Hillary, Hermione, and Us

When I was in fourth grade, I loved playing Around the World. This was the game we played, usually on Fridays, in which one student stood behind another's desk, the two students shouted out the answer to a math problem--delivered by the terrific Mrs. Groff--and the victor moved to the next student's desk, trying to make it all the way around the room's large rectangle of desks--"around the world." I was very good at this game, and often enjoyed the spoils of victory, which I'm pretty sure were Gummi Bears. But there was another student, an African-American girl named Michelle, who was even better. She was blazingly fast and, as much as I liked winning, I loved watching her play. She inspired us.

In sixth grade, I tied for second place in the 50-yard dash. My equal was my friend Sajy, and the boy who came in first was a year older than us. The true champ, however, revealed on Field Day, was a long-legged girl named Robin--and she smoked all of us. Watching her run, we were astounded: Who could do a 6.7? She could!

I went to a public school, and as often as not the best and brightest were girls. As I grew older and moved through school, however, I began noticing that some of the girls in my cohort began to disappear. No longer were they in the "gifted and talented" group, the "top section," the Advanced Placement classes. It wasn't until years later that I would learn of research showing how girls are at great risk of "dumbing down," starting somewhere in the fifth grade--about the time kids start showing an interest in fledgling romances and "boy-girl" parties.

These memories come back to me now because one of our best and brightest has lost the US Presidential election. Hillary Clinton has come up short, and I grieve.

I grieve for the country, I grieve for Hillary, and I grieve for my wife. I grieve for the little girl she was, once upon a time.

My wife, Jenifer, recently shared her experience in a Facebook post. She was responding to the sentiment, now widely expressed, that grieving is "soft," and that we are called upon to "get to work," or, by some, to get over it. Jenifer writes:

"You know the character Hermione Granger? You know, she's the smartest and most talented witch. She's always the most prepared. She's really passionate about learning. And she's really, for the most part, passed over. I grew up a Hermione Granger. Often, even when I was objectively or subjectively the best possible person for an award, a job, a promotion--I was looked over, passed over, or often even told to do the work of the other person. I have, throughout my life, been seen and treated as a half-person based on my sex (cisgender female). . . .

"For me, at a deep, largely unconscious and emotional level, Clinton became the avatar and champion of me. She is a living embodiment of every time I've been overlooked, every time I've been pushed down or pushed aside or treated poorly. Because like me, she just gets back up and gets to work. . . .

"And yes, I'm grieving. Not because Clinton lost an election. But because her losing the election was related to every time I have lost, and in particular, lost to someone who was truly *unworthy* of winning."

When I met Jenifer, it didn't take me to long to figure out that she was a Hermione Granger (even if I wouldn't discover that character for a few years). She was my equal. And yet, unlike me, she had experienced a school system, a community, a society that again and again denied her the recognition, status, achievement that were her due--because she was female.

Grieving is a natural, healthy response to profound loss. And Jenifer, and I, and all of us, have a experienced a profound loss.

To be clear, we are not grieving a political event. We are grieving the loss of what this election signifies, something far more significant: the loss of an idea about ourselves, our nation, that we are decent, moral people. The fact that people we love and respect have chosen complicity with hate speech and the language of fascism.

We are grieving the loss of identity.

Women are hardly the only ones hurt. The patriarchy--which sounds so old-fashioned now--also wounds men, gravely. The old mode forbids them from grieving. From expressing vulnerability. So many men today don't know how. As the poet Robert Bly puts it, they don't know how to shudder. We have a nation of strong women. We need men who can shudder.

There's a lot of talk these days about how the "angry white men" of America haven't been acknowledged by Washington. And it's true. These angry white men haven't been seen. But the crime is not solely the politicians'. These are men who haven't undergone the ritual of initiation. They have never, as youths, been seen by elder men, never been blessed for the golden promise of their power, and so do not understand vulnerability or the subtle demands of intimacy.

A man unseen walks in shadow and sees all others in shadow, and seeks to bring them into the orbit of his darkness.

When I see my son, Hawk, age 8, I marvel as his self-possession, confidence, emotional intelligence. They inspire awe in me. He knows who he is and understands that he is allowed, simply, to be there. He knows that his peers--from New Zealand, Fiji, Greece, Georgia, the UK--deserve the same. And he is beginning to discover his privilege.

Whatever gifts my son has received from me, whatever are of his own makeup and destiny, I know that many come from Jenifer, who feels similarly "entitled". Entitled to be there, to occupy physical space, to participate in equal footing in public discourse, to belong--in short, to matter.

I have friends who are not so lucky. Friends, who, because of the color of their skin, are more likely to be "extrajudicially executed" by public servants. Friends who, because of their gender or sexuality, are more likely to take their own lives, because they are not permitted to be there.

I grieve for them, too.

The day after the election, I stole away from the office for a moment. There was no place to go that was private, it was pouring outside, so I went up a back stairwell, between office floors, until I could go no further. Beyond the locked door was the roof of the building. I went as far as I could go, and I wept.

Whatever Hillary's shortcomings (that is say, her humanity), she has had to walk the impossible path expected of women, which is to be immaculate. But we have no need of perfect women. We need women who hold themselves, and are held by others, to be whole people. Women of ambition, intelligence, and doggedness honored for what they contribute to the world. Is it too much to hope that, adult by adult, teacher by teacher, mentor by mentor, friend by friend, we can nurture these gifts in our youth, girls and boys alike? That we ourselves might be the avatars and champions of those who need us most?

