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.

Sheen's Giant Bomb of Suck

Gorgeous early spring day here, topping out around 60 degrees, though quite windy at the park. We went there this morning (getting out of the house by 11:15 AM on a weekend counts as a victory of warlockian proportions for us). After about 15 minutes at Wilson Park--one of Kate's happy places, and Eva is quickly taking after her--my hands were cold, and I was quietly looking for excuses to leave. It didn't help that I was looking wistfully around at the play area itself--a small section of the park as a whole--and the people in it.

Wilson Park is the center of children's, and even adults', outdoor sports in North Kingstown. There are four tennis courts, three or four baseball/softball diamonds, and room for up to five soccer/lacrosse fields. (It was a tykes' lacrosse game there last spring which gave Kate and me the lacrosse bug...yeah, we've really followed up on that.) In addition to the athletic playing fields is a giant sandlot with several climbing jungle-gyms and a few swingsets. It's becoming Eva's little empire, since she's not used to sand.

The ground around our home is pretty hard-packed, with well-established grass, and a few thickets of trees or else hedges, and of course the paved driveways and road. There's no sand, and very little diggable dirt to speak of. So sand is still a new thing to the little girl, and she hugely enjoys just picking it up in her hands and throwing it into the air. She was doing that today, and tackling a few of the jungle gyms, as I surveyed the park and the many families, not unlike the three of us, taking the sunny spring morning outdoors as well, and wondering how long any of this will exist.

Of course we all have fits of thought driven by surges of emotion, which come and go like waves up and down a seashore. Still, I consider how the ultra-rich are doing their very best, out of sight, to terminate democracy and gather all available wealth to themselves, and I wonder for how much longer towns like North Kingstown will be able to provide even simple things like parks for the general public. An irrational thought, you might say, a weak theory of conspiracy baked too long until it's hardened into a cinder. But I read about the state-by-state lobbying groups funded by the likes of Charles and David Koch, at the state level pushing savage policies attacking the working class, such as the abolition of collective bargaining rights for public employees, and in Maine, even the abolition of child labor laws. It's hard not to read this news and feel the kind of foreboding which makes it difficult to keep food down.

And there's the case of Fox News, run by another billionaire, Rupert Murdoch, and wholly dominated by his persona and outlook (as well as that of his hand-picked deputy Roger Ailes). Fox News, including every one of its news and opinion hosts, has a slender allegiance--at best--to the facts, and often an outright antipathy, as the network as a whole acts to forward a libertarian viewpoint often blurring with anarchy. (Bill O'Reilly proudly touts his belief that the moon has nothing to do with tides. It's worth wondering, if you watch O'Reilly or any other Fox host, how rudeness, insult and the display of willful ignorance have come to be so prominent in major American media.) In short, Fox News is not legitimate news. But in the words of the immortal Sheen, at the moment they seem to be on the side that's winning.

That is as far as I'll go into social and political issues now, as this is a family blog. But a deep and growing fear for the future of my country is very much a part of my thinking these days, and it's not something I can altogether avoid when I write. I believe in some collective sacrifice on the part of every individual for the sake of a community, whether on the local level, or for states, or for our country, or above all the whole planet. Paying a fair amount of taxes and doing perhaps some physical service for the community are certainly part. The further we turn to an attitude of securing only our own benefit, the more we destroy this nation we grew up in and are protected by.

So these thoughts, and fingers turning white in the chilly breeze, had me wanting to leave the park well before Eva did. Sometimes I'm the crump in the family, the one who backs out of a thing because I'm not feeling up to it. I don't even have the perfectly good reason, like Kate, of being pregnant to just check out of commission for a day. With me, the trouble is usually in my head. My body just follows along.

Except for yesterday, when I did a bit of work for Kate's boss Cheryl, spring cleanup of their yard. Cheryl and her husband have a very nice log cabin--a genuine log structure, not a frame house with log-looking siding--on a small pond. (The small pond has the look to me of a kettle hole, a big hole in the land left by a melting chunk of ice as the glaciers melted back. If the glacier had been floating on the ocean, like Arctic ice, such melting chunks would have become icebergs. Over land, they fall onto the ground, rivers of meltwater pile sand and gravel all around them, and they gradually melt to leave huge holes where the ice had been--kettle holes.)

