22 Times Forever -- 2006

I began writing a small newspaper column for a local paper 20 years ago, and that feels like enough. My last one publishes this week, so I thought for the next few weeks I might post some from the archives, random drop-ins on 20 years.

His name is Nolan. He has bright red hair and a wicked smile. He is nine months old, and he had me at hello. 

I don't really know Nolan, or his mom, although our paths have crossed lately several times a week.  And what I understand of their situation comes mostly through observation and eavesdropping. 

Single motherhood can be ironic, and unfair.  A man living this woman's life, juggling a job, school and a toddler, has an automatic theatricality, a nobility, a cinematic quality, coming to a theater this Christmas (and it is, apparently; Will Smith is no dummy).  A single mom, though, is an accepted norm, nothing special, when of course it is. 

At any rate, I was wandering down a hallway when Nolan and I had a little interaction.  He was practicing his new skill of mobility and throwing some charm my way just for laughs, and I was helpless.  We fooled around for a few minutes, and I told my wife about it when I got home. 

"I got to play with a baby," I said, and she knew, the way women know things after 24 years, the way they know their husbands.  The way they know their habits and faults, their routines and their ruminations, their joys and grief, what they like for breakfast and what noises they make at night.  The way they know the holes in their hearts, the things they miss. 

My wife and I were of the first generation to find the future not in a doctor's office, but in a plastic container on the bathroom sink.  The home pregnancy test was positive, but then we knew it would be.  Spring came that year, as I recall, suddenly and gloriously, with warm days and misty rain in the evenings, with sunshine waking me up in the mornings, along with the sound of my wife throwing up.  Oh, we knew. 

We were fortunate, I see now.  We had health insurance, and supportive friends.  We had a good doctor, and plenty of books and classes to bring us up to speed on impending parenthood.  We got a new, larger apartment.  I got a second job.  We waited. 

The doctor said January, but doctors can be wrong, and babies have their own calendars anyway.  It amazes me now the details I remember: the look on my wife's face as she came out of the bathroom, the meal that went uneaten, the suitcase quickly packed, the bored cashier who stared at me while I said, "We're having a baby!" and bought chapstick, because the books said you might want to bring chapstick.

Looking back, through a long night of labor, some of it very painful, I don't think my wife even once complained of dry lips, but I was ready anyway. 

"Bonding," they call it now, but it's simply falling in love, those first moments.  I walked her around the room, this hours-old infant, pointing out objects.  "This is a plant," I murmured.  "This is a picture."

I held her up to the hospital window, as dawn broke over downtown Seattle.  "This is morning," I said.

 I couldn't wait for her to talk.  There was so much I wanted to explain, to demonstrate, to show her and watch her brain wrap itself around an idea.  She'd sit in her high chair, eating scrambled eggs, with that red hair and wicked smile, and charm to spare, and I'd think, "I have things to tell you."

 One day, when she was 3, she asked me why it was cold outside.  I picked up an apple and an orange, tilted the apple earth and moved it around the orange sun, and explained orbits and apices, seasons and cosmology, and she listened carefully.

 "Now do it in Big Bird's voice," she said.

 And one day, of course, I thought of something important, and turned to tell her, and she was gone.  And I just stood there, understanding and not, at the same time.

 My daughter turns 22 this Friday, December 15.  She will graduate college this spring, a grown woman who teaches children about music.  Maybe she throws in some cosmology from time to time, I don't know.

I am more proud of her than I can say here without sounding really obnoxious, so I'll leave it at that.  She'll be home in a week and we'll be adults together, and there is joy in that, and in the knowledge that she made it this far in spite of me.   

But I have little left to teach her, and I think about that sometimes.

So this little boy the other day was fun.  He laughed at this strange creature, with the hairy face and deep voice, and then he wobbled off to find new stuff, my heart securely tucked under his arm.

And as I watched him, I found myself thinking, "I have things to tell you," but of course I can't, and I won't.  But I would.