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.
