Panning for Moonlight

2011-08-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

This is more of a nuts and bolts entry. I'm not expecting this post to be enlightening or even interesting, but I'm feeling an urge to blog, and I also know I need to record a few things that have happened this summer. I virtually never write in my journal anymore, so this is the place, I guess.

Amaya turned a year old in mid-July. Right around that time, I was putting her to bed and she was lying, belly-down, on my chest. As she relaxed there, drifting away from wakefulness, I noticed with some sadness that she no longer fit in that space between the bottom of my chin--where she had nuzzled her head--and the top of my leg. Previously, her whole body had fit on my trunk. I could cradle her whole self there in a warm, protective embrace. Now she's too big. Her legs dangle down. She doesn't fit right. What made me sad was the realization that she'll only get older. She'll only keep growing. Last night, I took over the nighttime routine with Amaya. We're night weaning her, and this is the easiest way. A couple of times when I tried comforting her in the night by rubbing her belly and back, she pushed away my hands, swatted at them as if they were mere annoyances. In some ways, she's already beginning to separate from us.

Sonora has become an avid reader. In a few months, a she threw a switch and went from sounding out words laboriously to reading book after book with relative fluency. It had a lot to do with Elizabeth doing sight-word drills with Sonora, but still the transformation has been stunning and fun. Sonora has read most every children's book in our house at least once (we have quite a few, perhaps 50) and she is plowing through the local library collection.

In the same vein, Rowyn has become a puzzle maniac. She'll do two to seven puzzles per day. Luckily, she hasn't bored of doing the same puzzles over and over. We only have about fifteen puzzles in her ability level (20-50 piecers), but she just takes them out each day and goes to it. It's cute how she sits splayed-legged on the floor and ponders each piece before placing it. Sometimes she'll get out several puzzles and sort of roam from one to the other throughout the day. This is annoying because it litters the limited floorspace with puzzle pieces and her obstacle of a body, but mostly I'm excited by this new development.

A brief sketch of the happenings of the summer: We went to Utah and spent time with Elizabeth's family. It was fun. The kids hung out with cousins, grandparents, and aunts and uncles. Elizabeth and I talked and connected with her siblings and their spouses and kids. I went mountain biking (thanks, Bryant), running (thanks Howard), rock climbing (thanks Kaleb) and hiking (thanks Brad). On our way back home, the trusty white Eagle Summit Corey and Vanessa gave us eight years ago finally mostly died. It limped home and is still limping, but it's only being employed on on an as-needed basis. We don't really have the money to buy anything else or to fix the Eagle, so on the days I don't bike, I think I'll use the Eagle as a commuter car for work until it fully dies.

After Utah, I went to a conference in Philadelphia, which was the first time I had ever been back East. I enjoyed the city and liked exploring and familiarizing myself with the many vital historical sites. I went jogging several times after midnight because it was rather hot there and because the local time was three hours ahead of Pacific Time, to which I'm now adjusted. Shortly after returning from Philly, as part of a team of nine men, I attempted to climb Mt. Rainier, the most heavily glaciated mountain in the lower 48. We made it to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet, but the weather soured. We camped and hoped, but ended up coming back down the next day rather than risk a dangerous ascent. The views were beautiful, however, and the experience was worthwhile. The hike to Muir was a long, exhausting climb up seemingly endless snow and glacial fields. The men I went with, including my brother-in-law Corey and my friend from the mid-90's Harwood, were pleasant, supportive of each other, well-prepared, and enjoyable to be around.

Then I spent a week revising this young adult novel I've been working on for two years. I wanted to change a few things, but a few turned into many. I put at least 30 hours that week into revisions. I'm waiting to hear back from a handful of query letters I sent out. I hope hope hope a decent-sized publishing house buys this book, that many people read it, enjoy it, think about it, and discuss it. I've greatly enjoyed my journey with Lahora (the novel's protagonist).

While I'm going through that process (querying, waiting to hear back, tweaking my query, sending it out again, sending out the manuscript and waiting to hear back, etc.), I think I'll be turning back to nonfiction and writing a memoir. The house I grew up in, the one that most feels like "home" to me, blew up a few weeks ago. A gas leak. And I've been sort of melancholy since then. A place can hold memories. It can be a bank of experiences and just knowing that these places are around can be comforting. A major one for me was this home. And it's gone. I think I'll write as a way of holding on to the memories that flew out into the world in a flaming ball. Plus that will help keep me occupied while I pursue publication of Kissing the Lion, the YA fantasy I mentioned above.

Hailish Homonyms

2011-06-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Elizabeth began teaching Sonora about homonyms. The concept really caught on and several times per day since then, Sonora has been noting words that sound the same, but have different meanings. Elizabeth was keeping a running list on the fridge for Sonora, but the list outgrew its piece of paper. It's been fun experiencing with her the joy of discovering homonyms, especially when it leads to unintentional puns.

Today, Sonora was listening to the audiobook version of Because of Winn-Dixie. The woman reading the book employs an exaggerated southern accent, such that a word like "spell" is pronounced "spay-uhl." When Sonora got to the point in the book that describes how 14-year-old Litmus volunteered to fight for the South in the Civil war and then discovered that war isn't a romantic adventure, but is an awful hell, she ran in to tell Elizabeth she had discovered another homonym.

"Mom," she said, "there are two types of hail. There's the hail that falls from the sky, and then there's war. It's also hail."

Three Children

2011-02-20T21:23:00.000-08:00

You know, I never really believed people when they claimed having a third kid made things disproportionately harder. The claim seemed sort of self indulgent in a pity-me sort of way. But I'm finding it to be true. It's not something I can really put my finger on, either. It's almost as if that third child brought with her a time-devouring salve and smeared it on every aspect of our lives.

Let me backpedal a bit, though. I don't mean to blame our baby for all this. She exceeds my idea of an angelic kid. She almost never cries. She smiles at almost anyone and then smiles more when they return the grin. She is happy to be held, happy to sit, happy when her sisters play with her, happy when the cat sits near her, happy...most of the time. She likes most of the foods we've recently begun introducing her to (just tonight, Elizabeth cheered her fondness for avocados: "Yay, we're three for three!" Apparently, it is important to Elizabeth that our kids like avocados). And so forth and so on. It's not as if she is an unpleasant addition to our family. But an addition she is.

The third car seat makes both passenger cars feel cramped, especially if we drive for more than 15 minutes. Rowyn has just stopped taking naps, but it doesn't really matter, because Amaya still naps a few times a day, which makes any excursion hectic for Elizabeth, who is always aware of when she needs to be home to get the baby to sleep. At night, the bedtime routine takes three hours. We start getting Amaya ready for bed just before six. Rowyn needs to be asleep at seven. Sonora usually falls asleep between 8 and 8:30. And before all that, we've got to cook dinner and eat. So our evenings are a fairly frenzied race from the time I get home from work until all the kids are asleep. There isn't a lot of gown-up time for Elizabeth or me because we're usually cleaning up the house, catching up on work or other errands, and preparing for bed ourselves so that we can get a reasonable amount of sleep.

And this last point--sleep--has been the real killer. This is the area in which Amaya is less than superb. She wakes up often (sometimes every hour) throughout the night, and rarely sleeps past 5:30 in the morning. Rowyn has been waking up three to four times a night, sometimes screaming and thrashing about making all kinds of weird irrational demands. If she wakes in one of these fits, it takes at least an hour to get her calmed down and another half an hour to get her back to sleep. Sonora is a super champ sleeper these days, but the other two are making up the difference. Elizabeth and I are both night people who enjoy sleeping in. But we've had to amend our ways and we are enjoying life a little bit less because of it. When one of us does take some "me" time by staying up late, we invariably sleep far too little and spend the whole next day grouchy (Elizabeth), groggy and stupid (me), or both.

There are other ways our lives have been complicated by having a third child (by American standards, our house is quite small for a family of five), but I'm beginning to feel like a spoiled brat as I think about poor me with a really great wife and three wonderful healthy kids living together with plenty of food to eat in a warm, dry house with electricity and running water. So I'm going to stop complaining now.

I promised a friend I'd post a recent picture of our family on this blog. Problem is, we don't take that many pictures of ourselves (by today's standards). If Elizabeth and I didn't have sisters and sisters-in-law who love photography, we would have rather few quality photos of any of us. Below are a few photos we've snapped over the last couple of months.

I'm not quite sure what was going on in the photo below, but I'm guessing Sonora was behind it. She builds forts, beds, hideouts, unicorn traps, etc. all day long all throughout the house.

Besides avocados, Amaya is fond of several other foods, including rice noodles.

Elizabeth kept the older two busy for hours transforming one of our front windows into "stained glass." I hope when we eventually clean the artwork away, the glue truly is water soluble.

The Newest Addition

2010-08-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

When we were gearing up for Rowyn's birth at home, I was nervous. It was to be our maiden voyage into dangerous new territory, and it took me several months (and one movie) to adjust to the idea. Things went really well, dreamily even, so I had no objections to having our third baby at home; in fact, I have become a quiet advocate of at-home child birth, so good was our experience with Rowyn.

This delivery, while it went well, didn't go as smoothly as the previous one. Part of the reason for this is that the pregnancy in general was more challenging. Elizabeth was having heavier than normal contractions months too early. She had to be on partial bed rest for a while. Then the contractions stopped altogether, no Braxton Hicks contractions, nothing. As the delivery date drew nearer, the contractions started again. Several nights right around the baby's due date, Elizabeth would have regular contractions for a few hours. "This is it," she would think, and her adrenaline would rise. She would get up and start preparing for the baby or would just clean the kitchen or bathroom. One night, determined not to have another false start, she went for a walk at 3:00 a.m., striding alone along the gravel streets of our town hoping to get that baby out. But the contractions stopped.

She wouldn't have been all that anxious except that her parents, sister, and sister's three kids were coming, and, while she was very glad for them to come visit us, she didn't want to have the baby while they were here. Our house is very small and a home birth would have been rather uncomfortable for her with everyone there. If she didn't have the baby until after they were gone, it would have made the momentous visit sort of anti-climactic for them.

Her family left from Utah the morning of July 15th to come visit us. It is about a twelve hour drive. Elizabeth's contractions also started early that morning, but this time they didn't stop. At around nine in the morning, we loaded the kids into the stroller and walked around town, being sure to go up the steepest, longest hills we could find, starting with the one right next to our house. By the time we got near the top of that hill, Elizabeth's contractions were intense enough for her to have to stop and breathe through them before continuing. "I think it's working," she said. We kept walking for about an hour, going up that hill three more times, and then Elizabeth could tell labor was starting and it wasn't going to stop until she had the baby.

She called our midwife in Spokane and described her contractions and the midwife confirmed that the baby was on her way. Because the drive is so long from Spokane, she called a colleague in Moscow, Idaho to see if she could come over in case the baby came early.

Elizabeth had all the birth supplies neatly bundled and organized in boxes and bins in our closet. I popped a bag of soft towels into the oven to sterilize them and warm them for the baby. The contractions were pretty intense and painful now and I suggested that Elizabeth get in the hot tub. The problem was that it was mid July and a 98 degree hot tub doesn't sound very refreshing when it is 95 degrees and very sunny outside. I devised a sort of sun shade out of the hot tub cover to make the heat a little less intense and she climbed in. Even being as hot as it was, she said it was much, much better to have her contractions in the water.

A friend of ours who lives at the top of the same hill Elizabeth had been marching up earlier that day came down and got Rowyn and Sonora, who love going to her house. This was a relief, as it allowed me to focus solely on Elizabeth and allowed her to focus on having the baby. The midwife from Moscow arrived around the same time and checked in with Elizabeth, who was doing okay but feeling a little hot. She began standing up between contractions to cool off. Margaret, our midwife from Spokane, arrived a few minutes later and suggested we add some cold water to the hot tub, which was a good idea.

Soon, two more midwives in training arrived, so we had a grand total of four midwives on hand.

When Elizabeth got the urge to push, she climbed out of the hot tub and came inside, which was no small feat since her contractions were heavy, painful, and coming every two minutes. Just inside the front door, she had to kneel on the floor when one of them hit. We got her into the bedroom after that, and she labored the rest of the time in there.

Up to this point, things had been progressing well. Elizabeth was a little frightened because she hadn't done as much mental, emotional, or physical preparation as she had with the other two deliveries, and I think that as the pain increased, so did a nagging doubt that she was somehow not ready for this. To add to her fears, the baby was posterior and didn't seem to want to come out very quickly. "Is everything okay?" Elizabeth asked a few times in between pushing.

The baby's heartbeat was okay and things looked fine, though the baby seemed reluctant to make her exit. At times, I felt a little useless. Except for a brief stint lying on the bed, Elizabeth labored for the most part kneeling on the floor at the end of the bed while resting her upper body on the bed. The two midwives in training sat on the floor on either side of her while Margaret moved about coaching, examining, and guiding things. I stayed near Elizabeth's head. I asked her how I could help, but there wasn't much to do: a sip of water; a cold towel; a neck rub. With all the midwives and birth supplies scattered about, there wasn't a lot of room for me. Which was fine, because I'm not much of a birth expert, but I like to at least feel as if I'm contributing to the effort.

The pushing became more insistent and Elizabeth could feel the baby sort of crown with each push, but then when the contraction would end, the baby would retreat back in side her. This happened again and again. "Is everything okay?" She repeated. She was becoming anxious. Something didn't feel right.

Finally, the baby's head was out. "We've got a cord here." One of the midwives in training said.

"What's wrong?" Elizabeth asked.

"The cord's around the baby's neck." I was afraid. Cords around necks are not good.

But with another push and several pairs of nimble hands, the cord was unwrapped and the baby was out. She was fairly bloody, which hadn't been the case with the other two. Margaret said it was because the placenta had been so close to the cervix, which we had known all along.

Elizabeth, still knelling on the floor at the end of the bed, held our new baby to her bare chest for a few moments and then we cut the cord. The midwives wrapped up the baby in some of the warm towels and handed her to me while they attended to Elizabeth.

It's always a shock to see the color of a newly-born baby. That grayish-blue skin tone, though I know it's normal, causes me a little worry each time. She was crying--raspy, chokey, quiet, lamb-like--so I knew she was getting oxygen. Slowly, her body changed color, starting from her core and radiating outward. Her head was the last part of her to redden up. She looked kind of weird for a while with the bottom half of her face reddish and the top half bluish.

About this time, I gave her back to Elizabeth, who was sitting up at the head of the bed, her arms and legs trembling heavily. She took the baby in her arms and coaxed her to nurse. She didn't latch immediately, but soon she did, much to Elizabeth's relief. Although we knew the baby would be okay if she couldn't nurse right away, it is comforting to know right away that she will be able get the nourishment she needs to stay alive and grow.

She weighed eight pounds, four ounces, though she pooped out a whole bunch of meconium over the next hour, which probably brought her weight down a bit. The midwives finished up the examinations and the charting, cleaned up, drank some diet Coke, set up an appointment for the following day, and then left.

For me, this is the time when the home birth route is really great. We were already home. Elizabeth lay in bed. Our friend brought the girls home. I got some food ready. We proceeded at our own pace in our own home.

Elizabeth's family would be arriving in a few hours, so I finished getting their beds ready. When they called to report where they were, I didn't say anything about the birth. Elizabeth wanted to surprise them. They pulled in a little after 10:00 p.m., tired and disheveled. Had they touched Elizabeth's belly, they would have known something was up. Instead of feeling like a melon, it now felt like half-empty water balloon. But no one felt her belly. When they were near our bedroom, I said, "Come look at this; there is something in our room." I shined a dim flashlight at the spot on our bed where the baby was sleeping.

It took a second to register. "Oh my. Is that? The baby. You had the baby." Then they were laughing and hugging and congratulating Elizabeth and me.

The next few days, we hung out with the family. Mom Porter took over the kitchen and cooked everyone some great food. Dad Porter helped me dig though our flagstone patio to find the sewer cleanout, diagnose a problem with one of our cars, and get the refrigerator running more efficiently. Aleta and her kids kept our children well occupied. Elizabeth and I enjoyed their company as well as that of Amaya Juniper Lee, which is the name we settled on for our new baby.

It's been two and a half weeks since Amaya was born. Sonora, Rowyn, Amaya, Elizabeth, and I just went on an hour long walk. Elizabeth and I held hands and talked about what a pleasant postpartum experience we've had so far. Elizabeth is recovering well, and Amaya is growing strong and chubby. She's put on about a pound and a half. She is like Sonora in that she is very alert, constantly staring at stuff, already craning her neck to get a better view of whatever those dark little eyes are seeing. But she is also like Rowyn in that she sleeps pretty well. Except for a few feedings, she sleeps through the night, and takes about three naps throughout the day.

Rowyn and Sonora haven't shown any ill will toward her so far. They seem to like her when they remember she's there.

The timing of the birth was great. I had been finished with school for about two weeks, which allowed me some time to help prepare for the birth. Since then, I've been able to take Rowyn and Sonora most of the time and do a fair amount of house work and cooking. Actually, I haven't done much cooking because the people at our church provided us with so many dinners. Even though I was home and could have cooked, it was really nice to have people do this for us. Also, several days people have taken Sonora and Rowyn for the better part of the day, which allows Elizabeth and me to nap, clean up, or just recenter ourselves. We have really appreciated the help.

Now we are starting into the next phase. I'm hoping to finish this week the current set of revisions of the novel I'm working on. Sonora starts Kindergarten in three weeks. I'm going on a Scout campout in a week and a half. In a month and a half, school starts up again for me. Life and its demands are flooding back into our lives. But the last two and a half weeks have been very pleasant. In more ways than one, Amaya has brought new life to our family.

Bulging with Life

2010-07-07T23:31:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth's Sister Vanessa came to visit yesterday and took some photos. Thank you Vanessa. You rock (by the way, I removed one of the photos on Elizabeth's request).

Barley's and Clover's Big Day

2010-05-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

Sonora, Rowyn and I were watching a short stop-motion video on Youtube and decided to make one of our own. We spent the rest of Saturday morning on the project. It's about--you guessed it--unicorns. Here it is.

Oh, and Sonora lost her first tooth today. When I asked her if all that blood bothered her, she said, "It tasted pretty good." We may have a unicorn-loving vampire on our hands.

Pregnancy

2010-05-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

Most any of who might still be checking this blog likely know that we are pregnant and that our little fetus is of the feminine persuasion. So we'll have three girls, a small pack of sisters, which should fit comfortably into our extended family dynamics: Elizabeth has seven sisters and I have four. In both our families, sisterness is something special, at least it is most of the time.

So our current tasks concerning the pregnancy are: find a name for the baby, and keep the baby inside until it is fully developed. We still haven't settled on a name, and we are developing a bad track record in this regard. It took us until a week after she was born to finally arrive at Rowyn's name. But worrying about baby names has been slowly supplanted in Elizabeth's mind by worrying about all the strong contractions she's been having. Painful, frequent ones. Any time she stands up. And she still has two months to go. Bed rest isn't her thing (not that it's anybody's thing), and she and I are both hoping that this is just a phase of uterus-strengthening exercises, but it might be more than that. Time (and communication with our midwife) will tell.

Well, I hope to write more on this blog than I have the last year or so. Perhaps the new baby will provide the impetus. I've been working on a novel, and that is where most of my writing time, what little I have, has been spent of late.

Winter Break

2010-01-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

So, Winter Break was kind of a whirlwind for us this time around.

At the beginning of the break, one of our cars broke down. It still isn't fixed. The mechanics think that the computer is bad, but they can't be sure. No junk yard in the whole nation (as far as they can tell) has a used computer for this car. A new computer costs about $500. 2009 turned out to be a very expensive year for us (several car repairs, broken collar bone, tonsillectomy, dental work, new roof on the garage, my trip to Europe, many visits to the doctor by everyone in the family, etc.), and $500 is more than we have extra. So, we are trying to decide what to do about that. We could get a small loan and buy a used car. We're going to need to buy a car any way before the baby arrives in July, a car that will fit three car seats (our old Nissan Sentra only has room for two), so we may just bite the bullet and buy another car earlier than we had hoped. The only problems with this plan are that we had hoped to sell the Sentra and keep the car that broke down. It is much more versatile and useful than the Sentra. And we really don't like the idea of a loan. For now, I'm riding my bike to and from work while the weather is mild. It's about 17 miles round trip, and most of the way I have a wide shoulder or a paved path to ride on.

We also had a pipe break. In mid December, the temperature dropped to around zero for several nights in a row. Then it warmed up above freezing for several days in a row. One morning, we lost most of our water pressure, and, after some investigation, found that a little river of water was running up from between several cracks in the flagstone patio in front of our house. I shut off the water at the street, pried up some rocks, and started digging. I won't go into details, because it really would be boring to read, but I spent about ten hours digging in heavy, sticky mud. It took me a while to find the pipe, which meant I tore up much more of the patio than I needed to. After I found it, I repaired the pipe, only to throw a shovel full of dirt (and a rock) on it, only to have the hidden rock snap the pipe in two again. When everything was finally repaired, I filled the hole back in with mud and tried my best to reassemble the stones and mortar. But there will be a large, uneven area in front of our front door until the summer heat dries out the ground and I can re-set the stones.

Not too long after that, we raced up to spend a day in Spokane with Elizabeth's sister and her family. Their house, in stark contrast to ours, is large and uncluttered. The kids sort of disappear into various rooms, and the adults can talk, which is quite refreshing. And it is always fun hanging out with Vanessa, Corey, and their kids. We had a gift exchange which I always both look forward to and dread. I look forward to it because they always give us a whole bunch of great gifts. I dread it because Elizabeth and I have to think for a long time to come up with a gift for them that they might like, and we usually end up giving them one or two gifts that, in comparison to what they give us, seem so underwhelming.

Our stay with them was short because that night, my oldest sister and her two teenage twin boys, along with my oldest brother, two of his teenage kids, and my dad, came to spend Christmas with us. Everyone except my dad drove up from Phoenix. They picked up my dad in Burley, Idaho. They stayed for a few days, and it was really fun having them here. We went sledding, walking, snipe hunting, and driving around looking at Christmas lights. The teenagers drove the little lawn tractor all over the yard and the neighborhood pulling each other in the little trailer. They also fired up the chainsaw and cut up some old limbs that we used to build a fire with. Sonora really enjoyed spending time with her Aunt Kristinia and cousin Sirrina, who became sort of surrogate mothers to her (Elizabeth was sort of missing in action most of the time due to her nearly constant pregnancy nausea). My dad, brother and I spent a lot of time bonding in the kitchen cooking together. And all of us hung out together to talk, watch movies, open gifts, and eat. It was really enjoyable to be with them.

