All This Emptiness in Return

15 March 2010, SF to Boise

After a hellish two-day odyssey of trying to pick up a tow dolly for our Subaru, circling from one Uhaul center to another, from Daly City to SF to two different places in Sacramento, the big truck loaded and ready to go, yet each of the centers having their own perverse malfunction of equipment or incompetence which kept us from hooking up the dolly and moving on, my poor mom driving the Subaru behind me as we squandered two days and an eighty dollar taxi ride and an extra night spent in a Lovelock motel and no small amount of curse words, some in Italian, between us, we finally hit the road.

High snow pack at Donner Summit, blue skies and steely snow-covered granite peaks of Yuba Gap, the basalt ramparts of Castle Peak shouldering out of the white slope, the adjacent saddle where I took Anna on her first back-country ski to the Peter Grub Hut, remembering the next morning skiing the fine powder of Pyramid peak while Anna rested in the sun outside the hut, remembering all the gorgeous Sierra climbs that now seem so long ago, another world before baby Ada, the new summit in our lives;

The swift descent down the sun-baked backside of the Sierra Nevada into Reno, following the fast-running Truckee River, housing tracts terraced above the banks and far back into the brown hills, the valley pocked with cheap developments, the glittering boxy highrises of Reno, the freeway swooping through the carnival town like a roller coaster ride and then, past the reservoir and the storage lots, the road rising a little out of the valley, gaining the burnt-colored hills to the east, you’re suddenly in the high desert, the river still with you to your right, blue and charging, wispy cottonwoods along its green banks running through a narrow slip of a valley scattered with houses and ranches and here and there a cement factory or gas power plant;

And then if you’re not paying attention, the river is suddenly gone, having bowed away to the north, and you’re alone on the freeway crossing the basin flats, wide and alkalai-stained before the bare ridges that lope like mountain lions as they slide past the edges of the flats; and in the distance the taller ranges like lone islands, dusted with snow, serene against the desert blue sky; and nothing is on the radio out here, nothing but preacher programs and bad pop music, and you don’t want or need the radio anyhow, just the quiet of the country rolling over and under you, the city falling away from you with each mile, the rental truck groaning in high gear as you take a rise, a car or semi passing by, and from the rise a new panorama of flowing brown ridges powdered with snow, the ranges shifting in view as you glide down into the next basin, the long aproning hillsides dotted with sage and bitter brush, but little else, no livestock, few structures but the random lone treeless sun-flashed house on a terrace, a king’s view of no-man’s land;

With night a motel room in Lovelock, an acrid odor of a nearby feedlot on the chill air as you walk to the casino restaurant, take a booth and order a $7.99 sirloin steak and potatoes, nod at the old boys chatting at the counter, the casino floor empty yet spluttering away with trinket lights and nausea sounds, the waitress brings a bottle of Coors and a glass of white and your steak is surprisingly good, probably fresh from the feedlot and the cutting room floor, you muse;

And as you walk back to the motel room, across the wide silent street past a semi that’s pulled over into the adjacent lot, the black chill night above the street lamps and the brittle cottonwoods of town, tired, aching some in your lower back from the long drive, looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the cardboard mattress of the cheap room, you think ahead to the next day’s drive, how it gets better from here, the turn north away from the interstate at Winnemucca onto the slender highway, the country rising and becoming less barren, more intimate, rye grass in the hills and willows along the draws and pines higher up in the Steenes Mountains, towering as ice-blocks and chevroned with snow above the tan valley floor, blue forests wreathing the white ridgelines, and then the country seeming to change all-together as you cross the Oregon border, the desert harshness falling away, just a little, and greenery along the creeks, ranch houses set back under shade trees against the hills, cattle grazing about the brushy slopes and in the cool mini canyons of pink sandstone and heaped rhyolite, the country rising and buckling picturesqely with volcanic rock, cliffs and plateaus making maroon crescents in the tawny slopes, a rising undulant feeling that is in fact movement on a geologic scale, the country flowing to and from the Owyhee Mountains to the northeast, the pine-dotted highlands coming into view now, another island on the journey, yet this one you know is in Idaho, those mountains are Idaho!, and the steep climb and pass and the long grade down will put you on the Snake River Plain, the wide slate-dark river and the bridge crossing at Marsing, the farmlands and apple orchards that lead the way to Boise, a destination that feels so close now as you study the small clouds in the blue sky above that last mountain range;

