if this floor could talk

Daily I am faced with it, wake to it, again and again. Oh, the horror of it! My bare toes shrivel at the prospect of unshielded intercourse upon this great masterpiece of filth that has become of the formerly lush and lusty pile carpet in my home. Alas, and would it were not so.

My carpet is a grungy patchwork of splotches and stains in varying shades of grey, decorating the floor in a gross accidental animal print that stretches across nearly all our living space. The incidents that rendered this impromptu abstract artwork vary wildly, and in truth, I should probably feel more nostalgic about it. What I mean is that these stains, however disgusting they may appear, also serve as a chronicle of the collective lives that have been playing themselves out inside these walls, a timeline of the narrative of my family.

For instance, here near the doorway of the kitchen is the spot where I once bled. There had been a baby gate stretched across that doorway and a baby in my arms when, as I stepped over the gate en route to the living room beyond, the toe of my shoe caught on its top edge and sent me sprawling. An old fashioned wooden rocking chair sat only a couple of feet away, and instead of trying to catch myself, I had cradled the baby to my chest like a wide receiver with a game-winning touchdown pass and fallen full force into the side of that chair, which shrieked, splintered and collapsed beneath us all at once into a pile of broken kindling. Somehow I managed to protect my daughter from injury amidst the calamity of the fall, but I was hurt – arms and side and shoulder badly bruised, one forearm gashed where a spear of snapped slatwood caught and bit, both knees deeply skinned from digging into the carpet to stop the bulk of our weight – and we lay there as my blood dripped onto the floor, the baby screaming like her hair was on fire, me shocked silent as stone.

I stayed sore, scabbed and strawberried for weeks afterward, and the damage to the rocker was irreparable, but as far as we could tell, the baby hadn't even been scratched. The cut on my arm healed cleanly, but I still have a fat purplish scar on my right knee that itches like the devil sometimes when the weather's bad. I don't mind, though. I like to be reminded of that day, when I instinctively sacrificed my own well-being for the safety of my fragile little girl. I might even think that I'd saved her life had my own clumsiness not caused the whole ordeal in the first place. Nevertheless, it still makes me feel good. Makes me feel like a father, a real one. I appreciate anything that leads me to that.

And yet, when I see that stain where my blood fell, one among so many, I still typically think, "Ugh! I hate this carpet." Wherein lies the difference between my itchy scar and the sight of that spot, I don't know.

Look – those spatters not too far away from the bloodstain are from the first time the kids caught the neighborhood ice cream truck down at the end of the driveway, and I bought my daughter a Tweety Bird sherbet and my son a Batman, both their own choices, both with eerie gumball eyes. Over there near the window is where somebody was watching television with a cup of chocolate milk and kicked it over. And that, just to the right of the entryway – yeah, the one that looks like a turtle with a long neck – that's the spot it made when the cat got into the pantry, broke open a bag of flour, and proceeded to sneeze 'til he barfed.

Speaking of pets, I'm pretty sure that one is from the brief period when we had a dog. And that one. And that one. And all those over there.

The really huge stain, the one that occupies almost the exact center of the living room floor, comes from the time when my son was so sick as a baby. During the long recovery period that followed his treatment, he took medications that caused him to throw up repeatedly, enormous awful projectile vomitings up of whatever was inside him, over and over again. He probably puked onto that same spot on the carpet thirty times or more. The old couch used to sit there in the middle of the room, and we would hold him there, or lie down with him there, knowing he'd be throwing up at least once or twice and thinking that letting that ratty secondhand couch take the brunt of the abuse was better than washing bedclothes however many times a day. So we'd sit there, or lie there, and sure as the seconds on the clock ticked off, he would throw up again, down over the side of the couch. That's why one side of that big stain is flat like it is.

All this time spent, all this well-earned wear, these moments, these memories and so many others, ground down into the knap like a diary, and still the sight of it makes me cringe and wrinkle my nose in disgust. I can't help it -- I want a fresh start. Perhaps, when the time comes and we begin the work of pulling it up off the tacks, stripping it away from the subfloor and rolling it up into logs to be hauled away, then my feelings will change. Perhaps, as I throw those great heaps down amongst all the other cast-off debris at the landfill, I'll finally make my peace with its grime and give credit where credit is due: this carpet has been through so much, and it has served us well.

But regardless of my sentiments, next time we're getting hardwood.

truth in advertising

There are a multitude of prescription drug commercials that have dominated American television for the past decade or so, all attempting to coerce the public into a brand-name solicitation of the product with their local practitioner. The majority of these ads are surprisingly similar to one another, consisting of flowery titles superimposed over a gentle, slightly hallucinatory montage of scenes -- blissful people walking hand in hand on a beach, or laughing at the dinner table, or playing frisbee with a dog, all slightly slo-mo -- that play out on the screen while a comforting, motherly voice proceeds to read a litany of the most ghastly possible side effects of the drug:

“Use of Clandesta may cause headache, dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, halitosis, flushed skin, water retention, hives, shingles, scurvy, bloating or gas, stomach or intestinal cramps, diarrhea, constipation, lapses in bladder control, gigantic kidney stones, flop sweat, persistent nausea or vomiting, difficulty sleeping, difficulty hearing, difficulty speaking, shortness of breath, blurred or double vision, impotence, infertility, extreme nervousness or restlessness, paranoia, genital warts or blisters, muscle stiffness or weakness, numbness or tingling in the extremities, decreased coordination, shaking, fainting, seizure, hepatitis, jaundice, gout, low blood pressure, ringing in the ears, strange thoughts or dreams, unusual changes in mood, transient hallucination, racing or irregular heartbeat, unstable temperature, entoptic phenomenon, receding hairline or stretch marks, and may also increase the risk of skin, lung, bone, liver and/or rectal cancer.” After which horrific intonation the voiceover always immediately follows with the caveat, "Ask your doctor if Clandesta is right for you." Because hey, stomach cramps aren’t so bad, right?

My favorite is the spot for a sleep aid that states, "Users have been known to experience sudden depression and suicidal thoughts or actions.”

So what they're really saying, if I understand correctly, is that if you search within yourself and find you prefer your insomnia to, say, a purposeful self-inflicted death, then maybe this isn't the drug for you. And to that I offer kudos, guys; right on. We The People would earnestly appreciate that kind of blunt honesty in our advertising whether you were required by Federal law or not. Considering the content of the other eighty-something percent of television commercials we see, I'd say we need it more than ever. Need them both.

The honesty, and the drugs.

humanitarianism

I was outside working in the yard today as my eldest, who is 6, conducted his usual outdoor canvass of our property for hapless bugs to capture and observe. The focus of these quests is ordinarily worms and slugs, which he loves mightily (some might say unhealthily), but because it is spring and they are plentiful, he has recently redirected his fixation to caterpillars.

If you were to ask him (and quite possibly even if you weren’t) exactly why he feels the irresistible pull to abduct these larval Lepidoptera, my burgeoning research scientist will tell you it is of the utmost importance that he witness the development of a chrysalis and subsequent emergence of a fully metamorphosed moth or butterfly, for as he says, “I’ve never seen that.” If you were to ask me why, I would tell you that yes, I do believe his scientific curiosity comes to bear, sure, but that his true motivation is more likely due to the fact that, as far as bugs go, caterpillars rate pretty high on both the cuteness and handleability scales, and also, they’re slow and easy to catch - in other words, the perfect quarry for a kindergartner with a monster bug jones.

This morning, his hunt began with the acquisition of several ladybugs before he came across his first caterpillar crawling along on the large butterfly bush we have in the back yard (that’s Buddleia davidii, for you botanical types). He showed it to me as I was headed inside to retrieve some water for the two of us, speaking excitedly about how he had “never seen one like this before.” Though it looked small and fairly plain to my jaded adult eyes, I did my best to echo his enthusiasm in my response and demeanor before slipping into the house for the water.

When I returned, he was crouched down over the picnic bench on the back patio, and he looked up at me with an expression of supreme distress on his face.