In God's Golden Bowl

A million years ago, before the last Ice Age, we visited Nelson. I do endeavor to provide timely accounts of Where We Went and What We Ate, but time is nothing if not elastic when you're traveling, and is probably not best spent in youth-hostel Internet caves, especially when you're in New Zealand.

To this preface, however, I will add its epilogue, the account of precisely how we made our way to Nelson, which is to say that we nearly did not. The night before our Monday-morning flight, we decided to program the alarm on my new watch, a reward for 10 years of service at the day job. It was titanium and Danish, so no complaints there, but we did discover at this late hour, after perusing the instruction booklet we had so thoughtfully packed, that its "crown" could not, indeed, be extended to the third position, let alone the second. I would need to acquire an alarm clock if were were to awake in time for the flight.

And so I ventured across the oceanic breadth of Wakefield Street to the New World, which by New Zealand standards is a pretty good-sized supermarket. That I did this without any navigational devices, and possessing scanty star lore, without being struck by an automobile was a significant accomplishment. In the end, however, it would take three such sojourns to acquire the sought-after device and the 1.5V aka AA battery that powers it.

The "Abstract Art Swivel Alarm Clock" is a masterwork of Chinese design. You can tell its worth right from the box alone, which features the following instructions in no less than eight (8) different languages:

1. Removing the Battery Cover.
2. Inserting the Battery.
3. Setting the Time.
4. Setting the Alarm Time.
5. Using the Gerund.

Step 2 was my particular favorite, as the battery found its final resting place not because the slot was consciously designed to house it, but by a considerable application of will on my part. I won, but this meant the onset of a peculiar "click-clack" that would haunt me the rest of the night. Despite my lack of faith, the instrument performed its function, and early the next morning we were on our way back to Nelson.

The flight from Wellington to Nelson, across the Cook Strait, comprises probably the best 25 minutes in the air you will find anywhere in the world. We were treated to a glowing sunrise over snow-capped mountains, oceans of cloud, and that distinctive gemlike water. We had traveled once the other direction, taking the ferry from Picton; this mode of travel is equally majestic if rougher on those who haven't yet gained their sea legs.

When you land in Nelson's little airport, you are greeted by a flat plain encompassed by a far, long ridge of mountains whose distant strength is hard to capture on film. Once in the town itself, you find yourself enclosed by steep, verdant hills, long intersecting triangles of folded green in dappled golden light. The land here is reassuring, and you feel you have a solid place on the earth, as if you are given definition by its otherness.

We met with Kimberly and Cathy at the former's retreat in the section of Nelson called the Maitai Valley. The meeting was to be a yoga workshop of sorts, a reunion of those Jenifer had taught two years ago, but it was the Queen's Birthday, after all, and short notice meant a more intimate gathering would be had. After lunch in town, at the Morrison Street Cafe, we returned to the valley, and I stepped out to take some photographs and take in the view. It seemed I had stepped onto the set of The Last Samurai, even if that film was shot on the North Island. Just behind the retreat center was a small, sloped pasture, and I counted myself lucky to meet the likes of Zoe the goat and two horses, one brown, one white. How could you not grow as wise as they, living on the side of such a mountain?

Not all talk was yoga-talk, however; Jenifer, Hawk, and I also spent our share of time enjoying the view from Kimberly's spectacular and surprising Art Deco house. From the so-called Centre of New Zealand, which we had hike to last time, the house appeared an orange rectangle lodged squarely in the middle of a mountain. Up close, its color was terra cotta, its design boldly and aerodynamically Art Deco. It fit its environment quite suitably, and though Kimberly and her husband, both Americans, couldn't be more grounded, such a dwelling might well be considered "flash" even in avant-garde Nelson, home of healers and seekers. The architecture of New Zealand offers up some surprising secrets about the culture; I'll try to comment on these next post.

Jenifer and I also connected with Elayne, a massage therapist, and her husband Mark, a woodworker who specializes in Native American flutes. We had gone to Elayne for treatments on the recommendation of a mutual friend, and, as so often seems to be the case here, soon found ourselves invited over for dinner.

The flight "home" to Wellington the next morning was just as terrific as its predecessor, and it seemed we even brought a bit of Nelson's golden weather back with us . . .

Weekend in Waikanae

I was going to post this entry yesterday, but Fortune stepped in and allowed us to catch the last showing of Star Trek at Wellington's Embassy Theatre. Good thing, too, because it seemed best to see how "The Future Begins" before discovering how "The End Begins" with the premiere of Terminator Salvation.

Yesterday was largely a regrouping day after returning from sunny Nelson on the top of the South Island. I'll get to our stay there next time, but first let's go back to our weekend in Waikanae. Through a mutual friend we met in Nelson two years ago, Jenifer connected earlier in the year with Melissa Billington, an American expat who teaches "Myoga" at her Powa Centre in downtown Wellington (and also on TVNZ's Good Morning show). As luck would have it, she was running a teacher-training workshop in Waikanae, about an hour north of Wellington on the North Island's west coast, and we were invited to go along.

The drive up was fairly unspectacular if you were somehow able to become bored with the steep hills, dense bush, and glistening blue-green water; or if, through a sizable act of will, you had overcome your fear of hurtling down the wrong side of the road, perched to the left of the driver as if dangling like the gyroscoping gun turret mounted on the far side of a B-wing fighter.

In any event, we safely reached our destination, a lush and serene place far from the road known as Saddle Creek Farm. As we crept along the winding dirt path, a massive black-tailed rabbit sauntered across the lane, taking all the time in the world and offering our whirring hrududu no regard whatsoever. He had dealt with our kind before.

