Year in Review

Yesterday at midnight Uncle Andy was carried off by a white whale. He was not strapped to its back, like Ahab, but nestled in its bowels, like Jonah: an Uncle of Faith, not an Uncle of Wrath. The beast came belching to a stop outside the A&W Food Emporium on Meyran street, a milky, toothless leviathan with foul breath and a timetable: it blinked its yellow eyes, opened its mouth, swallowed my brother and a few other krill, and then it was off, plunging wild and free along dark highways into the cold heart of the urban east. This morning Catalina got a text-message: PROVIDENCE MERCIFUL: ALIVE IN MANHATTAN. WILD. -A.

Tonight we sacrifice the fatted Cabernet. We crack its skull, and splash its innards on the living alter of the tongue, a sanguinary celebration of divine providence. And we are not just drinking Andrew's successful skirmish with the Chinatown bus: we drink for a whole year, a wild year, in which providence has been wreaking strange and wonderful change in our lives. We drink to experience, that looming, cetacean body that appears without warning, swallows you whole, and delivers you to a far shore, dazzled, displaced, transformed. We drink tonight to the ritual destruction of the five year plan; we drink to the forced reinvention of the will; we drink to the fluid boundary between acting and being acted upon. We drink, in a word, for Benjamin.

Was there ever a time that we weren't parents? Life before the Visitation is a dim memory. I do remember the Call. I was settling down for a quiet night of work, Catalina out of town, the cats at peace, the whole night before me: projects stacked like Johnnycakes on the back burner of my imagination. The phone rang, and I let it go, vaguely registering the beep of the message machine, burying deeper into my books, into my Fausthood, relishing the beatific solitude that visits any man prepared to work deep into the night. Later I found out: just Gabriel, who with his usual diplomacy said "Blessed are you among men. Call your wife asap." I remember breaking the news to my brother of his impending Unclehood a week later, walking the streets of Brooklyn, past blasters of stereos, vendors of hats, men with yarmulkes, women with burkas, Puerto Ricans, homeless veterans, a drunk, a trash-talking four year old. "Well shiiiit," drawls a stunned A., kicking a crushed soda can into an open gutter. A moment of disbelief. Then a warm smile, a sly look, his usual merry twinkle. "You son of a bitch." We made burritos, watched fireworks from a rooftop, looked with rheumy eyes at the wounded skyline across the river. How were we to understand all this?

Soon there was a tightening of the belt. Eight months until doomsday, all right then, let's get organized: make a list, figure out what you've got to get done, work, run, produce. But a funny thing happened. Catalina returned, she started to swell, and almost immediately, the pending life began to exert its hold. We found ourselves reading things like "What to Expect When You're Expecting", pissing away time meditating on some artist's conception of what a child looks like at 17 weeks, (a cucumber, for the record), fretting about whether our favorite teas might injure the fetus. I found myself wanting to enter this experience, to do my research, to worry: to gather twigs and can worms. I ended up searching through the strange patterns of nest-making for some clue, about myself, about the species, about the Eternal Return and the Cycles of Life.

And then there was the summer, which we planned like a condemned man plans his last meal. First a lavish two week jaunt to Buenos Aires, the Paris of the South. We went in hot pursuit of literary ghosts (Cortazar, Borges, Sabato), but when we returned, we ourselves were ghosts, wan, overspent, underproductive: tourists, unrooted. We threw down tendrils in the dome, a luxurious six weeks of doomed tomato farming, squirrel husbandry, book editing, paper writing, reading, cooking, and general disconnecting with the events that loomed large on the horizon. The madness of our return, the chaotic search for an apartment, the growing panic that we wouldn't find our manger, throwing around that cash like we had it, all of this skin-of-the-teeth, all of it just-a-little-too-late, a harrowing sequence of last-ditch improvisations. Finally! A manger. And as my eight and a half months pregnant wife waddles around with leaves in her beak, patching a few small holes here and there, we are overcome with an uncanny sense of having just made it. Breath deep. Let it come.

And come it did. And when it came, it came after so much prolonged pandemonium, so much outlandish dithering and indecision and flapping and squawking, that it came without much noise at all. Just a baby. Relax. How hard can it be?

The noise level, it might be admitted, has not vanished. We still fret. We still read baby books. We still spend way too much time trying to figure out how to optimize this experience, both for ourselves and for the child. The other day, Catalina was amazed to learn, after three months of assiduously rocking the child to sleep every night for half an hour in her arms, that just throwing him in the crib and hitting the lights worked better: he calmed instantly, like a lobster with a nose massage, no fuss, no problem. Revelation! The child is like our new coffee machine, equipped with secret gizmos that heat him up and turn him off in ways that fit the lifestyle of the Modern and/or Prehistoric Parent. But the analogy to the coffee machine runs further, alas: too many knobs, and only the sketchiest of instructions, poorly written and machine translated.

Can we figure him out? Can we somehow manage to shower this child with all the love and attention and energy he needs to grow up into a mature, productive, self-confident adult, while at the same time spending enough time and energy on ourselves that we stay faithful to our own Guiding Spirits? Figuring out the Autobrew is definitely high on the list of projects for 2009.