However, the evening before they were to leave to visit my sister in Richland, Washington, our sewer backed up. And I mean backed up. Be glad I didn't take any pictures of the contents of the bathtub. After I churned up the sewage in my vain attempts to plunge loose the obstruction, it looked as if 25 people had hung their backsides over the edge of the tub and relieved themselves of a whole gut full of diarrhea. This made the bath tub and the whole house rather fragrant. We had new rules that night: No one may use the toilet; No one may run any water down any drain; and of course No one may shower (not that anyone would have wanted to). The plants got an extra portion of urine that night. And the next morning, my family members left rather expeditiously. I feel sort of sorry for the toilet of whatever gas station they first stopped at. In my quest to unplug the sewer line, I plunged and plunged, I bought a sewer snake and, after removing the toilet to better access to the pipes, tried unsuccessfully to make it reach the clog, I wormed around on my belly under the house and covered myself in dust and insulation trying to knock the clean out valve loose (though I'm sort of glad it didn't budge because I wouldn't have been able to move out of the way of the sewage that would have gushed out all over my arms, face, and body). Finally, I called Roto Rooter. The guy didn't think he'd be able to get to the clog, not without an exterior clean out valve ("And there's no way I'm going into that tiny crawl space to get to the clean out under the house"). But he tried for a while and, miracle of miracles, he knocked the blockage loose. We shelled out about $300 for his services on the night after Christmas, but at that point, $300 seemed a meager amount to pay for a functional sewer.

A few days later, I went camping with the Scouts for two day, and then a few days after that, school started again. It wasn't a particularly relaxing Christmas break, but it was a memorable one.

Just for fun, I've pasted below a little video Sonora and I made over the break. It's very silly and intentionally campy. So we did have some time to just mess around.

It's called cyberjacking

2009-12-08T00:22:00.000-08:00

Salsa Girls

2009-10-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

Like teenagers who have left home for the first time, our tomatoes, in boxes spread throughout the office at the back of our detached garage, are maturing off the vine. Elizabeth barely saved them from a couple of wicked cold nights. We didn't get to the peppers, and they turned into long, discolored, mushy incarnations of their previously sassy selves (sassy ones pictured above). This means salsa season is over, because now if we wanted to make a batch, we would have to buy most of our ingredients from the grocery store, which as yet seems like an awful idea to me, as garden-fresh produce is still too fresh in my memory. But I can't complain. It was a good salsa year. We made a lot of salsa, and we ate a lot of salsa, and almost all of it was very good. It was a good salsa year in another way, too: we discovered that both of our daughters really like the stuff, even when it is of about medium spiciness.
I already knew that Sonora liked salsa, but Rowyn, in her short life, has been a little pickier than Sonora. So I feared our youngest daughter would shy away from this magnificent blend of tomatoes, onions, and peppers. But last August, I gave Rowyn a corn chip lightly dipped in a batch of fresh salsa. She sucked the light red juice off, and then held the empty chip up and said, "Mo, Mo" rather emphatically. So I dipped her chip again and again she licked it clean. Then we gave her a little cup of salsa, which she dipped dry. Finally, Elizabeth gave her the whole 5-quart glass bowl--there was maybe half a cup left in the bottom--but instead of just dipping more chips in, Rowyn heaved this heavy bowl up to her mouth and began drinking the salsa juice. And this wasn't some wussy batch of salsa, either; there were a couple of jalapenos and a few other sort-of-hot peppers in the mix. I was genuinely proud of Rowyn and Sonora. These are MY girls, I thought to myself.

When I say I was proud of them, I'm not exaggerating. I felt the same swelling in my chest when Rowyn gulped down the last of the salsa as when Sonora learned to ride a bike or when she hiked the whole 3.5 mile long Kamiak Butte trail without any assistance. I didn't know I felt so strongly about salsa until that moment, but now that I think about it, this saucy stuff has been with me my whole life. Even in the late 70s early 80s, a decade before most of the U.S. had discovered its now favorite condiment, my family and I were eating salsa. We would put it on tacos and enchiladas, dip corn chips, Frito's, Wheat Thins, saltine crackers, and vegetables in it, and yes, sometimes some of us would even drink a little bit of it.

Every summer my dad, with the help of my mom and some of the kids, would hack away at onions, tomatoes, and chillies. We would throw it all in a big pot and we would can it up, though it never tasted as good after being canned as before. In the winter, though, a can of that salsa tasted like a warm morning. Even my grandma liked to make salsa, though she favored a sweetened green salsa with a tomatillo/shredded zucchini base. Salsa was so important to my parents that they spent an unthinkable amount of time dicing and then drying heaps of salsa ingredients. Their thought was that they could give this as gifts to their children-who were by then mostly all grown up--because dried salsa would be more portable than canned and could be taken with a person in an emergency. That way, even if there was some natural or personal disaster, my parents' children wouldn't be without their salsa.

Perhaps one of the reasons Elizabeth and I get along so well with our in-laws has its roots in salsa, for hers is also a family of salsa connoisseurs. In fact, the recipe I use (with adaptations) comes from the family recipe book Elizabeth's mom put together for her kids several years ago. On more than one occasion, I've experienced a pleasant sense of home-ness while crammed in together with the sisters and Mom Porter in her kitchen chopping salsa vegetables together, and then again a few hours later when we devour together that whole gallon of salsa.

And I guess that is it, that is why I was so happy when I realized that not only Sonora but also Rowyn loves this stuff. It felt like a solid confirmation of heritage: I am my parents' son and my grandparents' grandkid. And these two little tomato-faced girls are ours, not just biologically, but, perhaps more importantly, they are our kids culturally. I won't be putting together bags of dried salsa for them, but when they leave home as young adults, I hope they take with them positive, strengthening associations of home. I hope that they will grow tomatoes and peppers and onions and chop them up together into a medley that will remind them that they belong.

Great Wife

2009-09-06T23:24:00.001-07:00

I just want to give a shout-out to Elizabeth for being super great this summer. When I came home from a youth activity with a snapped clavicle on the second day of my summer break, she had a TV tray all set up next to the living room recliner, where I was ordered by the doctor to sleep. On it were a bottle of water, pain medication, remote controls for the TV, etc., and some books and magazines. Several times each day, she would ask me if I needed anything, if I was doing okay. She would lovingly scold me when I would try to do things I shouldn't have been doing and patiently endured my high levels of "I'm broken, what should I do?" anxiety. In one such moment of high anxiety, she even helped me fashion a very uncomfortable figure 8 brace out of some climbing gear and a messenger bag strap.

When I ditched her and went to Europe with some of my siblings and parents, she was happy I had the opportunity to travel and has never begrudged me the trip; she was just glad I brought home some German chocolate.

For my birthday, she asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted the family to go on a bike ride and have a picnic at the half way point. I wanted to see how my collarbone would fare while riding, and I have this dream of us being a family that does lots of biking together. She was glad to come along and even held back from mentioning that the time I had chosen was stupid because it bridged Rowyn's nap time. She was even mostly calm when Rowyn shrieked like a child possessed by a demon for the second half of the ride.

When I got my tonsillectomy, she again prepared the TV tray for me out by the recliner (I was supposed to sleep sitting up a little bit so that I wouldn't choke on my blood). But this time, in addition to the books and magazines, she also presented me with a fistfull of DVDs and a bouquet of hydrating/nourishing drinks. Throughout the week, she made several soups that were blended smooth so I could eat them. Not only was she able to make soups using produce from our garden, but they really were good, and all of them could be eaten warm or cold. And again, she stopped me from doing things that the doctor said could cause blood to start gushing in my throat.

I just wish I were better at taking care of her when she is down. I feel as if our relationship is pretty balanced in most ways, but she has got me completely beat in the area of taking care of people who are sick or hurt (and celebrating birthdays; she's really good at that, too, whereas I suck at it). My excuse is that I come from a family which has sort of a fend-for-yourself mentality. And that attitude seems to be pretty deeply ingrained in me. I'm usually extra helpful for a few hours after she has gotten hurt or fallen ill, and then I sort of drift off into a weird non-helpful mode. This ineptitude of mine is really frustrating to her, and, frankly, also to me.

It was very pleasant this summer to have someone anticipating my needs when I couldn't take care of myself. Some day, I hope, I will learn to do the same for her when she is in need.

-ectomy

2009-08-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

Up until a week ago, when I had my tonsils scooped out of my throat while I was unconscious, I was sort of proud of having really, really big tonsils. I would show them to people and they were virtually always impressed. "Wow," they would say. "Those really are big." I would nod and say something final, like "Yep. They've been big since I was a little kid."

When I was six, my family doc told me I had the tonsils of a thirteen-year-old. As a short, skinny "late bloomer"--I wrestled in the 75 pound weight class in eight grade and I only had to worry once about not making weight--I held onto those words well past my thirteenth birthday. When I was fourteen, I imagined I must have tonsils the size of someone in his twenties. This was consoling. I didn't really start growing toward my current height of 6' 2" until the summer before my senior year in high school. There wasn't much that was impressive about me: I was smaller than average, had below-average grades, didn't have any discernible musical talents, didn't have a car, didn't play on any of the sports teams, and wasn't stunningly attractive. I was "cute," in the way little brothers are cute. So, my tonsils were one of my only real assets, and I would show them off in times of insecurity.

Even into adulthood, my tonsils had remained an asset. Sometimes, if I liked someone and thought they were good friend material, I would tilt back my head, or, as the case may be, squat down frog-like and tilt back my head, and open my mouth and perform a sort of exaggerated, prolonged yawn while they inspected the large bulbs of lymph tissue at the back of my mouth. They would usually peer in cautiously, move their heads right and left pigeon-like, and then their eyes would widen, and they would say "Golly, those really are big."

But now they are gone. A lot of people get their tonsils out because of frequent infections, tonsillitis and the like, but I haven't had much trouble in that area. I used to get yearly bouts of strep throat, but that ended when I was about 19. For the most part, my tonsils treated me pretty well. We had a relationship of mutual respect. Except, of course, that they sort of obstructed my airway all the time, made it hard for me to swallow sometimes (and sometimes got food stuck in them that formed these funky-smelling little white balls that I would cough up about once a month--I called them "pearls," but Elizabeth didn't agree), made me snore with ever-increasingl intensity, and caused me to breathe badly while I slept. But I didn't really fault them for this. It wasn't like they were being malicious. They were just being their big selves. It's just that they were standing right in the doorway of a rather important passage.

So I went to my local family doc and asked him about them. He said, "Those are pretty big. They should come out." He didn't really hmm and haw about it like he does about most everything else. And then I went in for a consult with the Ear, Nose and Throat doc. He said, "You should probably have those removed. Having a tonsillectomy will likely help you snore less or not at all, and will probably make you breathe better at night." In the back of my mind, I kept asking myself Why, for the last three decades, when they look in my mouth and smash my tongue with a giant Popsicle stick, did other doctors not immediately exclaim, "Let's cut those things out of there!" But there was no use asking such a question now.

Because of my marvelously loud snoring, Elizabeth and I have been sleeping farther and farther apart. She was wearing earplugs, which helped, but I was waking the baby up and, even with Elizabeth wearing earplugs, my snoring was loud enough to keep her, and sometimes the baby, from going back to sleep. Besides wanting my wife not to rue the moment I entered the bedroom, I was also hoping that a tonsillectomy would help me sleep better, which would cause me to wake up with energy and vigor in the morning, which would in turn cause me to have more motivation, stamina, insight, and talent. So, I went in for the surgery.

Things went pretty well in the hospital. About seven different women in scrubs made rotating visits. I couldn't keep straight who was from the lab, who was from the pharmacy, who was just an assistant, who was my nurse now, who would be my nurse later, who would be my nurse during surgery, who was my nurse anesthetist who would be shoving a tube down my throat, etc. But they were all friendly and didn't mind that I had confused one for another and forgotten their names. Finally, one of these women pumped some stuff into my IV line and told me, "Teenagers love this stuff. They always ask me if it is for sale somewhere. But it's not for sale. For some reason, they just laugh and laugh and laugh." I asked her what this stuff was for and she said, "to help you feel okay about surgery." I thought that it was probably a little late not to be okay with surgery, but didn't tell her this. Instead, I let the artificial feeling of euphoria invade my body and enjoyed the gurney ride down the hallway, though I didn't feel any uncontrollable urges to giggle. I remember greeting my doc, all decked out in surgical scrubs, and then my pre-surgery memories stop.

When I came to, or rather, when my brain began coherently recording memories again after I came to, I was chatting it up in German with a nurse from Germany. She had been in the U.S. for the last twenty years, but I must have recognized her accent and we played get-to-know-you in German in the recovery room. When she departed she told me my German was good, which pleased me, but the ironic thing is that it couldn't have been that good because MY UVULA IS MISSING.

You see, to roll the German "R" properly, one needs to get the uvula and other loose soft-palate materials jumping around in the back of one's throat. It's not like the Spanish R, which is rolled with the tip of the tongue on the hard palate.

I made the discovery of the snipped uvula a couple of days after my surgery. My curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see what this bundle of horrible pain looked like (this has been painful, very painful, and nauseating, but enough bellyaching), so, standing before a mirror, I gingerly spread my mouth wider and wider until I could see back there. Sure enough, my big, fluted, fleshy tonsils were gone, replaced by white scabs over inflamed red throat skin. But to my astonishment, the white scabs continued above my tonsil-holes, up along my soft palate right up to where my uvula used to hang. Now it just forms a rather shallow V.

I didn't realize it until then, but I was also sort of fond of my uvula. It fit. It dangled there between my giant tonsils sort of like the buddy who is always brought along as the third wheel because he is good at helping the conversation along at awkward moments. Actually, more often than not, it didn't hang freely, but was sort of stuck to one tonsil or the other. But my uvula was never a problem. I had never even thought of cutting it off; it looked so harmless and good-natured. And apparently, besides my uvula, my doctor felt like digging out some of my soft palate as well. Unexpectedly losing some extra skin while I was anesthetized was sort of shocking and a little dismaying.

In a way, I feel as if I've been circumcised again, and, once again, nobody asked me if that was okay. It's not okay, just so you know.

I've been doing a little research and, apparently, uvulectomies (a word I never knew existed) and trimming off a little extra soft palate tissue are often done to try to help people with sleep apnea. When I had my consult with the ENT doc, I mentioned that I stop breathing at regular intervals throughout the night and could possibly have sleep apnea, so maybe he took that as the green light. I'm not sure. I have an appointment with him in a couple of days and I'm going to ask.

But the damage is done. He's not going to sew anything back on (and I don't get to keep my tonsils in formaldehyde either--I had to sign a release saying I agree to this). Perhaps my new and improved mouth/throat will work wonders for me. Apparently I snore no more, not even a little bit, which keeps things peaceful in bed. I have yet to reap the rewards of extra energy, motivation, talent, and insight, but it's only been a week. Maybe those will come. And, after a few more times waking up to discover that I have not unexpectedly lost a little body part while I was unconscious, I'll probably feel safe again. And the pain will eventually go away.

I'm going to miss my tonsils, and my uvula, and my soft palate tissue, and I will have to find new ways to show my friends I love them and make myself feel special, but eventually, I am sure, I'll be glad to have had my elective tonsillectomy and my involuntary uvulectomy. It was all just useless tissue anyway, right?

Lee European Vacation

2009-08-02T05:43:00.001-07:00

So, at the end of last year, when my parents, siblings, sibling-in-law and I planned our final route for our European vacation , one of the concerns was that we were trying to go to too many places in the two weeks--the last two weeks of July--we had available. We had seven countries--Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria--on the agenda. When we got to Europe and mentioned our plans to any European, the response was almost universally one of horror, for Europeans (including my brother-in-law Basilios) generally like to vacation for several weeks in one spot and really relax and savor the local culture. In addition to worries about trying to do too much, I also worried that seven of us might not all get along traveling together in a small RV. But I think everybody enjoyed the trip. I know I did. Below I'll do a skeleton sketch of some of the places we visited. Sorry about the many photos. I had over 1000 to choose from, and the thirty or so here seem to me like a pathetically small sampling (I really wish Blogger would come up with an easier way to build posts with photos and words).

We started our journey in Munich, Germany, and then spent a day driving along the Romantic Road, which is basically a series of towns and castles that preserve a middle-ages flair.

Next, we picked up my sister Trudie and her husband Basilios and headed for Switzerland, where we visited Zurich and Zermatt. Zurich had good food and a relaxing atmosphere.

Zermatt is a little town at the bottom of Switzerland. It is so deep into the Alps that no roads go beyond it; Zermatt is a dead-end town, but a really cool one. It is the leaping-off point for people who want to climb the Matterhorn and a tourist destination for people like us who just want to see the Matterhorn. My sisters Trudie and Kristinia and my brother Clinton and I took a cog-wheel train up to the top of the Gornergrat, where we had terrific views of the surrounding mountaintops and glacier fields. We hiked back down, which was a little more strenuous and took a little longer than we had anticipated (we were all pretty sore for a few days afterward), but hiking through the Alps was one of the highlights of the trip.

After that, we decided that, since we were there, we should catch some Tour de France action. So we stopped in at Bourg Saint Maurice, which was the start of one of the legs of the race. It was too crowded to see the starting line of that day's leg but we got to see all the cyclists getting ready and appreciated the tremendous effort that goes into this race. We also got to see Lance (swoon) leave his team's bus and ride down to the starting line.

From there, we journeyed to Barcelona, Spain. At first, the heat was stifling, and the traffic, with hundreds of motorized scooters aggressively swarming like wasps between cars, was stressful. But we soon adjusted to the heat and began taking the public transit instead of driving the unwieldy RV, and when we started playing in the Mediterranean, we started to really like Barcelona. One side note: all of the males on the trip were injured except Basilios. My dad had recently tripped and messed up his knee. Two weeks before the trip, I broke my collarbone diving for a catch while playing ultimate Frisbee, and two days before the trip Clinton sliced his hand wide open (notice the blue surgical glove he is wearing to keep from getting his hand wet--it didn't work). So Basilios was the only male who could enjoy the water injury-free, and he did enjoy it, diving under the waves like a giddy seal.
In the city, we visited the Picaso Musuem, which shows the evolution of his artistic vision from his days as a student through his cubist works. We also toured the masterpiece of Gaudi--an influential modernist architect--La Sagrada Familia, an astounding building, and walked around the Gothic Quarter (narrow, medieval-feeling streets packed with little shops, musuems, and a few old churches), and down Las Ramblas (a main pedestrian boulevard that is lined with little shops. Strangely, many of these temporary shops were pet stores). Barcelona is a city I wouldn't mind returning to.

On our way to Verona, Italy, we stopped for a day on the beach near the French Riviera town of Frejus. This stop was definitely too short. The weather, sand, and water were nearly perfect. We were sad to leave. We lived it up while we could, dancing at the campground discoteque, going swimming in the Mediterranean at midnight, and going swimming again in the morning.

In Verona, we watched Verdi's Aida in a Roman arena, built in 30 A.D. While the opera went sort of late (it ended at 1:30 a.m.), the experience of listening to and watching this well-performed masterpiece in a 2000-year-old venue with great acoustics was well worth it.

Venice was next on our list, and while the town was overrun with tourists like us, it was still impressive. The floor mosaics on the church floors were one of many artistic flourishes that struck me. Venice is very photogenic. Basilios, whose father is Greek, was able to point out many of the Byzantine influences throughout the city. Although everyone knows it is a problem, it was still sad to see the Adriatic Sea lapping at the tops of the last barriers that stand between the city and a flooded ruin.

For various reasons, I don't have photos of our journey through Slovenia (a green, hilly, quiet country, where we stopped in at Izola and waded into the Adriatic Sea) and Austria, where we visited Graz and Vienna. In Vienna, I missed Elizabeth the most. We had been there nine years earlier as adventurous, backpacking newlyweds, and memories of us together flashed their way back into my consciousness. She and I will have to go back in the near future. As with most of our other stops, we only got a tiny taste of Vienna, and of all the places we visited, I think this is the city where I would have most liked to spend more time.

Even though the trip was rushed, and we weren't able to stay anywhere as long as we would have liked, I'm glad we went, and I'm glad we were able to see so many sites, eat so many different types of food, smell so many different smells, speak (0r try to speak) so many different languages, and swim in different bodies of water. It was a memorable trip that will give each of us different choices of places we might visit in any future trips.

The Beginnings of Harmful Intent, or When Do We Start Wanting to Hurt People?

2009-03-11T00:20:00.000-07:00

Recently Rowyn has been more of a challenge to put to bed at night. I used to be able to lay her down on the bed, place a pillow one one side, and cuddle up to her other side, and then she would go to sleep. Or if she was having a difficult time, I would hold her in my arms and bounce her lightly while swaying from side to side. This would take longer (20-30 minutes), but it worked well. (I don't want to give the impression with this post that I'm some kind of super dad who puts the kids to be all the time. Elizabeth ends up putting Rowyn to bed 90% of the time, but I've noticed a few things the last few times I've helped her fall asleep).

However, a couple of times when I've recently tried to put her to bed, neither of these techniques have worked. For a week or two, Rowyn took to arching her back, screaming, and thrashing about while going to sleep (or not going to sleep, as was more often the case). She created a marvelous spectacle; she almost seemed possessed by evil spirits. But what really caught my attention was not the squirming, arching, and angry screaming, but the way that in the midst of her apparent fury, she would reach up her plump warm fingers and trace them softly, tenderly even, along my cheek or chin or nose. The contradiction in such moments between her touch and her demeanor was almost surreal.

The first time she did this, I cringed at first because I expected her to try to scratch me or pinch me or pull a few strands of my pathetically thin beard. She was upset and I thought she would lash out at the person nearest her--in these cases, me. I thought such reactions were more or less instinctual, especially in the pre-verbal and early-verbal stages, when part of a person's frustration likely arises from not being able to make oneself understood. If a baby or toddler was frustrated, I thought, it would be natural for that kid to want to bite or scratch or hit. But no matter her emotional state, Rowyn has never shown toward me any sense of malice. It makes me wonder where hurtful responses come from in children. At what point do we begin to desire to hurt others? Is it learned? Do some kids just demonstrate their anger more physically than others? If so, why? Genetics? Parental influence? Diet?

I suppose these are more or less fruitless, unanswerable questions, but they have been on my mind since the first time 11-month-old, in the middle of an awful fit, reached up to my face and told me through her fingertips not that she was frustrated with me, but that she loved me. And why did this surprise me?

A Good Weekend

2009-02-16T19:21:00.000-08:00

So, I know not too long ago I was lamenting the lack of snow, but this weekend made me really look forward to the coming summer. Here is a chronicle of the weekend:

Saturday we went to Klemgard County Park, a great park that is nestled in to a long valley, which is only about 8 miles away from our house. We hiked on part of the hiking trail, crossed an old bridge that spans nothing and goes nowhere,

had a picnic under the old bower,

and played on the playground.

That evening, while I watched the kids, Elizabeth cooked one of our favorite meals. I'm not sure what the name of it is (if it even has a name), but it is a pasta dish with bacon, capers, lightly sauteed zucchini, onions, and sun-dried tomatoes. It is all mixed up together along with a Gorgonzola and white wine sauce.

After the kids were in bed, Elizabeth and I watched Before Sunrise, the prequel to Before Sunset, both excellent films (we watched the sequel first a couple of months ago), though Before Sunset is the better of the two, in our opinion. It was Valentine's Day and we are not usually V-Day people, but we sort of caught the Valentine's spirit and talked about how in love and happy we are. Even though we know we feel this way, it is good to verbalize it occasionally.