The retreat building itself was a rustic wood cabin topped with the fairly commonplace corrugated steel roof that suggested a shantytown in Nairobi, Mumbai, or Johannesburg. Yet the scenery gave a far different impression, of a rugged land worked by rugged individuals who don't seem to mind the isolation of the bush or, indeed, of their tiny island nation.

Dinner that night, as all the weekend's meals, was prepared by a feisty Italian woman named Pia. The food was hot and excellent, an Italian/macrobiotic blend that was far heartier than I could have expected. Breakfast the next morning, however, would not be served until after a two-hour yoga practice that began at 5:30. Those familiar with my metabolism will know that this prospect was not encouraging, but somehow I found my center and enjoyed an excellent practice led by Melissa, and survived to tell the tale.

After breakfast, Hawk and I ventured into the wild. Along the way we met a strange goose with a green face and a box-like body. His "shoulders" were pointed and his honk sounded like an old-time motor car's; he was strange yet still familiar, as if from a world turned sideways, and typical of the fauna to be found on this fair green isle.

Further down the road we came upon a tiny white chapel set on a slope set before a tall sheep's grazing ridge. We had learned that this little building was actually the painting studio of the farm's owners. It seemed the perfect place for contemplation.

We returned from our tramp, content in having bolstered our man points; for we were the only males in a workshop full of women. The setting would have been perfect for who knows what manner of moon dancing, witchcraft, and Cosmo quizzes ("How to Tell If He Really Loves Your Dosha!"), but in truth the discussions (at least the ones I was privy to) centered around the science of Ayurveda and the Vedic moral precepts known as the Namas and Niyamas, as outlined by B.K.S. Iyengar in his book Light on Yoga.

I alway find that such getaways, when enjoyed in the company of new friends, tend to seem longer than they really are. But the darkness of Sunday evening rolled around soon enough, and we were on our way back to Wellington, for a brief interlude at our familiar room at the YHA, before an early-morning flight to the South Island, to Nelson, and to familiar faces.

Return to the Land of Tomorrow

Tomorrow Jenifer and I head back to New Zealand for three weeks. Joining us for his first flight will be Master Hawk, as he was dubbed by the airline. We look forward to taking some much-needed time off, catching up with our friends, and seeing what we can see.

As usual, I shall endeavor to report our antics, though the accompanying photographs may not appear until after our return. See you on the other side!

Sunday Afternoon

UPDATE May 19: Hawk is indeed growing! As of Monday he measures 29 1/4 inches and weighs 16 pounds, 12 ounces. Big boy! Oh, and he likes apples but not bananas. And cheese. He loves at least five kinds of cheese, including Havarti. Cucumbers are good, too, and carrots. And we mustn't forget the green beans.

Hawk at Six Months

Peekaboo Hawk.

Yeah!

From right: High, Just-as-High, and Third.

With Mimi and Opa.

Attack-Face Baby!

Baby Trumpet!

Feeding the Fire

Saturday night the Firebird went up again, gloriously, as several thousand moderns gathered ‘round, transfixed by its healing spell. As I swayed from foot to foot, a sleeping Hawk under my coat and wrapped against my chest, I heard someone behind me say, somewhat obviously, “I feel like a savage performing an ancient ritual.” Fortunately, this casual comment failed to incite a reaction from the fundamentalist forces of antagonism that earlier in the evening—or so I’d heard while waiting in line at Artisans for my three-shot Americano—had protested the glorious event for its purportedly pagan character. I wondered whether Christmas trees occupy a place of honor in the living rooms of these latter-day crusaders.

It’s rare these days to witness, much less participate in, any kind of public ceremony that doesn’t involve spectator sports. Indeed, in an age where commonality with your fellow person is most likely to be sought and found in one of your neighborhood’s three Wal-Mart Superstores, a civic event like the Phoenixville Firebird Festival is positively magical in its ability to draw so many in.

Unlike those odd family heirlooms of behavior wherein the original intent is lost and/or willfully forgotten and your Christmas Day feast consists almost entirely of cold cuts on potato rolls and you persist in perpetuating this behavior because you’ve persisted thusly since 1971, the Firebird Festival was founded with a grounding in myth and a memory of decades of local economic decline. Also, people like burning things.

Jenifer laughed at her own childlike glee when, after the morning’s class, she described the day as her favorite of the year. This time we were even more excited than usual simply because it would be Hawk’s first time ex utero. We would also be contributing to the town’s rebirth in our own small way by working a table promoting our friend’s yoga studio.

We set up shop in the lobby of the Colonial Theatre, a smaller version of similar turn-of-the-last-century movie houses such as the Embassy Theatre in Wellington or the Paramount Theatre in Austin. We situated ourselves by an olde-tyme Santa sleigh and a restored Wurlitzer organ and got down to the business of selling yoga, which boiled down to answering children’s queries about the contents of the festive little holiday-themed boxes occupying our table. The answer was “yoga” or, what amounted to the same thing, “nothing,” since the boxes were intended to deliver gift certificates or class cards. Oddly, none of the children was satisfied by our answers, though more than one attempted to cart off a box all the same.

On the off chance I’d have some free time, I took my notebook and conjured a plot point concerning medieval European politics. With all the yoga talk and ancillary burrito eating, however, I didn’t get around to catching up on a primary source I’d chanced upon in a used bookstore in East Stroudsburg (home, incidentally, to the Frank Frazetta museum, which may well be the objective of a future field trip—I’ll keep you posted). I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, since Hawk, 15 weeks old and already a precocious flirt, was bound to be the major attraction.

