An Eye For An Eye Making The World Blind

Morning came well before I was ready for it. A combination of meds seemed to keep me awake well beyond the limits of my usual sleep pattern, but not for my kids! No, they were bounding about when I awoke. I could hear them doing lord-knows-what in the floors below. So, glancing at my wife's gracefully somnilent form, I got up staggered to the shower.

The shower's such a handy thing... a malodorous cure and a relaxing place to think. So I did. First I thought "hey! who used all the shampoo" but then as the monotony of the routine took over, I started to think about other things. There's a cease-fire underway tomorrow. Israel will stop bombing what's left of Lebanon. And in an effort to get ready for the hiatus, there's a push to destroy as much as possible. There is a sadness about this suffering that will not rinse away. In that moment hunting about for some other shampoo, I'm thinking about the fact that some evil genius has developed a formulation that will blow up airplanes and moisturize dry and damaged hair. Impossible to imagine.

Mindlessly I get out of the shower and fumble about the routine of getting dried off and dressed. From the vent at my feet I can hear the gleeful shriek of my middle child and someone else making an animal sound. There is no intermediate volume in my home, just on and off. And thinking they'll need food or find it themselves, I hurry. Brushing my hair and teeth at the same time. Grabbing the aerosol deodorant as I look about for my pda. Suddenly my eyes are on fire. I'd sprayed the deodorant, but in my haste, did not look to see in which direction. A blast of butane propelled Cool Fusion is melting my eyeballs! Reaching for the sink I rinse. It burns. I repeat. Still burns. For some reason this stuff seems to repel water, oh... right. Its a deodorant.

Its a DEODORANT! I use soap to wash that off in the shower!! So blindly I search for the soap, lather, and I wash only to realize I AM PUTTING SOAP IN MY EYES! Before my eyes burned, but they at least smelled good. Now they were soapy and no matter how much I rinsed, I could not seem to get all of it off. Ouch! And however rediculous it sounds, when you NEED to rinse your eyes, you can't. They don't want to open. I tried and tried and the kept closing. So I'd fill my hands with water, hold it to my eyes, and open and close and the water poured from the spaces between my fingers. It wasn't working, but I was not going to try conditioner, no matter how dry my eyes were.

My ankles were aware of the nubby cotton towel and with a blind swoop, grabbed and dabbed. And dabbed. And blinked, waiting for the pain fade, then chuckled. My mind, vastly contemplating fighting and death and airport security and happy semi-ferrel kids, had not considered the many small and essential tokens in that present moment. I wasn't paying attention, and the chuckle was from imagining what my mother would say if I'd done that as a kid. Frankly, it would be more of a look than a word from her; something mixed between pity and wonder for this son of hers who is alternately bright and retarded.

So I dressed in about 200 blinks, found my groggy wife and kissed her a few times (I wonder if she could smell the deodorant on my face... she's like a hound dog that way... *gasp*... did I call my wife a dog? This is obviously untrue, but I begin to digress...) and went downstairs where my happy kids ate fruit and cereal and watched Scooby Doo cartoons.

Notes From A Summer Day, Long Past

Summertime!

Its warm. I got up late... something like 10:30 and the kids were willing around patiently eating bananas as their babysitter, Spongebob, taught them how to use sentence enhancers. It was 3am by the time the last guest left last night.

Kids wanted to get out of the house... I wanted a shower. We compromised. I cleaned up and they waited. Mom had a migrane. I could feel it then... the cool air blowing in off the late was already pretty warm. It was going to be hot.

The idea of being outnumbered at breakfast 3:1 seemed insanity to my lovely wife. I suppose it is. But we went anyway and caught a break. They were angels.

We had a blast... Bought some stuff to fix the sprinkler system and more propane for the tank. Boring to kids. The highlight of the trip was looking at toilets at Lowes... cracks me up. Three kids sitting on the toilets while a clerk watches nervously to see if they're actually using it.

I stopped and treated them to ice cream. They've been great. Then it was a mess... and the youngest fouled his pullup (cannot wait til that is over) and is now freeballing at the park where I jot this note. We found a creek as we walked here and climbed around under the bridge and sat along the banks... splashing our feet. Its hot, maybe 90 and the water felt great.

There is a moment there in the creek, when all you can see are the rocky banks and water creeping over, trees leaning in toward this hidden, babbling secret. Blue jays hopped from branch to branch and butterflies fluttered on the bank. One flew up to Noah, my four year old. He screamed and ran in a frenzy toward the car with the tiny yellow lepidoptera behind him, following lazily. I tried so hard not to laugh.

