Elevenses

When you were a baby you were the noisiest, most restless baby in the history of babies.

We kept you beside us for the first half year, in a sort of platform thing that stuck onto the side of the bed. It was called a "co-sleeper" and was supposed to be the perfect solution to keeping your infant near you without actually having them in the bed where you could, say, roll onto them in a drunken stupor and suffocate them.

We called it the "co-screamer" and looked upon it with unmitigated loathing for the nocturnal hell-din it signified.

When you were four you had a caretaker you adored. She and her wife loved you and indulged you and scolded you and watched over you and you thought that the sun rose and set on her. That same year your elders here in Oregon decided in their wisdom that people like your caregiver shouldn't be able to call their beloveds "husband" or "wife", and we tried to explain to you why she was sad. We told you that some boys liked girls and some girls liked boys but some girls liked girls.

"But dada..." you said, insistently, "Janey and Susie are boys."

When you were seven you had night terrors that lifted you shivering and sobbing from your bed in a dream so terrifying that I could not console you.

When you turned eight you told me that there were two people who knew everything about everything in the Universe; God, and Santa Claus, and you weren't certain about God.

You told me that you would rouse in the small hours of the night and think about Big Things; stars and galaxies, about how big the world was and how many things were in it and how you might never know all of them and how that made you feel small and sort of sad.

When you were ten you would break into tears, sometimes at the smallest of checks, because you had frustrations and fears and hurts you couldn't express. You hurled yourself at what you loved, like your mother, with the wild thoughtlessness of one who has never been badly hurt and then were aggrieved when she pushed you away as too rough.

Now you are eleven.

Even after more than a decade together I am sometimes amazed at what I don't know or understand about you.

I have no notion where you inherited your slender build; your mother and almost all of her family are compact and boxy rather than gracile (where they are not simply as round as balls...) and I am as bulky and squat as most of mine. What long-legged girl or lanky boy married into your family too long ago to be remembered, whose small, rounded arms and legs are reborn in you? Certainly not the one you took your rufus colors from, all thick Celtic hair and freckled fair skin.

And perhaps the most strange: I cannot seem to see though your eyes. You are too different from me, sky where I am earth, cloud-topped highs and drenching teary lows where I stretch away endlessly calm and stolid.

I do not understand your frequent glums, how often you give up quickly rather than persevere, why you seem to see boredom and frustration where I see patient learning and practice.

I love you, but I often don't understand you. We are air and flame against earth and water.

Here you are now, poised near the Land's End of boyhood, at once straining to strike out into the dark seas of adolescence while still clinging to the last vestiges of childhood; your mother's touch, your stuffed friends, the small warmths and cozinesses of your brightly-painted child's room. You are beginning to strain away from me while I am still finding new things to love about you.

I love your small sweetnesses and your great silliness, your quiet moments and your wild, tearing energy. I love you, my no-longer-small-boy, with the open-eyed recognition of all your faults and failings that live alongside your virtues and strengths. Family is for loving when there may be little liking and we are, at the last, family.

It's late, and I am tired, but before I am done I will walk slowly down the darkened hallway in my halting step, to lay my hand on your head where you sleep wondering what dreams you dream and hoping, in the still, silent moment the hope of every father for every son; that he will wake each day wiser, kinder, and stronger than he lay down.

And so I do for you, my son.

Happy Birthday.

Birthday Girl

We don't really know what day you were born, and neither do you. Your mother left you outside a little rural filling station near the town of Dongguan some time in the spring of 2005 and the Chinese adoption official responsible for you probably assigned the "auspicious" day closest to what he assumed was your birth day as your "birthday". He didn't know you, and probably didn't much care; he was just doing his job.



And we didn't know you, either. We traveled across the Pacific in pursuit of another little girl, a girl who turned out to be damaged, too damaged to adopt. By the time we met you we were reeling from the heat and the distance and the emotional trainwreck of the preceding week. We barely had time to pick you up, bundle you and your little "Funky Dog" bottle and your tiny yellow plastic sandals onto an airplane, and ride the long way back home. We had no idea who you were, or who you'd be.

