Category: Memoir

The Curious Nature of Time

Time is immutable until it isn’t. For me it got all out of whack after kids.

  When Charlie was born I became a dad. That’s when time first shape shifted. From that point on I haven’t been able to get a hold on it. When I catch up to it and live and move with it, when it all sycnchs up it’s magic. Before long I’ve lost the thread again and even in my memory that moment has morphed from a point in time to a blessed eternal experience that will live outside of time and space for the rest of my days. Other times, times like the colossal journey of the early years are even more inscrutable. The days were repetitious and overwhelming. Too large to be effected by the spinning of the earth. It felt like one never ending day. Until a morning came that looked different and the remembrance of it all now seems to grow smaller, ever more brief the further I am removed. 

  The first moment, the instant I saw my first child broke all understanding and left me a mess. It is easy to look at it and see the 30+ hours of consciousness that buttressed his arrival and think that time was aided in her transformation. Perhaps. What flooded me in that moment though was not due to exhaustion or elation. The full scope of the allotted time for a person became very tangible that moment. I was alerted very directly in that moment to my exact spot on the line that starts with my birth and ends with my death which is now incredibly important that it stretches as far as I can hope out into the timeline of this little mans own linear track. Life was abstract and time accompanied it before. Not tied to anything, not rooted in another’s story. Now it was finite and fading and valued like never before. 

Soon after we were home. Days were like years. Almost literally. I may have conceded to times dominion before I knew it could be questioned, but I knew the differences the years made. I was different at 4 than I was at six than I was at 16. It basically tracked with a standard deviation, but each year brought more knowledge more understanding and dare I say, ocassionally some earned wisdoms. They were absorbed, the ones I could recognize, passively. The learning you achieve by breathing more. By the uncontrolled firing of synapses making connections inside and out. I may not have put it together, not have put words to it, but years came with more than numbers. They brought growth. I grew years in those early days. Not the journey around the sun years, but the equal of them in terms of learning about me, the world, what it all means, how to feed, clean and care for something more than myself. Those are years. And they happened every day their early on. Some days more than others, but every day brought something that gave time a new track to explore and play with. 

  Baby world melded together from one to two. Charlie was just at his first birthday when we learned there was a Teddy coming. So no sooner had we nailed a bedtime routine than we added competition to it. Regression met emergence and envy and competition and compassion and peer-ish relations entered our home. We rolled with the punches much better the second time which was somewhat by necessity as life seems oddly to respond to addition with multiplication in many ways. That said, whatever more there was, it was fed by more and more love and concern. To paraphrase myself from an earlier time, if Charlie came and taught us how long the days could be, Teddy was the child who taught us how short the years could be. 
  Now I am as much observer as participant. I’m a dad of kids who need a good deal of observing. I am also a dad who can’t stop himself from watching as they explore and navigate the world and ideas and their abilities and challenges. They are compelling. They demand attention and I’m now walking with them. I may still retain control but that’s mostly a height thing at this point. Honestly. Their instincts are what drive us now. We maintain rules of the road, but they are driving in every way other than literally, and in many ways they are doing so figuratively even at those times. 

Time is uncatchable for us now. It is surging forward too fast or stopping completely. Slowed to crawl or dancing to its own rhythm and we are learning to find some of the wisdoms we can find from its nature. But mostly, we are finding that the wisdom is knowing we are at the mercy of time and we try as much as we can to respect her and do as much as we can to invest as much as we can that is of value in her. 

Bidet to Day Marriage

There is nothing more exposed in me by our marriage than my pridefulness stubbornness vanity  my unending need to be right. This was a surprise to me. Before marriage I could delude myself into thinking myself nearly always validated. If not by actual confirmation of my rightness than by a complete and utter lack of having to own my wrongs. I could always just take my conviction with me, fully intact and unharmed by anything approaching a fair adjudication. This is the great privilege of being single; a deep and unloveable self righteousness that I miss. Sincerely. That’s the good shit right there. But marriage, with all its pleasures, brings with it a heavy dose of reality. Which in my case reveals the aforementioned, strickened attributes. Comeuppance for short.
Still, sometimes, backstage, my old self comes out. Unafraid of conflict and unmoved by evidence and I will stand my ground no matter how wrong I am. I should note that in what is to follow I’m not even certain I was wrong. She very well could have been. Most likely it wasn’t even a disagreement based on disagreement. 

Marriage sometimes requires subtle parries around simply who we are. We were likely just in need of some generalized disagreeableness. It’s okay. It might sound awful to one considering marriage. That’s okay. I’d have spent a good deal of time judging that when I was not married too. For sport I now realize. But at the time it was serious and important. Just know that your feelings are more important and I’m considering your reasoned scorn and doing some good hard thinking about myself, buttercup. And to my married friends, I think you know what I mean. Some good old fashioned, no blood, no foul, standard issue, Sunday morning silent sneering. It passes with some minor pointed statements, some purposeful planned ignoring and a good 15 minutes of alone time, usually under the guise of a trip to the bathroom on one or the others part. In this instance it was me who scrammed.