Sunday was a slow, lazy day. We went to church, came home, I took a nap, we went for a walk, cooked dinner, put the kids to bed, and then read and surfed the Internet.

Today, President's Day, was busy, but in a good way. This morning, Sonora and I went outside and trimmed some of the apple trees. We also spent some time climbing the trees
and playing ponies (Sonora's latest obsession). Some of the prettier apple branch clippings we bundled into a stick bouquet that we later presented to Elizabeth, who had been inside working and taking care of Rowyn.

After about an hour and a half of tree trimming, Sonora and I decided to build our first fairy house. Sonora has been curious about fairy houses since watching the movie Kristen's Fairy House, a gift from her aunt Vanessa. We chose a secluded spot behind the wood pile at the edge of our back yard. We used a sparkly rock as the floor and constructed the little dwelling out of as many pieces of curved wood as we could find. It's not an elaborate house, but it was fun and Sonora is half convinced that a fairy is going to move in.

When the fairy house was done, we ate lunch, went for a long walk together, played in the park, washed out buckets for food storage, cleaned out the garage, washed the cars, cooked and then ate dinner, and put the kids to bed. I still have a few hours of grading to do tonight, but this weekend was mostly free of school work. We were able simply to be together, which was really nice, though it made me long for summer. Mid-June, which is when my summer break starts, is still a long way off.

Death Anxieties and Childish Insights

2009-02-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

So, over the past six months or so, while commuting to and from work, while working in the yard, while doing the dishes, I've been listening to lectures on literature, partially out of interest in literature and partially to get ready for the GRE literature subject test. So far, I've listened to over 100 hours of lectures on literature. To tell you the truth, I really like the insights they provide into the works themselves and the tastes of the works I get from the lectures. However, the literary topics covered are kind of heavy and often sort of pessimistic. I'm not anti-pessimism--sometimes being pessimistic can be really fun and kind of energizing in a weird way, sort of like how saying "Screw it all," and meaning it, can be sort of freeing--but too much pessimism can become tiresome.

(This will be a rather lengthy aside, but here is an example of a warm/fuzzy segment from Georg Buchner's unfinished early nineteenth-century play Woyzeck. The grandkids have asked the grandmother to tell them a good night story and this is her response. Note: this is my own translation from the German, so there might be a few errors:
"Come here, you little crabs! Once upon a time there was a poor child who had no father and no mother. Everyone was dead; there was no one left in the world. Everyone dead, but still the child searched day and night. And because there was no one left on the earth, the child wanted to go up into heaven, and the moon looked down so friendly on the child. When the child got to the moon, it was just a chunk of rotten wood. And then the child went to the sun, but it was just a withered sunflower. And when the child got to the stars, they were little golden mosquitoes, stuck up there like the red-backed shrike sticks them on the sloe. And so the child decided to come back to earth, but the earth was a sunken harbor. And the child was totally alone. And the child sat down and cried, and there the child still sits and is completely alone." Nice bed-time story from Granny, eh?)

A lot of the heaviness from these works of literature has to do with the fear of death and what happens after death. This fear, of course, is as old as consciousness, and even religion can't cure people of it entirely, because, even for the faithful, there is a fear of hell or rebirth or the telestial kingdom, or the nagging doubt that God will turn out to be just like Santa Clause: a comforting fiction. So probably most people are afraid, in one way or another, of what happens after their last breath.

Now, I'm one of those people who believe in God and the afterlife and, truth be told, the thought of death doesn't produce in me a lot of anxiety, but in the same way that it can be fun to toy with pessimism, I sometimes like to imagine death as simply an end to existence, a vacuum, an eternal state of non-perception. This line of thought is thrilling to me in the same way playing "Bloody Mary" was exciting as a kid, or the way it was thrilling and terrifying to imagine that skinwalkers-who-ran-fast-as-cars were real and that they ventured off the nearby Navajo reservation to prey on people in villages just like mine. But I also realize that for many people the fear of death is real. I'm also convinced that death is a difficult concept for any person, regardless of conviction, who has really thought about it.

Anyway, this is to say that these lit lectures have me thinking about the fear of death, and thinking about people thinking about the fear of death--and its inverse, the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life--a lot lately. And this has led me to wonder about what the idea of death means to a kid.

As near I can tell, Sonora first encountered death as a concept when she was two. I can't remember the details, but she was on a hike with Elizabeth and they came upon a recently dead bird. It was bleeding out the mouth and Sonora squatted to examine it. She determined that the bird was painting, not bleeding, that the small, bright crimson pool was the bird's way of creating and sharing art. Elizabeth did not correct Sonora's interpretation, and I think the contradiction--painting, not bleeding; creating, not dying--sort of broke Elizabeth's heart while it also made her laugh.

The next time I can think of when Sonora encountered death was about six months or a year later when she and I were on a walk and she noticed a large ring-necked pheasant lying dead on the shoulder of the road. She asked me what was wrong with it and I told her it was dead. Then I felt compelled to explain what death is--that it is when the body dies and the spirit leaves the body and the body gets eaten by other animals, and doesn't ever move again of its own volition. This led to a discussion of humans and death and, being the sort of lay-it-all-out-there sort of person I am, I told her that she would die one day and Mom and Dad would die, that everyone dies eventually (thinking back on it now, I feel a bit like the grandma in Buchner's play, mentioned above) and that that is okay because the spirit lives on and goes to heaven, etc.

Since then, I think Sonora has spent a bit of time thinking about death. She talks about it when she sees a dead insect or any dead animal or when a character dies on a movie she has watched. She seems mostly okay with it now, but for about a year or so, I think it challenged her conception of life and made her a little more anxious than she might otherwise have been. For example, about six months ago, the plug in our bathroom sink broke. It was one of those metal plugs that is linked to a plunger you can pull up or push down to engage or disengage the plug from the sink. It took me about two weeks to get around to fixing the plug and in the meantime the drain was just open, a black circle with no net, no trap, no security, that the water ran down. Before the plug broke, even when it was disengaged, the plug had provided a sort of safety net to any but the smallest items that were dropped in the sink. One time, when the plug was absent from the sink, Sonora accidentally dropped a small hair barrette down the drain and it slipped into the hole. That ruined her whole day. She wept and shook and asked over and over where it would go. Where would the barrette go that fell down the hole? From then on, she was obsessed with keeping things away from the drain--barrettes, toothbrushes, even things much too large to fall in, like cups and the soap dispenser--so that they wouldn't fall down the hole and suddenly be gone for ever. When I finally repaired the sink so that the plug could go back in, she was visibly relieved. There have been very few things that have upset her as much as the sight and reality of that drain did. This may be a stretch, but I chalk up her fear of the unplugged drain to her anxiety about death. Death is the drain that life suddenly falls into and is then apparently gone forever.

The other instance that led me to believe she ruminates on death occurred when I was driving her to her friend's house for preschool. Out of the blue, she asked me "Daddy, what is under the earth?" I told her, as simply as I could, about dirt and rocks and layers floating on a sort of volcanic marshmallow layer, which led to a cursory explanation of volcanic activity, but her question, I came to understand as we talked, was not "what is the earth made of," but "how stable is the earth? Is it like an egg shell that can crack open and swallow us up?" Again, it was the idea of everything disappearing in a flash that was on her mind.

I guess what this all has taught, or at least reiterated to me is that we humans have a tough reality: from the moment we begin to be conscious of ourselves, we begin to recognize that we will die. For whatever reason, this realization creates a lot of distress in us, and we deal with it in different ways. A lot of art--literary and otherwise--has been created as a way to explore, examine, and cope with the realization of universal mortality and with the thought that "I, too, will die," which feels very profound. Of course, we've got a lot of stuff going on which keeps the wolf (in this case, the wolf is not death, but the idea of death) at bay: love, family, food, work, television, sports, politics, video games, music, hobbies, books, friends, church, school, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, and schedules. So many plugs to hide that awful yawning black hole in the bottom of the sink.

Virtual Bird Mate

2009-02-05T23:05:00.000-08:00

"Come here; I want to show you something," my boss said to me the other day. He pointed out his office window at a bird and told me to watch it. The brownish-gray bird, a little bigger than a sparrow in size, was just then perched on top of the side-view mirror of a van. The bird hopped down so that it was facing the mirror; its feet clung to the rim just underneath the mirror and the bird had to flap its wings to keep from falling off of its thin perch. But it wasn't just flapping its wings to stay put. It was spreading its wings more widely and puffing out its breast more broadly than necessary while rubbing its open beak on the mirror.

I realized why my boss wanted me to see this: the bird was courting the van mirror. "He's been doing this for at least two hours," my boss told me. I watched the bird for a few more minutes as it hopped back up above the mirror, then flailed around in front of the mirror again, then repeated its actions. After a while, it gave up and moved to the mirror of the car parked next to the van, hoping to have more luck courting the virtual bird in that mirror. It was humorous, but also somewhat heartbreaking, to watch this bird try to build a relationship, try to connect with, a reflection.

There's a message somewhere in this, I told myself. An obvious one is that human industry messes with wildlife in innumerable ways. But that "lesson" didn't resonate deeply enough. I've seen other things--starved deer hanging from barbed wire fences, for example--that have driven that point home more successfully. The missive that seemed to fit best had more, I think, to do with connection, illusory connection.

The radio and television provide a sense of connection to people that is an illusion, but I think we mostly know that it is an illusion, and are therefore charmed as much as seduced by these media. But the Internet, I'm beginning to think, is more seductive in convincing us that we are part of something larger. On the internet, people who haven't seen each other for many years, and very likely will never actually see each other again, ever, "connect" through the Internet. I've become "friends" with many old acquaintances on Facebook, for example, though after a few exchanges of "what have you been up to for the last 15 years," we usually lose interest in each other and sort of forget that we had re-connected. Such re-connections are enjoyable and make one feel momentarily young and alive, but, at least in my experience, tend to be short-lived. Even Facebook connections I have with my siblings and other family members are, after a few ecstatic Hello-how-are-yous, left untended.

Another example of a mirror is this blog and some of the other blogs I read. I can update people on what is going on with Elizabeth, me, and the girls. I can read about other people's families, their travels, accomplishments, and even sometimes their sorrows. This is rather convenient and, again, makes me feel a sense of connection with some of the people I care about. However, a blog entry is a poor substitute for a conversation over warm cocoa. It is no replacement for a handshake, an embrace, an understanding glance, a shared laugh.

I suppose the bird-mirror/human-Internet comparison breaks down at some point: unlike the bird and the mirror, Internet communication does have at each end an actual human. In essence, with the Internet, there IS a bird on the other side of the glass. The sad thing, though, is that the glass barrier is there and the birds, for all our flapping wings, can not touch.

Christmas Eve in Our Town

2009-01-24T21:30:00.001-08:00

So, I meant to write about this a while ago, but never got around to it. Normally, if I wait too long, I don't get back around to writing about an event, but this one was unique enough to hold onto.

For Christmas Eve, we decided to go to the local community church, which, actually, is the only church in our town (there is another church building in town, but it is currently functioning as a duplex, not as a place of worship). The church had advertised its Christmas Eve meeting by setting up outside the post office a small plywood A-frame to which was stapled a letter-sized invitation to everyone.

We had been intending to go to church here ever since we moved into the town a year and a half ago, but we had never made it. That night, we dressed up in casual semi-formal clothes and hurried off so as not to be late. Turns out we were over-dressed and, though we arrived one or two minutes late, we were early. About 25 people in all showed up that night. 15 minutes after the advertised start time, the service began. A woman and a man co-led the service.

I want to pause here to give you the setting of the place: it is a wooden church, painted white on the outside, that is perhaps 60 years old. The floors were a little creaky, but were covered in red carpet. Two rows of pews face a podium which sits upon a slightly raised landing. On the right-hand side of the landing was a piano, before which Elizabeth now sat. On the left-hand side were a couple of electric guitars and a set of drums (apparently someone who attended there could play some instruments). The ceiling was vaulted, but, with old exposed beams, felt more like a nice barn than a cathedral. However, despite its rough appearance, it had a welcoming, non-pretentious warmth to it. In some ways the building reminded me of the local Grange halls near the tiny village in southwestern Colorado where I grew up. The community would hold square dances, charity dinners, auctions, and other gatherings in these halls. This little church felt sort of like a sanctified Grange hall.

"Unfortunately," the woman said as a disclaimer at she began the service, "we won't be having any music tonight. That is, unless one of you out there happens to play the piano." She chuckled at the suggestion, presumably because she was acquainted with everyone in the congregation besides us and knew that none of them played. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elizabeth's hand slowly raising itself, almost unbidden, until the woman turned her attention to my shy wife.

"Really? You can play the piano?" the woman asked. Elizabeth nodded.

"And you'd be willing to play tonight?" Again Elizabeth nodded. "Thank the Lord!" the woman said. She gave Elizabeth the name of the first song, and then went about searching through the hymnal and scratching together a list of songs while someone else began reading the Christmas story found in Luke.

As Luke 2 and then Matthew 2 were read aloud, the reader would stop after each major plot occurrence and children would come forward with the appropriate ceramic figurines of a manger scene. Sonora had been given a wise man and when it came time to take up her piece, she proceeded with full concentration to the little stable that was set up on a card table in front of the podium and carefully set the stoic wise man in place, then returned to me.

At each of these pauses, we would sing a song to Elizabeth's piano playing. No one led the music; the woman would just sort of nod in Elizabeth's direction and then she would play a short introduction and then begin the song. I really could not believe that Elizabeth was playing at all. She is person who is generally reserved, afraid to call attention to herself. Recently, she became very sweaty, shaky, and rather nauseaus simply from giving a presentation to a group of women about sprouting. Most of the meeting I stared at her back in disbelief (After the meeting, when I expressed my surprise to her, she said "You can't have Christmas Eve with no music. That would just be sad.") In between songs, she would flip the hymnal open to the next song and brush her fingers silently across the keys in order to practice the song in her head. She played quite well the five or so songs that were given to her.

At the end of the meeting, the man leading the meeting called our attention to a cake at the front of the room. It was coated in white frosting and, written across the cake in red frosting were the words "Happy Birthday Jesus." He lit the fourteen or so candles (I have no idea how they chose the number of candles) and then called the kids up to blow out the candles. Sonora contributed by blowing on the elbow of the older girl in front of her.

Then we retired to an adjoining multi-purpose room where some tables had been set up, and we ate cake and drank water. No one approached us to ask our names or find out where we lived or to see if we would be coming back, or to talk to us at all. It was as if, somehow, they had expected a complete stranger and her family to appear unannounced and play the piano for the Christmas Eve service.

Although the service was poorly planned and poorly attended, I was impressed by a congregation that has the faith to produce, out of thin air and my normally shy wife, a musician to play for their Christmas program.

The Snow is Gone

2009-01-15T22:42:00.000-08:00

A week and a half ago, we had snow,

snow,

snow,

snow,

snow.

It had been cold and snowing for three weeks.

We received a package we had ordered a few weeks earlier: a conversion kit for our bike trailer that would make it so we could pull the kids behind us while we cross-country skied.

We tried it out that Monday night and skied around the streets of our village: up and down some of the smaller hills, to the ends and back of a few dead-end streets, back and forth on the only paved street, and finally, out on a county road that winds along beside the creek. It was fun. We felt free. In the darkness we slid silently along the roadways in between rows of houses made cozy with snow.

It is sometimes hard to find ways to exercise, to get outside as a family, during the winter, but we decided this was going to be our activity. We would travel the back roads that spiral away from our back-road town.

And then, the next day, everything began to melt. It rained for a few days, and then it was sunny. The creek swelled to five or six times its normal size. The roads turned to gravelly mud. The sledding hill turned to green grass. Birds can often be heard chirping. A few days ago, we went to the park and played for a while. I rode my bike to work the other day and was not uncomfortably cold.

It is more convenient with the snow gone. My back likes not shoveling the driveway. We can drive more quickly on the roads.

However, our little cross-country ski rickshaw is still fully assembled, waiting, in the garage. The long poles that lead out from the body of it, the poles that connect Dad or Mom to the carriage, seem to yearn like a lonely person's arms. "Where is the snow?" it seems to be asking me every time I visit.

Night Sledding

2008-12-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

After we woke up this morning (Monday), Elizabeth asked me what was on my schedule. "Not much" was my reply, but it still ended up being a busy and somewhat stressful day for me and for Elizabeth. But in the early evening, around 5:30, after I had finished shoveling the driveway and walkway, I had an urge to go sledding. There wasn't much time for it, but I went inside and asked Sonora (who, on an annoying sugar high, had been pestering Elizabeth all day) if she wanted to go sledding. She said yes excitedly and I helped her suit up.

It's good that Sonora has good snow gear, because it was cold tonight. The sun had set a little after 4:00 and the temperature was now hovering a few degrees above zero. The air burned our faces. The sled crackled each time we sat on it. Where the snow had been mostly plowed or scraped away, it moaned dryly beneath our feet, not wanting to pack together. Instead it shifted into stratified little mounds beside our boots.

But this crispness to the air and snow felt good somehow. It more sharply defined things, brought everything closer together, even the stars. Clouds had hung over us most of the time for the last few weeks, but tonight while Sonora and I were out, the stars were clearly visible behind the puffs of fog created by our breathing: galaxies, constellations, clusters, lone stars. Sonora pointed to a star and said, "Look at that bright star. I wonder if that was the one that shined on baby Jesus." I told her it might have been.

At first, we tried sledding down the long hill behind our house, but, though we had sledded on it just a couple of days ago, there was nearly a foot of new snow on top of the previous track we had used. We just couldn't get up any speed in the deep snow, so we took to the streets. Very few cars were out and I felt confident that we would see any car headlights in enough time to react to avoid a collision. We didn't end up seeing any cars while sledding, so I couldn't test my hypothesis.

There are many hills in our village. We sledded down four of them, the last one, a couple hundred yards long, being the longest ride of the night. The walk up the hill was slow and we had to stop a few times so I could warm Sonora's freezing face by cupping my bare hand around her chin and mouth and cheeks. But the descent was worth it. It was long and fast-paced. We were mostly surrounded by darkness, though I could see well enough to stay between the looming snow banks on either side of the road. Ice crystals knocked loose by the sled pelted our faces like sand. We blinked to keep our eyes clear and to keep them in focus. It was exhilarating, soaring down the snow-coated street, hugging my daughter tightly in front of me, knowing that she was enjoying herself as we skittered and bounced and lurched over the uneven, crunching surface, submitting completely to gravity as it hurled us downward.

When we came to a rest in the middle of a block, underneath towering old leafless trees, Sonora said "Let's keep going Dadda." But we had reached the bottom. We would have to climb another hill in order to sled again, she was getting cold all over, and Elizabeth would have just finished making dinner, so I told Sonora it was time to go. She held onto the rope of the sled and trotted in front of me. She was Rudolph and I was Santa and the sled was our sleigh and we were delivering presents to all of the kids, she told me. So we hurried home while playing at being Saint Nicholas and, upon arrival at our warm home, congratulated ourselves for a job well done; many imaginary children had received many imaginary gifts because or our hard work.

From there, the day continued as before: we ate dinner, Elizabeth and I got the kids ready for bed, put them to bed, and then kept on working on things deep into the night. I'm glad that Sonora and I could go sledding. Those 45 minutes playing outside in the cold night with my daughter changed a stressful day into an enjoyable day.

Holiday Tradition

2008-12-15T21:58:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, snow fell for the first time this year. It finally felt like winter. The doors to our cars have been frozen shut every morning since. I have to pound on them with my frozen fist, beating around the outline of the door, trying to break the thin ice seal that holds the weather stripping fast against the metal frame. Tonight, when I arrived home and stepped out of my car, I breathed in deeply through my mouth; my throat caught, protecting itself from the biting cold (it's supposed to get down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit tonight) , and I coughed spasmodically, and my throat burned.

I'll eventually tire of these inconveniences and long for spring, but right now, I am glad for these manifestations of winter. Winter is a time to retreat indoors for the long night; it's a time to savor Saturdays in the snow; it's a time for hot chocolate and soup. It's also when Christmas happens, and Christmas traditions have been on my mind lately.

Having children and watching them experience some of the same traditions I experienced has given these annual acts new meaning for me. Each Christmas ritual Sonora performs reminds me of one that I did, and conversely, it makes me think of my parents, when they were younger, and then my whole sense of childhood returns, if only for a few moments. These traditions seem to collapse time, sort of like a compressed accordion; multiple generations connect. Often many generations of a family do gather and re-connect at Christmas time, but even when I am not with my brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents at Christmas, I feel linked to them through memory and association.

Here are some of the memories that have presented themselves so far in the build-up this Christmas:

Elizabeth has sewn each of us a stocking. These stockings are clean and cute and personalized. We've never hung them from a mantel piece above a fireplace because we've never lived anywhere that had such a thing. When I was a kid, we only lived for two years in a house with a fireplace and a mantel. Otherwise, we hung our stockings from thumbtacks pushed into the wood-panel walls. Our stockings were not very clean and weren't particularly cute. Mine had my name on the white cuff. It was made out of a fleece-like material. What I remember most about it was the hard candy stuck inside the toe of the stocking. Each year, another piece of candy seemed to attach itself to the mass of hard sugar that had somehow latched onto the material. I would pick at the candy lump, but wouldn't tear it out for fear of ripping the stocking. Besides, I never have really liked hard candy, so I wasn't sad it was going to waste.

Most of our presents are wrapped in reusable cloth gift bags Elizabeth sewed a few years ago, but one of the presents I purchased was too large to fit in any of these bags, so I had to wrap it in wrapping paper. When I was young, we had a family present-wrapping ritual. My mom and dad would hide most of the presents under their bed and, when it was time to start putting gifts under the tree, my parents would call us into their bedroom one by one to wrap gifts for our siblings. My parents had a bedroom at one end of our single-wide trailer-house. Their bedroom was removed from much of the commotion experienced in the rest of the small dwelling. When I would go in there to wrap gifts, it always seemed quiet, still. Part of this sense of peace was due to the act of wrapping. Under my mom's guidance, I had to concentrate on cutting the paper to the right length, wrapping it carefully, so as not to rip it, taping it in the right spots, and finally, creasing the ends in the right places so that the paper neatly hid the contents of the gift. Sitting on my parents' bed in their quiet room, keenly focusing on a task, the experience felt almost sacred. For some reason, I am sure that my mom, when she was a child, sat like that, together with her mom, wrapping gifts.

The Christmas of 2003 was the first one Elizabeth and I spent in Washington. We didn't have a Christmas tree, and we were conflicted about buying a real one, conflicted because they were expensive and because it seemed a waste to support cutting down a 10-30 year-old tree just so we could have a "real" tree in our house. So we decided to buy one. In fact, it was her sister Camille, who was living with us at the time, and I who picked one out from a wide selection at a local thrift store, and hauled it back to the house. Elizabeth and I are still using that same tree; Sonora helped me assemble it this year.

