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I may not talk about the baby and our lives in terms of merchandise, so much, but Shasta and I are alike in that we both daydream about things related to the baby. I have a list of things I am looking forward to giving our child:
1) Someday I will give him or her the Cross fountain pen my friends in Paris gave me. I was thirty-three years old, adrift and divorced and a failure at work, but I felt, suddenly, very loved. I was sitting at a bar called the Klein Holland, and I opened the box and realized my friends thought of me as a writer and they missed me a little already.
2) I’m going to pass on two arrowheads my grandfather Clayton gave me when I was little. I believe my grandfather found them in the just-plowed fields near Flatrock River, where the Wendel property used to be. They are beautiful: hand-chipped from stone, perfectly edged, with unbroken points. Children today will never find Indian arrowheads on the ground. Not like these.
3) The brass compass my parents gave me one year when I went to summer camp. I remember my parents explaining that if I got lost, I should hold it still and flat and the needle would point to the North. I said, “I need one that points HOME.”
4) My little shelf of favorite books. My friend Jim once gave me a signed copy of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (when I was little, my father told me how much he liked this book and I remember looking forward to being old enough to read it). I’ve also got my signed Maxine Hong Kingston and Jim Harrison.
And maybe someday I’ll have my own books on this shelf, and I’ll be able to pass these on too.
5) I have a signed Frank Frazetta portrait of Kubla Khan. To me, it represents China and fearlessness and also my youth and my friend Mike, who kept this in his secret room for years, then suddenly gave it to me.
6) I have a picture of Shasta frowning at the camera when she was five years old. She gave it to me a few years ago and I love it very much.
7) I have a box of old journals and drawings, a hard drive full of old photos. My mother, so tiny, unable to speak English yet, in an ancient Dallas full of sunlight. My father dressed like the tiny cowboy he hoped to be. My Uncle Thom standing with a basket of fresh tomatoes in an open doorway. My Aunt Sara with her feet up in a little red wagon. I hope that someday our child will open these things and study them. I hope he or she will see my young self –five years old and happy, reading Babar for the first time, or later, so happy in Africa and France, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people our child has never met—I hope our child recognizes me.
I know my handwriting is illegible, but I hope the pages are fragrant with my life, with all those feelings, and that those moments are somehow loved again.
One piece of merchandise that I am currently mourning is my iPod. An iPod isn’t the kind of thing that has any value five years after you get it, but they are weirdly personal in a way. My last iPod had these words etched on the back: “Africa, America, China/My lonely, lovely head.” This iPod and my dog Tristan have been my constant companions as I walked in the sunrise and sunset this long, daylight savings winter. Tristan is still here, but I, through sheer dumbassery, dropped my iPod from the pocket of my fleece right into a $##$@ TOILET BOWL last night. Shasta is off in New Jersey with her friend Chloe, so now my world is silent.
This post has really gone on too long –but I’m curious: what are some things other people are waiting to give away?
I don’t know if many people are losing sleep over the “cloth vs. disposable” diaper problem, but I suspect Shasta is not the only person researching this and every other aspect of baby-parenthood. I know Jennifer (of Jennifer and Jody) is, for example . . . And the fabulous Rooneys have thought this through too. Anyway, I found this on-line today, and it seems a pretty definitive breakdown of the issue:
I remember reading Superman comics where he would find himself trapped on Bizarro World, a place where a chalky white Superman wore a backwards S and put on glasses to go fight crime. Bizarro Superman spoke like Frankenstein and did everything backward, as did everyone on his planet, so naturally Bizarro World was completely screwed up.
Recently, I’ve felt trapped in Bizarro World.
Since the Reverend Wright controversy, I have heard a lot of people blasting Barack Obama for being secretly angry and hateful toward whites and even America in general. I think that only in Bizarro World could a display of tolerance and openness to other people’s feelings be considered a sign of a candidate’s secret intolerance.
As a man looking at raising a child of color, I appreciated Senator Obama’s speech on race. As a half-Chinese/half-Hoosier wandering goof, I appreciated his reference to his grandmother and the complicated ties that bind us all together. I think that most of the people who are reacting badly to him either a) have not read or heard what he said, or b) live in segregated communities (or families).
My other Superman memory involves a “Superman vs. Muhammad Ali” comic I had. The story involved the two most famous people on earth being forced to box to see which one would face the gladiator sent by an invading army from another galaxy.
I remember –and I still love this moment—that Ali and Superman enter the ring (under a red sun, where Superman would have no powers) and Superman is allowed to keep his costume and cape because “otherwise, many of the spectators from other planets would have too much trouble telling the two apart.”
S. and I had our fingerprints taken today, one of the last things we need to do to make this all happen.
Before we left for the homeland security office, we were all aglow with the moment and took a picture of ourselves. We left without seeing how it turned out, so I drew it in my notebook while we were out. For some reason, I misspelled Ethiopia, but then we got home and it turned out the word was backward in the photograph, as if it were written in a mirror– so maybe it was magic and not stupidity on my part.
Anyway, a big day.
Saturday, S. and I went shopping for a crib. Actually, she’s BEEN shopping for a crib for months. She had been preparing in much the same way the Japanese planned Pearl Harbor. I just went along for the final attack. Somehow I lived to tell the tale. I am the Kamikaze who lived.
Anyway, she picked out a nice one, and I must say I had no idea there had been so many developments in something that is basically half-bed, half-cage. Some cribs resemble nothing so much as little jails. Others look like pirate furniture, like pieces of ships or like they’re made of railroad ties or something, two hundred pounds of wood forming a kind of sandwich around the little mattress. S. picked out a pretty little “distressed” number, a whitewashed hardwood that looks somehow airy and solid both.
S. is obviously the woman for me because only a couple times during those eight hours did I wish I was somewhere else.
I’m not saying I didn’t do a little daydreaming (because that is, I realize, my way) but I also watched S. in action and felt immensely lucky. We stopped for Dairy Queen halfway through the afternoon and I thought, like the poet Lew Welch, “So it comes to this,” and for all the years of wandering around and meeting people and hoping and thinking . . . I was glad it came to this.
I’ve been thinking about my friend and co-worker, Max, whose seven year old daughter came home with her face wet because the kids on the school bus were making fun of her. Her class had been discussing Abraham Lincoln and she brought in a resin bust of Lincoln that Max had made. On the bus, the other girls in her class insisted that her daddy hadn’t made it because it was plastic and then they called her a liar, which made her cry.
I started thinking about the day children make fun of our kid for being black, or acting white, or for being too short or too tall or too happy. I hope to teach our child that he or she is a royal child of Ethiopia, a descendent of Solomon, a prince or princess with an invisible cape of stars.
We are a family of special people, I will say, and if we aren’t like anyone else, that’s because it took ten thousand years for the world to make us and we are special and made for something new. We are airplanes in a world of bicycles, clouds in a world of mountains. I have blood made of the Yangtze and the Ohio Rivers, I’ll tell our child, and Shasta is the smallest and warmest mountain of New Hampshire. And our child is made of love and Africa. We three have original maps and books inside and we are writing stories that have never been heard before.
Also: I was looking at a really great blog the other day and saw a beautiful little sketch that Jana had done of herself and the future. I did a similar one; Shasta added the flowers.