“We’ve got a big problem, Dad,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I was watching the new caterpillar crawl on the bench right here, and he fell down there in the crack, and now he’s stuck.”

I looked where he was pointing, and sure enough, the little guy had slipped perfectly between two of the slats of wood that make up the sitting surface of the bench.

“Oh no,” I said to him, knitting my brow in concern. “What are we gonna do?”

He thought for a moment, looking back down at the bench, and then said, “We need a saw,” nodding slightly for effect.

“Um…”

“Then we can cut the bench and he can get out.” He looked up at me and smiled. Nay — beamed.

“Well, we could do that, sure, but if we cut up the bench, then where will we sit?”

“We can sit in chairs,” he said, a note of exasperation in his voice, as if wondering how I could be so incredibly stupid. “He’s stuck in there, and we’ve got to rescue him.”

“I know, buddy, and you’re right — we do need to help. I just think we can probably come up with some other way to get him out of there. Don’t you?”

“Well… maybe. But I really think we need a saw.”

Luckily we were able to work out another, less destructive method of rescue together, and our humanitarian efforts were entirely successful for both the caterpillar and the bench. But I have to be honest — if my ‘gentle coaxing with a folded piece of paper’ technique had failed, I’d have been sorely tempted to try his idea. Because in spite of its deleterious impact on my outdoor furniture, I must admit it would have worked like a charm.

only mostly dead

“They say I got brains, but they ain’t doing me no good; I wish they could.”
     – BRIAN WILSON, ‘I Wasn’t Made For These Times’

“There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.”
     – STEVEN PATRICK MORRISSEY, ‘You Handsome Devil’

When I was eighteen years old, I would have told you that writing was every bit as vital to my existence as breathing. Many days have passed between then and now – fifteen years’ worth of steady decline – until the same effort that once would yield a fully imagined story, if not two, now offers only a handful of stonewrung blood, a scant few overwrought sentences heavy with scratchouts and false starts, clotted with waste ink and knots of frustration, and lacking. Now I am thirty-three, and I am no longer a writer. But the memory of my youthful passion and resolve, of that deep faith I once held in my own abilities, is extraordinarily vivid, and sometimes so tangible that I almost believe it could still be hiding inside me somewhere, crouched in the dark and waiting.

* * * * * * * * *

My wife has a habit of saying that she “can’t find” a thing when she has not yet actually looked for it. This rarely fails to make me laugh and has become sort of a running gag between the two of us. A typical exchange goes something like this:

“I can’t find my keys,” she’ll say.

“Well, have you looked for them?” I counter.

To which she’ll respond, always mock-offended, “Well, no,” or, “A little,” or sometimes, “You see me looking, don’t you?”

Then I’ll say, “Why don’t you try…,” and offer up my best guess as to the whereabouts of the Item In Question. She then either goes to check this new possibility or puts on her best exasperated adolescent and says:

“I looked there already. Of course.”

“But did you look look,” I’ll say, “or did you just stand there and stare at the desktop without touching or moving anything?”

Then she’ll put one hand on her hip and sigh heavily and ape further pouty, bottom lip stuck out, and by that point we both usually crack up laughing.

The more I think about this, the more mine seems like nervous laughter.

* * * * * * * * *

Over the years I have found no end of things to blame for my gradual silence, but always I was able to at least feign denial by continuing to write intermittently, however insignificant the results. Then, a little more than three years ago, my son got sick. In addition to the obvious emotional pressure of having a critically ill child, the ordeal also put an enormous strain on our meager family finances. I took as much time off as I felt I could get away with, but it was only perhaps ten days after his initial diagnosis that I was forced to return to work while my wife stayed alone by his side.

The hospital where he received all of his care is about 50 miles away from our house, a commute which made it impossible for me to visit every day. This left me with far too much time on my hands to sit and think unhappy thoughts. One would imagine that this would have been a perfect opportunity to sit down with pen & paper and begin to try working out some of the things I was going through, and I did attempt this on an almost daily basis. But nothing was working. I couldn’t seem to get anything out except a rambling, senseless sort of late night pontification, generally calling into question most everything that had come before in the wake of this profound life-changing event.

And whether it’s always like that when faced with such circumstances, I don’t know. I still have a hard time putting it into perspective. I always thought I had endured life-changing events before – lots of moves, break-ups; a messy divorce; myriad career changes; childbirth; et cetera – but nothing close to this. Nothing anywhere close to this.

At any rate, there I was, still considering myself a writer, in the midst of what should have been the most tragically inspiring events of my life, and I could scarcely turn out a coherent sentence. I made attempts, as I said, not all of which were completely awful, but I was reaching beyond my abilities to express myself, and I could feel it. It felt like pretending, and that disgusted me. As far as I was concerned, the subject matter was sacred, yet instead of rising to the occasion, I found that I’d been rendered virtually mute. One day I reached the point at which I couldn’t go on simply playing at it any more, and just like that, I allowed myself to give up. It wasn’t that I suddenly lost all desire to write, but more that I could finally let go of the idea that I had anything truly worthwhile to say.

And here I am. Largely fruitless, as ever. But feeling, for the first time in a long time, unwilling to quit just yet.

par[ent]ry

So, I'm a dad, the proud father of two. My son is two and a half (or 32 months, in the odd menstrual shorthand of which parents seem so fond), and my daughter was born just one month ago today. Admittedly, parenthood isn't a job for which I thought I'd be very well-suited. I have never harbored any illusions about my own maturity level (or, rather, lack thereof), and I had serious concerns about my adequacy at the outset. The levels of selflessness and vigilance and determination required to be successful as a parent, not to mention the sheer magnitude of redefinition one's lifestyle must weather, weren't so much frightening to me as they were awe-inspiring, and my torpid self-esteem allowed for only the most marginal confidence as I began this adventure.

To my great surprise, I have found that fatherhood has come quite naturally to me, and in fact now seems like the only truly worthwhile thing I've ever done with my life. Equally surprising was the revelation that this so-proclaimed "world's toughest job" is an absolute riot; though it is not without its myriad vagaries and struggles, of course, I certainly find myself laughing much more often than I am crying.

My son Jeremy (named for Jem Finch in 'To Kill A Mockingbird') is so very cool. He's at the amazing age when some new aspect of his blossoming individuality seems to manifest itself each day, and it's such a blast to watch a person appear from the ground up like that, magically; I can't get enough of talking to him, listening to him, studying the ways he interprets and interacts, watching him puzzle through the intricacies of the world and how it works. The time I get to spend with him, though never as much as I'd like, is always the highlight of any day, and for all my concern beforehand regarding the ways in which my life would change, I can scarcely remember what it was like without him.

Not too long ago, the possibility arose that I would be reminded in the most terrible way; at three months old, Jem was diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal blood disorder that saw him enduring chemotherapy at four months old and a stem cell transplant two months later. With more than a little luck and grace and the most extraordinary pediatric medical care available anywhere in the world, we're thankfully out the other side of that darkness now. As 'out the other side' as one can ever be after such an experience, anyway; Jem is almost 100% healthy, but still, there are remnants, remainders. He grew sick at such an early age and was sustained on liquid nutrition through such a pivotal period of development that he never learned how to eat properly. This situation continues to improve, though we do still struggle with it, and despite the fact that we must continue to supplement his meager intake of solid food with four-per-day boluses of a prescription formula passed through a little plastic-and-rubber g-tube knob in his stomach (two inches or so to the northeast of his bellybutton). Sometimes I have to remind myself of his age and the fact that two-year-olds often don't eat very much, that it's actually fairly common behavior, circumstances notwithstanding. I wish it didn't require reminding myself.

He also just recently transferred from the care of the oncological team at the hospital where he was treated into what they call their Survivor's Clinic. The Survivor's Clinic is a new team of doctors assigned to kids who are two years post-transplant or into remission. The team's collective expertise is dedicated to the careful study of his physiology with special attention to the countless thousands of ways in which deliberate and sustained administration of radioactive chemicals into the human body can jack it all up. They run lots of tests that monitor his development and then do their best to utterly horrify us with the results. But we have to love them -- they mean well, really they do. Surely, they must.