So Cheryl and her husband live on the shore of a kettle hole, surrounded by oak trees. And with all the terraces and retaining walls around their place, there are plenty of spots where the wind eddies around and drops oak leaves. It seems the oak leaves from half the pond's shoreline end up in Cheryl's yard. Eight inches thick in places, wet and starting to mulch. I can tell you, raking, pitchforking and then hauling these things away in a tarp was a tougher full-body workout than anything I'd done at the Y in the last two years. I practically had to drag myself back to the car when I finished (for the day--I'm going back next Saturday), with sore quads and hamstrings, sore hips, extremely sore shoulders, and wanting to go to sleep. This was the kind of whole-body fatigue and soreness that makes it painful to roll over in bed.

So this morning, the blahs were probably 65% in my mind, but still a good 35% was post-strain soreness still, and wanting just to flop down in a comfortable chair, dig into a good book, and start thinking about something. Standing in a park with the wind whistling through my fingers just got me onto a mean path of thought that took me to the bleak place I described just above. This morning, I suppose my body led my mind.

As for the reading, I'm back into the history of the petroleum industry. I'm taking a break for a bit from philosophy and the whatever-it-is you'd call Finnegans Wake. If reading Kant is like using a pickaxe to get through a bed of coal, reading the Wake is like blasting through granite, and reading some history is like digging in sand. Compared to the first two, it's practically a vacation. Besides, it has me thinking about yet another writing project (beyond the Deepwater Horizon project) that I'd like to embark on.

Meanwhile, on the way to the park this morning, we listened to a bit of sports radio. Kate and I have the rough policy that the driver picks the radio station--common sense enough, though when the family travels together I usually drive, so that means I dominate the radio.

I adore sports talk. I fell in love with it in the fall of 2005, when I was living in North Kingstown and taking classes up at Harvard, and I would drive up and back once a week, and for the two-hour trip started listening to those guys yelling and screaming about local teams all day. Only, by and large, listening to the noonday and afternoon hosts, I found them to be pretty reasonable guys, by and large, though certainly pushing certain issues which would get a response out of listeners (such as critizing an underperforming player or team).

The real trick of a successful host is to successfully manage the callers, who range from very knowledgeable to idiots oblivious to the facts. Entertaining shows draw many callers, and of course a slew of regulars who don't mind spending an hour a day on hold just to talk on the radio for 30 to 120 seconds. (I confess to having called in five or six times, once to advocate that the Sox sign Barry Bonds to a one-year contract. If the Red Sox, after 2004, were viewed as the Evil Empire Lite, well, why not eliminate the "Lite" part? Anyway.)

So I like sports talk radio. We listened this morning for about half the trip out to the park, before I changed the station to one of the pop-dance stations that Katie likes and I despise so much (she says sports radio puts her to sleep, so I try to listen to it at the start of our trips to and from Maine). The weekend shows tend to be pretty dull, I admit, since the top-line hosts have the days off, and the majority of games are in progress. So this morning the guys were talking about Charlie Sheen.

I'm not exactly a pop culture maven. I grew up on pop and rock music, checked out of rap, and have been more or less unaware of new groups and performers since 1995. (I think U2 is a modern Rolling Stones--great lead singer, good lead guitarist, plus two guys--and I believe that Led Zeppelin might never be approached for musicality, once they narrowly edged the Beatles in that category.)

I resolutely ignore reality TV, since it's more contrived than anything, and I have a visceral dislike for people intentionally making fools of themselves for the sake of attention. (Physical comedy is something else--that requires talent. But people being petulant, violent jerks to one another is simply demeaning, to everyone who participates and watches. Kate watches BrideZillas, and it makes me wish I had an office in another room.)

My reality TV is live sports. Here you've got guys--or women, when I watch skiing or skating--who are among the very best on the planet at what they do, honestly competing. (Okay, some dog it from time to time, and sometimes the refs are questionable, but that still doesn't approach the all-around voyeuristic worthlessness of reality TV.)

