A New Son

World, Eliot James Gregory Sutherland. Eliot James Gregory, world.

Kate's and my second child, our first son, arrived last Friday at 9:37 AM Eastern daylight time. Kate had hoped for a daytime birth, since she likes to be able to see the blue sky while giving birth, and like with Eva, she was blessed with a clear blue daylight sky when the time came. Though this time around was a bit more worrisome than Eva's birth.

Kate had been diagnosed again with pre-eclampsia, the onset of blood conditions in the mother which can lead to seizures (fully blown eclampsia). The seizures are an immediate threat to the lives of both mother and child, so medical staffs take even the signs of pre-eclampsia very seriously. For a layman like me, these signs boil down to high blood pressure and excess protein in the blood.

High blood pressure can result from many factors, but the elevated protein level is due to partial liver failure (and with this some kidney malfunction, I'm told). The liver fails to clean the blood adequately and the protein continues to build up in the bloodstream, and this leads (directly or indirectly) to seizure. Doctors take serious precautions to keep that from happening.

Kate had something like this with Eva, namely the elevated blood pressure but not the high protein count. Still, the blood pressure alone was enough to spook the docs in Rhode Island so that they requested Kate come in to be induced. I won't re-hash that whole episode since I wrote about it two years ago when I posted about Eva's birth. So you can dig through our old posts if you're inclined!

But this time around, Kate's protein count was quite elevated, 3900 g/l, when anything over 300 g/l is cause for alarm. They almost sent Kate down to Portland, instead of receiving her at Lewiston. Even so, Kate got a phone call on Thursday morning, a day after leaving a urine and blood sample at the Rumford hospital (yes, we've moved to rural Maine--another post) from her midwife Jane, directing her to come to the Lewiston hospital immediately to be induced.

After a discussion over the phone, Kate was convinced that this was a genuine emergency and so we made preparations to head in. We packed one bag, dropped Eva off with Kate's mother, and drove down to Lewiston. We were in a calm kind of panic, knowing that time was precious but that a headlong rush might do more harm than good.

We were both relieved to walk into the M3 ward at the hospital--we were now surrounded by the people and the equipment to deal with an emergency--and were shown into a room.

So it came as some surprise when a nurse walked in and said to Kate, "So, you're just here for a 24-hour observation, right?"

Um, no. We're here because Kate's and the baby's life are both in danger, so she's getting induced.

This was news to the nurse, who promised to go get all the facts. A few minutes later she returned, armed with the facts, and apologized. "Your midwife, Jane, is in the OR with another birth," she said apologetically, "and I didn't get the whole story. I'm sorry. We'll be inducing you, yes."

Jane herself came in a little bit later and apologized again, and started discussing options with Kate.

Basically, there's no fun way to get induced. There's the chemical jelly which softens the cervix, but using it would preclude Kate from using the hot tub during labor. So the jelly was out. There was the balloon, inserted up the vagina and inflated to force the passage to dilate. This had been quite painful the first time around, in Rhode Island, for Kate and she didn't much care for that choice either.

Jane was reassuring. "The design for balloons has come a long way in a few years," she said, "and they're much more comfortable now. You'll still feel it, of course, but it shouldn't cause the same kind of discomfort this time around."

With some trepidation Kate chose the balloon. The medical staff went to work, I went for a walk, and we then settled down to wait. Of course, we both hoped it would be quick--maybe an hour or two of balloon induction, hopefully labor would start, and she'd push the kid out maybe around midnight.

"Oh, no," Jane corrected me. "If this goes well, Kate might go into labor tomorrow morning."

Oh, I see.

The folks at CMMC (Central Maine Medical Center) were kind enough to give me an inflatable mattress--as big an improvement, for my part, over the fold-out chair in Rhode Island as Kate's new balloon was for her--and I settled down for a choppy night's rest.

Kate of course got little or no sleep at all, being a bundle of fear, anticipation and hope, rubbed raw by the balloon. I do recall being woken once or twice by nurses tending to Kate, so I suppose I grabbed an hour or three of sleep. But around 7 AM there were four nurses around Kate's bed, asking how she felt and she was describing labor pains. It had begun.

On Kate's instruction I walked downstairs, and after grabbing my obligatory cup of coffee (not part of her instructions) I called our doula, Naomi, and then Kate's mother. We had hired a doula--an intermediary or intercessor for the mother with the medical staff--to provide some extra guidance and reassurance for Kate since we had so recently moved up to Maine.

Kate doesn't especially love change, you see, particularly of the pack-up-and-move kind, so combining the stress of a relocation with being removed from the entire medical staff she'd come to know with Eva's birth, and the birth of #2 so imminent, we decided that another professional caregiver on the scene would be helpful. The idea was Kate's mother's, and she found Naomi, and I'm glad she did.

Naomi said she'd be coming right in. I went back upstairs and Kate was hard at it, with contractions coming every 10-15 minutes. This time around we weren't alone in the room, Kate wasn't walking around, and I didn't have to do as much massage-and-pep-talk duty. I was, in fact, feeling about 50% in the bag from fatigue so I pretty much let the nurses and midwives have at it.

Naomi arrived, and by about 9:00 Kate's contractions had gotten pretty strong. It seemed to me just moments later that she was pushing, and yelling, and then out popped Eliot.

Honestly, the whole thing seemed to me like it took about three minutes. String me up as an oblivious male, fine. I guess I deserve it.

I was impressed that the entire time, as Kate labored, Naomi almost prowled around the bed, focused competely on Kate's face, giving the lower-back rubs that I'd done with Eva's birth, and constantly monitoring Kate's well-being. Really, it was Naomi who allowed me to kind of flake off and just observe things, because she was proactively doing everything Kate had asked me to do back in Providence two years ago.

So now we had Eliot in the world, and of course next up was the afterbirth.

They gynecologist came in and scooped out the placenta by hand, causing Kate to scream, "Stop! I want a DNC! STOP!" But the guy kept at it, then informed her matter-of-factly that he was 95% sure he'd gotten the whole placenta, and if any pieces were left behind, they'd fall out naturally. And that was that.

(And his words proved to be true, though the process was much longer and more traumatic than we expected...and Kate still has angry memories of being dismissed by the insensitive gynecologist.)

Eliot was a serious little runt, 18" long and all of 5 lbs 4 oz. His eyes were sealed shut, of course, and he looked somewhat like a shriveled little pink alien. He screamed at the top of his miniscule lungs whenever he wasn't wrapped up. But he remained in his bassinet next to Kate's bed.

The docs estimated that Kate lost half of her blood with that birth. She was lightheaded and unable to walk for more than a day. She told me later on that Eliot's birth hurt much more than Eva's had. Even though the boy was smaller, I can only guess that was because of the induction, forcing her body to deliver before it had fully prepared itself.

And this post will end here. But much more is to follow, about the beginning life of our second child, Eliot, and the reaction of his new older sister, Eva.

Summer Fun!

Kate here ... I know, I know unbelievable right? Well don't get too excited, I'm just posting some pictures then its off to bed for me! 14 more days of work, and then perhaps I will have more time and energy to start posting again ... then again with a toddler, a new born, and a new house to settle into, maybe not. We'll see ... for now though I'm at least making sure I share these great shots we've taken lately to give you a glimpse at a Sutherland summer (thus far)!

Playing in puddles is what Eva dose best!

Her hair is finally long enough for mommy to start playing with it! - She's all dolled up for the graduation ceremony at RI School for the Deaf!

More hair-dos! - Can't forget the b'ankie!

Enjoying her beautiful new bed set from Mima!

Dreaming about rain and jumping in puddles! She put the boots on herself, take note they're on the wrong feet!

Daddy's beautiful blooming garden!

Two of my most favorite people! So lucky to have them both in my life!

Copters and Tractors and Jets, Oh My!