But one thing I do miss about not having a real tree is the pine smell. When I was a kid, the family would drive to the 10-acre lot of land we owned about 5 miles from where we lived. The land was covered with juniper and pinion trees and we would tromp around in the snow, looking for the perfect tree. For us, however, the perfect tree was one with identifiable flaws that my mother insisted on: it couldn't be too big (it pained my mom to think of us killing a mature tree that had struggled as long as she had against the extremes of the high deserts of southwestern Colorado); and it had to be growing very close to a larger tree (her reason for this qualification was that, if the little tree was growing close to a larger one, it was likely to die anyway, so we weren't making too big an impact on the Pygmy forest). Once chosen, each of the kids would take a turn swinging the dull hatchet my dad had brought along and then we would haul off the meager beast and set it up in a corner of the living room. It was always in a corner because we wanted to do our best to hide the limbless side--the side that had been growing against the larger tree--from view. No matter how far we shoved the tree into the corner, though, it still looked a little shabby. But it always smelled as good as the full trees my friends put up in their houses. My grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents all spent a lot of time in those high deserts and would have had similar trees. Sometimes I feel guilty when I think about how Elizabeth and I have changed the tradition by using a fake tree, but we live in Washington where there are no pinion or juniper trees of the varieties my ancestors would have known, so a fake tree isn't so bad.

When I was a kid, almost every Christmas, we would make gingerbread houses. For the gingerbread, we would use graham crackers glued together with a powdered sugar/egg/cream of tartar frosting. The trick was to handle the crackers carefully and hold them in place much longer than you would think necessary to allow the frosting to set. But Elizabeth is a purist. She makes the gingerbread from scratch. It's an all-day process of mixing and chilling the dough, rolling it out to a certain thickness, cutting out patterns, baking the pieces, putting them together, and decorating them. A couple of years ago, in addition to a house for herself, Sonora, and me, she planned and made an elaborate gingerbread train.

This year, we just did houses and a small train.At first, I was opposed to all this work. "Let's just use graham crackers." I said. Elizabeth acted as if I'd profaned a sacred institution. We've never used graham crackers. But I've come to appreciate these dark, hand-made, fragrant, thick-walled structures. I've come to understand that they are fleeting works of art similar to Navajo or Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings that are intricately constructed for traditional ceremonies and then swept away. Sometimes the construction of something is what matters, even if the final product is impermanent.

This year, Elizabeth's magnum opus was the Advent calendar. She worked on it at night for many nights after the kids went to bed. This is not a cardstock open-the-box-and-get-a-cheap-piece-of-fake-chocolate Advent calendar. This is one that will last until we die. The first thing Sonora does each morning is to excitedly take an ornament from the appropriate pouch and hang it on the cloth tree.

My family didn't do Advent calendars. I didn't even know what one was when I visited a friend's house in my early adolescence and they had one of the cardstock ones. When he explained it to me, I was excited, but the chocolate for that day had already been eaten, and I then revised my opinion: this now seemed to me a stingy way to approach the build-up to Christmas.

I'm excited to add Elizabeth's calendar to the list of traditions. Even though the memories are only a few weeks old, I already remember with fondness watching her plan out and slowly construct this addition to the Christmas atmosphere. And it is fun to have a tangible countdown to the 25th.

I'm sure that, as is the case with the Advent calendar, every so often we will add a new memory to the list of those we revisit each year. Hopefully, our kids will take these with them, the most lasting of the Christmas gifts we give them, and carry them into their lives to give to their children.

Washing Dishes by Hand

2008-11-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

I've always hated washing dishes. When I was a kid and it was my turn to do the dishes, I would often hide a couple of the grimier dishes so I didn't have to wash them. When I was fifteen, I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant. I came home at night feeling greasy, feeling coated in chunks of half-eaten food. I lasted three days as a professional dishwasher, and then I quit.

But one time when I was in my early twenties and was home visiting my parents, I had a sort of breakthrough with dish washing. It was late at night and I was washing the dinner dishes alone in the kitchen while listening to Tracy Chapman; my hands worked mindlessly in the warm, slippery water. And then, suddenly, I felt alive, elated almost. I wanted to sing. It sort of felt spiritual; I wanted to pray. I also got the urge to go wandering. So, when I finished the dishes, I walked outside and wandered in the darkness around the little southwestern Colorado village. I ended up at the small park at the center of town and there, looking up at pinpoint explosions of light in the blackness, I followed my urge and chanted energetically at God. When I returned home, I felt refreshed.

Since then, I have experienced a few other transcendent moments while washing the dishes. Tonight, for example, while I was washing dishes in our silent house, everyone else having gone to bed, I realized again that washing dishes isn't so bad. That was my first realization.

The other realization that came to me as I cleansed plates and cups is one I've had many times before, but it was particularly clear to me tonight: Everyone feels misunderstood. Virtually everyone feels, on a regular basis, left out, overlooked, insecure, victimized, unloved, passed over. And this includes those who seem to be on the inside. They may even envy those who envy them. Or maybe they don't notice the enviers at all. But they don't feel understood. Nobody feels understood, but most people forget this and feel alone in their isolation and wonder Why Me?

Mine was not an original thought--many people have reached this same conclusion--but in that moment it felt an important realization and I was glad to have thought it, glad to have experienced the flow of thought, the thrill of connecting conceptions, the satisfaction of epiphany. Something about doing dishes opened my mind to contemplation, and I thought; the result of this thinking wasn't life-altering, but I was glad for the exercise.

I think part of what can make dish washing an enlightening experience is the process: through simple, cyclical, repetitive motions, I am accomplishing something, cleansing kitchen implements, making attractive that which was moments before unappealing. But more than anything, I think, it is the texture, the feel of things that causes the thoughts, like stones in tilled earth, to rise to the surface. The smooth, rounded handle of the Pyrex measuring cup, slick with suds. The stick-slide-stick-slide-stick chatter of my fingers across the wet glass casserole dish. The sloping descent of the warm red rag over the fork tines. The efficient swoop of the rag over the belly of a cream-colored bowl whose surface, like that of an egg shell, is not quite smooth. The continual re-warming of my air-cooled hands (re-inserting my hands into the water feels each time like a discovery). The almost imperceptible vibrations as my fingernails pass over the thin stainless steel salad bowls, creating a sound that is almost unsettling but at the same time clarion. This sound vibrates up my fingers and settles in the underside of my wrist.

Somehow these textures create a sort of tactile music that mixes with the motions of the task to create a meditative space, and in this space, I can think. It's not that I look forward to doing the dishes now. I don't. But the next time I do them, there will likely come a moment, when I'm about half-way done, during which I will feel enlivened, and my mind will be glad that I've decided to immerse my hands in warm, slippery water.

Books and Year

2008-11-20T20:03:00.000-08:00

This past year, I read perhaps more pages than during any other year in my life. It's not that I read all that many books; it's that many of the books I read were long. Most of these books, I'm a little ashamed to admit, weren't very intellectual. In fact, the bulk of my reading consisted of fantasy fiction books: long, drawn out tales of men and women involved in epic struggles in a reality that includes magic and fantastic creatures. These accounted for about 7,000 of the roughly 9,000 pages I read this year, and I'm not going to waste any more words on these fantasy books except to say that it was, for the most part, enjoyable and fun to read them. However, they almost never inspired me, awed me, or caused me to contemplate. But a few other books did.

The Backslider, by Levi Peterson
fascinated me. This novel, set in rural southern Utah in the 1950s, is about a sometimes wayward Mormon boy who struggles with faith and sexuality. The novel has wide emotional undulations--often it is hilariously funny, at other times somber, and other times, it is tragic. This book is not for the Mormon faint of heart. It is no Gerald Lund rip-off. The book is quite irreverent. One of the many humorous scenes described in the book is of the main character, Frank, and his brother, Jeremy, wrestling the reluctant family dog into a creek so they can baptize him. The main character often views God as a pleasure-killing, vengeful master, and the Holy Ghost as an entity best avoided (he might tell you not to do something fun; or he might tell you to do something unpleasant). The book also includes a fair amount of swearing, several descriptions of sexual encounters, and frank discussions about masturbation.

The Backslider drags out from the closet some Mormon-specific skeletons--polygamy; blood atonement; and varying interpretations of the Word of Wisdom--but many of the conflicts are more broadly defined within the context of Christianity. For example, Frank's view of God seems mostly informed by the images of an angry, frightening Old Testament God, unreconciled with the much more personable Jesus of the New Testament. When Frank touches fossils in rock, he wonders how old the earth really is, and, if the earth is only a few thousand years old, why God would want to trick us with so many misleading clues, such as dinosaur bones and fossils. Frank vacillates between monastic self-denial and indulgences of the flesh. Guilt, repentance, and sin appear throughout the book.

The thing I found most refreshing about the book was its honesty. It asks aloud many of the questions people are afraid to utter. At times, however, the book tips past honesty into absurdity, as with the times when various characters get themselves so tied up in guilt, self-denial, and asceticism that they do things to themselves that seem implausible. Another thing that slightly disappointed me was the conversion to Mormonism that one of the main characters undergoes at the end of the book (converting to the faith has become a cliche that Mormons seem reluctant to leave out of most stories). However, the conversion is handled so artfully, in such a unique series of events, that I quickly forgave the author for turning the book in that direction. In fact, the most important conversion (not to any religion, per se, but to Jesus/God as a loving, empathetic, easy-going guy) , the one that comes to Frank at a vital moment near the end of the novel, is mildly shocking and not at all what a seminary graduate would expect to encounter in a conversion story.

Overall, The Backslider is a well-constructed novel that caused me to reflect upon the human condition, the nature of God, the place of pleasure in life, the necessity of love, and the struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

I'll save for a future post my thougths of the three other books I've recently read: Straight Man; In Cold Blood; and Anna Karinena.

By the way, I just realized that all of the books I've read this year have been written by male authors. I'd like to make the next book I read one written by a woman. Recommendations?

Ferris Bueller's Teacher

2008-11-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

I just came across the following quote of Ferris Bueller's economics teacher. It brought back a lot of memories and associations with mid-adolescent emotions. Here is the quote:

"In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. 'Voodoo' economics."

But besides calling up mid-teenage anxieties, it also made me realize with mild horror that I've sort of become that guy. Today in class, I was leading a discussion on George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant." The essay, published in 1936 takes place in Burma (Myanmar), which was then controlled by the British as part of their extensive empire. I wanted to bring present-day relevance to the essay. The (mostly one-sided) discussion went something like this:

"Does anyone know what Burma calls itself today? (long awkward silence) Myanmar. What news in the last year has been associated with Myanmar? No one? Buddhist monks? Protests? Anyone? Hmmm. (Brief explanation of the protests for civil rights and against human rights violations) What other recent events has Myanmar been in the news for? (long awkward silence) Cyclone? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Tens of thousands of people dead? International help refused? Any of this familiar? U.S. Navy ships just sitting there with unused supplies? An international debate about violating a country's sovereignty to help its citizens? Nobody knows what I'm talking about? Well, let's get back to the essay. Why was Orwell, a British Imperial Police officer, in Burma in the late 1920's? Anyone?"

I wonder if my students were just hearing that Waa, Wa, Wa, Wa, Waa, Waa sound that Charlie Brown hears when adults speak to him. I hope I don't get to the point where, for the whole hour, I just turn my back to them while I write on the board and drone on about some uninteresting subject.

Inheritance Scam Spam

2008-11-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

So, the Inheritance Scam E-mail is unlike most other spam in that, when you write it, you don't pressure and guilt your audience into forwarding it to everyone. You want your audience to think that she or he alone has received this rather remarkable offer. Your goal in this E-mail is not to bounce your E-mail around the globe forever; instead the purpose is to get the recipients of the message to give you money, and lots of it.

To get your reader to give you money, you need to convince her or him that you, in fact, want to give him or her a lot of money. Convince your reader that you are linked to an important person, someone she or he may have heard of in the news. Be sure, however, that your own invented identity is not someone she or he would be familiar with. Your scheme for how to actually get the money from the poor sap is up to you (arrange a meeting in Amsterdam; send a fake money order, etc.); the purpose of this communication is to teach you how to hook your readers and convince them to take the next step, whatever that might be.

Here are some tips:
Always originate your story in another country. Americans often assume that their country is the only stable one and will therefore not be surprised when you write that recently, when the Brazilian (or Ugandan, German, Chinese, Australian, etc.) government collapsed, you escaped with millions of dollars.

Come up with any reason why you need this person's help in liquidating the money. It doesn't need to be a rational reason. Make something up.

Instead of just writing $ or "dollars" when discussing the money, always refer to it as U.S. Dollars or USD. This will demonstrate that you are an international, metropolitan person, someone people can trust.

Make lots of grammatical, spelling, and wording errors. This will make your audience connect with you, will make them think, "Gee whiz, this is someone I could go bowling with, someone I could drink a beer with." Americans value feeling this way about people and will believe you if you awaken such emotions in them.

Lastly, address your E-mail so that it sounds as if it was sent specifically to this one recipient so that the recipient thinks he or she has been specially chosen for this important task; also, include as your contact E-mail address one that includes the name of organization you are claiming to represent, but has as its domain name some common E-mail service (example: OfficialDeutcheBankRepresentative@hotmail.com).

So, here is a brief example. As always, feel free to expand on this. Oh, and 12% of all US Dollars made using this method will need to be sent to me.

Dear Sur/Mam,

Allow me introduce myself. I am Honorable Hanz Werner Magnus from Norway, and am need your help. Recently my oder brother, Crown Prince Haakon of the Emaculate Kingdom Norway, tried cheat me out my inheritence. A snivelly thing this was to do to me and so there for I took my inheritence and sneaked out of the country by way of Sweden.

This inheritance is 47 million US Dollars. I can assure you that I have always said money on my person always. As an onorable member of the royal famly I am embarrased to have to ask such a thing of you, but I need help getting said USD into a useable state. You see, I am hiding in barn in Sweden. Luckily, no one has recognized me. No one knew about me because every person talked only on my brother, not me, so I can remain hidden.

I am willing to offer you, kind sir/Madam (and I make this offer to no one else; I have been told you are unique and trustworthy), 25% of my 42 million USD if you will help me get to the U.S.A. where I will be safe from my brother. Here is what you have to do. Send me 10 thousand USD so that I can come by a plain ticket and a fake passport. As a measure of my good will toward you, I will immediately, upone receive your 10 thousand USD, send you a real money order for 12 thousand USD. When I get to the U.SA, I will give you the remainder of promised 25% of my ineritance: 37 million USD.

Please hurry. I need help. My brother soon will discovery my were bouts. You will be richly rewarded. Send me the 10 thousand USD soon before I am caught and you will be rich man/woman.

Contact me very soon at my email address: OfficialPrinceNorway@gmail.com.

Many cind thanks,

The Onorable Prince Werner--Norway.

Remember to be kind yet firm, approachable yet authoritative, vulnerable but not pitiful. But above all, be convincing!

Endangered Woman Spam

2008-10-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

As with all spam you send, when you mail out to hundreds of thousands of people your "Let's Scare Women" spam message, the point is to get as many people as possible to forward it. Your message has to make people afraid, really afraid. It's important to instill fear in women, but it is equally important to instill fear in dads and husbands, because, if these males and females are scared, they might actually drag their lazy mouse hand and click on "Forward," which will fill you (although you will never know the button has been clicked), the author, with a sense of fulfillment bordering upon divine rapture.

Besides personal fulfillment, the purpose of the "Let's Scare Women" spam is to re-balance our messed-up society. By reminding women that they are weak and vulnerable, you are doing a duty by keeping women from crossing a lot of dangerous boundaries they might otherwise cross. And by making the dads and husbands afraid for them, you are providing fodder for the argument that women need a man's protection. And we all know what the sub-text of this argument is (although we don't state this to the fairer sex because they might get offended)--women should be controlled by men.

So, having established two important reasons for the composition of such a communique, let us proceed directly to the outline of how it is produced:

1) Open with a voice of concern that lets the anonymous recipient know that you care about him or her. Remember that this E-mail will be forwarded between acquaintances, so when a person receives it, your thoughtful words will make the receiver feel as if the sender actually cares.

2) Provide some examples that prey on people's natural fears. Include some examples about women being drugged, maimed, and beaten by people who were hiding in wait for the victim. You want your reader to forever wonder if someone is hiding under her car, in the dark van next to her, or in that dark blind spot behind her seat. One of the goals is to unsettle your audience. One way to do this is to make it sound as if such attacks were everyday occurrences.

3) Make an allusion to a credible-sounding source. The source can be real or imagined, but it needs to sound credible. Don't worry, most of your audience will trust that the information really came from the New York Times, or they will believe that there is a small newspaper in Kansas called the Quarterville Post. You can even provide a link to the home page of a newspaper; the reader will assume that the story must have existed and is now simply buried within the archives of the paper you linked to.

4) End the E-mail with a Call to Action. Remember that your purpose is two-fold: to get people to forward this E-mail to everyone they know, and to put women back in their place. So your call to action needs to encompass these two aims.

Below is a short example. Feel free to write much longer spam messages that include many more frightful examples.

"I'm forwarding this to you because I care about women, and I know you do too. Recently, there has been a series of brutal attacks on women that the Liberal News Media are simply ignoring. The Wall Street Journal has reported on several of these attacks, but the trend is much more wide-spread than even they are willing to admit. The Kansas-based Quarterville Post broke the news that throughout the past year, over one hundred women have been attacked in this fashion. Here is what the assailants do: They "hang out" at grocery stores and banks and wait for women to go inside. Then they quickly slip under the car of the woman and wait for her to return. When she gets back, the attacker takes out a knife and cuts the woman's achilles tendons. Now that she is unable to flee, the attacker drags her under the car with him and robs and beats her and sometimes steals her groceries, too.

"Some reports suggest that these attacks are being coordinated by a gang, and that this achilles-slicing gang has a presence in every town with a population over 10,000. The only reason you haven't heard about this is because members of the wussy liberal media think these gang members can be reformed and the members of the press don't want to offend this gang. But make no mistake: these are awful people and they are probably staking out women at your local Safeway as you read this.

"The best way to get a handle on this is to spread the word through grass-roots efforts. It is up to you to send this message on. Send it to everyone you know, even to those you don't know. If you don't forward this message, you might be responsible for the beating, robbery, and slicing up of a woman you care about. And men, don't stop there. Be sure to always escort your women whereever they go. Don't let them out of the house until you return for work. It just isn't safe out there without you there to protect them. The best way to protect a song bird from getting killed by a falcoln is to clip its wings and cage it. The same is true of women.

"Again, if you care about women, you must send this to everyone you know. It only takes .7 seconds. Send it. If you don't, you'll regret it some day. When your sister or friend or wife or daughter crawls home from the grocery store without her groceries, her face battered and her ankles bloodied, and asks you, "Why didn't you warn me?," you will regret not having warned her by simply clicking on the Forward button at the top of this page. Do it. Do it now. Forward this, or you'll be sorry, and so will everyone around you."

Now, after you have composed this message, send it to a whole bank of E-mail addresses. Someone in the group will send it on to people she or he knows, and then it will have a personal touch. You can now sleep peacefully knowing you have acheived something today: you have started a message that will probably be forwarded forever. Never mind that most cars are too low to the ground for an adult to fit underneath. Nevermind that many people would find it weird and report it if they saw a man trying to throw himself underneath someone else's car. When people are scared, they don't think about these things, because you've made it so easy for them to pass on the message. And as the message spreads through the infinite webs of cyberspace, know this: You have acheived immortality!

Low-Quality Junk Mail

2008-10-23T23:49:00.000-07:00

I've noticed lately that most of my junk mail is decidedly inferior to what it used to be. It's almost as if junk mail authors are starting to become disheartened and are only sending out second-best work. In an effort to improve the general quality of E-spam, and to help restore it to its previously lofty position (before E-mail services imposed "junk" filters onto everyone) as America's most-read material, I am going to do a series, including examples, on how to write and disseminate good junk. If you have any favorite categories I should cover, let me know, and I'll do my best to give 'em a shoutout.

Listen

2008-10-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

The shrill whine that train wheels make when they grate slowly against metal tracks has always appealed to me. I first heard it, and became fond of it, in the mid 1990s in Germany, in the huge train station in Hamburg, on the small platforms near rural villages. It sounds like a deeply-felt song, a series of long, high notes that trail after each other, as if one note, with its hand out, were chasing after the one that came before it, which was in turn longing after the one before, each crying out a sound of un-anxious longing.

In larger train stations, where several trains are always arriving and departing, the shrieks and cries of many large metal bodies blend to make a chorus of sorts. The sounds blend to a hum, almost like a harmonica whose five or six highest notes are being played simultaneously. Here the trains can really show off because they are guided by slanting rails into specific slots, guided sharply at clanking angles that would send them, at higher speeds, cartwheeling free of their constraints. But here, crawling along at this pace, they can bump and shimmy and squeal without worry; these sounds let their charges know that, momentarily, they will safely be deposed onto the platform, where friends wait to embrace them after their long absence. Or these passengers might ignore the hugging crowds and hurry to another train to head in yet another direction; or to home to fall asleep on the velvet couch. The heavy wheels spin one way, stop, and then spin the other way, singing on their way in, singing on their way out.

Another place, besides stations, where this sound arrests me is underneath overpasses. While in grad school in Spokane, I often walked under such an overpass at night on my way back to my car. If a train passed over, I would stop and listen to its conflicted sounds: the heavy, rhythmic crashing that caused the concrete pillars to tremble and the ground to shake, contrasted with the lofty whine of the wheels--the whale song of the tracks. On these nights those high pitches were the sound of contemplation; they embodied emotionally my disembodied thoughts.

I'm not one of those people who love trains; I don't fantasize about being a conductor or an engineer. I've never owned a model train. But I do like how the metal sounds as it grates against itself. It is a high, straining, somewhat hollow, metallic sound that rises and falls slowly. It is the sound of longing, the sound of waiting, the sound of relief, the sound of understanding, the sound of being found, of taking leave, of regret and forgiveness, of lamentations and rejoicings, the sound of coming and of going. It is the sound of gray drizzle on centuries-old roofs, the sound of cracked concrete and soot-covered backs, of luggage wheels clacking over slotted concrete, the sound of pigeons pecking pea-sized chunks of cheese bread from frozen cobblestones, the sound of hog farms and grain bins, of obsolete ingenuity and inter-dependence, of never-coming-back.

Those high peals drag their fingernails over the chalky hearts of the hearing near-by, searching, awakening...something, usually. Unless the sounds escaping from steel ring out and meet with no response, become incorporeal, impotent shockwaves diminishing into mute, dampening space

(So, um, in other words, I like that high-pitched sound that train wheels make when they move slowly down the track...and, in the moment of composition, I was also feeling fond of alliteration).

Travel vs. Goats

2008-10-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Laura posted some thoughts on her blog that sort of tapped into a latent dilemma that lately has been pressing on me: the traveling urge. Ever since Elizabeth and I got back eight years ago from spending three months in Europe (we were mostly in Germany, but we also spent time in the Czech Republic, Austria, and France), I have wanted to go back. Two and a half years ago, we geared up to go on a really cool trip; it still pains me to think about it.

