Twenty-three

 Hey, you! C'mere, let me give you a hug. You're not too big for that yet, are you?

Of course you're not. You're, well, still tiny, still only one day old. This one day, twenty-three years ago, when you left us, your mom and I, just a day after you arrived.

The only place your grew up was in our hearts.

This day, and all those before and after. The days I dreamed of and hoped for and never had. Dreamed of all the things we'd do together; good...and bad, happy and sad, cheerful or angry or bored or silly.

They never happened, did they, dearest?

Now there's only this day, the day you climb up the dark stairwell and sit beside me as I cry.

Because I still miss you.

Oh, yes; there's your little brother and little sister. Yes, they're great. I love them to pieces, and always will.

But today is about you, the big sister they never had, the little girl and young woman I never got to know.

This year was even harder because I'm not just missing you but missing your mom. The first time in twenty-three years we haven't had a partner to console each other, a friend and lover to give and receive comfort. 

I called your mom today. Told her that she was in my heart, and hoped that she could find some solace in that, find some peace. It's hard on her, y'know. She carried you closer than her own skin, slept behind your heartbeat for three-quarters of a year. She dies a little every time this year thinking of and missing you.

And so do I, in a different way.

Because every year, every time this day comes, I look into the darkness for the tiny flame that was your too-brief stay with us, to remember you, to grieve for you. To wish against all the years that we had another chance, knowing we never will. 

To have the years of you, child and girl and woman grown, father and daughter, loving and beloved.

So. Sit beside me for a little while. I promise I won't try and hold you when you have to go. But just now, for this time, just for this day, let me sit and dream the dream I dreamed, the dream of the you that never came.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Twenty-two

Oh, hey. I almost didn't see you there, sweetie.

C'mere. Siddown for a bit, can you? I'm just finishing this up, I'll be right with you.

That? Oh, it's some sort of IPA. Yeah, cliche, I know. Hey, I like 'em well enough, now that the Northwest is mostly over the "can you top this" bitterness craze. Go ahead, try a sip.

Yeah? Well, it was seven bucks at Grocery Outlet. Probably a reason for that, eh?

It's been a long year, hasn't it?

Retired? Yeah. Still working into that. Your mom is running in circles over at school; more to do, fewer to do it. Kid brother still gaming 24-7, baby sis ready to spread her wings and fly off to college...

Would you be there now?

Getting ready to graduate? Doctor, lawyer, beggarman, thief? Would you be working, instead? Putting in your forty hours behind a wrench or behind a desk?

Would you be cadging a drink from me like this, nasty hoppy IPA or what?

How much else would we have shared?

Your younger siblings share almost nothing with me. Your sister and I are both theater buffs, but she's very different from me in every other way. Your brother? I don't get him and never have.

And I never got the chance to know you.

I wish I had. I wish I'd been able to grow with you, to share your happiness and sorrow. To know you, as I had hoped, all those many years ago. But this day came, and went, and so did you, forever one day old.

I don't miss you the way your mother does. For her you're a huge hole in her heart, a part of her she'll never find, the end of her dreams for and of you.

I miss the you who never was. The little girl, the young woman, the strong daughter who, in the best way of fathers and daughters, stood by me into the grave and carried my memory beyond it.

Instead, we have yesterday, and today, and then you'll be gone again. Here, have another sip. Yeah, it gets a little better after a couple. Still not very good. Seven bucks worth.

But let's have a last round, you and I. And grin and shake our heads and look away, and when I look back you'll be gone.

Until the next time, love. Goodbye. I love you. I miss you.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar. March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Twenty

 Well, good morning, my dear.

Yes, it's early, isn't it? Blame that damn cat, yowling to go out in the small hours. If your little sister would leave her hallway door open the wretched creature wouldn't have to wake the house trying to escape and I wouldn't be sitting here, lit by only a phosphor screen waiting for my coffee to brew.

Would you like some? It's Colombian, lovely, deep and dark, rich and earthy.

Do you like coffee?

That's one of the many, many things we'll never know about you, though, isn't it?

