On this beautiful summer day when I took my grandson Elijah (who is one and half) out in the stroller, his little words and phrases were longer, and went up and down the scale. He was singing.

He sang with complete unselfconsciousness, when he was “in the zone”… that is, when we were progressing slowly through his neighborhood, with its massive stately trees, dappled shade, and quirky little side streets.

Elijah would stop singing whenever I stopped the stroller.  He also stopped singing whenever I tried to record his singing.  His song was not for publication.

It was for the slow summer day, for the alternating bands of sunshine and shade we passed through, for the stroller wheels clicking over every crack in the sidewalk, for the jolting back and forth as we negotiated the lumpy places where tree roots were lifting the concrete.  It was for the robins, for the blue sky, for the sunshine and the coneflower and the hydrangeas, for the hibiscus, blooming everywhere.

It was perhaps most of all a song for the trees.

You and I, we live in a world of alarm clocks and encyclopedias. We can be as full of questions as a porcupine is of quills.  “What does your song mean?” we might ask Elijah, or another silly question such as “Who are you singing for?”

But Elijah lives in a different world, a world made up not of the passage of hours but of moments.  His life is not yet about Meaning. It is about Being.

If I tried to ask Elijah such a question, I think his eyes would get opaque and his attention would slide away like it does when I am trying to impose some boring adult ritual on him such as washing his hands before lunch.

For Elijah, the world is not yet about talking, but about experiencing. It’s about seeing tree leaves moving, and plumbers who stop their work to smile.  It’s about listening to bees buzzing and lawn-mowers droning and mulberries hitting the sidewalk. It’s about feeling the breeze blowing and taking in the presents the breeze brings: the smells of new-cut grass and river water. It’s experiencing time itself stopping, on this warm summer afternoon as we click-clack sleepily over one sidewalk joint after another. There is no future, at this moment. There is no past.  There is only this warm, humid summer afternoon…

And the trees growing, and a baby singing.