Here were the plans: Our group would consist of Elizabeth, Sonora (then 1.5 years old and thus costless on an airlplane), me, and Elizabeth's sister Carrie and her new husband Carson.
We would fly with our bikes, panniers, a child bike trailer, and our camping gear to Munich Germany, where we would set out to the south-east. We would take 4 leisurely weeks biking through southern Germany and most of Austria, finally ending up in Budapest, Hungary. We would either take a train back to Munich, or fly out from Budapest.

We had the whole trek planned out. There are campgrounds, most of which are right on the water at one picturesque mountain lake or another, every ten miles or so along the route. I looked up rules on taking bikes as luggage. We purchased all the gear we needed.

And then we did our budget.

The year before, we had lived on my $22,000 salary, and while my salary had increased since then, we weren't going to be able to muster up, without going into debt, the $3,500 we figured we'd need for the trip. So for the next few months I cringed when a now-irrelevant deadline passed: the date we would need to buy our plane tickets; the date we would board the airplane; the date we would set out peddling at the feet of the Alps.

Since then we've taken one trip--to Alaska for a week--which was a pretty cool trip; it felt as if we had gone somewhere. Besides that, we've just driven to Utah or Colorado or to the other side of Washington. Or we've had stay-cations, which are a poor substitute. Our journeys have been kept short partially because, having purchased a house, we haven't had much extra money, and because we had Rowyn.

But as Rowyn gets old enough to make travel a little easier, and we begin to entertain thoughts of travel again, we've also started making plans that will anchor us to where we are. These plans consist of goats and chickens.

Elizabeth and I are as drawn to the idea of procuring our own food as we are to traveling and, I'm realizing, these are mutually exclusive pursuits. Milk goats have to be milked multiple times a day, every day of every week of the year, or else the milk will dry up. Eggs have to be gathered every day or else eventually the chickens will peck into them and develop a taste for eggs that would ruin the flock for egg-bearing.

We could ask our neighbors to milk our goats and gather the eggs, but to ask someone to do this for a month while we romp about Europe (or South America, or Africa, or Asia, or Australia) would be irresponsible. Besides, few people would have time to do this. Fewer people still would like us enough to do it.

We don't have any animals yet, nor do we have any plans for travel. Over the coming winter, we will make a decision that will of necessity exclude from our lives something we are excited about.

Summer's End

2008-10-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I'm pleased with my job is that I get summers off: almost three months in a row, one-fourth of a year. That is a pretty good deal. I don't get paid for these months, but we've been able to save up enough money to make it through each summer so far. I cherish these months of spending time with Elizabeth and the girls. But one difficulty with this schedule I've noticed particularly acutely this time around is that, when I go back to work, I go through withdrawals. The symptoms are sadness, frustration, and a sense of loss.

Elizabeth feels many of these same feelings when I go back to work. She can't just go outside and leave the baby. She can't just make a quick trip to town or run an errand without packing up the kids. Most days, she sees no other adults and spends her time reviewing the alphabet, wiping up curdled breast milk, making crafts and cleaning up the house. When I get home, we try to talk to each other about our respective days, to re-energize each other with casual, caring conversation, but we can't really talk, because Sonora becomes frustrated at the shift of attention away from herself and yelps "MOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMY" until one of us busies ourselves with her.

However, tonight, Sonora said something that led me to believe that she, too, senses that something has changed, that she, too, misses having her other parent around. "Daddy, do you feel okay?" she asked me. I had had a hard day, a long series of non-accomplishments at work. And I had had a couple of hard days before that--working a normal day, coming home for an hour to eat dinner, going to three-hour Scout meetings, and coming home to a dark, silent house. Tomorrow, I get to spend another Saturday doing Scout stuff.

"No, I don't feel that good," I told her.

"I wish we could play together more," was her reply. Since mid-September, I've only taken her to the park once.

"I wish we could, too."

I don't really have a right to complain. I love spending that time, those slow, warm, family months, with them. Few families get to spend that kind of time together. But the transition back out of that life is a shock, even though I knew it is coming. It's a sort of metamorphosis, I guess, like the cycle of a perennial plant that withers with the first frost, hunkers its essence down into its buried bulb and then waits, waits, those long, lonely months, for the sun to warm the earth and beckon it into bloom.

Bike Winning

2008-09-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

Two or three months ago, a friend of mine described for me an interesting way to teach a kid to ride a bike. The main idea was that you remove the training wheels and the pedals and let the kid propel herself with her feet. This will teach her or him balance. Once the child can balance somewhat, put the pedals on and the child should be able to learn how to ride without falling over so much.

It wasn't that simple with Sonora. She is only 3.5 years old. In some ways, she is perhaps too young to ride a bike, but I didn't want to have to teach her how to ride with training wheels and then take them off and have to teach her all over again. Better to teach her all at once, I figured. However, she hadn't done much pedaling of anything before, so I had to teach her how to pedal as well as how to balance. We practiced almost every day of the week for about a month and a half before she got it. The video below shows her at various stages in the process. It was a rewarding way to spend time with her.

Slack-lining

2008-08-31T00:18:00.000-07:00

Earlier this spring, Elizabeth's sister Carrie came to visit. Her husband Carson brought with them his slack line. He had me try it and I was hooked. So for my birthday, Elizabeth got me a slack line kit. It has been sort of rainy since then, so I've only been able to set it up a few times, but Thursday Elizabeth's sister Vanessa came down and we took the slack line to the park. Everyone tried it out, but it takes a long time to get a feel for balancing on a piece of bouncy one-inch webbing (I practiced on Carson's slack line for a couple of hours before I could take more than one step without falling off). Even though no one was able to walk the line by herself, I think everyone had fun trying.

Re-planting

2008-08-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

When we got back from our three-week jaunt to Utah/Colorado/Idaho earlier this summer, the arugula (a nutty-tasting salad green) and spinach plants in our garden had gone to seed. From every plant, a shoot had shot up a couple of feet; leaves, as if surprised by the sudden surge away from the earth, clung desperately, limply, to the sides of the new stalks. I picked a few of these leaves--we added some to salads--but the good taste had gone out of them. They had passed beyond their prime and had set about procreating, had done what all life tries to do: perpetuate itself.

I think what most people do, what I've always done when a plant goes to seed and no longer produces food, is pull up the plant and toss it into the compost pile or dispose of it in some other way. But this time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to see what would happen if I let these plants do what they wanted to do. I asked myself why do we buy packets of seeds every year? Why not let the plants supply their own offspring? I kept watering the plot they were in and observed as more seeds populated the spinach stalks, more seed pods stretched away from the arugula stalks. At first the seeds and seed pods were green, moist, soft. The arugula seeds were tiny in their pods, but they exploded with a peppery, nutty, radishy flavor when I sampled them. Slowly they began to dry out and firm up. But I was worried the seeds might not be any good.

In recent history, as agribusiness has mostly outgrown local production and become a major industry, people have bred and modified some plants so that they are sterile. They may or may not produce seeds, but they don't produce any offspring. Other plants have been genetically modified significantly enough that their seeds can be patented; it is illegal to collect and re-plant these seeds. Both scenarios--intentionally producing and perpetuating sterile crops, and making it illegal to re-plant a seed--seem to me bizarre and mildly abhorrent. This strong human desire to own, to control, to manipulate, to dictate even to nature is just weird and possibly very destructive. When food corporations completely dictate or shut down the reproductive capacities of edible plants, they reinforce the idea that profit is more important than life.

Scandinavians, by investing in and building Svalbard International Seed Vault in a remote area of Norway, have recently taken an important and decisive step toward preserving plant life, toward ensuring the survival of millions of plant species against natural disasters, wars, and human interference. This seed vault has been called, sometimes derogatorily, the "Dooms-Day Vault" or "Noah's Ark," but I find its presence to be rather comforting, even though it is very, very far away from me. It shows that, somewhere at least, people care enough about the essence of life to drill a huge hole into a frozen mountain and store millions of seeds from all over the world, to be re-distributed at need. All this effort and money to build a vault to store not gold or military weaponry, but seeds, which are at once so banal and so benignant.

When the arugula and spinach seeds were dry and seemed to be ready, I decided to make our own mini seed vault. The seeds came free easily, eagerly. It took a little while to separate the seeds from the organic debris that came with them. I lightly shook the arugula seeds in a bowl and picked out the dried pods. With the spinach seeds came many small pieces of brittle, papery yellowish leaves. These I had to blow away like wheat chaff. Once I had a small pile of each type of seed (I gathered enough to last about 15-20 plantings), I set the seeds aside, dug up the plot, and re-planted two rows of arugula and two rows of spinach to see if the seeds were good. The rest of the seeds I stored in brown paper pouches. In three days, the arugula had sprouted; two days later the spinach started coming up. It took twice that long for the seeds to germinate in the spring. The whole process has been strangely exhilarating.

Now I'm thinking we'll harvest seeds from all the plants in the garden that do well. These seeds will form the foundation of next year's garden. Another idea I had today was that we should buy produce from the local farmers market and get seeds from the plants (tomatoes, cantaloupes, peppers, cucumbers, peaches, cherries, etc.). These plants have been grown locally and should, therefore, do well in the local climate, as opposed to a seed packet sold in Washington filled with seeds produced from a plant in Florida.

I can't help but think that my recent interest in the perpetuation of plants has something to do with my interest in my family. Elizabeth and I tried for four years before we got pregnant with Sonora. We thought we were sterile, but now we have two miraculous daughters, now a sapling and a seedling, both straining upward, plunging their branches toward the sun. My parents are nearing retirement. They went to seed a while ago. They move cautiously and are becoming a little more brittle each year. I have one grandparent left: my mom's mom. We are all of her stock.

About a month ago, while Sonora and I were out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, we saw the biggest cherry tree I've ever seen. It stood as tall and almost as wide as the two-story Victorian home in whose front yard it was rooted. I lingered, wondering if I couldn't collect some of the ripe deep-burgundy cherries. While I was staring at the tree, a short, thin, jolly old man approached Sonora and me from across the street. His captivating smile was that of a person who thrilled in making other people happy. He asked us if we wanted some of those cherries. I said we did, but we didn't have any way to carry them. He went home and returned with eight empty plastic whipped-cream containers. He used to live in this house, he told me. Now his son lived there, though he was out of town for the weekend. The old man's son had planted that tree for his daughter when she was a little girl. She is now in her forties.

A seedling planted by a father for his daughter. And Sonora and I stood in its shade as it towered over us.

The cherries were sweet and juicy and full. Sonora helped me pick some, but she mostly stained crimson her face and hands and shirt; even though she picked many cherries, her container never filled up. We brought seven full containers home to Elizabeth and we all ate them over the next week.

Even before I had harvested the spinach and arugula seeds, before I knew I was interested in saving seeds, I saved a few of those cherry seeds and pushed them into the moist earth near our home. I saved them because their parent had grown well in this town, had grown well for that man's daughter, for that old man's granddaughter. I hope our small seeds will grow tall and spread their branches wide, wide over us. While we are waiting for that to happen, we will enjoy the cycle of planting, caring, harvesting, eating. To get the whole thing started, we'll have spring greens this autumn.

Summer

2008-08-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

I lover summertime, and I love our front yard in the summertime. The three maple trees out front have flung out their leaves like so many sieves sifting the sun, green hands holding up the air. These trees provide shade over the grass until the early afternoon, and after a few hours the house shades the same spot, so it is cool and comfortable there; the grass is soft. The warm weather draws us outside; the shade keeps us there.

This summer has been about as fun a summer as I've had since I was a kid (probably, I'll never again have a summer as enjoyable as those I had between the ages of 4 and 12, because those days of freedom and discovery on the plateau lands in southwestern Colorado have set a very high standard). Part of it has to do with having a house and land and trees. The two summers previous to this one were spend in two different locations, neither with any trees nearby. I felt stifled and dried out. But now we can walk outside, walk barefoot through the grass and weeds, spend time in the shade, lie back on the ground.

Besides the house, the land, and the trees, I savor the summer because I don't work. I wake up with Elizabeth and the kids, we spend most of the day together, we put the kids down for bed, and the Elizabeth and I have a few hours to ourselves; sometimes we do something together, sometimes we do things in isolation, but the evenings provide a nice rejuvenating buffer between one day and the next.

Here are some of the things I've enjoyed most this summer:

teaching Sonora to ride her bike on the basketball court at the nearby park (she still has training wheels on, but at least she can pedal reasonably well)

picking vegetables from our garden with Sonora

walking through the yard while holding Rowyn (she likes being outside and seems to listen intently to all the sounds

watching Sonora walk around with her watering pail and water random plants (she even made a couple of flowers grow and then blossom in a planter we thought had nothing in it)

going on walks as a family

jogging every morning with Elizabeth and the kids

traveling to see family

eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner outside on the porch or the patio or the lawn

Dressing my Baby

2008-08-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

When I lay her down on the changing table, she looks contentedly at me. I wonder, and a sense of guilt pervades the question: Do I ever pay as much attention to you as when I change your clothes? Do I ever focus just on you, just on you? She kicks and squeals and slobbers as I pull her arms out of the sleeves of her shirt. After I peel the tight neck of her shirt up over her face, she blinks, looks up at me with squinted eyes as if to ask: "Is it over? Will you be scraping anything else over my face?" Or maybe, "Did something just change?"

She is always excited to have her diaper off. I wipe her legs, her genitals, her back with a soft, warm, damp cloth, and she relaxes. The new diaper I fold in half and wave above her like a fan to dry her off so that for a short while, until she wets herself again, she will be totally dry. She shivers as the wetness evaporates and cools her skin, she pulls her arms, bent like chicken wings, in against her chest, goose bumps raise up across her skin. When I put the diaper under her back and snap it closed around her legs, I am amazed at the size of her thighs, round and fat, a fat-wrinkle roll halfway between her hip and her knee curving in an arc most of the way around. All this mass, all this body, that mind, that head, those legs, those fingers, those eyes, simply from the time she spent in the womb and now spends at her mother's breast.

After I pull her pants on, up her legs, past her clammy, flex-toed feet, I wait to put her shirt on. I run my fingers lightly over her belly, her arms, her back. She relaxes again, coos lightly, drops drool over her chin. Her skin is smooth like well-kneaded, half-risen bread dough. She feels my touch. I hope she knows I love her. When I put her shirt on, I have to pull her arms away from her body again to get them through her sleeves. She resists, so I give her a finger to hold onto and that makes it easier for her. Again, when the neck of the shirt is drawn across her face, she blinks, looks around uncertainly, wonders, perhaps, if the world is new again.

With her shirt on, she is mostly dressed, but I hesitate to put on her socks and instead I take each ankle between my forefinger and middle finger and begin tapping with my thumbs on the bare soles of her feet--left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right--while I quietly sing her a song to the rhythm of the tapping. I do not sing well, but I hope that, as her mind grows, this triangulation of left-sound-right will help her understand things, will later help her process the difficult things, the awful truths, the deep frustrations, that will come her way in the future when she reaches adulthood and realizes the confusion doesn't leave with adolescence. Maybe I can help her develop a strong corpus collosum. Maybe I can give her some advantage in life. Maybe something I do will make a difference.

Is this a father's blessing?

And then I push her feet into the socks, straighten the stretchy fabric into place, and give her to her mom. As I watch her cuddle the side of her cheek into that comfortable space between shoulder and neck, I know I have just experienced life.

Salami Picnic

2008-08-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

Sonora enjoys processed meats--lunch meat, hot dogs, pepperoni, jerky, etc.--so when she expressed reluctance at the idea of riding in the trailer behind me when I went for a bike ride today, I knew how to make her excited about the trip. "We can stop for a picnic on the way and eat some salami," I said, and then she was interested. I really should have prepared a better lunch, but I was in a hurry, so I just grabbed the herb-coated salami and some nectarines and we hit the road.
The route we took wound out of our little town, followed a creek for a few miles, wound through wheat fields for a few miles, then through a small pine forest, then through more wheat fields and then back home. All of the roads are gravel, which made for a pretty slow pace (the trailer felt like an anchor at times).

Along the way, Sonora would point things out to me, and I to her. She thought the town's sewage lagoons were little lakes and I didn't have the heart to correct her. She has developed a fascination with grain silos and wanted me to look at each one we passed. I called her attention to the red-tailed hawk that was screaming at us shrilly from above as she circled the tree her nesting chicks were in. I also pointed out the small grove of trees that stood out like an island in the swaying sea of almost-ripe wheat. In the grove is a picnic table. That's where we stopped for lunch.

Sonora had brought the salami (she wanted to carry it in her purse), but I had left the nectarines in the garage, along with the knife that was supposed to cut the fruit and the chub of salted meat. So we had a lunch of salami and water. Sans any utensils, we just took turns biting into the thing. It was kind of fun, but sort of gross, too; it is awful-looking stuff. After our meal, I picked a head of wheat and dug out a few kernels. They were soft and green. When I bit into one, it was juicy and sweet with a hint milkiness somewhere between coconut and soy milk. As I dug more out, Sonora ate them faster than I could get them to her. "I like sweet wheat," she said.

The rest of the ride went more slowly and was kind of hot. It was still mostly enjoyable for me, but Sonora was bored and tired of bouncing around on the washboard (when we reached a short stretch of pavement, she said, "Dad, let's stay on this road, okay?"). When we got home, we tore into the nectarines; the salami hadn't been particularly refreshing.

About a week ago, just after some random fellow resident slowed down her car to briefly chat with us while Elizabeth and I were jogging, I told Elizabeth I think we are small-town people. She immediately agreed. We jogged over a small bridge that spans a gap through which the stream meanders that Sonora and I followed on our ride. That ride confirmed what I told Elizabeth: I like the country. It's not that cities don't have a lot to offer (I told Elizabeth yesterday that I wouldn't mind living in New York City for a couple of years), but they don't have wheat fields and hawk nests and old silos and gravel roads, and sweet, almost-ripe wheat. Perhaps I'll feel differently tomorrow, but today I liked what I saw.

The Ethics of Hunting

2008-07-28T01:08:00.000-07:00

I had an epiphany the other day, and this is how I arrived at it: We are growing a garden, which is an excellent, environmentally sound way to procure food. But, even though it is rewarding--Sonora and I poke around the garden every day and take note of the most minor of changes--it still has a minor negative impact because we use city water to water it. City water takes electricity to refine and to pump; electricity is generated using coal or radioactive material, both of which have unhealthy side effects, and so forth and so on. Wild plants, however, grow from rainwater and require no electrically-powered pump to water and no fossil fuels to run a tractor to plant their seeds. So, I realized, if we could live from wild plants that we collected on foot within walking distance of our house, we could live without much of a negative impact environmentally. This is unrealistic, of course, for many reasons, but I liked the idea and pursued it further.

What about meat? was my next thought.

For a brief moment following this question, I had an image of plucking chunks of meat from raspberry bushes, which is also unrealistic, but then it hit me: hunting is harvesting wild meat. This elementary realization shocked me because I had long ago written off hunting.

I used to go deer hunting in Colorado with my brothers and my dad when I was a kid. We weren't one of those die-hard hunting families with 50 different rifles and extra chest freezers just to hold the three elk we'd "bagged;" if they were lucky (and a deer unlucky), one of the males in the family would kill and bring home one deer a year. They would gut it out and bring the carcass home and hang it up-side-down in a tree to age for a few days in the cold October air. They would slit the skin around its ankles and pull down, as if trying to pull a blanket away from a reluctant child, carving with a knife the white membranes that held the skin to the muscle; the sound it would make was similar to the sound of pulling plastic wrap off a bowl. Then we would bring large chunks of meat and bone, sawed from the main body, into the house, where this animal flesh would bleed onto the kitchen table as it was chopped into steaks and roasts and jerky strips.

It was all pretty gruesome and the house smelled gamy for weeks. I didn't ever like the process very much, nor did the sagebrush-fed meat taste very good to me (I did like the jerky). When I went hunting with my dad or my brothers, I never shot a deer; I don't even remember pointing a rifle at one, but I observed because I thought the knowledge might be important some day. That is, until the last hunting experience I had with my dad.

He shot a doe. It was an easy shot across an open field and she went down. But when we got to her, she wasn't dead and my dad had to finish her off. He took out his knife and approached her, and she stared at him calmly as he approached. Her dark, round, moist eyes peered at him, perhaps at his soul. He straddled the does neck and then plunged the knife through her throat, severing her arteries and opening her esophagus. As she bled out, she stared at him until her eyes went dull.

My dad was silent and when I approached him, he turned his head away. He was crying. I could tell this, though I think he was ashamed. "I hate this part," he mumbled in explanation.

After that, I decided hunting was too painful, for the animal and for the hunter. I figured hunting must cause the hunter to become jaded, insensitive to death, insensitive to his or her own humanity.

The thing is, however, that every time we eat meat, we participate in the death and killing of an animal, of some cow or chicken or pig somewhere in the world that also has searching eyes. The difference is, we don't have to look at them. We get the plastic-wrapped bundle without having to hear the plastic-wrap sound of the skin being torn off. But isn't that jaded? Isn't that insensitive?

And there is the environmental factor to consider. Most meat sold in a grocery store (some co-ops excepting) has been grain-fed--highly inefficient--and given a steady regimen of antibiotics and hormones on a feedlot in the U.S. or New Zealand or somewhere else, shipped to a slaughterhouse, cut up, shipped to a packing plant, packaged, shipped to a grocery store, purchased, and shipped home to a refrigerator. A lot of energy has been wasted on this roast.

A deer or elk feeds on wild, organically-grown plants (unless the animal gets into a farmer's fertilized, insecticized, herbicized crops), lives a relatively fulfilling life, and then it is shot by a hunter; she or he will have to see the animal whose life has just seeped out of it. Unless this hunter is a trophy hunter (a despicable thing, trophy hunting), the hunter will know what she or he is eating and that it cost a life; this person can not hide behind the ignorant screen of cellophane and Styrofoam that suggests that meat costs only money.

There is the economic benefit of hunting as well: $50 or so will buy a license. An adult deer would yield somewhere between 50 and 120 pounds of meat, an elk a lot more. Of course, to have the full savings, instead of taking the carcass to a meat packing plant, you've got to skin it and butcher it yourself, which is messy and time consuming but valuable in that the family knows they are eating an animal that is dead and bleeding on their table because of them.

The thing is, though, that hunting is highly unappealing to me. I hate killing things, even insects. I've forgotten most of what I learned as a boy about gutting and skinning and butchering and packaging. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that hunting is more morally correct than consuming meat purchased at the grocery store. I am becoming convinced that I have two choices: hunting or becoming vegetarian. Elizabeth and I were vegetarians before for a few years and it was difficult to give up meat, but it might be easier than buying and using a rifle.

What do you think? Is hunting more ethical, more moral than just buying meat at a store, or is this recent mode of thought misguided?

Death of the Family Vacation?

