Have you ever held a three year old by the hand on the way home from preschool?…
You’re never more important than you are then.
— Fredrik Backman, “Anxious People: A Novel” (Atria Books, September 8, 2020)
Eric Kanigan @ 4 years old. He used to clutch on to his Momma’s hand, tears welling up, before he released her on his way into pre-school. 26 years old now. Still clutching on to his Momma. 🙂
6:58 a.m.
First day of Winter. Temperature: 61° F. Repeat: 61° F, on December 21st. Paradoxical? Global Warming? Heti whispers: “Not everything has to be so heavy all the time.” Whoa Sheila, try walking with me in this Head for a few yards.
I step on the scale anticipating a bad outcome…and expectations are exceeded on the high side. Now Sheila, here’s some real Heavy.
Rain patters on the roof, bangin’ on the gutters. I flip open the Dark Sky app…it’s calling for heavy rain for the next two hours.
“Severe weather alert: Coastal Flooding.”
Well, maybe that might work – a flash flood to drag me along the highway, scrubbing the cheese, gingerbread cookies and peppermint chocolate gelato off these bones, and cleanse me of this mood while it’s at it.
I pause as I put on my sneakers. Maybe it’s best to wait for the rain to let up, and run later. Who are you kidding? Get your a** out the door.
I’m out the door. I run. With Me (M), and me (m).
M: What’s with the mood?
m: I don’t want to get into it.
M: Blog title? Anger management? Angry about what?
m: Hard of hearing? Pick a topic. I’ll find an angle.
M: Root cause? [Read more…]
He said that after the third child, he told his wife, Enough! He felt too old to have any more, so he got a vasectomy. But in the years since, he’s had many moments of regret, because once the boys got a little older, he said he wanted it again—the experience of cradling an infant in his arms.
~ Sheila Heti, Motherhood: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co., May 1, 2018)
Photo: caz gordon with Father & 2 day old Son
Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls…
You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea…
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
~ Philip Booth, from “First Lesson” in Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999
Notes: Photo by mary-annm. Poem via 3 Quarks Daily
Michael Chabon, in his new collection of autobiographical essays, “Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces”…shares various insights into fatherhood…In one essay, he recalls a recent visit to his own father…The older man was recovering from an illness, and the two lay on a bed and watched a movie together in silence. It took Mr. Chabon back to his own childhood, when they often sat together quietly watching movies… The realization made him more conscious of the importance of sharing such time with his own children: Just being together was valuable. “That makes me look more mindfully at moments where I’m sitting on a couch with my daughter watching shows on HGTV,” he says. “I’m sitting here and she’s sitting there and she puts her feet up on my lap.” “…this feeling,” he says, “that this is a way that I experience love…that is unspoken and unacknowledged and invisible.”
~ Alexandra Wolfe, edited from Michael Chabon Wants to be a Good Father (WSJ, June 8, 2018)
7:34 p.m. train. Grand Central station. Last peak hour train home. Standing room only. Heads down, glowing screens, wifi slow, thousands sucking on the same straw. Pages loading slowly, then stopping altogether. One head, after another, mine too, lifting in frustration. Beach ball spinning, locked up. There’s a message in this. To thousands of us sitting on this train. Whether we are listening, now that is another story.
8:31 p.m. Walk home. Down the platform. Up the stairs. Across the bridge over I-95. Up the hill – and the last 1/4 mile stretch, before losing this tie, this shirt sticking to my back, and these leather shoes strapped around my feet for last 12 hours. Free me, please!
I see them in the distance. Two boys, 7 or 8 years old, kicking a soccer ball on front yard. Mom sitting on the porch reading. When’s the last time I’ve seen this? [Read more…]
Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception. The child is enthralled, and then the mother comes into the room and says to the child, “That’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird.” Instantly the complex wave of the angel, peacock, iridescent, transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. “This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky,” and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception.
~ Terence McKenna, Ordinary Language, Visible Language and Virtual Reality
Notes: Quote via cobotis. Photo: Ahmed via Eyeem via Newthom.com
The love a parent feels for a child is strange…
It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room.
It sends the soul flying.
~ Fredrick Backman, from Beartown: A Novel (Atria Books; Tra edition, April 25, 2017)
Notes:
Cut me some slack. It was a long day. Too long to even share a "It's been a long day" post. Ok, so I didn't know what "repose" meant. I turned it in my head: Pose…Portrait…Re-pose…Repeat…Poster…Model posing…Model posing? Wow.