Dog days of June here. We've just passed the summer solstice, so the long march back toward winter has begun. The weather tends to bounce between upper 60's and lower 80's, usually with some clouds in the sky, sometimes clear blue and sometimes, like today, totally overcast. A couple of mosquitoes humming around. Ordinary Rhode Island summer.

Except that this weekend will be the big air show at Naval Air Station Quonset, about two miles as the crow flies from our home. Several planes have been in the air practicing all week, mostly World War II-vintage props. On the other hand, the big cargo planes aren't coming and going as usual this week, so it's actually been a bit quieter than usual.

Until today, when the Blue Angels took to the air. They're the last act for the Air Show, the rockstars of the whole getup. I've seen them in person, and being no expert on flight, and fearing heights in general, I'm highly impressed by the precision, speed and of course, noise. (The air show folks hand out free earplugs to the crowd--a welcome courtesy.)

So the Blue Angels and a few other jets are now in town rehearsing, and it's possible to hear them screaming and roaring all over the place. It will go mostly quiet for a few minutes, perhaps with a distant purr in the air, when suddenly the scream gets loud again and you can hear a plane (or several) ripping by. If they're especially low--within a few hundred feet--a low hum accompanies the scream. Even as an adult, for me the experience ranges between annoying and unsettling.

For a 21-month-old girl, however, it can be pretty much terrifying. Eva normally loves to watch planes, scans the sky for them, and will point one out as soon as she sees or hears it (and frequently when she doesn't). When the big cargo lugs are coming in and out of the air station, lumbering potbellied 4-prop behemoths, Eva will stop whatever she's doing and stare.

However, when these high-speed war machines go exploding by, the poor girl is no less than nervous, frequently frightened enough to seek a hug, and sometimes dissolves altogether into tears. It doesn't help that right now, as the boys are practicing out there, it's supposed to be naptime.

The planes started flying just as I cleaned up Eva's lunch and brought her into her room for a few books before her nap. I began reading to her when the first group of jets came low overhead.

Now Eva is also learning to listen and talk, and she's growing increasingly sophisticated at it. Just a week or so ago she told her first story, a series of single words which referred to a sequence of events in time: "Mama...dada...pizza...milk...sauce." ("Sauce" being applesauce.) In her babyish way, Eva had described dinner to her doll. Just recently she's begun pairing words, as if she's linking the concepts: "Mama-dada...Mama-Eva...Eva-dada."

Of course she still talks a fair amount of gibberish, that almost-significant alphabet soup of sound toddlers make when they're engaging you but have no English at their command. What's particularly entertaining is when Eva sprinkles actual words in amongst the gibberish. And today, with the planes disturbing our reading session, was the best example yet.

Eva looked up nervously when the planes roared overhead, and clearly wasn't paying attention to Winnie the Pooh, so I started explaining. "Those are planes," I told her, "They're making a lot of noise because they're close to the ground." Of course Eva was just as unsettled as before, so I kept on repeating this, adding that "You're safe. You're here with Dada."

Soon, Eva was repeating, sort of, my words back to me, with her endearingly wide eyes, signed gestures and emphatic diction:

"Eema thama muissu abba pwaaaane."

"Oowa vimmi dikka guwa nooise."

"Matha aiea bamma anni gwoound."

"Amma thama iwi magga safe."

She kept on like that for a little while, nonsense followed by one of the words I'd emphasized to her. I got the feeling it was therapeutic for her, since the planes kept flying by and she was plainly still nervous. At one point, since they were so close, I grabbed her, ran outside and we saw four Blue Angels go ripping overhead in close formation, just a couple of hundred feet above the trees. "Planes," I said, pointing.

"Pwaaanes," Eva answered.

After returning her to her room, the jets came ripping by once more even lower, and I cursed myself for bringing the little girl in too soon. And of course she exploded into tears at the sound, so I went in, calmed her down with another book, and went back out to finish my lunch.

As of right now, the jets are still in the air practicing, and still occasionally flying overhead. And I just checked on the little girl: passed out on her bed, partially covered by her blankie, with one corner stuffed in her mouth.

That's my girl.

My Crappy Garden

I'm a pretty foofy guy. I do have my angry moments, and there are certainly dark aspects to my personality, but by and large I prefer happiness, love and bright colors. So much so that my sister Julie, after seeing the family nameplate I painted for our front door, opined that I'd father only girls.

(Sorry, Jules. Little Fausto's on the way after all. And remember that Dad was a stud athlete but fathered two girls before he & Mom managed to come up with me.)

In high school I took the whole bright color thing to kind of a silly extreme. Miami Vice was big during my high school years, and despite living in small-town New Hampshire and having pretty much no sense of style at all, I did my middle-class best to emulate Sonny Crockett's look. Only in my case, instead of custom-made Italian silk suits, custom loafers and black Ferrari, it meant light blue cotton pants, pastel shirts, boat moccasins and a gray El Camino. It was roughly as convincing as my espresso-and-stache impression of Tony Stark. Less so probably because of the pink shirt and my inability to grow any facial hair. On top of the timid personality and confirmed reputation as a dork.

Anyway, that silly part of my personality is alive and well. It's the part that loves cartoons, the part that revels in reading to Eva in silly voices (the Winnie-the-Pooh characters are a work in progress), and a number of other foibles Kate could tell you about.

I've enjoyed a moderate bit of gardening for a while now, and since graduating college I've always loved having some flowers around. Inside or out (though you have to be careful about the kinds of flowers that attract bugs), blooms and leaves are good things. I read somewhere that keeping oxygen-producing plants in your living space can noticeably improve your state of mind--removing carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen in the local environment is a good thing--so I've made a point since then of keeping at least a few green and growing things nearby.

I had a few flower pots while at the condo, but obviously no garden. Now that Kate and I rent half of a duplex, I've made a very small effort to grow some flowers near the door. I'm not going to invest time (or money we barely have) in any landscaping, but I did pull a few weeds near the doorway and prepped a little triangular space--handily marked off with some plastic edging--for perennial seeds.

We now have a half-barrel sitting in the driveway, and then this little trianglular patch near the door. I spent the month of April mixing coffee grounds, which are very good for flowers, into the dirt. The potting soil in the half-barrel remained light and dark, but the dirt by the door, no matter how many times I dug it up and aerated it, has packed back down to roughly the texture of concrete.

In early May I planted seeds in the barrel and in the ground by the door. Among the other flowers by the door were about a dozen morning glory vines, which I was hoping would twine up around the hand railings and provide a nice colorful accent to the main entry. I even planted six morning glory seeds at the front corner of the house, so the vines might creep up the gutter pipe.

No such luck.

The barrel's looking quite nice, but the other two areas, not so much.
Even my my not-so-green-a-thumb standards, these flowers are pathetic. Just sad. I can't wait to move to Maine, where the soil is too acid, and the shade too heavy, for anything but ferns and moss. Screw the damn flowers.

(Of course, that didn't stop me from buying some fertilizer and tossing it on the ground. I'll be getting another bag of seeds and scattering those where nothing's growing now. I guess I'm chronic.

Thrift Store Fever

Recession or no recession, money or no money, for pretty much all of my adult life I've been into thrift stores. I suppose if I'd had all the money I wanted when growing up I never would've had a reason to go to one in the first place, but I've been a regular secondhand shopper for nearly half of my time on the planet. I think it started when my sister Julie got married, and her then-fiance' Halsey told me about a store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I could buy a good used tuxedo--Keezer's. I went, and was blown away. Powder-blue, light gray, white, maroon, long tails, you name it. Of course I got a basic sash collar poly-cotton blend, but I could see that thrift-store shopping is a great way to go.

When I studied in Italy during college, I also got to know several secondhand stores in Rome, and came away with a hideously ugly, green leather trenchcoat, with massive shoulders and a flip-up collar which made me look like a Nazi jackboot. But it was college, and my sense of style was about as fine as my choice of ways to spend my time. (That would be primarily in the basement of a fraternity.) So aside from the green leather trenchcoat (and later a gold lame' tuxedo which I added to my collection), around college I discovered the usefulness of thrift store shopping.

