Life Without the Monkey

Beloved children,

Earlier this year I was unpacking your bag after you’d taken a weekend excursion to Grandma and Grandpa’s, when a single thought raced through my mind:

Oh no. They forgot the monkey.

In the rush of gathering all your things—no small feat, given your capacity for sprawl—they had remembered everything except that white plastic monkey, your trusty lullaby machine of almost five years.

I took a breath. In an emergency, I tend to become resourceful, not panicky. Grandma and Grandpa would be visiting in three days. We could make it three days sans singe.

You must be wondering what the big deal is. It’s just a monkey, right?

Wrong.

Let’s contextualize this. When Mom was first pregnant, we received a gift from your aunt’s sister that was somewhat out of the blue. We hadn’t expected a present from her, and we didn’t have any sort of sound machine on our baby registry. When we unwrapped this lullaby device, Mom and I both thought, “Huh. A monkey.” There was no way we could have conceived then how integral to our lives that plastic primate would become, how deep in our consciousness its melodies would carve themselves.

Since the day you were born almost five years ago, my son, we have used that monkey for virtually every nap and every bedtime. It is, literally, a lifelong companion. The device has a timer option where it stops playing music after 20 minutes, but we read early on about the importance of keeping the sleep environment consistent all night long. So, from day one, we’ve let it crank out tunes sun-down to sun-up.

I hadn’t done the math on this until recently, and when I did, I could hardly believe the numbers. Even if our calculations exclude naps (which would add a whole bunch of lullabies), you’ve listened to that machine for over 1,700 consecutive nights. Each song is about 2 minutes long, and you’re in bed on average 11 hours a night, giving us a figure that boggles the mind: That monkey has played you approximately 575,000 songs. Since the machine cycles through five individual songs, that means you’ve been exposed to the same five tunes 115,000 times each.

I hope no mandatory reporters are reading this; I’m pretty sure there are laws against subjecting a child to that amount of anything. What effect does that have on one’s psyche? Will you wake up one morning, à la Dexter’s Laboratory, and instead of having a vocabulary reduced to “omelette du fromage,” only be able to speak in “Twinkle Twinkle”?

Amazingly, we’ve had spells where you, dear daughter, asked for even more music. For the better part of two years, you’d only go to sleep if I were singing or humming “You Are My Sunshine.” So the monkey music would be going, and then I’d do my best to superimpose “You Are My Sunshine” over the top of Brahm’s melodies. It was no symphony, let me tell you. But then, in one of those silly bedtime twists, you gave up on “You Are My Sunshine” one day and instead wanted to hear “The Wheels on the Bus”—not just any version, though. It had to be by Raffi, on Alexa, and on repeat. That’s right. We’d been injecting your brains with 100,000 repetitions of the same five songs all your life, and now you were asking for another song, in an entirely different key and tempo, to play simultaneously without ceasing. Uh, what?

The “Wheels on the Bus” shenanigans eventually faded, and now you’re back to one song at a time. Even so, the notion of a music-free bedtime is entirely foreign to our household. It’s hard to imagine life without the monkey.

And yet, when you returned from Grandma and Grandpa’s, that was precisely the reality we had to face.

Your first night back, it was around 2 a.m. when I awoke to you, my boy, standing beside me, stirred, perhaps, by some monkeyless nightmare. As I carried you back to bed, I felt an alien silence filling your room. I was conscientious of my own tiptoe steps, each movement stark and exposed without the warm blanket of lullabies cushioning the walls. Instead of returning you to your cozy room, it was as if I were depositing you in a ghost town, an eerily noiseless place once inhabited by humans.

To my surprise and relief, after that one hiccup, you two slept soundly (no pun intended) till we got the monkey back. You didn’t even ask about it, in fact. Your grandparents returned it to us a few days later, and we’ve been using it again ever since, racking up the song tally by the dozens.

Which makes me wonder: If you sleep fine with the monkey and you sleep fine without the monkey, then who is this whole monkey routine for, anyway? Might the consistencies we build into your lives be as much for our comfort as your own?

In any event, the whole monkey episode got me thinking about the many routines of my own life, playing like background music in each scene. Perhaps because “routine” comes from “route” (which, notably, also yields the word “rut”), I associate many of my life stages with commutes of one kind or another.

I think of hauling my saxophone case across the Friendly Hills neighborhood in Morrison, Colorado, to get to school in sixth grade, my fingers chapped in wintertime from the biting air.

