Ensnared in Language

Sunday morning, I wake up with everyone in one bed. My daughter came in sometime last night after midnight and my wife has fallen asleep while my son was nursing. There’s no way I could get out of here without waking everyone up.

 

The cloudy morning light is coming in through the blinds. We sleep with them down now, which seems anathema to me after a lifetime of sleeping next to windows, positioning my bed as close to them as possible to look up into the sky before sleeping. Now the room is nightly closed off against the clank of the dumpsters and the glare of the streetlights outside and then sealed over in the sound of rain from the computer: an unbelievable sound which becomes static after a few moments---like how even the best cup of coffee loses its flavor and becomes hot liquid after the first few sips. 

 

It must be about 7 when everyone wakes up. I could probably stay, but I’ve got a few things I’d like to get out of the way. My wife is disappointed; once again, she’s got a morning of watching two kids who need constant attention. She probably doesn’t even taste the first sip of coffee. Besides, it’s hard keeping a hot cup away from kids’ hands; her coffee tends to get cold in out-of-reach places. 

 

I ride up the hill. Still continuing the obnoxious habit I started a few days ago of thinking of homes that were for sale last year, or the year before, and their prices. All of them seemingly affordable now; all of them eminently livable and beyond reach. 

 

The part of the ride down Bay Side Rd. is a reprieve. No houses have ever been for sale on this road and everything is in bloom. A doe out eating the blossoms stretches herself languorously across the road with tentative hooves for the macadam. Even through my stuffed nose, I can make out the apple blossoms: the smell of a cloudy day. 

 

As I coast down the hill, I think of the conversation my wife and I had the night before. For months the information has been piling up, accounts coming in, that our daughter doesn’t speak as she’s supposed to. The way she drops ‘S’s and ‘F’s, it turns out, is not some quaint idiosyncrasy of development, something to be worked out later, but rather potentially indicative of a problem. 

 

I hadn’t given any credence to this idea. She’s my little girl. She speaks the charming way she does. She—like all children—is perfect. I also didn’t want to open the box on potential problems that tends to spill out from getting oneself involved in systems. Any system is a sleeping giant. Kafka tried to explain this to us. You wake one up—even unintentionally—and you become ensnared. A system ensnared my family when I was a child. It bound them to the working definitions of autism, even though the system had no understanding of autism—but, like all systems, it is incapable of professing ignorance or even being ignorant. 

 

The thought of those interminable institutional corridors, those bureaucrats, councilors and functionaries wrapping around my little girl, making decisions for my family is really more than I can handle. So, I tell myself she’s fine. Her speech is her own and it’s fine. 

Still coasting down the hill, I think how paranoid this all seems. I tell myself to lighten up and to stay open. Systems are often benign if not completely ineffective, and of course, I start thinking about the near-impossibility of communicating effectively within them, much less to them. Sleeping giants, indeed. The greatest people must be the Quixotes who try to change the systems, the Sisyphuses who put their shoulders to these rock-like systems. 

 

She articulates complex thoughts; she responds in novel ways. She’s creative in her speech. There may not be an ‘S’s or ‘F’s and even some consonant clusters are difficult, but there’s no reason to subject ourselves to something fraught with danger. Oh! I’m going back and forth on this again! 

 

…

 

My sister didn’t make eye contact as a child. She didn’t talk. In her early development, she might have said a few words, but these seem to come almost unbidden, as if they surprised even her when uttered.

 

One such instance I can’t forget was her use of the word ‘bubble’. We must’ve been very young because we were in the bath together. She looked off into the space where she was so comfortable resting her gaze, away from everyone and everything, and named the frothy soap around us. The two sounds of ‘bubble’ are the only intentional syllables I ever heard my sister use; they were just as ephemeral as the object itself. Nothing led away from this utterance. When she said it, she returned to her customary silence, though both my mother and I shouted encouragement. After such a performance, it was hard not to. 

 

Now I understand that it may have been this encouragement that disallowed for further speech, even stopped it up. Maybe it was hard for her to repeat the performance. Maybe she didn’t say the word for us. 

 

…

 

I go into the café. There’s frost on the window panes, but the sun is already starting to warm them and to cast long shadows from the rhododendron bushes up the walls. I sit down to work and immediately start to think of what’s happening at home. I see my wife, her coffee cold, picking up one kid and putting another down. I see my son, belly down on the floor, pumping his arms like a bird, smiling with the half-dazed look of infants, but I don’t see my daughter so much as I hear her. It’s something that’s been playing over and over in my head: the memory of her introducing herself to a kid at the park. 

 

“My name e eme”

 

“Huh?” the kid replies and looks confused. She repeats it, but the kid doesn’t understand, shrugs his shoulders and runs off to play with someone else. She watches him run, but stays rooted to the spot. 

 

…

 

A week later. My son wakes up at six and I take him for a walk after I’ve made coffee. The sun is coming up through the clouds. I’m walking north, but each time I come to a cross street, I see the pink and orange skies between the buildings. There’s no one out and the birds aren’t singing so much as they’re muttering to each other. Sleepy chirpings. 

 

We leave all five blocks of downtown behind and climb up the slight hill on the north side of 11^th Street. It’s not much of a rise, but it’s sufficient to get above the 1 and 2 story buildings and see the Bay reflecting the rest of the calm sunrise. The clouds have given the light a syrupy quality and it runs in channels of color from the east and disappears in the Bay. Over the water the sky is a tarnished mirror, oval and silver-gray.

 

My son is quiet the entire walk. There’s a frost on the ground so his little hands, dangling from the carrier are cold. I take them in my hands and warm them. He glances at me and returns to looking around. From his stationary position in the carrier, he watches the hedges march past, the parked cars drift by, the buildings float by like clouds. We walk for over an hour, from end to end of this tiny town and he doesn’t make a sound. His observant role doesn’t require commentary. I listen to his silence and think how often what we say only muddles what we feel. How there are seldom right words and a right occasion. To some degree, our talking is all so much problem-making. Our struggle to name, describe and critique what’s around us only gets us lost in our phrasing: the limitations of our language. As language results from experience, what leverage can it possibly offer for escaping that experience? Perhaps it is only setting up and tearing down the same structure over and over. 

 

Listening to the silence around me; speaking to my son in this silence, it seems utterly absurd that I should ever ask anyone to teach my daughter to speak when she is the only one who can define her experience in words. 

 

Walking back down the hill, I long to bring her this news. I want to tell my wife, too. We don’t need to worry! Words are only a great piling up of history and rules and the perspectives of the past. We’re making our own language, the record our own experience. But, then I come down among the buildings and see the letters, the words, the names and see how it’s another system and one that we’re all hopelessly ensnared in, one in which the expression “my name e eme” falls on deaf ears. 

 

 

 

 

Shared Humanity and Isolated Reality

I’ve been riding out to the discount grocery store the next town over. A sentence, I admit, that sounds quite odd, but after you have kids, you need to find practical ways of entertaining yourself. So, I can’t write “I’ve been going to this new bar” or even “I’ve been taking a lot of walks lately”. Today, I woke up at 4am; my daughter couldn’t sleep and I lay on her floor patting her and soothing her. After all, she’s not even three yet. I had a Zoom meeting at 6am. And plenty of classes to plan for next semester. After all that, at the end of the day, when the kids go to sleep, you don’t do anything that’s going to rob you of your own sleep. You do something practical; you take a bike ride to pick up some groceries. 

Luckily, it’s an interesting ride this time of year. To avoid the highway that connects these two towns, I have to take a backroute through a part of town called ‘The Bottoms’ which is the flat, treeless expanse that leads up to the ocean. In my heart I call it “los fondos” in Spanish. I’m not sure why. There’s nothing Spanish about the place.

