Beckmann, Nauman, Van Zandt

In an undergraduate creative writing class, at the encouragement of a visiting writer, I sorted through a pile of art postcards and chose the painting below, Max Beckmann's "Self-Portrait in a Tuxedo" (1917). The idea was to select a painting that best reflected what we admired in our own poems, then talk about it.

Then, I liked that I wrote elegant, formal, imposing, and inscrutable poems (with very large hands), though I probably said something in the class about negative capability and the nothing that was not there in my poems. The point, I thought, was not so much to speak honestly about creative process or outcome, but rather to seem very smart and thoughtful, with the secondary benefit of impressing anyone. Then, I wanted to be a poet, at least as much as I wanted to write poems, and poets seemed to intimidate other poets. What is still vivid for me is how well I remember liking that painting. I tacked it to the wall of my hostel room in Bangladesh, and then again on the wall of Katie and I's first apartment in Chicago, over the desk where I tried to write before and after my middle school teaching day.

During my senior year of college, I liked to ride the el downtown to the Chicago Art Institute and wander through the galleries, often during campus events, especially sports. I was studying history, and earning a teaching certificate, so I had no training in visual aesthetics or creative practice. My taste tended to run to extremes of convention and innovation; what I could either seem to get my mind around or fully misunderstand. This attitude had the ironic effect of making my biases more concrete, and limiting my sense of curiosity about a world that seemed so interrelated with poetry, or so it went until the afternoon I watched Bruce Nauman's "Clown Torture" installation.

What is going on here? I remember thinking, as Nauman, on televisions, sat on a toilet, told irritating children's jokes, performed simple clown tricks, and held up a goldfish bowl, all while some other person, off-screen, yelled variations on "No!" If my mind wanted to wander into parody mode, then it also seemed to find no ironic distance from which to express my own skepticism. Nauman's work was all removal and distance. Watching it (experiencing it? witnessing it?) had the effect of making my attitudes about art feel not only small, but particularly vulnerable, as though Nauman had both anticipated the limit of my rationale feeling about the work, and also triggered a strong emotional reaction; one maybe even stronger than the great rooms of still life and sculpture one floor up. Nauman's "NOOO!" still instantly conjures my twenty-something self, standing in a gallery, rubbing my chin, silly hat and all; desperately trying to osmose some understanding of art, imagining I had some fresh perspective--some superiority--by which I might instantly make sense of the world around me. He seemed to have my number: all ethos; very little understanding.

At the very end of that year, a friend, maybe the best writer in our workshop, explained over a game of Trivial Pursuit that he was not going to keep writing poems. He had written his senior thesis about Robert Frost, and decided that American poets were too unhappy a lot, too eager for tragedy and suffering, too narcissistic and self-satisfied. He held out as an example of this useless pettiness Lowell's unattributed takedown of Robert Frost, that a "mutual friend" had said, "It's sad to see Frost storming about the country when he might have been an honest schoolteacher." Better, my friend sad said, to make money and enjoy our short lives. My friend was the first person I knew who liked Townes Van Zandt, the "real poet," he liked to say. I admired my friend's certainty, and his willingness to walk away from poetry. I saw my inability to do the same as a specific weakness of pride, a foolish unwillingness to cut my losses, and whatever it meant for our friendship, it was enough to see me through that first stretch of feeling naive, under-conceptualized, uncertain, and lonely.

Freedom

I like what Bill Littlefield said so well this week on Only A Game:

"On the days that seem easiest to understand, it feels like there is a clear line between our grievances and our delights, between that which oppresses and threatens us and that which can temporarily banish our troubles by entertaining us. To the people who lost loved ones on Wednesday in Port Said, it must feel as if there is no safe place at all."

Littlefield gets right how activities that seem safe, even delightful, before a trauma, undertake more subtle considerations of risk and reward after it; how uncertainty persists in habits of self-distraction. I have written about a few of those habits--hiking and television watching, the management and medication of sleep--and also in newer writing that has yet to make the rounds. Driving, dating, everyday finance, even parenting are sometimes occasions for the integrity of a life to collapse inward; for the malevolent unreason of the world to exploit vulnerabilities and undermine confidences. As those activities, vulnerabilities, and confidences continue normalcy in a life, a corresponding over-caution becomes exhausting; however coincidental, its intrusions seem both predictive and useless.