This year, as Kate and I have struggled through the winter on severely reduced means while I look for work, used clothing and other items have become an economic necessity. Thrift stores are almost an exchange mart for baby and toddler clothing, since as a rule the child outgrows the clothing before it wears out. To date we've bought perhaps three pairs of shoes for Eva at retail, but instead dropped $3 to $5 a pair for the used variety. Ditto for jackets and winter clothing.

Kate and I have bought furniture, such as Kate's desk and our couch, from a big used-goods store nearby called Savers. Every few weeks, if we're not out of money, I'll drop by to see if something we're looking for might be there at severly reduced price. Obviously, when shopping used you don't have as much choice as you would at retail. If you're looking for something even moderately specific, you need to be patient and just keep dropping by, and wait to see if something like what you want happens to be on hand. Then, you need to be very thorough in looking the item over, to make sure that it's not defective in some obvious way. The store staff is generally pretty careful about the merchandise they set out for sale, but things like minor rips or burns in clothing can slip through their inspection.

However, it was only recently that I noticed the store's book section. Not that I need any books. I've got a lifetime's library worth of literature, and should I ever have a job again, and should we come to have a decent home, I expect to have a proper library.

Eva's got a library of her own. It's not like mine, though. No Homer or Dante or Joyce or any history or math. No, Eva's library includes titles like "Baby Colors", "Mommy Hugs", "Snuggle Puppy" and "A Very Special Critter". Great books in their way, with illustrations Eva enjoys, and stories she likes to listen to. Since she's learning so many words so quickly now, her ability to listen is improving, and her taste in stories is expanding.

That's good, because I can't tell you how tiresome it gets reading the same three or four books to her every night for months. Even when her selection rotates slowly, it's like listening to the same twenty albums from your youth...until you're 45. After a while you know them too well to even pay attention any more. Maybe Eva's not there with her own books, but I sure am. Dad needs variety. Sometimes I don't care what the baby wants. I need me a little more variety in what I read to her. (I suspect Kate feels much the same, only not so stridently.)

So there's this book section at Savers. I quickly browsed it last week, and found two whole rows of shelves devoted to nothing but children's books. Eureka, I thought, This is how we replenish that library of hers!

Kate's workmates just threw her a baby shower for Fausto, and she was armed with gift cards to Target. I just got a delayed unemployment payment--we'd been surviving without it this past week--and we also got some straight cash for the shower. So I pushed for us to go shopping today, Kate at Target and me at Savers (about a half-mile apart on the commercial strip in Warwick). Since Kate was looking for sandals for Eva--something too specialized to find easily at Savers--she took the baby, and I dove into the books.

Winnie the Pooh, books by Sandra Boynton, Little Critter books (my favorites, aside from the classic Richard Scarry) by Mercer Mayer, and some really excellent Christmas books to stow away--I hit the motherlode today. Seventy cents a volume, so I got twenty books for Eva. Even picked up, since Kate was still busy at Target, a volume of Romantic writing to enjoy over an espresso at Starbucks afterward. As we'd say (and I did) in our Roses and Thorns, my trip to Savers and then Starbucks was unequivocally a rose.

Parental Incompetence, Parental Love

What about when you screw your baby up? Make her sick, make her sulk or cry by acting genuinely inconsiderate, accidentally hurt her (like, say, by washing her hands with water that's more suitable in hotness for adults). You take steps to make her or him better, that's what. And then you employ your common sense, or else hike your butt to the internet or a book or a doctor or a knowledgeable parent or a trusted friend or all of these and you figure out how not to screw your baby up again. And this process, in various guises, over various timescales, is part of the lifelong process of parenting.

Kate and I just got through with an adventure mostly concerning Eva, considering she was the one getting sick. She'd come down with a rash covering her arms and legs, reddish spots one-half to one inch in diameter, some with darkened red rings like the dreaded bullseye of Lyme disease. Rhode Island is pretty much ground zero for Lyme disease--we're less than sixty miles from Lyme, Connecticut, for which the disease is named--so it was a head-slappingly humilitating, not to mention slightly scary, moment yesterday morning when I first noticed the apparent bullseye patterns on Eva's right leg, one on her calf, one on her shin.

Kate and I share one car these days, and she'd driven it to work, so I couldn't bring Eva to the doctor's office. All I could do was e-mail Kate about it (thereby making her worry all day) and set up a doctor's appointment for today, which Kate would have off. Lyme disease incubates slowly enough, and the bullseyes typically appear quickly enough, that even if this was Lyme, I had small fear that Eva might suffer from it chonically. But I didn't want her to suffer at all.

It being a fine hot spell in early June, we walked down to the beach, about a quarter mile away, where Eva could run in the sand and wade in the ocean water of Narragansett Bay. She's always loved water and swimming, and even though she's still intimidated by the coldness and waves of the seashore, Eva's learning quickly that getting wet there is fun. For about three days straight we'd gone down and Eva had run on the sand and gotten wet. I was happy to watch her discovering a whole new part of the world, something she'll be able to enjoy for the rest of her life.

We'd spent the previous weekend in Maine, visiting Kate's parents, and Maine is still in the grip of blackflies. Blackfly season precedes mosquito season, is roughly as annoying, and lasts about a month. After tagging along after Mima through the yard, petting the bunnies, and sitting on the Ranger for a ride, Eva had a healthy number of bug bites. No big deal, we all did.

Flash forward to this week, when after a few days on the beach, the bites have become spreading red welts and the bullseyes had appeared. My level of concern rose steadily toward panic as the day went on, and by the time Kate came home in the late afternoon, Eva's legs were swollen and red, and more bullseyes had appeared on her arms. I was now alarmed.

But I didn't dare tell Kate, because I was about to head up to Boston as part of my process of preparing to enter the Naval Reserves--one part of my plan to make it through the doctorate program--and I didn't want to freak my poor wife out just before leaving for the evening. It seemed to me, worried as I was about those worsening welts, that to tell Kate I was scared, and then leave minutes later, would be like putting a grenade in her hands, pulling the pin, and walking away. A very unfriendly and very dangerous thing to do. Kate's good enough at working herself into a frenzy without my giving her a big push.

Besides, I counted on her sense. If I was scared, so was she, and if Eva seemed to require emergency room treatment immediately, Kate would go. And so she did. While I spent the evening in a Hilton hotel near Boston, studying calculus and the history of maps, Kate was sitting in the emergency room waiting area in South Kingstown. The doctor informed Kate that the rash was most likely an allergic reaction to sand flea bites.

"Has she been to the beach lately?" the doctor asked Kate.

"Um, yeah, for the past three days straight," she admitted, suddenly feeling a bit foolish. So we seemed to have our answer.

A few rubbings of antihistamine topical cream, and the rash seems to be going down, especially in Eva's arms. After three days if the rash persists then Lyme or something else might be involved. So we'll be looking sharply at Eva's skin for the next three days.

Of course I knew none of this while up in Boston. Since we're doing without cell phones for the time being, I had no idea, and I knew that if something like this happened, that I wouldn't. After leaving last night I thought it at least 50% likely that I'd come home to no Kate and Eva tonight, with Kate at the hospital having Eva tended to.

I arrived back home at 2 PM, driven by my recruiter, to no family car. I expected as much...but then remembered that I hadn't brought my own key. I doubted that Kate had left the door unlocked, and she hadn't.

Fortunately enough windows were open that I found one I could crawl through. Not the first time I'd had to break into my own place, but after a few phone calls I'd heard the basic story. Kate filled in the details when she arrived a bit later, having wrapped up this whole episode with a few hours' worth of therapeutic shopping for baby stuff.

So our task now is, how to limit these stupid flea bites without cutting the little girl off from the beach altogether? Homework, homework.

POSTSCRIPT--After sitting down tonight at dinner, as Kate and I were playing our normal Roses and Thorns game, Kate asked Eva if she had a rose. Let the record show that Eva answered "Dada!" for her first rose ever. And then said it again for her second.