Los fondos are not as scenic as it may sound with ‘ocean’ in the description. They look like flat fields would anywhere else. There’s a bit of salt in the breeze and when the ocean really gets going in the winter, you can occasionally hear it over the relentless wind, but it sounds more like a washing machine or something.

The fondos are downright drab, but the sky is wide, wide open above them and there’s an old trestle bridge that spans the Mad River right before it dumps into the ocean. From the bridge, I’ve seen seals in the river even though it’s probably close to a mile from the mouth where the bridge crosses it. They seem so out of place surrounded by flat grassy fields, munched by cows and low mountains reflected in their shallows, but the seals are not infrequent in the river. Ever curious, they’ll watch you crossing over them, giving the impression that you’re the one out of your element, which, of course, is true.

From here, the route goes over a hill and then into the next town which is what you’d expect of a small town surrounded by such tenacious wilderness: well-forested mountains on one side and crashing ocean surmounted by rhododendron thickets on the other. There are little patches of grayish beach along the river and, on the other side, a long isthmus of sand that recedes as the mouth of the river changes.

The area is pleasant to ride through because there is very little traffic. Sometimes I can make my way through all the fondos without seeing a single car. Of course, it’s very dark and on moonless nights, I’d be lost without a light. I’ve come home with a load of groceries and found myself following a roving pancake-size light all the way through acres of wind-swept darkness back home. It’s a humbling experience and one relevant to what follows. 

…

A week before Halloween, I managed to get my daughter to sleep before it was too late and I realized I had time to make it to the grocery store. The ride takes about 40 minutes one way, so there’s a cut-off for when I can leave. 

The night was warm with the coming rains and the humidity seemed to keep the wind down. I coasted through the streets of town, and within a few blocks, I was past the point of streetlights—little good they do here. Even downtown, the redwood forests seem to send down an impressive shadow, against which illumination is practically worthless. Here and there are a few dingy globes which serve to brighten nothing save the air and insects immediately about them. All the light is converted into glare in the humidity. There’s more light reflected from the wet streets than actual illumination. Imagine Christmas tree lights garlanded on a dark, damp, shaggy spruce in the middle of a forest at night and you have an idea of what the streetlights look like around here. 

There’s always a little wind in the fondos, even when it’s perfectly still in town. All that flat ocean beyond with nothing but a little cusp of dunes to break the unimpeded movement of air all the way from Japan, Taiwan and the Kamchatka. There’s something almost lonesome about the place when the wind isn’t raging, like the movements of a very tired, but indefatigable vagabond. One imagines the smells of hibiscus, kvass, ice and all sorts of strange things as this vagabond wind blows over the wet pasture land. 

Ah yes, the pasture. I’d be remiss if I left the cows out, for they are an important presence in the fondos where the ground is too swampy to build, the earth too salty to foster growth, and too valuable to wallow. Everywhere in the bottoms, cows shift in the muck, their hooves pound out of the soft ground. Their quarter-size bovine eyes glow in the range of my bike light like flashes from Charon’s fares, still held in their customary place. 

That last one may have been too much, but your imagination can get away from you out here. Also, keep in mind, it was just before Halloween, there are a few pumpkin patches out in the fondos, a corn maze and not a few creaky old farmhouses standing apart from their neighbors, the dilapidated barns. 

It’s a great autumn landscape and the broken macadam that wraps the parcels into acreage is often crossed and recrossed by skunks, racoons, foxes and, in one particular area, peacocks. All of them have appeared out-of-the-darkness in the plate-like beam of my bike light and then disappeared back to the dark periphery. Most of the time, I’ve seen them all on a single trip. Raiding the farms for the most part, I imagine, but perhaps also lured by the same restlessness that brought us to the end of the continent. Those skunks and racoons might bump up against the ocean at night and think “now what the hell is this?”

There are owls, too. Great silent shadows, even in the darkness. They’ll fly right over the top of you, encouraging some primal fear to leak from your scalp. It’s like they’re flaunting my inability to have any interaction with them. Something like watching sharks swim through the ocean, unmindful and almost dispassioned by human presence. 

I cross the bridge, led to it by a rhododendron tunnel where a bush has trellised a chain link fence and in the wet darkness creates a cave that frames the craggy stanchions of the bridge.  

The moon ripples in the river like the stove light’s reflection in a cup of coffee before anyone is awake. The kind of light that disappears when there’s no one to observe it. 

After the bridge, I’m in another town, a town with a main street and little else. It’s a wonder a place could be bordered by the ocean and redwood mountains and manage to be this dull, but it is. It’s a place of rugged pickup cruising suburban streets. The kind of weird rural/urban overlap that reminds me a bit of southern Michigan. The kind of place where you see cars with deer tied to the hoods cruising through a factory district in a town of over 100,000. 

But McKinleyville is, in reality, an actual rural place belied with a street of car dealerships and fast-food outlets. It’s much smaller than 100,000 souls, the kind of town you see all over California that seems to have been created without a center in mind, the kind of place that went up so quickly there was no nucleus to grow from. One street has stores, all of them new, all of them pre-fab-looking, and, in the root system of streets that feed into this one, there are homes. Living here, I can’t imagine what there would be to do other than drive away from it. 

I’m sure I’ve seen McKinleyville in the sun, but there’s some incongruency with the image in my memory and so the default appearance of the place is damp, huddled together under dingy, impenetrable clouds churned out by the mountains. But at night, all towns are gray, and I make my way through the root system to the main street to the grocery store. 

Ever since I lost feeling in my arm after carrying groceries over seven miles in my messenger bag, I use a larger, two-strap backpack which serves its purpose quite well with reinforced straps and plenty of padding. I’ve developed a rough idea of what a full bag looks like as individual purchases in a shopping cart, but I usually head home with the bag piled pretty high. 

I rode out into the night with a substantial stack of groceries in the roll-down bag, which was now unrolled just about all the way allowing from the ice cream, hummus and other prepared foods I’ve been trying to stop buying but, when confronted with such low, low prices, my resolve weakens and I buy all kinds of stuff I don’t really need which is invariably packaged in plastic. 

I’ve got this mountain of stuff lashed to my back, but the bag centers it pretty well and I’m quite conditioned to getting it all back home. The food—if it can be called that—is a source of motivation. When I get home, I’ll be hungry and there will be plenty of options. 

But for now, there’s this hill to bomb down and this podcast in my headphones which I’m paying peripheral attention to when a truck goes by and something sails over the top of my head. I feel the wind of it, I feel its force flatten the air that’s moving over me for a moment. It’s a killing sound, that sudden silence, something like the owl flying over. Then, in the wake of the silence, the truck guns it, rips ahead down the wet street. 

When you ride through the night, it’s fairly common that people will mess with you, but, luckily, throwing heavy objects at you is less common. I watch the red lights of the truck disappear down the road. There are no obstacles, no stop signs between the truck and the highway onramp about a quarter mile ahead. I’d never catch it, but, quickly, as if to avoid being seen, the truck makes a left into an area, where I can’t remember there being anything but a couple of driveways. 

Shit. Are they coming back? Are they turning around?

Unfortunately, being attacked on a bike is something of a crime of opportunity. Bored people who have a hard time recognizing the humanity of others are often driving around both angry and bored and the pathetic figure of someone struggling to rock a narrow two-wheeled machine up a small grade must fill them with some kind of dull ire. They yell. They lay on the horn. They drive as close as possible without hitting you, but they usually keep going. On a dark night, with no other traffic around, when someone turns around to come back, they’ve gone beyond taking advantage of the opportunity and they’re displaying some substantially sociopathic tendencies. Best to get out of the way.