And you slow the truck as you near the last desert town along the way, and stop for lunch at the J.V Café like you always do, and sit in a booth and order lunch and talk with the old gal at the counter and the still older gal waitressing about your long drive and your big move, a story you wouldn’t have brought up but they’ve coaxed it out of you, the story they want to hear because it’s also theirs in some way, as they too have made this crossing, they too it turns out have lived in San Francisco and have delicious memories of that far-away city, and they too now need this emptiness more than all the fullness of the coast, need this space for memories, for stories brought in from the highway, and the one at the counter becomes quiet, and the waitress leaves you alone after filling your cup, and you drink the thin coffee looking out the window at the gas station and the glinting tan hills going back and you think how easy it could be to not start that truck up again, how easy it would be to stay here, to let go of everything and have all this emptiness in return.

The Rigged Game

11 Aug 09, San Francisco

“To write, nine tenths of the problem/ is to live.”

– William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Monday morning, fog as thick as a winter snow drift (and colder because you can't ski it). A wind-swept weekend of chores: changed oil on Subaru, 3 loads of laundry washed, a hurried haircut from Anna, a walk to grocery store, a run on the hill. Only a little time for reading on porch and smooching with Anna and baby. (Did get in a Saturday afternoon bbq at K. and C.'s place, where I met the editor of Zoetrope magazine and had a good talk about what they’re looking for in fiction.)

But didn’t get a damn thing done with the agent search. I'm pathetic when it comes to online work. Like taking roundhouse swings in the pitchblack. If only the mission involved hammer and nails, then I'd build myself a mansion of a publishing house with yours truly as their keystone author, bust in the courtyard and all. But online research? That ghost-realm behind the screen evades me every time.

Another good tumble at soccer practice on Tuesday, which hasn't helped my back, slightly pulled from loading 5/8's sheetrock solo at the yard. The usual pain in forearms after a day of hammering rock back from door jambs yesterday. I'm getting nearly too old for this. I've got, I believe, enough brains to move up and become a foreman, but I don't want that. I want something else, yet it seems I'm not quite clever enough for that and so I'm stuck on the lower rung of a ladder I don't want to climb. Twain's quote, which heads this blog, darts to mind. Never have I dived right in for the three year test, though. Started with sawing wood and kept at it as a backup, but now I wonder if it the old block hasn't acted more as an anchor than a buoy.

There is this idea of progress, getting a little further along each day or week, whether it’s with writing or work or the household or life itself somehow. But life itself can’t be progressed, can it? The material things that make life more interesting or vivid can be tinkered with and accumulated, but even there, you’re dealing with the ephemeral nature of things. And if your objectives are strictly objects, then at the end of a measly two-day weekend all you’ll have to show for it is a laundry line of clothes flapping in the fog, four greasy quarts of used oil that need taking to the recycle center.

Maybe it's the idea of progress that's rigged. Isn't getting by enough? Isn't getting by with your family and friends, day by day together, enough? It should be. But here I am acting the stone-age romantic again, pining for simpler days, when around here the Ohlone natives fished the bay and strolled from village to village, doing more hanging-out together than anything else.

But the fact is I'm stuck with the modern, perhaps very American, belief that I should not only be getting something more done each day, I should also matter somehow in this world, be important. And I'm selfish and self-driven enough to believe that poison; to want for myself a role more distinct than merely as progenitor of the human condition.