2008-07-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

So a few weeks ago, while we were on vacation in Utah, Elizabeth and I heard a blurb about an upcoming story on NPR about the passing of the "Golden Age of the family vacation," as if family vacations are now dead or at least past their prime. We were going to meet a friend at a park in Salt Lake City, so we didn't get to hear the story, but here is what I think they were going to say: Disneyland, airplanes, in-car DVD players, and high gas prices have killed the great American family roadtrip. Maybe they said nothing of the sort, but I'm going to proceed on the assumption that this was the premise of their story.

Of course, I'm not sure I know what a great American family vacation looks like. Here is my image: the family, packed into a car with stuff strapped to the roof, driving to some National Park, or along a historic route, or to see family members who live far away; along the way, the parents lead the children in all manner of time-consuming games to keep the kids from fighting and whining: playing I spy; singing show tunes and children's songs; passing out books and puzzles and yarn; etc. Most of these activities work only for a short while and then the kids are fighting and Dad is yelling and threatening to turn the car around and go home--a stupid threat, even he knows this, but it is tradition and an easy thing to say when he is angry. Through the road trip, the kids get to know their country more fully, bond with their family, and receive mental bookmarks to place in their memories as they become self-actualized.

I am certainly glad for some of the trips we went on when I was a kid. Mind you, we were poor and my experiences reflect this. Some of the experiences I remember were not necessarily pleasant, but I'm still glad for them. Here are a few that stand out in my mind right now:

I don't remember where we were going or how old I was (young), but I remember mountains of snow on either side of the car. We stopped and got out. The road was at the bottom of a seven-foot deep white canyon. The day was fairly warm and the snow was densely packed and taller than both my parents. My dad lifted each of us kids individually up onto the towering snow. Somehow this unexpected snowy encounter became a main attraction in the trip, something we talked about as much as whatever it was we were originally going to see.

On another trip, the family was driving during the summer to some desert location. We traveled in my dad's beat up 1965 baby blue Ford truck. My parents and the baby sat up in the front bench seat. The rest of us rode in the bed of the truck, protected from the wind by a camper shell. On this trip, my parents had left us a case of Shasta soda to quench our thirst, but we worked our way quickly through it and we were beginning to get thirsty again. I also needed to pee. We banged on the window to let my parents know they needed to stop, but they had had enough stopping on behalf of whiny kids (with seven kids, it must have seemed as though every twenty minutes one or the other of the children needed to stop). When I got no response from my parents, my older brother, Clinton, suggested I just pee in one of the empty soda cans, which I did with great relief. When I was finished, I decided to dump my urine out the window. But Dumoan, my oldest brother, grabbed the can from me. He was thirsty and didn't want me wasting the remainder of a soda; apparently he hadn't seen me quietly relieving myself in the corner. I started to tell him that that warm fluid in there was not soda pop, but Clinton shook his head as if to say: "Let's just see what happens." Dumoan took a deep draft of the warm, salty hint-of-ammonia Shasta and then spit it out in horror. Clinton was laughing heartily while I chuckled in disbelief. Dumoan punished us both that day; he failed to see the humor that kept us laughing even while being pounded with fists.

In that same blue truck, we took a trip to a couple of the National Parks in southern Utah. Zion NP stands out in my mind, mostly because it seemed somehow otherworldly, exotic, pre-historic. I remember water falls and trees and weird rock formations. I also remember a shirtless man whose entire torso and arms were covered in tattoos. He was a hairy, tan, big-bellied man and I hiked close behind him, trying to untangle all those images from each other. I had seen tattoos before, but never in this quantity; they were like cave paintings: stories that couldn't begin to tell themselves to me but held some meaning anyway, overlapping stories, some grotesque, some beautiful, some scary, others comforting. All kinds of human emotions wrapped up in ink impregnated in a fat man's skin.

When I was eleven or so, we took a trip to Vegas and stayed in a hotel, an unusual treat for us. My parents, being frugal, chose the cheapest hotel they could find. The whole family slept in a single room with one queen-sized bed. Most of us were strewn out on the dirty carpet, using a pair of pants or a couple of shirts for pillows. Our poor sleep that night, however, was not due to physical discomfort, but rather to the rhythmic knocking of our fellow patrons next door. My parents are fairly sure our neighbor was a prostitute with a customer. They were annoyed and embarrassed to have all their kids hear that display. I can't say for sure what the profession was of the person next door, but I do know I was intrigued by the whole thing.

In southeastern New Mexico, I saw my first cockroach; it was crawling up the shower wall in another inexpensive hotel the whole family slept in. We were on our way from Colorado to Texas. Somehow seeing the cockroach was validating. I had seen thousands of commercials for cockroach killing chemicals and contraptions, but never seen the actual creature that caused Americans to spend millions of dollars to control them. On that trip, I knew we had gone somewhere.

For spring break when I was fourteen, we went to St. George, Utah to visit my maternal grandma. We didn't know that St. George was a spring break Mecca for college and high school students. We went to "the narrows" above the town to shimmy our way up a long crack in the sandstone. It was fun, but what I enjoyed most were the hundreds of physically mature girls sunning themselves in swimsuits on the rocks. I had never seen anything like it.

When I was eighteen, I took a trip with my dad. Since it was just the two of us, I don't know if it qualifies as a family vacation, but it had the feeling of one. This time, however, I did most of the driving while he sat in the passenger's seat. We didn't sing songs or play games. We talked, like we had never talked before. We talked about relationships and love and sex and religion and sorrow and life. When we spoke, I noticed he did not hold back in the discussion; his words and ideas were not sanitized and carefully chosen. They were honest. Our relationship was not like the father and son relationship I had become used to; we were now peers. I was now an adult, and that was the first time I had felt like one.

On this most recent family trip Elizabeth, Sonora, Rowyn and I took, we visited friends in Boise, spent time with Elizabeth's family in Utah, I went backpacking with Clinton, we went camping, to the Lagoon amusement park and to family reunions in Blanding and Logan, Utah. It felt like a family vacation: I snapped at Sonora a couple of times; we stopped occasionally to feed Rowyn or change her diaper. Sonora helped entertain Rowyn, sang songs with us, started learning to play "I spy," and spent lots of time playing with her cousins. She also participated in paper boat races, rode a horse, rode a roller coaster, picked peas and raspberries, learned to fly a kite, went to the dinosaur museum, and saw all of her grandparents. I wonder what, in 30 years, she will remember from this trip.

I certainly hope the family vacation is not dead; if it were, I think we as a nation would be poorer for it. Family vacations provide rare moments in time by which we can gauge the progression of our lives, our development as individuals and as part of a family unit.

Distant Canyons

2008-06-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

I've long felt a sort of mystic connection to Native America, mostly because of where I grew up, my parents, and because of my religion, which sees a connection between ancient Israel and ancient America. The little town I grew up in is surrounded by Ute land, and to the south is the Navajo Indian Reservation. And beyond the Utes and the Navajo in time are the Anasazi, or the Ancestral Puebloans. I have many memories of investigating ruined mesa-top pueblos and sandstone cliff dwellings. Long before my ancestors left Europe, these people lived on the land I grew up on. My parents have also long been interested in Native American cultures: my mom collected Navajo rugs and Hopi Kachina dolls; my dad collected arrowheads and pottery shards. I have worked at a couple of places whose identity relies heavily on indigenous culture: The Anasazi Foundation and Mesa Verde National Park. So last winter when my brother Clinton and I began planning a trip to the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, I felt as though I was preparing for a sort of communion, a return to a part of my spiritual and existential core. The reality, however, turned out to be less romantic. The trip was much shorter than anticipated and made me embarrasingly aware of my distance from the long-dead people I feel a kinship with.

Clinton and I hit the trail last Saturday morning. We started hiking around noon, which was a few hours later than we had hoped to start, but it still left us enough time to get to the spot we had decided would be our destination that day. We began hiking down Sand Canyon trail and were enjoying the slight downhill grade of the trail. Along the way, I pointed out things I had learned from my time at the Anasazi Foundation: which plants make good bow and drill fire sets, which plants are edible, what barks make good tinder. Clinton knew much of this already, but I told him anyway because I was excited to be in the desert again. We were both confident and excited for the challenge and the adventure.

We had prepared well for the trip. We were both in reasonably good shape; we had enough food to easily last seven days; we had a tent, sleeping bags, a stove, a water filter and everything else we would need. We knew from the planning phase onward that the biggest challenge to the trip would be the lack of water. In the summer, none of the streams in the monument run. But from several experiences in Arizona digging in dry creek beds and finding water, and from learning at Mesa Verde that Ancestral Puebloans almost always built their cliff dwellings next to a seep spring, I was sure that I could find water. Still, as the day grew to be very hot, and our 70 pound packs weighed down on us and as the warning of the ranger at the Anasazi Heritage Center ("I don't think there is any water out there") continued to echo through my mind, I became a little less confident.

Most of the first few cliff dwellings we saw were not dwellings at all, but were probably grain storage buildings. There were no reliable sources of water near these that we could find. We did find one dwelling that had obviously been built to be lived in and after poking around a nearby shallow alcove, I found a seep spring. It was not flowing, but the soft sandstone was wet to the touch and could have yielded water with a little effort. Finding some indication of water bolstered my spirits somewhat and we hiked on.

Besides water, another major challenge in to our undertaking was the terrain. The topographical map I was using, I came to realize, used meters instead of feet to show elevation changes, and it was of a scale I wasn't used to. What this amounted to was canyons that were deeper and plateaus that were much higher and more rugged than I had anticipated. Most of our planned route followed no trails; instead we hoped to climb out of one canyon, over a plateau, and into another canyon day after day. The extreme scope of what we had planned began to dawn on us as we sank deeper into our first canyon.

At first, we took several pictures of ruins we noticed in the sides of the canyons, but as we grew more an more tired and as our water supplies diminished, we would simply glance at at a ruin and then continue on, not bothering to take out the camera and document it. That afternoon, when we realized we were not going to make it to the point we had originally intended to reach, we picked a place on the map where two creek beds merged and where I thought we could find water. We climbed over a plateau at a low point and into a sandy creek bed. By this time, we were rationing the little bit of water we had left. We stopped at small grove of cottonwood trees and I took out the small spade Clinton had brought with him and began digging in the sand to look for water. After digging about eight inches down and encountering only dry sand, I decided to hike farther downstream. I left my pack with Clinton (he was trying to rest in the shade, but the deer gnats hounded him until he gave up), and walked about a mile and a half down the creek bed. I stopped at several promising spots and dug a hole a few inches deep with the toe of my boot, but never found any hint of moisture. Finally, when I was much farther from my brother than I had intended to be, I heard water running.

I walked toward the sound of the water and had to cross onto private land to get to it, but I found a little oasis--a large, fast-flowing stream. It didn't look like a natural stream, more a product of irrigation, but it was wet and I was excited. We camped that night under an old cottonwood tree a few hundred yards away from the source of water. That night was enjoyable. We stretched our tired backs, boiled water to poor into our freeze-dried meals, talked about the hike, what we had seen and gone through, discussed our families, and talked about life. We were glad to be alive and felt somehow victorious, as if we had defeated nature. From where we were camped, we had cell phone reception and he called Mandy and I called Elizabeth, to let our wives know we were alive, we had found water.

The next morning, we got an earlier start, though after filling up with water, our first task was to climb up the east-facing side of a plateau. The sun reflected off the rocks and the heat was astonishing even at nine in the morning. Toward the top, after we had scrambled and climbed for most of the morning, I began to feel nauseas. I'm not sure why I was feeling sick, but I quickly lost energy as well and began lagging and wanting to take long breaks. I few times I dry heaved and wished I could just vomit and get it over with. I thought maybe the nausea came on because of the ibuprofen I took that morning to help with the soreness I felt all over, but I was also afraid my body was dehydrated. After we had sat in the shade for about half an hour waiting, without success, for me to recover, Clinton half-jokingly offered me a sprig of Mormon Tea. I chewed on the thin, green eight-inch stick for a moment and then stood up and we started hiking. After about five minutes, my nausea was completely gone and ten minutes after that, my energy level was back to normal.

We hiked at a brisk pace across the top of the plateau and continued on until we hit an old 4x4 road, which we followed farther to the northwest. That day, we were headed for a spring that was somewhere in about the middle of the Monument. We thought if we could find a reliable source of water, we could set up a base camp there and do dayhikes to areas that looked interesting. When we dropped back into a shallow canyon and hiked on top of another plateau, we got to the canyon I thought should contain our spring. We dropped off the side of the plateau, bushwacking our way down through juniper and pinion trees and brush. We hiked downstream for about a mile to where I thought the spring should be. We got there and found nothing. By this time we were tired and we each had maybe two cups of water left. The day was very hot again, and we were losing a lot of water through sweat and through breathing. We walked a little farther downstream to where we had a good vantage point of the lower canyon. We could see a little clump of cottonwood trees among the darker pinion/juniper trees and we decided to head for the cottonwoods. That must be where the spring is.

I think we both knew there would be no spring there, that we would find only dry sand just as we had done every time before when we used cottonwoods as our guides. And besides, the canyon opened up considerably where those cottonwoods were; it was more of a valley than a canyon at that point--not the sort of terrain that produces a spring in a desert. However, we went for it, hoping we would find water. Just as our intuition told us, the creek bed was a dry downstream as it had been above. We dropped down for a rest beneath what would be a waterfall if there had been water. I took out the little hand-sized shovel Clinton had brought and began digging in the sand. It kept collapsing on me, but I kept digging anyway. This, I knew, would be a moment of decision.

I dug the little well about one-and-a-half feet deep, until I hit the sandstone bottom and could dig no more. The sand and rocks were moist, but no water came seeping into the hole, not even a little water pooled in the bottom. In fact, every minute I waited, I notice the damp sand that lined the walls of the well becoming dry as the heat and thirsty air quickly wicked away the moisture in the earth. That is when I knew we were done. To continue on would be stupid. By continuing on, trying to find the elusive spring, we had already put several more miles between ourselves and our cars.

Hiking back out of that canyon was tedious and tiring. We had decided to head for the cars and go camping instead in the mountains near a river, where we would lie back in its cool waters and be refreshed in its clear abundance. But the cars proved elusive. We followed Clinton's GPS, which he had used to mark where the cars were. As the crow flies, it placed us only a few miles from the cars, but as the hiker walks, we were several times that distance away. We climbed and staggered until we ran out of water. Clinton began to get nauseas, and his nausea was definitely a result of dehydration. He had urinated only one time since we started the trip a day and a half earlier. His muscles were beginning to cramp. Both of us were tired, almost unnaturally tired. We stopped in a little patch of shade. I could tell that Clinton wasn't going to be able to continue much longer.
After we rested for a few minutes, I suggested I leave my pack with him and that I take the GPS, find the cars, and bring my car back and pick him up. We had been following a 4x4 trail for a while and I thought I might be able to get the car back to him. He agreed to my suggestion without reservation. He held out to me his Nalgene bottle. It had maybe a fourth of a cup of water in it. "Take this with you, man," he said. I protested. He needed it more than me. He shook his head, "Just take it. You'll be walking; I'll be sitting here. You need it." I took the orange bottle and his GPS and set out. The GPS said I had 1.9 miles to go, but it ended up taking me five miles to get to the cars, as I had to follow a road of some sort so that I would know how to get the car back to my brother. Strangely, as I was hiking, I did not feel tired or thirsty. I maintained a pace of about 4 miles per hour and found my way back to my car.

I was only able to get my car to within about 3/4 of a mile of Clinton. The road became impassible, but I brought him some water I had left in the car and we hiked out alright. That night, when we finally got out of the Canyons of the Ancients, we didn't go to the mountains to bathe in a river. Instead, we headed for a hotel in Cortez, a hotel with beds and running water. I told Clinton I felt like the land chewed us up and spit us out. "That was rough. That was rough," we kept telling each other; that was rough.

The thing that kept coming to my mind, still keeps coming to my mind, is that thousands of people lived where we could not survive for two days. Tree ring data taken from logs used in Ancestral Puebloan dwellings suggest that the climate 1,000 years ago was not much different than it is today (it has gotten a little warmer and a little dryer). That means there was only about as much water then as there is today. But they survived, they built rock homes with square walls and multiple stories. They built large, round, deep ceremonial spaces using only sticks and rocks. They made pottery and painted intricate designs on it. They created art.

When I realized these things, I realized I am not as close to these ancient desert dwellers as I had previously assumed. We grew up on the same land, but I grew up with electricity, with factory-made clothing and footwear, with a well dug by a machine, in a house built out of lumber made of trees hewn hundreds of miles from where they would be nailed together into a structure.

I'm glad we went; I enjoyed spending time with my brother, and I am glad for the reminder of the immense cultural structure we take for granted but which keeps us from dying. But I feel a little more removed from the ancient people who played a part in constructing the mystique of my childhood. We aren't as alike as I had previously thought.

Mountain Song

2008-06-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

In just under a week, we are going to leave for Utah and Colorado. Elizabeth is going to Utah and I'm going to Colorado. My brother and I plan to go on a 6.5 day, 90 mile backpacking trip around and through the Canyons of the Ancient National Monument. In preparation for this trip, I've been half-heartedly training by riding my bike to and from work and donning my backpack.

When Elizabeth's sister Carrie and her son Asher came to visit, we took a short trip to one of the only mountain-like features in the area: Kamiak Butte. A 4-mile trail climbs the butte, follows along its crest, and then drops back down to the parking lot. I decided to carry Sonora in our kid backpack and hike the trail quickly to get into shape. Elizabeth carried Rowyn in a baby sling thing, and Carrie pushed Asher in a jogger.

The thing that always surprises when I visit the butte is how much it feels like wilderness. In reality, it is little more than a large, wooded bump that rises 1,300 feet above the surrounding rolling fields. But once the trees surround me and my feet hit the loamy earth and the musky air fills my lungs, I feel as if I am in a mountain range.

On this occasion, I was trying my best not to be distracted by my surroundings. Kamiak Butte was a great place to train for a backpacking trip, sort of an outdoor gym. But as we reached the top of the the first ascent, Sonora said "This mountain sings a pretty song." Her words stopped me.

When I asked her what she meant, she did not elaborate, but I knew what she meant, and I am immensely grateful she hears that song. I stopped then to listen, to feel, for myself, as I should have done earlier. "Should we wait for Mom and Carrie?" I asked. Sonora said we should, and we did. The hike was slower after that, but more enjoyable. When we reached a downed log, Sonora asked to walk on it, so I took her out of the backpack and she scampered around on the log, which is something I always liked doing, still like doing, when I am in a forest. She walked the rest of the hike.

When we came to a fork in the trail, we decided to go up to the summit. Sonora and Asher climbed up the trail to the top. They proceeded with gusto; they didn't know that reaching a summit is often significant to people, but they seemed driven to ascend. At the summit, they climbed onto and jumped from small boulders and we all stared for a moment at the falling, fiery sun. We returned to the cars just after dark.

At two months old, Rowyn is too young to let us know of her recreational likes and dislikes, but Sonora has definitely indicated a love of nature, and that brings me deep satisfaction. Part of me wonders why I care whether or not my daughters like to be outside. They have their own personalities; they will inevitably have likes and dislikes different from mine, but this one matters a lot to me. I think it has something to do with my perception of wholesomeness and fulfillment. Hearing a mountain sing seems to me to be akin to feeling life, to tasting beauty, to embracing kindness, to hearing God. I want my girls to know that, even though they move about freely, they are planted in their planet, they are a part of it: the dirt under their fingernails and between their toes is the dirt that grows their food and holds up the tree that cradles the robin's nest; it is the dirt that holds their house up, that will be the receptacle of memories, will harbor the imprint of their tender feet, so that when they return to that place in many years, the dirt will enshroud them in memories of running and planting and playing and singing and will say softly, over and over, "you were here, you were here, you were alive, you are rooted."

Interiority

2008-05-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

My daughter Sonora provided me with an eye-opening experience a couple of months ago. As the desktop wallpaper on our computer, I posted a photo of Elizabeth and me from the summer of 2000, when we were tramping around Germany. Sonora saw the photo and said, "There's mommy. Who is that man with Mommy?"

A similar experience occurred a week or two ago. A colleague of mine, a history instructor on our campus, was browsing through this blog. She saw the photos of Elizabeth and me when we were working at Anasazi. She did a double-take and said "Is that you? That doesn't look like you." When I burst out laughing, she did some backpedaling and said, "It's just that you look more mature, wiser, now."

I know I've aged noticeably in the last 8 - 10 years. I've also gained some weight; I could stand to lose about 20 pounds. This extra weight shows itself off well in my rounder, jollier face. But I think the most striking differences between then and now are those that outwardly demonstrate my place in society. Back when Elizabeth and I were working at Anasazi, and then for the first year or so after we were married, we were blissfully outside the mainstream. We traveled and lived on a shoestring. We bucked against convention (as faithful Mormons, our "bucking" would seem fairly mild to some). We analyzed everything. We wore home-made moccasins and necklaces whose cords were darkened and made shiny with neck grease. We considered the joys of nudism. We didn't always shower; we didn't always shave; we didn't always cut our hair. Sometimes we wore the wrong genre of clothing to social gatherings just because we didn't want to conform.

A few years ago, when the seep willow necklace broke that Elizabeth had made for me at Anasazi, I felt a sadness I couldn't then understand. I wore that tan necklace for several years after we were married. I never took it off. In the shower, I would slide the necklace up my neck and soap myself, then let the necklace roll back into its familiar resting place just above my collarbones. When I wore T-shirts, the wooden necklace would display itself by hanging just over the neckline of the shirt. Button-up shirts, however, would completely obscure the necklace. Sometimes, when I wore a semi-formal shirt, I would wear the necklace on the outside like a bow tie or a priest's collar.

When it broke, it slid down inside my shirt, warm against my skin. I removed it carefully, holding both ends of the thin artificial sinew thread that had supported it for so long. I carried it carefully so that the hand-cut wooden segments wouldn't slip off, and put the whole thing in a bowl. I remember it piling in like water. I've meant to fix the necklace. Elizabeth has meant to fix it. But neither of us has, maybe because it broke around the time when I started wearing to work or school more shirts with collars, around the time we got pregnant with Sonora. Maybe we haven't fixed it because it was the last vestige of a stage in our lives that is forever gone.

The weird thing, though, is that I still see myself as that person, the one backpacking through Europe and sleeping in random clusters of trees, the one who got excited to go on multi-day "primitive" hikes with teenagers, the one who would wear knee-high mocassins and carry a hand-made leather bag on a cross-continental flight. When people don't recognize that younger me, I am surprised, not because I'm made aware that I'm getting old and fat, but because people no longer recognize a part of me I consider essential to my collective identity.

I think we still struggle to resist convention and analyze life, but it happens in such benign ways as to be almost imperceptible. We diaper the baby in re-usable cloth. We only mow our lawn once or twice a month. I bike to work most days. We don't have TV. Elizabeth grinds wheat and wears socks with her skirt to church. Sometimes I wear Chacos sandals with my slacks. But in most ways, we are bland, normal, main stream.