The last angry thought I had that particular Sunday morning was likely some 10-15 minutes later. I sat there largely cooled off before thinking, ‘Why the hell don’t we always have a spare roll on the back of the GD toilet like every other f****n’ bathroom in all of suburbia!’ Yes. There I sat, praying there was a hidden bidet we’d never noticed at purchase. This would be the PERFECT time to test out a bidet. I mean, I’ve never tried one, but god, it sounds luxurious. Besides, when better to take that private leap than when you are in desperate need of assistance but your personal shortcomings as an actualized person keep you from doing the only logical, only sanitary thing and calling down, in the age old tradition, and asking your spouse to come up and get you some TP. Well, needless to say I wasn’t doing that. I considered calling the kids, but that was too suspicious. Besides, they would sell me out somehow faster than I’d be caught out if I did call her for the help. 

Nope. I ‘prideful manned’ it out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, all the way to the linen closet and duck walked all the way back to my proper perch. It was the act of a desperate man. Immediately upon my return I realized how very, very stupid I am. It made me laugh. Than I meme’d it. Because I’m 44 and desperate for likes and smiley faces. This further de-escalated me and like that the disagreeableness was over. I came down, after washing my hands thoroughly of course, showed my wife and we were once again right back in to the lifelong laugh we are sharing. No worse and probably a little better for having asserted a little thoughtless ego preservation. 

  

Parenthood Changes

Life has me ponderous at a time when there is precious little time to do anything but ride the current. 

All of us are so full every day. Full of stuff. Stuff that needs to be done, eaten, taken, dropped off, completed, returned, thrown out, retrieved, fixed, cleaned, washed, folded, put away, picked up and put to bed. We are doing all the things. At least all the things we know to do. All we can do. All we can find time to do. 

I miss the focus having tiny kids gave me. It is a very centering thing, having kids. At least at first. The world gets so small for you that it’s hard not to be centered. Your world collapses to your living space and a small collection of points. Your workplace. The ridiculously expensive but super convenient grocery store you only go to if you HAVE TO, which is every other day, and the other three stores you trek to on the weekend because one has the cheap milk, the other has the reasonable produce and the other because there’s always a sale on yogurt drops or pouches of the puréed carrots the kid decided was the only food worthy of him some time ago. The pizza shop. The gas station. And home. The living room kitchen bathroom bedroom which has morphed into one space, each formerly distinct zone possessing all the traits of all the rest. It’s not somewhere I can say I want to ever go back to, that crazy, sleep deprived, questionable hygiene and nutrition time when emotions were spattered about like the half eaten cheese sticks we no longer ‘find’ all over the place. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. I found a new me there. The new me.

Now that new me is back at it, trying hard to make it work. Don’t mistake me, I can barely remember and hardly recognize the me that lived before becoming dad, but I’m not so insistently and consistently engaged in the constant crisis and joy of newborn parenthood like I was back then. 

Tonight was a nice night. We watched a short video after showers and pajamas. It was as far as I can tell a couple of young or not so young men talking to one another as they tried to raise dragons in Minecraft. The me before having a 5 and a 7 year old wouldn’t have uttered, let alone understood such a sentence before, but I’m getting it now. 

  Today was the first day that T went to school after his very best friend for the past 3 years up and left to Germany. He’s cool with it, me and his mother, not so much. I drove him to school this morning. It’s a funny life we’ve made our way to. I work about a 2-3 minute drive from our home, but I drive him a half hour away and have to leave early to be to work on time. Normally mom will drive, but a time or two a week it’s me. He is the king of the place by now. Super sweet and happy but a bit of a celebrity as well. At least all the love that’s in the eyes of his former teachers (well, all but one, but there’s always one) makes him seem like one as he leads me down the hall, not getting two feet into the building before tossing off his coat, ready to get at it. He loves his dance class and he is going to be in the recital this spring. We are all super looking forward to it. 

Momma took the big boy out to his swim lesson today which is at the same place as T goes to school. It runs just before T is to be picked up, so I could stay at work a few minutes late. Charlie is becoming a real swimmer. He is the only one in his class that swims the deep end with no assistance. 

