The Experiment: Day Sixteen, the Lovely Wreckage

I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy.

                          – from Salter's A Sport and a Pastime.

Now another change. Gone is the ennui of the empty house, the clicking quiet of the wooden floors, the cool uncertain mornings, the faint despair that seeps in without having Anna and Ada with me. And while I miss them more than ever, I've gotten into a good dutiful rhythm of work and play: steady work at the house I'm remodeling, tending to the garden when I get home, a beer in the hammock with a book in my lap, or futball in the evenings with the immigrants at the park. All I seem to need – outside of my girls – is a simple life of sport and literature for work not to feel too pointless and for life to hold some beauty for me. My desires seems as reduced and refined as those of Salter's protagonist in A Sport and a Pastime; as simple and hearty as Turgenev's in Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

But of course that beauty is no more than a sugar high without the sustenance of my women folk. When I was single it wasn't that way. Beauty then was an ideal, an actual element on the chart, so real you could study it from every angle, pursue with your senses and know esthetically in your mind its existence from the materials and shapes of the world about you. I won't say that's changed. But somehow, with family, I have, or my pursuit of it has. I still value Beauty just as much, but have less time to approach it esthetically, yet more time, by demands of family life, to feel it in my heart. More time to know the beauty of my wife in the happiness and struggles of merely trying to make dinner or time to go for a walk; more time to know beauty through the dearness of my daughter growing and learning about the world. Perhaps it's a more grounded sense of beauty, a less theoretical one. Less prosody and more prose. Less prose and more pinch of Ada's plump cheeks, a cheeky question from her and a check on the old bachelor state of contemplative and sometimes self-indulgent interaction with life.

But interestingly, experimentally, it's been a state I've been able to slip back into these last weeks – which has been therapeutic for me, a good artistic relief. But now I'm ready for the lovely wreckage of family life again.

And knowing they're to return from Colorado in a couple days has had me kicking my heels in anticipation. For Ada's birthday I'm building her a playhouse in the side yard – five by five feet of salvaged lumber, two windows and a used door under a shed roof, clad horizontally in pine I'd salvaged from my job. I worked on it yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a blustery sky of chalk blue shaking the trees now and then and whirling sawdust up into my eyes. The little house came along, the framing slowly clad course by course like a sleepy girl pulling on her socks. I had meant, on my last big night solo, to ride off to a bicycle rally (the Hellodrome race put on Boise Bicycle Project), but the rhythm of work had me charging along, as did the suffusing excitement of knowing Ada and Anna were due home the next day. A beer and then a whiskey soda added to the suffusing, but not the saucing. Mixed drinks and miter saws go hand and blade. Yet I had that humming feeling, serene, that has you pausing to admire the windy light in the walnut leaves, the gliding shadows on the grass, the surging green of late spring over the valley and overhead like the whole world's a floating garden and you're just a chittering, nut-drunk squirrel tinkering away at your nest in the trees. Tinkering and sprucing and knowing your little fur family is soon to be with you, soon to be home.

While all that sounds a bit corny, it's true. And maybe that's what this three-week experiment has taught me: how much I've changed since my solo days – “grown” sounds self-congratulatory – to need my family close for any artistic effort to hold much meaning for me. Without Ada and Anna all the rest is a glorious sunset seen alone from a hilltop. That used to be alright, the being alone and the beauty just for me, perfectly alright. But it isn't anymore.