The Baby-Faced Gangster

19 July 09

Ada is as cute and sweet as all get out. I’m sure she’s no different from other babies in her ability to charm her parents. There's an evolutionary reason babies are so darling: to keep crazed sleepless parents from putting the screeching kid outside the cave door at night. Evenings have been tough. Ada gets fussy and requires constant attention, bouncing in arms and an impromptu song or whistled melody as I trot up and down the hallway, acting organ grinder and dancing monkey at once. Was going to write about how down I've been with stress of work and having no time to myself, and even less time to read and write. The chained feeling of suddenly having to work for three, and my own lack of creativity and insight causing me to lumber under the weight of daily survival, slouched and ground-staring, from here to long past my remaining green days. But then the thought of that darling girl made me laugh and forget my selfishness.

Ada is actually laughing now, an abrupt little cough of a laugh, her big-cheeked smile cocked up on one side like James Cagney, eyes narrowing dubiously. In fact, many of her expressions have a wry quality, sly and scrutinizing. She's the baby-faced gangster seeing through your cheap moves, pushing away that pathetic unloaded pistol of a bottle, ignoring your hapless pleas, unmoved by your late-night dancing pantomimes for peace. For a while we weren't sure if her smiles were anything more than mere facial experimentations. But that laugh of hers is the real deal, a crack of lightning through the clouds.

Rivulets

17 July 09

My friend O.V. wrote me the other day about how now that he and his wife have their baby boy he feels — not in a morbid, but rather, in a liberating way — that it’s safe for him to die. Not too soon, of course. What he meant to say is that he’ll now live on through his son. And I think he feels some relief in that assurance. By living on he didn’t mean only by blood line, but by story line, the family lore, the memories and tall tales and history that is something larger than our own period of living, yet to continue it must be carried on by our children, just as we’ve carried, and cared for, the stories of our parents and grandparents.

I don’t know if I described that properly. Another attempt: should my writing go nowhere else, it’ll have been worth all the effort that Ada might someday read my journals and know something more of our lives and her history; her back story, as they call it in novels. From my writing, and the family remembrances we recall to her on long drives and mountain hikes and evenings staying up late, she becomes our tale-bearer, our story-carrier. Our memories will be retold and thereby outlive us.

I believe that’s what O. meant. He’s a writer also and I know he thinks along such lines. All the published books in the world are great, but without readers, they’re merely tombstones on the shelf. Similarly, what becomes of the family history if there are no children to pass it down to? The image of a stream trickling out onto an arid plain comes to mind. A child is a dashing river, into which you can never pour too many stories, good or bad, factual or fiction, so long as there is truth to them.

I like how Steinbeck puts it: fiction is a true story about something that didn’t happen. But that’s another idea for another day. Or is it? I think of all the fireside stories my nutty grandma used to tell us when as kids my sister and I used to stay with her at her cabin: bears that came around in the night and ate children whole; a great aunt who died because she’d never fart in public and so got her intestines in a terminal tangle; her insane brother who should have been in a state hospital but instead sat in his wheelchair in the front yard masturbating and babbling at passersby; how the marijuana plants she was growing on the front porch were just for looks and how she was growing them as a favor for her Mexican friend who liked the smell of them; how our grandpa was in fact gay and she had proof of the men he ran around with . . .

I don’t know if I can sift any truths from these tales, but I remember them well, and perhaps the larger truth I learned as a kid was that sometimes people tell you crazy things that shouldn’t be believed on the whole, and sometimes those people themselves are crazy, and sometimes the crazy person is your grandma, and the love you feel for her shouldn’t be confused with the troubling things she might say and do.

But confusion there is. A good history always contains a dubious or dark or debated strain, doesn’t it? Anyhow, I’m not sure my grandma was too concerned with family history or the teaching of any larger truth. She was getting her kicks shocking her grandkids with gritty lessons, Grimm’s-like cautionary tales about masturbation, insanity, homosexuality, drug use, and the cruelties of social mores. She was at once hazarding us against being, and telling us it was alright to be, crazy.

She did teach me something about story, though, whether she intended to or not. Story and family lore. And so long as I have a say in it, my long-gone, gone-in-the-head grandma will continue coursing through this world.

The Ides of Summer

13 July 09

“Human Greatness . . . the direct shooting mind . . . is incompatible with a man’s lying to himself.” Ezra Pound in Kulcher

Fog sifting in from the coast, up through the trough that leads to Pacifica, south of the dark-blurred cypress trees of the Twin Peaks ridge. A raven flops into the misty distance and is gone, past the bleak rooftops of the cloud-encased city.

Is there anything as chilly as hung laundry flapping in the fog?

Your weaknesses are yours alone, and can't be alleviated by friendship. Friends see your flaws and faults, and true friends forgive you those. But if you try to explain the weaknesses that run like fissures all the way down, not only does the attempt sound pathetic and self-indulgent, your friends will simply dismiss them. They’ll think, "well, those things may be half true, or hardly true at all, but old so-and-so is such a great guy anyway, what's he worried about?"