New Numbers

Eva continues to grow quickly, both physically and behaviorally. Her personality is much more complex now than it was even four months ago, and she's picking up words and concepts now almost like they were toys. It's amusing and at times a bit amazing to see what she does, and how.

At times, however, it's just plain hilarious to watch her and listen to her. She's a largely unselfconscious bundle of inquisitiveness, playfulness and affection, balanced by a pronounced stubborn streak and a good old-fashioned temper. I like her.

Kate tends to be much more active in teaching Eva specifics like the alphabet, numbers and of course signs. I'll do such things in a more desultory, accidental way. I prefer to simply be around, provide her with a range of toys or an environment like going outside, and mostly let her discover her own amusements. Of course I play with her too, but Kate takes a serious initiative in things like this. She's a much better mother than I am.

Both with our explicit instruction, and through the Signing Time videos, and through just paying attention, Eva's loading up her vocabulary almost on a daily basis. A brief (not complete) lexicon of Eva-speak:

Kitty (formerly kit-tieh): cat

Doggy (formerly dog-gieh): dog

Tawaz: colors (i.e. crayons)

Bass: bath

Sawah: shower

Gapes: grapes

Nana: banana

Sasu: dinosaur (among her stuffed animals)

Side: Outside (i.e. I want to go outside!)

Out: Up (i.e. pick me up! We're working on this one)

Aa' done: All done (frequently screamed during a tantrum, or said when she's scared of something)

Sat: What's that?

Ta-ta: cracker

Waddah: water

AAHHH-gin: again (i.e. do that again!)

Sauce: Applesauce

Pizza: (she's gotten this one perfectly since she was 9 months old)

Wainjuh: Ranger (grandma Ande's--i.e. Mima's--Ranger 4-wheeler)

Dink: Drink

Seep: sleep

The list could go on and on, but that's a decent sampling of how her language approaches English pretty well, though she rarely puts several words together. She's still pretty much a one-word-at-a-time speaker.

What's more interesting is her personality, how she's learning coyness and even some skills at manipulation. But there's no mistaking when that temper shows up. Sometimes it's in deadly earnest, when she's howling with all her might for something different than what we're giving her, like some nights on going to bed, or frequently being strapped into her baby seat in the car. A recent development is brief flashes of the temper, when she logs a more or less perfunctory protest but seems to know she's going to lose.

She pulled one of these last night, after we'd lowered her into her crib for the night. Part of the new ritual in putting her to sleep is letting her finish her bottle of water before we take it away and turn out the light. So she stalls, sips the bottle slowly, rolls over on top of it and generally refuses to give it up. Some nights she's more charming than others, but still, by and large, when your baby wants to stretch the day out and make sure you keep her company, it's a wonderful thing. Still, bedtime is bedtime.

Eva had selected, among her many dozens of stuffed animals, a small gray koala to go into the crib with her (along with four other bears, a doll and a couple of blankies). I dropped the koala into the crib next to her as she clutched her bottle and resisted giving it to Kate.

Kate remained patient, counted to three, and then took the bottle from Eva's grasping hands. As soon as she'd lost the bottle Eva yelped sharply, grabbed the koala and threw it straight up into the air. It flew up, came back down and landed right in front of her. She ignored it and began a sullen pout, sucking on her red blankie while staring straight ahead.

That was a new kind of protest. It wasn't a genuine attempt to escape or sway us to her will. It was an expletive, a single burst of frustration followed by resigned acceptance of the truth. I was blown away. (I was also laughing to the point of coughing my lungs up.) Our 20-month-old baby had effectively just sworn at us.

Eva's also learning to count. Kate's taught her much of the alphabet (she tends to lose focus if I try to run through it backwards), so now she's turned her attention to numbers. Kate will make the ASL sign for each number in turn, and Eva will speak them. First up to ten, and now up to twenty. Based on tonight's effort, she has a little way to go. A recap of Eva's responses as Kate made the signs:

(1) One!

(2) Two!

(3) Fee!

(4) Fouah!

(5) Five!

(6) Six!

(7) Semmen!

(8) Eight!

(9) Nine!

(10) Ten!

(11) Leven!

(12) Twel!

(13) Benteen!

(14) Benteen!

(15) Benteen!

(16) Benteen!

(17) Benteen!

(18) Twunny!

(19) Twunny!

(20) Twunny!

So Eva's got a little ways to go with the numbers, but I think she's off to a fine start. She told her first story the other day, speaking a string of words which implied an actual sequence of events: "Mama. Dada. Kitty. Pizza. Sauce. Dink. Bass. Seep." Kate heard it and was pretty amazed.

So she's doing a fine job growing up, eating plenty of yogurt and getting her calcium, still in the 99th percentile for height and 75th for weight--tall and slim. Since I'm not so physically imposing myself, I'm hoping Eva winds up 6'6" and scares 98% of the boys away so they won't pester her in high school.

The Wishing Tree

I love Irish music, and have for over a decade. I became aware of how much I loved it during the winter of 1997-98, when I was living in Philadelphia. I was attending U. Penn that year, studying Greek and Latin and making the decision whether to go into ancient literature as a teaching career (obviously no). I did spend lots of time in bars. I was emerging from an extended phase of drinking heavily, which had begun during my sophomore year in college, and continued on-and-off until just about then.

The death of my father in 1996 from brain cancer shook me into the awareness that my prolonged adolescence was over and it was time to start living a life I respected, and actually accomplishing a series of things I could call a career. In other words, it was time to grow up. I still drank quite a bit that year in Philadelphia, but I was putting an end to the problem. I realized that it's not enough to discover, as I did after sophomore year in college, that alcohol does damage to a person's life, brain and body. When the addiction has become physical, merely wanting to end the addiction is too weak a motive.

Alcohol damages and ends friendships, family relationships and careers. It precluded any scholarship I might have done in college. It deadens the conscious part of the personality, freeing the more primitive urges to express themselves.

This is why drunks tend to act crudely and boorishly, and be undesirable company in general. But if you cultivate the habit of not acting on those crude desires, but only let them loose in your mind, then being drunk can actually become a means to discover what is happening further down in your brain than the consciousness is willing to travel. That's important for thinkers and artists.

There's also the fact that drinking helps destroy relationships and career prospects. It engenders a general sense of shame in a person. And that shame itself can be useful--it is particularly strong acid on many of the assumptions in life, on social and religious conventions, and on identities based on race, nationality and class. In short, drinking heavily can train a person's mind to disregard as unimportant many of the things held sacred by reputable folks. Only your immediate emotional needs survive. If you're a writer or an artist, that is invaluable. It's a prerequisite for the vocation.

The society we've built up, including religion and government, certainly has its basis in our own psychology and in the world around us, but not all of it. Any system includes its own arbitrary limits, declarations peculiar to that system, and not necessarily to any other. Christians make Jesus Christ, only-begotten son of God, the focus of their religion. No other religious system does. Capitalism enshrines the idea that each person has the right to buy and own as much as he or she can afford. Not all economic systems are so. To step beyond those conventions takes hard work, both intellectually and emotionally.

So drinking has its benefits. But I decided against creative writing as a career, so I knew I had to sober up. It took a while, especially since I didn't want to go dry, and preclude the possibility of ever having a social drink again. I knew weaning myself of habitual drinking, without giving it up altogether, would be more difficult than going cold turkey.

But even so, it wasn't enough to simply want to give up drinking. I needed something else I could turn to, something I'd rather be doing instead of drinking. Otherwise, in my bored, solitary moments, I'd be too likely to find myself at a bar again, drunk or well on my way. I needed something similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls the "higher power". During that winter in Philadelphia, I found it: ballroom dancing. Ballroom dance was my avenue back toward being social again, making friends, meeting women, and doing something which was fun just by itself. A dance with a decent partner whom I might never see again after that dance is still a fine thing.