“Please repeat the word.”
“And now the origin of the root please.”
A nine year old would have nailed this in a Spelling Bee.
Like it makes a bloody difference. Long day or short day, I don't have a clue what it means. Google it Dummy.
It's 10:15 p.m. and I'm flying over I-40 heading South – reflecting on last night. It was 8:30 pm. The house is empty, the TV is spewing white background noise and I’m sprawled out on the couch.
I'm flipping through my RSS feeds and stop. I can't seem to untangle myself from a passage written by Sadegh Hedayat: “Henceforth I lived like a soul in torment. All my waiting, watching and seeking were in vain.[…] Repose was utterly denied me. How could I have found repose?”
Like a rock skipping over water, the mind ignores words that don’t fit and locks on words that seem to have a mysterious grip. [Read more…]
This coming Sunday, in homes across the nation, millions of American men will awake to the arrival of breakfast in bed. Prepared and served by their children, these Father’s Day repasts convey appreciation as well as contributing to the general bonhomie of the day to come. But as he sips his coffee from his “World’s Greatest Dad” mug, even the most obtuse father has to ask himself: Have I been the man my children deserve?
~ William McGurn, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Father’s Day, wsj.com, June 12, 2017
Photo by Julien Stenger
One day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.
~ Toni Morrison, excerpt from “The Work You Do, The Person You Are” (The New Yorker, June 5, 2017)
Photo of Toni Morrison: contramare.net
Excerpts from How to Raise an American Adult (wsj.com, May 5, 2017) by Ben Sasse:
…Our nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis. Too many of our children simply don’t know what an adult is anymore—or how to become one. Perhaps more problematic, older generations have forgotten that we need to teach them. It’s our fault more than it’s theirs…
My wife, Melissa, and I have three children, ages 6 to 15. We don’t have any magic bullets to help them make the transition from dependence to self-sustaining adulthood—because there aren’t any. And we have zero desire to set our own family up as a model. We stumble and fall every day. But we have a shared theory of what we’re aiming to accomplish: We want our kids to arrive at adulthood as fully formed, vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves as called to love and serve their neighbors. Our approach is organized around five broad themes.
Resist Consumption…In a 2009 study called “Souls in Transition,” Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues focused on the spiritual attitudes and moral beliefs of 18- to 23-year-old “emerging adults.” They were distressed by what they discovered, especially about the centrality of consumption in the lives of young people. Well over half agreed that their “well-being can be measured by what they own, that buying more things would make them happier, and that they get a lot of pleasure simply from shopping and buying things…But consumption is no route to long-term happiness … Although we often fail at it, Melissa and I aim to imprint in our children the fact that need and want are words with particular and distinct meanings … Parents can impart such lessons many ways. The occasional camping trip, off the grid, can teach the basic definition of shelter—and make the comforts of home look like the luxuries they are. You can shop differently too. One of our daughters is a serious runner, so we purchase high-quality shoes to protect her developing bones—but most of her other clothes come from hand-me-downs and secondhand shops. We want our children to learn the habit of finding pleasure in the essentials of life and feeling gratitude for them. We’d like to think that, when they strike out on their own someday, they’ll have a clear sense of what they really need… [Read more…]
October 28: Bringing maman’s body from Paris to Urt…The undertaker meets a “colleague” there…I walk a few steps…on one side of the square…bare ground, the smell of rain, the sticks. And yet, something like a savor of life (because of the sweet smell of the rain), the very first discharge, like a momentary palpitation.
October 29: How strange: her voice, which I knew so well, and which is said to be the very texture of memory (“ the dear inflection . . .”), I no longer hear. Like a localized deafness.
October 30: At Urt: sad, gentle, deep (relaxed).
November 1: Indeterminacy of the senses: one could just as well say that I have no feelings or that I’m given over to a sort of external, feminine (“ superficial”) emotivity, contrary to the serious image of “true” grief—or else that I’m deeply hopeless, struggling to hide it, not to darken everything around me, but at certain moments not able to stand it any longer and “collapsing.” [Read more…]
Tuesday evening. Downtown Manhattan. I’m hailing a cab. Rich food swims in Chardonnay. Wind bursts chill the bones: Winter.
I flip on Waze with an eye out for a cab – 16 minutes to Grand Central. The 8:36 train departs in 18 minutes. Unlikely, but possible.
