Becky's Quirks & Quazy Qualities

There are quirks that are endearing and quirks that are forced and not at all endearing.  Becky's are sincerely endearing.  There is a uniqueness to her person that is not created by an effort of will but a soft, gentle honesty.  This posting will be in list-form and will be about a person who exists in my personal life where, outside of that life, she exists as a professor, friend, and family member.  She's always first in my life.

• she craves asparagus.
• she loves Def Leppard and Journey in the way that a preteen loves Justin Bieber.  It is not nostalgia but pure ecstatic joy.
• she adores fairies - figurines, paintings, and murmurs of the little creatures exist all over our home.
• she has seen a fairy.
• she has filled over 100 personal journals since she was 16.
• as a child she spent her nights swooning to a cassette tape of Michael Crawford as the Phantom of the Opera.  At other times, she spent her nights swooning to "Mr. Roboto".
• she wrote and directed plays as a child, most of which starred her friends and were videotaped by her father.
• she was an award-winning Irish step dancer.
• when a preteen she spent a summer day reading "The Phantom of the Opera" and, without noticing the passing of time, earned a massively miserable sunburn.
• her veins flow with the steady bubbling of Dr. Pepper.
• she has the constitution of a character in a Jane Austen novel.
• her belief does not fail - and in this life that is a quirk.
• she remembers meeting Dennis DeYoung and also remembers the fact that he was eating a candy bar when they met.
• she was born in Tennessee but has the accent (or lack thereof) of a newscaster.
• her celebrity crushes are usually men who are far too old for her (i.e. Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey, etc.)
• she cannot pronounce the word giraffe.
• she loves me.

The Magic in My Life

“Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.”

~ Dhammapada, The Sayings of the Buddha

- Oliver affirms life – not because he looks like me but because he's my son and because, through the fact of his existence, he's an affirmation that I can create and create on a heart's scale and more, as opposed to the simplicity of destruction with which I often felt more at ease.
- José Saramago's novels exist.

- Becky “took away all of my reasons not to care” in ways both practical and invisible.

- There are roughly seven billion people on this planet.

- As I write this, I am sitting on a bed on the second floor of a building. That building sits upon a tiny round rock that is currently hurtling around a medium-size plasma orb at 67,000mph. That orb of plasma is currently traveling through an interstellar cloud it entered roughly 44,000 to 150,000 years ago. I could go on about our location within the Orion Spiral Arm in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars – but let's stop there, for now.

- The music I loved as a teenager still moves me but the lyrics take on new meaning.

- The boy who thought he'd not live to see 18 is now 27.

- Faerie figurines are perched all around me.

- My wife had a short story accepted for publication – on her first attempt at submitting work since 2010 or earlier.

- Inside this apartment building there are people all around me, just on the other side of the walls or floors, living out their lives just as oblivious to me as I often am to them.

- There are three furry felines in the living room – just sitting in there, like it's the most natural thing in the world for them to be there.

- Joy Division

- My son is currently sleeping and sighing while he does so.

- I am the improbable sum of all of my ancestors.

- iLiKETRAiNS

- Hamlet (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009)

- Whether we will it or not, we are all bound to one another.

Two Depressives Walk Into A Marriage

My wife and I are both exhausted.  It's cold, rainy, cloudy outside, and the trees are skeletons.  The road makes that "wooshing" wet sound whenever cars go by and it sprays cold whatever everywhere.  There's no Christmas coming soon, no New Year, we're just in the doldrums of winter.  The hallways at her college probably sound hollow and are a bit darker, even with lights - like an empty hospital in an X-Files episode.

I began taking anti-depressants when I was fourteen.  At the time my mother's brother was in the midst of an unnaturally colored descent into something like a quiet madness which would, by the time I was seventeen, lead him to take his own life.  My father's mother suffered from unspecified mental illness which has only recently been revealed as schizophrenia.  My parents understandably sought relief for me rather than watch their son, a sensitive, smart, and oft-bullied young man, push himself further toward desperation.

The Ring

The ring came before Christmas, intended for Christmas, but my wife couldn't wait and, seeing her own excited impatience, neither could I.

Enchantment, 16 Oct 2005 – undergrads at Appalachian State, the wind seemed to howl its disapproval as a classmate knocked on the door to my small, student-apartment. I'd just stepped out of a hasty shower, having thought that I would spend the Sunday alone, but at that point scrambling to put clothing on, to look presentable.  The rest was crashing through the assumptions and safety of others - setting a small piece of the world alight.  We decided upon what we wanted and we let nothing stop us from going to it - could we have been less devil-may-care?  Likely.  Would we, being who we are, have done any differently even in a thousand different chances?  Less likely.

Devotion, 16 Feb 2007 – as my wife's endometriosis stabbed inside her abdomen, something that wouldn't be diagnosed until much later, we sped toward downtown Charlotte from her parents' home on Pineville-Matthews Road. We'd been engaged for mere months, a formality, really.  Admonitions of family rang without consequence: warnings of regret for not having a church wedding, too soon, too fast.  My impending father-in-law drove fast and I scrambled to keep pace, nearly rear-ending him in the process.  My wife and her mother had to remove much of their jewelry for the metal detector as it pealed their threatening natures upon their entering the courthouse.  The judge was disheveled, his robe still slightly open from a visit to the restroom just prior to our arrival.  I'd change nothing.

Creativity, 25 Sept 2011 – we wouldn't learn until later how close I came to being a single father, or without any family at all.  The explosions inside the eyes of my wife as she was told not to push, not to allow anymore stress to reach our still unborn son.  Her breath exploding from her mouth in heavy, frustrated exhalations - almost shouts of air.  Our son's gray and wobbly body removed.  My wife's screams of desperate anguish as soft-spoken Doctor W reached in, up to her elbow, digging for the placenta that was torn to pieces.  The post-delivery surgery.  My son in the NICU.  The damned nightmare beauty of it all.

They sleep now next to me - my son's tiny arm curled up onto my wife's chest, his small head resting on the inside of her elbow.

The ring that could easily have been memorial.

The Living Is Easy

A recent Fall day was spent in the state of "Summertime."

First it was Anne-Sophie Mutter, the unexpected strains of Porgy's Charlestonian agony - a black man in the heat of the South - lilting out of a purely German violin.  Oliver looked at me, his stone-blue eyes lolling about in his decidedly overwhelming exhaustion.  He cooed as though the music coerced him to do so, emitting his happy whispers in an almost secretive tone - to say "ooh" too loudly would give everything away and would spoil his enjoyment.  He allowed himself to smile before his eyes became cool slits among puffy pink clouds of chub.

Miles Davis?  Those buggy-eyed admonitions were too hot, too too hot for this cold day.  Oliver's clothes were just a bit too tight and Miles Davis was just a bit too excited.  His high voice is fine but for a baby it is anything but childish.

Billie Holiday.  The instrumental genesis of her version begs the sight of swaying hips in some predecessor of Technicolor.  It made Oliver smile.  He can't dance, he can't stand, he can't even crawl.  I can't dance, that is to say, dance well either - but he gave it his own.  His diaper ground against the multi-threaded padding of his crib.  He cackled, his belly shook with the promises of soon-to-come laughter.

I fashioned some of the lyrics into my own - "your daddy's unemployed/and your momma's good lookin'".  Honestly, though, I'm more employed now than I ever was as a high school teacher.

I am a homemaker, dear friends, and I am in love with my love, my son, and with music.