Through it all, Jeremy has been wonderful, such a happy child, the picture of sweetness and intelligence and spirit. I hate to be one more parent who can't shut up about how their kid's the ideal, but seriously, folks -- the guy's a knockout, a total home run in the child department. He said two things tonight that I can't recall ever hearing him say before. The first was when he answered my wife Holly's admonition of "I love you, Jeremy" with "I wuff you too," and he now acts as though he will never respond to a declaration of love in any other way, having repeated it over and over all night, including when I tucked him into bed.

The second occurred while we were playing in the floor of his room before dinner. I was trying to clean up a bit, and he got distracted and wandered out of the room. About sixty seconds later, he reappeared in the doorway and said, "I'm back!" This kind of happiness is unquantifiable.

And now, as of thirty days ago, we also have a girl. Her name is Ella Caroline, and she is full of piss and something quite unlike vinegar. She also suffers the misfortune of bearing a marked resemblance to her father, but other than that lamentable business, she is perfect in every way.

Not much to say about a newborn, really -- they eat, they sleep, they cry to eat, they poop, they eat, they eat; they poop, they poop again, then pee on you, then puke on you, then sit there looking cute and very old, then sleep, then eat, and eat, and eat. And eat. Holly is working hard to cope with the extraordinary challenges of breastfeeding in addition to the enormous physical and mental strain of the surgery and the sleeplessness and the hormonal revolt, and I am doing a lot of housework and trying to lighten the mood by acting my usual silly self. For example, I have begun to use the term 'boob juice' when referring to breastmilk. Thus far, I have not found its usage to elicit the mirthful response I intended (alternatives under consideration: 'boobiefood', 'breastfruit' and 'teatloaf'.)

Somehow I had forgotten just what a very small thing is a newborn baby. Infants are so very tiny, in fact, that it always makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable to handle them. I realize that I am fully capable of doing so in a reasonably responsible manner, but still the naked reality of their fragility can be enormously intimidating to me. Wow, but this one's supercute though, man. She totally melts my heart. And I find that it's considerably easier to stop worrying so much about breaking them when you can cradle them against a chest filled with something like fresh-baked cookie inside.

I just stood up from where I've been writing this out and took a few steps around the kitchen to stretch my legs. It's almost two a.m., and Holly & Ella have been sleeping on the couch in the next room since before midnight. Standing in the doorway a moment ago, watching their breathing, the sleeping faces of my beautiful girls, I thought about how very lucky I am, and how some days I'm so tired I just want to whimper like a puppy, and how other days I'm so excited about my life that I'll sacrifice precious restful sleep for the equally rare opportunity to stay up late at the kitchen table singing love songs about it with a pen.

ill-advised

I have begun an experiment wherein all the recent e-mails I've sent have been otherwise perfectly ordinary, but the subject lines are goofy crap I've copied from spam - stuff like 'Wall Street Alert!' and 'R U Big as a Barn?' and 'Be a sperm-man with truckload of sperms' - in an attempt to see if more people scan their new mail by sender or subject.

Incidentally, it would seem that more people scan by subject line, since I haven't received replies to any e-mails sent since I began this brain-damaged endeavor. Either that, or nobody likes me.

Oh, PS - check this out! Cleveland rocks!

need gift ideas for those hard-to-shop-for behavioral psychologists on your Christmas list?

Look, everybody – it's Pavlov's toy.

a quickie

Hello, everyone.

I'm sorry so much time is passing between updates these days. The last few weeks have been utter madness at work, and I have only been able to make it to the hospital for short visits in the evening every two or three days. It makes me crazy, being away from my babies, but there hasn't been any choice lately, and I've had to press on the brave face and pretend it fits.

Jeremy's progress is achingly slow, but right on track. Things are good - blood levels continue to climb, and we're down to one antibiotic (from the previous buffet) and off the morphine completely. He's taking Methadone for the withdrawal symptoms, but so far, thankfully, they only manifest themselves in general grouchiness and a little nausea. Almost all signs of the mucousitis have disappeared, which means that he feels much better, and the elevation of his mood is significant, while being slightly offset by the aforementioned morphine withdrawal and the big doses of steroids he's been receiving. Still, seeing him smile and laugh and play again, seeing him begin to eat again, act the part of a normal healthy baby again, brings me such great joy that I have absolutely no basis for comparison.

Thank you all again for your thoughts and prayers. One of these days, I'm gonna drive to every one of your homes and personally administer much-deserved hugs, despite the protests of your unsuspecting spouses.

Meanwhile, Holly and I celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary this week. My father, kindly gentleman that he is, allowed us an entire night on our own. Holly got to visit our actual house, which she hasn't been able to do for almost six weeks now, and to witness firsthand the full extent of my startling domestic skills. I took it as a good sign that, immediately following her statement that the place was "spotless, holy crap", she totally jumped my bones.

Boy, that house sucks without them. I find myself listening to loud music almost every second I'm there now, in an attempt to diffuse some of the emptiness. Lately I've been stuck on The Glands' eponymous record from several years ago; it's excellent, and I've been positively wearing the grooves off it (the vinyl version is five or six tracks richer than the CD version, and ordered differently, and far superior, in my own little opinion, but it's a great album regardless, and if you've never had the pleasure, then get thee to Best Buy or wherever, 'cause life is filled with uncertainty, and this is one of those rare guarantees). Has just the right flavor of melancholy exuberance that seems to perfectly soundtrack my life these days. I want to be blissfully happy about every piece of good news, just jump up and down, to do donuts in the clown car 'til the wheels come off, but I can't completely let go and revel in my joy for fear of the backlash of bad luck I'd surely cause.

But hey - if that's the worst part of the fight right now, then hallelujah.

PS, folks - if you're interested in keeping closer tabs on the progress of our little heavyweight than a layabout such as myself provides, then check out Holly's hospital weblog, which she pretty much updates daily. She also knows lots of medical terminology that makes my face go all frowny. (No pictures of her, tho, unfortunately...)

corny

It's 5am, and I'm heading home from the hospital to shower and get ready for work. I only have a second, but I wanted to let everyone know that the transplant went beautifully yesterday, better than anyone expected. Jem continues to amaze his doctors (and his parents) by practically skating through all the parts of this lengthy ordeal that they expect to be the most trying, and yesterday was no exception. He made it through the entire transfusion with no nausea, no fever, no fluctuation in blood pressure at all, stayed perfectly content until about six minutes after they were done, and then fell soundly asleep.

We still have a good stretch of road left in this pilgrimage, but so far, so good. He's the most immunocompromized for the next month, and it'll take two or three weeks before we know if the new cells will regenerate his system like they're supposed to, but we're off to a terrific start. We found out today that the cord blood donor was female, so not only is his blood type changing from O negative to O positive (how's THAT for sci fi?), but he'll also really freak out anyone who ever tests his blood, as they will find female chromosomes there that they can't explain. Go, human body! Far out.

Thanks again to everyone for keeping us in thoughts and prayers. My little blog family means the world to me. More when I've got the time, I promise.

Oh, ps - there's a preservative in the transfusion blood that has a very peculiar odor, and ever since the procedure yesterday, Jem's breath smells like canned corn. I don't even slightly mind all the girlie chromosomes floating around in his sweet little body, but I really hope that smell doesn't last. I mean, I like corn and all, but yuck, dude.

superhero

As I type this, I am sitting at a courtesy computer in the hallway of a cancer ward on the third floor of a children's hospital. I am just outside my son's room, inside of which he sleeps peacefully, aided by the somnolent drift of Atavan and morphine and Benadryl through his bloodstream. It has been a long three months that has brought us here, to this night in this place. The clock at the bottom right hand of the computer screen says it's one a.m., which means that today's the day; in approximately ten hours, a nurse will start the blood transfusion that will determine the course of the rest of our lives.