 It was my turn to be on bed duty. We still lay with them. Judge if you like. That’s your business. It’s how we do it. I read a good long chapter book to the younger one while Charlie started plowing through library books. He even kept reading past lights out by the combination of dim lighting of a nightlight and the green stars that are projected from Winney’s pot of honey that rests on the dresser. He just loves reading, loves books. He’ll take them to bed with him he loves them so much. I let it go for some time. But eventually I told him it was time to go to sleep. It was a really good bedtime. We’re busy and scattered but we’re doing our best. It’s not intense and it is. Its just a lot. It’s like its all of life, every aspect of it, coming at us all the time. I can get very down thinking about all that isn’t happening, all the writing I’m not doing, all the fun we could be having. But what’s the point. This is life and we’re doing things as best we can, getting better every day. 

Well most days anyway.

Thanksgivings

I’ve come full circle on sentimentality. It’s not that to some degree I haven’t always had the predisposition, I have, it’s just that it’s become something I embrace, even seek out now that I’ve got some road behind me.

Life is moving as fast as it ever has. Faster in many ways. But for some reason I’m less and less moved by it. I’m underwhelmed by momentous change. I’m not as easily energized by my own morphing and evolutions. I’m simply living it. I’m running full speed to keep up and I’m barely processing it’s going so fast. Who can make sense of this stage with the solid oak I grew from growing ever wiser and the seeds I’ve planted requiring constant tending. Not to mention the intentions I had for myself before the realities I never considered became the droning and pressing necessity of each day as I try to make a life I’ll be proud of.

I’m tired and busy and energetic and overwhelmed at all times. I’m looking at a life that is zooming past and trying to find any and all rest stops and exits that look like I can afford to take them. I’m trying to get as much of this finite life as I am able and it feels impossible to catch up to it.

So I find myself on days like today, Thanksgiving 2017, in a sentimental place where I can experience the benefits of compounding interest as I feel the past in the present. It’s easy to do as Thanksgiving has been a huge part of the magic of life for me.

The early ones were at home and had the tables, all that we could move, fold, setup and tear down, stretching against the grain and crossing transoms to stretch far enough to fit all the family who could be there. I was a kids table holdout who ventured rarely and always regretfully to the grown up table at least once before I was ready. As a result I was always more than happy to give up my seat with the big people to spend another year at the fun table. The food was warm, the air was steamy, small rooms filled with big people and warmed by a kitchen that never stopped.

Later, when we were a tad older, but still young it became Florida! We went every year to visit our grandparents in Vero Beach. It was there my dad pointed out the connection that it might not be pure coincidence that Nana and Papa moved to where his beloved (Brooklyn) Dodgers had there spring training facilities. There I saw the shuttle from the driveway and looked up with my dad who marvelled that his dad, staying warm on the enclosed deck had been around when horse drawn carriages and Model T’s were filling the streets and now we were here in his driveway watching the space shuttle. It was there where we snowy natives spent hours learning how to body surf and seeing my dad in shorts, something rarely seen, but always when there was an ocean to swim in. He liked to bob in the waves, floating with his toes popping out of the water, riding the tide in peace. It was there that I saw the dance between my mom and her husbands wonderful, but decidedly commanding mother play out with a remarkable amount of good humor, understanding and grace on all sides. It was there where the adults I’d know later were the kids I remember now. When we see each other I like to think they see that young vibrant me as well. Time has taken its toll and it always wins, but its nice to know their are cousins who’ve seen you all the way through and know you. The real you. And it was their that I learned I may be the funniest in a room now and again and that may be a very useful thing, but I should never forget that theres a family tree of funny that has deep roots and long and surprising branches. I come from funny stock. Thanksgivings with the Wershing/Medler’s were the funniest.

College came and the family tradition couldn’t last forever. We quickly redeployed and had the usual guests and local family holidays that are the norm. Soon I took to heading up to the mountains where some friends had established roots. Saranac Lake and environs. It might have been just three or four times, but those Thanksgivings were amazing. They were like a vast, tribal, artisanal, low culture-high culture blend you can really only achieve in your twenties. Full capacity, zero responsibility, unmatchable sociability and comraderie and a determination to be adult. To this day, no offense to anyone else ever those meals were the most succulent and delicious I’ve ever had. It was a 3 day party and there were late night shenanigans, beer fridges and high times indeed. It was a joy of being alive kind of feeling that I’ll always love.

Then we had the family gathering at my brother’s house in Poughkeepsie. It was like a perfect little blessing that for those years, with me in the city and my sister in the area as well. We would inevitably show up the night before, until there were kids. Mom and dad would show up at night, mom having cooked a meal for twenty and packed it all in the trunk and we would unload into the just gorgeous home he was always so generous with. We would each offer dish and be welcomed to bring it and make it. My mother always liked us to be involved, but it was her production for sure and it was perfect. Food on the piano for serving, table set to Rockwell like perfection and new family as funny as the rest in on the conversations and bringing new humosrs and smiles to our faces. I don’t know what was said, I may have even had a part in the sequence leading to the laughter, but a memory that sticks out for me is my mom removing her glasses and wiping tears, in full all out laughter, only at catch her breath to say, ‘I haven’t laughed this hard since last night.’, only to kick off another round of table wide guffaws. We were all a little grayer at these gatherings, but we still through the football around and stayed up late enough for our turkey sandwiches and movies. Resisting every urge we might feel to get going home if that was in our plans. This was our first real thanksgiving after the kids. The one where we could bring a baby and begin our families traditions in earnest.

