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Gravity

16 Apr

“A black hole is, quite simply, gravity gone mad!”

So Heath frequently intones in his stately British accent.  Our tow-headed purveyor of galactic doom, obsessed with all manner of star death, has memorized a BBC video,  and this phrase has become something of a mantra for him, and, secretly, for me as well. 

For you see, I am now forty seven years old, and it has been eight years since that glorious time when I both ran a marathon and appeared onstage in a bathing suit, feeling, as a result, young and lithe.  Since that time I’ve learned a few things about gravity myself, and they are not very pretty. 

Without my shirt I’m beginning to resemble those burly old guys who trot their bellies into the icy waters off Coney Island every New Years Day to frolic about like over-fed otters.  When it comes to my midsection, gravity has, indeed, gone mad. 

And while this cruelest of forces is slowly dragging my pendulous bits earthward, it also continues to keep Hallie’s diapered behind planted firmly on the ground.  Approaching the age of two, her standing is slowly improving, but walking is still but a dream.   Of course, this bothers her not a bit.  She knows little of gravity and cares even less.  In an unwitting reenactment of Newton’s watershed moment, a dustbuster recently fell on her head.  Far from bringing enlightenment, this merely riled her and, after a brief cry and a little soothing, she continued on her way, scooting across the floor in search of objects to scatter, raging at the universe in a language all her own. 

Amy, of course, is affected by gravity not all, being a creature of light, air, and occasionally fire.  The sun to our planets, she warms us when we are cold and lights our way when we are lost.  I see it most with Heath, who struggles with an outsize temper, disowns us frequently, and yet yearns to be near her constantly.  She never forgets this, even under the most trying circumstances, and I, with a temper of my own,  learn by her example daily.

I often wonder how I’d handle fame and fortune.  So many men crumble under the weight of what seems, at my great distance from either, an amazing gift.  I know my weaknesses, and I’m sure I’d stumble a bit, but I doubt I’d fall.  Because somehow Amy, Heath, Hallie and I have managed to create a universe that spins at just the right speed to keep the stars glittering, the black holes at bay, and my feet on the ground.  

So let the testing begin.  I am more than ready.

 

 

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The Ascent

29 Jan

It’s bitter cold here in New York.  Seventeen degrees  and the wind howling down out of the north to shatter against the city’s land mass,  sending shards of atmosphere screaming along the East River and up into Queens where they relentlessly sliced into Heath and I as we made our way to school this morning.

P.S. 122, and it’s eastern approach along Ditmars Avenue,  most certainly rank with Everest and K2 as some the most treacherous terrain on earth.  Seductively flat and populous during warmer weather, amateurs are frequently lulled into a false sense of security on this traverse.  But when the weather turns, it can become deadly.  Heath and I passed several parents who had given up entirely, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk staring blankly into the distance as a thin layer of ice formed over their face and their children tried to prod them into life.  Poor bastards, there was nothing I could do.  To help them would have been to endanger my own mission, and that was unthinkable, the prospect of return far more daunting than the agony ahead.  For if Amy were to spend another day with Heath at home, her head would surely explode.  And after a week of stomach flu in our house, that’s one mess I just couldn’t face.

It’s the flu that kept Heath home these past two days.  Briefly ill, he rapidly returned to peak form, and though he is a smart, funny and completely adorable child, he is also, quite frequently, whiny, demanding and incredibly high maintenance.  As Amy and Hallie were recovering from the flu, and I was fighting it off, the last thing anyone wanted was to print a coloring page of every celestial body in the known Universe, one at a time, at an interval of roughly one every thirty-five seconds, from dawn until dusk, which is Heath’s current idea of heaven.  Nor did we want to read Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” from cover to cover.  And we certainly did not want to spend the day either arguing or explaining about literally everything.  We wanted to rest.  We wanted Heath to go to school.

So we began our preparations before dawn.  Neither one of us spoke much, lost in our own thoughts, knowing what we were up against.  Shortly after the sun had cleared the horizon we kissed Amy and Hallie for luck and began our ascent.  Being purists, we used neither ropes nor oxygen.  However we did hold hands, especially when crossing streets.  We found a rhythm that worked for us and, with slow but steady progress,  we found ourselves, shortly after 8:00 am,  just below the summit.  We stood there quietly, as men will, savouring our achievement.  After a moment I simply handed Heath his lunch box, gave him a kiss and wished him a fun day.  And then, sensing it was the right thing to do, I let him travel the rest of the way on his own, up the steps and into the school.