As the burning time approached, we packed away our gear and headed down to the site. The streets were filled with people eagerly awaiting the countdown and soon enough the sky was filled with smoke from wood saturated from the week’s heavy rainfall. Within minutes flames licked the mighty Phoenix and the intentions of thousands soared heavenward.

Afterwards we followed the flow back up Bridge Street, walking back to Jess’s house for her “Pyro Postlude.” For the first time in recent memory, we found ourselves at a genuine party filled with interesting people our own age. Jenifer and I certainly had no idea what we’d find when we moved to the area from a university town, and it took us some time to get our bearings and discover the awesomeness lurking beneath the surface. Usually, however, this awesomeness found expression in folks a decade or three our elder. And now, on Firebird Day, another layer of Phoenixville opened to us.

Later, I walked to retrieve the car to spare Hawk the cold. The streets were mostly empty now, but the lights still shone with yuletide cheer. I scraped ice from the glass, then circled by the fire site to see the remnants of the blaze. The fire was still going, now surrounded by a small circle of stalwarts. I imagined our friend Henrik, chief Bird Builder, was among them, and envied these few in this moment. I smiled, though, too, for I have had my share of fire-talk; and I thought to myself, or maybe I said it aloud, “There’s good medicine.” It takes only a few, or perhaps not even that many, to change the world.

Whole Wheat Is Not Whole Grain*

It most certainly is not, and nowhere is this grave truth more hilarious than in Bolt, Disney’s new animated feature. Bolt is the first movie Jenifer and I have seen in the theater since Hawk’s arrival (and it took a village to engineer the outing). Neither of us had particularly high expectations going in, but we’d seen the trailer for months and just had to see the hamster. Fortunately, it turns out that “Rhino” — an exuberant fanboy who lands the dream job of the canine hero’s AWESOME! sidekick — is not the tale’s sole source of comedy. The pigeons throughout the story steal scene after scene; watch in particular for the writing partners Bolt encounters upon reaching Los Angeles, easily the best part of the film’s unexpected Hollywood satire.

*This is not actually the next post. Consider this a stopgap, interstitial tissue, the mezzanine, if you will, betwixt “The Blessing” and the forthcoming “Austin Powers.”

The Blessing

A voice in the dark: “Ryan.” Only it isn’t dark, not entirely. The bedroom is lit with the eerie glow of the new alarm clock/radio’s blue LED, the sort of light cast by the TV that’s left on by grandmoms when they can’t sleep, only without the flickering.

“Ryan.” There it is again, that voice. Jenifer’s voice. I leap out of bed—which you can do when it’s only eight inches off the floor—and into action. The heartrate soars, adrenaline courses, the klaxons are blaring—DIVE! DIVE!—and I am the personification of power and puissance, I am a ninja, I am the wind, and I am fumbling with epic mightiness to fix a sock on Hawk’s flailing foot—and then Jenifer’s voice cuts in again and points out in no uncertain terms that my efforts are “strictly tertiary concerns” (I apparently having vaulted right over those of the primary and secondary orders) and that my attention is needed on the more immediate and urgent task of changing the wee bairn’s diaper.

Yes, of course, I answer, perhaps not in those words. I’m not sure, really, what I say, only I brave the beacon of Mínas Morgul (so I have come to call the ever-watchful blue LED; and, yes, I know in the movie it’s green) and haul baby Hawk into the bathroom for another stint at natural infant hygiene, otherwise known as “elimination communication”; for Jenifer has developed (and I to a lesser extent) the ability to detect his waste elimination needs almost before he does. Sometimes we miss (hence the diaper), but more often than not we anticipate in time and thus enjoy Hawk’s happy attention rather than his unhappy wrath. This, as you can imagine, is exhausting.

And I wonder why I find myself already a week out from the final day of the Screenwriters’ Conference of the Austin Film Festival. The conference was the first time I was away from little Hawk since his birth eight weeks (already!) before. During the summer Jenifer and I had decided that the conference would be sufficiently far away in time that my going would not be an issue; in fact, Jenifer insisted I go.

For weeks the trip loomed large in my imagination as I looked forward to the epic anchor point of the year, the screenwriter’s New Year; and if my departure was less grand than that of Húrin son of Thúrin, or of Hector’s taking leave of Andromache, each famously dandling their sons on the eve of their doom, then my return home was a triumph neither of those heroes could lay claim to. I had survived the foreign campaign unscathed and returned to hearth and home restored by the effort. During the conference, Hawk was never far from my thoughts, but upon seeing him again I was completely surprised by how overcome with emotion I was. How had he grown so much in only five days’ time? What had I missed? What new superpowers had he manifested? I felt reborn from four days of paneling and partying, but nothing could compare with Hawk’s evident transformation and the incessant march of his metabolism.

I had returned to the new world, the one without order or plan, the one that demanded an abandoning of expectation and preference for structure and predictability. In this world, as I have suggested, things tend to take longer to accomplish and at times risk not being done at all. So it was with our planning for Hawk’s baby blessing.

Jenifer and I had struggled to come up with a location and format for the event. When asked what a baby blessing was, I’d joke that it was a christening without the Christ, but really what we were after was a gathering of our closest friends and family that was reverent but not overly programmed. We felt that it should have a sense of ritual about it, should be led by a qualified facilitator; we didn’t want to just wing it. Here Hawk would be officially introduced to our community and we wanted to get it right.

Jenifer’s father joked that, knowing us, we’d enlist an East African shaman to conduct the ceremony. I wish I’d been there to see the look on his face when Jenifer reported that our first choice was, in fact, Malidoma Patrice Somé, noted shaman and elder of the Dagara tribe of West Africa. Unfortunately, his schedule was booked.