My six months of dancing in Philadelphia would be a long story in themselves, so I won't tell it here. But the lessons I took at that studio with my teacher Shana were, altogether, perhaps the biggest single step I took toward forgetting the drinking problem. Still, that didn't mean I wasn't drinking that year. I was, and I got to know plenty of bars around Philly. Philly is just Irish enough--not like Boston, but more than, say, Dallas--that many of the best bars have Irish themes. My favorite--and I have no idea if it's still there--was The Bards, in Central City. It was a modest pub, featuring its own in-house brew (Yard Ale--amber, as smooth as Guinness, but not as heavy), and no TVs. Conversation reigned at The Bards. A person might sit down at the bar, order a pint, pull out a book and start reading. It was a great place, an alcoholic coffee shop (and I was already in love with coffee shops). More than that, it featured musical Sundays.

A widespread custom in Irish bars all over the nation is that Sunday evenings feature a session of musicians who come in with their instruments and play. They tend to know each other, of course, but there's nothing formal about it. It's more of an open mic, though there's rarely any singing, and no mic. Traditional Irish music is something like jazz or blues, with some standard sets and chords and the potential for a band to simply improvise variations endlessly. I fell in love with pipes, fiddles, flutes, guitars, and Bodhran drums. I actually took some violin lessons that spring but decided I didn't have the time to invest.

Aside from becoming a Sunday evening chronic at the sessions, I snatched up a bunch of CDs of Irish music (ITunes didn't exist then, remember). I listened to those discs dozens and dozens of times. My Sunday morning breakfast-and-laundry ritual had an Irish soundtrack, to the point that I'd start making breakfast--either French toast or pancakes with coffee--and be sitting down to eat at pretty much the same point of the same song each week. It was almost choreographed.

Beyond the simple sound of the instruments and the varying rhythms, I loved the emotions the music was so full of. There is the endless, inconsolable lament, which I was sensitive to through the shipwreck of my late teens and 20's. There is also the inexpressible and orgasmic joy, a feeling of celebration which overwhelms everything else. Irish music by itself is nearly the perfect musical expression of the tao principle of yin and yang, two utter opposites forming one whole. I found in it my own psychology.

Two songs were my favorites, one joyful and the other melancholy. First, the happy one. It comes from one of the first discs I bought, actually a 2-disc set of various Irish artists playing tunes both traditional and original. It was composed by the piper Davy Spillane, and it's called "Sliverish". Because of that tune I feel that a banjo makes a fundamentally happy sound.

(And please forgive the crappy audio. It's the best I could do without a sound studio.)







My melancholy favorite is called "The Wishing Tree", composed by Seamus McGuire. It's not so much purely mournful--those tunes can be pretty horrid--but is more an even mixture of joy and sorrow, the combination of both which resounds through the ages of human existence. I think of a tree, somewhat like the tortoise of Asian and Indian mythology, which spans many human ages and comprehends all possibilities of existence, almost beyond life and death themselves.

The illustrations I've posted to this blog entry--one treelike, the other more of of a stylized celtic pattern--are actually concepts of the Norse mythical tree of creation, Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil has much in common with my concept of the Wishing Tree. It participates in all things foul and fair, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, deadly and life-giving. Everything that can be wished for is already part of our concept of creation. And any wish soever must always have the contrary and unexpected consequences we fondly know as life.

The Wishing Tree implies to me a person's engagement in life, in setting hopes and aspirations, and whether attaining or not, engaging in the struggle which has defined our species throughout its existence. Victory is always attended with sorrow--whether through the austerity and discipline of the preparations, or through the consequences of winning, or by other means. Nothing in this life comes without cost. The stronger and deeper and more sincere a person's expression of life, the stronger the elements of triumph and tragedy exist within that person. Ultimately a person wishes for life or wishes for nothing. To the extent he or she wishes for life, that person learns the wisdom of the Wishing Tree. You cannot wish for part of it: you can only wish for all.

The piece itself is a melody which repeats three times, each time with additional instruments. The first run is a cello with very little accompaniment. A violin takes over the melody in the second repetition, with more strings in the background. The violin continues in the third, but with a swelling background which eventually takes over for the melody and then fades away.






In that tune I hear three generations: grandfather, father and son. By the time I first listened to the Wishing Tree, my father was dead and I had no immediate prospects for a family of my own. I thought of my grandfather, dad's father, and then my father, and me. Dad barely knew his own father, and I of course never met him. There was a mythical character to this distant man, seen in a few black-and-white photos and some fragments of handwriting, even taller apparently than my own father, a skilled musician who brought his accordion to his hospital ship during the war and played for the convalescent soldiers. He was also the man--a gynecologist who wooed and eventually married the younger sister of one of his patients--who wrote home that he was burying the boys he'd delivered earlier in his life. I'm told he returned from the war a broken, desolate man who committed suicide a few months later. I envisioned the deep-toned cello as his voice, sounding its wisdom alone through the echo chambers of time. He is followed by my own father, singing the same melody but higher, more plaintively, closer to the present. I saw myself as the third verse, surrounded by the cacaphony of life today, but producing a melody that hasn't changed.

It's easy to transfer this concept down one generation, with my father becoming the cello, me the second verse, and little Eliot due to become the third. He'll know my father as I knew my granddad, as a quasi-mythical presence who becomes larger due to his absence. When I hear the tune I start to think of this continuity, and then think metaphorically about the quality and the nature of my own wishes on the Wishing Tree. I'm at a crossroads of my career, and life, perhaps lacking the resources to continue on the professional path I've selected. Heroes choose their way, and I've frequently been overly meek and not had enough faith in my own ability. My failures at Dartmouth and later are painful enough evidence of this. I frequently return to the thought that my wishes on the tree have been too small, and that I've asked too little of myself. A crossroads like this in life is another chance for me to define who I am for the rest of my life. Which way will I go? I don't yet know.

* * *

To focus simply on the music for now. I'll list my favorite pieces of non-pop music, holding to my categories of those which have a mournful or somber character, and those which are ecstatic. In no particular order, because I couldn't rank these:

Sorrowful:
-Beethoven's 7th Symphony, 2nd movement (Allegretto);
-Mozart's Requiem, Lacrimosa;
-Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings;
-Brahms' Requiem, Alles Fleisch ist Wie dem Grass;
-Seamus McGuire, The Wishing Tree;
-Dougie MacLean, These Broken Wings;
-Randall Thompson, Alleluia.

Happy:
-Leo Kottke, Stolen;
-Leo Kottke, Morning is the Longest Way Home;
-Altan, Dulaman;
-Hapa, Olinda Road;
-Davy Spillane, Sliverish.

(You might note more entries in the melancholy category. So be it. I'll add, however, that quite a few of the happy--or happy in their way, at least--songs which I love are of the pop/rock variety, like the Beatles' Savoy Truffle, Zep's That's the Way and Boogie with Stu, and Pearl Jam's Bugs. So there.)

A note also about the Beethoven Allegretto movement (and I think Brahms based his Alles Fleisch movement at least partly on it). Last night Kate and I watched The King's Speech, about how British King George VI overcame his stammering problem and was able to speak effectively to his empire during World War II via radio. King George and Winston Churchill combined through the radio to provide the leadership which British citizens needed during the Nazi siege on England, and during the worldwide onslaught of the Axis. The movie concludes with King George delivering his first major address of the war, as hostilities with Germany are about to begin. Churchill has just been elected, all attempts at peace have failed, and Germany has taken Poland by blitzkrieg in a matter of weeks. The Nazi military machine is faster and more fearsome than anything in history, and it is soon to turn toward England.

With this backdrop, the King--Berty as he is known in the film--steps into the broadcast room and prepares to speak. His speech therapist Lionel Logue is with him, and coaches him through the most strenuous effort of his adult life. The development of the film to this point has made it quite clear that the main role of the king is to communicate with his subjects via radio. Berty, with his stammering problem, has no greater weakness than speech. He knew as well as anybody the desperation of England's position in the coming war, and the importance of his own role. And he knew better than anybody that his weakest quality was at the same time his country's greatest need.