So then I have to ask myself, what is this extra thing? If I get my novel published, will I have the extra in my hands then? Will the sight of poplar trees drifting against the sky be any more beautiful or any more mine then? The small things that move me won't be any different, but there's the very real danger that I will be, and not see those things anymore. The extra things are already with us, aren't they? What more extra do I need than Ada smiling in my arms, gazing right back into my eyes, making funny sounds as she tries to tell me something more important than I could ever write myself.

(And as proof of it: late that night, a little whiskey in me, holding Ada as I pace the bedroom, she quits crying and suddenly looks deeply into me with her sweet watchful eyes; the wise little creature, her soul still dewy from the other side, and she smiles and chawls out some sounds trying to talk, trying to tell me something, and she's saying, it's going to be all right, it's going to be okay, funny daddy.)

Pushing the River

9 Aug 09

Last night was Anna's art opening at Four Barrel, and a fine night it was. Ada was a perfect ladybug, too entranced by all the people and din of the cafe to cry or fall asleep, gazing away at the paintings on the walls. The paintings looked gorgeous, given the big space they deserve by the long, whitewashed walls. Suzanne, the curator, arranged the paintings so that as you walk into the cafe the first works are the less focused, closer-cropped scenes of the River Series, and as your eye travels down the wall, the distant panoramas become less obscured (the Plain Series), so that the effect is as if you were far-sighted and your view corrects as you look out over the deepening landscape. I was really proud of Anna and her work, and secretly don't want any of the pieces to sell, as I couldn't stand losing one of them. Don't know how artists can handle selling off their babes.

So it was a great evening and good to see so many friends and folks of the art world crowding in. Looking around at all the people there who were doing their thing — artists Paul, Jeff, Victoria, Craig, Noah and Kris, writers Gravity and Rebecca, furniture maker Luke, handy-man extraordinaire Justinian, magazine editor Miki, Susanne herself — I had a grand feeling of camaraderie. All of them good people, talented and with taste, yet not a snob among them, hard-working and with particular visions for what they want to achieve in their mediums, and all of them, if not having "big" success, having the real success of carrying on with their art, despite the myriad oppositions that come at you from self or society or economics.

All of us carrying on, carrying the arts and crafts on our backs if only by caring dearly for the arts and crafts, each of us a part of a larger stream of artists doing the same; and we wash up at art shows and readings and openings and are amazed to see so many others we haven't seen for awhile, all the others who've been working hard and alone and sometimes forgetfully of the greater river we belong to. After a few glasses of wine it's like we've been holding our breath underwater we're so lightheaded with talk and giddiness and the passing ideas that seem all the more clever as the bottles empty, yet some of them stick, the ideas and the connections made, and especially the camaraderie, the knowledge that you're out there together in the artless world, persevering and pushing that river on.

Was a great night for Anna, though little Ada might have stolen the show. I told Anna if the Ertnoose (that's 'peanut' in Geman) costs us a sale it's going to come out of her college fund. If she gets one, that is. (I worked and paid my way through college and I'll be damned if . . . oh, right, I'm reminded by Anna, it's not the Depression Era anymore. . .)

Fortunately the wine lasted right up to closing. Afterwards everyone wanted to go for a drink, the usual gleeful extension of the night.

"Get a drink?" I said to Jeff as I collected the baby bag. "I'll be lucky to get home and get some sleep."

"Right," he said, and trotted off with Rebecca of the Short Shorts on his arm.

The Loveable Suffering

27 July 09

More fog this morning, dripping out of the sky, slicking the balcony, washing out the cypress and roof-bunched ridge to west. Being near the ocean gives a sense of limitlessness or connection to other places and continents. But there's also the feeling of the land's end, the last of the West I love so much. San Francisco, bounded by ocean and bay like a three-sided island. There are no more mountains or river valleys or high deserts in which to roam beyond that fog-clenched ridge, only the vast moat of the sea. The warm flowery smells of land scoured away by the brackish grey of the sea's bouquet. Am I pining to move? Is Idaho calling me, or perhaps Italy or Australia, places with abundant countryside? Each summer spent in SF kills a little of the kid in you, the kid who even at age eighty will be yearning to get out and play on a dew-wet July morning.

