The Sound of a Diaper Folding

At the height of the madness there was a regulation size city bus ripping limbs left and right as it blundered toward the hook-up, two freewheeling French girls with flip-flops and several bottles of burgundy, a vatic 14 year old nose-locked to his blackberry and subject to spontaneous chicken-jigs, a silver-bearded Jonah, a hands-laying healer woman, a towering robo-hulk with a good eye for long shots, a storyteller-gunman type, replete with a grey moustache, large regular teeth and narrow eyes, a Chinese tea pusher, a Turkish epicurean, a Colombian poet, a purveyor of fine theorems, and one wild whale of a one-year-old with a penchant for pigscreams. Inexplicably, nothing broke, no one got hurt, and the Gathering ended as inconspicuously as it had begun: a little dust on the chairs, the distant hum of the highway.

Family is a wonderful thing. Among its other virtues, it provides a window into a cross section of humanity that otherwise gets winnowed out by our social and professional biases. When was the last time I talked world history with a jittery teenager? Or discussed domestic policy with a retired LAPD officer? There are perspectives and rhythms that I had totally forgotten about, having fallen into the usual trap of assuming that the bulk of the world was like the one in which I spend my days. Newsflash: it is not.

Of course the average mathematician doesn't have to travel very far from his office to realize that mismatched socks and uncombed hair are far from the usual fare. But whenever I revisit my family, I am amazed at just how narrow my circle really is. If the world were nothing more than the gross aggregate of the life I live every day, the people that form my family would be totally uninventable, so far from the mean as to imply some structured skewing of the data: a character fraud, as it were, carried out by some wily painter of people-scapes and set just so to substantiate my pet theory of Natural Diversity. As it is, it can be a challenge to appreciate that these characters were formed in the same slow crucible of experience as I, and that what look like the wild, improbable touches of a journeyman artist are in fact the natural consequences of experiences totally beyond my ken.

We had a great time. We sang, we danced, we drank, we croqueted one another to the rotten log halfway down the mountain in ever widening circles of sporting malice. Wings were flapped, feather preened, crests shaken and bills stretched. It was the Great Family Roost, 2009, and every zany pin-feathered cockastruz who came got exactly what he was looking for: a scent of the flock, a sense of the family pattern. And then, without warning, it was over. Perhaps the Great Cockastruz flapped his wing, or shook his tail. Whatever it was, they all got the signal, and one by one they packed up and pulled out, leaving nothing behind except a few tracks, a couple of white smudges: the usual aftermarks of zootomical scrutiny.

Today, for the first time in two weeks, we are home alone. As the din ebbs and the dust settles, nature slowly pushes in to fill the spaces: the wind is back to its old tricks of making noise in the pines, I see, and that obnoxious Stellar's Jay has decided to come back and pick away at the herbs again. Zoogle and I saw a 10 point buck down the hill this afternoon, and later we spied a spotted fawn asleep on the sand at the side of the road. As we ate dinner in silence on the back porch tonight, we noted that the sun had remembered its old trick of arranging the day's left over color in bright, clean swathes across the twilight sky. And a gray fox came trotting across the lawn just as the first stars came out, a swiftly moving shadow whose passage mopped up what remained of the malice.

2 am Monday morning

A lot of people ask if Benjamin sleeps through the night. I never know what to say. Yes, he is capable of sleeping through the night: he has done it more than one occasion, and both his parents have risen like sunflowers the morning after, beaming and radiant as they sing the glories of the Regular Boy. And then there are nights like tonight, where it's 2 am and Zoogle has been thrashing around like a downer cow for three hours. Does Z. sleep through the night? Perhaps we can say: yes, as long as the night is deemed to have started at the hour of his choosing. And as long as sleep crawling, fitful dreams, random cries, and the occasional foot to the thorax are included within the general category of somnolent behavior.

A few months ago Catalina read a book called Sleep Training: The No-Cry Sleep Solution, thinking to nip this little Turandottino in the bud. "All right, what's the skinny?" I ask her, thinking to save myself the trouble of reading yet another two hundred page technical text based on an idea so flimsy that all of its essential features would fit on a stickynote. But it turned out that the wily autheress had been cheap even by the standards of advice-books: the ruling idea was so slender it slipped through the cracks entirely, and my professional reader of a wife, this trained parser of texts, was wholly incapable of giving me anything more than the roughest of vague ideas. "You need to be prepared to suffer for ten days", she managed to report. "Ten days, and then you're in the clear: consider it an investment." But the rational for the suffering, and its details, and the way all this pain was supposed to transform our child into a rat-tailed liron: all these things were forgotten, or never absorbed, or so obscured by the Attachment Parenting mumbo jumbo that they never crystalized into hard, concrete plans of action. Anyway, the punchline is that we never took the plunge, and thus continue with the nuits blanches long after most babies are sleeping like turtle doves.