Would you have been a coffee drinker? Were you smart and sweet, or funny, sad and blue, calm or quarrelsome, happy and bouncy or grim as the death that took you today, this day, twenty years ago.

Your birthday, love. The only one we ever had.

Here. Have a cup, anyway. I'll put a dollop of sweet cream in it to cover the bitterness.

Good? I hope you would have liked it. I'd have liked to share this moment with you, your dark hair frowzy from sleep, your eyes heavy, your hands warm and smooth around the cup, here in the darkness we'd share.

I'm sorry that we only have this night.

Tomorrow you'll be gone again, gone as you always are, running on before me across that bourne from which no traveler returns. We have only tonight, your birthday night, to sit together and remember the you that could have, should have been.

Your mother and I miss you, dear. She the you that was, me, the you that never was, the you I'd hoped to watch grow straight and young and tall as I grow stooped with age.

That's good, eh, the coffee?

We still have the rest of tonight, until you have to go. So let's sit here, love, and listen to the sound of the rain that falls in the dark, falls like the tears I've wept for you, lost and gone these many years like the steam from a coffee cup, swirling and rising and vanishing like the night as the dawn spreads across the sky.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

Sixteen

Hey, love. Come. Sit with me.

I miss you.

Well, I know. Yes, I miss you all the time. But this time, every year, I miss you a little more, because this was your birthday and birthdays are special.

No. I didn't get you anything. I'm sorry.

Well, sixteen is hard. You are not a woman grown but not a child anymore, either. It's hard to know what you like, you change so quickly. One day it was all sparkle princesses and ponies, then it seemed like just the next day it was CDs and clothes and new soccer cleats. It's hard for your dad to keep up with you, you run so fast now.

I don't know how you do it, as little as you are.

You are little, sweetie. Only one day old, dust and ashes all these years. The only place you grew was in my heart, and in your mom's, who hurts for you so much she cries out for you.

I miss you, too.

But I miss the you I never knew. The little girl frightened of scary noises. The busy tween. The rude teenager. And, now, the young woman, strong and sure, lit from within with promise, like a star, or a lighted window on a cold lonely night.

There's just this one night, though.

Your birthday, every year, when you come and sit with me. And that night, like every night I miss you, again, and wish I could kiss you, just once, before we have to say goodbye.

Yes, love. Yes, I will wait for you here again next year, my very dear.

Goodbye. Yes, love, I love you. Goodbye, sweetie.

Goodbye.

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

~ David Ignatow

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Fifteen

Well.

It's that day of the year again, isn't it, love?

That day where once, or twice, or a handful of times I stop and really think about you.

Not in the usual sort of passing way that has become your visits to me of late; the random idle wonder at the sight of a dark head in a gaggle of teenage girls, or the fleeting memory of a still small bundle of yellow flannel jammie.

But a dead stop remembering you as you were, and remembering me as you were to me.

Not the tiny day-old baby girl that was all that you would ever be. That was your mom, who carried you all those long and fretful months. But to me; the gangly girl you might have been, or the petulant and angry teenager I hoped you'd avoid becoming, or the compact dark young woman who would one day stand over my grave and remember me.

Instead I got to stand over yours, and now I am almost all there is; your mother and I and a handful of our friends, to remember you.

I'm sorry you never got the chance to grow up into all those dfferent people, darlin'. I miss those people and all the other people you might have been but never could be. I wish that I was going home tonight to find you pissed off and arguing with your sullen little brother and pushing aside your goody-goody little sister and shouting at you to lighten up and lay off your siblings, which says something pretty brutal about how much I miss the you I'll never get to know.

I do enjoy our little visits on this day, troubling as they are at times.

I wish you could stay for a while longer. But tomorrow you'll be gone. Again. As you were, and as you always will be, even though in your quiet and ephemeral way you'll be here as long as I am. That doesn't really count. Not next to the you that isn't here with me.

And, look; it's time to go already. Yes, I'll miss you. No, I'm sorry, you can't stay longer. Yes. I'll think of you again.

I always do.

Goodbye, love.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Fourteen

I'm sorry I haven't thought much about you, darlin'. Between your little brother being a pest and a pox and a trouble, and your little sister being absorbingly adorable, and my worries and fears about my surgery I've been a little preoccupied.