We had no idea whether you'd be serious or silly, giddy or glum, outgoing or introverted. Whether you'd like to run and play or sit and read. Whether you'd be gentle or rough-and-tumble. Whether you'd be an "easy" child to raise, or a struggle. Whether, like some people, you'd come with your own happiness inside, or whether you'd have a lifetime of struggling against woe.

So far I'd say we've been pretty damn lucky. The girl we got was the girl who loves Ponies and sewing and cartoons and loves to laugh and make silly jokes, who loves to cuddle and play and shines from the love and joy within like a warm window on a cold, dark night.

So even though this may not be exactly seven years from the day you took your first breath, it's close enough for us; we're lucky to have you, small one, lucky that we've had this time together, these five years and change, years of watching you grow in size and in knowledge and in heart. Answering every one of the hundreds of questions you ask every moment, hoping to help you to the young woman you're going to be.

Happy Birthday, then, sweetheart. No matter the how or when, this is your day, and ours to celebrate you.

Anamchara, on her Birthday

As when a beauteous nymph decays,
We say she's past her dancing days;
So poets lose their feet by time,
And can no longer dance in rhyme.
Your annual bard had rather chose
To celebrate your birth in prose:
Yet merry folks, who want by chance
A pair to make a country dance,
Call the old housekeeper, and get her
To fill a place for want of better:
While Sheridan is off the hooks,
And friend Delany at his books,
That Stella may avoid disgrace,
Once more the Dean supplies their place.

Beauty and wit, too sad a truth!
Have always been confined to youth;
The god of wit and beauty's queen,
He twenty-one and she fifteen,
No poet ever sweetly sung,
Unless he were, like Phoebus, young;
Nor ever nymph inspired to rhyme,
Unless, like Venus, in her prime.
At fifty-six, if this be true,
Am I a poet fit for you?
Or, at the age of forty-three,
Are you a subject fit for me?
Adieu! bright wit, and radiant eyes!
You must be grave and I be wise.
Our fate in vain we would oppose:
But I'll be still your friend in prose:
Esteem and friendship to express,
Will not require poetic dress;
And if the Muse deny her aid
To have them sung, they may be said.

But, Stella, say, what evil tongue
Reports you are no longer young;
That Time sits with his scythe to mow
Where erst sat Cupid with his bow;
That half your locks are turn'd to gray?
I'll ne'er believe a word they say.
'Tis true, but let it not be known,
My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown;
For nature, always in the right,
To your decays adapts my sight;
And wrinkles undistinguished pass,
For I'm ashamed to use a glass:
And till I see them with these eyes,
Whoever says you have them, lies.

No length of time can make you quit
Honour and virtue, sense and wit;
Thus you may still be young to me,
While I can better hear than see.
O ne'er may Fortune show her spite,
To make me deaf, and mend my sight!

("Stella's Birthday 1724" by Jonathon Swift)

Far Overhead

The date of my arrival on Earth as an individual was marked, according to Wikipedia, by "...panic overt(aking) the American public, which created an enormous sense of vulnerability regarding the United States' ability to defend its territory. Adding to this fear was the element of surprise...which left the American public in what was observed as a “wave of near-hysteria"

I wasn't responsible. Really. I wasn't.

It was this guy...

"Простейший Спутник-1"

...better known as Sputnik.

Funny, in a way; the birth of the Space Age (or at least the Space Race) the same day as my own. And here we are just over half a century later with the Space Age reduced to a sagging badly-maintained space station loafing about in high Earth orbit with no particular purpose and nothing to look forward to except obsolescence.

I hope this is not a personal commentary as well.

Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce called Sputnik's radio signal "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."

No one ever described me quite so poetically.

Well, damn.

My Soviet counterpart lasted 90 days. The radio transmitter fell silent in early November when the batteries went dead. The satellite's low orbit decayed through the autumn of 1957 until on 4 JAN 58 the object re-entered Earth's atmosphere and was consumed in a fire that probably lasted no more than a few seconds.

The reentry is not reported to have been observed.And here I still am.

Little PS-1 might just have been responsible for much of the modern world. It stunned the U.S. public and jump-started much of the Fifties and Sixties science boom in my country. The Wiki entry says that Sputnik-1 "...would eventually invent the Internet, upon which this page is published, NASA, and an increase in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education. One consequence of the Sputnik shock was the perception of a "Missile Gap." This was to become a dominant issue in the 1960 Presidential campaign"

Which leads me back to last night.