On to Plan B: The Great Quentini, a local performance artist known for his unconventional drum kits (fashioned from junkyard scraps), irreverent but heartfelt spoken-word pieces (on the importance of chlorophyll), and genius for unusual hats (carved from foam). But he, too, was unavailable.

I mentioned our dilemma to my local men’s group and one of the guys suggested we require everyone to bring their own blessing. YES! We would have everyone else shoulder the load. Perfect!

That left the location to find. We wanted an outdoor site and had originally dreamed of holding the event atop the nearby Hawk Mountain for obvious reasons, but with October you never know what kind of weather you’re going to get and we had mobility concerns to take into consideration for a couple of our guests. For a time the leading contender was Wayne’s Woods (named for General “Mad Anthony” Wayne) in the Valley Forge National Historical Park, but here there was no guarantee of freedom from crowds.

In the end we held the blessing at ocean earth wind fire, the yoga studio where Jenifer works and our home base in Phoenixville. Jenifer and Hawk and I took our place in the backyard and the gathered joined in an effortless circle. My mother started to Jenifer’s left, presenting a cross-stitch wall hanging announcing Hawk’s birthday, and then each member of the circle in turn presented his or her gift to Hawk. Each gift beautifully bespoke the giver’s individual talents: testaments, artwork, performance, poems both original and carefully chosen.

Just as the city sounds penetrated our patch of greenspace, we made no effort to block out the external world or the public atmosphere of failures and bailouts, the sense of crisis in the air. The world has always been ending, but with such folk as were gathered about us it will always begin anew. These extraordinary people, our community, had witnessed and supported our growth as we pursued our callings, and now Hawk had heard the call. Perhaps Tom, in identifying what was required of each of us, put it most simply: “Never be afraid to be great.”

Afterwards Hawk’s two families spent the remainder of the afternoon at Chanticleer Garden, followed by dinner in downtown Wayne. The day had been perfect, the weather beautiful, and finally the time came for our families to part ways. Jenifer and I decide to take “the back way,” as we often do, and here that means a passage through Valley Forge Park. But Hawk’s cries of hunger mean that we have to stop for a feeding, and Jenifer and I smile at each other as we recognize that the only stopping place is the great Arch. This stone monument is one of my favorite places, a sanctuary.

We are alone, the three of us, at this sacred spot. I think of it as the spiritual epicenter of the land, where General Washington and his men braved the harshest of winters during the Revolutionary War. At the edge of the field are the darkening trees of Wayne’s Woods, and as I collect photos Jenifer and Hawk remain at the Arch under the silent watch of the deer and a burning sky.

Darkness falls and Hawk finishes. Only it isn’t dark, not entirely. We get in the car and, guided by moon and stars, find our way home.

Summer's End

I was going to title this entry "Back in the Saddle" or "The Receptive," but this morning there was an autumn chill in the air, and Jenifer and Hawk are off for the first of the fall teacher training sessions. Leaving me home to . . . write.

Several days ago a friend asked how the writing was going. The good news is that already the new family routine allows plenty of time for it. Sure, there are moments when it feels like (to me alone of the trio, no doubt) that I've stumbled headlong into a set designed by Spielberg, wherein the toy train is steaming around the bend, all the appliances are flashing and screaming, and that sinister toy monkey is clapping his cymbals. At me.

But such moments are fleeting interruptions to the general slowing down and steady and simple being that a baby brings. This past week has been more of a ramping up to writing, a melange of software configuration, file management, and getting used to the idea and process of regularly plugging away on a story. You see, shortly before Hawk arrived the laptop picked up a nasty virus that shut down production. Having seen their van ambling along the interstate, I called the, uh, Geek Squad for assistance. This was on a Sunday. The "double agent," whose accent revealed that he was from very much elsewhere on the North American continent, eh, informed me that the earliest appointment for a house call would be on Friday. I took it, thinking all the while that this was entirely unsatisfactory. But another buddy suggested I take up the cause with the boys at Circuit City's Fire Dog, and lo! I was able to haul in the computer that very evening. With any luck, the guy said, it'd be ready as early as Tuesday. Boy, was I set.

I'll spare you the agony of the next two weeks, saying only that after at least a half a dozen trips out to Circuit City and probably twice as many phone calls I was once more in possession of the laptop and all of my files. It seems Brad--how great is that?--had had trouble locating not only the correct driver but also the gumption required to complete the job. Rarely have I witnessed such a fine display of incompetence.

The net result, of course, is that I was out of action for a full month, and that has turned out to be nothing short of necessary, as something inside me told me it would. Sometimes the Universe conspires to slow you down and you pay attention and give thanks to the evening chirping of the cicadas and the fiery sunsets and the dark hours after, and you, with head clear and fire stoked, are once again ready to enter a new and willing season.

The Vigil

Hawk is somehow already 10 days old, and yesterday was the first that felt easy. Most of those days I've not known with any certainty what time it was at any given moment. I've spent it looking at Hawk, and after him, and I couldn't be happier. When Hawk is in the state known as quiet alertness, surveying our faces and the environment, gathering intelligence, his features sometimes assume a severity we call Samurai Face. And then just as quickly he'll blink those grand E.T. blinks, suggesting unfathomable depths of wisdom, and I find myself gazing upon a Star Child. He also does a mean impression of the late great James Brown, if James Brown did T'ai Chi.

I'd known, of course, that Everything Would Change, as Everyone Was Happy to Point Out, but I didn't understand the absolute focus required, nay demanded. As the leader of a local La Leche League group explained, unlike other projects or campaigns or aspirations, such as taking a new job, your life for a time is full of upheaval and uncertainty, but then eventually you adjust to the new demands, the new life, and reestablish a sort of equilibrium. With a kid, that doesn't appear to happen. The world changes, you change, and you keep on changing. The old life truly has passed away and a new one begun.

