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)

Asthma in the Moonlight

I can't really tell if its late or early. Perhaps its both. There is a timeless quality to the sound of the house when everything in it sleeps. Faint detail becomes apparent, even prominent. Its been a long day, a long week. I'm tired and not sleepy. My attention is fully preoccupied with a mix of ideas, memories, and a midnight soundscape I'd never been awake to notice. Somewhere in the dark, past the glow of the fluorescent glow of this laptop screen there is the hum of a happy cat. My wife sleeps next to me, her breathing as the sound of waves. The fan in this laptop has a purr softer than the cat, and seems to deliver more heat than the furnace vent next to the bed. Down the hall my son begins a coughing fit that is the onset of an asthma attack.

Back in a second...

Three minutes later he is laying down sleeping, unaware of the bronchodialator at work in his lungs. We'll see if it works. I'll be up a while, listening for him. He's still coughing, but asleep somehow. He's in kindergarten and this drill is not new. Its been a while, but in his first 3 years we went to the ER regularly to get him breathing treatments because he just wasn't getting enough air. Always this time of year... winter.

I remember the first time holding him in our bed with my wife. We were calling the pediatrician because all the things the things the old wives recommended hadn't worked. Every three or four seconds another spasm of coughing seemed to make him shudder. Such a little body. His lips had a bluish tint. Bring him into the ER, the phone decreed. When you have three kids, you have to send one parent with the child and let the other stay home and wonder how it is going, hoping you won't have to explain to the other kids in the morning that their brother is hospitalized.

Firsts are easy to remember. He was dressed in that uniform toddler sweatsuit and whisked off to the car where I drove with all haste to the hospital. In the car his breathing was thick and uneasy. Alone in the back seat he was scared and he began to a low cry because he didn't have the strength to cry louder. I drove with my left hand and reached behind to his seat with my right, my shoulder twisted to a mild burn. I tried to comfort him by talking about anything, about trying to relax, that we were almost there and we weren't. He was scared because he couldn't breathe well and didn't know what would happen next. I was scared because I could not stop his suffering.

It was just a moment. Life is full of them and we only remember some. I wondering if we choose what to recall. This trip was repeated easily a dozen times and it became no less serious, but somehow less frightening. Later, when he fell out of the second story window... well jumped, really... It the asthma seemed in retrospect a lot less serious. At the time I was mowing the lawn and watched him fall, actually thinking he might be dead when I saw him hit the ground. Clearly he wasn't as the following winter he hit a pine tree face first, necessitating a visit to the plastic surgeon ("just to be sure everything will heal right").

All of these moments seem grave when taken as a whole, but I think we all have some story like this. Its the mythos we build as we age that is passed on after we are gone. My son is at no loss for legend, but I'm more interested at the moment in the feeling of panic and fear that came with these moments. It seems that now, sitting in bed listening to my son cough repetitively in his sleep, that I am not worried. I'm also not sleeping, just listening for a break in the coughing and a chance for the wheezing to subside.

I've heard people say life's a bitch. This has never really made sense to me for a number of reasons. If the world is a feminine, and it does have a historical precedence for such a consideration (gaia, etc), it doesn't strike me as particularly canine. And there is frankly too much good in life to cast it as wholly bad. Its something else. There is a river here called the Rogue. While its possible seedy people once lived along its banks, its more likely the French first called it Rouge because of the reddish silt at its bottom and the locals couldn't pronounce it. Close, but not at all the same meaning. The same is true of these Life's a Bitchers. While some may rather barbituate or infatuate, I think the word here is habituate. Our life's experiences dull emotional reaction.

There is a sizable body of scientific work on this subject I find very interesting for a number of reasons and won't bore you with the details, but in essence our nerves detect stimuli within a limited scale of reference. You needn't look further than a Michigan playground in March. The first 45 degree day and every kid has their coat off. Compare that to a Texas playground at the same temperature. I don't see why emotional reactions are different as they're fed through the same system of conductors.

When I look back at these events in my son's life I recall the sensation of being scared, but it was less each subsequent time. In fact my wife was stunning calm as she attended the disfiguring face wound dealt by the pine tree. Some of it is shock and a temporary neurological tonic, but I think the same thing happens over time in a broader sense. I'm less worried. Things still happen. I'm sitting in a room full of sounds I've never noticed before. These sounds, textures, and I cannot imagine what else have been here before as I've seen life happen and I didn't notice. I'm left with the sneaking suspicion there is actually a lot thus far in life I've missed. Just beneath the blur of activity that is our instantaneous moment, there is something else. Something sometimes senses more than seen. A base of comfort, and understanding or calm. Its there when the sounds die away and all that remains is the hush of air through a furnace vent. Just a dim glimpse at something I expect to know better through retrospect that tells me this life is good.