Still, adrenaline kicked in and all I could think was “maybe I can catch up to them before they drive away.” I raced down the hill toward where I’d seen the truck disappear. 

Sure enough, the same truck sat there, facing me, idling, lights glaring at me from the base of a driveway. I threw up my arms in the universal “what the fuck?” gesture and stood before the truck. There was no movement. No yelling. No revving. Why had this guy pulled in here? I motioned for someone to get out of the truck. Nothing. A minute passed and it was getting spooky staring down these headlights and this low growling engine. I slowly moved out of the way, realizing that I was blocking the truck’s egress and I didn’t want it to suddenly decide to break for it and run me over. 

Yeah, “it”. Looking into the truck’s lights, I was starting to see it in a Stephen King kind of way. Was anyone even in there? What the hell was going on here?

There was more than one house back here and, from another channel of this driveway system, a car came rocking up behind the truck. It crept around it and toward me. I stopped it and went over to the window.

“Who’s in the truck?” I demanded of the sleepy-looking driver. 

“Huh?”

“Someone threw something at me. Someone in that truck threw something. Who’s in there?”

“I don’t know, man.” Sleepy answered. “This is a shared driveway.”

I let him drive out, but this emboldened me a little. At least someone else had seen us. At least there were other people around. I put a little more emphasis in it and angerly waved the truck toward me. 

There was a lurch as if the driver was visibly hesitating and then the truck slowly rolled toward me. I stayed in front of it, hoping to not be run down, holding my bike out a little like a matador’s cape. 

The window came down. Who would it be? Scarface? A burley construction worker? A barrel of a gun? I was thinking these things and, at the same time, still pissed off enough to not be thinking of them. I was totally vulnerable in my indignation. This is an easy place to find yourself on a bike. No one cares about your indignation in the dark, on a country road. The world doesn’t owe you anything but chaos and old night. And, for a moment, I saw that as the window came down.

A face, the green glare of the instrument panel reflected on skin. Smooth skin. Uncertain expression. A kid. A fucking kid! 

“Sorry, man. I didn’t throw it. It was my friend. He’s really drunk.”

But rather than raise my indignation, the sight of the kid mollified it. I sighed. “What’s your friend’s name? Is this his house?”

“Yeah. He’s Dylan. I don’t know what he was doing, man”

“You could kill someone throwing things like that.” I sounded like a dad. Hell, I thought, I am a dad! A dad who almost didn’t make it home to his kids because ‘Dylan’ wanted to screw around.

“What did he throw?”

“A water bottle. I think he thought you were a tweaker.”

A tweaker. I’ve got this before. This awful excuse that because you might be a drug addict, homeless, or both, you’re somehow fair game for a braining. It’s the worst thing to say. ‘sorry, man. I didn’t see you as a contributing member of society, so I thought I’d knock ya’ one fer fun.’ Ugh. 

“Where’s Dylan? In the house?” I tried not to sound too exasperated. 

“He’s calling right now” The kid answered his phone and talked to Dylan who clearly knew I was waiting for him. “Yeah….he’s out he— Yeah. He wants to talk to you. Yeah, dude. Come out.” He hung up. “He’s on his way out.”

When I saw Dylan walking out sheepishly, I stepped aside and let the driver go, thinking, as the car drove off of all that I’d stood in front of it imagining it could be. Imagining, before the window went down all the ways that truck in the dark, headlights blaring, could’ve been my grave or at least my hospital bill. 

I talked to Dylan and, eventually his dad a while. The dad was a country guy. Asking me if I wanted to press charges. Someone they both managed to really evade much of an apology. Dylan even offered the tweaker excuse again. “If I’d known you had humanity I never would’ve thrown anything at you,” he seemed to say. “Sorry, humanity is a difficult thing for me to pin down and, sometimes, I just throw things.”

With the dad standing there, I found my remonstrances seemed redundant. I didn’t smell any booze on the kid that his friend said was “really drunk”, but I stood there feeling like a tattletale and started dismissing my complaint before it was even out of my mouth, knocking it down to a “just be careful” which sounded cloying and kind of stupid, but I was tired. Too tired to champion punishment on a grand scale and I bade Dylan and father a good night before riding back toward the ocean shaking my head, riding back to my sleeping house beyond the muddy fields and the little swinging light at the head of my bike like a spotlight being dragged across the crumpled country roads where, luckily, there was almost no traffic at night. 

 

  

Masks and Mouths

 

We’d been in class a couple of weeks before I saw one of my student’s faces. Until this point, everyone had been following the mask protocol pretty well. I can’t remember who it was anymore, but they brought out a bottle of water or something, slipped the mask down and completely changed my perception of what they looked like. Under the mask: that knot of a nose, that burgeoning mustache, writhing lips over a chin looking like an elbow, something to be drawn into a shirtsleeve, not something to be loosed and wagged around. Everything below the mask had an underdone quality to it. This may have been the result of faithful covering or just the way we look. And then there were the teeth, askew, clawing at the air as if trying to find purchase on the emptiness that surrounds us all. Just as I was about to gasp, the mask went back up and the vision reconciled itself to the person I knew who sat in front of me twice a week from 10-12. That is, the student turned back into attentive, sleepy or furtive eyes. Without a face.

Later that week, I took my students from another class outside on a bold pretense, considering I teach English and there’s no reason to go outside that’s not flimsy or back-to-land sounding. But I’d convinced myself and, most of the time, that’s the only authority in need of convincing. We went out into the rawness of the afternoon sun and a student asked about masks. Here we were, six feet apart and outside. We could take them off right? Right, was my reply and, for most of the students, they came down. There were a few stragglers, but suddenly, I was looking at the chewing, cheeking, lisping humanity of my students. But rather than have another Poe-like epiphany when I was paralyzed by the moist gnashings of unmasked speech and riveted to the singular disturbing feature of what amounts to a hole in the head, I had a single impression: “my god, they’re all babies”, I thought. And I felt a sudden need to protect them or at least to treat them with all my kindness and patience. Their mouths, perhaps underused and silent, seem to speak their inexperience without moving.

The eyes have a deceit—it’s not intentional—but they are capable of holding back truths that the jaw and the mouth reveal in their nervous or flustered ruminating. They are also usually quite symmetrical—being mirrored by each other—and the mind naturally continues this symmetry all the way down the face as an assumption. But, in almost every case, the mouth acts against this symmetry. It might be that a mouth just isn’t symmetrically linked with the eyes or that mouths are just harder to balance, maybe because there’s only one. Whatever the case, the mouth, rather than the eyes, seems the vessel of our shared humanity. Perhaps this is why we kiss, rather than touch eyes. We carry around who we are like dogs carrying ravaged sticks. It may be that the eyes will give away a lie, but the mouth is where the lie will remain long after it’s told, sagging, pursing and drooling.

These students were people beyond the subdued expressions of their eyes. Their mouths suddenly began to twitch to life to communicate this; I think they were too polite to comment on everyone’s sudden change of appearance, but, thankfully, at least one observation was lobbed to me.

“Professor, you have a beard?!”