I know, I know. I'm sorry. I know that's not right. Especially now; fourteen is a hard age, the real beginning of the time you would have spent fighting for attention, fighting to become your own woman instead of a child, or an appendage of your parents. You would want to know that your dad was minding you, but not too much. Parenting you would have been like doing good tactical reconnaissance; being there, constantly alert to the slightest of changes, while somehow never being visible.

And there's the whole "time and distance" thing, too. It's becoming more and more difficult to see you as the newborn you were, the baby who was never more than one day old, locked like a damselfly in amber into that day fourteen years ago when you passed us on your fleeting race from the darkness of pre-birth to the darkness of death.

Instead I see you as the young woman you could have but never will become, the daughter I had but will never have.

And I grieve for you as the past I will always lose, as the future I will never have.

Today I will be too busy, too worried, and too frightened to think much about you, and for that I will grieve as well.

But I will think of you, if only for a moment. I promise. I won't forget you.

My daughter, my dear, my lost one. Today I will mourn for you, again, dust and ashes these fourteen years.

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Filius est pars patris

Well, my father died in...well, it'd be wrong to call it "his sleep"; it was the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead. He was alive only in the sense that his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath.

Early on the morning of Sunday May 3, 2015, however, that ended.

He died hard, my father, his body refusing to cease its function days after his mind had ceased to direct it. It was...painful...to watch. As a living man he was inordinately proud of his intellect. He was an engineer, a Cornell Chem-E from the postwar crop, and if there ever was a term that described him "engineer" was a good one. He was convinced that there was no problem that he couldn't out-think or solution that he couldn't design, whether to physical or personal matters.

He was in several ways a difficult man, but for all his cussedness he was also a decent, honorable man in a fashion that made his stubborn irreconcilability as much a quirk as a curse.

So to see his husk a mindless, twitching thing lying helpless in a bed was very hard. My mother and sister both told him that they were content with him, that he had finished his time here and they were willing to release him. I sat with him, talked to him, told him that he had done his job, raised his family and cared for his wife, and now that great work was ended.

But in his contrary fashion he refused to die until he was ready. And then, in the half-light of predawn, he was gone.

I don't want to be maudlin about his death. In many, many ways it was a great mercy. His mind was failing, the intellectual acuity that defined him in life leaving him apace. I believe that the part of him that was still lucid hated and raged against that decerebration, that loss of self, and both hated and feared what he was becoming, the gormless vacancy of mindless existence, the parody of his life that would have been not life but un-death. The death of his body spared him that, at least.

But that mercy is only for the dead. As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone.

I am in several senses my father's son. One of those is that I, too, am vain of my intelligence. As such I understand that it is the nature of life and death that sons are born to bury their fathers, that a man who dies before his children is in that way a blessed man and that the child who buries his father will find nepenthe for the grief and loss of that parting.

But that does not make me feel particularly blessed or peaceful today.

The son is a part of the father, and now that part of me is dust and ashes.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

The Lost World

Eleven years ago today I lost you.



Once you were the darkness that consumed the center of my heart. Once I would have given everything to have you back, to change time and regain you.

But not any more. I know your mother feels very differently, but you lived beneath her heart for almost a year, and she loves you in a way I can never do.

For me you are a memory of a hope, hope for a future that was lost the day you were born. To have you back, to have that future back would mean that I would have to give up my today. Give up all the ten years since, give up your little brother and sister, give up the woman who I loved and who has grown to became the woman I still love, give up myself and the man I have become.

That seems too much for me to ask, and yet in a far corner of my heart I feel like that you're dying again because I would refuse to ask for it if I could.

So all I can do is grieve for you, my dear, and for me; for the world that never was, and now never will be.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Bryn Rose Gellar March 1 2002 - March 2 2002

American Skin

In case you're wondering what prompted the violent posts of the past several days, this is my daughter's classroom Friday, the very same day that a nutter took his Bushmaster .223 to a school very like it, and a classroom very like it, and killed children and teachers very like the ones you are seeing.