For me, it started on Friday, August 29 at three in the morning. I woke, sensing that Jenifer was no longer in bed. I found her downstairs on her knees in front of her favorite chair, a loveseat, where she had been stationed since 1:30. She told me that she didn't need me yet, to go back to bed until the usual hour. I complied as best I could, though for half that time my stomach was in knots. Hawk was on his way.

We spent most of the next 24 hours in front of the chair, Jenifer on hands and knees, my hands pressing on her sacrum each time a contraction came on. Over the course of the day Jenifer was only able to eat a few pineapple slices and a bit of toast. From time to time she would get up and walk around a bit, or get into the bath, but otherwise she maintained a single position. Hours passed, sometimes without words between us. The house was still, as if waiting with us and sharing this deep peace. Together we waited, moment by moment, and Jenifer endured. I could only liken the process, however feebly, to heavy squatting. When you are doing 20-rep squats with close to twice your bodyweight on the bar, and anything else at all seems a happier option, you can pace yourself to some degree, rationalize the effort put forth, make deals with yourself to get through the discomfort. Labor, of course, differs in that you don't know how many "reps" you have to do, you can't decide to wimp out and cut the set short, and your success or failure has no impact whatsoever on anyone else. Otherwise, Jenifer agreed, the two are completely the same.

The water broke, finally, at midnight. By this point we had moved to our new bed, which is low to the ground in the Japanese style. We felt that Hawk's birth was just around the corner. The contractions grew stronger and Jenifer's vocalizations, like a galdr chant, grew fiercer as she climbed the upper reaches of the intensity spectrum. Afterwards, Jenifer said "I didn't think I was a screamer." We half-expected the captains of the condo association to call the cops on us.

But no one came and neither did Hawk. Though nothing seemed amiss, both of us entertained thoughts of moving to Plan B. Jenifer's labor was fast approaching 24 hours. How long was too long? It's not like you could consult a monitor that indicated 83% completion. I remember quipping, "Most things get harder before they get easier," and, at last, just as Jenifer reached the ends of her endurance, the head appeared.

Jenifer felt it before I saw it. And then, with a final push, Hawk flew out and into my hands. I passed him to Jenifer and we pushed into the bathroom. Jenifer bathed Hawk and herself by candlelight, birthed the placenta easily. The first thing Jenifer noticed was that Hawk has my ears, and then his long feet, and only then his sex. Back in the bedroom, we weighed (7 pounds, 14 ounces) and measured (21 3/4 inches) him, but mostly we just looked at him. Here he was, at long last, the realization of our union and of generations going back beyond the reach of thought or memory. Hawk was born in the bed he sleeps in, and that morning we slept in it together for the first time.

To say that Hawk is a revelation is a vast understatement. Days before his birth I'd dreamed of him, of his size, his brown hair, the way his features are a mixture of Jenifer's and mine. In the photos I'd taken chronicling Jenifer's pregnancy, now Hawk also is present; before he was only an idea, an abstraction, an it even, for we had undergone no testing, no diagnostics, no ultrasounds. We knew nothing of his size, shape, sex (to say nothing of his gender), but already we understood something of his personality, or at least his energy. Throughout the pregnancy there was an abiding sense of rightness for Jenifer, and so we chose not to question this and subject it to the analytics of the Rational. On Hawk's fourth day we visited the hospital to see a lactation consultant. The place had the flowery stench of a funeral home, and we knew that within the panoptic walls of this institution Jenifer could not have had the birth she, or Hawk, needed.

I'd also dreamed recently of the daughter of a friend of ours, a rare, beautiful child who knew from an early age what she wanted to be, a dancer. She has just started college, for dance. In the dream, she was backstage preparing for her performance, unaware of being watched, just being effortlessly herself. The dream took me back to the day before Jenifer went into labor, when I was at the company picnic and my table was engaged in a conversation about kids going off to college with reasonable majors to get reasonable jobs. Better not to put all of one's eggs in one basket was the prevailing wisdom, and I nodded and smiled at my colleagues while inside I vowed never to succumb to this line of reasoning. And how could I? How can we expect our children to follow their dreams if we have not only forgotten but willfully buried our own? The question most often asked of Jenifer — "What if something goes wrong?" — was just another version of the one directed by my corporate compadres at me — "What if you never make it?"

A few days after Hawk's arrival, a friend who knows something about swinging for the fences wrote me about living a vigilant life that will inspire my son. In pursuing my own dreams, in helping Hawk to discover and achieve his own, would I be able to say that I am happy in this life, happy that he has joined it? I need not ponder this long, for I already have an answer. These 10 days have been the sweetest of my life. Hawk already has taken me out of myself, down a long, winding road where there is no past, no future, only this demand, this need, this moment. Hawk, I promise you, I am happy. Let's take the road together.

A Boy Named Hawk

Introducing Hawk Octavian Parker Rasmussen.

Born Saturday, August 30 at 1:30 AM.

Full report to come.

40 Weeks

[Insert pic here, Fire Dog willing.]

Note: We are grateful so many of you share our excitement for the baby's arrival! As we approach the big day, whenever it comes, we ask that you please refrain from calling or e-mailing for news. You can be sure it will be posted here. Thank you!

38 Weeks

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushroom for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind
— Just Enough by Nanao Sakaki

The days are strange. Their shape matches that of prior days, the responsibilities known and commonplace, but these days are marked by an unfamiliar waiting-but-not-waiting, and filled with an eagerness to meet the new person in Jenifer’s belly. They herald the end of one era and the beginning of another. I will not be the same.