I enjoyed very much Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. It is an energetic, well-constructed, and thoroughly unconsoling novel. Time and again, Franzen asks, what does it mean to mistake an abundance of opportunity for the absence of consequence? What binds us to our choices beyond the freedom to make or not make them? The hero, Walter Berglund, clings as dogmatically to the preservation of a minor species of songbird as the neoconservatives who coax his son to profiteer during the Iraq War shift their moral, political, and social rationalizations; as his best friend struggles to preserve in his public self the heterodox moralities of rock and roll; as his wife rejects inherited models of companionship for equally ambivalent ones. I would say that the thinking here feels very Midwestern and Catholic, except that the main characters are Lutheran and Protestant, the author Jewish. Better to say, I think, the values that resonate throughout the book seem exceptionally American: full of transformative potential, utterly blind to context.

Four years ago, I went to the wedding of a very good friend from college. During the weekend festivities, I threw up in front of a famous landmark, underdressed for the rehearsal, arrived late to the wedding the next day after trying again and agin to buy a nicer pair of shoes, and generally stood in corners of elegant rooms feeling very sorry for myself. I left the reception that night inside my own fully-inhabited, private head. Mostly, I hated feeling pitied by those other guests who did know about Katie's death. I resented those who were not aware of it.

Do I see now, in my allergic hostility to weddings then, a certain collegial narcissism, a willingness to take what I could in order to extend the terms and scope of my grief into new geographies? Whether I was merely sympathetic or understandably, justifiably overwhelmed, seems beside the point. I had no idea how to insulate myself against a world that seemed largely indifferent to my grief. I felt stuck perpetually sussing out the sympathy of strangers who, of course, attended the wedding with other, more relevant intentions.

Cait, Walt, and I are going to watch the Super Bowl this afternoon at a friend's house, with some other parent-friends we've made in the last seventeen months. It has become, gradually, an abundance of energetic and social occasions with other new parents. Walt is mobile and capable. He likes being around other kids, especially bigger ones. My mom says that Walt is as social and engaged as I was at that age, a tow-headed charmer of all ages and genders. I would like to be able to tell Walt with any certainty that the world is either a secure or insecure place, but his experience of it will finally supersede my limited perspective. I can only stand near Walt, and not too close, as he climbs then leans out from one precarious structure after another. In the meantime, this afternoon, I will glue myself to the television and root convivially for whomever is losing. Go Giants! Go Pats! What does it really matter to me who wins?

A friend recently posted to Facebook photographs from high school. As my sister pointed out then, a late-adolescent move from moon-shaped, Dynasty-style lenses to narrow rectangles updated my look a good twenty years. I have aged well, at least in the relative sense. High school, like college, was no series of peaks, not physically, intellectually, or socially. Rather, both were periods of experimentation and the practice of many kinds of failure. Gone are the short eras of chorale singing, chewed cigars and fedoras, beaded hair, not wearing jeans on principle, subscriptions to Mother Jones and The Nation, Spyro Gyra mix CDs, etc. We can, it seems, only choose so many uninherited influences. As I no doubt wrote in many yearbooks, next to so many lyrics by Jimmy Buffett and Kris Kristofferson, in the end, the truth does set us free.

Baby Ducks

Walt will play for minutes—minutes!—on end and by himself these days. He hugs, points to his eyebrows, distinguishes mom from dad from grandma from the friend visiting last week who brought over for the house a head of kale and six pounds of butternut squash. Walt is drawn to wheels of every variety. He pulls the giant plastic bin filled with cars out from under the piano, dumps them on the floor, and runs a few across the carpet. The slightly larger plastic cars are self-propelled, but he hasn’t quite figured out the winding mechanism. I hold and point these cars toward the sofa, but often they run in circles—bad tire, poor alignment—and end up behind the easy chair, or under the coffee table, where we dig them out weeks later.

Last Sunday, at the park, Walt borrowed from another kid a miniature pram with a plastic baby doll inside of it. He ran the pram back and forth on the sidewalk, alternately smiling and furrow-browed, pleased and determined. The sidewalk was really a narrow strip of cement between two sports fields, beside a school. When the pram ran into the grass, Walt pushed and pulled a bit, stood back, then grabbed the doll and tossed it onto the ground. Too heavy. He labored across the grass.

