so mike drives in the point that well, 35 is really middle age. i mean, he says, what’s really the quality of life past 70?
and it’s bad enough that growing up terrifies me. i can’t stand it. it puts me into a panic. time is fucking irreversible.
the problem is of course there is much too much alone time around me. between working nights and just staying up late because i have always been that way. too much night and tv, youth replacing youth, growing old with the newscasters of my youth, seeing them replaced, hearing how another just past away (Roger Gimble and Bill Beutel and Peter Jennings; although Jennings was a shock).
and another child on the way; a boy and the panic rears its head quicker and harder and blunt.
in the moment of making love to my wife, in the moment of playing with my daughter, where time stops and i no longer think of myself and my place and the time that has left me and the time head that is leaving me, there is sudden and abrupt delight and peace and i am alive, i am young, i am forever.
all i have is them and they are becoming all i need and all i will ever want.
“As I imagine you”
told from yianna’s perspective things i cannot say to her from her eyes, as i imagine her.
ie,
“the first memory i have of my father was his eyes and his breath. his gaze was steady but his breath was sour, always the slightest uncomfortable hint of bile at the edges. he was a big and often times mean… ”
etc
goddamn 35
turning 35 today and he has to admit, he is no longer a broken man anymore.
the cracks might still run deep, fissures deep beneath within the very core,
he had to admit, he truly was no longer broken. he was married. he had a wonderful child
and his wife was bearing another. he had a home, he had most of the things he wanted
he had a father, his mother still loved him and his family dearly, a few good close friends
he could no longer be broken, although perhaps still be moved from time to time
while running, thinking of his death, think of lifelines not pursued or thwarted
moved to reflection, to the oddities of life, of how he got there, of where he could still be
he wasn’t broken turning 35, he had to admit and he still had yet a way to go
but he was going to be whole getting there.
every blank page
and every blank page is
a mark of failure
a badge of honor
of not having written it down
of having lived every minute instead
every empty page is
where nothing will remain
where something has happened
a life about to be forgotten
a life worth living
every measure of silence
a moment lost to time
not a moment lost to living
for my father, 2007
i see you with ioanna and i am filled with a kind of sadness. i wish you were my father from the very beginning. i wish you had held me in the hospital when i was born and i wish it was you that brushed my first set of tears out of my crying eyes. i wish that it was you who had a hard time changing my diapers and it was you who laughed when i ran around the house naked. that taught me how to ride a bicycle. how to kick a ball. how to use a hammer. how to fix things. i wished that i was young again and it was you from the very start. i wish it was you from the very start and you could have fixed me before i became broken. i see you with our daughter and there’s a little smile on my face as i think “how lucky she is to know her grandfather from the very beginning.”
father’s day, 2007
with another one on the way, i look at ioanna, our first daughter and measure up the father i have been so far. i think i got most of it right and there are areas in which i can improve. i can give her more of her type of time, i.e. dolls and the like. i could take her out to the museum more often as well. make it a point of teaching her things, like numbers and the alphabet.
i look at her and measure up myself and for the most part, as much as i want to find myself lacking, as i often do with so many other things, i am proud to be her father. i am happy. i could be more, but i’m happy with how she’s turning out, which i n turn means we’re doing alright as parents, i’m doing alright as a father. not bad for someone like me.
she gave me a card today, approached me slowly as if she balancing a bowl of soup in her hands. and handed it to me barely, her fingers still at the edge of it. ‘lemme show you’ she says and takes it gently back and puts a finger between the folds of the envelop and tears it open in little rips. she was delighted in opening it, revealing the big reveal, that the card was a bear cub exploding her arms to give her daddy a bear hug. squeals from ioanna. pure delight.
i hugged her tightly and smelt her hair. i could do better, but i’m not doing so bad either.
beer and nuts
just because the beer is in the cooler, it doesn’t mean the nuts aren’t salty.
at some point you have to
start again, get right into it, start this conversation because, frankly it’s too lonely otherwise.
as tiring as this is, as it can be, full of boredom and the mundane.
the big news is mz is pregnant again. we’re 5 months int it now, a boy, and although the maternal serum test and the AFP came back negative, the doctors saw something in the baby’s heart. an echogenic foci in the lefdt ventricle. and while by itself it is not enough cause to warrant an amniocentisis (a 1 in 1500 chance at this point of there being a genetic abnormality), we’re doing it anyway for the piece of mind.
and i’s too much even writing this, as if, as if, as if. as if any of it doesn’t get lost in the translation. as if by recording the course of events i can somehow change them. as if it mattered. on and on.
she’s more beautiful than ever my wife is. in a short span of 3 years our daughter has gone from blind crying baby, to pouring imaginary coffee and toasting our cups with a resonding “cheers!”
and all of it matters because of the living of it and the writing cannot bear any of it.
it never, ever goes away
it rears, on hind legs, rabid and soft. it insists, like some kind of new pain. i don’t know what i am doing as a father, as a husband. in frustration the little one bit me, and i smacked her, quick. but despite that, every time i wake up into the living room she says “daddy” the way some people say happy birthday. how could my father abandon a child like this? i watch my wife’s belly, stare at it like it was going to tell me something. waiting for it to tell me that it’s going to happen again, we are going to suffer again. a month is a long time and even then, even then. i don’t think i fight with her over nonsense, i feel something vital is happening there, something is coming loose. then again, as if my anger can hold it back together. as if we were dealing with fissures as opposed to tears. a new kind of broken, every time.
an aversion to rest
a sinking of the teeth, i dont wanna hear this, i’ve never heard
you say it, not so loud, not like this and i feel as if the clouds
are conspiring against me, and the leaves have turned the sharpest just
before winter and if there was a way around it, i expect you to find it
to put the curves into it and the corners to rest, have the cement edges
weathered down by tongues and hold my hand through it all,
i’ve been done long enough to have it all come to this, to stray pebbles
caught beneath the heel, sand and dirt in my hair to coughing
and i dont wanna hear the tremor of your voice or the wind pushing
against the door or empty branches
only the sound of a palm caressing the cheek before leaving
of putting my eyes to rest