The day job has been intense, unremitting, and there I am told repeatedly to enjoy all the sleep I’m supposedly enjoying at the moment; my take is that I’ve been training for the sleeplessness that is to come. Dreams of editing newsletters three days in the past week are not encouraging, especially when there is no possibility of a holiday. The evening job has been no less intense, unremitting, and there I tell myself repeatedly not to be so hard on myself as I head into the second half of the current draft.

The real work, of course, is taking place in the ever-growing Pod that houses the nascent visitor soon to join the party. But not too soon. As Wing Commander of the Mobile Pod Defense Forces, my mission objective demands that I deflect all well-meaning but misguided attacks (such as the classic “How is she?” — the special intonation and accompanying hand-wringing reserved for the infirm and those perishing of consumption), wherever possible establishing a high-energy perimeter and employing whatever verbal throws and locks are required to squeeze the well-wishers from “Any day now!” to “When the baby’s ready.”

On my end, at numerous points along the axis I’ve been asked whether it’s hit me yet that I’m going to be a father, as if I were about to be struck by a baseball knocked over the hedge by a gangly urchin. To date the answer to that question has been an assertion of my readiness, my preparation, my active choosing. Now, however, as Jenifer and I approach the end of our time as Two, and I realize that our future travels will include a Third companion, I can offer a revised edition: the image of a an alarmed Wall-E scurrying from the massive dreadnought that’s now blotting out the sun, and whose landing is stirring up gale-force winds and the resulting dust storms. Of course, that could also be the result of our housecleaning campaign.

Going through books is a perilous task. In clearing out our old office, converting it to a guest room, I end up reading E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” triggered by a friend’s annual summer retreat to his Vermont summer home, and James Baldwin’s account of his time in a remote Swiss village, when I’m supposed to be reading manuals on parenting and childcare.

Amid these preparations, I receive news that an early script, Disaster Man, landed in the top 15 percent at the Nicholl Fellowships. It doesn’t advance, but nonetheless it’s encouraging to get a note from program director Greg Beal, who writes the nicest rejection letter you’ll ever get. I’ll have to catch up with him at the Austin Film Festival this fall (one of many reasons to make the pilgrimage). I find myself looking forward to this conference more than ever, in part because it will require the first significant travel in a year.

Last week Tom and I met to discuss future projects, things to pitch at the festival. He picked me up from the gym and we rode to his place in his convertible Skye. With the wind in my hair and Billy Corgan sneering on the “radio” (or whatever sort of satellite contraption Tom has set up), I was instantly whisked back in time to an earlier season, riding with Jenifer through the Stockholm archipelago the day after Midsummer. And then earlier: on the Autobahn with my old friend Thorsten, feeling very European with a scarf lashed around my neck because of a sore throat brought on by nightclub carousing. I was traveling through time, and the years held no meaning.

This spell held its power as, several days later, I found myself sifting through yet more books, more memories, stored in my parents’ garage. Here we reorganized space and time, and old books were not the only unwanted things discarded. Perhaps awareness that the Podnaut would soon be cleared to initiate its landing sequence is what helped us begin to dissolve the awkwardness that had passed between us for the whole of my adult life. All of us would soon take on new roles and there was no longer time for inherited and worn-out patterns of judgment and avoidance.

Afterwards my father and I threw the football for the first time in a decade. The motion came right back, as if no time had passed, and we dropped into an effortless harmony. I recalled the pang Mr. White felt, the chill of death, as he watched his son duplicate the actions of his youth, and I knew that I was stronger now, and my father knew it too.

36 Weeks

A Summer Shower

Shawna over at Shouting at the Wind recently asked whether her fellow writers are actually writing and what goals they’ve set for themselves. I dashed off something of a jujitsu non-answer, saying that these days I’m working on goal-free livin’. That’s an honest answer, if a partial one: on the one hand, yes, I’m concerning myself less and less these days with hard-and-fast deadlines when it comes to completing the various stages of the current opus, recognizing that when we allow it time is not so much a steady march as a wandering, though purposeful, exploration of a balmy summer day; on the other hand, the extended process of writing a movie is never far from the frontal lobe. But there’s a bigger fish to fry, too, and that’s the impending (though timely) arrival of my first child.

Thus, I’m excited to be about a sixth of the way through a new draft. A Real Draft, as opposed to previous outpourings of the ongoing iterative development methodology. It’s going well, swimmingly, in fact, and that’s probably because I’m not hammering at it every last second. But I’m also taking the time to prepare the house, read up on the baby literature, and enjoy my oh-so-busy social calendar. Please join me, then, as I set the flux capacitor to the second day of summer . . .

Earlier that day, which my traveling buddy the Kid had pointed out was already in fact “tomorrow,” I had returned from my field trip to New York City. There would be no rest, however, as I was to play second fiddle to the first, Jenifer, or rather the one within. We would be hosting a shower to celebrate the baby, and there was work to do.

Actually, my part involved showing up and waiting for my parents to arrive. I also bought four bags of ice (not enough) and poured them into a large bucket. In truth, however, much of the preparations had already been made, and we were fortunate to be blessed with so many helpers. So we waited while our guests made their pilgrimages to Phoenixville, to the backyard of our friend Susan’s yoga studio, ocean earth wind fire. Apparently, there is a fifth element, a cloaking device, that prevents otherwise high-functioning adult humans from missing the building, or in some cases the town, and so I sat and drank my Artisans house blend as they cranked their Google machines, GPS devices, maps of seven seas, and other assorted amulets. Previous weeks had seen frantic e-mails expressing great consternation over the coordinates to be plotted in the navicomputer; if at all possible, a friend explained, he would prefer to avoid coming out of hyperspace in the middle of the Cheesecake Factory several towns away, a likely occurrence since he had charted no less than four Phoenixvilles in a 50-mile radius.