I avoid sitcoms for much the same reason--dullwitted characters, with uninspired writing, foundering their way through contrived plots. Though I do watch cartoons, including (occasionally) Dragonball Z. Any watcher of reality TV or sitcoms might want to skewer me for that, but (a) the writing is often better, and (b) at least the ridiculous nature of the cartoons is obvious, not concealed.

I don't want to go into an even longer digression here, but there are two television shows (aside from live games) I do watch: House and Breaking Bad. All I'll say now is that, I'm proud to have introduced Kate to two of her favorite shows and characters: Metalocalypse (and Pickles), and Breaking Bad (and Walter White). She introduced me to House, and has compared me to him on numerous occasions. So every once in a while I play along and walk with a limp.

I've seen, total, maybe ten minutes of Two and a Half Men. It fits perfectly into the category of dullwitted sitcom I so despise. Charlie Sheen has been part of some pretty fun movies--Hot Shots! and Major League come to mind--but I had pretty much no reaction at all to his ongoing role on this show. Of course, it's impossible to navigate to a news website these days without idiotic Lilo-Britney-type gossip prominently getting in the way, so I've seen more than I ever cared to about Sheen's professional meltdown. (I suppose it's been accompanied by a personal meltdown of sorts, but who really knows?)

He got himself fired in spectacular fashion from a very successful TV show, while revealing a huge amount of disgust (concealing even more jealousy?) for the show's creator. During a round of interviews Charlie gave, he let loose with a series of almost inspired quotes, including drinking tiger blood (I hear he's trademarked it and has sold the name rights to a drink manufacturer--PETA will love that), and my favorite, riding the mercury surfboard. (Mercury is liquid at room temperature, though Bill O'Reilly might not be so sure--but in any case, who cares? The idea is too much fun.) Winning, the warlock thing and "defeat is not an option" are much less clever and much more mockable.

So Sheen torched his present job (though there's a small possibility he might have it back next fall), and then arranged a 20-city tour of his new one-man (and two-goddess) tour, the "Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option" tour. He might have called it the "Huge Bomb of Suck/Defeat is Highly Likely" tour. The first show occurred last night (April 2), in Detroit, Michigan. Why not on April Fools Day?

Apparently Charlie rambled pointlessly, the audience booed frequently and Sheen at many points derisively mocked those who heckled him, including with the taunt that they'd already given their money to him. Too bad, because he could've really turned this tour into something. Apparently Sheen wrote the whole thing, if you can call it that. That was his first mistake. Furthermore, he goes over the events of his divorce from CBS and subsequent talk-show rampage. That was his second.

I say, Sheen should've hired five or ten good comedy writers to put together a series of vignettes, of comic one- or two-person scenes illustrating various ideas, or really not related to anything at all. The whole show could've had a general thrust in the direction of life as a star, or some of the reality of putting together a weekly show, or something actually new to the audience. You know, something vaguely educational, a comic show about a slice of experience unknown to the people attending.

Rule #1: don't even mention Two and a Half Men, or anyone associated, or CBS, by name. Let any reference be implicit. Rule #2: have a planned, rehearsed series of one-man character vignettes (Sheen could play two guys at once, like one-man-show actors frequently do) that he's rehearsed and knows cold. I think Sheen has the charisma and acting ability to hold a stage for 90 minutes by himself. If he'd followed those two rules, I think this tour might have turned into something pretty successful. As it is, it's likely to end before he wanted it to. I don't see the theaters in cities #10-20 hanging onto such a lame no-show. (Apparently those extremely quick sellouts weren't people going...they were scalpers and secondary ticket agencies, who are now losing lots of money because they can only sell the tickets at a loss.)

Tough luck, Chuck. At least Sarah Palin--another charismatic dope--has a few handlers who know what they're doing.

Music

What's becoming increasingly common these days, is for Eva to wake up before Kate leaves for work (generally by 7 AM), denying me a comfortable sleep in until about 8 or so. Generally though, when I'm not feeling worn out (like this morning), I like getting up around 6:30, early enough to make our coffee and peruse some news--though most doesn't post until 7-7:30--before I hit the books and then help Eva through her morning.

