Chelsea Dyreng

A couple days ago my two year old came in from the backyard beaming. “Look, Mom!” he said. “Look what I found!”

He showed me a daffodil that he had plucked from the yard. It was the first (and so far the only) daffodil in the yard, and he was over the moon about it.

We talked about the flower for a minute. We smelled it (I LOVE the smell of daffodils!) and we found a little vase for him to put it in.

“Can you draw a picture of me holding the daffodil, Mom?”

Sure!

So I drew a picture of Levi holding the daffodil. When I was finished I let him look at it and he grinned from ear to ear.

When his older brother and sister came home from elementary school the first thing he wanted to do was to show them the daffodil. It was the first thing he mentioned to my middle school daughters, too, and also to Scott when he walked in the door. Levi’s excitement over this humble little flower was inextinguishable. It was pure Joy. It was as if it was the first time he had ever seen anything so lovely and exquisite.

But then I thought about it . . . it had been about five months since flowers had been growing in our yard, and it had been 12 months since the last daffodil. Since my son was almost three years old, that is a third of his life! He probably doesn’t even remember seeing a daffodil before.

Ironically, I planted that daffodil for him. Three years ago in the fall, before I even knew the gender of the baby in my belly, Naomi and I planted fifty daffodil bulbs around our yard. “These bulbs won’t come out until around the time the baby is born,” I told her. “It will be like a birthday present for the baby!”

Little did I know how much Joy it would later bring him!

I wish I had coined the phrase “Surprised by Joy,” but it was actually C.S. Lewis. It is the title of the book he wrote about his conversion to Christianity. Then later (after he wrote the book) he married a woman named Joy.

I guess you could say he had a thing for Joy.

I have been “Surprised by Joy” many times. As a child, Joy was like a constant river running through my life. As I got older, Joy became slightly less consistent and more elusive. Eventually Joy took a second place to Work and Worry. Which is fine, since Work and Worry have their purpose, too. But now that Joy is not a constant visitor she really does take me by surprise sometimes.

Like the time when I was about 35 and we went to the beach. I hadn’t really “played” in the ocean for a while, since it always seemed that I was too pregnant or too nursing or too tired . . .but on this day I commandeered the boogie board from my kids and went out on the waves by myself. I had so much fun I started laughing out loud. All by myself. Just me and Joy.

Joy visited me again last month when a friend challenged me to take a photo of nature every day and post it on Facebook. This challenge couldn’t have come at a more dismal, colorless time of year. Usually North Carolina is very busy with animals and plants, but not so much in January. I had to be creative to try to find interesting things to photograph and I was getting a little discouraged.

Then one day I was on my way to a friend’s house when I turned the corner saw the most amazing thing: thousands of birds swooping and swarming around a field. It was so unbelievable I stopped the car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road, my mouth hanging open like I was watching a flock of angels. I took a couple photos and then just stood in awe and watched the birds fly as one huge, chattering organism, curving and floating, twisting and cavorting through the air, then landing and carpeting the field, then taking up their wings and doing their shape-shifting all over again. It lasted only about five minutes and then they flew off into the forest. “Wait! Take me with you!” I yelled after them, running down the street. (Just kidding, I didn’t really do that.) But the experience really did raise my pulse for the rest of the day.

[I learned later that these birds are starlings, and what they are doing is called a “murmuring.”]

Like my son Levi, I wanted to tell others about this experience, and when I did they would always mention Hitchcock’s The Birds movie (which I watched when I was an impressionable little girl and was probably one of the first things that started to suck Joy out of my life). But I didn’t feel fearful or apprehensive at all when I watched this murmuring. I only felt filled with Joy.

I just love how Joy sneaks up on you like that.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger–something better, pushing right back.” Albert Camus

When I was young, my dad owned a gas station, car wash and fireworks store called The Red Barn.

(This was the only photo I can find of my dad in front of his business.)

I was probably 9 or 10 years old when I overheard my dad saying that someone had been syphoning gas out of the cars down at the station.

After several decades of serving customers my dad saw all kinds of little tricks that people used to try to cheat the system. Sometimes he would find fake coins in the coin box at the car wash, and once he even found a quarter that someone had drilled a hole in and hooked a wire to so that they could dip the quarter in the coin slot to “pay” for the car wash and then pull it back out. It must not have worked well because the wire jammed the coin machine, putting it out of order.  By the time my dad discovered the problem, the thief was long gone. When he dismantled the coin box and discovered the theif’s little “fishing pole” he was so impressed he mounted it on the wall in his office. My dad always had a lot of admiration for creative ways to make (or save) a buck.

But syphoning gas out of cars was not creative or cute; it was a serious problem. We had employees who lived down at the station and we couldn’t afford to have someone to stealing gas from them. I asked my dad what “syphoning” meant and he described to me every fascinating detail.  “You’ve got to be careful, though,” my dad warned, “Once I swallowed a mouthful of gas and I thought I was going to die!”

(Let’s make it clear that syphoning gas has the potential to cause your internal organs serious damage and as a rule is not recommended.)

Sadly, the identity of the mysterious Red Barn Syphoner was never revealed.

***

Twenty-nine years later I am pouring myself some cereal. My kids have already served themselves and vacated the premises, leaving behind cereal bowls scattered out on the table in various levels of completion. Some bowls are empty, some are still-half full.

And then there is this one bowl, filled to the very tippy-top rim with milk. I look at it and frown. There is so much milk that if I move it at all or lift it to pour it out, milk will spill all over the table.  I shake my head, disappointed at the waste, and trying to decide whether or not it is worth it to go find that child and drag it back to the table.

Then I look down at the bowl of dry cereal in my hand–in want of milk–and I remember my dad and the Red Barn Syphoner.

I take out a straw with a bendy top and put one side in the over-flowing bowl of milk, hold my bowl of cereal off the edge of the table, and situate the straw so that the end pointing to my cereal bowl is lower than the end that is in the milk. Then I bend down and gently suck the end of the straw. Like magic, the milk comes pouring out of the straw, just like a faucet. I happily wait while my bowl fills, and when I have all the milk I need I lift the straw out. I am so proud of myself that I poke my head out the door and yell to Scott who is in the yard, “Scott, I just syphoned milk in to my cereal bowl!”

“Great!” He says. “You should teach the kids!”

And I did.

Because you never know when the stuff you learn from your parents will come in handy.