The story in its entirety is a long one, and I have been fighting to tell it for many weeks. In fact, I don't know that I've ever struggled with writing like the telling of this tale has brought, and the fight still isn't over. Then again, nothing this important has ever happened to me. It becomes incredibly difficult, I've found, to shape the words that will convey how your entire life has changed in a few short moments, and you can spend innumerable sleepless nights examining and reexamining the details that surround those few moments, turning them over and over in your hands, trying to make sense of it, to find a pattern, some semblance of math or reason that would seem to add up to what has happened, who you've become, how the world looks and feels to you now, from this new perspective, through these new eyes. But it can't be done, of course. It's like taking a single piece from a thousand different puzzles and then trying to fit them all together to make an image you've picked at random from volume Nam-thru-Op of the encyclopedia. Even if you could manage to force the pieces together, maybe snipping off an extraneous tab with scissors here or there, you still can't fashion a picture that makes any sense.

I've written many pages about the events of the last three months of my family's lives, none of which fit together particularly well, and none of which can explain what has happened. At some point I may manage to assemble these bits and pieces into a moderately coherent whole, perhaps even for the pages of this very journal, but until then, this thumbnail sketch will have to suffice. The short of it is that my wife and I took our son to the hospital the weekend of Memorial Day with a persistent high fever. Less than a week later, his abnormal test results led doctors to their diagnosis of a rare blood disorder called Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis. The disease isn't classified as cancer, but it essentially behaves the same way as cancer and so is approached using a similar course of treatment. Our little Jeremy has handled it all like the brilliant, ebullient, tireless star that he is, with smiles and laughter in the face of so much ugliness and suffering. Through six weeks of the initial chemotherapy, his mood and character were so bright and delighted that you could never have guessed how sick he was if it hadn't been for the thin rubber IV line that sprouted from a tiny hole in his chest to poke out between the snaps in his onesies, or the steadily receding hairline that eventually left him bald as a cueball for the first time since before he was born, or the way his diapers would smell the first few days after a treatment (most chemotherapy is processed by the kidneys and leaves the patient's urine smelling strongly chemical, not unlike something burning on the eye of a stove). His remarkably constant good humor has made this ordeal infinitely easier for his mother and I to shoulder.

Still, it has taken its toll, on all of us. The past two weeks have been the toughest thus far, comprising the most intensely concentrated barrage of chemicals to his system, and it's finally begun to show in more upsetting ways. His appetite has completely dried up, leaving him to receive all of his nutrition through the IV now, and when he vomits (which happens at least four times daily, regardless of round-the-clock nausea medication), it is only a slick translucent green bile, just like the awful stuff we find in his diapers. His skin is dotted with hives, and mucousitis lines his throat and the inside of his mouth with sores, making even thumb-sucking too painful to endure. There are headaches, chills, and fever. He cries often now, whereas he so rarely did before, and the cry is pronouncedly different from the moderate urging tone to which we'd grown accustomed, sounding so mournful as to require enormous patience and courage from Holly and I to keep from bursting into uncontrolled sobs at the sound of it. The smiles and laughter from our happy boy are much fewer and farther between these past few days, and it is to us as if the sun has suddenly disappeared from the sky. And yet, we know the worst is far from over. All this recent hammering down of his immune system has been leading up to today - at 11 a.m. he will receive a bone marrow transplant that will hopefully negate the disease entirely and leave the three of us to lead relatively normal lives from this point forward. Whatever normal is anymore. I'm fairly sure I never knew in the first place.

For those of you that hadn't already connected points A and B, it was our family to which Poppyseed's generous entries about her friends' sick baby referred. The handful of 'bard denizens who learned of our plight through their kind inquiries regarding my prolonged absence from these pages have been wonderfully supportive, as have all our other friends and family, and I cannot thank them enough. Your words of comfort and concern have made a huge difference to me, and I'll never forget them. Please continue to keep us in your thoughts and, if you are inclined to such, your prayers as well.

Jeremy was 25 weeks old yesterday; he has spent more than half of his life now with radioactive chemicals coursing through his veins. I keep telling Holly to try not to worry too much. I tell her that this is always how superheroes are born.

---

As footnote: I can't sleep tonight. The strain and stress of the coming transplant have rendered my mind's shutters useless, and they've been stuck wide open for the last three days or so. Last night I cleaned our house (which is an empty, lonely place since Holly and Jeremy took up residence here at the hospital again) within an inch of its life. Tonight I wandered the vacant hallways of the hospital, eventually making my way down to the ground floor, where there is a bay of vending machines filled with all manner of bad food. I walked over to the only Coke machine I've found in the entire hospital that dispenses cans rather than those plastic bottles (Holly thinks I'm completely mental, but I swear the soda tastes different from one container versus the other, and I much prefer the cans), deposited 65 cents, and pressed the button for regular Coca-Cola. There was a huge CRASH! from inside the machine, and I watched in amazement as the issuing chute at the bottom of the machine filled with cans. For my 65 cents, I was dispensed nine ice cold Cokes.

It may seem silly, but I believe that providence can announce itself in silly ways sometimes. It was just after midnight when I pushed that button. I feel lucky today.

who?

HELLO! My name is yourblindspot.

I thought I'd wear a nametag in case all of you had forgotten who I was.

Which wouldn't surprise me – it's been ages since I've managed to come around here, even to play read-and-catch-up, much less actually write something. I miss you all, but I've been entirely consumed in life stuff during these past weeks. Our home computer still doesn't work, which leaves me to do whatever Internet business I might have... well, never. Unless I want to stay late at work, writing about how adorable our child is, instead of actually being with him, and his mom, in our house. And I don't. (No offense.)

So instead, I'll merely say that I am well, and that I hope the same for all of you. I'm thinking of you often, and I'll be back more regularly when I can manage to pull my head out from where it's lodged itself so firmly betwixt my hindquarters.

As for the kid, my furry little noodle? I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.









My love to all of you.

This non-entry is brought to you by: Enfamil LIPIL with iron, the first infant formula with DHA and ARA for healthier development; Pampers Sensitive Touch baby wipes, keeping your baby's ass smooth as a baby's ass; Playtex disposable bottle liners, 'cause formula stinks something awful; and by Zout, saving your clothing from stubborn poop and vomit stains, whether you're a new parent or merely a conscientious alcoholic.

some good news and some bad news

I had the luxury of sleeping in a bit this morning, and when I woke up, it was to the beautiful sight of my son’s sweet little face about nine inches from my own. Jem’s been having trouble sleeping in the bassinet lately, and for the last few nights he’s shared bunk with Holly and I. He was understandably unconscious, as he kept the two of us up pretty late last night, so I got to spend the first twenty minutes or so of my day just staring at him, watching his expression change as he dreamed about whatever two-week-old boys dream about. Nipples, I’m guessing. Just like thirty-year-old boys.

Before long, I heard the front door open and close. Holly came back to the bedroom to say good morning and check on the babe. She had made an early run to Wal-Mart for diapers and wanted to make sure I was awake. It was about ten minutes till eight.

We boys stayed in bed for a while longer. Jem started to wake up, and we chatted quietly about how adorable he is as his tiny fists opened and closed and his eyes worked themselves further open. Perhaps five or six minutes passed before Holly returned.

“Hey, honey? Some lawn truck just backed over our mailbox.”

Aw, crap. So much for lazy Saturday.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I was sitting at the kitchen table and heard an awful noise from the driveway. When I got up and looked out the front window, I noticed that the ChemLawn truck that had been parked across the street was gone, and our mailbox was flattened.”

“Flattened?”

“Totaled. History. All our mail is blowing around in the middle of the street.”

“Oh, man.”