But today the little girl was upnatom early, and she even shared breakfast with Kate and me, so now she's wandering around in her trundler with nothing specific to do (no, I don't play with her every instant of the day), especially since I warned her not to follow the cat everywhere.

Eva loves Jasper. Loves him not quite to death, but certainly to the point of scaring him and frequently bugging the crap out of him. There aren't many spots outside of the basement--which is generally cold--where the little guy can remain out of her reach. (Our bed is the one that comes to mind right now.) If he's curled up on a chair, or under a chair, or in some nook on the carpet somewhere, or like right now, on the corner of the couch by the window, it's seldom more than ten minutes before Eva routs him out. She's just too fascinated.

Before Eva was born, I mentioned the presence of a cat in the household to Kate's aunts one Sunday, and they responded with many dark and urgent warnings that the cat would smother the baby, if not out of jealousy, then at least out of being oblivious to the presence of a small child. Nothing could have been further from reality. Jasper is, as my friend Martha (who introduced me to him), a lover not a fighter. (Just yesterday I saw a neighbor's cat rolling happily in the dirt by our driveway, while Jasper cowered five feet away beneath the side-door stairs).

I've never seen an animal more deferent and gentle in the presence of a human infant. Jasper really avoided contact with Eva for several months, and only two or three times (maybe more, I suppose, since Kate was usually home) did we have to rout him out of the bassinet (with Eva not in it, of course). The cat seemed to realize clearly that Eva was a living creature and gave her a very wide berth, particularly in her sleeping spot. There was never a problem.

Fast-forward to now, when Eva's an increasingly speedy and grabby toddler, full of affection and curiosity and, at her small size, unaware of her strength when it comes to things still smaller. Read: the cat. She can really whack the stuffing out of him when she winds up to deliver a love tap. Fortunately she rarely gets a second whack, but she's also grabbed him by the tail and hauled on several occasions, leading to at least one episode of the poor cat wailing from the kitchen as she dragged him across the linoleum.

By and large he offers no resistance. Unless, of course, he has a defensive position, like on an arm of the couch or in Kate's desk chair. Then, if Eva just quietly bugs him enough, Jasper's liable to extend a single claw and catch the baby by one sleeve, and hold on while she turns to me or Kate and whines. "That's what you get for bugging him," we'll say. He's never taken a full-out swipe at her--I'd have no choice but to punish him if he did--and I think that's due to two things.

First, Jasper is too gentle by nature. Even when he and I roughhouse--and nobody else does with him--he'll eventually get pretty feral and deliver a good hard bite. Almost immediately he'll stop, as if in shame, and begin licking the spot he just bit. It's pretty funny. But second, and on top of that, Eva is too gentle. She's not abusive or cruel by nature (unlike me as a young boy, who showed an unfortunate talent for willfully abusing our family cat Simon, another tuxedo like Jasper).

Eva doesn't do anything, by and large, worthy of really fierce retaliation, like throwing or poking him. Yes, a big whack to the ribs every once in a while isn't nice, but no cat's sticking around for more of that, mean or not. (And Simon was part Siamese, the breed developed to guard the temples of Siam. It is by design that those cats are loud, obnoxious and somewhat territorial. Jasper's got none of that mean blood in him).

So the cat has a kind of wary tolerance for the little girl, not fleeing on sight, but always alert to her position and ready to move at the first sign of things going bad. He'll allow her to touch him if she's gentle and not grabby, and doesn't poke at his feet or anything. But she's still too young to have developed any sophisticated behaviors toward the cat, like dangling a string for him to play with.

One of Eva's toys is a three-foot segment of gold Christmas tree string beads, cheap plastic glittery things which helped form our holiday decorations this year. I thought she might like them as a kind of necklace-thingy, and for months Eva draped them over her shoulders in just that way. But now she's discovered how the cat likes to chase dangly things, and at least a dozen times a day Eva will drag the golden bead string over to me, hold it out with her insistent "Eh-eh-eh," (she's on her way right now--just took a two-minute bead break), expecting me to lure the cat over by drawing the beads back and forth across the carpet.

