In Baby Attach Mode

Earlier this evening I was driving home. BlueEyes, Little Brother and my husband had fallen asleep in the car and I was listening to the Mars CD from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium album. I realized that the first time I listened to this album was when it had just come out in 2006 and I was cutting a zillion brains on the cryostat. I remembered that this was just around the time that I started realizing that perhaps the grad student in the lab that I liked having coffee with might be a better match for me than the person I was living with at that time.

I also listened to this album a lot driving through California before going to the first ever SfN meeting I would attend in San Diego in 2007. The grad student I like hanging out with had now become my boyfriend.

I also listened to this album after the next SfN in San Diego when we drove to San Francisco. The grad student that had become my boyfriend was now the father-to-be of the baby I just found out I was pregnant with.

I looked around in the car at the grad student that had become my husband, that unborn baby that was now a 4-year-old and the sun that was setting outside.

I had just read in the paper about how a nursing home had people with dementia listening to songs from when they were young and how that comforted them. And I pictured myself there in the future, listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers once more and I realized all the more how ridiculously fleeting and fragile everything is. And as The Red Hot Chili Peppers sang that “the thing we need is never all that hard to find” I realized that all of that was in that moment right there sleeping in the car with me.