And so it is that at 2 on the night before the day on which my wonderful wife freely volunteered for an extra Redeye shift to give me a little more time to work on my paper, I am up writing in my blog instead of nourishing my soon-to-be-taxed brain with a full night's sleep. Meanwhile, four guests snooze like trolls in trailers ten yards away, and two more, in the upstair's bed, have the presence of mind to mumble something about a cursed blighter as they smile drowsily and burrow deeper beneath the sheets.

Woe to the first person to show signs of repose tomorrow.

Done

1. Picked up a kilo and a half of unpasteurized goat blow from my dealer on Hick's Road. Assurances were given that this is truly the good shit. Doubts niggle.

2. Baked two whole-wheat sourdough almond loaves as part of Operación Conquistaklaus. One was snatched from the cooling rack by a low flying Steller's Jay, the other picked to the bones by the Dome's long-whiskered resident rodent. Operación postponed.

3. Found: one bug in modeling code. Seeking exterminator.

4. Managed to slash a trench in Zoogle's leg with a piece of plywood spinning free in a power drill. The wound blends with his eczema, sunburn, diaper rash, carpetsores, and babypox, luckily.

5. Have played Stan's guitars. One is a certifiable piece of shit, the other a sort of blackmarket dung. No word on the accordian.

6. Have performed final rites for the tomatoes, one of the peppers, all the garlic, and a number of flowers. Have tentatively subcontracted keeners for the onions and the broccoli.

7. The idea of a triple bin composter received a very lukewarm response from the mother-in-law. Possible explanations: one, she knows that they don't work, two, she doubts our ability to generate that much compost, three, she doesn't want to have to look at the thing, four, she thinks they generate bad karma, five, she doubts my ability to make one, six, had a bad experience with triple-bin composters in the past and doesn't want to dredge up memories. All cards very close to the vest, as usual. Work proceeds without drive, wily-nily and at a sluggish pace.

8. Zoogle is back to his old tricks of running laps between the hours of 2 and 4 in the morning. It is not a matter of waking before or after he does: it is a matter of finding some five minute slice of time in the day when Dad-blear clears and I can remember whom to curse.

9. Rodents still duped by bird wire: cages on the raised beds continue sans chicken wire.

10. I am stiff as a German lip, bloated with pie crust, drowning in Walden, invisible to my wife, and a teething ring to my boy. No complaints.

To Do

1. Read up on how goat's milk affects babies before accepting the 2 gallons/day that Eric's neighbors currently use to water the shrubs. (Note to self: find out if all goats are such boom-or-bust creations before buying one for your wife.)

2. Work on baking an authentic loaf of thick, crusty European Roggenbrot mit Sauerteig with which to dazzle and addict Klaus the Steiflippender Neighbor. Ulterior motive: loosen Klaus's Teuton tongue and start Z. on his third Muttersprache before he gets too old to hold it all in his head.

3. Finish at least one academic paper before I leave the mountains, that I might start on an essay when I reach the coast, that I might apply for grants and jobs when I reach the Burgh, that I might leave the rain-addled East forever for the glories of this open West.

4. Check in the morning to see if Zoogle still has blood seeping from his inner ear. If so, easy on tomorrow's variants of Cosme Cohete Hits Turbulence on Re-entry.

5. Do an internet search to see if Stan's $6000 vintage blood-tinged gaucho accordion with knife-scuffs might be had for somewhat less.

6. Water the flowers. Bury the tomatoes.

7. Buy two 10 foot pine two by fours, one 12 foot two by six, as many as six 8 foot one by sixes, though fewer if I can find suitable portions of one inch plywood lying around the house, six galvanized steel hinges and a sheet and a half of thick exterior plywood. Convert all this into a compost pile.

8. Wake up before Zoogle and get to work. Failing this, wake up after Zoogle and give thanks that you weren't on Redeye.

9. Add chicken wire to the rodent cages on the raised beds.

10. Do yoga, bake a pie, go to the lake, read Walden, love my wife, dandle my boy. Contemplate why I never get anything done during my summer vacation.