How incomparably older I must’ve seemed to them. Not of their fecundity, pale shoots stirring under the soil, but like something aged. What do they bury to age? Cheese? Wine? Certainly not pretty images, but I imagine they were just as vulnerable. I saw in the students, inexperience and eagerness, they saw in me—pirate bearded, crooked toothed, chapped—old indulgences, fatigue and sun ravaged skin. I’m sure they inwardly recoiled a little before remembering the archetype other teachers established before me: we are an ugly, time-ravaged lot. Often teachers are the first to give this impression to the youth. Their parents’ faces are too familiar to reveal it. Besides, unconsciously, they retain the memory of their parents’ faces from birth when they were still hale and, in the case of the mother, quite flushed with youth and purpose. I remember, in elementary school, musing on the ugliness of at least a few of my teachers. And here I was, equally aged and ugly before my own students, giving off faint fumes of stale coffee and out-of-country dental work, cheeks creased by lack of sleep and stress, shaven in strange places. And yet, this must’ve been expected in fact, if anything, I think it made me less intimidating for, suddenly, they all began to talk at once. It was as if the extra moisture from their mouths had pushed the saturation over the limit in the clouds above and it started to pour language, unimpeded, sighing, clicking, lingual, soft-palated language. For a moment, I left my mask dangling on my ear and then took it off. If nothing else, I was damn tired of breathing my own smell.    

Twilights

 

The sun has been worn down to a flat disk of copper, like a relic of an ancient civilization. That dull light that spins from the star is metallic and, one can almost believe, filigreed and intentional. We’re positioned between the coppersmith and his forge. To the east, the fires are mounting to the skies and plumes of ash roll into the morning fog. The sun comes up with a hissing sputter. The light is brazen and crepuscular.

I go up the hill to look at the house. 300,000 dollars too much and the carport is shared with the neighbors, making a bizarre continuous construction; the two houses like a very, very long double wide. 390,000 dollars with an old roof a 70’s brown carpeting to match the copper sun that hangs in the window. The mountains march right down into the backyard;  however, and when I leave, I see a pack of grey canines down under the shoulder of the road that are somewhere between foxes and coyotes. They came crawling out of an aqueduct that passed under the road, stopped to look up at me, the sky and the tangles of fruiting blackberry, and ran off.

It's hard to imagine that coyotes or foxes don’t have some kind of atavistic response to the firelight. They must know that it’s not really twilight all the time. But me, I just want to sleep all day and when I get up, I feel anxious, too alert.

I took my son to see the house. He hadn’t been napping, so I knew he’d sleep for the whole walk in the carrier. Initially, he’d cried and flailed his head, but when I cradled him and walked up the hill with deliberate, flipflop steps, he dozed off.

When I got to the house, I went up to look in the front windows. A battered washing machine and a utility sink in the converted garage. They should’ve left it a garage. But imagine it as a place to play or to work and it looks fine. The connected carport bothered me less. The neighbors had a bumper sticker “How Swede it is!” This superimposed on a Swedish flag. Scandinavians, even American Scandinavians probably keep to themselves. I remember the anecdote about the most popular television in Sweden (or maybe Norway) show being footage of a train passing through the country. No narrative, no music, no characters (other than the train). I imagine the neighbors—elderly—watching that nightly in their house, cozy, hyyge.

I went into the backyard. I figured that baby strapped to me would make my intentions clear or at least less minatory. Recently poured concrete. I could hear the realtor focusing in on that, as if a flat slab of concrete had any potential or meant anything more than being able to charge an extra 20,000 for backyard with slightly more order imposed on it. Another look in the windows, the bedrooms are small, wooden and frayed at the ends. Bare feet have stuck to these floors in weather less warm than in this late afternoon. Behind my reflection, the sun is like a lamp turned on inside with no apparatus, just a light, like the glare on a picture frame or the ghost of the flash in a pre-digital photo. There was a movement and I looked down, into the carrier. My son’s eyes are almost indifferent to color. They could be brown, blue, gray, green, but they have none of the haunting scowl so many babies affect. His eyes are lustrous and patient. They are open and easy to love, like the smiling babies on diaper packages.  

…

We were in Sacramento, on vacation, when the doctor called. She didn’t know what the lump is; neither did anyone else, so she’d made an appointment at UCSF. A rare thing to have gotten us in so early, so, at the end of the vacation, I drove my daughter the 300 miles home. Slept, dropped her off at my in-laws, and drove back 300 miles. I taught my class from the garage of my sister-in-law’s place in the morning and then drove to the Bay.

I was so anxious about being late, that we got into the city too early, let our guard down and went to 24^th Street to get burritos and coffee—the essence of the city to me, but I found I no longer knew the places for them. The server was nice at the taqueria, but I apologized to my wife for the burrito. The only thing I could taste was onion and unsalted tortilla. The coffee was dull and too strong, lulling and overstimulating, leaving us to miscalculate and race to our appointment, frantic before the doors of the hospital, running back and forth to the parking garage for things we’d forgotten.

I took it as a good sign that my daughter should be in the waiting room. It wasn’t her, but a girl wearing her pajamas, about her age and size with her same sleep-puffed face and tousled dirty blonde hair. My wife and I spoke to each other about her, using terms of endearment for our daughter but changing them slightly to fit this girl who was unaware of us as she played slowly by the fish tank, like she was the one under water and the fish were swimming around the chairs and magazines.  

The girl left and I quelled the returning anxiety by answering work emails from my phone. My wife bounced our sleeping son in the carrier. The room was quiet. One Russian mother called to her daughter who had a large hemangioma on her arm and seemed not to see the chairs placed in front of her, so close did she get to them before dramatically reeling back. Perhaps it’s a Russian trait, some kind of folk game.

While I held my phone and watched the girl step toward and away from the chairs, they called our son’s name, putting a long question mark after it. It was gratifying to hear it said aloud like that, a confirmation that we’d named him the right thing. Soon after we’d been processed, the doctor came into the small examination room. She gave our son a few palpitations, a few frisks, dandles, whatever. She commented on his size—big!—and then asked to see the lump. I appreciated that she admitted almost right away that she didn’t know what it was. It was like *touch*, *poke*, “Nope. I have no idea what that is.” She was aware that her knowledge had limits, a sign of being knowledgeable, strangely. But the others did the same. The next doctor invited in had curly hair and the air of being fun and communicative; someone you’d be glad to see at a conference or a crowded cafeteria. Maybe she reminded me of my friend Rebecca and I was projecting all these traits.   

The fun, Rebecca doctor was more animated and more intentional with her prodding. She gave blow by blow descriptions of what she was feeling, but couldn’t tell us anything new. “It’s squishy, but defined. It’s not hard but…It moves.” I was waiting for these descriptors to reach a critical mass of symptoms which would yield a diagnosis, but they just floated out, one by one, unattached, meaningless. “Consistent, lumpy, smallish…” It could’ve been charades of adjectives. She went out to get someone else.

A third doctor came in, and this one was the sage. She wore her lab coat loosely, like a scarf worn for panache. Her hair was salt and pepper and she wore a serious expression that had no need for pedantry. Without being told anything, she opened her hands like she like someone going to catch an easy pass. She laid them on my son’s back and closed her eyes. Nothing. She just shook her head.

How could this be so baffling?

“Should we get it biopsied?” One of the doctors asked. The others seemed to agree to this without inculpating themselves. There were no ‘yes’s, no ‘no’s. Just a miasma of suggestion. A few calls were placed down to the Mission Bay campus and, through connections, we got into the fine needle aspiration clinic at 4pm on Friday.

We left still feeling pretty hopeful. We talked about meeting Mikey or maybe getting something to eat later. The firelight hadn’t come down to the Bay and the late afternoon sky was open and blue between the cornices of Victorian gingerbread, the banks of a river. We drove down Divisidero, then to Hayes Valley, then around Potero, then the parking lot confines of Mission Bay and the UCSF buildings that no one who lives here ever has to pass by, new and out-of-the-way as they are.

