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Part of the routine is acknowledging the routine. Your kid pokes their head in the doorway after you’ve put them to bed, their expression a sort of unconscious weary defiance, like a stepped-on ant that still crawls in circles, clinging to life, and you lead them back through the house, an acknowledgment and a refusal. You tuck them in again, knowing that this isn’t the last time, but that there will be a last time, some time. And you kiss them on the forehead and tell them you love them, even though you’ve already told them that the first time, and a million other times, and nothing would have changed that fact. You say things that don’t need to be said, because they don’t need to be said, because sometimes things not changing is the news.
This works for many things. The view from your window that you’ve memorized but will forget someday, and wish you had a picture. The long battles that end not because they’ve been won, but because it’s impossible to find new ways to describe them. The song that you attach to some vital moment in your life—playing on the radio as you drove home in the dark, alone—you have to fight not to contaminate it with the everyday, keep it special. You spend your adolescence railing against the idea of routine, and conformity; your twenties doing anything, usually dumb, to escape it; your thirties and parenthood welcoming it like a warm coat in winter. And then, you simply accept it, a sign that you’ve lived long enough to see the seams, where the tape loops back around. You notice how new things are actually old things with fresh paint, or different names, and it fills you with comfort and powerlessness.
But some things aren’t new; they travel downstream alongside you—friends from college whose politics didn’t spoil, bands that never quite hit their peak again but still put out decent albums, bar trivia nights and dependable hiking trails and favorite breakfast cereals. Even baseball teams, sometimes. Even parts of baseball teams. Even parts of baseball teams that shouldn’t exist.