Holly went out to retrieve our bills and what was left of the mailbox from the roadway, and I pulled myself out of bed and shambled into the living room, still wearing my clothes from the previous night. She came back through the front door, holding up the remains of our mailbox between thumb and forefinger like a dead animal. It was utterly demolished, gone from regulation height to an inch and a half of bent tin with one swift, bumper-scraping miscalculation. Even the flag was crushed and folded like the bellows of an accordion.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “What’re we gonna do?”

“I’m gonna make some phone calls.”

I pulled out our telephone book and flipped back to the Yellow Pages, to ‘Lawn Care and Maintenance,’ and found the number for the local ChemLawn office. A customer service representative connected me with Bill, the supervisor, who confirmed that they had a truck dispatched to our subdivision that morning. He was very cooperative and said that he’d send the truck driver back to talk to me. Feeling rather full of myself for having advanced the matter so efficiently, I cracked the top on a Coke and settled down on the sofa to wait for the driver.

It only took him about five minutes to return. He was a younger guy, wearing a long goatee Pharaoh-style and his ChemLawn cap backwards on his head. We talked for a moment, and it didn’t take long before I realized that he wasn’t the one responsible for the destruction of our mailbox. I consider myself a fairly good judge of character, and I could tell that this guy probably wouldn’t have just driven away from the scene of an accident, much less continue to deny the allegation once he’d been called on it. We talked about how it is against ChemLawn’s policy to use driveways to turn around, and he even said he’d considered using our driveway before deciding against it, instead choosing to drive to the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. He also gave me a rundown of the other cars on the street at the time he was there, as well as giving me the tip that any chemical maintenance company of their variety, be it lawn care or pest control, is required by law to put a sign in the treated yard which identifies the treatment and the company, and that I might determine what if any other company had been in the area this morning by trolling the neighborhood for those signs. Thoroughly convinced of his innocence, I thanked him for his trouble and let him go.

Frowning, I walked out to the end of the driveway to think. Holly seemed so sure that his truck had been the one. As I stood there, a tow truck passed me. I turned and followed its progress down the street to where it stopped two houses down. There was a police car there, and an officer was speaking to another resident at the end of his own driveway. A few words of their conversation drifted up the street – ‘not mine’ and ‘over there’ and ‘I don’t know’ – but not enough to determine what the trouble was.

Then I noticed the nondescript white truck that they seemed to be gesturing towards, the one in front of which the tow truck was lining up. It looked from my view to have been backed up into the man’s driveway, but the houses in our neighborhood aren’t particularly close together, and I couldn’t really tell from where I stood. I decided to mind my own business and turned back towards our front door, heading inside to regroup.

Human beings are a funny species. It’s amazingly smug how we think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution when our brains are as lazy as they are. Case in point is the following thought process of my very own, a series of torpid connections that I would love to blame on having recently woken from a deep sleep but have trouble honestly doing so. You be the judge.

As I’m walking back up the drive towards the house, I’m looking at Holly’s parked Cavalier. We usually keep her car in the garage, as its back seat holds the base for the baby’s car seat, and parking it in the garage prevents us from having to bring the baby out into the wind when we’re going somewhere. It’s a two-car garage, but there are still so many boxes in it from the move that it only has space for one of our two vehicles right now. So I’m walking up the driveway, looking at her car and wondering to myself, Why’d she park the truck in the garage? I knew she’d taken my pickup to Wal-Mart because I’d needed gas, and she’d planned to fill it up for me.

Then I remembered our conversation from the previous evening. The three of us had driven the mile to her brother’s house to eat grilled, beer-boiled bratwurst (which I love dearly and cannot resist, regardless of the price my digestive tract has to pay for the pleasure of their consumption), and as we were leaving our house, Holly commented that she hadn’t locked the garage because she didn’t know how. We had a short, genial conversation about how approximately 1/3 of everything we own is in that garage and the importance of keeping it locked, after which I promised to teach her how the mechanism worked at some point during the day today.

Recalling this, I thought, Wait. She doesn’t know how to open the garage.

Then where the hell is my truck?

I had stopped there in the driveway, still staring at Holly’s car, and my gaze turned slowly from her back bumper to the police car and tow truck in front of the neighbor’s house two doors down. The police car, and the tow truck, and my white pickup truck.

Oh, shit.

I literally slapped my own forehead with the flat of my palm as all the seemingly disparate pieces of the puzzle suddenly flew together, and I turned and ran across the front yard towards the cop.

When I finished filling out the police report and retrieving my fortunately undamaged pickup from where it had come to rest against a fortunately undamaged Jackson County power box, I went back in the house to tell Holly the story.

“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” I said. “The good news is I figured out who backed over our mailbox. The bad news is it was you.”

“What?”

“Do you happen to remember engaging the parking brake on my truck when you got back from the store this morning?”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yeah.”

After we managed to stop laughing, her first comment was, “Dude, I told you having this baby made me stupid,” followed shortly thereafter by, “We really need a flatter driveway, you know?”

“Would you settle for a flatter mailbox?”

fun with dookie

This parenting business - I don't know. It makes you kind of disgusting and ridiculous, doesn't it? After only two weeks as a father, I'm already noticing behavior in myself that I never could have imagined enacting before. Sick, distasteful stuff that seems perfectly normal at the time but retrospectively makes me feel like sort of a lunatic.

At the forefront of these newfound crackpot credentials of mine is a preternatural fascination with the stuff what shoots out of my son's tiny butthole. The trouble started, I believe, with a statement made by the lactation specialist who taught our breastfeeding class at the hospital. We were making lists of the pros and cons of breastfed vs. bottlefed when someone piped in from the back of the class:

"Their poop doesn't stink."

Right, I thought to myself, smiling. Their poop doesn't stink.

"Right," the teacher echoed, her voice completely absent of the sarcasm that had accompanied my own thought. "Their poop doesn't stink."

Wait... What? Really?!? Holy cow, how is that possible? For months, I had been anticipating the horrible, eyebrow-melting stench of baby crap as it is portrayed in every movie and television show I've ever seen, and now I find out that this disgust can be deferred?

I was glad we had taken seats in the back of the classroom, because I'm fairly certain I was making weird clicking noises in the back of my throat to accompany this interior monologue. Once I regained my senses, I looked around the room and found no one staring at me strangely, so I guess no one heard.

But honestly, I never really regained my senses. The first time Jeremy pooped (once the tarry black nast that is meconium was well out of his system, that is), I made sure I was front and center to test these odorless assertions. And whaddya know? It's true! It still looks pretty awful, and certainly unlike any crap you've ever seen before, but no stink! Not completely without smell (bearing instead a strange, slightly chemical tincture, like mild PVC adhesive), but light enough to be inconsequential.

My curiosity thus satisfied, one would think I'd move on to weightier items of interest, no?

No.

See, it seems that breastfed babies' rectal emissions also somewhat retain the scent of whatever Mom has most recently eaten. For example, some friends of ours came over this past Sunday afternoon and made a huge pan of lasagna for us. The idea was that neither my wife Holly nor myself have saved much energy for cooking lately, and this deep-dish Italian treat was something on which we could feed for several days without the concern of further meal preparation. However, neither Holly nor myself have saved much energy for grocery shopping lately, either. As there was virtually nothing else in the house, Holly had lasagna for pretty much every meal since, and the pan was empty by Monday night.

Imagine my surprise upon changing Jeremy's diaper last night and finding the smell of lasagna greeting me from within it. I was so impressed, I even ran the diaper into the bedroom to give Holly a whiff. And this is the level of freakishness to which I've sunk.

Anyhow, I'm obviously not trying to pretend this is acceptable behavior. I think I'm just looking for a little confirmation that I'm not the only guy out there who views these first stages of parenthood as sort of a big science experiment. 'Cause this machine we've made is bewitching me. Even its dinky, not-so-stinky exhaust pipe.