My flush cheeked boy, starting another day.

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First, Crazy & True

1 May

First love, crazy love and true love.

I had a crush on Kelly from the first time I met her.  Acting class, 9th grade, I must have been fourteen years old.  She was the classic older woman,  being fifteen, and seemed to possess all the knowledge and sophistication which that age implied.  She was out of my league and I knew it.   So we became friends.   Friends amongst friends, actually, as her basement became the de facto clubhouse for a whole group of us, a great place for Doritos and Cokes and Saturday Night Live.  

During Kelly’s first year of college a bunch of us drove down for the weekend.  We laughed, we drank, and Kelly and I took a late night walk.  We sat on the steps of a quiet building and I told her about the death of my father, talking about it for the first time with anyone.  Shortly thereafter we had a date.  I took her home, I said good night and there was a kiss.  A kiss in the cold night air that was so long wished for and yet so utterly surprising that I could feel the thrill of it right down to my toes.  I can feel that kiss to this day.  First love.

The thing about Becky was that she picked me.  Yet another acting class, this one in college.  The teacher divided us into two groups, putting us on opposite sides of the room, and asked us to communicate with someone.  As the exercise began and the resulting noise ensued I realized that a very cute girl with long, dark hair was trying to talk to me!  I couldn’t believe my luck!  Of course, she already had a boyfriend who she’d been dating since she was fourteen and who she just couldn’t break up with because it would kill him!  She also scratched her shoulders until they bled and I once made her so angry that I got up in the middle of the night and hid the scissors.  Oh yeah, and the boyfriend never went away.  But these were all minor impediments.  Our relationship continued its ragged course as we chased each other around the midwest for the better part of nine years.  Thank god she finally decided to hate me.  Crazy love.

Amy was different.  As was I, by that time.  I’d been in the wilderness for a while.  I had turned thirty.  We met, we went out.  She liked me, but I wasn’t sure.  Then I liked her and she wasn’t sure.  

But then she invited me to a play.  It was long and tedious and on our way to a party afterward we got caught in the rain.    As we sat in our damp clothes in a slightly shabby Chicago hotel suite and sipped our drinks, I felt a subtle glow, and from within this quiet moment of contentment I heard myself say “What are we doing?” 

She smiled a rather bewitching smile and asked me what I thought we were doing. 

“I think we’re dating.” I replied. 

And so we were.  We’ve been together ever since and I cannot imagine spending my life with anyone else.  She is, by my definition, true love. 

And from that love has grown a family, and a whole new set of definitions.

My child snuggling into my chest.  First love.

Heath insisting on wearing his underwear backwards and frequently eating his own boogers.  Crazy love. 

The absolute joy I get from making my daughter smile.  True love.

First love, crazy love and true love.  They make me who I am.

 

 

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Land of Ghosts

21 Nov

Darkness comes early now and as cold winds beat against our thin windows the temperature drops, time seems to fall away, and my son and I watch trains cross the sky.    Less than 100 years ago our densely packed neighborhood was mostly farmland, and by traveling west down the hill upon which we live one came to Hellgate Field, a stretch of land where for thousands of years the Matinecock came to fish for giant sturgeon; where deep water, treacherous tides, and large obstructions with names such as Frying Pan Rock and Bald-Headed Billy claimed more than 1,000 ships; and where Heath now runs with his friends, plays on the swings, and comes to a complete stop whenever a train passes overhead.  During World War I the city spanned this most treacherous section of the East River with the Hellgate Bridge, building as well the massive arches that lead up to it, bisecting our streets and cutting a shallow diagonal across the sky. 

As evening approaches the trains glow warmly from within, and on icy nights their pantographs throw sparks from the overhead wire, thrilling my son.   For Heath loves trains.  In fact, he spends a fair part of his days being a train, barreling down Ditmars Boulevard, hugging the storefronts and hooting at anyone who dares to get in his way.  At four years old his imagination is strong and free and when he inhabits it he is joyous.  Hallie, on the other hand, has yet to find her passion, unless it be the joys of the raspberry.  From dawn to dusk, while Heath creates and enacts entire railroad empires before her, Hallie makes rude farting sounds and drools onto her chin.  She does this in her usual deadpan manner and is, seemingly, unimpressed with her brother’s efforts. 