***

A few months after we got back from Germany, before we had been married a year, Elizabeth and I were backpacking in southern Utah. As we were climbing out of a large sandstone valley in the Escalante drainage area, we paused when we noticed beach-like ripples in the rock. The ripples continued on subtly at that same altitude for as far as we could see. This was part of some prehistoric lake, a great body of water. Probably, buried deep in the stone, there were millions of fossils of sea life: shells and plants and fish vertebrae. But to most people, this was only a desert. Shrubs clung to sandy depressions, but the water was gone. Hard, mature stone stared back at us. We were thirsty, and we hiked on.

2008-05-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

Remembering Anasazi

2008-04-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

I'm collecting memories, Anasazi memories. I'm picking up an old project I've picked up several times before and I would like your assistance. Any of you out there who worked on the trail or who knew me, Elizabeth (Liz), Tanya, Laura, Sunny, Joe, BJ, Ezekiel, etc. during the year of 1999, please send me a list of memories associated with Anasazi. And by anyone, I mean family, friends, anyone who may have encountered us during this time. I just need some memory joggers; I've forgotten a lot of stuff. I don't care what format the memories come in; go ahead, just puke them onto the screen in a comment to this entry or send them to me at my E-mail address: elijoal@yahoo.com.

For inspiration, take a look at a post by Tanya from a few months back.

By the way, the project I'm working on is a book, a memoir, of our Anasazi year. I just sent off a book proposal to a small publisher. We'll see what happens.

2008-04-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

Spring is still sputtering along, trying to get some traction. I've started commuting to work on my (sometimes Elizabeth's) bike. It is a little over eight miles each way and it has been pretty cold in the mornings. The forecast is still calling for rain/snow for tonight and tomorrow, so I thought I would rebel against the weather and post a few photos from a warm, sunny day we had a week and a half ago. My oldest sister, Kristinia, and Damian, one of her sons, came to visit us for a few hours on their way back home from my younger sister's wedding. Kristinia and Damian live in Phoenix and they seemed to bring some warmth with them that weekend.

2008-04-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

So much of my reality has to do with perspective.

Sonora has usually seemed like such a small person. She was a baby and then a toddler, and now she is a kid, but still small and very much a child. However, since Rowyn was born, Sonora suddenly seems much older and much larger. A few nights after Rowyn was born, Elizabeth heard Sonora crying and went in to comfort her. Elizabeth took Rowyn with her and set Rowyn down on the foot of the bed and picked up Sonora in the darkness. Elizabeth panicked, because the girl she struggled to pick up wasn't Sonora at all, but some giant child a kidnapper must have put there after he stole our child. Of course, it really was Sonora, but she suddenly seemed huge after holding an eight-pound baby. For a few moments, Elizabeth's body coursed with fear and adrenaline when she thought someone had swapped kids with us.

A few days ago, I was chatting with Howard, my brother-in-law, about how I was frustrated with how cold of a spring it had been so far. That is, I was frustrated until he reminded me that our nephew, Bryant, who is in eastern Russia, would probably love to enjoy the kind of weather I was complaining about.

The other day, I wrung my cold hands in front of my boss and explained to him that the room I had just taught my class in had been at a temperature of 60 degrees for the whole hour. He acknowledged that there was a problem with the heating system, but also mentioned that many countries, including Japan (I have not verified this) don't heat or cool their classrooms. Their students and teachers simply adjust. Our building is heated using natural gas, he reminded me, and natural gas, when burned, produces carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. "Americans are going to need to become a lot tougher in the coming decades," he said. I agree with him.

Food prices in the U.S. have increased substantially, including the prices of rice, wheat, and other basic foods. Elizabeth and I were lamenting the fact that to build up our food storage will now cost us noticeably more than it would have a year ago. I heard a report on the radio yesterday that in Haiti the price of a bowl of rice had recently doubled from 40 cents to 80 cents. Most people in Haiti live on about two dollars a day. People are rioting to eat.

Sometimes I grasp that that which I have mistaken for forever is really only today. Sometimes I am shocked to realize how abnormal my idea of normalcy is. Sometimes words such as "deserve" and "need" taste like poisonous opiates.

2008-04-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

The Birth

Saturday the 5th was kind of a sad day for Elizabeth. The night before, she had had false labor; at one point in the day, she was crying. "I thought we were going to have a baby by now," she said when I looked inquiringly at her. So that night, when she came out of the bedroom and said she was in labor, she was a little suspicious of her contractions and their regularity. She didn't want to be let down again, and she didn't want to bother Margaret, our midwife, and have her drive down from Spokane for a false labor.

She did call Margaret, though, and then timed her contractions, which confirmed to her that this time it was real. Margaret began the drive down, and we waited.

A few months ago, when Elizabeth expressed her desire for a home birth, I had some misgivings. What if there were problems? What if the midwife gets here too late? After all, Spokane is kind of far away. Will I have to do more stuff? I'm not that good at doing too much stuff. Sort of like a missionary, Elizabeth resolved my concerns and even showed me a documentary, The Business of Being Born, as well as several YouTube videos of at-home childbirths. Somehow, my anxieties disappeared and by the time Margaret arrived, having a baby at home seemed like the most normal thing to do. Now I'm really glad Elizabeth was persistent in presenting to me the beauties of home birth.

Around 1 A.M., Margaret and her assistant Teri arrived, and Elizabeth and I climbed into the hot tub. I felt a moment of husbandly pride; I had fixed the hot tub a month or so earlier. I'm not all that helpful during birth--I usually just stand near Elizabeth and wait for her to tell me to do something--so having at least the hot tub to contribute eased my existential guilt somewhat. The water was pleasantly warm and I mostly just sat there while she moaned her way through two hours of contractions. She checked on me several times, asking if I was doing okay. I thought it was a funny question: How hard is it to sit in a hot tub for a couple of hours and hold somebody's hand every few minutes?

It was during the hot tub hours that I really felt that this whole home birth thing was pretty great. We were outside, under the clouds and stars, having a baby. The midwife and her assistant checked on us every once in a while, but it was just Elizabeth and I most of the time. At one point, about an hour after we got into the hot tub, a distant coyote yapped several times. Cool, I thought; we are still wild.

When Elizabeth started feeling the urge to push, we went inside the house and she continued laboring in the bedroom. Another of my concerns about having a home birth had concerned the messiness of it all: What happens when her water breaks? What about the blood? What do we do with the placenta? It seems many people have had these same concerns, and a month or two before the birth, the midwife sent Elizabeth a list of things to do to prepare for the messy part of birth. Earlier in the evening, we put new sheets on our bed, then we put a cheap shower curtain over those. Next we put an old fitted sheet over the shower curtain. Everything else was pretty much the way it had been at the hospital for Sonora's birth: the assistant kept putting those blue absorbent pads under Elizabeth to catch any fluids, and it worked.

When we came back into the house, I suddenly felt an urge to look after our guests. They weren't really guests, but that is the category my mind placed them in. In case they wanted to take a nap during lulls in the delivery, I pulled out the futon, put on sheets and blankets, and then I got snacks and drinks ready. Of course, I probably should have been concentrating on Elizabeth, but I suddenly felt the pressures of being a host. This feeling persisted throughout the rest of the night until they left shortly after dawn, and at times this innate obligatory sense became oppressive: I wanted to be with Elizabeth, to share in the experience, but I also felt compelled to look after the well being of the two women who had come to look after Elizabeth's and the baby's well-being. If there were any drawback to having the baby at home, this drive to be accommodating would be it. At the hospital, I knew it was someone else's job to make everyone comfortable, and I didn't worry about it.

Elizabeth finished laboring in the bedroom. At first, she lay on the bed, and then she moved to the foot of the bed, where she knelt on the floor and rested her head on a pillow on the bed. When the contractions came, she screamed or moaned into the pillow, but even muffled by the pillow and bed, she was pretty loud. At one point, Sonora came tottering in from her room. She looked disoriented and half-asleep. Afraid that she would prove to be an annoying distraction to Elizabeth, I rushed Sonora back to bed. The next time Sonora came in, Elizabeth was very close to delivering the baby. I didn't know how close, or I wouldn't have left to put Sonora to bed again.

A minute or two after I put Sonora back in her bed, the midwife's assistant appeared and whispered "Baby, baby," and gestured excitedly for me to follow her. While I was out, Elizabeth had delivered the baby and, with a little assistance from Margaret, had caught our baby with her own hands and carried her into the world. I arrived back in the bedroom at 4:15 A.M. to find Elizabeth kneeling on the floor, her naked body embracing a mewing, vernix-covered newborn baby. Elizabeth seemed to be trying to embrace the baby with every part of her, to enfold the baby with the outsider of her self the way she had done with the inside of herself. "Go ahead, lift her to your chest," the midwife said; "there's plenty of cord." Elizabeth straightened and lifted the baby nearer her heart. Later that morning, I overheard Teri, Margaret's assistant, telling Margaret, "it was a beautiful picture, the way she held that baby; her face just lit up with joy and amazement. It would have made a great photo." And she was right, when I walked in, I saw an expression of rapturous disbelief. From the look on Elizabeth's face, she was experiencing one of those moments of pure, mostly inexplicable emotion.

After Margaret clamped off the cord, I cut it and then held the baby while Elizabeth delivered the placenta. After that, my memories blur somewhat. At some point, Margaret stitched up a small tear Elizabeth had sustained in the delivery. The big stuff was over, everything had gone well, and we were all tired. But there is a moment after that that stands out. The baby was a few degrees too cold, so Margaret said I needed to lay her on a heating pad or initiate skin-to-skin contact. I took off my shirt, unwrapped the baby, and laid her on my chest. I think it is then that I realized I have a new baby too. This isn't only Elizabeth's baby. With her head on my sternum, the baby whimpered occasionally, but didn't cry. She tried out her fingers, flexing and un-flexing them, lightly scratching the skin on my chest with her tiny fingernails. When Margaret came to wrap up the baby and do the initial inspection, I felt sad to part with her.

Margaret measured and weighed her, looked at her skin color, tested reflexes and tone, gave her a vitamin K shot, and wrapped her up again. The hand-scale she used said the baby weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces (though a few days later, a digital scale put her at 8 lbs. 10 oz. She had gained weight due to Elizabeth's two milk factories, so initially she was probably somewhere in between those two measurements). She was 21.5 inches tall. Elizabeth lifted the baby to her breast and after a couple of failed attempts, the baby latched on well. She has been eating well since.

After everything was done, Teri cleaned up, and we removed the sheet and the shower curtain. A friend of ours took Sonora. Elizabeth, the baby, and I slept in our own bed in our own house. It was a very good experience overall. We hadn't had a bad experience in the hospital when Sonora was born (we had a great midwife then, too), but it was relaxing, comfortable, and somehow fulfilling to have the baby in our own home.

At first, we decided to name our baby Juniper, but after a couple of days, we decided on Rowyn. Her full name is Rowyn Leavy Lee. Leavy was my maternal great-great grandma's name. She was a pretty amazing woman (her name was spelled Levy, but I didn't want people to think of tax levy, so I added an a in to the mix).

A couple of days later, Elizabeth's sister Vanessa and our friend Kathryn came to see us. I took a couple of photos right after the birth (I've included a few of them here), but all of the cute ones below were taken by Vanessa.

2008-04-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

Times have been a little strange since Elizabeth got back from Utah a couple of weeks ago. She has been "nesting" the whole time, except when she was too exhausted from sinus infections, ear infections, and bronchitis to move around. I've been quite impressed with her stamina and energy lately, though. She goes to bed early and then I stay up much too late reading. The next day, I feel tired and wonder how my wife, who is due to deliver a baby in less than a week, is able to clean the house, organize craft and entertainment bins for Sonora to have constructive stuff to do when Elizabeth is occupied with the newborn, cook and freeze dinners, and organize baby clothes and diapers. At the end of almost every day last week, I felt guilty when I realized I hadn't done very much to help Elizabeth. Sometimes I think I'm a pretty great husband, but lately, when I realize I've spent most of my time at home watching my very pregnant wife work, my positive image of myself is shattered. Today Elizabeth made a list of things for me to do that included fixing a couple of things around the house and washing the windows. I completed the major things on the list, made dinner, and spent a lot of time entertaining Sonora, while also at least sort of listening to all the sessions of conference. So, for one shining day, I felt like a good husband again. It won't last; my lazy side will win out. But it was nice having at least one day during which I didn't feel the slightest bit guilty. The nesting bug must be catching, if only temporary.

Spring is coming rather slowly to the Inland Northwest. It is supposed to snow throughout the night. A Dar Williams song says "February was so long that it lasted into March." This year, February is lasting until April. Our garden is mostly ready for planting, but this is definitely not planting weather. Unfortunately, I really want fresh garden produce right now; I want to make gallons and gallons of fresh salsa. Ripe tomatoes seem like an eternity away.

We've had a couple of visitors. Elizabeth's sister Vanessa came down with her kids from Spokane and also transported Elizabeth's sister Carrie and her son. I had fixed up the old hot tub that came with the house and the kids had fun in it. Unfortunately, I hadn't gotten the water chemistry part of it down yet and the water was pretty murky. The kids didn't mind, and I haven't gotten any reports of weird skin rashes, so nothing was lost, but I felt a little uncomfortable inviting our guests to enjoy our cloudy water. I've since gotten it right and Elizabeth, Sonora and I have been enjoying a clear hot tub.

Carrie and her son stayed for a couple of days. I think they were our first overnight visitors at our new house. There is something validating about having people come to see you. We live in a pretty out of the way place, so there will probably not be many people coming to visit. We got some good tractor (that's what we call our riding lawnmower) time in on a day that almost felt like spring.

Well, Elizabeth just walked out of the bedroom and said "Okay, I'm in labor," so I'd better go. We need to contact the midwife and give her time to drive the 75 miles from Spokane to get here before the baby arrives. Because of a mixture of sicknesses, a marriage, and people moving, virtually all of the people who otherwise might have been here for the birth or helped out afterward are not going to be around, but I think with all that nesting Elizabeth has done, she has prepared us pretty well.

2008-03-04T00:06:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try linking to a newer song Elizabeth wrote a while ago. It sort of fits the mood of the post below. Enjoy.

2008-03-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

When Elizabeth leaves, I get all sappy and kind of sad. I held out for about a week this time by reading at night, but now I'm really noticing her absence. It's a weird sort of sadness that settles over me when she is gone, and it is deepened by music. Slow, heavy music becomes more appealing at such times and all music seems to be more meaningful and heavier. This auditory weight seems to take on mass and settle into my chest cavity, widening the absence. Right now, I'm listening to that kind of music.

In a way, this feeling is strangely enjoyable. It is similar to that sadness that drove me as a teenager to get on my bicycle and ride for miles along the only paved road that ran out of the village I grew up in and then, miles from my house, just as night was setting in, get off my bike and yell out the name of the girl I had a crush on as if she could hear me and feel my longing. Or the feeling I would get as a teenager that would draw me out of the house to wander, again at dusk, the dusty fields that bordered the Ute reservation, wondering if there really might be an edge where the world drops off into nothingness. Or the time I drove all night from Mesa, Arizona to Colorado because I had a feeling my dad was going to die. He didn't die, but I had many invaluable conversations with my parents because I thought I might never see one of them again. I also climbed onto the roof of their house and watched a sunrise from up there; it was a fiery orange and yellow and to watch it felt strangely like listening to heavy music, like listening to a poem I could feel but not quite understand.

At times like these, my mind inevitably turns toward death. I wonder what it would feel like to lose her and the unborn baby and maybe even Sonora. The emptiness in my chest grows and the weight gets heavier. My arms feel as if they will sink through the chair, through the floor, stopping only at the earth. I picture my inner self falling, collapsing, and then lying like a slug on the ground, letting everything else go, letting emotion spill out like water from a burst balloon. I don't allow myself to fully imagine these possibilities because I don't want to feel that bad and I know that, until it happens, I will never have any idea really how bad that would feel. These thoughts come about any time Elizabeth and I are apart for more than a few days. But as I said, I don't mind this feeling so much because it reminds me of the connection we have. It is a sadness that reminds me that our separation is only temporary, the pain mostly of the imagined sort.

And it carries with it a certain creative energy that makes me want to at least partially see past the superfluous, as happened the time I went to visit my parents in Colorado. In a way, it is cleansing and re-focusing. Part of me wants to get up from wherever I am, whatever I am doing, and go to her, to wander through fields at dusk or ride a bike down highways until I get to her; it's like some kind of weird magnet that my conscious mind is only partially aware of, something I can feel, something my self can feel but that I don't totally understand, though understanding it isn't important somehow.

I'm going to describe an experience that is unabashedly cheesy, but that ties into what I'm feeling right now. A few years ago, Elizabeth and I went to listen to a well-established author read from one of his books. The reading was held in a building that had a lot of artwork--paintings and sculptures--scattered about. Before the reading, we viewed and pondered on the art works, admiring some of them. At one point, I scanned the whole room, took it all in. There was one image that really stood out to me in that survey, but I couldn't remember which one. I just knew that I found it to be beautiful, sublime, and moving, and it somehow made me feel almost giddy. I re-surveyed the room, trying to find the piece of art that had made me feel that way, but I couldn't find it, so I went through the catalog of images in my mind. I realized with some delight that the image that had so moved me was Elizabeth's face as she stared at a work on the wall; I had unconsciously swept her up in my survey of the art collected there and she had made all the other works pale.

Since she has been gone, along with the feeling of sadness and weight, I've been having feelings similar to the Elizabeth-as-art feeling. I might see a photo of her and for a brief instant, before my mind fully recognizes her, I will feel a rush of positive associations with the image. The same thing happened when I saw a picture of my daughter this morning, a picture in which she is making a funny face. Before it registered that I was looking at Sonora, I had a flash of emotion: love, fun, protectiveness, adoration; in the next instant, when I realized I was looking at my daughter, I had a sudden urge to chase her around the house and then swing her on a blanket and toss her onto the couch, to read her a book and teach her a few more German words. But then I realized she and Elizabeth were gone and I stored that urge away; I will retrieve it when they return.

2008-02-29T22:50:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth and Sonora have been gone for five days. They are visiting Elizabeth's family in Utah; Elizabeth's grandfather passed away and they are going to go to his funeral. Grandpa Porter was a very good person. I didn't meet him until he was well into his eighties and stooped with age, but his smile still was young and his kindness full and genuine. I'll miss him, though for several years he has been more than ready to go and be with his wife, whom he loved fully. They were one of those couples who made it, who provide young couples with hope; after more than five decades of being together, they still took obvious delight in each other's presence. After she died, he sort of deflated and seemed to gain some hope from each passing sicknesses, as if he was thinking: this one might be the one that takes me away to see her again.

And so Elizabeth has gone away to be with her family and to remember her grandfather. I would have gone also, except that I can't miss more than a day or two of teaching class. She didn't want to make the trip as short as it would have to be to get me back to class, so she drove the 650 miles without me, keeping Sonora occupied with a steady stream of toys and snacks (along the way, Sonora had one of those milestone moments: she peed on the side of the road; Elizabeth told me over the phone and we were both proud of our daughter).

The trip to see her family came at a good time for Elizabeth; she has been missing a connection with other women (she even read The Red Tent for a second time recently, though she usually doesn't read books twice). She wanted to be surrounded by femininity and her seven sisters and mother could provide for this need and they have been. Though she loves our house and our yard and Sonora and me, she gets lonely out here in our village. There are very few women she can connect with and those few are usually quite busy. So when she decided to leave for a week, I was glad for her; she could lower her bucket into a river of femaleness and refill herself.

The problem is that she will come home. I miss her and she is beginning to miss me, but she will soon feel the absence of her sisters when she gets back here, especially as she approaches child birth. Elizabeth will be doing a home delivery and would like nothing more than to have women around to support her who loved her. One will be there for sure and maybe two, but I sense in her a desire to be completely enshrouded and buoyed up by women who were once girls with her. They won't be able to come because the distance is too wide and lives are rooted where they are, but the desire is there.

Soon after Elizabeth and I got married eight years ago, Grandpa Porter visited me to tell me to always treat Elizabeth with respect, love, and patience, no matter what. I've tried hard in my own way to do these things, and, along the way, I've also somehow added this expectation: her complete happiness is my responsibility. She has told me this is a ridiculous expectation and I mostly agree with her, but it is deep-rooted. The thing is, and she is usually mostly glad for this, I'm not a woman. No matter the health of our relationship, I'm a man who does not provide a feminine connection. I will of course be at the birth to support her, to assist her, but I can't be a sister.

Elizabeth is gone right now, and I miss her; I feel a little bit deflated. The wonderful thing is that she will be coming home, and she will keep coming home for a long time. We are slowly becoming no longer a young couple; in less than two years, we will have been married ten years. In forty years, I hope she and I will will have a relationship comparable what her grandparents had at that age. I guess I just need to remember that her sisters and the occasional close friend will be a necessary part of her happiness, and therefore part of mine.

2008-02-17T23:15:00.000-08:00

This morning, Sonora and I went for a long walk. It was still foggy and cold when we started out, but I knew the day would soon warm beyond freezing. We came to a spot in the road where the ice was thin and milky white above nothing. I don't really know why ice freezes in flat sheets above a nearly-dry depression in the ground, but I remembered searching out this easy prey when I was a child. "Step on it." I told Sonora and she walked tentatively forward onto the icy patch. It cracked and fell in with a deep, thin, hollow crunch. She laughed and began stomping all around until the whole thing had fallen to pieces; it looked much like a window pane would have after receiving the same treatment. I laughed with my daughter.

One of the unexpected joys of fatherhood has been rediscovering some of the things I liked as a kid. I had forgotten, until the walk this morning, about hollow ice on dirt roads in the late winter. It made me recall other things like sledding down icy roads on steel-runner sleds, or gently eating the very thin ice that forms in protruding ledges from the snow as it melts, coalesces, and then freezes in a day's time. When I was a child and heard the stories of the Children of Israel, I imagined that manna must somehow be like those thin films of ice that stuck out toward me from the ground, offering themselves up for me to collect and enjoy.

I am glad for the reminders Sonora's discoveries give me that I am still with myself, that every day of me is still in me like a hundred thousand Russian dolls packed into one; it is comforting and somehow wonderful. I wonder which of Sonora's memories, in twenty or thirty years from now, will remind her of this idea, will draw her back to her youth, to walking on a dirt road on a winter day that whispers of spring, breaking up irrational ice.

2008-02-10T00:28:00.000-08:00

I don't mean to dwell too much on pregnancy and birth, but ideas and topics of discussion concerning birth and pregnancy seem to be enwombing our little family. One thing that has struck me of late is how different the experience in the uterus is from how I had previously imagined it. I've heard the womb being compared to The Garden of Eden: it is warm, comfortable, safe. Getting born is kind of like being thrust out of The Garden: it is cold, scary, dangerous, and annoying. In fact, I even read a book once that suggested that one of the strongest unconscious desires humans posses is the drive to return to the womb. At the time that sounded like an interesting idea. Now I think it is dumb.