As I was driving home I got to thinking.

Who am I?

What am I doing, and why?

When I was a child I dreamed like a child. Except I dreamed that I would shake the world, that I would leave a name that would echo down the years with a grandeur and a whispering, like Hulagu Khan with his pyramid of skulls.

And then I grew up into the real world.

But when I was a younger man I still had at least some pretensions to playing a part on the world's greater stage. Not inventing NASA or the Internet, perhaps, but as a soldier I was involved in events that changed the way the world wagged, for better or worse. I went places and did things that, in their small way, impacted those places and things. I had notions about the world and my ability to affect it, and those notions, while exaggerated, made me at least believe that I was changing the world and the lives of the people in it.I spent a moment yesterday reading about the people who are "occupying Wall Street". For all that I think they are a quixotic and forlorn hope they are, at least, acting out their beliefs and those beliefs - that my country is and continues to be fallen into the hands of malefactors of great wealth and that only by prying that wealth from the levers of power will there be any chance that the Lesser Breeds such as I and my family will have any chance at having a say in our own futures beyond mere random chance - while my part is to sit and read about them and then go home to my dinner.

I think about myself today; slowed, domestic, exercising myself in the public fora through nothing more than this pallid electronic medium...and contrast that with the younger man in his jump boots and aid bag.

I think about joining that group in Zucotti Park, about more; about the kind of men who fought the company thugs and the National Guards for the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day, who fought the FBI and the state troopers for civil rights, who fought the British soldiers for liberty and law.

And immediately think; but what about my family?

Who will work to pay off their mortgage, their schooling, their food? Who will help them with their homework, find their stuffed pets (my son just awoke crying that his small stuffed manatee had swum away somewhere in the bedding. At eight years old. At two in the morning. Sheesh.), who will help my bride through her transition to her next job if I am arrested, if I lose my work fighting the banksters...if I'm suddenly not there, who will be?

Thus does domesticity - and my own fears - make a coward of me.

Don't get me wrong. I've had a hell of a fucking good half-century-and-four. I've lived well and foolishly, loved badly and immoderately, sampled life here and there and liked the taste of it. I've seen the sun come up over the Red Sea and set into the mountains of Panama. I've caressed the naked skin of the woman who has borne our children, and felt the fear of violent death and the elation of its passing-by.

And I have, I hope, more yet to come; pride, and passion, the work of helping my children to grow strong and good, in fighting (still...) in what ways I can to make my house, my city, my nation, and my world more honorable, more equitable, more honest, and more realistic places than they might be without my mite's worth.

But I wouldn't be human, and I wouldn't be who I am, if I didn't regret not being...more than I am.That I didn't invent the Internet or pile up my pyramid of skulls no longer troubles me.

But still, in these quiet early morning hours, I can't keep myself as I sit at my darkened desk in my silent house from straining, just a bit, to hear the faint beep-beep-beep in the night sky far overhead.

Straightedge

I'm 54 today.

It's just another day - I was up in the West Hills drilling a soil boring this morning, stopped by the shop around noon (I did treat myself to a sushi stop for lunch...) and then legged it across the street to drop in on of our construction projects for a check. At the moment I'm taking a break from writing up a soils report to post this.

I'll be back later tonight with some more reflections on twoscore-years-and-fourteen, but right at the moment, thinking back over the people I've been and the place I've gone, y'know what I was reminiscing about?

Straight razors.

It started with a brief visit to my friends Maia and Q here, where our heroine and her husband Mike visit an old-school barber shop in their home in Colorado. As part of the treatment the barber gets out the straight razor to shave Mike, and I was instantly transported back to the Division barbershop on Ardennes Street back in the Eighties.Because back in the day I still had hair, and I got a big kick out of getting a flat-top #1 cut that made me look the spit of my old man in his Navy crackerjacks back in 1944. And the best part of the whole gig was the big finish, where the grouchy old Army barber got out the shaving gear.

He would heat up the lather and strop the straight razor, and then it was all hot shave cream from ear to ear and down the back of my neck.

But before I could relax into the smooth heat he was there with the blade.

