I am the new father of a 10-year-old girl. For the past couple months, I’ve been walking with her to the school bus stop every school morning—nearly a block, all uphill. Depending on whether she and I are having a slow morning or a fast one, we might wait up to ten minutes for the bus to arrive. Or we just get there in time to see the bus turn the corner and head toward us. But if we get there with time to spare, there’s nothing to do but pay attention to each other.
Grace loves umbrellas. Last week it was raining but warm, so she took her umbrella and held it over her head while we waited, trying to keep her coat and her backpack dry. I heard the rain dripping onto her umbrella and it reminded me of the movie Totoro, which the two of us watched together between Christmas and New Year’s.
I asked her whether she remembered the scene with Totoro, Satsuki, and Satsuki’s umbrella. Grace remembered, and she started to laugh. I asked if she remembered how Totoro reacted to the sound of rain dripping on the umbrella. Immediately she launched into an imitation of the electrical charge that pulses through Totoro’s body when he hears the rain drum on the umbrella.
Grace has a flexible face and she likes imitations, and her imitation of Totoro channeling the energy of the rain just cracked me up. I laughed, she did it again, we both laughed, and then the bus came.
Later that day, at Wednesday Worship, I gave a message on Tolstoy’s fable, “Three Questions.” He concludes that of all times, the most important time is now, because it’s the only time when we have any power; of all people the most important person is the one we’re with, because we never know whether we’ll ever be with any other; and of all that we might do, the most important thing to do, is to do good to the person we’re with.
It’s terribly difficult to live that way, I think. And it comes at a cost to timeliness and productivity. But with Grace at the bus stop, it’s easy. It’s the five minutes in my day when I’m sure I’m spending important time doing the most important thing with the most important person.
