TMBG – Page 3 – …All my darkest hours talking like this…

Toddler Hiway

My daughter wakes herself up very early to get herself together and then get on public transportation to high school. This year is the first time that I’m not taking my girl to school every day. She and I have taken that ride since we started her on pre-school at 2 1/2.

Before her first day of school, I thought about when I first met her. I cut her umbilical cord. Then the obstetrics team went about the birth rite rituals of our time: they preserved some cord blood for cryogenic storage, took a footprint for the government, and declared her to be a 10 on the APGAR scale.

Babies are no longer made to cry. Instead, they are cleaned, swaddled, and handed to the father, who stands shaking in the delivery room (in this case, not with a video camera). And Dad cries.

The head nurse said, “Come meet your daughter, Dad.”

I held her, felt her breath, then I saw the strength in her eyes. She wiggled a hand free from the hospital blanket and reached for me. Nothing was ever the same again.

And laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” ¹⁸And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized, ¹⁹and took food and was strengthened.

Acts 9:17-19

Is it a corny cliché that the birth of my first child was the spiritual experience that brought me to God?

Clichés exist because the experience happens to many people. Everyone is born. Everyone has biological parents. It is always a miracle and God always calls. Some would shrug at the significance of the event; something that happens thousands of times a day, and over a trillion times in the history of humankind, would be deemed commonplace; per se not a miracle. That sort of conclusion has got to be wrong. Humanity celebrates great achievement and lionizes the power of our heroes who can sustain consistency over the long term.

In the years that have followed my daughter’s birth, the power of this moment is totally undiminished. In that moment, there was birth and there was rebirth.

I thought about this as I watched my teenager prepare for her first day of high school, and I think about this everyday, in the moments after I tell her that I love her, and when I watch her take her first really independent steps into this big world.

Lyrics

In the mornin’ sun
’round seven o’clock
The parking lot fills
around Toys-Я-Us
And my little girl,
she will get away
Ride her bike down

Toddler Hiway

Take your Close’n’Play
Toddler Hiway

Resurrection

Today is Easter. It is also the Birthday of my daughter. We had a big movie party at the theatre where I saw Star Wars, Raiders of The Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Rocky… lots of iconic films. But the place is now totally different. During the time that I’ve been back in my hometown, I saw the city work with a developer to bring about a rebirth of that old movie theatre. I thought I could experience a flourishing rebirth in my home town, too. No.

Today was also a going away party. My fiancee, the kids, and I are going far away. The Movers arrive Wednesday.

Not for nothing, but I am totally done with this city. It is a place, full of ghosts, decay, and injustice. I curse this place as rotting, heartless, and forsaken.

Are you just being cranky ?

For many blessings, I am grateful. I met my fiancee here. Well, in the big city, anyhow. This happened a few days after I got back from my road trip, described in the previous post. That was nearly a year and a half ago. In summary, I had given up dating and had resigned myself to the reality that this whole part of the country was a terrible place to fall in love; romantic irony ensues. Of course there is way more to it than that, and love is a long road. Considering how negative I have been on this blog about my own penchant for self-sabotaging love, you’d think I’d have more to say about my courtship and this wonderful woman who’d put up with an insufferably cranky idiot like me. You’d be right. I have an plenty of wonderful things to say, especially about her about how much I love her. I say them to her. She hears me, and she understands me.

My hometown did provide a public school system where dedicated teachers helped my children grow and learn. They are like heroes to me, and I feel deeply indebted to them, and its a debt that I cannot repay. Sadly, being underpaid heroes is one of their defining characteristics.

I also passed the bar exam. It was expensive and stressful to do, and I wasn’t able to practice law in any real way. It was necessary for me to work in a totally different profession. But passing the bar in a second state was no small feat. Getting a new job in a totally different field is also no small feat. They say that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. That’s a corny thing to say, but I assume the gist of the comment is that scarcity and a total disregard for decency makes any form of professional success a remarkable accomplishment in this neck of the woods. So I suppose, I should be really proud or something. But another popular thing to say here is “Big Whup” as in “Hi, I’m Paul Baldwin, and this is coffee talk. Where we talk about dogs, daughters, lofts and coffee. No big whup.”

It would be easy, therefore, to invalidate my feelings; declare that I am not grateful enough. Certainly it seems like a popular sentiment to express about me. And people certainly like to feel self-righteous and certain.

