I am a winter hued girl. You may not know this about me. The combination of my light blonde hair, blue eyes and pink toned skin makes me look best in cool colors like ice pink and all blue tones and white, but not so good in colors like yellow, cream, bubblegum pink and other warm toned colors. I’ve known this for some time and I’m sure to some extent, it was some marketing campaign that taught me this to get me to throw out half of my wardrobe and buy new cool colored clothes. But I think it holds true. Often the shade of a pink shirt, as much as the style or the fabric, will either complement my skin tone and the blue of my eyes or clash with my natural tones. By genealogical odds, Finn is similarly colored and by some odd departure from his Mexican roots, James also has cool toned skin and eyes. We are a pale, blue eyed family.
This weekend, we painted the one room in our house, our bedroom that had not yet been painted at least once since we moved into our house 2 years ago. I painted it a darker blue-ish, grey-ish teal inspired by a t-shirt that my sister Meg gave James in a similar color. I really like it. I mean, this does not often happen. I usually buy paint by impulse and decide on a color that vaguely matches some color in my head that I saw in a magazine once and often looks not at all like how I imagined it would look. This is not always a bad thing. Our living room and Finn’s room ended up looking really great even though they came out far from the rooms of my imagining. Our kitchen, on the other hand is on its third paint color and I still hate it. This could have something to do with the fact that I generally hate our kitchen, the linoleum, the tendency towards grime and the mismatched cabinets. But all this is to say that I painted a blue room because it was a color I really loved on James and then as I looked around our house last night and saw the aqua of the front room, the various greens of the kitchen, Finn’s room and the library and the mud color of the entry and the dining room, (more of a grayish brown than a chocolate) I realized that our entire house is cool colored, painted in tones that would look good on us in a shirt. Maybe this is some subconscious desire to frame us all in a complementary light or maybe I have so trained myself to be drawn to cool colors in clothing, that I am now drawn to the same colors in paint. But either way, I have a very aqua and green house. I’m sure that in not so many years, these colors will be the mustard yellow and pea green of my parents generation, disgusting, overdone and out of style. I will have to move on to a new cool color; I am a winter after all. But I will be sad to see Aqua go.
I feel guilt come over me when I realize that I have been looking at a non-work related e-mail for ten minutes now and probably missed things that I should have been doing to do my job. And then I flip over to my work e-mail and there are no new messages and I flip over to my calendar and our database and there is still nothing new to do. And so I bring up my gmail again and read another paragraph of a beautiful essay written by a friend who is trying to get a job where she can help people discern their spiritual and occupational direction. I wish that I was doing something so connected and important. But then I feel guilty again and try to find something work related to do and I sigh for what I am wasting and what I am wanting and for all the things that eight hours a day could accomplish.
Yesterday, Finn passed a big milestone, the first Birthday. Unless he has uncanny memory skills, he will not remember a thing about it. He won’t remember me lifting him out of his crib in the morning and doing a jig around his room singing “happy, happy happy birthday to you to you to you-oo-oo” like the way the waiters sing at Mexican restaurants. And he will probably not remember James driving him up to Panera bread, as they do every Thursday to hand him over to my mom for the day and where this day in particular she will tell everyone she sees that her grandson is one today and allow them the joy of celebrating with her by giving Finny something for free--a cookie as big as his head, an ice cream. He will not remember how his new habit of pointing to everything but especially things in the air or on the ceiling will obligingly seem like he is showing how old he is now, how many years he has been here-how cute we will think that is. And he will certainly not remember how my dad, his grandpa held him on his lap at the Cheesecake Factory last night and laughed till his face turned red and he had to cough for the effort of it while Finny slapped at the lit candle and then the whip cream and then the mound of ice cream in the sundae that the kind waitress had brought him as yet another free treat to celebrate; how he smooshed the sundae in the direction of his mouth and then repeatedly turned towards dad to see what was so funny and reach up with whip creamed hands to touch his mustache and his nose. I’m sure he will not remember how in the car on the way home, while he shrieked in his car seat approaching a full blown break down, James and I discussed how to best handle small children in restaurants. And at the end of the day yesterday, I stripped Finn down to his onesie, changed his diaper, cranked the dial on the stone angel that played music and swung him into his crib on his belly. He watched me put things away in his room and then let his head fall down on his sheet where he couldn’t see me below the bumper and he was asleep shortly after. He won’t remember it but I will, the whole day. And I guess that’s the point. We make a big deal every year on at least this one day. And though eventually he will start to understand and demand presents and parties, yesterday was really more about us, about making my mom proud and my dad laugh, making James and me grateful and remembering how one year ago last night, Finny came out of me into the world and changed everything.