We saw friends in the city last weekend: birthday parties, brunch. It’s a little more than an hour’s drive, and we timed the last trip poorly. As we drove up and over the hill, Walt started to konk out. His eyes glassed over. He went limp in the car seat. We desperately named every fire truck, ambulance. We asked Walt the same few questions, over and over. Do you want to go to a party today? Do you think you’ll see your friends there? Sluggish, a tad imperial, he replied, Dah. As we got out of the car, Walt saw other kids and perked up a bit. He ran pell-mell between fabric discs placed on a yard, racing from one iceberg to the next.

Whenever Katie and I visited Indiana, I would get a lot of mileage out of mocking animated shows: getting the words wrong, misnaming the characters, asking pointless questions about the plot. It sounds so awful now, but then, I think my nieces and nephews were at least sometimes amused. As you probably know, I love The Wonder Pets. I have fond memories of singing (the wrong lyrics for) its theme song. When did parody become sincere affection? My nieces and nephew have since moved on to more sophisticated fare, which I love, too: The Office, Friday Night Lights. Perhaps I will one day get them on board with Parenthood.

When Walt and I watch The Wonder Pets, I struggle mightily to enjoy the show and not get too sentimental. We are watching The Wonder Pets to entertain him for a few minutes. I can wax nostalgic for my personal history another time. Walt loves, especially, Ming-Ming (the Wonder Pet duck), which is to say, he loves ducks. Our bathtub is filled with plastic ducks. Our bookshelf is rich with fowl-ian tales. Duck was Walt’s first word. He points at many things still and, lacking the word, offers a heartfelt, Dah.

Perhaps the duck fascination is inherited and short-hand. When we first met in the Peace Corps twelve years ago, I liked to offer Cait false consolations about the culture shock overwhelming us. When it gets bad, I would say, just think of the baby ducks in the world! It became a running joke in our friendship, then our marriage. Walt will no doubt role his eyes one day at some duck-related anecdote from his early, precognitive youth. I keep on my desk a photo of Cait watching gulls fly across a lake in the Sierras. They swirl around her head. Cait is facing away from the camera, a little older than Walt is now. According to his mother, Walt is my spitting image, but I don’t see it. We walk around the house, yard, playground, and parking lot. He holds my finger and pulls me in one direction, then another. In safe climes, he toddles off and plays a while on his own, comes back to say hi, then heads off again.




Baby Ducks


Fragile as epiphytes,
tight as silk saris or orange peels:
the truth always gives way.

The day we met
I convinced you I overcame
childhood rickets. Later:
that I flew with John Denver
the night before he died.

Here’s a fact:
95% of baby fowl
purchased each Easter
never make it to their first birthday.

Forgive all of this
confessing—

but when I told you
if it gets bad
to think of baby ducks
I didn’t love you. Not like this.

Mrs. Bridge

Walt this morning stepped onto my face to reach the cat on the bed. I managed to grab hold of his legs so he wouldn't fall, and also to toss my eyeglasses across the floor so he wouldn't stomp them, and then I waited. He poked at the cat, giggling. I have no idea if he reached the cat, or if the cat was (most likely) standing just out of reach, or if that cat cleared the bed immediately and ran into the bathroom. I waited there a while, on the floor, on my back, face-footed, until eventually Walt lost interest and climbed back down. We got dressed for the morning, went outside and walked around the block, visited the birds next door, played in the living room, had some oatmeal. A little bit later, he stood at the stairs pointing at the door to the basement apartment. Nap time.

I finished reading Mrs. Bridge last night. A good friend, and talented writer, recommended it as a kind of anti-Cheever opus of the mid-20th century. There is so much to admire about the book: its plainspoken and sparse style, the range of feeling, the mix of satire and gentle humor, the short vignettes (117 in all) that often find India Bridge just short of connecting meaningfully with the friends and family in her life. I was born and lived the first 14 years of my life in Kansas City, so there is a certain fascination with the names and places in the book. I couldn't help feeling that the book is rather cruel to India Bridge, who seems to have no curiosity about the world or engagement with it, except for the conventions of her social circle. She does not know or particularly like her children. She is prim and defensive, calculating and manipulative. Like all of the women in the book (except for the friend who kills herself, and the daughter who moves to New York City and never returns), she is both boring and bored. Still, as I finished the book, I felt intensely sad and lonely for her, and I suppose, for myself and about the world around me. Reading the book initiated that mix of feeling, thoughtfulness, and empathy that often make the best literature so satisfying, so good; that makes me want to keep reading, to find some sense of understanding about the world in which I live, and maybe also (to borrow a phrase from a colleague) to find it and myself on the page.