_________

Bicycling home from the job I saw S. walking on 19th and pulled over to talk. He was carrying a porcelain cup of coffee, straight out of his studio around the corner. I asked him how the writing was going and he told me a book release party was being thrown at a nearby bar to celebrate his new work, a memoir. I liked his last book, but everything he writes has that overtly self-conscious quality of a transvestite strutting around soaking up the catcalls and taunts. (And I mean that as a compliment.) In the end, he's a good guy, a hard-working writer who's contributed a lot to the local literary and political scenes.

"How's the family," he asked.

"Good, good. Ada's cute and terrible as ever."

"Getting any sleep?"

"Sleep isn't so bad. But I'm lucky if I get a half hour in the morning to write."

"Nobody I know has anything good to say about having kids. Nobody. I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it."

"Maybe you should wonder about your friends."

"No, no," he said, half seriously, "I just don't think kid's are worth it."

"Oh, it's worth it. One or two anyway."

"Hmm," he hummed through pressed lips. "I don't know. Tell me how it's worth it. I need facts. Nobody can give me facts, and when they do the numbers don't add up to how ruining your life's worth having a kid."

"No," I agreed, "all the facts point against it. Kids are intangible things."

"Like love."

"Like love. On paper nobody should ever have any kids, I agree. But then the same goes for writing, doesn't it? What's it worth to you? What's your pay boil down to per hour, for all the hours you spend writing each day?"

"Yeah, it wouldn't be worth it," he shook his head. "I just don't know."

"Maybe nothing's worth it when you add up all the facts."

"Guess that's why us artists do so little with the rest of our lives, outside of art. We're cutting down our losses."

Cutting out more than that, I didn't say. The losses add up to gains if you live richly through the swings, I didn't say, and don't know myself if I believe it. The little wonder is a pain in the ass that hurts all the way sweetly to my heart, I didn't say, and do know as truly as I know anything. And what the hell, I could be strolling out of my cramped apartment toting a porcelain cup of coffee with nothing to do but drift around doubting anything's worth the trouble, nothing doing but a few books written about that same narcissistic wondering, with a few beery book release parties thrown in as facts proving their own self-worth. But I didn't say any of that. I could see S. was itching to get strolling. His coffee cup looked cold.

"Well, have a good one," I said.

"Say hello to the family."

"You bet."

And home I rode, into the loveable suffering.

Sonoma Sojourn

23-26 July 2009

“The petite bourgeoisie holy trinity: cooking, children, and spectator sports (which includes shopping).”

– Adam Gopnick, Paris to the Moon

And what about just plain old laying around?

Early Saturday morning, lazing in bed with the baby as Anna showers. The excitement of knowing that today we'll get out of town for a weekend up in Sonoma. Ada cooing and rocking about in her papoose, playing around with different expressions. First, her wise-acre smile out one corner of her mouth, then a full frown, the upside-down horse-shoe that old Italian men make when they wish to say boo, or 'I don't know, you got me,' or che te ne frega, meaning, what the hell? Boo, says little Ada, the corners of her mouth turned down and her eyes looking up, Boo, what the hell?

Here's what the heck, little one. We're getting out of town, heading up to stay with friends in Sonoma, and along the way watching for properties for sale up there, because we've got it in our heads now to try to buy something. Sonoma could be a good place to move. But all 200K will buy you there is a trailer home. Probably one with a heavy skunk residue in the air from the pot plants grown in the living room. But it's beautiful country up there, a mix of forested coast ranges and rolling hills of apple orchards and vineyards. Properties range from million dollar estates to junked ranch style compounds overgrown with eucalyptus and yes, pot plants.