Jem

1pm, Tuesday March 9th, 2004. Sitting on our small patio out back, feeling the breeze on my face, 60 degrees and sunny. A van passes down the long dirt road that runs behind a protective row of Leyland Cypresses that border the far edge of our backyard, and a plumed line of rising white dust marks its wake. There is a drywall contractor’s crew at work in the unsold house next door, and its hammering is strangely soothing, perhaps a throwback to cherished afternoons from my youth spent in the company of my father, who himself once owned a contracting business and would sometimes take me along to job sites to watch him work and pretend I was helping. He’d pack two lunches, or we would buy matching cans of Beanee Weenie, sodas, and a bag of chips at a nearby convenience store. We’d choose a spot on the site, a seat of concrete or unsanded plywood, and eat the beans and franks cold from their cans with plastic spoons, and share our chips, and talk. Eventually we would go back to work, which meant I’d be using discarded scraps of 2x4 like splintery building blocks in a corner, constructing a rickety castle with rows of bent ten-penny nails lining its parapets while Dad hung sheetrock or framed doors and windows. The wind would blow across the foundation slab, and the same sounds and smells would float over into my little fortified corner that I am sensing this afternoon, here in this place so far removed from who I was then.

---

Now I am also father to a son.

Fifteen minutes shy of twelve hours ago, I was sitting on the sofa, watching an episode of Beavis and Butthead (which MTV2 has recently begun re-broadcasting, much to my inner 16-year-old’s delight), when I heard Holly call down the hall from the bedroom. Enrapt by the flickering foul-mouthed figures before me, I caught nothing of what she said, only its urgent, forceful tone. I pawed at the remote (note: the mute button, not the power – I am a man, after all) and called out to her in return.

“What, honey?”

“We need to go!”

And a long beat, which probably wasn’t all that long but certainly seemed to stretch out over several miles, followed finally by the clarifying, “I’m pretty sure my water just broke, and we really need to go.”

I believe I may have tried to vault over the back of the sofa à la someone much more graceful than I, but all I remember clearly was my eventual stumbling burst through the bedroom door to find soaked bedclothes and a particularly pitiful-looking Holly standing sheepish with a mushy wad of toilet paper in her hand.

“You know, honey – I think you might be right about your water breaking,” I said with a smile. Unable to help herself, she grinned back.

“Just shut up and help me.”

Like a fool, I immediately began to clean up the mess, mopping at the carpet with a towel and stripping the bed. When Holly came out of the bathroom from changing clothes and saw me there in the floor, the earlier moment’s glibness abruptly vanished.

“Do you realize we live twenty-five minutes from the hospital? Leave it! Get up! We’ve got to go!!!”

Oh, yeah, I heard in my head, in Butthead's voice.

“What’s wrong with you,” I heard her ask rhetorically as she walked away from me down the hallway. In my rush to keep up with her, we left absolutely everything at home – Holly’s clothes and sundries, the baby’s going-home outfit, the camera, the birth plan, everything. Ultimately, I suppose, it didn’t matter very much, considering nothing else went as planned, either.

We managed somehow to survive the drive to the hospital (with my beautiful wife repeatedly snapping at me that if I drove the speed limit, “we’re not gonna make it,” and me reasoning that if we all died in a high-speed collision on the way there, then it “wouldn’t make much difference, would it?”), outside of which I initially walked right away from the running car, keys dangling musically in the ignition, to help her inside until she stopped and pointed out to me what I’d done (or, rather, hadn't done). Registration, elevator ride, and suddenly we were in the birthing room, prepping for a quick ultrasound to verify the baby’s position. The whole process, in fact, has seemed much like that – rushing past me at high speed, and my neck whiplashing back and forth to catch a frame or two of the action, as if I were trying to stand on a subway platform and read the painted registration numbers from a specific car in a passing train.

The ultrasound showed that the kid was still breech. I knew Holly was upset about this, as she had desperately wanted to deliver naturally, but she and I both wanted whatever procedure would be safest for the two of them. After speaking to an anesthesiologist, the staff wheeled her away to be spinally tapped and likewise epiduralized, and I was left alone for a moment, awaiting further instructions. A nurse brought scrubs and a hat and a mask and those slippery paper shoes for me to wear, and I began to dress up as a doctor, grateful for something to keep me occupied while I waited. When the nurse returned, I was fully decked out in my ER gear, and I bounced up from my chair like a jack-in-the-box.

“Are they ready?” I asked.

“Well, there’s been a problem.”

Okay, not at all what I wanted to hear, lady. What is it with you healthcare professionals and your dramatic pauses? May I remind you that this is real life and not a script? Please explain yourself quickly and economically before I start hardcore freaking out, please.

“The anesthesiologist wasn’t able to find the spinal space.”

Again with the pausing. I wasn’t saying anything at all, merely standing there zombie-like with my mouth hanging open, but inside my head I was screaming WHAT?!? JUST TELL ME, BITCH! IS SHE PARALYZED? IS SHE DEAD? WHAT? WHATWHATWHAT!!!

“There is such a curvature in her spine that he couldn’t successfully administer the epidural, so they’re going to have to use a general anesthetic instead. Someone will come and get you when the baby is delivered.”

And that was that. Hundreds of dollars and twenty-plus hours invested in birthing classes, and yet, in the end, the full extent of my coaching was to stroke a few strands of her hair from her eyes before they wheeled her bed away. I spent the following twenty to thirty minutes of non-labor pacing the floor like a ‘50s cliché, minus the cigarettes (but only because they wouldn't allow it). If I am honest, I don’t think I’ve ever been as nervous in my entire life as I was for that brief span of time. Strangely, though, I wasn’t nervous about the operation; I may hate doctors, but I have relative confidence in their collective abilities. Instead, I was nervous about meeting him. Heart-poundingly, gut-knottingly so. I didn’t have all the action and distraction of the typical delivery room experience to divert my attention and diffuse the emotion of my first encounter with the person I helped create and now plan to raise, to teach and soothe and entertain and love and protect and cherish with every ounce of everything I am. And if the idea of that task doesn’t give you cramps, you’re much tougher than me.

Then he came rolling down the hall, and he was all sticky and vernix-dusted and cuter than a truckload of buttons, and my anticipation vanished. He was still crying from the manhandling he’d no doubt received in the operating room, so I picked him up, tucked his tiny swaddled body into my arms, and said, “Hey there.”

The crying stopped instantly, and he struggled to open his sensitive eyes far enough to catch a narrow glimpse of me, of my face and the smile that all but enveloped it. I had to wonder if he’d ever opened them before, which called to mind the way ducks and chickens will 'imprint' upon the first thing they see when they hatch. Then, for the rest of their lives, these birds will get upset any time the person or object is taken away, and can only relax again once it returns.

“Imprint to your little heart’s content, pal,” I whispered into his tiny, perfect ear. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”

---

Have a cigar, gang, and celebrate with me the birth of Jeremy Robert, my son, born March 9th at 2:44am. 6 pounds, 7 ounces, 19 inches long, and mom and baby are healthy and happy. Dad, on the other hand, is positively delirious.

Wait’ll you see the pictures. No kidding, he’s gonna melt that protective plastic sheeting right off your monitor’s screen. I offer my cherished readers fair warning, however – I may never write about anything else again. ‘Cause nothing else could ever compare.

my wife; my life

My wife is so amazing. I have studied her perhaps more carefully over the course of this pregnancy than even the fastidiousness that my passion for her has previously inspired, and I am repeatedly awed by the things I discover, the fresh intricacies I uncover, by the many ways she continues to bloom before me as a human being.

For example: I have often wondered about the meandering, seemingly irresolute nature of her commitment to the study of medicine and nursing. Most times, when she speaks of it, there is such a fiery drive in her voice that I must marvel at the contradictory ambivalence of her academic history. Though her recent attempts at reviving these scholarly pursuits have yielded the finest marks of her career as such, the accompanying pedagogic timeline would appear to betray a distinct lack of dedication.