So now I sit under this elm tree and the kids have come back... "We're boiling hot dad, can we play in the river?" Sure. How can I resist? This is the best of times. Welcome to summer.

D-Day

Some weird accident of cosmic symmetry has my wife's family near perfectly aligned with my own. Her brother and I have birthdays a day apart. My wife and sister a week a part. My mother and mother-in-law, at the beginning and end of the same month, and our fathers on the very same day. It is known as D-Day. Two gifts send different directions on the same day. Different styles of paternal care, different expressions of love. That day is coming up. Its time to start considering how to gift and thank people who have done so much, even when they may not fully understand what it is they've done.

Understanding is based on experience and context, and I started my life with lots of experience in fatherhood. Everyone had a chance to do it, and after taking a brief turn, they seemed to disappear. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but when men pop up and disappear in your life just when you're trying to figure how to be like them, you have to observe quickly. So D-Day is kind of an unofficial father's day to me... to all the guys who took a turn in line, for better or worse, they've framed my experience of what it is and isn't to be a man.

My genetic donor, whom my mother originally married and divorced was a sore spot for years. He just disappeared. Gave up his rights to me, and I never saw or heard from him again. He's recently reappeared now, but at the time, I felt disposable, useless. It was a burden to care for kids as a single parent, and while I didn't understand that, I did understand that I was a burden. Its not what my mother meant, its just how it came off. She was dealing with a lot: two kids, a new business, and an emerging neurologial disease no one would diagnose for years. I blamed the guy who was missing for the problems that arose in his absence. Angrily, I referred to him as my mistake, my Faux Pa.

The next guy was a rebound marriage who frankly couldn't manage his temper, especially around me. I remember the beatings more than anything else in that part of my life, and for the arbitrary things that caused them. Taking the last piece of bacon, using too much toilet paper, dropping rocks from an overpass... ok so I had that one coming to me. They were a blur of anger, from the lashes many whippings. They seemed to never end. Until finally they did. And I came home from school one day with my mother to see that our home was completely devoid of possessions. Everything was gone. The furniture, the silverware, the TV and stereo... the checkbook. It was all gone. I thought we were robbed. He was just moving on.

And then the sickess set in. My mother got more and more weak, light headed, dizzy. She started seeing doctors who started telling her she had diabetes, hyperglycemia, and a million other things. It turns out she had multiple sclerosis. I remember moving in with my grandparents for a while after she had vertigo for a few weeks. My sister and I were in elementary school and were trying to do things for ourselves. Must have been laughable. We all lived under the stable roof of my grandfather while things sorted out. As horrible as it probably seemed to onlookers, it was a great time in my life. I was surrounded by the people I loved. And my mother was sick, unable to really look around at anything for fear of worsening the spins, but we'd sit and talk, or read stories to her. It was great. Like a really, really long sleep-over. I'd play with legos under the pull-out bed in a fort, with blankets draped over the side while mom was above, listening to my aunt read her The Hobbit. Things were good, for me. Not for her. She continued to worsen. They told me they didn't know what was wrong. People quietly whispered things to each other there like "what will we do with them if she dies?". I was more than a little nervous.

Eventually she stabilized enough to go back to her own home and we lived in a state of care between two worlds. I was angry at all these other dads for not being there and making someone else stand in. How silly... rescue is rescue. Oh well. Eventually mom's physical therapist put her up to a blind date. It was almost quite literally a blind date, as she was in a wheelchair and had only partial vision. Some guy she knew was returned from Vietnam, and having finally finished college on the GI bill, was trying to catch up on a life others got to have while he was stuck in a jungle somewhere. What a catch... crippled blind mother of two... I can only imagine her trepidation. It was a date that changed my life.

They met and fell in love. A thing I cannot possibly imagine. I see my mother, and I love her too, but it was a big, big thing to take on. This group of floundering people. I remember trying so hard to impress him, and still being afraid of him, thinking he might have a bad temper like some of them, or just leave when he felt like it. I did a magic show for him. I was maybe 5. My sister wrote letters to him almost daily, asking him to check a box yes or no if he would like to 'spand the nite'. We wanted so much to be wanted, and knew it was a lot to ask. And oddly, unbelievably, this guy actually wanted all of that. It is a gift for which I can never offer enough thanks. He changed my life. He was there. And has been.

