This Is Family

The stillness of morning in Fayetteville.  Our waking, or at least mine, is  due to the increasingly excited grunting of a seven-month-old.  His eyes startle me for a moment with their blueness, something he inherited neither from myself nor my wife.

At 1:00am he had awoken and I'd brought him to our bed to nurse.  We fell asleep before he finished and so he ended up spending the night with us - something I'd figured was going to happen.  I was too tired to take him back to his room, anyway.

So upon my waking at 7:30am there he is: sitting upright with his mother's help, gazing around, smiling, and making small consonant sounds to the morning.

My wife is overtired from weeks of long hours at work and I no longer have moments when I do not smell baby poop - the scent is glued to the sensory receptors in my brain so that, whenever my wife asks me if I smell something in particular I can only reply, "Poop?  I only smell poop."

And I love it.

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.

Ten Years Gone

Becky has begun reading the novel What Alice Forgot, the story of a woman who suffers a concussion while exercising at her gym and, upon waking, has forgotten the past 10 years of her life.  She awakens in the mindset of who she was 10 years prior - newlywed, pregnant for the first time, and hopeful about the future.  As she begins to explore the world around her she finds herself in the middle of a divorce and bearing a C-Section scar.

This has led both of us to wonder what we would think if, upon waking here in the apartment, we'd forgotten the past 10 years of life.  

Southern Ruin: A Photo Post

In the weeks preceding the birth of my son I began traveling with my wife each day to the college at which she teaches so that, in case she went into labor, I would be with her to take her to the hospital.  I was no longer employed as a high school teacher and was able to be as flexible and as available as she needed me to be.

Though I spent some of my time on the campus milking the open wireless network and researching genealogy I felt a need to go explore some of the surrounding countryside of Bladen County, where the college is located.

I am a North Carolina native.  Six of my direct ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War along with at least six great-grand uncles.  My mother's family hails from Aiken County, South Carolina and my father's from Stokes and Surry Counties in North Carolina.  Add to my heritage the fact that I am also a far left-leaning liberal, an agnostic-atheist, etc, and you have with me, like with much of the South, a quiet mess of contradictions.

Still, I make no secret of the fact that I have a particular and irrational love for the South, similar perhaps to the way someone might love a stray mutt - a mutt who may howl, scratch itself obscenely, and be rather a nuisance but a mutt who is also comfort and a symbol of home, even a symbol of one's own true self, if thoughts are allowed to wander so far.

In any case, and before I wander too far into the absurd intricacies and fallacies of at once hesitant and strong regional devotion, here are photographs I took as I traveled around Bladen County, North Carolina.  These are the scenes which struck me most:

Naming

For our son, the middle name of Eliot had long been chosen.  My wife and I may have even plucked this name from as early a time as our last year of college.  We'd had no definite plans of children then and, in fact, we'd only just been married during the spring semester of our senior year - but we both agreed that, should the opportunity arise, this name was wholly agreeable, great even.  I chose the spelling.

For quite some time we had liked the first name Byron, mostly as a literary nod though neither of us, while not opposed to Lord Byron, were not tremendous fans.  For quite some time Byron Eliot seemed like a foregone conclusion.

To be honest I've never truly liked my own first name - Joshua.  During the 1980s and up through this year the name Joshua has remained fairly popular.  I was born in 1985, however, when it would seem the name reached a peak.  I can still remember elementary school and how the teacher would call out the name and several boys would all answer.  Add to that the fact that the namesake was of one of the worst of butchers to be found in the Bible and my lack of enthusiasm should be, if not understandable, at least justifiable.

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.

The Point of Writing and Eternity

For likely 20 years now I have told myself that I want to be, and that I am, a writer.

This started with my first attempts at fiction when I was seven years old.  I would take my father's printer paper, remove the little hole-punched strips that adorned the sides, and create illustrated books.  I don't remember the content of those books, not really, but I remember being immensely proud and, what's more, thoroughly satisfied and happy during and after their creation.

Creation, though I didn't examine it so closely at the time, in the extension of the physical self into another physical self - the duplication of our own physiology (nerves, neurons, neuroses, etc.) to something physically resembling but not quite like us.  This is, in essence, what we do when we have children with the glaring exception being that we have more control over our creative expression in the inanimate than we do in the animate.