“Do we take babies?” The receptionist asked another receptionist, who, in turn, came over to ask us to repeat why we were there. The temperature takers at the door swiveled around to see us, the anomaly. The ones with the baby. The first receptionist made a call. It was quick. He said no more into the receiver than “Do you have a kid?” and then “Yeah; OK.” He turned to us. “Yeah, they’re waiting for you. 2^nd floor.”

I can’t go much beyond this hospital and this floor because the narrative stalls there. The Trinty and Shasta forests caught on fire. The cinders exploded into the air, cooled to ash and muted the light. The Delta variant cases kept going up. Mandates came back. Everything crept back up to the edge of closing down and hovered there, just before quarantine. I still feel like I’m still standing in that second examination room because I haven’t really moved in time since then. Leaning against the wall, useless, worse than useless, in the way as the door opened and I had to move to avoid the pathologist. He had been sad to see us. I remembered this from when my daughter had to have her blood drawn; no one wants to do babies. I forgot how much you don’t want them to be hurt, that useless urge to protect them. We must’ve talked for half an hour before he tried to get the tissue he needed and got none or maybe next to none: not enough. The pathologist, who told us he had small kids of his own, who said one had something like this and he hadn’t even taken him in for it, had me hold alcohol pads while he tried to mark the lump with a blurring marker, marked and remarked as the lump floated under the surface of the skin. He tried again. My son with the lustrous, uncolored eyes cried his hiccupping baby cries and the needle pumped up and down. Enough gore to paint all five of the slides laid out. But it wasn’t enough. He looked through the microscope there in the room, wheeled the lens up and down and explained that he didn’t know what it was. There wasn’t enough tissue to really know. But, he’d take a look and get back to us or maybe I should call him. Yeah, in fact, call him.

I left a message days ago.

…

I completed my circuit around the house, passing through the carport, patting my son’s back. I stood there a moment, under the long, adjoining roof to take him out of the hazy light, hoping the enforced dimness would put him back to sleep. I looked down again and his eyes were closed, his forehead back against me. I kept patting and walked out into the red-golden light and down the driveway, back to the eucalyptus swale where I’d seen the fox-coyotes. On someone’s lawn, there was a fawn, still with the spots, browsing in the wildflowers. I stopped patting and watched her knobby walk into the forest. She must have way of knowing that the light won’t stay like this. All these animals, they must already be used to these things we just can’t accept.      

Fathers Day

 

My son turned one month old today, on Fathers’ Day. At home there’s been a lot of noise and figuring out who is doing what. Often my wife and I are trying to do the same task while another, more pressing one, goes unaddressed. We’re in the kitchen, say, and a pot starts to boil over, but a diaper needs changing. While Gina is taking off the diaper, I’ll start looking around frantically for wipes. Of course, the pot, meanwhile is overflowing copiously, snuffing out the flame. Unlit gas is spraying into the apartment. Either that, or we’re both going for the diaper or the burner at the same time and, for some reason when I get to it, I find I’m reluctant to relinquish the task I’ve chosen for myself. Stubbornly, I continue reaching for the burner knob even after I’ve seen that Gina’s going to get to it first. Meanwhile baby wails are filling the house. It’s always something.

So, I go to the library. It seems easier to leave the house, to thoroughly divide the household tasks which result entirely from our children. If I take my daughter to the library, for a moment I only have one responsibility and, alone, there’s no risk that I’ll run into anyone when attending to this responsibility. I won’t have to share it. That’s not to say we don’t get into trouble at the library. I’ve got to order another copy of Chicka Chicka 123 because my daughter tore half a page out of it. She’s also doing this thing where she loves to rub the pages excessively between her thumb and forefinger as she turns them. Not only is the resulting rubbing noise annoying—especially on the heavy, glossy paper they print kids’ books on—but it crumples the paper something awful. I have to smooth everything back out before we return the books and some of them still look like something that’s been relegated to the back of a fifth-grader’s desk for an entire school year.

The best course of action is to get the books and get out; then we go read them in a neutral zone: a place with nothing else to rip or crumple. We live next to a plaza with grass and benches which affords a pretty nice place to read. Sure, there’s usually someone swearing very loudly to themselves lying prone on the grass nearby and there’s all kinds of gnarly things to be found among the stalks of the ornamental plants, but I figure exposure to that sort of thing is just part of growing up and learning about the lousier aspects of existence. So, we sit there, on the decrepit bench, reading our haul from the library book-by-book, my daughter picking out the ones she wants to read first. As I read, I imagine my wife at home happily feeding our infant son and perhaps reading a New Yorker (I brought back a few throw-away copies the last time I was at the library). The reality may be quite different, but it’s got to be easier for her without the two extra toddlers banging around the place: my daughter and me.

I find that when I get into the plaza to read with my daughter, I’m inclined to read the whole pile. Eight, nine, ten books. I’m happy to sit and read with her as long as I can because the primary thing I miss as the parent of two young children is being able to do one thing at a time. Every morning, I wake up at 5 so I can try to focus on one task, namely preparing for the coming semester, before everyone else wakes up and the crying, feeding, changing, meal preparing, deciding what to do, packing up the car, remembering to bring the 300 things we need to leave the house, making sure everyone is changed/used the bathroom, etc. etc. routine can begin. You can’t call that routine; it’s just treading water. The issue is that I’ve defined work my entire life as something done with dedication. A project with a start and finish with maybe a little flow between. From the first book over 200 pages I read as a kid, to the papers I wrote for graduate school and hiking the Appalachian Trail, all of these things required that I focus on them and tune out distraction. I got pretty good at that and the result seems to be that I can sit—without moving anything but my fingers—in front of a computer and work for hours on end, or, at least, I could. With one kid, I was still able to sneak out the back and go to work for the day. When my daughter was an infant, there wasn’t much I could do to feed her, so I assumed the ‘breadwinner’ role, coming home late from night classes and basically rolling into bed after looking in on her sleeping form. For weeks, I barely saw her awake. And when I went to work? You guessed it, I sat down and plowed through the tasks without interruption. But now with two kids—God, how would a single mother do this? You’ve got one who doesn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time and when she gets up, if unsupervised, some kind of substantial mess is going to result. The other one, needs not only constant attention, but constant holding, comforting, rocking, swaddling, changing and nursing. When he does go to sleep, it’s for 20 minutes, and that’s usually only when you’ve got him strapped to you, so you have to move in this very awkward way to keep him steady—yeah, there’s that, too, his neck doesn’t actually support his head, so you’ve even got to constantly provide the support. Again, that’s fine on its own, but with a two-year-old it becomes a totally different ask.

I can’t sneak away from this. I’d be terrified of what I’d come home to. It’s summer vacation. I couldn’t have planned it better to be in a position to help as much as possible. A few hours to work every morning will eventually see the completion of the three classes I’ve got to plan, but, what’s beginning to happen with never being able to commit to a single activity and stay with it is a sort of erosion of interest and, even, of personality. I find that I’m having to reconsider who I am in a way I haven’t had to do since I first left home.

I know that sounds dramatic, but think about it, we base who we are on the things we’ve done, the things we want to do and the way we react to what’s happening in between—also known as the present. When you’re constantly switching from one short task to another (there is something Sisyphean in changing a diaper that, before being completed is soiled and, thus, needs to be changed again) you don’t have time to remember the past—not 10 years ago, but that morning— and you don’t have time to contemplate the future. For example, I think about what I used to do when preparing to travel to a new country. I’d buy the guidebook, maybe the most well-known national writer in translation and get reading, annotating and anticipating. Before visiting Romania, I must’ve read three or four books about the place. Now, if it were possible to go somewhere, as soon as I opened the Wikitravel page, I’d have to leave it to go attend to something, by the time I got back to it at night, I’d be too tired to care. Which brings me to the present. I know that important things are probably still happening in the world right now, but nothing seems relevant to me—none of it even seems to concern me. It’s like it’s all just going over my head. My reality is these two kids. Their demands are what I need to do, all day, every day.  