Circumstance changed and kids continued to grow and we began to have our traditional Turkey days at Karen’s parents house. It was such a treat. They live on beautiful land outside Saratoga county. Youhonestly couldn’t paint a more beautiful picture of holiday land. The house was always full of all our favorite treats and every meal was a chance to sit and visit between indoor and outdoor adventures in a landscape carved carefully by nature and man over decades of tending and refining. There were sled rides in snow, treasure hunts, long adventures in the basement workshop and treats to fill the hearts of toddlers and middle aged men. These were magical visits that always started with Grandma and Koba greeting us at the car, as excited to see us as we were to be there. Travel is hard at that early stage, but they always understood and went so far out of their way to make sure the memories were of the wonderous variety.

Now, today, the tradition turned again as we went to a new gathering place in Maplewood. We’ve been passive observers of Karen’s sister and brother in law as they’ve put in countless hours making a warm and welcoming home, a dream home really since moving in years ago. Now once again the tables were laid out against the grain, traveling through the home from back to front, seating and feeding generations of family with more than a delicious meal. It was a magical day. The kids sat at the big table and did mostly great, when they weren’t crawling underneath. Hectic moments when all arrived and too many hands went on instinct to the kitchen, chaos slowly turning to perfection as the food was pulled together by my brother in law, the magician, casual conversations happening everywhere you looked between people who loved being with each other and can so rarely be due to the simple and never ending logistics of life. Good laughs and good food, great stories and long and luxuriant pickingat desserts that fed and fueled the days journey into night. Hugs and goodbyes and smiles and warmth. The tradition is beginning for these guys, the little ones. For me it’s settling into the pace where, seeing it starting again for the kids and watching it evolve once more for all of us grown ups, I can finally catch up to the sentiment. I can feel the nostalgia and the beauty of it all in real time.

It all leaves me so grateful to be sharing this journey with these fellow travelers, every one of them from each iteration.

One Summer and Water Gun Dolphins

One particular summer arrival sticks out. We were in the Carolin Drive house so I couldn’t have been more than five. It was summer so I was definitely four. I could have been three, I suppose, but it would be odd to remember it at all. It was sunny and to my memory we were waiting for my dad to get home. Derrell would be with him. My memory always has it as after work for my dad but it could easily have been Saturday morning. Who’s to say. So it was a terrible realization that we were seeing what we were seeing. No one batted an eye that dad parked in the street. This was suburbia and we had a perfectly good and perfectly empty driveway. Regardless, the trauma blocked this oddity from notice. You see, there he was, dad, just strolling across the lawn practically overflowing with aloofness as we all thought how terrible it was. Derrell would be wandering the airport all alone! Looking for Dad! How could he have forgotten! It’s all the bigger boys talked about for days!

Of course, D was in the back seat, lying on the bench, cool as a fan. Dad and D, well, they got us good.

This would have been in the heart of the years when D spent summers with us as a kid. He’d get on a plane, or maybe a bus, I have no idea, somewhere in New York City. He lived in the South Bronx, but to us Western New Yorker’s, far more familiar with Toronto than NYC, it was a behemoth not at all disassembled to the boroughs. D was from New York City.

I think I like best the thought of my dad and Derrell, perhaps 12 years old at the time, rolling down the road and hatching this plan. Derrell was already a skilled clinician of holding a room with funny. My dad was his perfect comedy partner, a classic straight man. Dry humor and perfect for the role he was cast in in this sketch. Everything is in that conversation that got them there. It’s the late 70’s so they didn’t pull over. There were no seat belts restricting movement and I’m sure D popped over the passenger seat to the back bench to test it as a hiding spot while they soared out 531 to Union in Spencerport. It would be a long time until it extended all the way to Brockport. Just a skinny, bearded, cool Dad looking like a hipster Abe Lincoln and the lean, long limbed black kid with fabulous and fabulously big and round specs plotting a prank on the way home.

img_4883Derrell was almost certainly a curiosity the first time he arrived on Carolin. I mean, how could he avoid being one. But I am equally certain that would have lasted all of 2 mins. He is, was and will forever be touched with an undeniable charisma that shrinks distance, bridges difference and effortly seizes the attention of those in his light. I’m sure that by his first morning waking up and pouring sugar on his cereal he was the brother we’ve all known him as, as I’ve only known him as.