I like Eliot's notion, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that a poet develops his/her taste in three stages. First, he reads until he finds those other poets he really likes. Next, he reads those poets intensely, so that he understands what he likes about them. Finally, he attempts to read the rest of literature, and uses it to test those taste, and to observe how it might evolve. Of course, that last step is quite a challenge one, to which we must inevitably fall short. But I suppose it's more problematic to stop at the second step, to decide wholesale that there can be no literature except for what we know we like. To do so would seem to satisfy not a love of literature, but instead a love of compulsion, and for the accompanying anxiety about what we have not read, or worse, about how our own work might fail. Of course, it also seems difficult to decide that benign neglect is the way to go; to love everything, so as to exclude and risk valuing nothing. Liking anything, I suppose, requires a certain vulnerability about judgment: the limits of one's range of interest and exposure, alongside everything to which it might be compared.

In his review of the best films of the year, David Edelstein notes the many occasions for our cultural obsession with apocalypse. Zombie plagues, diseased plague, global warming, world war, even melancholy begins the end. Last week, the NewsHour ran a feature about extreme weather in 2011, the radical frequency and scope of it. If it is our cultural moment to decide how we feel in the abstract about annihilation, and whether we intend to fortify the bunkers or anticipate and solve the problem, then the latter feels conventional and overly confident, while the former is titillating and exotic, tinged with all the promise and release of nihilism. I suspect these are alternately economic questions, a manifestation of faith in markets and currency--Why take precaution, why not maximize the take, if it's all destined to come to an end?--and also the familiar questions of liberal democracy and empire. Will government do the work to serve the neediest, empower the capable and competent, and represent and protect everyone? Must it?

What little time Cait and I have some evenings to watch television, we've newly devoted to Parenthood. If the first season is a bit uneven, still, at its best, this is a very, very good show. Developed by the creator of Friday Night Lights, Jason Katims, and Ron Howard (director and producer of many things, including Arrested Development), Parenthood hits nearly all of my buttons these days. I could say I like it for its great writing, strong cast, Northern California setting, and gentle optimism for and about the world and family at its center, but I doubt I would have given it a chance were it not for the New Yorker's strong endorsement of it this week, and it's ready availability on demand. Parenthood is still another example of how NBC can develop excellent shows--Friday Night Lights and Community come to mind--that get critical raves and a cultish audience, for which it nonetheless can't quite find its audience. If you get a chance to check it out, do so soon, because as things currently stand, it may very well be canceled at year's end with season 3 (the best one yet).

Parenthood uses for its credit sequence Dylan's upbeat version of "Forever Young" from Planet Waves. The song also very neatly bookends its pilot with this version and his more contemplative slow-down from that same album. The folky original is absent in the episode and show. That version was Katie and I's wedding song, and I didn't know the later versions until I sought them out after her death. I might try to say something very clever here about the many manifestations of the things we both desire and grieve for in the world, but instead I'll say that I felt a tremendous relief that hearing this song, when I didn't mean to, was okay. I could handle it, and I even enjoyed it. May your heart always be joyful, may your song always be sung. I'll post below two videos. First, the pilot episode; watch it through the end of the opening baseball scene (up to the credits). Second, in keeping with a common thread on the blog, a pretty great duet of "Forever Young" by Dylan and Springsteen.

Cait, Walt, and I walked down to the campus bookstore yesterday afternoon. The academic term starts next week, when the students arrive, and I wanted to check that my course texts were in-stock. They were there, alongside the novels, poetry and story and essay collections, histories and criticisms, of the other classes offered by the English department. Such a wide range of styles, authors, and genres are read and taught and discussed and loved here, from Milton to Bishop to Chandler to Berryman, to Lowell's imitations of Berryman to Mitchells' translations of Gilgamesh to Plath's journals alternating jealousy and earnestness about her ambitions to publish poetry in The New Yorker; and this doesn't yet count the course readers, with parts and fragments to complement the full texts. We didn't linger too long there before Walt started pulling books, indiscriminately, from the shelves. Off to the upstairs cafe, then out to play in the fountain and quad, which are deserted only a day or two more, before heading back up the hill and home.