What planted the home-buying seed is a little cottage for sale up in Boise that a buddy of mine told me about. It's on a third of an acre, in the North End neighborhood of big trees and yards and dirt alleyways nestled against the foothills of the Boise mountains. All for just 189 grand. By the internet photos the place looks charming, small and in need of some work and love, which is to say very attractive to us, with a good-sized yard that could take goats or chickens and be enough area for a big garden. Also an old garage/ca rage house could make a great studio for Anna. And we could roll an Air Stream into the yard, or build a writing shack for me. And the place is surrounded by big trees. Trees changing moods with the seasons: their bare limbs against a night sky of falling snow; red house finches daubing the trees in spring; the luxurious shade of hot summer afternoons.

Here's also the heck, young Ada: I want you to know seasons, and not only the interminable spring of San Francisco. There's nothing lovely about weather that's always lovely. Paradise comes to bore us, doesn't it? (Is there a good quote from Milton about that?) Something oppressive about the constant breezy blue skies, dreamy as they are, especially when the only variation is two months of entrenched fog. (JW, hunkered in the avenues, the front lines of the summer fog assault, told me the peas in his garden are growing mold, there's so little sun!) Yet, just ten miles away to the north, over the Golden Gate Bridge, it'll be 80 degrees and lovely.

___________

A warm and nearly very relaxing weekend in Sonoma. Stayed with Anna's good friend R at the country house she's renting for the summer in order to work on her novel. We left for only two days, but by the load in the car we might have been the Joads heading out west, a mattress strapped to the roof of our Model T. The mattress being baby contraptions and diaper bags and the big bouncy ball which has become indispensable when Ada won't calm her crying. And the funny thing is how little Anna and I want this stuff (does anybody?), yet there's no getting around some of it. Going light is a value in travel and in life as well. But going light means knowing what you'll need and what is superfluous, and since you can't know that exactly there's a degree of risk involved. I balked at that goddamn bouncy ball, lurid green and bulbous in the rear view mirror, revolting to every atom of traveler in me. But I must say Anna was right. For there I was, Sunday afternoon on the patio, stirred from my book and lemonade, bouncing fussy Ada on the ball after nothing else would soothe her, and finding a little peace myself as I watched out at the drifty poplar trees above the swell of grapevines, the valley oaks with a tinge of red in their leaves already, brought on by the drought.

We made a great fuss to get to the Russian River on Saturday. I wanted to be on the river terribly, and once R's boyfriend J and I were adrift on our tubes and in long talk, the women sitting on the shady banks, the venture became worth its hassle. Funny how as a parent you crave relaxation over everything else. All I wanted for the weekend was to sit reading on the deck and go for walks, and it was no small pain to have to help with dinner and dishes and the pile of logistics required to get the gang to the river. I was cursing to myself on the drive, but like I said, being on the river was wonderful and a reminder that you've got to push a little sometimes to make that summit and the view that can only be had from there. You know the view and your need for it, and you say to yourself that as a parent you'll never quit working for it, but the long haul does tire you, does transform you just a bit. You stop to rest on your pack more often. The matter is whether that change jades you, or strengthens and motivates you to find that view by other means.

J and R were as kind and helpful as could be, but you feel that friends without kids just can't know the condition you're in as a parent. They breeze after whatever whim pulls them, from mixing a drink to flirting on the deck to going after a game of whiffle ball in the drive, while there you are in your lawn chair, pinioned by a sleeping baby in your lap, grateful as a beggar to whoever brings you another beer. Not that I'm complaining. I've had twenty years of that, counting back to high school. And while you can't get enough of those carefree days, they never come close to the good deep loving feeling of being pinioned by a sweet baby in your lap, her eyes glimmering as she wakes from a nap and smiles up at the leaf shadows in the trees.

Cautionary (Piece of) Tale

29 July 09

“Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics, women, drink, money, and ambition,” – Hemingway, when asked what harms a writer. (The Green Hills of Africa).