I like sitting in the park and reading kids’ books because that’s attending to what is needed of me. Listening to the news so I can offer my commentary on Armenia’s recent election is something I do to please myself. It’s not required of me, therefore, I don’t have the time for it. The only thing I’m able to react to is the crying at my ear, the picked up band aid that is approaching a mouth, the overflowing trash (mostly dirty diapers) and the sink that’s always full of dirty dishes.

Of course, dirty dishes give you nothing to talk about with anyone—hell, even other parents don’t want to hear about this stuff; they’ve either lived it or they’re living it and no one wants a reminder. Meanwhile, I’m not cultivating any new interests. I’m not learning anything new. I’m forgetting things I did know because my brain has been reduced to a state of distraction, constantly anticipating the next interruption as it is. At the end of the day, when there’s a rare moment with both kids are asleep and I try to talk to my wife, I find I have nothing more to say other than “uuuugggh”—which doesn’t make for scintillating conversation, so I close my eyes, finish my beer and try to remember something about what it was like before. It’s difficult to settle on any particular memory, but I remember that I used to be able to think about what I was going to do with a Saturday afternoon—I mean, I really used to be able to entertain ideas. Quite incredible really. Given that know, just to have the time to remember these things is almost more than I can muster.

I didn’t see how far removed I’d become from my early thirties persona until my daughter picked up a comic book my wife and I had been gifted about a young couple in love (I think perhaps the young couple was supposed to be something like us, but I can’t recognize either of us in their naïve simplicity). In the comic, the whippersnappers are going through their daily routines and, in doing so, express their love for each other in simple, indirect ways. Reading the book now, I don’t pay any attention to this, but rather to the fact that these people are able to do so many elective things with a single day. On some pages, they read, go out to eat and watch a movie all in the same day. Being able to do even one of those things would feel like I’d entered the twilight zone.

Right after I’d had this realization, I started to look for more profound meaning in other quotidian things I find myself reading—since I’m now limited to the quotidian medium, lacking the brain power to read anything else in 3-minute spurts (I’ve been reading a history of Byzantium for about six months now). Invariably, this should come full-circle and find something quite relevant and earth-shaking from my daily forays in the library with my daughter. The book was in the Arthur series. In it, Arthur, an unidentified and somewhat androgenous animal (a rodent, maybe?), finishes a school year and goes on vacation with his family. It rains the whole time the family is on vacation, but they manage to have fun despite this. Or rather I should say, Arthur and his sister DW have fun because… his parents? They don’t matter at all. They’re not even stock characters with predictable “parental” lines and dad jokes. They’re only there to make the business of going on vacation believable for a ten-year-old audience. They’re a requirement. They’re only there because other kids have parents that are also always heaving in and out of the fog of domesticity like something so staid and predictable it’s ceased to have any meaning independent of what you’re willing to grant it. The parents in this book were horrifying because, in a dramatic way, they had no agency. Arthur and DW had more interaction with the scenery than with these parents. The parents were more like the car that took them on vacation, necessary to mention, but nothing more. The teacher who appears only on the first page of the story has a name. The parents are never more than “mom” and “dad”: archetypes hollowed out by time. Reading this, I saw that I, too was fading into this level of existence that is far too concerned with just being and cares very little for becoming, in fact has no capacity for such concerns. There is no time to become anything other than what I’ve already committed to—the parent of these children and I can see how, in the future, to them I will take on the same inevitable and furniture-like qualities I guess all parents eventually take on.        

Is there a way to prevent this? Is there a way to imbue myself with a more profound personality? One that can withstand the onslaught of raising children? Maybe, but I have to ask myself if it’s worth pursuing at this point. It would be like so many other projects I’ve nearly taken on since my daughter was born and, in the end, had to ditch because I realized (as I always do) that my role is no longer at the center of the stage. The most noble thing I can do, is to step back and focus on equipping my kids with what they need to grow up to make their own impact on the world and, hopefully, have their own kids so that they can realize one day just how profoundly they took their parents—especially me— for granted. Indeed, I think the only way I ever would’ve understood what my parents did for me was to have kids of my own and read them Arthur books. But that’s the wrong view, anyway. I should be thinking about it from my daughter’s perspective and all I can tell you is that she loves that Arthur book and I don’t think it’s because of the parents’ diminished roles. She likes it because she likes Arthur, because the story arc has some tension and because I read it to her. I’m the one that makes that book stand up and talk and, maybe that’s better than all the other things I could be committing myself to. Scattered as raising two kids may be, it certainly feels more important than any other project I’ve ever embarked on.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to write this, and that’s something a two-dimensional, static book character probably couldn’t manage. Although, all the credit goes to my wife who nursed the baby, did the dishes, folded the laundry, bathed and got the baby to bed in the span of time it took me to write this—and dammit I wrote fast! 

Dream Reading

 

I wade into the white noise blaring from the computer in the evening. The room has an infant scent that’s like Halloween candy—sweet, waxy, new. Even though I make no noise, there’s a mewling coming from the cradle. My son, two weeks old, is on the verge of waking up in there and I tiptoe over to my side of the bed and wince each time undressing makes the slightest sound. I make it into bed without waking him. My wife’s asleep. My son’s asleep and, the next room over, my daughter’s asleep. I close my eyes and stare at the back of my eyelids in the dark and listen to everyone’s breathing as best as I can through the white noise.

When an hour has gone by and I still haven’t gone to sleep, I try to copy my wife’s breathing. At first, it’s lulling to know that I’m breathing as one would who is in such a deep state of sleep as she appears to be, then I remember that our bodies are different and that her breathing is matched to her, not me. I stop and my thoughts go back to the approaching fall semester and all I have to do to prepare. Great ideas occur to me on the improvements of my classes, but I don’t write them down; I don’t even get up because to do so would break the spell of this strange anesthesia I’m under, like the original twilight sleep. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness, but neither am I fully awake.

Sometimes, when I’m very tired and I try to read, I fall asleep knowing I’m holding the book, but, asleep, I know I’m holding the book and I have reading dreams. That is, the content of my dreams comes to me as strange things I’m reading. These dreams have no visual element other than text, but the text somehow creates pictureless ideas.

The sleep I’m having now feels like one of those reading dreams, but I’m reading the room, hearing the sounds of it, even looking at it as I remember it when I closed my eyes. The computer screen shows a waterfall. This accompanies the roaring sound I’m hearing. The computer light is periwinkle and electric, like static popping under a blanket. The corners of the room lie in shadow. I feel the weight of the blanket on me. My legs are warm; I move them apart from each other. I begin to hear strange things in the repeating white noise. The falling water has begun to sonically blur. It sounds like the rush of wind heard when biking down a steep hill and then it turns into a hiss, sort of like static but without seamlessness of static. I hear it stop and start. It’s a sound I’ve seen before when watching falling water. If you focus on one part of a waterfall, the whole thing looks like it’s falling in jerky stop motion. The sound is like that and, if I could look up at the screen, I bet I’d see that now, too. But even dream reading the screen feels like too much work and I continue not to focus on anything in particular until gradually, a sound shapes itself from the distance: an opening, a throat clearing, an “ahem”. It clarifies. The first few hiccupping sounds of my daughter’s crying. Am I dream reading this, too? I strain my ears for it. A loud car growls by outside. When it’s passed, I can clearly discern the cries that are punctuated by a taking in of air and sound, mostly, like letting it out through the glottis, like a swallow in reverse.