I love to run on foggy mornings.  Early, just after the sun has risen, I’ll head west down Ditmars.  Coming to Astoria Park, I’ll follow the path beneath Hellgate Bridge and down to the river itself where the fog is often so thick I cannot discern water from sky.  Running along the river toward Hallet’s Cove, I almost always think of the General Slocum, a steamship that burned off these shores in June of 1904 killing more than 1,000 people.  I imagine the victims slowly climbing the retaining wall, hair wet, dresses dripping, waistcoats smoldering, trying, still trying, to escape the river.  And then they are gone, having failed yet again, and in the stillness I continue on, feeling slightly chilled.    Time is permeable here and the past seems very close.  A playground for my son, this park, for me, is a land of ghosts.  

We’ll both miss the park this winter, it’s frigid micro-climate making visits rare.  But it’s not going anywhere and we’ll all be back in the spring when Hallie, interacting with the world more every day, will begin to create her own relationship with this little piece of the world.  Until then there are cookies to be made, tracks to be built and stories to be told.  And of course there’s the trains, throwing sparks and illuminating the darkness as they travel across the river and into the night.

 

 

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Hallie’s Smile

31 Oct

A smile from Hallie is a rare thing.  With a stoicism that would have made Buster Keaton proud, Hallie remains solemnly non-committal.  Down Syndrome children are born with low muscle tone, which means they’re floppy.  Like a very cuddly rag doll, head and limbs go everywhere.  Because of this their physical development is slower than most children’s.  But Hallie’s been doing great.  She holds her head up, searching the horizon like a prairie dog, she struggles, she kicks, she grabs my nose, slaps my face, and yesterday she gave me a head butt worthy of a soccer hooligan.  This we call progress. 

And yet she rarely smiles.  

But within her limited range of expression she is hilarious!  With comic chops well beyond her years, she does more with a tilt of the head or a briefly raised eyebrow than anyone I know.  Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, were they alive, would certainly bow down to her.  Like the three wise men of old, they would gather together in the mists of some 1920’s Hollywood watering-hole and then pilgrimage across vast deserts, endless plains, and numerous decades to present-day Queens, where they would honor my infant daughter with precious gifts.  Chaplin would bring his physical grace, Lloyd his derring-do, and Keaton, whose lean wisp of a body is forever trying to make way against gale force winds, tumbling boulders, and collapsing buildings would bring the greatest gift of all: the quiet strength and comic ingenuity to overcome life’s greatest obstacles and to make us laugh while doing it.  In return she would bless them with, of course, a smile.

Because while they are rare, Hallie’s smiles do exist, as radiant as they are brief.  Initially, they might have been mistaken for a mere flicker of a facial muscle, but no more.  Her smile has found her eyes, and in unexpected moments her face will suddenly illuminate, igniting like a flash of summer lightning.  In that moment I know my daughter is a joyful being.

So, having accomplished their task, the three kings begin their journey home, each taking a final pratfall in hopes that their slapstick grace will win one more smile.  Chaplin, shameless ham that he is, lifts his hat and twitches his moustache as the others file out, but to no avail.  Sadly, he pulls the door closed with his cane, and then, as silently as they came, they are gone.  

Hallie, after pausing for a moment, lifts an eyebrow and cocks her head as if to say, “Can you believe those guys?”  And we laugh.  Only then does she look at us, wrinkle her pale blue eyes and smile for all she’s worth.

 

 

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An Occasional Complaint

16 Oct

It’s the snuffle and cough season in our home.  Hallie snuffles like an pig on the scent of truffles while Heath coughs like an excited seal and this goes on all night long. Then we all change beds.  Sometimes twice.  Finally we all get up ungodly early and the kids spend the rest of the day crying, whining, pooing, peeing, vomiting and/or wiping their snotty noses on whichever one of us is closest.  Then we make dinner.  That we have so far avoided food poisoning is amazing.

My acting teachers always said that you shouldn’t go into acting unless you really wanted to act. It was just too hard otherwise.  This is so much truer of parenting, because even when you really want to have kids, there are times when you don’t want to have kids.  And once they’re here there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is an upside.  Very little repulses me anymore.  A handful of anything that comes out of my kids is just not a big deal.  I wipe their butts with abandon and flick away their snot with aplomb.  As long as whatever I’m dealing with is not actually in my food, I’m good.  And as for the slight baby vomit smell I may occasionally emit, you can all just deal with it.  I’m busy raising future generations.

Finally, as someone who splits his week between work and kids, let me just say that work is a trip to Tuscany by comparison.  The old stereotype I grew up with of the tired husband coming home at the end of the day to be fed and coddled by his ever so grateful family?  Scam! Scam! Total scam! The dude’s been chatting about golf around the water cooler all day while his wife has been home with a squalling infant and a pantsless, runny-nosed four year old whose response to her every request is an imperious “Why?”.