But oddly it got harder to be there for him as I got older. Maybe he just didn't know what the job duties were anymore. Things are oddly strained sometimes. We want an ease for which we cannot find. But my appreciation cannot be lessened. I've already sainted him.

The other D I picked up with my marriage, and what a trip that was. He was a banker and all I knew was how very serious and proper he was. Or that's my impression. When I finally came to the home to meet him and Lisa's family for the first time, I was greeted at the door by her ancient grandmother who, in her excitement, bit me in the chest. Still reeling from an energetic toothing, I was introduced to her parents seconds later as: "This is Scott... he has a tattoo!" I wanted to die. But they've been wonderful family. As a father, he's another layer of support I never imagined. Always there, and whereas my father always knew how to frame a thought (he was an editor for many years), my father in law was born with the innate knowledge of the innerworkings of things. Nothing goes unfixed in my home now when he visits. A fabulous symbiosis, since most things in my home are breaking!

I have much to be thankful for on this day, as much for the people who left the void, as for those that helped fill it. Its a world that my children will never know, except through far-away tales of loss and abandonment, where the good guy gets his girls and lives happily ever after.

Allergy

She's lying down after a night of reverie, a fabulous evening of unexpected delights. In the hours before, all she knew about was a 6:30 dinner and reservations at a comedy club. She bloomed with the night's shade, funnier and more beautiful with every passing hour. Words flowed mingled with red wine and mixed company. At reverie's end, at 5 am, she laid down and sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed.

In a couple hours kids six small feet were pounding up and down the halls like gazelles on the Serengeti. I arose, hung over and undercaffeinated, looking across the bed to my wife. Her porcelain skin glows against burgundy sheets, her curved form the desire of every sculptor since the discovery of clay. But the pillow crammed under her eye means migraine, and she's going to feel it when she's awake.

I wonder what it is that caused the sneezing, and pad slowly down the stairs, careful not to upset my fragile thought. The first visible child is running through the living room on all fours with a long string tailing behind him. He stops and looks at his butt, shaking it to see the tail wag. I smile, kiss him, and shuffle to the aspirin and coffee pot. The drawer is broken. Someone's hung on it and bent the track rollers. I wiggle, shimmy, then grip and rip it from the slot, admiring the bent metal and cursing my lack of coffee.

In the last fifteen years, I've known her and not known her. She was mysterious and beautiful then, and still is, but in a way I find difficult to grasp. She makes love seem easy to feel and hard to accept, like I couldn't possibly deserve the gift so freely given and fear having nothing to offer in return. A terminal fear. Lonliness waiting to detonate. And it was a question like this I asked her that night, between sipped wine and rare food, her merlot hair waving gently to her shoulders. Her eyes sparkled, and with a smirk told she's not changed.

But she has. She was a beat poet and a flapper girl, a nymph and free spirit in those long ago college days. The love we felt produced binding and formative changes: work, home, kids, stay-at-home motherhood. So maybe she still is a beat poet, and nymph, but reality is harsh. Did Kerouac have to yell at his kids for not flushing the toilet? Did Peter Pan ever change a diaper? If she has been the same, somber suburban life has settled in around her. My reaction has been high blood pressure medication and antidepressants. She, dressed in black beaded flapper shirt, is a Brownie mom; surreal and unchanged. Maybe she hasn't changed, life did.

So as I make coffee and wait for the sound of her groggy feet, I think about her and our anniversary today. Twelve years. How could I go to some store and buy some other guys words about a generic wife and give this to her? Does he know her? The way her subarctic toes creep across the bed to my warm legs at night? The way she's still afraid of me kissing her collarbone, suspecting after all this time I still may be a vampire. Its the widow's peak, I think. So instead I'm writing her this note, an extended thought on a trip we're still walking together. Happy anniversary.

And the sneezing from upstairs means its almost time. She'll be down soon. Kids are watching cartoon superheroes from underneath the sleeper sofa, a cotton and steel fortress. She's allergic to something around here. The meds don't help much. We've tested her. Nothing unusual, and nothing insightful. Maybe she's allergic to domesticity. That I could see. Somehow I can't see Kate Chopin scrubbing the kitchen floor and doing laundry. And this is the moment of epiphany for me, that after all this time, she's not changed, our circumstances have. I've made a life of throwing myself into those circumstances, she's been herself. Those moments I was mad at her for not becoming Betty Rubble when we had a home, I was wrong. I fell in love with Betty Boop. Its who she is. And its beautiful.

(originally written October 2005)