Much as I love the big fellow, I think Papa missed out on an element here: family. And to think Hemingway was a Tolstoy man, too. Where would the Russian great be without the deep intricacies of family life, feudal to royal? But it isn’t until Hem gets old and a little crazy and sentimental over his slipping life that family members start to appear in his fiction. Until then it’s bullfighters, rum-runners, boxers, hunters, and the cunning women that bring them down. Woman as mother, or loving companion? Only the coddling meddling kind, who pamper a boy or man, and thereby hamper his need to get on the trail or the rails and see life. For some reason Hem despised his suburban Chicago upper-middle class upbringing, sensed cowardice in the conventions of it, despite the good vacations into the lake region his father’s income as a doctor afforded them. Family held you back. Much as it gave to you, in comfort and companionship and love and the lessons of life, those things only weighed you down or backbit you in the end. While that may sometimes be true, what possibilities for material! Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver come to mind right off. Wharton and Austen, of course. But then they’re women, right?

And talk about family stories. . . It was last month when my co-worker El started telling me about the affair he’s been having with his dentist’s assistant. We were up on the scaffolding, just the two of us, rolling out tar-paper and stapling the courses to the sheathed building. The fog had burned off and the trees and gardens of the backyards below sparkled in the sun.

"Nice, huh?” he said, lifting his phone to show me a picture on the screen. “Is my girlfriend."

“Girlfriend? Real nice. What about your wife?”

“She don’ care.”

“Doesn’t care? Or doesn’t know?”

El grinned deviously, his gap tooth showing, the tooth that got him into all of this. He’s a handsome, warm-eyed Guatemalan who goofs around on the job a lot, but he’s a good guy, and I guess that’s why the boss keeps him around. He’s got a rogue’s charm.

“It don’ matter, man,” he explained. “My wife, she like my sister.”

“So your sister doesn’t care if you run around on her?”

“She don’ know — so she don’ care,” he laughed. He then emphasized that the secret is just between us, and I’m not to tell any of his family on the job. Apparently they don’t care either, so long as they don’t know. As we worked he gave me the back-story, how he’d gone to have his teeth fixed and started flirting with the dentist’s assistant. He picked her up when she got off work and the affair took flame from there.

“You’re a fast worker, El.”

“She’s hot, man. You work fast too, you see her.”

Later in the day, when nobody was around, he showed me more photos, these involving the dentist’s office, which had become their meeting place at night.

“But her husband,” he grinned daringly, “he’s a real big fucker. A Tongan.”

“Man, I’d get out of it.”

“Why?”

“I’m telling you. It’s gonna end bad. You should get out while you can.”

“I don’ care.”

“You’ll care when your face is caved in and all that dentist work’s gone to waste.”

“I don’ care,” he flashed his rogue smile. “Is life, man. It go up and down.”

And the story would indeed go up and down for weeks, diving to some pretty ugly lows. Turns out his wife got a hold of his cell phone, and the pictures therein. She didn’t take it like any kind of sister I know. The following night she followed El to the dentist’s office and snuck in after the two. Caught them getting creative in one of the chairs and tore the hell out of the place, breaking equipment and ripping pictures off the walls. El didn’t show up for work the next day. When he did he told me the whole deal. Somehow his brother and old man on the job still didn’t know what was going on, so I wasn’t to spill anything. You’d think the blowup would’ve put an end to the affair. But no. Love, especially the mistaken and infatuated and blood-roiling kind, doesn’t slip away so easily. And nearly each day I receive another saucy update on El’s rollercoaster ride.

So there might be a story there. Certainly there is, but is it a story for me to write about? Is it mine, as a writer, free to take what I find or am told or can imagine, and carve a piece of fiction from it? Anna doesn’t like the idea. When I told her about the affair she thought the whole thing rotten, and hazarded me against exploiting it. What insights could I draw from it? she wanted to know. It’s a fair question. But I’m not so concerned with that, as long as the story is a good one. If there’s a drop of humor in a story, then that’s often all the insight I need. Humor redeems our ugly side. What makes me laugh is, at times, worth examining in itself, even if that means looking darkly into a gash caused by a toilet falling out of the sky.