Good friends don't believe your fears. They believe in you, at all costs, and love you too much to split hairs. And so your weaknesses remain yours alone, subterranean to those closest to you. Fault lines, tremors you can't talk about. To do so would be self-indulgent in the least, and disillusioning at the worst. Your weaknesses are yours alone.

Maybe it’s the weather has me down. Hell, it’s July and I’m wearing wool socks and a blanket over my lap as I write this, gloomy from the view from the cabin window of my study, my cozy skiff riding the incoming waves of grey. I refuse to crank on the wall heater. It’s mid-summer and not only that, it’s a Saturday morning: something has to give. When the girls get up we’ll make a big breakfast and the sun will seep in, then splash through heroically, and for a few hours we’ll be reminded of what season it truly is.

By late morning the sun does come out and Anna, toting Ada in the wrap-around, hangs more laundry from the line above the patio. The potted olive and lemon trees do their best to look summery in the mist-strained light. The plants like our city-potted lives: root-bound, pending, eager to uncoil into the country earth. But what binds us isn’t so much the city as our fears of leaving the city, moving away from the intricate connections of career and friends, habit and true affinity.

But having Ada makes me want summer more than ever. Warmth and gardens and shade pooling under leafy trees; nakedness, simple primal nakedness both of body and of our lives. The girl is getting cuter and more enchanting by the day. She isn’t a baby. She’s a mysterious critter coming into being before our eyes. The looks and depths of soul in her eyes, that of an old soul arriving here from another place, gazing around with a mixture of astonishment, curiosity, scrutiny, and happiness at this new dwelling place. And I want it to be summer for her, and not a few months of rooftops floating in clouds.

And I want her to be happy, and for us to be happy, and for the fears which all of us have and accumulate in the dark hours to get a proper airing, like laundry in the sun, that they can be felt for what they are, and not heavier for the dampness of the season.

The Raggedness of Our Parts

12 July 09

At soccer practice last night, charging for a ball I split open my brow against the head of another player doing the same. Didn’t come home from the hospital until one AM, starved for dinner, stinking of practice, and stitched across the top of my eye. Poor Anna. She was still awake when I got in. She knows how important sport is to me and is willing to watch Ada into the night for it, but this, combined with her usual ongoing worries, really had her exhausted. Makes we wonder how the ski season is going to turn out, if at all.

All parents make sacrifices, yet women make more of them, if in ways men don’t always see. A father curtails his activities, goes on a few less fishing trips or stays in on a Friday night. All the while the mother is changing most of the diapers, waking in the middle of the night to breastfeed, fretting over the best ways and means of caring for the child, reading books and comparing notes with other mothers, concerned to her core over the smallest detail of car seat and baby rattle. Men think, oh, the baby’ll be fine. One way or another, the kid will turn out all right, as long as we give her plenty of love and keep her from running out barefoot in a snowstorm.

The next morning, wrecked as I was, it was the least I could do to wake and get to work on time — both because we need the money and because I’d brought the situation on myself. That was my sacrifice. Anna wanted me to sleep in. But what was a touch of discomfort all day if it meant not losing a few hours wages? A touch of discomfort: isn’t that what parenting is all about? A skin-deep sliver of pain or anxiety or sleep depravation, ameliorated by the infusion of love you feel for your babe? The love that keeps you going, that larger force, despite the raggedness of your parts?

Heard Obama on the radio defending the effectiveness of the bank bailouts, how without Fed chairman Bernanke shoveling dough at the banks that were “too big to fail” the whole show would’ve caved in on itself and the recession would’ve become the next Great Depression. Part of me says, Oh, yeah, let’s see about that, let’s try that experiment. Obama won’t admit it, but Bernanke’s plan is but a continuation of trickle-down economics. I’d like to see some flood-up economics. Give that 900 billion to the working people (by way of tax breaks, WPA style work programs, reinforcement of social institutions, or hell, straight cash in installments) and I guarantee you the stuck economy will get moving again, from the ground up. People who can’t afford to invest money, but must spend it on rent and real goods to get by, will do the greasing of the gears that “credit flow” ostensibly does. Let the upper towers tremble a little. Those fat cats climbed up there, let them get down on their own. So long as our economic foundation — village economics — still has bricks and mortar with which to rebuild itself, I don’t fear a little glass falling out of penthouse windows. Let the mega-corporations and chain stores and the big banks crumble. The people will still be here; and they just may rediscover the old American can-do spirit that has, up until the infantilizing effects of corporate takeover, made this country strong.

But now I’m sounding like a radical. Nothing like a whopping hospital bill in the mail— nastier than the cut that brought it on — to get your blood up and push you over the edge.