Upon watching a Milli Vanilli video

Let us discuss, without judgment toward Kendra's Youtubery, the following features in the Milli Vanilli video for "Girl You Know It's True," copyright 1988: 1. The suspiciously spandexy short pants worn, in contrast to the broad-shoulder-padded blazers. 2. How one member of Milli Vanilli is decidedly better at lip-syncing than the other. 3. That beret though! 4. The irrelevance of forgetting anyone's number anymore because cellphones. 5. Will we ever, ever know if Eddie is ok, despite the fact that he did the best for him?

*** This post is dedicated to my sister from another mister, Brandy, fellow girlchild of the 80s, who celebrates her birthday today.

We do not have just this moment.

At the end of Season 6 of "Mad Men," Don Draper paints a beautiful scene for the executives of Hershey. Draper pitches them on the meaning of a Hershey bar to a little boy, accompanied by his father, knowing that the wrapper would not misrepresent the contents within. The wrapper looks just like the bar. The promise of what would be enjoyed was almost as good as enjoying it.

Moments later, Draper crumbles and reveals this was an invented story. Draper was an orphan, raised in a whorehouse. It's a false nostalgia. He then shares the real sense-memory of consuming a Hershey bar in one of the rooms of his fractured past.

The Hershey Bar pitch is one of the most powerful in Season 6 and echoes "The Carousel"--arguably the best season finale in all of Mad Men stock.

***

Our tenant asked to borrow our can opener. We hadn't moved the electric one yet so all we could lend was our all-in-one corkscrew can opener Boy Scoutish gadget. He said he'd Google how to use it. I reminded him this was his Camp, Part II. This would be his first summer in a few where he would not be working at his beloved camp. "Don't remind me," he said, "Been having those 'no camp this summer' heartaches." He was having heartache over what was his Summers Past, over what was his Not This Summer.

***

We do not have just this moment. We do not register in our minds every time we see a tree: Look at that tall structure with its strong totem and its many arms and its fluttering green dangling appendages. What is that? Is it alive? Are there others like it? We have all the moments that inform this moment and we know: that is a tree with a thick trunk and abundant leaves.

***

They, the sages and the poets and the YOLO campaign are wrong about how we only have this moment.

***

We get to have this precious moment that is transposed by all the moments before in memory--some more foggy than others--and we get all the moments of the future that we can imagine in our mind's eye.

I am starting to lose memories that I once kept like aged photos tucked into a locket, strung around my neck. I am losing the crisp lines around faces and the context and the details are slipping through the holes of my pockets. Even though my recall is becoming poorer, somehow I am wealthier because I still get to live in the body with the feet that have run across these bridges, with heart that has beat for these loves.

Is that not a rich, rich life? What Creator crafted our consciousnesses so, that we have the capacity to reflect back on and project forward and to experience the presence as in a hall of mirrors?

*** And yet none of us are guaranteed another moment. So we live, trying not to rush through this one or to squander the next, because each one is as a hundred soft kisses, a thousand words, a million guesses as to how stupid blessed we are just to be.

4 pairs of Converse high-tops

We bought four pairs. You came into the world with four pairs of Converse hightop shoes. Daddy bought unisex colors: two sets of aqua (unisex? debatable) and two sets of black, because we didn't know if you were a boy or girl. But we were prepared with hightops, sizes 3, 5, 7, 9.

We didn't know how this would work, you joining us, no other family member for 1000 miles, Mama in grad school, Daddy working 3 jobs. When the nurses handed you to me, I couldn't tell if it was just the anesthesia making me shiver or if the great and profound weight of this new life in my care was making me quake. I was holding 8 lb. 1 oz. of beautiful you but the pull of gravity at that moment was much greater. Like a Mac truck had backed into my hospital bed and dropped a heap-ton of work and sleeplessness into my lap. Somehow--and I can't explain it because I think you have to experience it firsthand--a feeling washed over me that you were the only one thing in my life that I couldn't get out of, and yet we were going to be ok, you and I and Daddy, and that we were going to be so, so happy together.

I mean, for starters, at least we had shoes.

The first time I saw your Daddy walking up the hill of Schultz lawn, he was wearing Converse. They were red Chucks, the only appropriate choice for the man who captured my young heart.

Whenever we would go to visit your grandparents in Ann Arbor, we would visit Sam's to buy ourselves a new pair of Cons.

***

It's terribly naive to think that we should make this bulk investment in Converse for a girl who would not walk for another 13 months, but I suppose the shoes symbolize our naivete and our induction of you into our Converse club.

***

You put the last pair on today, the bookends on this shoe collection, and you complained that they were pinching your toes. It felt unfair, that you had outgrown these shoes that had once seemed so impossibly big without our even noticing it.

This, too, is a symbol of the invisible ache that your own growth causes the people who love you most in this world, and also of the wonderful shoes you have yet to fill that you do not yet own, in sizes we cannot yet fathom.