I realize that I’m completely awake and I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Getting up after just lying there for hours comes as something of a relief. As least now, I have something to do. I wade out of one white noise soundscape and into another. When I open my daughter’s door, the sound of pouring rain runs out and bifurcates with the waterfall sound in my bedroom everyone else is asleep in. There’s a lambent night light, like a small church candle in a monastery niche, more revealing the darkness than relieving it. Another hiccupping cry. I shut the door after me and close myself into the sound of crying rain.

“What’s wrong?” I ask my daughter, standing at the railing of the crib, her hands tightly wrapped around it. She doesn’t answer, but when I reach down, she releases the railing and allows herself to be carried upward. I bring her to my shoulder and her thirty pounds rests squarely against me, like a backpack swung around to the front.

I lean back into the rocking chair, but I’m too tired to sing, really too tired to hum, so I just rock and feel drowsy. I rock and after a while I’m dream reading again and it’s like my daughter is the one rocking me, she’s just doing it backwards. This is a strange feeling and it makes me feel like I’m not holding her tightly enough, so I force myself a little more awake. I open my eyes and see that she’s wide awake. Her eyes are taking in everything, although she’s perfectly still. It’s strange that she doesn’t talk to me. She just stares, like she’s trying hard to remember something.

I try a few songs. Eventually, they become half-hearted humming and when, after 20 minutes her eyelids haven’t even begun to close, I tell her I’ll lie down next to her. She tenses, but lets me put her back in the crib. Lying down, she keeps her eyes open. I pull over a beanbag to rest my head on and, from the small foam pad by her bed, I push my arm through the slats of the crib and gently pat her on the back. My arm is somewhat cinched in, but it’s not completely uncomfortable: I’m still lying down; I’m not holding her anymore, I can even pat without too much discomfort. I close my eyes and the sound and the dull golden light of the nightlight seem to wash over me—only they are much more soporific this time. The room has a close humidity, that isn’t dampness—it’s the kind of summer night I remember from June in Michigan when the air is totally still and the stars and fireflies are all hung together in the motionless air and there’s a kind of sublimination that seems to happen between the body and the air. It’s not sweating but the gradual turning into the same languid night air the surrounds one.

I realize I’m falling asleep. I open my eyes and see that my daughter is still awake. I wonder if she’s forming the kind of memories that I’m tapping into right now. I wonder if in the future when she’s unable to sleep, if she’ll lean into this memory, into this room and, thinking of what she’ll think of in the future for a sleep mnemonic, I fall asleep.

I wake up with the dust motes rising from the carpet into the morning light. I feel better rested, having slept on the floor than I would’ve if I’d slept alone in a comfortable bed and I find myself looking forward to the day as I once did when I was young and it was summer. My daughter is still asleep and the white noise is still going in each room, though now this hiss of the falling water sounds a bit primitive in the daylight.

Precipitous Delivery

 Early in the morning, May 20^th, we drove over to Blue Lake to pick up some vegetables.

The afternoon winds had already picked up, although it wasn’t nine o’clock yet and the air was ocean-current cool. Driving east, it warmed slightly when the foothills blocked some of the wind, but most of it made its way through the narrow valleys that wend their way alongside rivers and streams in the eastern portion on the county, bringing the meltwater out and the salt air in.

The vegetable pick-up was for ten and we arrived in town before nine with no clear destination. We stopped by the tennis courts and my daughter Esmé took her bike once around the nets before abandoning it for an errant tennis ball, which we threw back and forth for a while the sun warmed the courts and a team of a sort of ping pong-tennis hybrid moved in an occupied a quadrant of the court. We all stopped, mesmerized by the plink and plunk of their miniature rackets and balls.

The breezes slackened and the sun warmed us into more exploratory movements. We wandered out past the horse corral, over the pedestrian bridge that spans a dry creek bed and up to the foot of a lumber mill which no longer runs but is chromatic enough to appear functioning despite the closed fences and the weeds springing through the parking lot.

Parked in front of this derelict mill, was an abandoned Mercedes, missing a back door. I climbed in. Gina, my wife, didn’t like the look of the thing, and, once inside, I had to agree. There’s something interloping about even being in an abandoned car: a place that only one or two people have spent substantial amounts of time in, molding it to their shape and personality. The mill, on the other hand, was too general to have this kind of feeling. It would be hard to interlope in a place that had been created for a large-scale purpose but sitting in the back seat of someone’s car was like finding a photo in the trash and trying to put oneself behind the viewfinder, imaging why it was taken in the way it was and why it’d been thrown out. 

While I was taking my time thinking about all this, Esme’ had climbed into the car with me and we were sitting in the back pretending to passengers in some great cross-country road trip when Gina hurried us out of the broken-down and doorless car, it was time to get the vegetables and get to our appointment at the pool.

When we got back home from the pool and half an hour of playing crocodile, I wasn’t too surprised to find a pool of water in the hallway even though we’d showered, and changed back at the locker room. Somehow, going to the pool, one brought puddles of water home, even when you didn’t cross the threshold with wet flipflops and dripping bathing suits.

However, this puddle was more viscous looking than pool puddles and standing over it, Gina mentioned that it had come from her. This was no errant pool water. It was amniotic fluid perhaps coaxed forth by our time in the pool and the similarity of the surroundings. Either way, here it was. No contractions, no other signs of labor, but enough of a sign to call the hospital.

On the phone, the nurse asked the requisite questions and it came back that we’d have to come in. As usual, feeling nothing myself, I dithered, inquiring if maybe I should stay and let Esmé have her nap, after that I could take her in the bike trailer to her grandparents and, only then, would I ride over to the hospital to check in on things. I liked the idea of riding a bike to important life events: weddings, births, etc. Luckily, Gina isn’t nearly as nearsighted as I am and requested that I stop what I was doing and get everything together.

I still probably took too damn long, but eventually, we ended up in the car driving a few miles over the speed limit only because I felt I had a good excuse.

At Gina’s folks, I puttered around getting the car seat out, still in no real hurry. Esmé, two years before, had been induced and the entire process was about 48 hours in the hospital. I saw no reason to hurry for something that worked in long stages and, with such dubious reasons for even going. Water breaking? Wasn’t that a Hollywood reason to go to the hospital? Did anyone’s water even break in that crazy-making way? It certainly didn’t for us. Not last time, anyway. I drove to the hospital like a grandmother driving home from church, still half-convinced that what I’d seen on the hallway floor at home was from the pool.

We went into the same tirage room we’d been in years before, the one we’d slept in while we’d waited for the induction drugs to start working. Gina got the once-over and they were about to let us go when the nurse got the call from the doctor—check the cervix.

Four centimeters. Well, this was slightly unexpected, but…um…encouraging. I guess it was good that we’d packed these bags and dropped Esmé off; yes, maybe it would be a good idea to stay. But, still, let’s take a nice long walk. After all, we’ve got a sitter now and really no reason to stay here. Might as well go out and get a coffee or something.

We moved into the delivery room. The same room we’d been for 14 hours the last time we’d been here. The room where I’d read, talked, encouraged, lapsed into silence, hid in the corner, cheered and cried out “it’s a girl!”. It was a great room, but like the empty mill, it had been designed for an institutional purpose and didn’t maintain one’s memories—I guess that’s an argument for giving birth in a car; until you have to sell it, anyway.

I was prepared to toss my stuff down and stride out the door, but, the hospital has its requirements and we had to fill out the intake forms and give preferences, listen to options, etc.