The fact is: my home town actually is a terrible place, and the whole region is a savage wasteland. So… no, I will not retreat from calling this place out for being what it is. The good things that I found, were despite the hostile environment; not because of it. My disgust is a valid feeling, I own it and it is mine.

I had a rant here about how my daughter was almost upstaged at her own party by my vain jackass older brother and how this bittersweet moment was nearly taken away from her.

There are times when a blog is a place to say the things unsaid in real life. But the Internet is a poor place to air dirty laundry, and in any event there was no incident, only my feelings about the near incident. Because my fiancee also saw the incident about to happen, she helped tamp down the situation, and nothing did happen. Ta da!

In private, she let me know that she supported me and reassured me that I am a great Dad. Her love buoyed me. So the scene that I was trying to avoid, was avoided. I didn’t blow up at anyone. Instead, I went to pay respects to my Mom.

That is where I encountered this cat.

This cat was in the woods behind my house, guarding the final resting place of my Mom. The cat made eye contact with me. The day was quiet and still. For a long moment, we regarded each other.

Hours later, however, I was told by a close acquaintance that “Some cat got hit by passing car” on the main road near my house. Although I didn’t see it, it made me afraid. A cat died on my road out of town; it is a bad omen for the road ahead.

I hope the cat that got hit was not this one who I saw. The person who told me was not an eyewitness, but had spoken with a person claiming to be so. Maybe, then, this hearsay was just a rumor; some misinformation as worthless as the rest of the gossip here. Yet, I doubt this hope. The suburban squalor belies a dark savagery of this place. I fear that the worst has befallen that innocent fellow. Poor cat, you couldn’t escape!
Whatever sorrows have occurred. And bad omens or notwithstanding, I will escape. I will start from my Mom’s grave, and take that same fatal road. I must put this hellish town behind me.
I will never live here again. If I can help it, I won’t even visit.

Lyrics :
Long before the screen door slammed, she was out of Xenia
A stranger could have loved that town but she had to leave

I wish I’d gotten to know her before I fell in love
I could say who’s to blame, say who’s the man in this cautionary tale
But I swore I’d be true and I’ll swear and I’ll swear ’til Kitten’s out of jail

It was like a TV show, the way she stole that car
Easy now to criticize, easy now to talk

I thought my luck was changing, I guess I was wrong
I could say who’s to blame, say who’s the man in this cautionary tale
But I swore I’d be true and I’ll swear and I’ll swear ’til Kitten’s out of jail

Didn’t want to be a slave
Just turned out that way

I wish I’d gotten to know her before I fell in love
I could say she’s to blame, say she’s the man in this cautionary tale
But I swore I’d be true and I’ll swear and I’ll swear ’til Kitten’s out of jail

Road movie to Berlin

I took a family reunion trip last week. I drove for eight hours to get there. The cliche is that road trips “Give me time to think” but the truth is more like it makes my escapist daydreams become real.

What kind of escape was it? Certainly not an escape from ghosts.

I went straight to the oldest living relatives in my family and spoke with them about my past, present and future. Specifically, they wanted to talk about my Dad’s past relationship with me; part out of loving concern for me, part because they miss him. The case can certainly be made that they are now the only people who could do anything like speak on my father’s behalf.

Really? You are not done blaming your Dad yet? Really!
No, its not like that…. or, heck, maybe it is? My hermeneutic of suspicion is poor.

Point is: They didn’t try to answer for him, but they did help me understand the things he said to his own family about his own life, which included his son (me) who he loved but who broke his heart by siding with his mother. They described his anger, which consumed him and destroyed him. They were traumatized by it, and saddened by it.

Inevitably, they spoke about the War. After the war, soldiers are supposed to leave the front. Some go back to the barracks, some go home. But because my Dad was a child when war took his mother, where was there to go? His whole life, he was like the solider who could never stop fighting the war.

For me, it felt like a breakthrough, and an escape from the infinite loop narrative that I tell myself about my life and history.

So it was a real escape, and not just a daydream.

NOW, Lyrics :

We were once so close to heaven
That Peter came out and gave us medals
Declaring us the nicest of the men
Time won’t mourn our loss
It’ll just sweep up out skeleton bones
So take the wheel and I will
Take the pedals