As the King prepared to speak, the first chord of Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement, played. I thought, How strange--that sounds like Beethoven. The scene continued, and the movement carried on, and I felt that the choice of music was wrong, too heavy a setting for what should have been more combative or triumphal. But as the scene progressed--shots of Berty laboring to speak, hesitating and stopping, with Lionel standing in front of him desperately coaching him on in silence, alternating with shots of people around the country focused utterly on their radios--the import of his words became obvious. And I realized more and more that the choice of music came to fit the scene perfectly. The stark somberness matched the head-throbbing effort the King made to speak clearly. The darkness and urgency suited the eve of war.

It was a good film--not one of my favorites, but a good film--but that scene by itself is unforgettable, not least for the choice of music.

Fausto

As Kate reports, we're expecting a son. Now suprises can always happen. I was supposed to be a girl, and if expectations had held my name would have been Stephanie. Of course, this was in the pre-ultrasound days, and the doctors' best method of guessing the sex of the fetus was by its heart rate. Girls tended to have quicker heartbeats than boys, and I clocked out as a girl. So Mom and Dad were surprised when I turned out to be male.

But the ultrasound tech was pretty confident--98% sure, she told us--that Kate's carrying a boy. So we have the name lined up, which I won't reveal online until the little tyke is actually born--until then, and maybe after, I'll call him Fausto. The explanation will come later.

Still, the thought of having a son is tremendously consoling to me. I wanted at least one child of each sex. Should we go for #3 or beyond, it won't matter to me whether it's a boy or girl. There's also a subtle one-upmanship among guys, it seems, that if you're fathering girls, you're firing blanks. A Texan coworker once told me that a man's size determines the sex of his children--you have to be big to have a son. (That idea sums up Texan culture pretty well in my mind.)

Of course I also wanted a child to carry on our family name, since Eva will likely surrender hers to a husband someday. Basically, I've got all the culturally-conditioned neuroses operating nice and strongly in my brain to make me want a son. On top of that, I just want the variety, of having one of each. Boys and girls each present very different challenges as they grow up--boys tending to be reckless and get in trouble, and girls being the focus of all male attention in their vicinity--that I wanted to take on both.

I feel an instinctive connection with my daughter, and by staying home without a job to raise her, I'm seeing her habits and growth on a day-by-day basis that I never would otherwise. I can't say that I'm always the most patient or creative parent, but I do try to keep Eva safe, busy and learning. (Including letting her discover the fun of soaking herself thoroughly in a puddle.) When I think I've been too wrapped up in my own work, or showing too much frustration toward her, she toddles over to my knee, flops her hands on my leg, looks up in my eye and says "Hiii."

Then I know I'm not doing things all wrong.

But the thought of a son is a bit more daunting. I had a decent relationship with my own father, but it was very incomplete. His own father died in 1945, six months after he'd returned from serving as a doctor in World War II. Dad was eight.

The official reason was a heart attack, though it's always been thought within the family that he committed suicide, from despair and depression following the war. I've heard the story of when Dad was told the news. "Father is gone," the children were told. "Can I go too?" Dad answered immediately.

It's fair to say that Dad grew up without a father showing him implicitly how to be a father. I knew that when I was a little kid, Dad was a giant--six-foot-seven, with a deep and powerful voice--who walked with a tread like a feather and who rarely raised his voice. My impression even as a child was that he was afraid of his own strength. Mom spanked me probably hundreds of times. Dad never spanked me once.

He'd been a very good athlete in his youth, being scouted in high school as a pitcher by the Yankees, and then starring on his college basketball team. Dad was everything I wasn't, apparently: big, strong, athletic and popular. I was a mousy runt who liked books, singing and drama. There wasn't much overlap in our interests. So when I ran around a soccer field like the proverbial headless chicken, and never seemed to show much concern with practicing or getting better, Dad said not a word. He let me be myself.

As I grew into high school, I began having social trouble like most all teenagers do, feeling isolated and inadequate and at times altogether friendless. I saw the group of popular athletes and grew terribly jealous, but by then I knew that I was too bookish, and not nearly good enough at any sports, to ever join them. So I remained, like I'd always been, a mama's boy.

I was pretty stupidly a mama's boy, too. I was really convinced that my mother knew everything. And by that time--when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen--I largely knew my father as the big lumbering brute who came home, collapsed in front of the TV and watched news for two hours, and lost all his arguments with Mom. I took this as proof that he was stupid and Mom was much smarter than he was--it never entered my mind at that age that he might be letting her win the fights because he didn't want to argue. (There was obviously much more to their communication than I ever learned about, as I know realize with my own marriage.)

Still, underneath that surface level of disgust, I did have an almost religious reverence for my father. It was due partly to his height--it's difficult not to respect someone who's huge--but even more, and more subtly, to his demeanor. Outside of the occasional fight with Mom, within the confines of our own home, I never knew Dad to lose his composure. (Well, except maybe for the time he burned out his little old chainsaw cutting the winter's firewood, then hurled it with a screamed expletive at the woodpile and smashed it to pieces. Relieved, he walked inside, took a shower, changed, drove down to the hardware store and bought a new, much more powerful, chainsaw.)

I also had a subtle sense, from all his volunteering around town for various (and important) positions like fire department treasurer and school district treasurer, that he was very highly regarded in the town. And Dad never mentioned any sense of pride over this in the house. Toward his own son, as toward nearly everyone else, my father was very understated.

It wasn't until Christmas vacation of my freshman year in college, when I worked at the bank where he was president, that I learned just what kind of professional persona my father had. I was in a back room, stuffing forms in folders and filing them, but I saw the impact that Dad had on everyone there. He'd walk into a room and everyone was paying attention to him. He'd quietly ask for something and walk out once he had it, with no fuss or waste of time. In short, he was a leader. He had a charisma as understated as everything else he did.

I was blown away. "That's my DAD!", I thought to myself. The tired, floppy guy who came home at night was just the reverse image of the man who ran a bank, served a community, directed over a hundred people and was responsible for over a quarter billion dollars.

Though our relationship didn't overtly change after that, I understood much better just what Dad did, and who he was. At the end of my freshman year at Dartmouth--my only good year there--when he and Mom came to pick me up, after loading the car I threw my arms around him and thanked him for everything he'd done, namely pay for it all. Dad didn't react much at the time, but this moment came back eight years later as he lay dying of brain cancer.

He'd been diagnosed in June 1996 with advanced brain melanoma, with 13 (likely more) tumors growing all over his brain. The onset, as is typically the case with cancer, was subtle and gained speed with time. In December 1995 he began noticing that he was losing dexterity in his left hand, and over the following months the problem worsened. Mom later recalled occasional memory lapeses or bursts of hostility (she never stopped blaming herself for missing the disease's approach). At a family vacation in Connecticut--days before his diagnosis--I recall playing pinball with him, the venerable "Addams Family" game. (Someday, I'd like one of those in my basement.)

Now, Dad was born in 1938, and was a teenager in the 50's. He grew up on pinball and rock'n'roll. Factor in his well-above-average athleticism...well, he could kick my ass at pinball any old time he liked. It wasn't even anything resembling a contest (like it was in basketball, where I could at least rely on his tiring out after five minutes). Dad never lost at Addams Family.

That day in June, he lost. He couldn't score any big points. I later recalled, the money button on that game is on the left side of the machine. Dad simply couldn't hit it. His hand was no longer answering his brain. By the time Dad drove up to New Hampshire that following Monday to see the doctor, he was really scared.

The whole family gathered once we heard the diagnosis, inoperable brain cancer with three to four weeks to live. I spent two of those weeks at home, keeping Dad company and helping Mom with some of the work. Lisa and Julie were there too, of course, particularly Lisa who still lived in Moultonboro.

