Here's to the hopeful...with a nod to wispy wonder

"A good woman will be more impressed with what you want to do than what you have already done."

That's a pretty impressible missive, don't you think? It was sent in to Walker Lamond by a faceless and random Ryan, for Lamond's book, Rules for my Unborn Son. I like it. I have my own blindingly quirky ambitions and so the sentiment resonates rather hopefully with me. It might be, in fact, one of June's best attributes, the fact that she embraces these wispy, abstract, dreams of mine. They can be cloud-like and ephemeral at best, which is kinda why I like them...also kinda why I don't understand why she tolerates them so lovingly.

I want to write books that never get written, travel roads that might never see my shadow, and get frighteningly curious about the impossible. June watches patiently. More often than not she joins in. I'm lucky.

I suppose that those wispy doings have taken her places she might never have imagined going, but it's probably kept her a little off balance as well, or a lot. She's a gamer of the most admirable kind, a true believer in loving under the best and worst conditions...like her daughter, she just smiles and offers her arms and the affection found in their grasp. She surely must think the matrimonial equivalent of, "Oh, Daddy," on at least as many occasions as the Zedder does. I love the earnest enthusiasm that she wears like a coat on a cold day, it’s inspiring. The wind blows from many different directions in my house and she never shields herself from it, she flies kites.

I’ve had notions of driving across the country, Route 66 perhaps…of moving to places where oceans shimmer in the sun or mountains rise up from wildflower fields…where roads just end. I’ve considered travelling to every single baseball game on a schedule…every one. I’ve got note pad stacked on top of note pad, all of them full of ambitious but stagnant stories. There is artwork half scratched into crowded sketch books, and a resume of half completed educations and interesting contract after curious contract. I embrace change and run, no sprint, from the stable, unimaginative, resignation of everything being exactly what it is, nothing more…nothing magical. I don’t believe it, not for a second. It will be June and Zoey who roll with those punches unless I happen to change, which thirty-something years of shoulder shrugging and head shaking prove unlikely. I was told by a 44th street psychic that the day I stop doing exactly what it is that I do, the weirdly wondrous way in which I do it, is the day a lot of people will stop believing in those things that they can’t see. I brushed the compliment off and wandered out into a late afternoon Hell’s Kitchen glow looking for my next big adventure. June just held my hand and laughed. She doesn’t ask a lot of questions, but she almost always seems to have the most timely of answers. Her freckles help.

So I keep thinking up things, keep saying You know, I’d really like to…, and keep meaning to get around to this or that, and she keeps smiling, and wrapping willing arms around me and waiting for whatever happens next. I don’t know if that’s a typically woman thing, that ability to just trust and support, or if that’s just simply one of June’s best features, either way it’s reassuring that this life isn’t just made for the practical and the logical. It’s still, on occasion, a place for dreamers and impossible ideas.

All that typing from that one not-so-silly quote… I wonder if it’s universally true? Ladies? Can a man's history matter less than his hopes? I like thinking that the world works that way.