We were still moving through the bureaucratic rigmarole when Gina started to feel sick and then started moving around the room looking for things to hang from. She started to moan and I stood by, uncertain when things would get serious enough to act. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I didn’t want to look uncaring either, so, I just followed her around like a Charlie Chaplin character miming someone, making quiet suggestions of encouragement, mostly to myself. Still wondering if we were going to be able to take that walk. 

Luckily, a nurse came in and, by the look on her face, gave me reason to abandon the idea of doing anything but staying in this room. It was good to understand where we stood. I started to give my encouragement a little louder now, with a little more confidence, but still mostly to myself. By now, Gina was moaning loud enough to drown me and pretty much everyone else out. The nurse saw me in the corner shouting encouragement to myself and suggested that I offer a sort of guided meditation, listing body parts to relax. I couldn’t tell if Gina thought it was a good idea or not because when I said things like “Relax your hair; good! Now, relax your ears” she just moaned louder, but when I got to ‘relax your shoulders’ and saw them flop down, I thought perhaps it was helpful, so, I kept going.

I got so wrapped up in finding new things to relax each time a contraction started, I didn’t notice the room gradually filling with nurses. I did notice that Gina’s moans and had turned to screams because I could barely hear my own guided meditation which by this point had digressed into more of an anatomy lecture as I thought of more and more esoteric parts of the body to relax like uvula and hyoid bone.

One contraction went on for so long I was hoping to get my guided meditation down to relaxing tarsals and metatarsals, but when I was still on ‘sternum’ the doctor walked in briskly with a whole coterie of nurses in tow. There must’ve been about 20 people in the room. I wondered how many had come over from idle curiosity, as Gina was now screaming loud enough to almost command an audience. We’d only been in here for about an hour and I wondered how long she’d be able to keep it up without losing her voice. Then the doctor, leading the assemblage of nurses in a chorus, squatted down like an umpire behind home plate and shouted “push!”

“Push?” I looked down to see how things were progressing and saw there was reason to push. The baby was already on his way out. This wasn’t Hollywood, it was faster. We’d gone from “I think my water just broke” to “Push!” in about two hours. Most movies are longer than that.

It took a while for my excitement to catch up. I’d been so ready to be standing on the sidelines for the next six hours or so, that I needed to remind myself that this was my wife and my child right here both happening now. I took up the refrain “Push!” I shouted, maybe a little too loud, checked myself and then switched to “breathe!” because it didn’t seem so demanding. But when I realized that breathing wasn’t going to get the baby out, I switched back to “push!”, but I stopped jumping up and down and clapping my hands when I said it.

In a few minutes and what I can only imagine to be indescribable pain, it was over. Gina looked up at me, dazed, but still fully in possession of her faculties.

Still dazed Gina looked up at me and asked “Is it a boy or a girl?” With Esmé, I’d been able to help in a way that wasn’t just cheerleading. I’d seen her come out and announced “it’s a girl!” to the room. This is the great thing about not knowing the sex, it gives the partner a purpose, but, even in this respect, I’d dropped the ball. Everything had happened so fast: I’d been so caught up in yelling “push” and so relieved when the baby came out, I hadn’t bothered to look at the genitals. “I don’t know,” I admitted. The doctor looked up from her work anticipating the placenta and turned the baby over in her hands so I could see the penis. “It’s a boy!” I yelled, although I was pretty sure that Gina could see for herself.  At that moment, it was like everything came back together again. The three of us—me, my wife and the baby— had all been put in these disparate roles in this somewhat socially circumscribed task of childbirth, but, the news that the baby who’d just shot out was a boy was so remarkable, the three of us, my wife, my son and me, cried. The doctor, seeing that we were in this vulnerable position, asked the boy’s name and it was like we all said it at once: Luca.

…

Later that evening, when we’d been moved to the postpartum room, I drove out to get dinner and, leaving the hospital, I felt like an astronaut drifting out into space further and further away from the earth and from warmth, love and life. I passed the exit for the 299, the highway that heads out to Blue Lake and thought about the ordinary morning we’d had walking past abandoned mills and climbing in empty cars and I saw that perhaps it had been the emptiness that had resulted in Gina’s labor. When the cold becomes too intense, we seek out warmth and when the world feels depopulated, perhaps we seek to fill in the absences. It felt that way, anyway, driving down the near-empty highway at night, the father of a baby boy who already felt too far away.

…

We got home the next evening after staying the requisite 24 hours in the hospital for all the tests that ferret out the various maladies that might not be immediately obvious. Luckily there were none. It was impossible not to continually compare the experience to the way it’d been when my daughter had been born. I kept finding myself saying inane things like “I don’t remember this.” As if having a single child is enough to turn anyone into birthing center expert. Luckily, they kept us fed and often enough someone would come in and see how we were doing. The whole experience really gave me sympathy for nurses who are constantly having to barge in on other people’s life-changing moments and ingratiate themselves to the mood. Here we were beaming with happiness and the nurses who were probably having all kinds of ordinary non-beaming-with-happiness kind of days, were having to acclimate themselves to our level of joy. I know I’d find this very hard to do every day.

The nurses also seem to be on rotations shorter than their shifts. I know nurses work long shifts, but it seemed like every five or six hours, someone new was coming in and introducing themselves to us and we’d have to watch as they measured our happiness and gave a commensurate response. By the time the last one came in, I was too weary of watching them mirror my elation to really respond to their questions with anything more than monosyllables. It almost started to seem like they were more excited than me, which I didn’t think was possible.

When they finally let us out it was late in the afternoon and we had to deal with the added strangeness of daylight after being inside all day while strapping a floppy-necked infant into a car seat. The whole process of taking an infant home from the hospital is so awkward, I imagine there would be a lot of money in any idea that could make it feel cozier somehow, like, I don’t know, baby taxis or something.

Gina’s folks were waiting for us with Esmé at home and what we’d been waiting for all day—this new sibling meeting which seemed to cement the four of us as a family—was almost too ideal to feel real. We set Esmé up with a Boppy cushion to hold Luca and she gently smoothed his hair and repeated ‘hi Luca!’ with a toddler’s candor and interest. I’m sure at some point, she’ll get jealous of him, but watching her smooth his hair on the couch with a radiant smile on her face, that moment is hard to imagine.

…

It was initially difficult to settle down. I felt like I had 100 things I’d fallen behind on while in the hospital and the house was a mess. There were also these two babies that needed to be cleaned up and put to bed. Gina was almost too exhausted to stand and I had no idea how I was going to be of much help. I kept walking around in circles, picking things up and setting them down in the wrong place.

I managed to get my daughter to sleep and to pick up a little. Gina was in the bedroom with our new son, hoping he might sleep for more than two hours at a time. I sat in the living room having a beer, thinking with this new pace of life, an evening beer would probably be my only respite from family, work and social obligations. After the beer, I meant to go in and read, but I fell asleep almost immediately.

I couldn’t have been more than two hours later when I woke up to Gina shaking me awake. “Esmé’s awake!” She whispered at me. I was so tired, it took me a minute to remember that Esmé was my daughter. I stumbled into her room and discovered that she needed a diaper change. In my exhausted state, I accidentally emptied the contents of the diaper on the floor, then I did the same thing somehow in the bathroom. Then, in her crib, Esmé hit her head and started crying.

After half an hour, I finally got her quieted down long enough to crawl back into bed and then be awakened again by her cry coming over the baby monitor. This time, I grabbed a pillow and a blanket.

…

Our first night as a family, I slept on the floor of my daughter’s room and my wife slept—if you could even call it that—feeding my son, in various positions, crib-side. When Esmé woke me up on the floor in the morning, and when I heard baby cries coming from the next room over I cried out “welcome to your new life!” to Gina. I was smiling when I yelled it.