So as autumn turns to winter and the clouds begin to build in the west, think of me from time to time, a man who is blessed with exactly what he asked for and occasionally just has to complain about it.

 

 

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A Change of Seasons

19 Sep

The first frost warnings of the season came to the outlying suburbs last night.  The resulting surge of cool autumn air blew through the city as if to clear away the greed and folly of this past week, and remind us all how little nature cares about our problems.  Robert MacFarlane points out in his wonderful book, The Wild Places, that the great forests that once blanketed North America waited Seventy  million years for the arrival of man.  I have little doubt after this week that those trees will also watch us go, and that our time here will be seen in their collective memory as a flicker of sad comedy, a slapstick spasm of existence that faded almost as quickly as it arrived, leaving a world to undo the damage and then quickly forget our meager shot at grace.

Which is to say, funnily enough, that I find solace in this change of season.  Amy and I will celebrate our twelfth anniversary this weekend and though I don’t think we intentionally planned our wedding for the autumnal equinox, it makes so much sense.  The wistfulness of summer’s end meeting the fresh hope of a new beginning is marriage in a nutshell.  And as my  week moved toward this time of change and celebration, it grew so rich in moments of beauty and hope that it stood in stark contast to the frantic scurryings on Wall Street just a few short miles away. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.

As I was turning off the light in Heath’s room last night he awoke and said “Dad, what are you doing? Is it Christmas tomorrow?”  Taken aback at this unexpected view into the my son’s heart, I was moved to learn that upon awaking from a dead sleep his first thought is of Christmas and that his greatest hope is that it’s tomorrow. 

Hallie, to the amazement of her therapists, burbles incessantly, emphatically making her points in a language all her own, and punctuating her few moments of silence with a solemn upraised fist.  Fight the power sister. 

And Amy, nursing a cold, a constantly hungry baby and a three year old boy who would happily crawl inside her skin if he could find a way, has graced me with some of the warmest, loveliest smiles I have ever seen.

New York is a crazy place.  Among it’s most widely accepted myths is that money bestows wisdom, happiness and importance. When you walk among the wealthy every day it’s a very easy belief to buy into.  But lately I’ve been thinking about Stonehenge, where, in the coming days, the sun will rise over Salisbury Plain, fall in perfect alignment with the ancient stones, and illuminate the heart of this solemn structure.  Such is the day I married Amy, and such are the moments we share with our children, when we look into their eyes, hold them close, and allow them to show us in so many ways that what we are doing is right and necessary and important.

They illuminate our lives.

 

 

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Hurricane Season

10 Sep

The nights have been warm of late.  But as the darkness grows old and the stars fade, cool air that has spent the night crossing the Atlantic finally makes landfall at Rockaway and continues across Jamaica Bay, rustling down the streets of Queens, flowing around and through all the open windowed houses and apartments, gently stirring to life the sleeping families who have come here from all over the world to chase their dreams, until, finally, the early morning breeze rattles the blinds above my head and I open my eyes. 

And, sadly, the joy’s not there.  Like fresh peaches being slowly allowed to rot, I am incapable of enjoying summers last gifts. 

When Amy gets up, Heath cuddles against me, a physical closeness that’s just starting to become rare.  Hallie, peacefully sprawled across her bassinet wiggles and sighs, and I wish that I could sleep with her utter abandon. 

Like a sailor’s glass, my moods rise and fall with the changes in the air.  This weekend, as hurricanes filled the waters of the Atlantic and Hanna worked her way up the east coast, my emotional weather darkened and grew turbulent.  Exacerbated by lack of sleep, lack of exercise, caffeine addiction and a screaming need to have some time of my own, storms began to brew.   As always, my impulse is to grow quiet, hole up with a good book and ride it out.  But like any solitary endeavour, this was nigh on impossible with two small children and a wife who is more tired than I am.

And so I weathered the storm as best I could, reading and sleeping as much as possible while trying to be on best behaviour.  Doing the dishes, making food, feeding Hallie and answering Heath’s fifth iteration of “Why?” with as little impatience as possible.  Trying to accept the fact that I have, for the moment, lost hold of all the strands of my life.  As they blow frantically about, I do my best to grab them, but to no avail.  Until the wind dies down and fair weather returns, which it always does, I’ll just have to wait.

