Bubbling up
A young girl’s glee is enough to bring you back to your youth
Bubbles have a hold on us as curious beings, and for good reason. The glorious globule of gas held in a liquid membrane is a phenomenon to the beholder.
Even the little bubbles that form when I’m anticipating a text from someone who is actively typing are able to hold my gaze because they contain messages soon to arrive. The joy or sorrow and everything in between can bubble up from the words we use to communicate our thoughts and feelings. And those thoughts and feelings are natural to the human condition and crucial to our survival.
Recall your first bubble. A milk-drunk infant who forms a tiny bubble on her lips after nursing and in her mother’s arms. Her father leans in and takes notice. He doesn’t speak, but there is a quiet language already begun between them. Or then, as a toddler, he splashes a tubful of suds as the miniature orbs sail into the warm air encircling his head. Now, a barefoot child chasing after a flow of bubbles floating up to the clouds.
Moments of peace, wonder and freedom. God knows, when we recognize them, we cherish them. Remember the joy and wonder? Notice how relaxed and free children become when they are at play with a purple bottle of circus bubbles. It’s as if the whole world of dreams grows out of the end of a single wand. Contagious is the eagerness, and such intent in that child’s own industry can’t help but wash over those present.
And bubble after bubble, imagination expands into innovation. A child giggles and is forgiving, even when their bubbles pop, because it’s the challenge of making a bubble happen that is the real reward.
The intoxicating truth about bubbles is the miracle of their birth and the propensity toward uncharted flight. Their ability, once free, to defy gravity, no matter how short-lived, holds the lessons of failure when a bubble pops before it forms, and yet the promise of dreams come true when the bubble floats overhead longer than expected.
Perhaps you can remember dipping the simple tool with its grooved ring, a kind of bubble scepter, then lifting it upward, dripping with anticipation, its circular end now appearing as a tensile disc of slick sheen catching the light. A moment of success suggesting magic and physics and
faith, even before the first current of air bounces up against it. Perhaps you take in an expectant breath as you inspect its properties for the first time, amazed at how a liquid can stretch and fill the void of something so solid, and though as a child, you’ve no understanding of the science or the mathematics. But you can still sense the delicate beauty and the thrill of unpredictability, the combination as alluring as a butterfly.
And though you are only a child, you are a prescient being taking in the world of the bubble, along with the whole world around taking in you, and together you all exist as one in a single instant. And you seem to learn pretty quickly that this roundish spaceship, an airfilled membrane before you, is also filled with possibility because of its
ability to withstand force, adapt and grow, enough so that it will stretch beyond its own measure and become a thing to marvel and study with each envelope of breath creating an outer convex in perfect harmony with its concave interior.
And true, you’re only a child, but a child who is able to lift a fragile glistening circle into the air with one breath, and that is wondrous, for to blow too harshly snaps the surface immediately. It’s the repeated tries at learning to calibrate a single stream of air until the flat surface begins to give ever so gently into a lovely seethrough pocket until it is liberated from its umbilical wand and floats away on its own.
That disciplined effort is proof of dreams come true.
I saw those shimmering streams of spherical dreams encompassing my granddaughter in photos and videos my son texted recently. Watching her brought me back to when he was a child, and even further back to when I was a child. There she was, emoting wonder while peering at a large bubble reflecting the world around her. And there she was spinning in a sea of bubbles, bubbling up with joy as she chased them until they floated away and disappeared with a surprising pop.
Now there she is, running with her dad, my son, amongst so many beautiful bubbles, her older brother’s mother gently commenting while taking an iPhone video. And there my son is, lifting his young daughter up to the sky, and they laugh and embrace and she wriggles down, wanting to do it all again. She’s 3 and her need to discover how nature works is nurtured by the adults in her life who love and care for her.
It’s essential for a child’s health and well-being to be free to try and express and fail and try again to be able to achieve a modicum of honest success.
And perhaps it’s time for those of us who are adults to recall these childhood moments of joy. To take a breath from the destructive contentiousness that pandemic life has delivered to almost every level of our daily lives. Perhaps a little wand and a jar of sudsy water will at least show us that it’s OK to relax a little, laugh a little, understand that we have neighbors who live just a little drive away. Even just a bubble’s flight away.
Bonnie J. Toomey’s stories, essays and poems have been featured in Baystateparent Magazine, New Hampshire Parents Magazine, Baystateparent Echo, Penwood Review and Solace in a Book. Toomey worked as an adjunct at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire where she earned a masters in literacy. Bonnie writes about life in the 21 st century and lives in New Hampshire with her husband. Learn more at www.the deep beauty book.com/writers-2/ bonnie-j-toomey.