Waste a minute or ten (in the dark of this day your dirty hand is everything).

I sneaked back to our bedroom.

A long day away, home finally. Baby fed, lying on the floor next to oldest siblings playing Christmas songs on stringed instruments, kicking and glub-sing-drooling along. So, safe and happy. The third child, the two-year old, cheerfully drawing pictures of minotaurs or food or something. In other words, all children occupied.

So I sneaked to our bed. The bed in our dark room on an early December evening. I sprawled out my fatigued body and even more tired spirits and closed my eyes for…how long might I get away with? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

Two minutes later

”Dada?!” A squeaky voice cautiously hollered from the hallway. “Dad? Where are you Dada? Dad?!”

[he has recently began casually referring to me as “Dad” in addition to the Marcel Duchamp-inspired “Dada.” ]

”Um, yeah,” I wearily called from the darkness. “I’m in here.”

“Are you in here Dad?” he queried again, as I watched his semi-silhouetted form cross the bedroom doorway and feel his way toward me.

”Yep,” I said. “I’m in here.”

“Oh.” he said, finally making his way to bed’s edge and trying to drag his stubby body up with all his upper arm strength.

“Do you want to snuggle?” I asked, reaching over to assist.

With a grunt, he rolled over the top of me, ignoring the question and breathing heavily after the ascent.

He rolled to his side and backed himself against my body, resting one arm atop mine and seizing a couple fingers with his messy sticky grubby little fingers.

“Are you sleeping?” he whispered loudly. “I don’t want to go to bed.”

“I’m not sleeping,” I said. “I was just tired and a little sad and wanted to close my eyes for a few minutes.”

”Oh.” he said with epiphany, and I could hear his eyes wide open in the dark and felt his hands resting and gripping mine and his little smelly body smashed against, and he said nothing else;

we laid there, in the dark, for ten minutes. Silent, awake, in the dark. His grip on my hand held steady, the fingers of his other hand slowly danced a tingly pattern on my arm. He said nothing else and I could feel his eyes and thoughts silently skittering around the dark room and occasionally roaming outside through the window where a little moon peek-a-booed North Pole headquarters.

Finally, a head turn and murmur. “Shall we get up?”

”We shall,” I grunted back. He disentangled himself and rolled off the bed, trotting through the dark to the open door and the light down the tunnel-hallway.

I followed, and pondered my squandering of the last ten minutes. Minutes I could have used for something valuable or productive.

But they’re gone, and all that is left is the sticky grime from the hands of a two-year who just interrupted my deserved reverie.

That’s all was left, and then I washed my hands and faced the rest of the day and the dark night ahead. Nothing left of that ten minutes. Nothing, except a fleeting experience that neither one of us will probably even have trace memory of in a week’s time.

What a waste.