During one of the weeks I spent at home, I was sitting next to him holding his hand when one of his closest friends walked in, Rick Buckler. Only the best of friends were admitted to see Dad as he deteriorated, and Rick was one. Rick had proven his friendship as steadfastly as a person can, helping us several times during Dad's decline (stories I'd rather not go into right now). Rick was a trusted and beloved friend.

He walked into the room where Dad and I were and they began talking. After a few minutes, Dad wandered onto the topic of my freshman year at Dartmouth, and how I'd hugged him and thanked him at the end. Tears were rolling down his cheeks as he told Rick about this. It had been the first of perhaps two times I'd ever told my father I loved him, and only eight years later did I see how strongly it had impressed him. As he died, at last, Dad and I were becoming friends.

I'd gone back down to Boston, to resume my job and wait to travel back up to visit him again. It was now three and a half weeks after diagnosis, and though Dad's condition had worsened dramatically--he couldn't leave his bed and could barely talk--still hope wouldn't die. On a Wednesday afternoon, for no particular reason, I called home from my job, asked for Dad to be put on the phone, and told him, "Dad, I'm really proud of how you've been handling all this. I love you. I'll see you soon."

At five-thirty next morning I got the phone call that he had died. One small thing I had no regret over: I'd told Dad the most important single thing I had to say, and he died knowing how much I cared for him. That little, at least, mattered in my mind.

My biggest regret since he died was that we never fully became friends as adults. Needless to say, as I've flip-flopped my way through successive decades--it's now nearly fifteen years since he died--I've come to resemble my father more than I did as a snot-nosed college grad. I feel more compatibility with his occasionally dirty sense of humor, his social instincts (though I'll never develop them as highly as he did his), his wry humor with himself.

I've come to admit that no man on earth will ever resemble me as much as my own father did--with the possible exception of my son. But as I struggled into the responsibilities of adulthood, namely career and family, it would have been tremendously comforting to have a man I could turn to and trust implicitly, to talk with, share laughs with, and even suffer criticism from. Honest criticism, courageous, blunt and loving. There are many times I could well have used it.

As I think about my own son, hopefully on the way, I look forward to taking my memories of my own childhood and father, and being a good father to him too, as well as Eva. I'm looking forward to seeing how like and unlike me he is. (And I won't grudge him being a mama's boy and thinking I'm an idiot.)

As for the nickname.

I'm a baseball fan. I root for the Red Sox no matter what. In the years before 2004, when the championship drought was 70+, 80+ years and counting, my allegiance was always with the Sox. Didn't matter how much they stunk, how close they came, or what the Yankees did. I was for Boston.

Then 2004 happened, and fans like me learned what it meant to win. It was a good feeling.

Fast-forward to 2007, when Boston won again. But before that, the Yankees met the Cleveland Indians in the divisional playoffs. Now any old-school Boston fan is also a Yankees hater, so I was pulling for New York to lose. Boston was in its own playoff series, but on this one night, I was watching Cleveland, at home, versus the Yankees. And again like any old-school Boston fan, I had a secretly paralytic fear of the Yankees, that they were simply a juggernaut waiting to burst out and steamroll all opposition. So I was desperately rooting for the Indians to defeat what I feared might be an undefeatable opponent.

I think the Indians swept that series, so the Yanks weren't so immune to defeat. But on that one night, a pitcher by the name of Fausto Carmona took the mound for Cleveland. Cleveland's strength was in its pitching, with Carmona, and ace CC (Chesterton Charles! No wonder he goes by CC) Sabathia (now a Yankee), and a bullpen featuring the twin Rafaels, Perez and Betancourt. It was quite a fearsome lineup, and they pretty much had their way with New York (and also with Boston, for the first four games at least...then the Sox won the last three).

But on this night, as I watched, Fausto Carmona stood on the mound, facing down possibly the best lineup of hitters in baseball. The Cleveland fans were screaming crazily from all sides, as Fausto pitched and pitched again. I was awed by his presence on the mound, cap pulled down to the tip of his nose, glove brought up to the cap's brim, looking down to the catcher with a violent scowl.

The scene called to mind the Roman Horatius, a lone man holding a bridge against the invading army of Etruscans; it recalled the Spartans holding Thermopylae against the Persian hordes. Or, to cleverly foreshadow events, it was like one of my favorite short stories from childhood, Leiningen Versus the Ants. Only that night, it was Fausto Versus the Bugs.

The fate of baseball rested on one single pitcher, staring with dour ferocity down from the mound. Through seven innings he held them scoreless. Then came the bugs.

Apparently, on warm nights in Cleveland during the spring and fall, it's not unusual for millions of midges to rise from the shoreline mud of Lake Erie and swarm the city, infesting everything as they go. Suddenly the ballfield was a thick cloud of bugs, visible even on the TV screen. They swirled in clouds around the pitchers, winging jerkily in all directions and seeming only to grow thicker.

Fausto only bore down harder, growing even more icy and pitching with the same precision and strength. Unfortunately for the Yankees, their man on the mound was Joba Chamberlain.

Joba had been a revelation that year, coming up from the minors as a relief pitcher, throwing in the high-90's and over the course of his first 11 or so innings in the majors not allowing even a single hit. (The first to get a hit off him was Boston's Kevin Yooouuuuuukilis. Youuuuk!)

So that night, needing to keep the game close, Joe Torre sent Chamberlain to the mound in the bottom of the 8th. The bugs were out, and within about a minute it was clear that they were really getting to Joba. He took his hat off, swung at them, stepped off the rubber, and generally made an idiot of himself. Without going back to look at the box score (so I might have some of my game details already a bit wrong), I'll say Joba allowed a run or two of desperately-needed insurance for the Indians. I do recall that Torre pulled him off the mound before the inning was over and inserted Mariano Rivera, in a last-ditch bid to preserve the chance of winning. To no avail--Cleveland won.

I'll always have a warm spot in my heart for what Fausto did that night--since then he's been up-and-down as a pitcher, never quite living up to his early promise, though far from a bust. Simply put, Fausto is a decent major-league starting pitcher, a tremendous accomplishment in itself. But for that one night, Fausto's game was solid gold, and that's all I asked.

Then he stunk it up against Boston and I loved him almost as much for that.

So there's that, plus I just think the name is very cool. Faust + o, Fausto. I love the sound. But Kate won't hear of actually naming a kid that, so I'm stuck with using it as a nickname. Oh, well.

It's a BOY!

By the way, did I mention I'm pregnant! I'll be 19 weeks tomorrow, and one week shy of being half way to term! Kind of unbelievable how fast time flies! Of course this time around I'm working full time and when I come home in the afternoons I try to get in as much quality time with Eva as possible (with Michael too of course, but much of our quality time now is spent sharing quality with Eva). Strangely enough though having less time idle has given me more time to worry about all the possible complications that could potentially happen. The excitement of having a boy this time around kind of ups the ante too. The prospect of welcoming a new life, male or female is thrilling in and of itself, however after already having gone through the experience of having a baby girl, the whole "new and different" aspect of raising a little boy has both Mike and I kind of on the edge of our seats!

I suppose now you all might be too! ... Although many of you already knew I was pregnant, because the very day I found out I blabbed it to just about everyone in our immediate families. It was Christmas day, and my mom and step-father were here visiting. Mike and I had started "trying" again in early December (since I nursed Eva until mid October) so I stocked up on pregnancy tests a couple weeks later. By Christmas day I was down to my last test out of three, (the first two were negative of course because I took them much too early) and with it being Christmas day and all I fantasized about what a wonderful gift it would be to find out that day! The digital stick promptly read "pregnant" and a second later I was announcing it to Michael, my mother and step-father (and Eva)! I followed the announcement by insisting we keep a secret at least until it was doctor confirmed, but then my sister called to say Merry Christmas, and it just popped out of my mouth! - And then I just couldn't stop!