‘That’s not a water gun.’ D said.

‘Yeah it is. Watch.’ And if the 40 or so years between now and then have been in anyway instructive as to who would respond by shooting a stream of water in his face, running away and laughing, it was my older brother Mike. It’s a tiny moment, so neither would remember it. But I do. I don’t know why what sticks out sticks out. When you’re a kid you notice at weird times and implant memories for no reason at all. I remember this tiny exchange followed by screaming (the fun kind), chasing, laughing, a sprinkler.

‘It’s a dolphin. It can’t be a water gun if it’s a dolphin.’

 We had water ‘guns’ shaped like sea creatures and in hindsight I’m glad we did. A dolphin spitting at you is funny, the bazooka like shooters that mimicked real guns from my youth, they were not as fun. At the time I wanted the water gun. The real one.

It was a disappointment. Like the length of wear for my sneakers or the irregular stamps on the tags of the Levi’s we got at Marshall’s. Silly, stupid kid insecurities that are now mildly amusing memories of things I wish I hadn’t been so hard on my parents about. Like when they got me the one speaker ‘box’ because the salesman explained it was higher quality than the two speaker cool ‘box’ I really wanted. 12 year old boys can be hard to please.

But other things were not done for necessity or by simple misunderstanding. Like the assorted wildlife shaped squirter’s whose triggers we pulled and had just as much fun as any of the kids playing with handgun looking cousins of our spitting animals. It was subtly communicated, explained when asked and a lesson I took.

D took to the dolphin. In the end, chasing one another with squirting sea life was just as fun.

Valuable Time

I don’t know how much time I have. It’s been true for a long time now. A long time getting ever longer. The more time goes by, the more the reality sinks in. I don’t know that the trajectory, the one tying my ever accumulating time to my ponderance and curiosity about it’s end, will stay. What I know is I have the second just passed. What I can assume is I have the moment before me. I can presume the days ahead and I can blindly trust the years laying out before me, stretching ever more beautifully outward into a peaceful and wonderful, assured existence seeped in love and garatitude and understanding. It’s the future I strain to make out in the hazy distance with dusk approaching and I tend to make a lot of decisions to serve that ideal state. That one that is least accountable to ever finding me. The one I wonder these days whether I’m imagining,  a mirage, acting on its promises.

  So, yeah. It’s autumn. The days are getting shorter and the night is stealing daylight hours and I’m suddenly consumed by thoughts. Rather I’m submerged in feelings. I’m a foreigner in their world. I know a few of them. Joy, sorrow, excitement and anger. Curiosity is an engagement of sorts and has an emotional intelligence to it, I suppose. Creative. That may live here as well. I don’t know. It’s beautiful. Rich with textures that can trigger anything. Scary too. I don’t speak the language and things are impossible to understand. I used to break down to depression and mute the varietals that swirl for some assurance. It was treacherous, but navigable and earlier, before I had my bearings it was the only way through. Anger worked and could kick in at any time, but now I’m a bit more comfortable with taking it in and accepting it as something I don’t understand. Sorrow and anger are still there, but less dominant. I guess that’s the mellowing I’m told comes in autumn.

There comes a time when time’s limits are undeniable. Largely, though not entirely. I will live every moment knowing and watching the limits I can predict inching closer. My limits, the limits I can see others breaching. Ones that will arrive at my doorstep, first from others and finally my own findings. Thankfully, when I turn around, as I will if I have time when the night finally falls on me, I’ll see in the eyes of those looking at me an eternity. A limitless shimmer that will go out forever, beyond the limits of imagination or folly or foolhardy selfishness. I’ll see a thousand lifetimes coming toward me stretching as far as the eye, the mind, the soul can see and in that moment I’ll perhaps feel free. 

The time that dropped from the trees to me when it bounded and flutttered in such summertime abundance that I couldn’t see any value in it is dwindling slowly and revealing its nature to me. I could look back on my earlier days and bemoan the myriad wrong ways I blew through my inheritance. I could do that. Many do. But that’s not how it hits me. It doesn’t. Sure. I wish time was so abundant now. I sometimes wish I could live long enough to bury my sons who would pass, wizened and aged and having spent a lifetimes and another’s of minutes and moments and experienced all. I wish I could do it so they wouldn’t have to say good bye to me. But it’s selfish. My moments, what time I have left is of infinite more meaning than the fortunes I’ve lost. I know now that the minutes aren’t mine. I know now that they are merely a gift. A gift I am tending, one that was given without warning and one that can disappear the same way. A gift I now treasure the way that I should. A gift that provides no longer the abundance it once did or the thoughtlessness the abundance allowed. I now know the value of my time. 