Now speaking generally I have never understood the "need" for anyone to own one of these military-style weapons. Frankly, an old-school Ruger 10/22 would seem perfectly capable of killing as many first-graders as you need to feed your sickness and has the added feature of being terrific for hunting squirrels when society collapses in the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse.

And I've never understood the idea that you can't legislate the type and number of arms that We the People can bear. How many fuckin' GI Joe look-alike Bushmaster .223's do you need? Christ, one is too many. The fuckin' deer and squirrels have yet to shoot back. And cricket bats and Winchesters work just fine on the zombies; you've seen Shaun of the Dead, right? What, a bolt-action Mauser isn't cool enough for ya?

But far beyond and above all the bloviating, this is what matters to me. She is half of my skin in the game.

If she, and millions like her, can be 0.001% less likely to capped by some nutter with a bad attitude and an autoloading rifle by the hard graft of separating the two then to me the benefit is worth the cost. Mental health? Don't make me laugh. I'm an old sergeant, and I do simple, easy, and certain. I know with dead solid surety that it's simpler, easier, and more certain to take the weapon out of the hands of the asshole nutter than take the nutter out of asshole nutter with Prozac and a couch.

I don't pretend to have an unbiased opinion on the subject. If you're coming here for that you are in the wrong place. On this subject I am in full-rant mode.

I am tired of the lies about tyranny prevented and the evasion of real death and maiming done to innocents. I am tired of people with vested interests in weapons lying about how regulation equals confiscation. I am tired of the endless blaming of the nutters and not the admission of how much more difficult it would be for them to indulge their murderous nuttery if they had to do it with a kitchen knife.

But to me what is the most important thing is that these children, that MY child, benefit from increasing the chance that the next nutter won't be able to lay his hands on a Bushmaster .223 before he walks through the door of this classroom.

If this be tyranny, I will make the most of it.

The Rains Come To Stay

It's not that late, but I have to be on the road again in the morning, early, so it's late for me. The kiddos have both been packed off to bed and the front room is a mess from a day forced indoors by the autumn's cold and wet. I'm too tired to try and pick up the litter.

My legs ache with the steady ache I've learned to live with for the past year. My neck and shoulders ache with too little exercise and the hard graft of entertaining small children over a long weekend. The back of my skull aches with the unpleasant knowledge that in less than six hours I will have to rise and drive 200 miles north and then walk a mile through the wet woods to work.

And over all of that I am soaked in a sort of quiet despair. I look around at my country and my world and realize that what I'm seeing isn't really new and it isn't really terrible. It's the same old tiresome horseshit that human beings have been doing to themselves and each other since Cain ambushed Abel out in the cuna grass; lying and pretending not to lie, grabbing everything around them regardless of what the long-term destruction they are causing. Indulging in every hate and stupidity and lust and whatever other evil toxic fucktardry they can think up.

When I was researching the last Decisive Battle I spent some time with the Praetorian Guard. You can't learn about the Guards without encountering a man named Lucius Aelius Seianus, better known merely as Sejanus. He was, perhaps the "original" Praetorian; one of the Emperor Tiberias' cronies who took the piss-ant garrison troop that had hung about the Forum for centuries and made them into the chooser and slayer of Emperors.

Anyway, you can follow the link if you want to learn more about ol' Lucius. Suffice to say that he was probably an evil little man who was brought down by others probably just as vicious and ambitious as he was. He got the chop, too, for his pains.

But I'm not thinking about an ambitious soldier now, sitting in the window seat looking out on a drizzly night. I'm thinking about a young girl.

Her name was Junilla, and she was the daughter of Lucius Aelius. Her right name was probably something like Junilla Aelia, and I have no idea who she was or what she was, down to her age at the time of her father's sudden encounter with the public executioner in 31AD.

We know nothing about her; not her age, or her looks, not how she walked, or talked, or stood up, or sat down. Being Roman she was probably dark-avised, and being young - at least, young enough that she was not considered a woman but a girl by the ancient chroniclers - probably slender and gracile. Based on the description of her arrest she sounds like a very young woman or little girl. Tacitus says of her:

"...the little girl, who was so unconscious that she continually asked what was her offence, and whither she was being dragged, saying that she would do so no more, and a childish chastisement was enough for her correction."