The Richest Man in Town

When I was in the eighth grade, a few days before Christmas Break, the religion teacher (I went to a parochial school) showed us It's A Wonderful Life, then asked us to explain what Harry Bailey meant at the end of the film when he declared his older brother was "the richest man in town." I had thought that the message was a pretty straightforward moral contrast. George Bailey was rich because he had friends who liked him and supported him in his time of need, a kind of wealth Mr. Potter, who had more money but no real friends, nonetheless couldn't buy. It turned out that mine was something of a minority position. Steve Pittert declared, to much agreement, that George Bailey would in fact now become even wealthier than Mr. Potter because of all of the money that people had brought to him that night. Soon, he explained, Bailey would crush Potter and restore order to Bedford Falls. The teacher worked us around eventually to the former interpretation, but the lines were drawn. It was one thing to root for the restoration and continuation of George Bailey's loyal opposition to Potter; it was another to root for the rise of Bailey, and the overthrow entirely of Potter's reign of terror.

Fifteen years later, I was teaching 7th grade social studies in a public school in Chicago, when a student asked whether we might watch a movie during the upcoming holiday party. We had agreed as a faculty to again order pizzas in for lunch before the break, and to have instructionally-driven "holiday parties," which might incorporate some aspect of instruction while also entertaining the students. The previous year, we had seen students from the higher grades roaming the halls in wild packs, seeking out pizza and soda from the lower grades, and so this year's festivities were meant to have more structure and order. I chose "It's A Wonderful Life" as the class movie, and posed the same question to my students. Their answer was the standard one, and when I posed the Bailey Rebellion thesis, no one took the bait.

It was my last year teaching at the school, for which I generally felt a sense of relief. It being the holidays, that relief was shaded with more than a little nostalgia for the job and work. Who was I meant to become, if not an enthusiastic and highly capable 7th grade teacher? What more should I expect from the world? These were easy, age-appropriate questions to ask, and it was wrong to feel overwhelmed by them. I had an easy enough answer. Already, I had applied to graduate school with the aim of studying and writing poetry. That afternoon, before the movie, I took time out to open presents from students. Among the cards, cookies, chocolates, etc., one student had given me a hip-hop hamster toy that started rapping every time you squeezed its stomach. I was thrilled. I took the toy with me to our various family holidays that year, though it became harder and harder to recreate the thrill in other settings.

Cait and I drove yesterday to Rancho Siempre Verde, where we spent the afternoon with friends and family making wreaths, looking at the trees, roasting s'mores over a fire, and swinging most of the various new tree swings installed this year. It was a beautiful day for it. On the way, I kept trying to find the right mix of Christmas music to start the season. I had very little success. Albums I liked as a kid felt too customary, while the newly-discovered stuff seemed derivative, even arbitrary. Where was that first thrill of nostalgia, uncomplicated by practice and intervening time? As is their annual custom, two local Bay Area radio stations have now switched to an all-Christmas-all-the-time format through December 25th. Their offerings during the drive were a mix of the truly awful alongside the interminably familiar. How strange to recognize the voice of yet another late-career rocker making a turn at Christmas crooning, to hear instead the superior precedents of Sinatra, Bennett, Crosby. A kind of staged sing-along, I suppose.

We watched Love, Actually the other night. It is a movie that thrills Cait, and I think the sort of movie one can really only oppose in the general sense--it's a manipulative, easy, bourgeois, sell-out of the worst kind of ensemble flick--or on gender grounds: men shouldn't watch and enjoy movies like this, and if they do, they should keep it to themselves. Since acknowledging the viewing on Facebook, I've heard much of the latter but none of the former. O, Christmas season, that makes annually even George Bailey unborn and born again. No doubt, this might be the year to get that fantastic gadget, to make each other happy, that Uncle Billy and Kid Brother Harry finally come home to say nice things to each other. Like Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt, and the football: who knows, this just might be the year.