Crank

Benny seems to be developing a troubled side. Setting him on his back for a diaper change is like setting him in boiling oil: the horrified shrieks and violent thrashing last for hours. When you offer him food in which he has no interest, he will hurl it contemptuously to the ground with one backhand sweep and stare with bored, irritated intensity at a spot on the far wall. He has also started to produce low, throaty growls, often for no reason. Though for the most part these growls are subdued affairs, somewhat unnerving but easy to write off as Tuvan warm up exercise, occasionally they snowball into spasms of white rage, eye popping, vein snapping contractions of anger whose raw emotional force lifts nape hairs throughout the room.

The fact that our child is developing a temper is perhaps not totally unexpected: he is, after all, the ill-begotten offspring of a fiery Latina and her grumbelpocks Toews of a husband. But expectations aside, he has been such a sweet child thus far that this shift to the cranky makes me wonder if something is happening to the boy. Could those three new teeth be torturing his gums? Has licking all the lead-infused construction dust littering the dome floor gone to his brain? Sunburn? Dehydration? Brown house spiders....?

We tend to think that watching a child pass through developmental milestones is a moving and uplifting process. What I have come to realize that it can also be somewhat demoralizing. The Zoogle that came out of the box was a wonderful creature, healthy, happy, perfect. At the One Month mark, the object of parenting seemed to consist of nothing more than holding steady at the helm: acting in such a way that this natural wonderfulness would just continue, in degree if not in form. What this naive vision overlooks, however, is that sweetness is no more intrinsic to our animal nature than frightful rage and violent displays of temper. Sweetness may be useful for convincing your mother not to throw you out with the compost, but rage is good back-up system, a terrifying efficient way of ensuring that she doesn't take you for granted and continues to feed you on schedule.

Benjamin is still a sweet child. His smile illuminates the room, and when he laughs that high, ridiculous giggle, there is not a heart in the world that can resist him. But slowly, a more complex creature is oozing into being. He is 'own little man', as my uncle recently said, willful, independent, conscious of what he likes and doesn't like and ruthless in letting you know it. And while this particular Crank may be short lived (he won't be in diapers forever), I strongly suspect that what we are seeing reflects some permanent stamp of character, a temperament that is at once fiery and stubborn and will last long into his adult life. Which is a sobering thought: if nape hair rises at the antics of a 25 pound cherub gone berserk, imagine the effect when he's a hairy chested six foot six 250 pound raging guerrilla of an adult. Which he will be in about two years, at the rate he's going.

California

I am sitting on the back porch of the dome, feet on the table, beer in the hand, watching with a sort of Buddhist vacuity as the sky changes from navy to baby blue above a band of smoldering orange at the far end of the valley. There is something singular about these colors: they seem to exist only in California in the summer between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m. Seeing them on this peaceful, windless evening, I am struck with a strong sense of my youth, a time perhaps too much given to the long and mindless contemplation of those elusive solar halos arching along suspected horizons. This is not memory, it is something more intense: sitting here tonight with sun going down at my feet, I think not of but in old patterns, am brought back to a mode of perception that I had long lost track of: a quiet, non-invasive way of seeing the world that is spiritual, imaginative, and dangerously undisciplined.

It is difficult to explain to someone who has not wasted years of their life watching California sunsets what is so spectacular about this light. The sun creeps not just behind the flora, but beneath it, inside of it, so that the sweep of the wild barley, the elegant sparsity of the native oak, the serrated contours of the pine, all these things begin to burn with a slow, glowing fire that connects, for one luminous, precarious moment, the earth, the sky, man, God, the individual and the collective, and there for a brief moment it holds, a pulsing, living symbol of relentless and inescapable unity, before the peak fades and the light ebbs and that strong, amber glow of connection slowly cedes to a lingering sadness, a darkening awareness of doomed dreams and impossible beauty.

These are the sunsets that I remember. I watched them for three years in Parkfield, with its vast silence and endless rolling hills, and then for four more in Atascadero, where the valley lay like a fiefdom below the brow of the Old Man's pleasure palace. Perhaps so much light-gorging went to my brain. Many of my present memories of place are associated with certain qualities of light, so that now, when I think about that day at the beach with Beem and the Crew, or that time we shot skeet with Uncle Bob, or holding hands with Tiffany by the lake, or the final set of tennis in our match for the league, what I remember are less the activities themselves but rather the shape of the light, its eddies and its pockets. My memories are Transcendent-pink, Lugubrious-amber: always wordless, always aching, dying and turning black.

