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.