Ma

The Chicago Bears won the NFL's Super Bowl XX by a whopping 36 points. I lived in Chicago at the time with Bears' Fan Husband and our three children.

The average Super Bowl game is about 3 1/2 hours long, start to finish. An NFL game clock runs for 60 minutes. And in that one hour the actual play time is much less. Teams have some "control” of the clock. For example a team ahead near the end of a game may use ‘run’ plays as opposed to ‘pass’ plays in order to ‘eat up the clock.’ Or a losing team can figuratively ‘slow the clock,’ in hopes of having sufficient time for scoring opportunities by always keeping the receiver in a position to easily step out-of-bounds, thus stopping the clock.

The Bears were a fun team to watch that season, especially that final game. Our older son, who was then 12 years old, was friends with a couple of brothers who were 11 and 13. The brothers' father, a high school teacher, recorded the Super Bowl game that day, as did many fans wishing to replay and enjoy the highlights of the event. The boys’ father then edited the recording, removing every moment of the game that was not actual playing time. And I don’t mean just editing out commercial breaks, but he also deleted timeouts, huddles, penalty calls, replay review time, official’s explanation of penalties, breaks between quarters, halftime/final two-minute warnings, clock running time between plays and any analytic banter by broadcasters. What he was left with was a crystal clean 15 minutes of actual play time, from the snap or kick of the ball on each play, to the end of the play as the player caught the ball, dropped the ball, was tackled, intercepted, stepped out of bounds or the play was whistled dead by an official.

It sounded good in theory, but what remained was something that was undecipherable. There was no lull or space to allow your brain to make sense of what you were viewing. The brothers brought it over to share with our son, Bears’ Fan Husband and me. We enjoyed a hearty laugh at the inanity of it.

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My youngest grandchild is 13 months old. During the academic year, I am by his side for 7-9 hours, two days per week, while his parents are at work. Excluding his twice daily naps, I eat meals with him. I play with him. I tend to his every need. He has my full attention.

He’s smart, fast, and always on the move. I try to take advantage of the rarer times when he’s less physically active, like when he just wakes up or, when he begins to tire after two or more hours of constant movement. During these precious moments, I read to him, sing or do quiet activities. A recent favorite is when the two of us sit near his living room window and listen to city sounds. I whisper near his ear, “Listen. Do you hear the birds?” as I make an imitation of the bird I hear. He sometimes tilts his head, but otherwise is still. He is absolutely silent. When he hears the sound I’m describing, he beams and clenches his fists excitedly, but utters not a peep as he waits for me to describe the next sound.

He can distinguish the sound of a jet plane, a favorite of his. He hears the planes before I do, what with my 62 year old ears. He watches my eyes, waits for me to hear it and when he sees my eyes light up, I whisper, “Yes! I hear the airplane.” Then he lets loose with a long, “Oooooohhhhh,” as together we watch the aircraft pass overhead. I comment on its size, any visible lights and noticeable colors, but most airplanes are white or gray on the bottom, which is usually the only part we can see. His house is in one of the flight paths to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Sometimes between the sounds of planes, cars, birds, dogs, strong winds, the patter of rain, distant trains or emergency vehicles, I’ll talk of the towns from where the airplanes might be traveling, Richmond Virginia, New York City, Tokyo Japan, Frankfort Germany, Sydney Australia, and Timbuktu, Mali, are some names I mention. I tell him what the current weather is probably like and the time of day in the town. When he’s older I’ll point it out on a globe.

Last week he was darting about in his playroom as I was sitting on the floor near him, when he suddenly toddled over and put his head to my chest. It’s an unusual thing for him to do. I put my arms around him and gently held him as I leaned back against a cushion. He kept his head still on my chest. Concerned that he was ill, I felt his forehead to see if he was warm. His temperature seemed normal. “Are you okay?” He hadn’t stirred from his static position, when I noticed the concentrated faraway look in his eyes. Then it occurred to me that he was listening to my heart beating. I said quietly, “LUB dub, LUB dub, LUB dub.” He looked up at me and smiled. “Do you listen to Mama and Daddy’s hearts?” I asked. He said, “Dada.”

He understands only some of what I blather all day long. And while he loves to babble, he can only speak a handful of words. Mama, Dada, Bub-bub (bubbles), ball (ball), ball-ball (balloon), bye-bye and nahm-nahm (food). He and I depend on eye contact, facial expressions and hand signs for much of our communication. His joke is to put a piece of fuzz or scrap of paper in my mouth and say, “Nahm-nahm.” I reply with feigned shock, “No! That is not nahm-nahm. P-tooey!” He laughs and repeats the action, “Nahm-nahm.” I laugh and repeat, “No! That’s not nahm-nahm! Yuck!” We both laugh.

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This past Christmas, we visited our older two grandchildren who live out-of-state. It was their school holiday break and our 7 year-old granddaughter, had a reading assignment. It consisted of thirty different ways or means of reading, of which she was to choose one each day. Each assignment required a minimum of twenty minutes time spent in the carrying out of it, for example, “read to your dog,” or “read to yourself, then describe what you read to someone,” or “read to a grandparent.” I helped her with her task during our visit. One day I urged her to select the “ ‘read’ a picture book” assignment. We looked at the drawings in the book, “Journey” by Aaron Becker and discussed the story the drawings imparted. We went through the book a second time, pausing on each page, saying nothing, just looking at the drawings. When we closed the book, she was silent, thinking, I guess. Then she told me that her teacher had told her that books with few or no words could still be challenging books, and also that anyone had the right to read a book and decide later that they knew a better way that the story could be told. 

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I saw a great foreign film the other day on Netflix, a Japanese film titled “Departures” (beware if you look for it, for there is also a completely different series with the same title. My film features a cello player.) The film uses what the Japanese call ‘ma’ which mean emptiness or nothingness. For instance if I were to clap my hands the time between the claps would be the ‘ma,’ a pause, a breather, ‘nothingness’ time. There were scenes in the movie when, for seemingly no particular reason, it would break and show the main character, an adult man, playing his child-sized cello in some beautiful outdoor open space. The wind might be blowing tall grass around him, or a river might be winding its way nearby. Those breaks in the film’s story symbolized his ‘ma’ time, ‘ma’ necessary for him to properly absorb the job transition he was enduring (at least that’s my interpretation, but then I’m not a film critic.) Even though it wasn’t what you’d call an action-packed film, these breathers were a pleasant break for me, allowing time to think, to absorb, to digest.

Maybe the appreciation of ‘ma’ only comes with age? I don’t think so. I think even rambunctious, energized babies and chatty, imaginative children enjoy lulls, time for quiet, time to absorb, time to inhale, time to replay, time to discern, time to refine, time to think... nothingness time.

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