I was shooting the shit with The Old One the other day, trying to explain why the last several months had been so difficult. At some point in the conversation the word 'regret' surfaced, and though his council was to avoid that road at all costs, these sunsets remind me that even if he's right, it would be useful to find a way to express the ways in which these could-have's gnaw and pull at my consciousness. These are the agonies of Heimweh. And though I realize if they remain unchecked they devour the Self, it is also true that their existence reflects some key truth about our character, our assumptions, our basic constitution. The I that triggers our various worldly contortions may not snap into clear relief simply by understanding how this light, this place, these trees and this ocean and these magnificent mountains that roll on far farther than the native habit of one man's natural imagination, how these things integrate to a sense of Home, but it will almost certainly remain obscure if we don't.

Of course there is more than self-knowledge at stake: there is also the Future. And what has slowly become clear to me is that a man with no sense of native place is weak and vulnerable, incapable of either living or dying with grace. What has become clear to me, now that I have spent two aimless seasons among the Cloud-people and fathered a son and worried escape on no savings and no plans and no relevance and no reasons, what has become clear to me is that Home is for the lucky and the skilled, that it is a whirling club Fate throws us as we cross the narrow gap between Going and Coming, and that if we flub our footing or look down at the wrong moment, it falls and disappears forever.

Francisco says that if you've been happy in some place, you should never go back. I consider Francisco a wise man, but I wonder if the reasons for his dictum were rooted in memory or in light. It makes all the difference: I don't think much about having been happy in California, but tonight, sitting alone on the back porch as the sun set set over the valley, tonight in this simmering light I am joyful as I haven't been in years.

Vacation

In the dream vision we are writing furiously in our nook amid the pines while child-starved family members eagerly Zoogle-sit for hours at a time. The vision also includes incense bearing trees, demon-lovers, Abyssinian maids, and all kinds of hanky panky on the banks of the river Alph, of course: a richly textured opium dream as beautiful as it is doomed.

I do not believe (more exactly: I chose not to believe) that summer vacation with a toddler is an intrinsically fantastical concept. Were I a banker and my wife a socialite, with the joint objective of catching up on light reading in the spas of Baden Baden, I believe that relaxation, at least to some degree, would be within our reach: we would simply hire a nanny named Gerta Schliessenmaul, hand over the zumopfergehoerendeerbse and be done with it. At 9 we would hand off the Zoogle, at 10 my wife would take the Mud Treatment, I would smoke my pipe all day, and early every evening there would be a knock at our bungalow, the matronenhefte Gerte with a beaming Zoogle in her arms, a wriggling, happy child glowing in the dual delights of reunion with mama and liberation from Biederfrau.

But we are academics, not bankers. The defining characteristic of our job is its lack of leisure time. Academia (at least pre-degree or pre-tenure academia) represents a kind of indentured contract with Posterity, wherein any time not spent teaching or sleeping or eating Chinese takeout is time that really ought to be spent developing one's Gesammelte Werke. The academic is always looking over his shoulder, always wondering who will be asking about his latest Productions, always anxious about his grant applications, always cultivating his great, writhing hoard of good ideas.

In effect, then, vacation is just a code word for 'doing everything you usually do, with the added challenge of more social expectations.' Zoogle still gets up at 6 every morning. Redeye shift, anyone? Nary a taker, and no wonder: just about every evening is filled with low-key, desultory conversation that drags late into the night, the sort of loose, fragmentary talk that gets mixed with drinks and mild boasting and family stories, slowly building the slender structure we call Clan. And Clan can be a beautiful thing, but it pays no heed to child bio-rhythms, and doesn't recognize the relentless metronome of the Tower, and runs rough-shod over anything shy of a Deed.

Being on vacation at the Dome is a wonderful thing. The air is clear and calm, and in the late afternoon native birds loose their long, lazy lovesongs in the wood below the lawn. The clean, forgiving scent of pine acts as an absolution from the soot and exhaust of the Big City, seems to purge my body of Pittsburgh's diesel fumes and restore the animal edge to my bludgeoned senses. From the back deck, one can watch the sun set over the valley, the smouldering orange glow of the desert a mortar of light holding the living green of the pines into a firm but fading natural mosaic. This area is a place of spectacular natural beauty, and not a day passes in which I don't consider myself exceptionally lucky to be here. But it one thing to be lucky, quite another to be rested: I anticipate heavy eyebags when we return to the grind in August.