Dog Days

Hot, in Louisiana, Rhode Island and Maine. Harder still to put up with when I'm frustrated, bored and lonely on the job, and Kate is frustrated, bored and lonely while raising Eva.

Not that my job is all boring, but being trapped in port with another series of minor mechanical problems is really frustrating. We're on a tender, a marine pickup truck which runs supplies to and from oil platforms. Tenders aren't science vessels, which means this mobilization--mobe for short--has taken an uncommonly long time, with a more thorough build-out including a side-arm for the sonar unit and the A-frame on the stern, not to mention welding the cargo box to the deck, which has become our control van. Many things can go wrong, and several have, and so we're still in port when we should have left nearly one full week ago.

I'm resigned to it now, partly because I have plenty of computer work to do, partly because I have a Starbucks I can escape to when I feel the need, and partly because I can walk again. I've had some bizarre muscle tightness in my hamstrings for the last two weeks which got especially bad once I returned to Louisiana, and left me almost unable to walk. If you've ever had severe muscle tightness, the kind that pulls on and affects all the muscles around it, you know what I mean. My glutes (yes, my rear end) and my calves felt almost as nasty as my hammies, and it left me almost unable to sleep, on top of hobbling around ship like an old man with arthritis. After a particularly bad night last night, I feel closer to normal today than I've felt in a few weeks.

Don't know why, but I'm not arguing. I hope the cramps don't come back.

Kate, meanwhile, has been more than holding up her end of the bargain in Maine, occasionally in Rhode Island. Not only tolerating my constant absence this summer, raising Eva alone like she did last fall, but managing our household affairs while I e-mail and phone the things I'd like her to do. We're moving soon, into an apartment not too far away from the condo in North Kingstown. It's a great little place (so I'm told), near the beach, secluded, with a basement. The only drawback is that they don't allow pets, so Jasper will stay in Maine. (Mom-in-law and Dave are happy to keep him around--if not thrilled about tending the litter box and feeding him every day--but I know he'll miss me. I'll miss him too--he's my little feline bud.)

Anyhow, this is a bit of a headlong move because Kate and I are trying to avert or at least gracefully endure foreclosure. My spotty employment of the last two years has finally brought a degree of ruin upon us. It's possible that we'll short-sell, though not given. This summer, I made the decision that I was willing to accept foreclosure--if we couldn't sell--but not bankruptcy. Since the bankruptcy laws were rewritten in 2005, it's a really terrible arrangement and I'd rather not go through that creditor-friendly wringer if I can possibly avoid it. I may yet fail, but I've not yet surrendered.

So Kate's endured several urgent errands that I've pressed upon her from my hot and sleepy vantage in the bayou. All while searching for, and finding, our new living space on her own, and managing an increasingly mobile and expressive little fidget monster who doesn't always enjoy being hauled along for the ride.

Last weekend, since Kate succeeded in securing our new apartment, she had an extra day to make it out to the Cape and spend some time with the Sutherland side of the family, at the reunion going on there. Sister Julie and her husband Halsey have thrown a few of these now, and the whole family enjoys gathering on the beach. Halsey's now an old pro at throwing big beach bashes, and the location is great enough to overcome anyone's hesitance at having to put up with the rest of their family.

It was an odd feeling of displacement I had, talking to my sisters, aunts and cousins via webcam, while Kate was there in person. Like Kate and especially Eva were claiming them all for their own--Eva especially. She still has that infant charisma, being responsive but helpless enough to be a perfect magnet for everyone's attention. In two years, she'll be running around and screaming and it'll be easier for people to tune her out.

But now, it's not possible. She's a crawling, squidgy, vocal center of the universe and I felt very much on the margin when I talked to them from my chair in Starbucks. Eva as usual tried to eat the screen, or perhaps crawl through it (I can't tell which, and she's not saying), but she does seem to recognize me on the computer.

Kate had a good time there, drove back home to Maine, and promptly got really, really sick. She still is, as I type.

So it's been an eventful summer! An unexpected job, with lots of twists. The family flight from the unaffordable, though lovely, condo to a more affordable, and almost as lovely, apartment (actually, in some ways, probably even lovelier--but I'll miss my big windows and hardwood floor). The nerve-wracking choices and deadlines involved in trying to narrowly avoid bankruptcy. The pain, loneliness and frustration of being apart. The sense of triumph and accomplishment for me, at times, of work and, for Kate, of raising a child who's so far been universally praised and adored by friends and family.

Plus just making it through an adventurous year, being mostly happy, and honestly so. I can read Thoreau--stylistically not very charming, but one of America's, and the world's, great thinkers, in my opinion--and not cringe in shame. To paraphrase from a few of his books (and he wrote a lot more than just Walden! Though Walden was the most consistently introspective): "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I consider my best years still in front of me, having wasted enough time in constructive ways that I'm all the more convinced that the emotional ground my hopes have grown in, is deep and rich. Like he says of the swamp--those years of idleness will help many things to grow. "The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer...speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him." The age of cable television and the internet has exploded the number of orators, to use his term--loudmouths like Breitbart, Coulter, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Palin, Bachmann and the rest who might believe what they say or might not, but in any case seek the largest audience and most profit and influence they can. It's not my aim to be widely known, or very rich. I'd like for Kate and me to have a comfortable, clean home, and for our kids (yes, we want at least one more after Eva--and of course I want a son) to have good educations and an honest shot at lives as good as ours. My life goals outside of family are coming steadily into view, and the mark I leave on the world does not need to include my name. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." I don't mean to repeat Thoreau's experiment. His adventure was going to the woods and living a simple, introspective life, observing both himself and the natural world around him. His vision was incomparably fine. Thoreau's adventure was to Walden and the woods around it; mine will be elsewhere, but the effort I make and my sincerity in doing so will be worthy of Thoreau's account in Walden--and this includes my life with my family.

I've come to deeply admire Thoreau's thinking this year, starting when I was in the hospital for colitis this spring. I began reading Walden then, and was thrilled with the joy and dry humor I found in his writing, beyond the earthiness and severity which most people assign to him. (By contrast I find Emerson a crank. He might agree with Thoreau in almost every particular, but where HD details the smallest, most repetitive or bleakest aspects of his experience, Emerson paints only pastel. I hate pastel. He's like the pink, orange and yellow negative to Thoreau's deep green, brown and blue.) Thoreau has a simultaneous and inseparable admiration of and disdain for every aspect of life which is the equal of any poet. He was well-versed enough in Hindu mythology, and wrote compellingly enough about the value of simplicity and the falseness of all doctrine, that Mahatma Gandhi counted him as a teacher. Henry's ongoing joy at perpetually discovering the things around him floods out of every word. "Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings."

Kate endured many nights of my plowing though Thoreau, while I was hopped up on steroids and sleeping anywhere from one to three hours a night. But she's lived her adventure, and will continue to this fall when she begins counseling and teaching. She's a born teacher, and has reserves of patience I will never hope to equal. I consider my impatience a strength and will use it in other ways.

So it's been a tough year, and it's made us tough along with it. But not Eva, not yet. She has many years of her own, away from us as she learns to live on her own terms, to gain toughness. I see no need to scar and toughen up my little baby quite yet.