It just happened again. My teenager texted me that he was coming home from the city on the 6:15 train, and could I pick him up because it was raining. So I waited from 6:05 on, idling the car at the station for 20 minutes before I thought to wonder, by “on the 6:15,” had he meant that he’d arrive at 6:15? Or that 6:15 was when he had pulled out of Penn Station?
I texted back a carefully-phrased question: “Where the heck are you?”
“On the train, duh.”
I suppose if either my husband or I were regular commuters into the city, we’d have developed some kind of system about this long ago. Something complicated, like looking at the final line of a schedule and saying “I mean, arriving at 7:05.”
But that still wouldn’t work with teenagers, which God knows (since God made them) are the most self-absorbed life forms currently on the planet.
I complained about it all to my brother, but he just laughed. “It’s a matter of perspective,” he said.
“Easy for you to say,” I replied. “But you had teenagers, too, not so long ago.”
“No, I mean literally, it’s all about perspective.” He’s a physicist, and he used to tell us at dinner how some of Albert Einstein’s deepest thoughts were precipitated by trains – for example, what a passenger on a train going the speed of light might look like to someone on the platform. When Einstein has idle thoughts about trains, it leads to revolutionary new insights into the nature of space and time. For me, it leads to overcooked dinners and grumbling about certain people’s thoughtlessness.
“Remember that Thanksgiving we talked to Dad about the moon?” my brother asked.
“Man, oh man, I remember how we tried.”
I’d spent much of that night in the kitchen but when I came into the living room, you could have cut the tension with a knife. My brother, proud of his newly-minted PhD, was trying to explain that although the moon always looked the same to us, it did in fact rotate once a month, on its own axis, as it orbited once a month around the Earth.
Dad refused to believe him. “I don’t see it,” he said.
“It’s like this, Dad,” he said. “Say you’re the Earth and I’m the moon. I’m facing you. But when I move around you, if I’m still going to face you, I’ve had to turn myself.”
“But the same side is still facing me, so how is it you’ve moved?”
I got a flash of insight. “Dad, you be the Moon. In fact, let’s get up from the table and give it a try. Jerry, here on the carpet, you’re the Earth. Dad, out here, you’re the Moon. You’re facing each other, right?”
“Right.”
“Now, Dad, don’t spin and I’ll move you around him a quarter of a circle – are you still facing him?”
“No, I have to turn.”
“Aha!” said my brother. “You see? You have to rotate while you orbit!” And for a fraction of a second, I saw some kind of realization flicker across our father’s face. Then it faded. ‘No, I just don’t see it,” he said. It never did work on my Dad. But it still paid off for me.
One stormy day, when the rain was coming down in buckets, my toddler wanted to know why we had to leave the house in the rain when he was just about to fall asleep on the couch. I had gotten nowhere with any of my explanations: “Because I can’t leave you alone in the house ever since you climbed out of the playpen,” or “Because I have to beat your brother’s kindergarten bus to the stop.” Where had I seen such stubbornness, before? Aha! The nub of a thought dawned in my head.
I tried a new explanation, this time from my toddler’s two-foot-high point of view: “We need to go out so you can see your brother when he gets off the bus, and he can see you.”
“Oh. OK.” And to my amazement, he stopped screaming and went to get his boots.
Now, that toddler was coming home on the 6:15 – or whatever it was. Suddenly my phone buzzed again with another text, “Sorry. Arriving to you 7:05.” I had to smile. Maybe we had both learned something in all those years.