But Hallie is holding her head up more and more, although she still refuses to give me a smile.  Heath has started school and, despite daily stories of him hitting somebody or somebody hitting him, he seems to enjoy it.  Amy is as lovely as I’ve ever seen her, and for the most part, as patient.  And the storms are receding now.  The water is still rough, but no levees have been breached.  And tonight, I trust, the winds will once again make their immigrant journey across the sea to stir the dreams of my neighbors, to whisper the leaves of the trees and to to kiss my family with the fresh air of a receding darkness.

 

 

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Five Simple Ingredients

22 Aug

Lately when I scoop up my daughter Hallie she has the weight and feel of a good loaf of bread.

I bake bread.  Tired of the dry tasteless quality of even the most expensive store bought loaves, I began baking my own a few years back.  I found that in return for four hours work I could have two warm brown loaves beautiful to look at, wonderful to taste, and so nutritionally real that my body is shocked into a state of physical bliss.    But that’s not all.

There’s the simplicity.  Water, yeast, honey, flour and salt.  With so little to think about, I can focus on quality.  The quality of the ingredients, the quality of my stirring and kneading, and the quality of the time spent doing one thing well.  A luxury in this day and age. 

My son Heath helps.  He actually gets very excited about it, running into the kitchen and dragging his box (an overturned wooden crate) from beneath the kitchen table.  Of course, being three years old, helping involves pouring all dry ingredients into the bowl, stirring in a rather lackluster way, eating as much raw dough as I will allow, and then stirring again in a far more frantic manner until dough flies everywhere and I yell “That’s it! Out! Out! Out of my kitchen!” At which point he gleefully flees the room, laying low until the bread is ready to eat.  It’s our system and we’re fond of it. 

And it works. For I have come to believe over these past few years that the quality of my bread is directly linked to the joy I find in making it.  Rushing the process when tired and cranky always leads to failure.  Dry, misshapen loaves that disintegrate when I try to slice them.  Heath’s assistance, on the other hand, despite the inevitable mayhem, has never failed to produce two solid, resilient and delicious loaves.  It’s the love, you see.  It makes things taste good.

Neither my wife Amy or I have ever been any good with plants.  She adopts them only to fret over their long, sad death.  I occasionally attempt an herb garden, bringing forth small dessicated sprouts which feebly struggle and then die.  And yet, amazingly, Heath seems to flourish effortlessly. 

And now we have Hallie.

With the thin shanks and shrivelled bottom of a ninety year old man she scared us at first, preferring sleep to food, and dropping weight she could ill afford to lose.  But things have changed.  True to her genes, food has become her friend, and she now seems to grow fuller and rounder each day. 

So when I pick her up and hold her close I’m reminded of a fresh loaf of bread.  Warm, sweet and full of love.

 

 

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Kind Words

15 Jul

I have never really trusted kind words. Fearing false emotion and cheap platitudes, I shrugged them off as politely as possible and moved on, never giving them their due.

I was wrong.

Not to avoid cheap emotion, please… God save us from Oprah’s couch. But I was wrong not to listen. Not to hear. Not to recognize the truth that is almost always there.

The responses to my first post, Gifts from My Daughter, have been an amazing lesson in the power of a kind word at a difficult time. Such words, I have learned, do not lose, but rather gain with repetition the power to comfort, attaining a warm glow, the softness of a favorite blanket, the smell of woodsmoke. I cannot hear them enough.

Surprisingly many of these words have come from old friends, people I really didn’t expect to hear much from again. And yet here they are, sharing their own lives and stories as if the time and distance that separates us does not exist.

Why did I ever let such amazing friends drift away?.

The answer, I know, is mostly geography. When you pick up and move every decade or so, you cut a lot of ties. Hell, in my youth I thought this was healthy, something everyone should do. As if uprooting all the trees in a forest every ten years and moving them all around could somehow be good land management.

Idiocy.

I should never have let it happen. These people are too valuable. I should have brought them with me. Forcibly if necessary. And we should all now live within blocks of each other, having coffee in the morning, beers at night, and barbecues on the weekend. Our children and grandchildren should all be the best of friends and have the run of each others houses. We should be there for each other all the time, sharing the seasons of our lives.

Idiocy as well, I suppose. But, understandable idiocy, which is usually the best I can plead.

So, I throw myself upon the mercy of my friends. And be they in Perrysburg, Chicago, New York, or Steamboat Springs, I have no doubt they will catch me. Most likely with a kind word at a difficult time. Which I will value above gold.

 

 

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