Here's my beef, now, with "It's A Wonderful Life." Who's to say who would be alive now had they not met us, and whether they would like their world more for our lack of arrival into it? That we are alive, and that we find some way to like some part of that continuing life, seems more honest, and much darker, than George Bailey's victory lap. If a better troop leader than George were organizing the sledding at the start of the movie, perhaps Harry wouldn't have fallen into the water at all. If George hadn't worked at the Savings & Loan, perhaps some of the residents of Bailey Park would have gotten free and wide of Potter's spider-web entirely. Or, perhaps one needs the settled life of a George Bailey in order to look back and declare, with certainty, that indeed the world is a better place for our inclusion in it: richer, warmer, generative to the lives around it. Certainly, Bedford Falls never gets the opportunity afforded Sam Wainwright, Harry Bailey, Violet: to forget about, and even ignore them, as things continue.

One aspect of grief that no longer seems present, for me, is a competing sense of obligations: old and new, there and here, then and now. There is plenty of space for the present and memory, and both bring forward those parts I love in a life. But it is my life I'm talking about, here. The terrible and unresolved question of how another life ends, on what terms and to what account, persists with all of the guilt and speculation of an annual season custom-made to accommodate both. Better, I think, to say that the gears turn a certain way with us stuck in them, and then, to allow more than a little whimsy in the appreciation of the many directions they might otherwise have turned, and do turn still.

The Availability Heuristic

Cait and I went to see Hugo last night. It was a fun movie to watch, with its screen-popping 3D effects, and a marvelously twisted plot that came together well enough at the end. Good acting, beautiful cinematography, interesting characters, and nice to be out alone on the hometown after our holiday week in Chicago. The turn at the end, to the stage and recognition of a lifetime's work, was awfully tender-hearted, if a bit puzzling. Cait and I tried to hash it out a bit on our way home: what had happened, exactly, to that great opening mystery of the automaton, the quest of the orphan to find the message from his father? What did any part of how the movie began have, in the end, to do with film preservation? The movie seemed to jump tracks midway, turning from story to argument, character to idea. It felt a bit like propaganda, which is far too loaded a word to make the comparison exact, but the boy seemed more a reason to start the story, than to end it, and I missed losing him for the argument.

I am not a huge Weezer fan, but they absolutely kill it with their 2008 cover of "O, Holy Night." Who knew a punk cover could find a fresh angle to that most tired chestnut of holiday music? It's ardent, and entirely without sentiment or irony:

In the current issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis has a great piece about the economist Daniel Kahneman, and the concept of the availability heuristic, which argues that we express a bias toward those outcomes we can most easily imagine, however probable or improbable they might actually prove to be. Lewis uses the availability heuristic to explain Billy Beane's competitive edge in selecting baseball players, based on privileged data analysis, in spite of the conventional wisdom about them. But the concept works generally, from politics (welfare queens, death taxes) to racial profiling to self-perceptions of obesity. Even Christmas music so easily falls prey to our expectations of angelic choirs, churches or warmly-lit rooms filled with wood furniture, snow, underdogs, and missing, until we are reminded, "true meanings." I'll skip the irony, as Weezer does. I genuinely enjoy many aspects of the holiday plunder, and I'm skeptical of too much holiday-era triangulating.

I have nearly finished reading Alexandra Styron's excellent memoir, Reading My Father. Her representation of her father's generation of writers, and their self-mythologizing and reverence for the novel, feels so fragile. What happened to these "literary lions," who were so sure of their own significance, that they could alternately dismiss or dismantle their families? I suppose this is a kind of useless moralizing that falls a bit wide of the mark--I'm reading this memoir because I'm curious about both literary Styrons--but I wonder all the same about their sense of priority in relation to ambition. And, here is the permanent warp in my own availability heuristic: how could any of these writers not have expected to die too soon?

It is devastating to read Alexandra Styron's account of her father screaming at her, calling her a creep, ungrateful, etc., at all, but especially over the most minor interactions. I suppose that I retain enough of my Midwestern roots to simultaneously marvel and wonder at the disclosure, which I think requires a certain elegance and distance to get right. The goal, it seems, is to structure against the confessional urge, to find the tension that contains it. One of the comforts of narrative is the idea that any experience might conform to a sequence, and so, contain a hierarchy: the experience can be told, and so, explained. I'm borrowing a bit from an essay I like to teach, and I think contradicting a big part of its argument, but certain experiences seem compromised by narrative's need to put everything into order; that what happens might only be secondary to the witness.