There was always something electrifying about the kiss of cold steel along the back of my neck. Maybe it was just the zing of cold after heat...or maybe it was knowing that one slip and things would get messy real quick. But I loved the clean feeling it produced, laying my nape and sidewalls down to the skin.

He never did slip, and I always tipped him high and walked out feeling like a real hard boy with my beret pulled down to show off the high whitewalls.

Well, time and genes have combined to give me whitewalls all the way up, these days. And I do my own trimming at home with an electric razor. I never found a barber outside the service who used the old straight blade after I left the active service. One of the barbers trimming my kiddo's hair told me that it's now against most state regulations, what with fears of AIDS and other blood-borne diseases.

Too bad.

Funny, all the things you do and those you enjoy; the cold steel shave up the back of the neck would seem to be an odd thing to miss. And yet, of all things, I do.

Nickel-Uno

"An eerie, intermittent croak - it sounded like a cricket with a cold - was picked up by radio recievers around the world last week.It came from beyond the stratosphere and signaled an epochal breakthrough into the new age of space exploration."

That was me.

Okay, that was "Sputnik I". But we had the same birthday:

4.X.1957 the Russians would call it; October 4, 1957 by our reckoning. Fifty-one years ago today.

All things considered, I've had a better run. The old Soviet spaceball lived about three months, reentering the Earth's atmosphere in January, 1958. The Missile Gap was here. I wasn't nearly was threatening, taking several years to so much as walk and throw avocados for the first time, although when I did I was deadly, according to my parents. I was Hawkeye with a fruit, able to knock down young toddlers (my little sister) on the fly with casual indifference.

I don't know whether I've changed that much, I'm afraid.

Mojo and I had a lovely birthday Saturday. We spent Friday lolling about until afternoon when we headed up the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge to the Bonneville Spa for a relaxing day of soaking and massaging and just doing nothing and listening to the rain. We slowly made our way back to town today, stopping at the Portland Chinese Garden for tea and a quiet wander.

Here's a selection of pictures from this beautiful garden: the main pool,
Lotus in the rain.
Tea and ricecakes.
Raindrops.

Finally home, to work on Maxine's bedroom, cook, read and just enjoy the quiet until the little peeps got back with their beloved nanny Jen and her inamorate Toni. Thanks, Jenny and Toni! Some tasty birthday pumpkin pie, savory and sweet with whipped cream.And then a slumbrous bedtime, and a quiet house.

One of the two of us born on that October day in the late Fifties lived fast, died young and...well, there wasn't much of a corpse, good-looking or otherwise. All things being equal, I have to say; I think I got the better deal.

Happy Birthday to me

The haiku on the right-hand side of the picture reads:

"Goju kara
kazoe yo chiyo no
matsukasari"
--
"Because you're fifty
count the New Year's pine branches
of a thousand ages"
--
In traditional Japan, people were considered one year older on New Year's Day, which therefore became everyone's birthday. The age of fifty was special because it was considered the beginning of respected old age. Therefore the boughs of the evergreen pine, a traditional New Year's decoration, also carry here the meaning of long life. In addition, the tall forehead of the figure suggests the extended head of Jurojin, the god of good fortune who also represents longevity. Finally, on the back of the figure is the auspicious Buddhist jewel symbol. So for a man reaching the age of fifty, everything about this small painting is celebratory: Happy Birthday, Happy New Year, and Long Life!
--
Respected old age? This as my son is climbing on me like a jungle gym. It's been said before but is worth repeating: we begin never knowing what the end will be. I have no idea what will happen to us as a family with a father at 50 raising a daughter of 1 1/2 and a son of 4. But whatever it will be, it will not be dull.
--
To my friends: my love and my thanks. To my enemies: may you always keep me vigilant. And to my children and the shades of my ancestors: hail, and farewell.

Now we are Four

It seems like you were tiny just a moment ago, so timid and shy, that I worried that you would be so meek that you would be bullied by everyone you met.

But now you are a bold little ruffian who loves going fast on his bike and insisted we ride the Oaks Park kiddie coaster THREE TIMES last Saturday - which, I might add, isn't nearly as much fun for a 49 year old as a 3.99 year old. It's a mass times acceleration thing, Peep.

But that's what happens when you turn four. You are adorable, inventive, playful, silly and impossible. We love you more every day. Happy Birthday, Peeper.