But the guests arrived without incident, chief among them my parents, Bearers of the Cake. This was a confection built to exacting specifications by Martín and his staff at the House of Clarendon, an English-style bakery in Lancaster, and no one would dare cut the thing without my parents’ consent or exacting methods (which involved, among other things, a tape measure and dental floss).

Soon the afternoon was full with greetings and well wishes and plain old good conversation, as old friends and new mingled and enjoyed the garden, the music, the food. After a course of quiches, raw veggies, and mixed fruit, the Cake (chocolate pound with Bavarian crème filling) was dispersed throughout the gathered, accompanied by a trio of homemade artisanal gelato: strawberry, pistachio, and a very fresh and herbal mint. And the people were happy.

And so were we. Jenifer and I made our rounds individually and later reflected on our day, our friends and family. They had come for us, for the baby, this new person who occupied the most darkly shaded area of a sprawling Venn diagram of fellowship. These were our people and they would be the little one’s people, if only for a time, and we found ourselves deeply moved by both their generosity and their acknowledgement of our part, however small—or, perhaps, however grand—in the unfolding human story.

30 Weeks

Sherpa and the Chairs of Chanticleer

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet —
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.*
— Rainer Maria Rilke

We are once again without our Sherpa. She left on Sunday on a bus to Massachusetts and her boyfriend, and we have resumed the usual routine. That’s not to say we’re unhappy, only that we miss our friend, again.

Sherpa is one of our New Zealand Friends, and the one who followed us from Nelson, where we first met, to Wellington before driving us through the North Island to Auckland. More commonly known as Diane, our Sherpa is capoeirista, yogini, surfer, clairvoyant, barista, and, even if she doesn’t yet know it, burgeoning life coach: She’ll Get You There™. She is a New Zealander by way of San Diego, having sailed in a small boat across the Pacific with the family of another NZF, Taya.

Our holiday began last Wednesday evening, when we drove to Baltimore to pick her up. There was something adventurous about the extravagant distance, and something right about picking her up a year to the day since we had returned from the Land of the Long White Cloud. Seeing her again reminded Jenifer and me that perhaps the greatest thing that came out of our trip to New Zealand, apart from the magnificent sense of freedom and possibility, was the friends we made. A reminder that the best of friends pick up whenever they meet as if no time has passed at all.

I recently joked with the very first of these friends, with whom my history goes back over 30 years, that most of our friends are over 50. He said that we need to get out more. I replied that we don’t like young people. He laughed. My statement was not a complaint but a recognition of the Venn diagram of circles we travel in locally through the yoga community, my local men’s group, and the cultural creatives of Phoenixville. And so it’s odd that we should slip so easily into a network of similarly aged new people so far away from home, and odder still that this should have happened in Nelson. It is a town that is surprising international in population and which serves the same function for New Zealanders as the Southwest does for Americans. People go there to escape, retreat, recover, retire.

We wanted to show Sherpa our place, of course, but also something beyond the usual routines and haunts. Sure, Sherpa accompanied Jenifer on her daily yoga rounds, and we visited Artisan’s (where in a fit of nostalgia I claimed the title of Mr. Americano, imbibing my favorite Kiwi coffee drink with not two but three shots of espresso — P-P-P-POW!) But we needed to do something special, only what?

Memory of a brief documentary surfaced (public television being our chief means of contact with the Outer World), an inkling blossomed into an impulse, and suddenly the answer was clear: we would visit Chanticleer Garden. We had been astounded to learn of this place nestled only a short drive away in the horse country of Wayne.

Chanticleer proved amazing from the very beginning. After a picnic lunch alongside a stream, we made our way through the vast lawns and intimate gardens, marveling at the variety of wildflowers and coziness of tree-sheltered hideaways. Sprinkled throughout the property at key viewing points was an assortment of Adirondack chairs, and we tried them all. Delightfully playful and many-colored, one set was even painted with giraffe spots. From the solid New Colonial architecture of the estate to the sculptural benches and footbridges, everything seemed integrated and chosen with care. A fraction of the size of the ever-popular Longwood Gardens, Chanticleer was more private and more immediate. It’s designed to be experienced, not consumed. Truly a pleasure garden.

The remainder of the week found us mostly lazing, in part because my foray into the Wild had brought about the worst episode of allergicality since the elms of Stockholm laid siege to my sinuses two summers ago. We attended a beautiful kirtan on Saturday night, but our thoughts kept returning to the garden of the rooster.

The funny thing about traveling is that you really do learn as much about yourself, your culture, as you do about the foreign destination. At Chanticleer we were traveling previously unknown pathways in our own land and finding ourselves somehow richer, freer. The day was an affirmation of what we already have: a secret world hidden in plain view. In Chanticleer we found a little piece of luck in our own backyard. It gave us the kind of experience we’ve been so fortunate in finding abroad. For all our yearning to be elsewhere at times, we have a pretty good life right here.


*From “Buddha in Glory” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell.

The Midpoint

My wife, this is no small thing we have done.
Steel has glanced upon stone, and a spark has caught.
I am the raincloud. You are the earth.
This child is the beginning of what must come next.
— Rumi

From "Hand Above Hand Above Hand" in The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition. Copyright © 2004 by Coleman Barks.