“Be great if I can catch the 8:36.” This is NYC Cabbie code – a much larger tip in it for you if you giddyap. It’s the American Way: Proper incentives = desired behavior. I buckle my seatbelt, grip the armrest and hope for the best.
“8:36?”
“Yes.”
He bolts through traffic – Rabbit with lock on the Carrot. Think bumper car or go cart sans contact, with the same weaving, bobbing, braking and jarring.
We arrive at the station at 8:36. I run to the gate, hopeful for a train delay. I watch the fading red tail lights down the tunnel, wheezing, trying to catch my breath. Damn! Next train, 30 minutes.
I walk to the next gate, board the train, find a seat, and get comfortable. Chardonnay burns off. Fatigue rolls in, eyes are burning on four hours of sleep. I pop in my ear buds, turn on soft ambient music, lean my head against the window, and close my eyes. Just 10 minutes, please, just 10.
The smartphone buzzes in my pocket, a text message. Let it go. Just let it go. [Read more…]
Steve Fugate lost both his children–his son committed suicide, and his daughter overdosed. Sixty-four years old, Mr. Fugate has walked across the United States seven times to raise awareness for depression and suicide and to inspire people he meets to “love life.”
Stick with it to the end…This Man is something special.
Excerpts from Jennifer Ackerman‘s: Why Bird Fathers Are Superior:
They are attentive parents, building nests, feeding chicks and even showing their young how to sing.
Tally up the good dads and the bad dads in the animal world, and mammals come up surprisingly short. Males provide direct care of their young in less than 5% of mammal species. Some mammals, like grizzly bears, are notoriously bad dads, known to kill their own cubs…most mammal fathers are deadbeats with a “love ’em and leave ’em” approach, sticking around only to mate.
Then there are birds. For our avian friends, attentive care of the young by both males and females is the norm. True, females shoulder the full parenting load in a few avian families, such as hummingbirds. But in some 90% of bird species, the males stay around to help: They share the duties of nest-building, incubate eggs, feed brooding females and the chicks, even train their young for independent life. Birds, in short, have a system of parenting not unlike our own, despite being separated from us by some 300 million years of evolutionary history…
How could creatures whose brains are so much smaller than ours and so different from them possibly be clever? …In the past two decades or so, we’ve learned that some species of birds have relatively large brains for their body size, just as we do…Birds teach. They learn. They solve problems. They make tools. They count. They remember where they put things. They deceive and cheat. They argue and console.
And they parent—most often together, with an equitable division of labor between nest and “office.” Many birds share incubation duties. Male and female double-crested cormorants swap that role about once an hour, so that the stay-at-home parent gets a chance to forage for itself. Woodpeckers relieve one another during the day, but the male alone incubates at night.
Some male birds go to extraordinary lengths not just to find food for their young but to participate in the actual feeding. The anhinga, or snakebird, which is found in the southern swamplands of the Americas, puts his whole mouth and neck into it, creating a kind of feeding tube to efficiently deliver partially digested fish down the throats of his young. (The chicks are soon shoving their heads down their dad’s beak to speed up the process.)
The Namaqua sandgrouse, which lives in the driest regions of southern Africa, acts as a living flask for his brood: A male bird flies up to 20 miles to find a watering hole in which to soak his belly feathers, absorbing a few tablespoons of water—then flies back to his chicks to let them drink from his feathers… [Read more…]
Artistic collaborations can happen in unexpected ways—just ask Ruth Oosterman. She has found a unique, creative partnership with her 3-year-old daughter, Eve. Together, they produce beautiful works of art. Through Eve’s vivid imagination and Oosterman’s talent, the colorful paintings are a mix of unrestrained creativity and small, intricate details. The Toronto-based mom calls the ongoing project Collaborations with my Toddler.
Together, they produce beautiful works of art that display both the vibrant, unrestrained creativity of a child and intricate details that could only be done by a talented artist. The tag-team style paintings are often started by Eve who doodles on paper with a pen or paint. Then Oosterman takes the lead, transforming the abstract marks into animals, landscapes, or portraits. With both of their contributions visible, the results reinforce the idea that two heads are better than one.
For Oosterman, the artistic journey is more important than the final product. “Through collaborating with Eve, she is teaching me how to paint all over again,” she writes on her website. “I treasure this bonding experience more than words can express.”
For more Oosterman Mother – Daughter collaborations: Ruth Oosterman
Notes:
And he reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it. Instead, in his even, sensuous voice he laves them in the petty myths of Europe, of snowy Russia, the East.
~ James Salter, Light Years
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