Choices

Back in Alaska now, nearing the end of my second week back. I developed a routine duing the summer, and with winter closing in, it's easy to hold to: work 8-5, roll on down to Wasilla, chat with Kate via webcam, hit the gym (getting back into swimming, and it feels goooooood), drive back to the house, have dinner, read for a few hours, and go to sleep. It's a simple routine, and with winter coming on quickly here, easy to keep. Daylight's down to slightly less than eight hours, and though dawn and dusk are lengthy and there's light enough to see by for a while on either side, the sun's not in the sky for long. Today it rose sometime around 10 AM, and set rather before 6. Despite the unseasonably hot weather--41 F this morning!--the shortening days and stiff winds, carrying clouds of dust from the mountains, give the land a stark cast. Lowering gray clouds swathed the mountaintops this morning and dusted them with snow.

Katie and Eva are still in Rhode Island, of course, and Eva is growing like we hoped she would, gaining weight and length and awareness of the people and things around her. Katie gets to see her dawning intelligence and expressiveness, though most often those still amount to burps and spit-ups. I saw one facial fit I might call a smile before I left, though it was unclear what she might be smiling at, and it was gone as quickly as it came. That's one of the many amazing things about newborns: all their muscles, including their mouth and face, are in nearly constant motion. Their legs and arms pump, they arch and twist their back, the face assumes one strange mask after another as the muscles move with apparent randomness. A look of concentrated misery might melt into a lax, open-mouthed doze. Eva might furrow her brows, and assume a look something like her mother's intense anxiety, but then her face relaxes and her tongue slips out. When the kid is yours, this kaleidoscope of motion is an endless fascination.

Newborns are really quite serious creatures. They don't joke around. They're tiny, get cold easily, they have small reserves of food, water and oxygen, and their needs are immediate. Their eyes are almost always closed for the first few weeks. An infant's means of communicating are crying and thrashing. It takes a little time to build up to it--she'll start out with a splutter and a murmur, followed by a brief cry or two, before working up to full volume. The whole process takes a minute or two, and unless she were warming some milk from the fridge, Katie would never let Eva get that far.

Katie's care of Eva has been both loving and hard work. The feeding alone is a tough learning process. Like pregnancy and birth itself, breastfeeding, for being natural, can be difficult, painful, and full of unexpected problems. A mammary gland duct might become plugged. The teat might begin to leak at surprising times (the things have Pavlovian ways). The mother and baby might pass an infection back and forth to each other, which makes the breastfeeding even more painful. The baby's latching on is often awkward and startling. And this is just what I've seen, or been told about!

But I've left that world behind for the time being, and I've come to the frozen coast (or near it, anyway). And a frightening reality has become obvious: with the reduced (i.e. no survey season overtime) hours, and my two-months-on, one-month-off pattern, Katie and I are making a little less than half of what we need to survive. We're out of backup resources and now, failing some kind of silver bullet, will need to make some very harrowing choices. Such as, do we default on a credit card and the car loan? We'll do without cable TV, but the phone is important for work, and the internet is our major means of communication...and despite all this, we're still running behind on the mortgage. Extended stretches of unemployment over the last two years have brought me, and now us, to this point.

She and I discussed it this afternoon, as I sat at the cafe. I didn't care who else might have been listening in--I'm not ashamed of our life. I'm proud of it. I don't pretend not to have difficulties when I really do. Kate and I thrashed through some of the immediate problems we face and, without making any immediate choices, prepared ourselves for a seige of sorts as we try to navigate financial trouble and at least keep our home. We discussed the possibility of bankruptcy, but the laws have been so rewritten to favor the creditors in recent years that I don't think it will help much--a few isolated defaults would be better than a permanent mark. And yes, I write this partly as a way of steeling myself for the coming decisions, and their aftermath.

It's a comfort just to be able to see her face even as we discuss things like that, which have no immediate solution. And of course there are good things in each of our days, and some banter. And toward the end of our talk, we'll exchange "I love you" once or twice, without other things to say. And though it's a comfort to say and hear it, the ice-cold, unsentimental part of me is impassive as those words whistle by like a chill breeze. They're a thin reminder of, a plea for, the rest of the relationship.

A friend of mine once told me a very interesting idea: love consists only of your actions toward another person. There is nothing else. I do think there's a lot of truth in that, but the desire, the will, the genuine pleasure in performing those actions, is no less a part. The emotion without action would be like the holy spirit without a vessel, or scripture without a reader. On the other hand, there's the thought of Paul: actions without love are themselves empty. A vessel with no liquid, an idle mind learning nothing. Both are indispensible. The vessel and the spirit need each other.

But so far apart, we have almost no means of doing anything. Katie's cleverness at throwing me a small birthday party, while she was in Rhode Island and I in Alaska, nearly made me cry. I went to my favorite cafe--Pandemonium, of course--and idly called her as I arrived. She then telephoned the cafe before I ordered my coffee, told them it was my birthday, and presto, I had a song and free dessert to go along with the gifts she'd mailed.

Something extraordinary like that doesn't happen every day, and usually, she and I have nothing but words to share. I won't say that damages, or drains our relationship. It's testing our endurance, right now, but how relationships grow and change, some parts withering and other parts taking fresh flower, is far deeper and more complex. I'm not worried about us, at all, with respect to being apart, or facing severe financial hardship. We'll live, and we'll have fun. But the words "I love you", repeated somberly or anxiously, are more like the cut than the bandage.

One of my favorite bands is Dire Straits, and one of my favorite lyrics comes from their song "Why Worry":

But baby
Just when this world seems mean and cold
Our love comes shining red and gold
And all the rest is by the way.

The plinkety-plink of the guitar--any Mark Knopfler fans out there know what I mean--is itself kind of plaintive. But like the intro to Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah, through the minor chords and dangling notes, strong, vibrant emotion animates the whole. More delicately in the Dire Straits tune, but very much like.

I think of when I saw Katie, desperate with pain and frustration, sobbing and sometimes snarling as she tried to feed Eva. Or I think of the nursery, with its colorful marine theme, mostly her work, and all the thought and hope she put into completing it. And after we finished, she spent every evening for nearly a week sitting in the rocking chair, participating in the atmosphere. As I think of how she'll put similar thought and and hope into the Christmas decorations before long. It's these unselfconscious moments, some loud, some quiet--some in pain, some peaceful--that make me feel the amazement and gratitude for her presence.

Next to recollections like that, hearing a saddened "I love you" almost like a toll paid for the conversation. Those three words aren't needed, and repeated too often, can obscure what we mean. Better even to joke, such as to imitate our favorite cartoon Metalocalypse (about a world-famous numbnut death metal band, Dethklok). Something along the lines of, "Ugh, I hope you fall off the balcony and break your neck, whatever." We've done that on a number of occasions, and when it came to a contest of each of us trying to gross the other out more, I can say that my wife has quite an, um, sanguine imagination. Yup, safe to say that.

Of course, there's a new show, and new games to play...our new favorite show, Kung Fu. Yes, a nearly 40-year-old show, that we've just discovered (thanks to Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill and David Carradine). And though Kate might chafe at my posting this, I do believe that Dr. Gregory House has been replaced in her heart by one Kwang Chai Caine...though I'm not so sure about Pickles the drummer. So now we've got an array of grasshopper jokes.

And the jokes can be better at recalling the unselfconscious ease of a loving relationship, and the nourishing warmth it provides.

For, as the blind monk would say, the same ray of sunlight both strikes the eye of the fish, and is also scattered off the water in a thousand gleams...