daughter that this was the one I was going to be taking home, because in every other situation involving a Major Life Decision there were variables to consider. The location of an apartment, the durability of a sofa, the miles-per-gallon and color of a car - all weighted with pros and cons created many options to compare. But children are a blind box situation - a little surprise that grows into a very big one.
There are those kids that look like what they’re going to look like when they’re older when they’re younger. (#worstsentenceever) When first introduced to the world, my child was an infant doppelgänger of Chris Bauer, the actor who portrayed Sheriff Andy Bellefleur on the HBO television show True Blood. There was, and I feel statistically sound saying this, no possible way to determine who she is now from where she was at that exact moment.
“Is she all ok?” my wife asked. She was still on the delivery table and had sent me from my entirely useless spot next to her head offering color commentary on her miraculous achievement to taking assessment of general health and finger/toe count to report back to her from the bassinet the nurse had placed the baby in.
“She’s great.”
“Ten fingers and toes?”
I counted again. They were really small, and we hadn’t had much sleep, and my first count had been eleven.
“Yep. Ten of each.”
I told her that I was absolutely not going to show them to her until after she had seen the actual baby, but I had taken the photos that Zoe had requested. I was surprised they let me bring my camera into the delivery room. I took a few full body shots and some close-ups of the toes. Now I was just standing there, watching her move, languidly and dreamlike, arms kind of waving in the wind.
“What’s she look like?”
“She’s perfect.” This was my Yelp review. This woman had made a person and I wanted her to know that without any kind of doubt she had done the absolute best job.
“I know that, but what’s she look like?” my wife asked, demanding a higher level of detail.
I considered our newest family member closely. “She looks like a gritty southern lawman who enjoys beer and deep fried foods. But…little and sleepy..”
“Aw. That’s great.” my wife replied. They had finally come in with the drugs after 15 hours of organic pain management, and she was what I’m gonna call “ok with that”.
Life is a blind box. I mean, we make choices but who really knows? “Things” could “go one way or the other”… we look at situations from the outside and try to determine where they’re going but there are SO many factors to consider. I’ve given up on predetermined notions; I’ve watched a tiny grumpy bayou sheriff grow into a spectacular young woman, a book that most certainly could not have been read by its “cover”.
So I look at all life like that now. For instance, our viral-loaded Saturday drive ended up to be a glorious day, a true stay-cation, where we each chose two blind boxes and then opened them over gluten-free Thai food before heading home to go to bed at 8:30 PM. Hera got a farmer, dressed as a chicken. Zoe got a cute cat that had been altered by radiation into a giant crab monster.
But I had chosen a box from a series of capybaras who had oranges on their heads. Seven of the possible figures were round, as the creatures were sitting down or eating or lying on their backs, but there was a different one where a capybara had become a bodybuilder and was standing up flexing. (Blind box toy design does not at all benefit from the question “why?”) The flexing figure was tall and not round, so I figured if I lightly shook the boxes, one would sound different from the others.
Science. And it worked. Our muffled laughter at that restaurant table was the best medicine we could have taken, besides actual medicine. We all ended up laughing ourselves to sleep on a day that began as uncomfortable as they come. I’m not suggesting that indeterminacy equals hope, but from now on I’m going to “lightly shake” every new day to better my odds. You never know.
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