I won’t hide now. From anything. I’ll still wish. hope is times companion. But when I find myself in places I don’t understand I won’t be fooled into giving up my time. I can’t be convinced to crawl in my shell. Time has taught me through dwindling supply the humility I needed to know her value. The value of this minute. And the next and the next after that. Each minute a thing to notice. 

Teddy’s Cheeks

Perhaps its just my nature to be wistful. That very well could be it. I could easily make the argument that wistfulness is my strongest suit as a writer. But wistful for me these days is honest. Because while parenthood is very very good at making you spend a good deal of your day living in the moment, it is also a role that is forever slipping through your fingers. 

There’s a lot that surprises you that first second. I became a dad in an instant. One second I’m a husband and about to be dad and the next I’m a dad. Full blown, card carrying dad. The card in this case was a Visa card and not some license to be a dad, though were there one my merely being a dad would not entitle me to the card. Nope. That comes later. I’m certified now, but still a newb. Becoming a dad is merely the starters pistol in your sprint to learn to be a dad. 

What I learned first, after the new brand of love, the overarching, in your bones kind of love that you learn in that first instant, what I learned was that life is fragile and mine will end. Hopefully some day decades and decades down the road when the loss will be real for my kids, but when it will be manageable. Still, this little boy had a story and it was starting right there, smack in the middle of the story I’d been only just getting accustomed to sharing with his mom. If everything goes right, if it goes as right as it can go I’ll get a few decades to overlap, 30 or 40 or 50 years to be in his story. Then, inevitably, I’d be leaving. Wrapping up my tale with tentacles lingering on the fringes of the stories they will be living. It’s the best outcome one can hope for and it is unavoidably imbued with melancholy. Sad is the wrong word. Melancholic. A sustained low level presence of unavoidable sorrow, that recedes to the background when joy is present and it is so so present so much, along with exhaustion and frustration and confusion and exhaustion. Did I say exhaustion twice? I did? Well, clearly I’m not as tired as I was a few years back. Then the entire list would have consisted of exhaustion and the list would hav been 7-12 items long. All of them exhaustion. 

My first son made me a dad. He came into the world and boom, I’m a dad. He cried, I messed up, I learned my error and I became more of a dad. This is a seemingly infinite loop. I mess up, I recognize it by something going wrong with him, I see that I messed up and I try something new and it gets a little better  and we do that all day every day forever. Which is true, but not true. It’s not forever. Time is very viscous and slides faster than I can keep up. You do eventually give the swing to sisters and brothers who will need it. You throw out the car seat that is beyond beaten and smelly and you recycle the last bottle you’ll ever have. Things disappear into the far back memories and then they go from there. Some of them go invisibly and without regret or a second thought. I’ll never change my kids disaster diaper ever again. The kind where you resort to cutting the clothing off to save everyone the terror of it coming off any other way. That piece of history is happily behind me, though I actually think I appreciated it for what it was at the time. Your mind and memory play little tricks like that. I know better. Just happy that’s in the past. Other things, well, I can’t let go of so cavalierly. Like Teddy’s cheeks. 

Teddy’s cheeks aren’t going anywhere. I trust he’ll have them for the rest of my story. But they are changing. He has epic cheeks. Anyone and everyone who has known him will tell you. They are squat and round and adorable. They are a feast for the eyes and they are so connected to the little misspeakings of an adorable toddler with the childlike voice that I’ll never fully have anymore. He is our last and when those cheeks go, they’re gone. Forever. And this time forever means forever. 

My Teddy’s cheeks won’t come back. So I am wistful. Nostalgic. Sentimental in the extreme because my life, my consciousness has a timeline and the horizon, though distant, is firmly in view and when I lose Teddy’s cheeks that horizon will draw ever so slightly nearer.  

 

Taken for Granted

More than anything in the world I’m grateful that we will have pizza this week. And vegetables. Fresh and frozen, canned. Whatever. I’m grateful that we know with near certainty that we won’t spend a minute thinking about whether or not we can eat.

I don’t always appreciate how safe I am. I lie in the dark and wonder if I left a lock unturned. I wonder if that was someone downstairs. I think about what is nearby that i could use to club a potential burglar or worse. Then I wait and wait and I forget about it and I go back to distracting myself with pictures of family and tales of struggle and memes that make me laugh. I watch highlights and listen to comedians interview each other on podcasts that I hear on my phone which can access, essentially, all human knowledge. I do all of it knowing I am not likely to have war greet me at the door. My children are not likely to learn the worst of life until they are ‘ready’ and then they will do so through books and movies and lessons and not life. I know the further out I project the less sure I can be of these things, but I’m confident.