Eight years ago, Katie and I drove from Chicago to Bowling Green, Ohio, to see her good friend, meet the good friend's fiancé, and spend some time together. On our way out of town, we stopped at one of those tacky year-round Christmas stores to kill some time and miss rush-hour traffic. We bought a small plastic tree for our apartment, which we decorated with ornaments from both of our families, and also a couple of CDs to listen to on the drive. It was an odd-numbered year, so we would have spent Christmas that year with Katie's family, and Thanksgiving with mine. Crossing Indiana, a state highway patrol officer offered me a deal: unclick my seat belt, and he would cite me for driving without my safety harness, rather than going 88 in a 65.

Walt is just crossing the threshold to full holiday awareness. I suppose there is no going back. We opened presents with my family over Thanksgiving, so that we could exchange them together, and it was fun to see Walt puzzle at the boxes, and enjoy very much the toys they contained. I have this fantasy of dressing Walt in one of those Ralph Lauren Christmas numbers with the plaid and the corduroy, but instead, we keep finding good hand-me-downs. Sheila and Jeff had out some photos from last Christmas, and the changes in Walt's face are so striking. He is leaner now, and longer, his hair is curled out, he walks. I have this idea sometimes that what I write these days is a direct effort to explain something to him about my life, but there is a good chance he will roll his eyes at any story about whatever preceded him, however dramatic, just as the chains will move, ever so gradually, until they measure other distances. In the meantime, excited as I am to write and teach, I'm thoroughly engaged with the coming holiday season. Here's another revitalized Christmas chestnut, bittersweet for the passing, this year, of The Big Man.

Snap

To combat Walt's croup this past weekend, we aired out the apartment both nights. Bath steam would not open his narrowed airways, so we tried instead the cold Bay air. Stacking blankets, we pulled Walt into the bed. We put the humidifier next to us and slept under the mist. Up from a solid sleep, mid-gasp, Walt seemed more often sleepily puzzled than anything. Why am I awake? Why can't I breath? We called the 24-hour help nurse, who listened to his cough and diagnosed it over the phone. We double-checked the book to confirm the tell-tale sign: stridor (seal bark). A strange, attack-copter-sounding word. Yet another minor virus, like roseola, that no one thinks to mention at the baby shower.

The last time my bedroom temperature reached the evening low was while I lived in Bangladesh, around the same time of year. Winter arrived that night all at once, following a terrific thunderstorm. I woke in the middle of the night to put on every layer of clothing in my bag, including a rain slicker and hoodie. It was cold that night, for Bangladesh at least. No humidity. I turned off the ceiling fan, closed the windows, curled into a ball, and waited for morning. As soon as the shops were open, I walked into town and paid a merchant to hand-sew a large, red quilted blanket, the Bangladeshi "lep." The blanket was sewn together from old lungis, saris, and sheet cloths. The stuffing was soft and I slept under that blanket every night for the next three months, until the early spring arrived.

I left my lep in Bangladesh, but Cait's is stowed away in the back of our chested drawers. What a quilt. Laid on top of an insulated blanket and down comforter, it's rather too warm for Northern California. The evening low last weekend evening was 43 degrees, but I had no point of reference to check it in our room. Walt slept like a champ, once he finally went down for the night. The next morning, we had that unfamiliar panic after waking naturally. Where is the baby?! He's next to us, wedged against the pillow wedged against the chair stacked with books to stand it in place.

We went out briefly for Halloween, then called it an early night. Walt was dressed as a goldfish--one of his favorite words. He didn't like to wear the top portion of the costume, so mostly he toddled around in his orange tights, the goldfish head severed and hanging to the left off his back. Macabre, at least for this household. I have spent more time outdoors in Northern California than I have any placed I've lived except Bangladesh, and I like it the most here, where we can see the golden hills (now green) off the back porch. Everything thrives in California, even during a cold snap. We moved Walt back to his crib and he slept well there, too, though not as late into the morning. Back to the grind of trading off first calls. The croup has developed into the common cold, which is apparently a pretty common turn in the cycle, a near-chronic condition and one we handle expertly--wait it out--now that Walt is going to daycare a few days a week.