Television is not good for babies. Apparently it’s confusing for them to process a two dimensional world when they are just getting to know the three dimensional world. I read this around the time Cary was born and it made me start looking at things differently. During that summer after he was born, I would walk him around the pond in his stroller, trying to see things through his brand new eyes. There was the one particular corner of the pond, where a large weeping willow dripped into the pond below. I’d turn the corner, keeping my eyes on the branches, sweeping down like a beaded curtain. I’d try to take in the second by second shift of the pendulous branches against the background of townhouses, contained in what Monet called the “envelope of light.” I’d pivot around the corner, keeping my eyes on the willow, watching all of the layers interact and change. And then I would notice my place in it, my interaction with the elements and how we were all moving and changing as one moment slipped into another and another and another. Sometimes the air was thick, and shimmered gently in the sunlight. Other times it was thin and almost absent, the grayness of the light rendering it invisible. My favorite times were when the sun was coming in at a low angle in the late afternoon, and its shafts would illuminate the tiniest particles. The other time was the late night dusk. Brussels is far enough north that the sun wouldn’t set until almost ten at night during the summer. That time felt so magical to me. There was a group of Turkish men that would meet almost every night to play some sort of card game on blankets they would spread out on one of the wider banks of the pond. I knew it would be dark soon, but it made me feel like the night and the day were somehow suspended together in perfect harmony.

A few days before we left Brussels, I took my tiny video camera out and recorded that walk. Unfortunately the footage was lost a few months later in a hard drive crash, but the act of putting myself behind the camera, laying it down in my mind in two dimensions I suppose, cemented the experience for me in a way, allowed me to capture those two dimensions as a reminder of the three, so now I can watch it in my mind, and do my best to enter it. You can’t capture all the dimensions, but maybe you can capture the feeling.