It didn't occur to me at the time, but now I'm sure the reason I couldn't hold it in, even for a minute, was because when I got pregnant for the first time it was a surprise even to myself. Although I couldn't have been happier, there was a bit of uncertainty surrounding the issue. I was slightly nervous to tell Michael (but he quickly alleviated every once of that within moments of my telling him), I very a bit more nervous to tell our families, and wracked with fear to tell my grandmother, with whom I was living with at the time. It took me a month to muster up the courage to tell her, but when I finally did she offered her blessing just as happily as everyone else! This time around, our situation, being married, and already having a child, seems to

automatically lend itself to celebration! So with no fear of judgements being passed this time, any hesitation to announcing my pregnancy was tossed to the wind!

I'm not going to get into it here, as my husband might on one of his infamous diatribes, but I will suggest to you all to watch Kill Bill II if not for the genius of the film alone, but for the wonderfully hysterical scene where Betrix first discovers she's pregnant while on an assassination mission.

There a beautifully awkward, yet honest exchange between her and another female assassin just after she realizes what it means if the strip turns blue. Needless to say the other woman lets Betrix and her unborn child live, and ends the scene as any typical woman would after finding out such news! Trust me, it will leave you with a smile, if no other scene does!

Returning to our story though, the pregnancy was indeed confirmed a week or so late

r and we've been anxiously anticipating "the" ultrasound to find out just who exactly is in there.

The day finally arrived last week and we were both happy to find out that the new little life we created is a boy! Had michael not been holding Eva when the ultrasound tech informed us, I do believe he would have jumped clear through the ceiling! Having some more testosterone in the house will be an adjustment for me, as 90% of my family consists of estrogen! Eva has made it quite clear in the past several months that she is die hard daddy's girl, so I am deeply hoping this little guy will turn out to be a mama's boy! It will be fascinating to watch Eva interact with her new little brother too of course, and how she deals with no longer being the baby, and to see if all that we've taught her on how to be gentle with the kitty will transfer to how she is with him. Mostly though I can't wait to have another infant in the house, and ALL that, that entails!

It will be another 21 weeks before we get to welcome him into the world, mean while he's movin' and a groovin' in his cozy home inside my belly, and I'm enjoying that quite a bit! The actuality of being a mother and raising a child is wonderful, but all that leads up to that is just as amazing if not more so! Creating life, carrying life, and bring it into the world is, to me, by far the most spiritual experience there is. I struggle to find adequate words to describe how pregnancy, labor and delivery make me feel, the closest I can come is; Fulfillment. I adore being the vessel with which to bear life, and could do it a hundred times if I had the opportunity! In fact the the idea of being a surrogate has crossed my mind on several occasions, and if my body allows might one day seriously consider it.

For now though, I'm enjoying OUR little boy and planning for his arrival in early September!

Courage

It's nearly 2 PM now, creeping toward the time when Eva wakes up, and is either surly and groggy for an hour, or is bright, chirpy and running all around. In either case, especially since it's raining intermittently, it spells the end of my quiet reading/writing period of the day. (I resume somewhat when Kate comes home for the evening, but only for a little while.)

I mentioned in the last blog that I'm back to reading history of the American oil industry, which is fascinating in so many respects, including that it forms the unseen skeleton of the general histories of this country you might read: our population explosion, our expansion across the continent, the rise of our industrial and military might. Oil is the only reason we've become militarily involved in places like Iraq and Libya (agree or disagree with the interventions as you will).

But I think oil could really serve as the exemplar American industry, exactly how Herman Melville thought whaling was in the mid-1800's. He published Moby Dick in 1851, only 10 years before the first successful oil well was drilled, in Titusville, PA by "Colonel" Drake. Melville's choice of the characteristic American industry--whaling--was eclipsed within two decades by oil. Still, his choice for a symbol--the white whale--of the nemesis each person carries within works much better than The Great White Oil. Or whatever color you'd want to make it. The whale's a living thing and just makes a better symbol.

Of course, that's all nonsense. The point of this blurb was altogether different: courage. See, between 2001-2008, I wasted a lot of time watching cartoons. During study breaks, after the day's work, whatever. I pretty much knew the Cartoon Network's whole lineup, and the (few, honestly) shows that I liked. One of these was Courage the Cowardly Dog, about this little pink dog named Courage, who's afraid of everything.

He has bad teeth and somehat mangy fur and his main abilities are: (1) pulling all kinds of equipment and costumes out of his butt when he needs them in an emergency; (2) screaming; and (3) doing absolutely anything for the love of Muriel, the kindly old woman who takes care of him. (Muriel's husband Eustace hates the dog, of course, the source of much of the cartoon's humor.)

Muriel is a sound sleeper. Her snores shake the timbers of the house. In one episode, an insomniac Sandman snatches Muriel's ability to sleep, so that he can get some rest, and leaving poor Muriel without a moment's bit of slumber for weeks. (Of course, it's up to Courage to get it back.)

That puts me in mind of another reference to sleep I enjoy, from one of my favorite action novels: The Three Musketeers (worth a post of its own, but in essence: D'Artagnan is not the true hero of that story. Who is?). A few of my favorite quotes come from that book, especially:

-Wine makes a man either happy or sad. It makes me sad...

(Athos, drunk, beginning to tell the story of his past to D'Artagnan in the basement of an inn)

In this case, the passage I have in mind isn't so much a full quote, as just the use of what I'm sure must have already been a cliche in Dumas' time. On D'Artagnan's first full day in Paris, having rented a room and having no money for food, he lay down on the floor and "slept the sleep of the brave." That phrase was new to me, and it grabbed my attention hard. That the quality of sleep could describe a person...well, of course. Those with sound consciences, masters of their fear, sleep well.

So I look at Jasper on the couch next to me, and think, Damn, if I could sleep like that, I'd be twice the man I am awake.

Captains and Kings

Real quickie post here. Kate and I have Netflix, and our latest disc was the first two parts of her favorite miniseries (one she watched while I was in the Gulf last summer), Captains and Kings. (I guess it was a bestseller book before it was made into a miniseries, but since I ignore bestseller lists, I might never had heard of it otherwise.) It's about this Irish immigrant Joseph Armagh, who so far is an amalgam of Joe Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller. I'll pick up other historical references as they're tossed into the mix. So the guy becomes rich and powerful and goes through all kinds of family tribulations and betrayals, same old thing.

The movie so far is better than I expected, though Kate and I were pretty much laughing at the first bedroom scene between Armagh and his then-lover Martinique. The actress playing Martinique is pretty creepy and not all that attractive, with heavy black curls and one eyelid that droops a little lower than the other. She's supposed to be some darkly passionate enigma with a murky past but she comes off kind of like a bat. And their bedroom scene could have been lifted from an old-school horror film, with foreboding music, rain pelting the windowpanes, and frequent lightning and thunder. Makes you think Martinique will have some sort of unfortunate influence on things down the road (think Roy Hobbs), but I confess to not caring.

I'm more into the historical references to the oil industry and the war (like I didn't care about the white whale allegory in Moby Dick--I have no idea what the whale stood for. I was into the portrayal of whaling). Anyhow, from the reading I've done (not all that much, sort of dilettante-level), Captains and Kings is pretty accurate about the oil industry and the war, including the reference to Standard Oil's system of rebates and penalties with the oil-shipping railroad companies.

So my point? Just this: the movie makes me think of one of my favorite U2 songs, Silver and Gold (which never made it onto one of their regular albums, at least in its studio version--I think it was part of some benefit CD). I love the low pitch and echo of the guitar, and I love the images in the lyrics (albeit images of oppression, but they're evocative). The lines which come to mind:

Captains and kings

In the ship's hold

They came to collect

Silver and gold.

I love that song, and the line. I suppose Bono had read this book, seeing as how he's Irish and all. Just a neat little connection. Maybe he'd never heard of the book at all and then got slapped with a copyright infringement suit after the song hit the airwaves. Dunno...but it's fun to think that he had the story in mind.