I think of my teenage summers washing windows, carpooling to the far corners of metro Denver to pristine neighborhoods where I’d shoulder ladders and plunge my hand in and out of a sudsy 6-gallon bucket all day long.

I think of my semester abroad in Montpellier, France, counting the tram stops to downtown or walking up the great hill to my dorm while carrying bags overstuffed with Carrefour groceries.

I think of trudging through Indiana winter from my cheap rental in Lafayette to the well-manicured campus of Purdue University, an ombré of icy slush soaking into the khakis I’d wear to teach my class.

When I look back on these and other routines, there is usually some degree of drudgery and challenge—and, in my memory, a paradoxical play of mundane and vivid. I can still feel the hot spots on my palm from carrying my sax. I can still recall my foreigner’s self-consciousness as I passed French bus stops and old Mediterranean-style homes.

For as uninteresting and trying as routines can be, they also have a way of branding themselves in our memory, shaping our experience, perhaps even our identity.

When I first started writing this piece, my son, your first year of preschool at the Hands On Children’s Museum was wrapping up. As much as you enjoyed your teachers and classmates and all the wonderful activities there, I myself sometimes tired of the preschool grind. You went four days a week for three and a half hours, and it was a 20-minute commute each way—make that 40 minutes each way, factoring in kid-wrangling—so that by the time I dropped you off and came back home, I was already thinking about leaving to pick you up again.

On the drive, we’d pass by the same strip of strip malls from Lacey to Olympia, get stuck at the same long lights. Coffee corner, train depot, Pool Guys Plus; Pool Guys Plus, train depot, coffee corner. For a while, you had designated Pacific Avenue’s underpass beneath I-5 as the official outer boundary of “Big Town City,” whatever that meant, and when we arrived at that spot, you’d always announce our entry. You’d talk to the buildings passing by and I’d have them talk back, putting on overwrought accents to distinguish one from the next.

“Hi, building!” you’d say.

“Howdy, partner! Where are you headin’ today?”

“To the children’s museum!”

“That sounds mighty fine.”

We’d pass another building.

“Hi, building!”

“G’day, ol’ chap! Where you off to today?”

“To the children’s museum!”

“Ah, capital!”

We’d pass another building.

At the time, playing these games with you was kind of fun but also kind of a chore, like teaching you a knock-knock joke: a pure delight the first time, a fading amusement repetitions two through twenty, and from then on a very particular brand of purgatory.

Now, though, several months removed from that routine, those moments, predictable as they were, glisten with magic. It’s not just nostalgia, either. I mean, it is nostalgia; if you haven’t noticed, I can muster nostalgia about pretty much anything. If I get wistful thinking about window washing, you can bet I’ll long for the days of car seat insertions and extractions, of “Wheels on the Bus” ad infinitum,of passing through Big Town City.

But it’s more than nostalgia. I want to say that these routines represent something profound—a stage in your development, a distinct moment and place. While that’s true, it’s more than that, too. Our daily rhythms and repetitions don’t simply represent something. They are the something. The routine is not just a metaphor for our lives; it is our lives, the daily stroke of the brush that, eventually, fills the whole canvas.

The adage goes that variety is the spice of life. I get it. Without change, without adventure, without challenge, we wilt. But what good is spice if you’ve got no food? The routine is the meat and potatoes, the staples that sustain us. There’s a reason that in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’s first request to the Father is for our daily bread. The day-to-day matters, physically, practically, spiritually. No wonder people refer to their faith life as their “walk”—how else can we get from where we are to where we’re going?

In my daily walk as your father, I can choose between two basic perspectives: I can relish the routine or I can resent the rut. If I choose to see it as rut, I’m stuck in the dirt, head down, chewing on small thoughts like This again? When will this end? Isn’t there something bigger? If I choose to relish the routine, I lift my gaze, aiming for the bird’s eye view; I discern a pattern in the earth—or several overlapping patterns, mine and Mom’s and yours—intricate, curving, looping, maybe even spelling something. I think larger thoughts, like This is our present. This one day will end. This is pointing to something. Rut or routine: Either we wander this planet pointlessly, or there is meaning in our daily walk.

The routine can be unglamorous, tiresome, mundane. It can be as mind-numbing as a five-song soundtrack played continuously for five years straight. But in the scarcity and shape of it, in its vividness, I sense a miracle as humble as bread—life itself, walked out step by step. To share this patch of dirt with you, to trace the same curves and bends, to etch our markings into the earth—this is a gift far more enduring than any single day.