But we have no idea whether she was a silly or serious girl. Whether she was cheerful or solemn, light-hearted or glum, friendly or standoffish. Did she like to read, was she an indoorsy sort of girl, or one who liked to play outside and exercise with her friends, a sort of 1st Century tomgirl?

Was she one of those young women who grow up early, approaching womanhood with trepidation, or a late-bloomer still a child when her father ran onto the rocks of Roman politics and his own greed for power.

And of her last moments we only know this, as written by Cassius Dio some two hundred years after she died:

"His children also were put to death by decree, the girl (whom he had betrothed to the son of Claudius) having been first outraged by the public executioner on the principle that it was unlawful for a virgin to be put to death in the prison."

First, let me say this: I find this tale of prison rape, which is recounted only in Tacitus and Cassius Dio, to be hard to believe. There is no record of any such "law" in the Roman legal codes, while the punishment for rape (stuprum, that is, forcible intercourse) of a freeborn citizen was death.

But then let me add that regardless of the letter of Roman law the story is effective as horror. It strikes home because of the act itself and the young age of the victim.

Perhaps thinking about the recent awful clamor about abortion and rape got me thinking about what a fucking awful horror rape is.

Perhaps most of all because it takes the moment we are most intimate and defenceless and turns it into a waking nightmare. It takes what should be the most tender act of lovingkindness we can perform and turns it into the ultimate moment of powerlessness, hate, and fear.

So though I don't really think that one of the jailers of the Tullianum went and raped a little girl before he murdered her, I think that the ancient storytellers thought that story was the most awful thing they could think of to add to the horror of the end of the tale of Sejanus and his fall.

And what saddens me even more is that they felt they needed something more awful than the cold fact of a young girl casually strangled for the crime of being born to an ambitious father. Something more shocking to tittilate their readers' jaded tastes.

Something more frightful than the bald fact of her child-body cast down the Gemonian Stairs in a tangle of dirty clothing, her still-unformed arms and legs asprawl in the gross indignity not just of death but of careless cruelty. Something more awful than the thought of the vengeful citizens of Rome stepping casually over this sad little corpse, of the cold winds of December skirling the ragged clothes around her stiff limbs and the pale sun unreflected in the flat stare of her sightless eyes.

I don't really understand why the long-ago death of a girl two thousand years old so saddens and depresses me. But it does, and outside my window the night rain seems to weep for every little girl so lost, and torn asunder, and thrown away down the brutal stairs to lie forlorn under the careless feet of the passersby.

Nine

...years ago my bride and I got our first mutual look at this little guy.

He came into the world with a shout and a pair of bright red testicles - which I am not ashamed to mention, since he takes great pride in that fact - and has proceeded to make a commotion and exhibit a periodic case of the red ass ever since.

We love the hell out of him when we're not aching to choke the life out of the little bugger. But sunshine or shadow, he is our mutual past, our present, and our direct link to the future.

Happy Birthday, son; you are my sunshine, my only sunshine. I hope we have many more, and always find ourselves wishing for another.

Full-contact Birthdays

Not for the faint of heart.But eight years ago today a little guy came onto the scene and changed our world. He's gone through Elmos and Thomas Trains and Star Wars and now he's a fierce soldier fighting the cyberwars of otherwhere. But he's still my beloved Peep, and he and his little sister still rock my world.Your feet go so quickly now, and your strides are longer every evening. Every morning I wake and find that time has stolen away the little ones I put to bed the night before and replaced them with a bigger girl and older boy, a little taller, a little wiser, a little further from the soft, warm babies I held to be enfolded in the sweet baby smells and to touch the soft baby skin.

I love you both, my little hostages to Fortune. May tomorrow and tomorrow see us safe abed and all well.

Horses of the Night

I've been up since five a.m., and it's nearly midnight; I left the house this morning in darkness and returned in the dark, and I have not seen my family waking for more than a full day.