I see pictures of children who are being greeted by a world that is roiling with chaos and violence the likes of which I can’t even truly imagine without a sheen of Hollywood staging and two dimensional falsehoods that are stored in my brain as images of war. Then a picture will turn up in the news of a child, a toddler, old enough to process but not enough to understand, if there is such an age, why the men are killing everyone, why these bombs are coming for them and I fall to pieces. I question everything. I wonder why I’m not doing more.

I didn’t know the gut punch of these pictures, these images until I had my boys. Until I had the identity of a parent. I could Identify tragedy, yes, but I feel it so very viscerally now. I see the confusion and fear and courage and bravery on the faces of children enduring war and I shutter at what they know. No 4 or 5 year old should know what these children know. I fall to pieces.

I don’t appreciate how good I have it and I never will. But at times it becomes starkly real when I see the world I’m protected from. The world I continue to place safely out of view. One I care about, want to change but am determined to not see. I don’t think this makes me a bad person, relatively speaking. Relatively speaking I’m fine. But I’m also selfishly and honestly and determinedly invested in keeping my boys out of those pictures. Out of harms way. Safe in this place where even the greatest tragedies, thus far are little more than inconveniences and mild disappointments when seen in the grand scheme of things.

I wish I was better than I am. I wish you were. I wish anyone who could would walk into hell and walk these children and their families out. I’d be so incredibly happy to help them, from here.

The Boys on the Trampoline

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I can’t begin to express how much I love this picture. I love that the tips of the pine are a lighter green, early spring and new. I love the underbrush, rich, lush and untamed. I love the slide you so long ago conquered now used solely as a ladder to a bigger kids toy. I love the soccer ball alone under the slide. Mostly I love the two of you, sitting with your backs to the house, both looking out and talking without us there.

I know that you’re saying things of no immediate import. Maybe Teddy is asking a question of you, Charlie, something he’s curious about. Maybe Charlie is imagining your boundryless stories that you offer in real time, words barely outpacing your synapses as you get yourself excited by the places your brain can take you, Teddy. Maybe you’re just taking a breather. 

Part of what I feel when I see this is a certain loneliness. It’s mine. It’s the kind many men feel as far as I can tell. Many people I should say. It’s a little scary to me because I’m seeing the seeds of future states these days in ways where I can’t help but project onto you my experience. The truth is I look at this and the first feeling is hope. Hope that you both will know how much you are loved. Hope that you will love each other. Hope that you will endure whatever is out there that we can’t see, that you will have to figure out. Hope that you’ll have empathy for each other and for yourselves. 

It’s easy these days to lose sight of what’s important. We live in an area and I daresay a time when parents are a bit too involved in the process of raising kids. It’s not a criticism, it just seems that way. There is so much being emphasized on the important things that aren’t all that important. Homework in kindergarten seems a harbinger of a severely out of whack system. I want you to learn that love and kindness and empathy are the best protection you have. I want you to know how to be loved and how to love. I don’t really care if you aren’t hitting milestones or excelling in the way you should be. I want you to learn to look inside for validation. I want you alone to determine what makes you happy. I want you to have extraordinary lives, not necesarrily over or overtly successful one’s. I want you to know how much is enough and to be grateful that you have it.

As you sit there side by side I want you to know that that is home. When you are 18 and 16 and one is going to college and one is staying I want you to feel the pain of loss but know you won’t be alone. When hearts are broken in minor and major ways I want you to sit on a bench like you are in this trampoline and just be brothers. I want you to be better at family than I am and I think you already are. 

You are our little boys and we will be here to protect you for what feels like forever to those two little boys in the trampoline. But watching you there together I can’t help but yearn for a snow globe to descend from above, covering you and us and our home and our yard and stopping it all from moving forward. 

I remember fifteen years ago like it was yesterday and time is only slipping faster from this particular vantage point. in a blink you’ll both be in your 20’s and I’ll be nearing 60. I’ll give you all the wisdom I can mine within me and I’ll keep searching and scraping for more, but when it fails, and it will one way or another, always remember that you have each other. 

None of life is guaranteed except for yesterdays. Collect as many as you can and hold them as long as you can. For me I’ll add this sight of you two figuring out life together from the comfort of your backyard and I will feel very lucky that I get to know you. 