It is only over the past nine months’ time that I have begun to realize the true inspiration for her interest in such knowledge. I could be wrong about this hypothesis of mine, and I don't necessarily believe she would admit to its truth even if she were aware of it, but I have come to believe it almost absolutely. This earnest belief is that she doesn’t actually want to be a nurse at all, and never has. All these years, she's merely been studying to be a mother, as soldiered against the myriad possibilities for attack and circumstance as she can possibly be.

The most recent checkup found our son to be holding his previous breech presentation in a manner every bit as stubborn as his two parents’ respective wills. Provided he waits long enough, our doctors have scheduled a delivery by Cesarean section for the 26th of March. In less than three weeks, I’ll be a father.

I have never been happier about anything in my life.

---

My life has become about boxes.

At work, I am preparing for the first big race of the season, which is taking place down in Sebring, Florida on the first day of spring. The last of my coworkers left for Florida last night. Because of my pending visit from the stork, I have been left to handle everything on this homebound end of the spectrum, which is a considerable management task for a reasonably sized and well-trained cadre of individuals, much less one single sleepy man. These duties largely consist of merchandise splits between locations and the packing of these split goods for shipment down to the Sunshine State. Thus far, I believe I am holding my ground quite admirably.

In addition, I closed on a new house about a week and a half ago, sat down at a thick wooden table beside a lawyer named Beau and signed eighty or so autographs, and now I own a three-bedroom, two-bath mortgage with a spacious two-car garage and two heavy rocking chairs on its narrow front porch. At night, when I am not shuffling furniture or boxes of books from the aforementioned garage (which may not actually hold cars for many months) into their designated corners of the place, I can sit on the back patio and listen to cows lowing in the distance. I can stare up into the vastness of the sky, at the stars above me, and it really seems as though I’m looking at every single one of them, even the dimmest sparks reflecting across time and space from the farthest corners of the universe.

As always, this somehow makes me feel simultaneously infinitesimal and enormous, like the fleeting memory of a wonderful dream.

I am a machine

Taurus Horoscope for Week of January 29, 2004
By Rob Brezsny

-reprinted without any attempt at permission to do so, but maybe if I pimp him, he won’t sue me, so go check out www.freewillastrology.com and save me from certain litigation!

"Mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a 'machine for turning coffee into theorems,'" writes philosopher Helena Cronin at www.edge.org. "In much the same way, genes are machines for turning oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells." According to my reading of the astrological omens, Taurus, it's a perfect time to apply this way of thinking to yourself. By the end of this week, see if you can fill in the blanks in the following sentence: "I am a machine for turning _______ into _______." In other words, define the nature of the alchemical magic you are here on Earth to carry out.

I’ve been thinking about this all week. Lately it seems I am a machine for turning energy into sleep. Or maybe stress into cigarette ash (yeah, I’ve fallen hard off the smokewagon with this nerve-wracking home loan application process, boo hiss to my unfatherly weakness). Any better ideas from the banana gallery? Be a machine for turning my fears into comedy.

Meanwhile, my unborn son grows larger and more unruly as we rapidly approach stork touchdown. One can now recognize actual human-looking body parts when he presses them hard against the inside of Mom’s tummy. Look, honey, there’s a foot! Right there, behind your bellybutton. No, wait, now it’s over here. That must hurt like a sunovabitch. And wow, what’s that thing? Is that his little butt crack? He’s mooning me! Awww! Our little frat boy.

We also started our birthing classes this week. I am very tired and cannot think of anything interesting to say about them, except that our teacher is one cool doula, and also that the whole couples-massaging-one-another-in-the-floor-as-a-group routine sort of makes me feel like I’m on ‘Real Sex’ or something.

buried alive

Remember when work was fun? When you used to look forward to each new day with the excitement that can only come from being part of a wonderful creative team filled with ideas and motivation and hope?

Yeah, me neither.

I’ve been chasing my own ass at work lately, not unlike when the cat has taken a burning or otherwise painful dump and then flees the litterbox at high speed and sort of sideways. Finalizing the year-end inventory paperwork, enduring seemingly endless planning meetings, poring over merchandise catalogs for new product – deathly boring stuff.

I really don’t know how some of you do it. By “do it,” I’m not talking about making the beast with two backs (aka The Deed; The Nasty; The Backseat Mambo; Hide the Salam; [choose your own scrompy euphemism here]), of course, which hopefully I have at least halfway figured out after fourteen-odd years of practice. What I mean is, I can’t understand how you guys can manage to make the pedestrian mudanities of everyday life interesting enough to sustain a regular entry output. ‘Cause personally, I suck at it.

For example: see above work-related copy.

Coincidentally, has anyone else ever heard of a skort before? I keep running across them in the aforementioned merchandise catalogs. Looks like a skirt, but is actually a pair of shorts. Thus, “skort.”

Can you feel the excitement pouring off me in waves?

We spent the long weekend house-hunting. Much like last weekend (the shorter one). If I have to scan one more length of crown molding for gaps, I honestly fear my eyes will pop like grapes in a microwave.

Would anyone who is unemployed or homeless like to kick me hard in the stones for the preceding complaints?

Deservedly so.

Is any of this worthwhile enough to justify recounting? Much less posting publicly?

This is why I disappear for months at a time.

---

Here’s a joke my old man told me:

A teacher has decided to hold a taste test for the students of her second grade class. The first boy comes up to the front of the room, and the teacher blindfolds him. She then places an unwrapped Hershey’s kiss in his mouth.

“Do you know what it is?” she asks. The student shakes his head.

“I’ll give you a hint,” she says. “It’s what daddy wants mommy to give him before he leaves for work each day.”

From the back of the classroom, a little girl shouts, “Spit it out! Spit it out! It’s a piece of ass!”

---

A few days ago, I was driving home and found myself struck by all the miserable-looking livestock standing out in the freezing rain. How awful, I thought, to endure such living conditions, only to be slaughtered for consumption by the same creatures who maintain them. It seemed each soaking horse and cow was glaring directly at me with their dark, mournful, condemnatory eyes as I passed. I ended up feeling so guilty about the whole issue that I drove straight home, ate a burger, sniffed some glue, and went to bed.

one more day

There was an event at work this past weekend. It wasn’t a huge race, just a medium-sized amateur regional, but I always have much more help with the larger events, so the smaller ones are almost worse for me, with at least as much work spread out over a wider range of responsibilities. Monday was the last day of racing, and around eight o’clock that morning, Holly and I were preparing to leave.

My wife Holly helps out at work sometimes. The pay is decent for outside, non-salaried employees (unlike myself, for whom the paycheck versus the hours averages out to the wage of a waiter minus their tips), and we inevitably need the extra dosh. The job entails little more than cashier duties, and its low-impact nature has been perfect since she got pregnant again.

Because of her two previous miscarriages within the past year, both Holly and I have distanced ourselves somewhat from what would ordinarily be joyous celebration of her condition. Our emotional nerves have been scrubbed raw by these prior high-to-low crashes, and it’s proven difficult to allow ourselves anything but the most skeptical excitement. Holly wears a pad every day and compulsively checks it for blood. I call her twenty times a day, checking on her condition as if she were deathly ill, making sure she’s eating enough, drinking water, taking naps. We are in limbo, lying on our backs in the floor beneath some imagined cosmic bedside, waiting for the other shoe to drop from the sky and cover us up.

We had a good scare several weeks ago when a cyst Holly had from a preexisting condition ruptured and bled a little into the pad. When she saw it, she calmly began making phone calls, and I laced my hands through my hair and sat motionless on the edge of the bed, marveling at her stability and trying to decide how I felt. After calling the doctor, she went back into the bathroom to check again and determined the true source of the blood. When she told me, we laughed, shuddered, attempted to catch our collective breath, found we could stop pretending everything was okay once it actually was okay. I knelt on the floor in front of her, held both her hands, looked into her eyes, and said, “We get a little longer this time, baby. We get one more day.”

Monday morning, the two of us had pushed our schedule to its limit and were rushing to prepare for work in the short time we had left. Holly was upstairs brushing her hair or her teeth, and I was downstairs hastily shaving. I had finished everything but my stubbly chin when I heard her say “no,” forcefully, from the upstairs hallway.