Granted, during the first six months following conception, life in the womb might actually be kind of interesting. The fetus has room to flip around, sort of stretch out a little bit. When Mom's belly brushes against a sharp corner, Baby barely feels it for all the amniotic fluid protecting it. But in the third trimester, when the baby is approaching some form of cogitation, when the baby might actually be able to think: "You know, I don't have it so bad, especially compared to all those kids who have to breathe air and wear coats in the cold and be shushed quiet in church," then the baby flips upside-down, and that, I imagine, is when things become less idyllic.

Our baby has apparently turned; she is head-down. Her head is shoved into the top of my wife's pelvis and it is going to stay that way (hopefully, at least for Elizabeth) until Elizabeth delivers the baby in mid-April. What kind of Garden of Eden is that? It would be like wearing a motorcycle helmet that didn't ever move when you tried to turn your head. And you are upside down for months at a time. And you are growing larger and larger, filling up the already cramped space with your legs and arms, which now have to stay folded up all the time. I imagine the experience being similar to going cave exploring and falling into a long hole head-first, a hole that has a recessed area at the bottom into which your head so nicely fits that you can't even turn your head from side to side. This walls of this hole encompass you so thoroughly that your arms are pinned against your sides. Your legs are pressed down against your butt by a pile of rubble that collapsed on top of them. Sure it might be warm and maybe even sort of comfortable in a weird way, but this would also be disconcerting, maybe even alarming.

As for metaphorically returning to the womb, I don't think my unconscious mind longs for it. Give me cold, uncomfortable, bright-lighted confusion. At least I can stretch my legs when I need to.

I know you might be thinking: "Yes, but a fetus has never called anything home but the uterus; she doesn't know any better and maybe she even appreciates her mother's hospitality. The fetus is probably relishing the knowledge that until she squeezes out under that bony arch, she is worry-free: no debt; no obligations; no skinned knees; no one to offend or be offended by." But really, think about it, really think about the physical dimensions of the third trimester for the baby. I think no one (even someone who doesn't really think yet) would like that. Maybe the trauma of birth is a welcome relief.

2008-02-07T15:57:00.000-08:00

Snow has been on my mind lately, probably because a lot of it has been on the ground here. School was canceled three times last week. I got to spend a lot of time with Sonora and Elizabeth, which was great. On Thursday, Sonora and I went sledding for an hour, then we built a large snowman (which later fell over because we built it on a hill), and then I piled up snow and dug out a snow cave, or "the little snow house" as Sonora calls it.

We got another six inches last night, but the temperature warmed up to the mid thirties by the time I left for work, so the snow had compacted down to three inches by that time. It is supposed to get into the forties each day for the foreseeable future, so the snow is going to turn to slush and mud and then go away altogether. It will be nice to have dry roads to walk/ride/drive on again, but I'll miss the snow a little bit. There is something romantic, innocent, secretive about the snow. Of course, apple blossoms, warm earth, and late sunsets also have their charm and I'm mostly ready for their approach.

Speaking of renewal and life and stuff like that, it looks as if Elizabeth might get her home delivery after all. The midwife she found a few months ago moved and was no longer available, but my resourceful wife found a highly-regarded midwife in Spokane who is willing to travel down to us (1.5 hours) to do the delivery. Elizabeth was almost giddy when she found this woman. I really hope it works out well with her. Elizabeth is looking forward to the delivery; she wants everything to go the way she has it planned. When discussing the apparent distaste many American women express toward birth, she said she didn't really understand it. She is pumped; she compared birth to preparing for and then running a marathon: it is long and painful and hard, but rewarding and kind of exhilarating. I'm glad I'm not doing it. I don't think I'd be so chipper about it. I think I'd probably describe it as sweating and straining to build a big house (the belly, the back pains, the indigestion), then having the house collapse on top of me (the birth), finding relief only when someone had dragged me out from under the wreckage (a few weeks later when the body is sort of recovered). Of course, the actual baby is pretty cool.

2008-01-28T14:41:00.000-08:00

I try not to think about my own life too much because I have a tendency to feel guilty for my happiness. Here is a case in point: about a year and a half ago, the position I was teaching in at the community college where I work was change from adjunct to full-time. That meant that a national search had to be conducted. There was a chance I would not get the job because someone better qualified could get it and then I would be out of a job. Over 70 people, some with PhDs, applied for the position. I have an MFA, a terminal degree, but it is still only a master's degree. Three finalists were chosen for an interview; I was one of them. I'm told that one of the finalists, a guy who had a PhD and several years worth of experience teaching at a university, flew all the way from the east coast to interview for the position. But he didn't get the job; I did, in part because I had already built up relationships with students and faculty members and was doing a satisfactory job in the classroom. I was happy to get the job, but sad for this other nameless person whose hopes were drown indirectly by me. I could have been on his end of things and not gotten the job and wasted all that time and money flying to some little rural town just to be turned away.

Besides a good job, I have a great family. Elizabeth and I didn't know each other that well before we got married. We thought we did, but looking back at our first year of marriage, when we both felt misunderstood and frustrated, we really weren't that acquainted with each other. But for many years since then, we have been really happy together. Why? I'm not sure, but just about every other couple I'm familiar with is teetering on the edge of divorce, living with disdain, frustration, power struggles, fear, intimidation, jealousy, spite. Why did I get to end up with a really cool wife? I don't know, but I rarely admit to anyone how in love I am with Elizabeth because I'm afraid they might think I'm gloating.

I haven't used the word "rad" for a long time, but I've got a pretty rad kid. Sonora is funny, loving, insightful, smart, unique, independent but not defiant, creative but not obnoxious, interested but not clingy. Some people at church don't enjoy her as much as I do, because she hasn't gotten the whispering thing down very well and is sometimes loudly observant of the people around her, but I think she is funny. There aren't very many parents who think their kids suck, so I don't have to feel very guilty about loving my daughter, but I try to downplay my admiration of her, just in case. However, an area where many people, especially dads, lack, is time. For about eight weeks each quarter, I don't have much time to spend with Sonora, but the rest of the time, I get to spend a lot of time with her: going for walks, poking around in the garden, looking at the stars, chasing each other around the house, putting together puzzles, stalking cats. I know that many parents hurt when they think about the time they can't spend with their kids; I feel that pain when I get really busy grading essays, preparing for class, and doing all that Scout Master stuff (I'm the Scout Master of our troop and I don't like how much time it takes) and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, so I try very hard not to rub in anyone's face how much time I regularly get to spend with my daughter. Also, we have friends who can't have children, and friends who are not married but would like to be. I don't know why Elizabeth and I have a kid and another on the way. I'm very glad for us, though I'm sad for those whose dreams go unfulfilled in this regard. Sometimes I feel a wave of depression when I realize everything other people don't have.

We just bought our first house and while it is little according to highly inflated American standards, it is a great place. Truth be told, our 1,000 square foot home is more than we need. It overwhelms me when I let my mind dwell even for a moment on the luxuries I've come to regard as basic services, when I realize with how little most people in the world make do. Nearly every day when I return home, I swell with affection for our house and the land it sits on. It's not much to look at, but it takes really good care of us. Here is a link to a couple of pictures of the place taken last November: http://picasaweb.google.com/JoalDLee.

I suppose it does not much good to fret about what others don't have; my mom once told me that if I can do something about a situation, I should do something. Otherwise I shouldn't worry about it. That is easier said than done because I cherish gratitude, and situational myopia--blocking out the situations of other people--is antithetical to thankfulness. I wish gratitude didn't hurt. I also wish others had those relationships, homes, jobs, educational opportunities, monetary resources, and experiences that would make them happy.

2008-01-26T00:15:00.000-08:00

We watched the film Juno tonight. I quite liked it, though it was strange to view the adoption process from the reverse angle. Before we conceived Sonora, we had begun the adoption process and were starting to spread the word among our acquaintances that we were looking to adopt, should they know anyone...We were considering placing advertisements of ourselves, hoping to lure a pregnant college woman to choose us as the parents of her child. It felt unnatural to me, this process of selling ourselves like a grocery item, like so much sterile canned food with a flashy label.

So I liked the way the film shined some light on this struggle, but more than that, I liked how the film captures the feeling of an age. When I write "age," I don't mean adolescence or adulthood, but era, or epoch. You see, I've been contemplating of late about what attitudes will shape the next age. I'm pretty sure we are beyond Post-Modernism--with its uneasy relativity--and we are heading toward something else, though I'm not sure what. The idea that a sort of Jungian-like shared mythology permeates the minds of millions of people simultaneously is a fascinating idea to me: Separate from a shared culture, what defines us, the whole lot of us, right now and probably for the next few decades?

Many people have jumped on 9/11--U.S. paranoia; the suicidal evolution of guerrilla warfare; Terrorism replacing the Red Scare in our political dichotomy--as the defining characteristic of the new times. Fear, loathing, and Irony are the fall-outs. To some extent, I think this is true, but for some reason, the reality represented in the film Juno stands out in opposition to the 9/11 conclusions. In Juno, we find a celebration of the life of the individual as it is protected, fostered, by the New Family. Of the different incarnations of Family in the film, none are the traditional nuclear family, but all provide a sense of strength, a sense of comfort, a sense of refuge. This suggests to me that, as we recover from anchorless post-modernism and from fear-inducing 9/11, people are embracing as their anchor and their harbor the family, whatever form that might take, and the communities that surround them.

I jump on Juno as an example because to me it felt timely; the film didn't necessarily capture my convictions, but I think it might have captured and portrayed a large swath of America's, perhaps much of the Western world's, convictions.

Another film I watched a while ago that I think likewise taps into a philosophical/collective-unconscious vein is Donnie Darko. This film was originally released in 2001, so it was all filmed pre-9/11. Strangely, though, it is steeped in a sense of post-9/11 uncertainty; part of the plot involves a jet-engine falling from the sky to crash into Donnie's house. Beyond a deep sense of uncertainty and shifting reality, however, are interesting questions of existence and meaning. Existentialism, it seems, is still a driving philosophy. Or, at least, the questions that is raises are still being asked in seriousness. One thing that Darko brings to the table that most other existential discussions have not, however, is God. God remains a nebulous, remote presence, but the presence is there, introduced unabashedly into the plot as a changer of events, a true force.

The films Juno and Donnie Darko seem to be the two ends of this new age: on the one end is family and a celebration of living; on the other end is the misunderstood, absurd individual who recognizes a god in some form, and the reality of inevitable death with the idea that life and death need not necessarily be meaningless.

So we are perhaps squirming away from the edge of post-modern drift and unknowability toward a grasping of family/community and some overt sense of God or spirituality. Where the individual previously struggled alone in a state of separate desperation, she or he now might be more inclined to pull others into the fray to see if they might all make some meaningful connections that will make the whole experience less frightening.

I think I'll name our new age: The Juno-Darkoist Age. I think the name will stick; it's very catchy.

2008-01-16T14:11:00.000-08:00

I've been kind of saturated in nostalgia of late, the kind that is deliciously depressing, that creates a slightly crushing-chest breathless feeling.

But I'm kind of sick of thinking and writing about heavy subjects. Here is a list of pleasant sublimities I've been enjoying: swinging Sonora in a blanket and hearing her completely honest, unrestrained laughter--it sounds like joy; feeling the swell of Elizabeth's tight-skinned pregnant belly; feeling the swishing kick--like the slapping tail of a powerful trout--of our unborn baby as she sloshes around in amniotic fluid; walking outside at night and feeling the clear, shining stars reaching down toward me through the tree branches; sliding in my socks across the living room floor; smelling the skin of Elizabeth's neck; watching the snowman Sonora and Elizabeth built melt down to a nub and be buried by new snow; noticing anew for the millionth time that snow sparkles.

2007-12-13T22:25:00.001-08:00

Through a quick series of links, I just ended up at a Web page of an artist who examines transitions. Her subject was tooth brushing; she had painted herself in the process of scraping bacteria from her teeth. Brushing her teeth marks a time of transition between home/work, waking/sleeping, etc. Part of me was repulsed, almost nauseated by this extraordinary exercise in bellybutton gazing; I felt disgusted that someone has enough leisure time to study herself as such an object of fascination. To me it seems like a quintessential American activity, with America being the stand-in for any civilization bloated with wealth, made complacent and arrogant by security, driven by nothing so much as by the pursuit of comfort, convenience, prestige, and sanitation.

Of course, this blog that I'm writing (along virtually all personal blogs out there) does the same thing: it publishes to the world bits of my experiences, of my fascinating mind. These words are textual snapshots of my bellybutton lint, offered up for all other people to gaze at, as if they cared. But viewing oneself as the subject of study doesn't seem to be a total waste of time, even though the cynical side of me right now would like to view its products simply as bourgeois vomit.

I don't think I'll go into my ideas about why humans are compelled to communicate, to share, but this communicative compulsion is part of it. Even more important, and more exigent, is the drive to understand. We want to know why we respond a certain way to a certain thing, why we are attracted to this person but not that one, how our childhoods affect our expectations as adults, why we fight, why we kill, why we love. To seek to understand these things, we have at our complete disposal exactly one human being: one's self. And so we gaze, observe, and share. In the process, we might discover something worth knowing about a human, about humans.

The sheer amount of waste represented in the idea of painting a series of toothbrushing portraits still troubles me some, and I'm glad it does because my negative response suggests to me that I am not as complacent, as tamed by the pursuit of ease, as I could be. But at the same time, I recognize that the poetry of a transcendental moment, even if that moment involves a mouthful of warm, minty suds, is of some value. And if viewed in the right light, this moment might even be revolutionary. But I'm not in the right light, and I guess I'm okay with that.

2007-09-22T22:10:00.001-07:00

Despite the school year's having begun, and my feeling quite stressed due to the weight of multiple life roles, I am happy. One of the reasons for this is that Elizabeth is pregnant. She is now nearing the 12-week mark, the time when parents can breathe a little more easily because the threat of miscarriage diminishes considerably. For us, getting pregnant is a real victory, a blessing of tremendous worth. Sonora seems excited by the idea of a baby sibling. She regularly kisses Elizabeth's belly and then says, "That was nice of me, wasn't it?" Perhaps she can sense that we are pleased that she doesn't resent the new life that is becoming part of the family.

And she has plenty of cause to resent the pregnancy and the tiny thing that is making Elizabeth's belly swell. Elizabeth has been sick since week two. Very sick. She was sick throughout the whole vacation to Alaska and started puking several times a day when we got home. She lost almost 15 pounds in five weeks when she should have gained a couple. She started taking some anti-nausea medicine a couple of weeks ago and the puking mostly stopped, but she still is constantly nauseas and usually pretty tired. What this means for Sonora is that her mom, who in the past has paid a great deal of attention to her, now spends a lot less time paying attention to her. This has brought Sonora and me closer. I've taken over some of the responsibilities that Elizabeth used to do and I spend more time interacting with and watching over my daughter.

But now that school has started, Sonora spends more time than ever entertaining herself. She even read aloud all of The Giving Tree to herself the other night. She would turn the page, repeat 75% of what was written there, and then move on to the next page. It was cute, but a little bit sad; one of her parents should have perhaps been there next to her reading with her. In some ways, Elizabeth's sickness will make the inevitable adjustment of attention toward the infant and away from Sonora more bearable for her, and Elizabeth and I believe that Sonora's having a sibling will be more valuable in the long run than her parents' undivided attention.

2007-09-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more Alaska pictures.

2007-09-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple more pictures from our Alaska trip.

2007-09-16T23:27:00.001-07:00

Shortly before Elizabeth and I got married, I met her family members who lived in Utah. Her oldest sister was pregnant with her fifth child at the time. That child will be in middle school in a couple of years.

That little girl's oldest brother, who was just entering the awkward, gangly early years of adolescence when I first met him, is almost done with his two-year religious mission in Russia. In Mormon culture, missions have become a sort of rite of passage out of childhood. In a recent correspondence with my oldest nephew-in-law, I told him it was hard for his family not to think of him as a child. But he resented this idea. He is almost twenty-one and has been mature for his age since he was young. In Russia, he has repaired many homes, guided adults much older than him toward more responsible paths, held positions of responsibility and stress in the church, and learned a new culture and language while living on his own. He is, in every sense of the world, an adult; he has earned the title and shall carry it well.

Yet, when I realized this, I felt sad. A week after he returns home, his brother, the next-oldest in his family, will leave on a mission. When he returns, the next brother will leave. And then all three of them will be grown up. And time will have passed forever.

It isn't uncommon to yearn for adulthood as a child and then, as an adult, to long nostalgically for the lost innocence and pleasant illusions of childhood, the gooey romance of adolescence. Even though I know that most people feel this way, I'm still having a hard time getting older. This struck me on a recent trip I took when Elizabeth, Sonora and I went to visit my parents in Seward, Alaska. My older brother also came on the trip. Mid-way through the trip, we stayed for two nights in a yurt on a tiny island at the mouth of Resurrection Bay. Our second day there, my brother and I took a sea kayak out on the ocean. We paddled a mile and a half to a cove where fresh water plummeted over a cliff and formed a small, boulder-strewn pond before running out to join the salt water. We watched in awe the process of salmon spawning, how they struggled en masse against the current, the rocks, and each other, each in various stages of death. Many were already white and dead.

We hadn't expected to see these thousands of salmon. We commented on this extreme process of procreation, of life and death, birth, death, life, and time. And then we climbed back into our tiny boat and headed out to see what we were most excited about from the beginning: a square concrete opening into the side of a mountain, just above the place where the water meets the rock on the other side of the bay.

Growing up, my siblings and I were fort builders. We built tree houses, dug dug-outs, partitioned old barns, stacked adobe brick into small, dangerously unstable structures, made passageways and rooms in willow thickets. Forts were worlds of our own making that existed on our terms. They were exciting. Even though we knew every inch of what the forts contained, there was a sense of exploration about being in them. Paddling on the open ocean that day, my brother and I were going to find a fort. We hadn't built it, but it was abandoned, so it would be ours while we were there. Seeing the fort meant paddling an extra three miles over choppy open waters, but we didn't mind.

We were tired when we got to the rocky outcropping from which the square hole stared out at us. We scrambled up the granite boulders and through shrubs and young trees, following a path other curious people had trodden. We stepped over the fallen, rotting door and entered the dark rectangle. We had hoped to find a secret entrance to a vast network of evacuation tunnels form far-flung military bases, or maybe even something more modest such as an underground barracks. But what we found was an empty concrete box, roughly the size of a large bedroom. An old wire hung from the ceiling. A small rectangular hole in the back wall near the ceiling provided fresh air (though with the door missing, this was unnecessary). We felt decidedly underwhelmed with our discovery.

We stayed inside a few moments making obligatory guesses about what the room could have been; we casually read a few of the names scratched on the walls. But neither of us left his name behind. No one would care that we were there, and we knew we'd never be back to see our names chalked there and talk about how time had changed us in the interim. We climbed down the same way we came up, climbed into our two-person kayak, and paddled back to the little island in the sea. A few days later, we flew our separate ways--he to Arizona and I to Washington state--to resume our adult lives.

I was sad for my nephew to become an adult because I knew that when he gets home, all the forts in the world will have changed, or maybe disappeared altogether, and that his brothers, in their rush to become adults, didn't know to enjoy what they had while they were still not quite grown-up. But I don't know, maybe it is better that they rush out of childhood. I suppose if we spent our young years obsessed with how great it is to be a kid, nostalgic for the present moment, childhood probably wouldn't be that unique.

2006-10-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

I come from a large family; there are seven kids: four older and two younger than me. It's comforting to know that six other people had a childhood remarkably similar to my own. When we get together, we sometimes laugh about memories or analyze the roots of certain shared behaviors. We fought often when we were younger, but now, for the most part, we share close relationships.

Elizabeth and I had a hard time getting pregnant. It took us over four years. Right now, Sonora is our only child. I think we are providing her with a good childhood. We are patient, do a lot of educational activities with her, feed her well, smile and laugh with her often, fully adore and love her. But we don't have any siblings for her.

We are trying again, but we are also in our thirties. Even if we could churn out a kid every two years (and our record suggests this is unlikely), our grand total would be about four siblings for Sonora. A full two less than what I grew up with and five less than what Elizabeth enjoyed.

Besides the biological obstacles to having more kids, I don't think we really want five. Three, maybe four. But I can't help but be sad for Sonora. She'll have more individual access to her parents than Elizabeth and I had to ours, but her world seems kind of lonely to me, so non-magical, so real. Adults don't have the same capacity for wonder, for backyard adventure, that siblings do. Hay bale forts aren't as cool to me as a thirty-year old as they were when I was ten. When I tell her about Santa and the tooth fairy, I will know that I am lying. I know that, no matter how hard I reach, I won't be able to touch the jet liner above me. Some of that lack of imagination will likely come across in my voice when Sonora asks. A sibling would be able to share in her illusions, co-inhabit a world that exists according to their changing rules. I am afraid adulthood has made me a permanent skeptic. I still love to wonder, but rationality consistently tempers my dreams.

Perhaps, though, Sonora's is simply the plight of oldest children everywhere. Regardless of whether or not Elizabeth and I are able to have more children, Sonora will never have an older brother or sister. She came first, is the John the Baptist to any possible others. Her sacrifice will be that the others will have what she did not: a young world ready for new members.

2006-10-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I came home from the community college where I work and shuffled out onto the playground in front of our apartment complex to meet my wife and daughter. Several women were scattered around the play area, sometimes standing together in groups with other women, sometimes solitary--sitting on an immobile swing or on the railroad tie that frames the sandbox. Around each woman, three or four children clustered. When a woman wandered one way or another, the children would follow in an irregular cluster, like little planets searching for their sun.

The women looked tired. Their shoulders bowed forward. They wore loose clothing that for the most part could double as pajamas. I wore slacks and a long-sleeved, semi-formal shirt, and I was the only man on the playground. Ten or fifteen feet away from my wife, my nineteen-month-old daughter played in the pea gravel. She didn't see me approaching her until I was a few feet away from her. I'm waiting for the day when she throws her arms out to me and runs up yelling, "Daddy!" Today, when she saw me, she stopped playing and stood up, then ran the other way calling, "Mommy?"

I know I'm not as important in my daughter's life as her mother, and probably I won't be for several years, but I wish I were. I know the couple of hours I am around my daughter each day doesn't compare with the thirteen hours my wife spends with her, but I wish that she could understand that my absence allows one of her parents to always be present. I played with her on the playground for half an hour or so, and she laughed when I swung her or tossed her in the air, but every time her feet touched the ground, she gravitated toward my wife. Every time I moved to play with her, I felt as if I were pulling her out of her orbit. In a way, it almost felt like it would be easier to just stand and watch, to observe her and not interfere.

It's hard to always feel like the less desirable parent, to have my identity be "not Mom." It would be easier to let her be and not play with her, not read to her, not help her put together puzzles. If I avoided doing these activities with her, I could also avoid the regular feelings of rejection that I experience each time my daughter realizes I am not her mother and runs to find my wife. But then our relationship would likely always be shallow and unfulfilling. I'll just keep trying. My wife assures me that separation anxiety from Mom is normal for this age. Hopefully someday, my daughter will be excited to see me.