Feeling the Love

Basketball player. That was the first dream.
More than anything I wanted to be a professional basketball player. I wanted it so badly that I played every day. All day. Not always easy for a kid from a top 5 snowiest city. Fine, I lived 20 mins from that city. Still, I spent a good many a days shoveling the playground courts across the street. braving wind and rain. Lighting up the court while running down car batteries.
I didn’t become a pro. That’s for sure. People who’ve met me as an adult might find it hard to imagine. I’m not really carrying a basketball players body these days.
I got pretty good. Real good. Good enough to make teams with guys who would make the pros. Good enough to run on the highest level court at any open gym. Not great, but pretty good.
By the time I got close enough to greats to know I wasn’t going to make it I got disappointed. Inertia kept me going. Inertia and the energy of youth and a deep love of the game. But I burned myself out. I was the kid that dribbled a mile or two to school and back, shot until my mom would make me come in as the sound of the ball on the concrete surely was keeping up the neighbors. I didn’t go pro, not even close, but I got a ton out of trying. I travelled, accomplished a good deal and even got in to college.
I was a failing student. Not a bad one, a failing one. You had to get 3 F’s to fail off the team in high school, so I’d carried two and came close with the rest. I’ve never liked school. But I’m very thankful I went to college.
I liked night classes. They tended to be populated by grown people, moms and dads going back to school or people looking to change careers, looking for a new direction. For me the appeal was that instead of 3 one hour classes a week there was 1 three hour class per week. I used to joke, ‘I can skip the whole week at once. Just think how much more efficient that is.’
In one of those classes I heard from the Executive Director of the local ARC who described what it was like to try to make a difference by helping others. It sounded great. I liked the idea of toiling for good. I liked the idea of waging a war on behalf of those that had been unfairly treated. I was in Human Services to that point because it was an easy course of study. That night would change that. I didn’t become a better student, but at least I was in the right place.
A senior girl who I knew in passing described an experience working at a summer camp. This camp was for adults, many of whom were ‘graduates’ of the Willowbrook state school. If you don’t know what that is (I didn’t) look it up.
Anyway, she described her experience, working morning to night in cabins and in pools and in music and arts and crafts classes, with adults with disabilities. Physical and developmental. Well, it sounded awesome.Truth be told, she struck me as the type of person that couldn’t do something so selfless. I was wrong, obviously. Both that she couldn’t and that it was selfless. Not at all selfless. It may be the place I’ve given the most of myself, but it’s also where Ive taken the most.
Over the eight years I worked there, starting a career in the field, I learned a thing or two about perseverance. Working with individuals who struggle day to day, but thrive through grit, determination and practiced indifference to the naysaying of others, I learned that it starts with trying. And trying starts with saying what you want.
As silly as it was to me to even think it, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write and get paid for it. I wanted to be a writer.
Turns out its not as easy as saying you want to. Unfortunately, you have to actually try. You have to try and fail a lot. Becoming a writer has made me learn that if a writer tells you, no, you don’t want to read this stuff I wrote, you should believe them. That’s how mine was for a long time. Now you STILL may not want to read my work, but at least it’s passable.
There’s truth to people who say all you need to do to be a writer is write. It’s true. But you can pass that hurdle and still not ‘feel’ like a writer. Until you feel like a writer you’ll never describe yourself as one.
I felt like a writer after I shared my work on a fateful winter morning on Medium and shared it with my facebook friends. I literally hit share and sprinted away from my computer and out for lunch. When I returned there were 20 or so amazing notes of encouragement. So many people who read it and liked it enough to tell me. It was unbelievable.
The next amazing feeling was being paid. I sold a piece to Mamalode. It was the sweetest and most impactful $20 I will ever earn. Someone not related to me, someone who didn’t even know me, bought my words. Breaking a big market, a Scary Mommy was amazing and a few bucks more. Being selected as a spotlight blogger for a dad blogger conference, well, I had no idea how big it was until I was there. I honestly didn’t know. It was great.
This past week it’s come full circle. I’ve written a book and I feel like a writer. Not in the way I imagined I would, I’m not retiring from the day job any time soon. I self published. It was not some bidding war. In fact, if you totaled the dollars I’ve earned and the dollars I’ve spent in pursuing my dream of being a writer you’d find a fairly decent sized number under the ‘break even’ line.
Something different started happening this past week. All these people I grew up with, in one place or another, at home or at camp or somewhere those places took me, they started buying my book and posting pictures of themselves with the book or of the book posed and lighted or in their hands. And they are saying the loveliest things. They are helping me, showing off my book and helping me sell it to people who don’t know me. Not sure anyone who doesn’t know me has bought one yet and I don’t care. I’d love if they did, but it’s not the point.
Book.SelfiesThese book shots and paperback selfies, they are amazingly touching. I can’t begin to describe to you how much they all mean to me. In a very real sense they are a literal dream come true. They are kindness and generosity and love I can feel. I’m moved beyond words and grateful to no end.
I never feel like thank you is enough. I start vomiting exclamation points. I start thanking so earnestly it might sound insincere, it might even read that way to me, but it couldn’t be more honest. I’m so very thankful.
If you are on my friend list it may seem silly that 10 or 12 people are doing this, it may start to seem silly, laughable or even annoying. I don’t care. I will love these pictures every day for the rest of my life. They are the product of so many kind and charitable souls celebrating a friend who is trying. To my eyes these pictures will ALWAYS be beautiful.
Thank you.
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