“What?” I called up, but she didn’t hear me, and after a moment I returned to my chin.

Holly came downstairs and poked her head in the door of the bathroom.

“I’m bleeding,” she said, and I knew from her tone that it wasn’t a false alarm this time. I was silent, as I tend to be when I’m upset, and she went off to call the doctor. Once I’d drained and rinsed the sink, I ran it full of clean cold water, dunked my head inside, and tried not to scream.

After contacting my boss, explaining the situation, and arranging for her to open the store for me, Holly and I got in the car and drove to the hospital. Because it was a holiday, the emergency room was packed with people. We waited for over an hour before being shown to an examination room, and then waited another hour before seeing a doctor. By this time it seemed that her bleeding had stopped. The doctor did a pelvic exam and saw residual evidence of the blood from that morning but no sign of a cause. The cervical plug (couldn’t they come up with something more poetic?) looked to be in place, and he decided to do an ultrasound and take a closer look.

As we waited for him to return with the proper equipment, I thought how terrible, to raise our hopes like this. What an awful man. I could already see the glint of promise in Holly’s eye. We were alone in the room, but we weren’t speaking, as if giving voice to our prospects would shatter their possibility.

When the doctor came back, I sat to Holly’s left, well out of the line of sight of the doctor’s KYed machinations (mentally I can handle such things, but no matter how cool I think I am, no matter how necessary it might be, if I see him, any him, touch her, I know I’ll flip out, so I play the avoidance game). For the first minute, he was tortuously silent. Ordinarily, or at least in my limited experience, a doctor performing an ultrasound gives a sort of running commentary on everything he or she sees and does. This guy wasn’t saying a word.

Oh well, I thought. Shit. And somewhere behind it, please oh please oh please.

“C’mere,” he says. I look up, and he’s beckoning me forward with a curling index finger. I stand weakly, come around to the front of the ultrasound screen, and the doctor points.

There, in pointillist black and white, is my child. I had missed Holly’s first ultrasound appointment last week with work and had only seen the static picture she brought home.

“See that?” the doctor said, still pointing. There was a flurry in the center of the fetus, like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings.

“That's the heart,” he and I both said in unison.

“Everything looks fine,” he said. “The cervix is tight, the heartbeat is strong…”

“You can see it?” Holly asked from the examination table. I looked towards her, and our eyes met.

“Sure,” I answered. “Sure I can.”

I turned back toward the screen, and just then the baby wiggled. I thought the doctor might have moved the wand, but then he said, “Hey, look at that.”

“I thought that was you,” I told him.

“Nope. He’s putting on a show for you.”

“Or she,” I corrected him.

“What? Did it move?” Holly asked.

“Yeah, he bucked a couple of times,” said the doctor. “That’s unusual this early. But as far as I can tell, ma’am, everything’s still ok in there.”

He finished his examination, gave us a smile and a handshake, and was off to help someone else before I was able to speak again. When the door closed behind him, I dramatically dropped to my knees on the floor. Holly laughed, and I looked up into her face, smiling through my tears.

“One more day, dad,” she said to me. “One more day."

synchronicity

It’s late, and I can’t sleep. Having one of those nights when the brain won’t stop spinning long enough for the eyes to close. Haunted by the past, the future, the roles of time and fate in our lives. I’m thinking about confusion and understanding, and the subtle web of balance in between.

The year I turned six, my little brother was born on my birthday, the same day that Mount Saint Helens blew her top up in Washington State. The year I turned sixteen, my grandfather died on my birthday, the same day I was spending in Orlando with the choral group from my high school. I handled the tech work (sound and lights and cues) for the group, who’d had a performance at Walt Disney World the day before. We’d spent a few hours in the hotel pool that night after dinner, and I got to see the girls, even the dancers, all wet and splashing unselfconsciously in bathing suits, which are almost better than underwear, and I happened to travel north to my grandfather’s funeral instead of driving south from Atlanta, if I’d been coming from home. But do the details make a difference? Does any of it mean anything?

My grandfather had retired from the U. S. Navy. Once, when I was young, he brought me a pair of wings like the Navy pilots wore, and with them I dreamt of the sky for many years. Then I turned sixteen, and I earned my wheels, and he earned his own pair of wings.

My mother’s water broke on our sofa in the middle of my birthday party, with all of my preschool friends gathered around for cake. A few hours later, my brother cried out loud for the very first time, while on the other side of the continent a million cubic feet of soot and ash rained down across the land like afterbirth, and the moment the chorus teacher Miss Lever knocked on the door of our hotel room, where Chris and Ricky and I had yet to go to sleep, somehow I knew. She came looking for me at seven fifteen in the morning, and I knew he was dead, because he’d already been sick for a long time then, and I held my forehead like an open Bible in both hands, and listened to the secret whisper of my blood against its veins, and I was a few seconds older.

glow

Each morning I drive a winding 40-mile stretch of backwater highway to get to work. This strip of road is a regular Tornado Alley for small, defenseless animals, and most anything that gets too close is sucked in, chewed up, and then spat unceremoniously onto the gravel shoulder like gristle on the edge of a dinner plate. In the four months since I started the job, I have witnessed a morbid menagerie of mangled corpses littering its path. I’ve seen cats, dogs, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, chickens (and other assorted birds), moles, snakes, turtles, armadillos, countless deer and possum, and even an otter once near the river. I’d say better than half the vehicles on the road in this part of the country are pickup trucks — hell, I drive one myself — and perhaps this statistic has some bearing on the elevated death toll, with trucks being larger, less maneuverable at high speeds, and so forth. Maybe, maybe not; I don’t know.

When I was three or four years old, my father’s best friend was killed by swerving to miss a deer. He lived high in the Rocky Mountains, and the abrupt turn sent his car flying off the narrow road and down into the valley below. This tragedy resulted in my being raised to believe I should never, ever endanger others or myself by attempting to dodge an animal in the roadway. However, I am a big fluffy teddy bear, emotionally speaking, and fortunately for ‘others or myself,’ I haven’t had to test the fortitude of this parental directive yet. Even passing by the crumpled little body of a kitten chokes me up, much less actually being the one who’s done the crumpling. Hopefully, knock on wood, I’ll never have to find out how I’d handle it.

It seems there isn’t much that can be done to prevent these vehicular homicides. A significant amount of research has been conducted in the interest of reducing collision incidence, specifically with deer, which pose a greater risk to vehicles and their occupants. Fencing built along the edges of roadways is very effective, but also quite expensive and labor-intensive. Certain states, specifically Colorado and Alaska, have built underpasses for animals. These special tunnels extend beneath busy highways and provide the wildlife with a safer alternate route, but their construction is also very costly.

Thanks to the Israeli government, I have a better suggestion. Authorities in and around the Negev desert became concerned with the growing number of camel-related traffic incidents in their area. The Negev is home to hundreds of pickup trucks and more than 5000 camels that are used for transportation and commerce. In the effort of preventing further accidents, the Israeli government held a meeting between camel herders, Bedouin elders, and members of the Transport Ministry and the Nature Reserves Authority to determine a helpful solution.

What they decided was simple but extremely successful — they elected to affix phosphorescent strips to the camels. Now, in the event that a camel is blocking the path of an oncoming car or truck, it conveniently glows in the dark. The program was only initiated a month or two ago, but there hasn’t been a single reported camel accident in the Negev desert since.

Just picture it with me, if you will: thousands of tree-hugging, wildlife-loving volunteers hiking hand in hand through the woods, putting little glow stickers on every creature they can catch. Picture camping out in the weeks that follow, the trees alight with phosphorescence, each squirrel and toad become a lightning bug, twinkling new stars everywhere. Envision our highways free of carrion! Imagine all those tire treads clean as a whistle! I don’t think that’s so crazy. Regardless of how my congressman feels.

C’mon, folks — are you with me? Let’s start with our pets.