Gatsby Moment

I wait for my Word program to load. I change my font to Helvetica. My eyes stray from the screen to the toys on the floor, to the Legos built on the living room sofa, to the things I need to clean or store or trash, but I haven’t made time to do it. Instead I type words on the screen. Instead I weave together memory and experience. I add just enough space for imagination and dreams, the inspiration of the soul, the reason we put our feet on the floor in the morning rather than staying in our warm beds. What I create will be a mystery even to me.

A soundtrack plays in my head before I even realize the connection between the moment and the music. It’s a song of longing, a song of loss, a song of things to come that will seem empty without the love of another person. It’s a song that played during the original version of The Great Gatsby movie before it was removed under dubious circumstances when the movie was released to DVD. I’m sure it had something to do with lawyers and copyrights.

In any case, it was there. As I looked into my child’s face this morning after breakfast, when he squirmed into the crook of my arm and smiled with the brightness of a sunrise, this song echoed out of the recesses of my memories:

“What will I do without you to see me through, what will I do, what will I do, what will I do?”

I could see Gatsby’s hopeful glance at his beloved Daisy over mountains of white roses that he bought to please her. Daisy’s obvious enjoyment of the flowers, face buried in the blooms, masked the tension between them. She was married to someone else. He had created his own wealth and built his future on the dream that he could get her back. And his dream was starting to become reality when she gathered his roses into her arms. Then this song plays over the montage of the next few scenes, a harbinger of the direction their relationship and the remainder of the story would take.

I read The Great Gatsby for the first time in tenth grade English class. Groans, sighs and general apathy towards an assigned novel that permeated through the classroom did not tarnish my enthusiasm. I fell in love with Gatsby. It was introduced at the perfect time for my sympathetic teenaged melancholy to color my reactions to Fitzgerald’s great-American-novel with blues only the Jazz age could replicate. I could imagine a love as big as Gatsby’s dreams. I could drift along rivers of memory with this character and long for something I didn’t possess, hope for something I couldn’t quite reach.

But why this song this morning? What was the connection between Gatsby looking at Daisy, so close and yet so far away, and my own face regarding my son’s – a face at once familiar and entirely new like a sunrise, bright and shining upon a day that has never occurred before and will never again.

Dreams. My thoughts are interrupted as Ben pulls away from me and runs upstairs to get ready for the day. I am surrounded by the song as I follow him.

“What will I do?...”

This week is effectively the end of our summer. Ben’s school starts in mid-August and until then we have enrolled him in summer school to prepare him for a full day of kindergarten. Summer school starts next Monday.

I turn around when I hear his laughter. Sesame Street is on television and I find Ernie blindfolded with his arms extended toward Bert. I quickly understand the game when I see Ernie’s feigned confusion toward the objects he encounters, the bushy eyebrow, squishy nose, floppy arms, and Bert’s eventual exasperation. “It’s me!” Bert shouts. Ben and I laugh aloud. I intentionally silence the sounds from my voice so that I can hear my child. His laughter is contagious and joyous. It is life-giving water running over a dry riverbed, skipping, rolling, jumping, delighting in its own movements, oblivious to its surroundings.

Just like Daisy. She may have recognized the love in Gatsby’s eyes, expected it to be there, but she moved past him like a child bouncing through life. Ignorant of the ways her behavior impacted others. At times nurturing dreams of love, at others drowning all possibilities, Daisy was an uncontainable torrent of rushing water. Gatsby reached out his hand and was swept away.

“What will I do?...”

Ben’s green eyes hold endless possibilities within their depth. He will have his own dreams and follow a path different from mine. I cannot hold him back. He is my creation yet separate from me. School will start and the world will barely take notice. His stories are only beginning to be told.