defying entropy

This morning my two-year-old daughter Imogen took all of the silverware out of the dishwasher basket, removed the contents of my hair styling drawer in the bathroom, and dumped a bowl of carrots on the floor. She is a wonder of entropy. My babysitter tells me that while the rest of the toddlers construct towers, Imogen waits and then knocks them all down. This behavior worries me slightly—that relatively-benign-yet-nagging feeling you get when your child isn’t quite up to the curve.

When I ask her about the crafts she makes at daycare, she says, “Devon made it.” Which is true in the way that an adult supervises toddler crafts. Does she not realize her creative potential, I wonder, her ability to put things together as well as take apart? I calm my fears by reminding myself she sits and listens to me read half of Giraffe and Pelly and Me by Roald Dahl; she has other talents.

While I was brushing my teeth, Imogen came into the bathroom and said, “Mama, come in living room and look!” She does this when she’s doing something she’s not supposed to. I braced myself, reminded myself that making messes was developmentally appropriate, not a plot to undermine my house cleaning.

She proudly pointed to three blocks stacked on top of one other. I raved.

I had a similar feeling once when I was in college, driving on my way to a volunteer job. I helped an instructor with English as a second language classes at a community center, though I should put helped in quotation marks. I mostly observed her technique and listened to the students’ incredible stories during the tutoring sessions I did after class. I wondered what I was doing there, especially on the half-hour drive to and from.

The route to the community center was dotted with small mercados and family restaurants. My favorite was a taco stand with a beleaguered sign that had eight small colored lights, only three of which were working. The bulbs looked sad and ridiculous, flashing like strobe lights, dwarfed by the text above them. When I passed them I thought, “I think I can, I think I can.”

One day when I passed the stand, I saw that the broken lights had been replaced, all eight flashing furiously. I let out an involuntary “YEAH!” and laughed the rest of the way to the community center. I was buoyed for the rest of the day, even when the incident lost something in translation when I tried explaining it to the ESL instructor.

Good fiction endings are supposed to be unexpected, yet inevitable. I think that’s because life is too.