The nonsense of our lives, funny or peculiar, in some cases maddening or alienating, is what the likes of Sartre and Camus were compelled to examine. What are these bits of life drifting about us, the detritus of our everyday, the anecdotes heard on the street or the job site? And what kind of meaning can be made of them? And if we must construct that meaning, doesn’t it follow that those bits are intrinsically meaningless? What is to be learned, in Sartre’s short story The Wall, from Pablo having lied to his jailers about the location of a fellow soldier, only to be accidentally and absurdly correct about the graveyard hideaway of his comrade, thus dooming him to execution?

(So Anna and I have our differences, on this point, and in our tastes for literature. For instance, I like noir lit quite a lot, Existentialism’s hardboiled American cousin. Anna finds the stuff short on depth and meaning – too stereotyped and cartoony. I concede that’s sometimes the case. Speaking of Hemingway, To Have and Have Not and Men without Women, his most noir works, are arguably his poorest for just those reasons. But still I like them. The Thirties were a rough time in the States and Hem’s stories carry the grit and slang and desperation of the period like bootlegged time capsules. Still again, it’s a woman, Martha Gellhorn, who does a better, a more personal and emotional job, of capturing the human suffering of the Depression in The Trouble I’ve Seen.)

But I’m straying. What’s to be made of a tale like El’s? Maybe it’s nothing more than just another pulp nonfiction overheard in our everyday, a curio to look over before leaving it well alone. Anna wanted to know if I wasn’t just exploiting the story for its scandalous qualities. To a degree, I am. At least as the example that got this entry going: proof of how rich a source of material family life can be. Maybe the moral of the tale is how much safer those stories are, if you’re lucky to be told them, when they come from other people’s families.

As for El, the last I’d heard he was separated from his wife, missing his kids, and trying very hard to cut himself off from the dentist’s assistant, who won’t stop calling him.

Little Traveller

18 July 09

Sometimes Ada moans frightfully in her sleep, or catches her breath like she’s wrestling with a nightmare, then wakes with a startling cry. It's a bit haunting, actually. We try to wake and calm her before things go too far. It makes us wonder what a baby could possibly have to dream about, and why nightmares? What could they dream of, except those things they carry into this life: the knapsack of their subconscious full of the relics of past lives.

Late last night Ada cried convulsively, as though from some deeply pained place, all the hurt of humanity twisting up from it — the poor girl red-faced and arms snapping. Anna and I took turns with her, both too tired to curse. Where does the convulsion come from? Or is it nothing more than a bb of gas passing through? That tiny pain a holocaust to her? Or some ancient memory of a holocaust?

Then a calm night's sleep, and in the morning she's curled against Anna softly as a rabbit, awake as her mother sleeps, cooing to herself, big eyes looking about the room contentedly, studying the old painting of poppy flowers above the bed, a smile hooking up one side of her mouth, our room a world of beautiful fantasy to her. I don’t know what tires you more as a parent, the lack of sleep or the course of emotions you’re run through.

Anna’s mother Claudia is here for the week. After busy days of helping us with chores about the house, we called it quits and made a trip to Montara Beach. Ada’s first visit to the ocean! The wind was blowing so we set up my one-man tent as a refuge and made a picnic lunch. Afterwards I carried Ada – to mild protests from mother and grandmother – down to the water's edge. She strained to look about at everything, the sandy pock-marked cliffs and the pale cloud-shredded sky, the tan beach arching away before the crashing waves tumbling in like falling mountains. I went in shin-deep, reached down and brought up a palm of water, which I lightly poured over Ada's head. Her face soured and she began to cry as I put my pinky into her mouth so she could taste the water running down her cheeks. Then I said a little prayer aloud to her and the thrashing sea, asking for it's blessing, that the waters of the world be with her and grant her their steady strength. I'm not a religious man, and if I was I'd fall closer to animist than any other. But I'm just superstitious enough to want to cover my bets and keep the sea on our side. Call it a pagan baptism. Soon Ada quit crying and began looking about again, her blonde lashes sparkling as she blinked against the sharp light. I gave her a kiss, told her she was a good girl, a good tough water girl now, with all the world and its waterways of travel before her, and brought her back to momma.