This is not to complain; this is the life I've chosen. My work is demanding on my time but it returns it to me by giving me good, tough problems to solve, and difficult tasks to master. I love doing geology for a living, and I accept freely that this means that sometimes I will have to put my work before my family.The part about this that slips the blade-tip of guilt into the hollow place in my throat is that it's not always so difficult putting that work first.

Because the work, you see, is grown-up work, an adult's profession, and my day is spent with other adults, many of them other professionals and scientists. The demands are always there, but so are the limits.

And children are, by design, born with vast emotional boundaries that are the bright mirror of their early physical limitations. Long before they can walk they can run you down, pull you back on your heels, shake you from sleep, and food, diversion, dissipation, from money making and lovemaking.My friend B has written a good little article about this neutron star of need; I feel the painful jab of truth when she says;

"Never enough of those perfect moments to store in our memories forever, or time away to take mental breaks so we can be fully rested for the continued onslaught of cleaning, cooking, straightening, and serving the little tyrants we love."

Because at the same moment I am feeling overwhelmed by the relentless sameness of my children's days (how many mermaid/Star Wars games can you play? How many times can you walk the same path, visit the same pool, the same arcade, the same playground?) I can feel far away a vibration, almost a sound but just below the edge of hearing; the distant drumming of the hooves of the horses of the night.

Faust's night-horses; the frantic spinning of the earth around its pole, of the planet around the sun, that will take those child-days and put them away forever. The little boy and little girl I loved yesterday, that I took to the Nickel Arcade Sunday, that I cuddled with last week, will be carried away in the turning race of the night-mares and gone from me, forever.The little people who take their places are almost the same...nearly perfect replicas...but just that tiny bit older, that microcosmic fraction smarter, more skeptical, less candid with that confiding, loving openness of their baby-days. They are another day, another week, closer to being adults. Perhaps loving, hopefully wise...but never again the sweet-smelling hugs of seven, or the chuckling cuddles of four.

So while I desperately want to claim those moments when I can be with adults and be an adult...I desperately want to hold on to those little people, the ones who can be, as B puts it, like ice cream, both too rich and yet a rich delight, an embarrassment of riches, a surfeit of love and loving. Because when the courses are run, the ice cream will thin away and be replaced with a more complex and more mature concoction; more tart, a tad astringent, perhaps. Not worse, not better, just...different. And without the vanilla sweetness of childhood.

So I sit at the screen tonight and wonder at the hint of vanilla at the back of my tongue. The seeds of tomorrow are already planted tonight, they lie in the dark ground unfruited and yet already reaching towards the light, and childhood is going as the night-runners hasten towards the morning. What is it I regret, I wonder; that in the hastening darkness there is never enough of me, or never enough of them?

"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."

(from "Frost at Midnight" by Coleridge)

Esto es peor

One thing we pride ourselves here at the Fire Direction Center is our unswerving commitment to Truth. We give you parenting with the bark still on.

Or, in this case, the tears.

This started, innocently enough, as a tumble with Mommy on the grownups bed as Daddy finished getting dinner ready. But rough and tumble fun turned to rough play and somebody's little foot hit somebody else in the mouth.

Ohmifuckinggod. The tears.Peep sobbed bitterly, clutching a pillow to his owie lip. Missy wept buckets, apparently in sympathy, although she kept sobbing about her "bum-bum" even though she bore no visible wound.

Cuddling, ice and caresses had no effect.

Mojo was unable to do anything but ride out the storm.

Tears, oh the bitter, bitter tears.

Enough wailing for a dozen operas. More fingerpointing than a Mafia trial. Muffled cries of "She kicked me!" mingled with sobs of "Shea-shea!!" It was Drama multiplied by melodrama that only preschool and toddler can produce...a heartrending chorus of absolute and unconsolable sorrow.Until, of course, it was time to Ride the Bucking Mommy.

Stay up for eight seconds and win the prize.

"To say before going to sleep"

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely --and why?We're still reminded--: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing onas back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.And became as lonely as a shepherd
and as overburdened by vast distances,and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

"Childhood" by Rainier Maria Rilke