When A Sack of Potatoes Sees Me In Ways That I Can't

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I was halfway home from a birthday celebration for my mother when I crested a rise on Interstate 95 and let out a dramatic groan. I could see the highway stretching far into the horizon — filled bumper-to-bumper with cars. Ugh. All those people driving southbound were my nemesis.

It didn’t occur to me that once I made my way further down that six-lane stretch of freeway, the next driver to crest the rise would look at me the same way. I never think about it, but I don’t only have a landscape in front of me. The landscape includes me.

The birthday celebration was a good one. My family gathered at the midpoint of our various locales, though my aunt and uncle, as well as my nephew and his young family, traveled from much farther away. There was an effort made for this party.

My mother was the oldest, a newly minted eighty-two-year-old. The youngest was nine months old, apparently known as A Sack of Potatoes. My nephew is the size of an offensive lineman, so you can imagine the size of his kids. When I first arrived and took a seat in the living room with the bulk of the partygoers, my nephew plunked Potatoes onto my lap.

Potatoes has a name — Finn — but his nickname suits him better. He is roughly the size of a sack of potatoes, and apparently the weight of one, though I’d argue he’s twice as much. But he acts like one. He sits in your arms, quiet and still, craning his neck periodically to stare you in the eyes with his huge, round, perfect blue set. His skin is nothing like a potato. It’s smooth as serenity. I couldn’t stop taking in how incredible he was — new, soft, calm, happy, weighty. He was part of my landscape, and I took him in with awe. It didn’t occur to me how much he took me in with awe, too. I noticed his stare, but I didn’t put my eyes into his head and imagine the scene from his direction.

After we sang Happy Birthday and my mom blew out the candles on her cake, one by one, we told a meaningful story about her. The stories were poignant, lovely, and funny — as my family likes to laugh as much as it wants to be inspired. I peeked at my mom a few times. She was listening intently, nodding, silently saying “aww” with the shift of her eyes, the tilt of her lips.

When we finished, she asked to speak. She thanked us and explained that you never really know how you’re doing as a person in the world, and to hear that her actions spurred happy, loving memories, especially in her children, meant a lot to her.

Later, as I crested that rise on the highway on my drive home, I realized I affect the world in ways that I rarely try to visualize. I don’t think about how I look as a part of the landscape someone else sees. Do I come across positively? What kind of memories am I leaving behind?

It feels a little like an out-of-body experience, looking at myself from the outside.

The week before the party, I took a few days to write what I wanted to say to my mom. My sister had suggested we commemorate her. I pestered my memory to give me everything it had, trying to recall all the things my mother had done for me and our family. I tried to look back on the preceding decades, to where my mom walked across the grounds of my life.

It was hard to put together such a lengthy history — my mother’s involved presence over such a span — but I tried to get a sense of her influence. I hoped that by sharing my curated list of the things she’d done, my experience of my mother would be felt by the people at the table, especially her.

One question wasn’t lost on me as the birthday party played out: what experience am I generating for those in my life? How do I look to them — facial expression, tone of voice, words spoken, actions taken? I am two distinct people in the world — the person I see, and the person others see.

As the party neared its end and people started to leave, I walked over to the couch where Potatoes was standing, inching his way along, hanging onto the edge of the couch cushions. The front of his shirt was drenched in drool. I was thinking, hmm, maybe I wouldn’t hold Sack of Potatoes, but enjoy watching him instead, because, you know — drool.

He kept an eye on me as he grappled to stay erect and not fall backwards. Potatoes are solid and grounded, but they can teeter so easily in their early years. I knew that everything happening to him at this early phase of his life was helping to create the brain that would manage him throughout the rest of it.

His big, wide eyes staring me down were shooting information through the optic nerve to his brain, letting it know about this stranger lady: my smile, my slow movements, my lofty stature. His auditory nerve and tactile senses were logging information about my laugh, my warm touch, and safe presence. I stroked the top of his head to feel its soft skin. I was imparting information to Potatoes that, at least for the moment, the world was safe and pleasant despite this towering creature in such proximity.

And this is how it goes. We take each other in throughout our lives and create a story — complicated or simple, safe or dangerous, loving or distant — and it’s written by how we perceive the people around us. I’m curious to know how I’ve been written into some of them. Would I want to hear those stories? Would they be what I hope they’d be?

This leaves me with some pondering. Someone else’s story about me isn’t for me. It’s for the author. Yet, I wonder what those stories would teach me — about others, about myself, about perception. I’d at least learn that I’m a traffic jam as much as anyone, that a sack of potatoes will learn to love as readily as it’s loved, and an eighty-two-year-old could stand to hear about the goodness they gave to the world.

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Have a good week, friends.