It usually works (as it did just now), and the cat is soon on hand, staring at the beads and making ready to spring. Only then, Eva wants back in on the action, and reachs for the string again, so I hand it to her. Only the little girl then flings it up and down as hard as she can, and then goes running at the cat yelling "Kit-teh!" You can imagine how well that ends.

So the little girl has a fair amount to learn, but her heart's in the right place. Helping her along through the morning, sprinkling episodes of playing (and Signing Time videos!) in among my reading and writing, is my typical pattern, however early Eva gets up. Today is a Wednesday, and for the first time in a while I'll be going to RI Civic Chorale rehearsal tonight.

I took the winter off because I missed so much rehearsal time while I was working nights, but this spring, with no job at all and a really grand concert coming up to conclude the year, I wanted to spare no effort to participate. Rehearsal days are always a bit of a two-edged sword. Having taken the last few months off from singing, I've gotten used to not having to leave home for four hours on Wednesday nights.

It's very easy to get used to being home and not having to go. Frequently I have to drag myself to practice, dreading the two-and-a-half hour's work. But I almost always come away refreshed, with more energy, after singing. That alone is a good indication of the good it does me, and by extension, the people around me.

This spring we'll be singing one of my two favorite pieces of music, the Mozart Requiem. (The other is Beethoven's Ninth. In one of those depressing surveys of American highschoolers, the question was asked, "How many symphonies did Beethoven write?" and one kid answered, "Two. The Fifth and the Ninth.") At some point in the future I'll write a post about the Ninth, only because I have a more systematic understanding of it, and I feel it's one of the very greatest works of art on the planet.

I first sang the Requiem in college with the Glee Club, and we barely pulled it off. And I mean barely. We had a full-out dress rehearsal the morning of the performance, and that dress rehearsal was the first time we'd sung the whole thing through. Our conductor, Louis Burkot, apologized to us during that rehearsal for maybe overestimating our ability as a group. (But we had a secret weapon: a kick-ass bass named Rocky as one of our soloists, a guy who'd soloed at the Met. Notwithstanding that he's a guy, his singing is a small but important part of my reason for picking Rocky as Eva's nickname--well, notwithstanding also that Sylvester Stallone is a guy too. But it's the whole crossover cuteness I'm going for here. Anyway...)

And that Tuba Mirum bass solo...it's giving me chills all across my shoulders now. "Tooooooo-baaa meeee-rooom spar-jens soooohhhhhhhhhhh-oooooohhhhhhh-ooohhhhhhhh-oh-oh-ohh-noooooom...." (The piece is about the mythic trumpet which will awake the dead on the day of judgment.)

Safe to say, Rocky made an impression on the whole Glee Club. Even sopranos were singing his solo to themselves. Almost the whole Requiem, like most of them are, is in Latin. The text for a Requiem mass is mostly set, taken from several Christian poems, most especially "Dies Irae" or "Day of Wrath" (a somewhat long poem). Not every composer used the same movements as the others, so sometimes texts will appear in one requiem mass that don't appear in others. It was pretty much up to each individual guy, what he used or not.

"Dies Irae"--not the whole Latin poem, but the part that actually names the Day of Wrath--is one of the commonest parts included in the mass, and it's usually a show-stopper with its energy and urgency. "Confutatis", "The Confounded" (i.e. cursed), is one of the most famous specifically in Mozart's mass for its violence and, by contrast, its subsequent profound fear and humility. I posted some time ago about how Kate and I watched the movie Amadeus, and unwittingly watched Part II before Part I. Eh, it was still a good movie and all the touches of Mozart's music throughout made it worth seeing regardless of the script (which wasn't bad at all).

I'm no expert on Mozart, but I do know enough about his life to realize that the movie creators (of course) took some creative license with Mozart's life for the sake of their plot (such as, I'm not too sure Salieri actively worked to kill him). But in college, Louis told us, as he was introducing us to the piece, about how Mozart composed much of the Requiem on his deathbed, though made it only through the seventh movement, Lacrimosa.

In the course of learning the individual movements, Louis broke down the Confutatis for us, stripping away its surging rhythm and getting down only to basic chords--and it still made an impression. That was, for me, Louis at his best, teaching us about music at the same time that he coached us to sing. Mozart lived from 1756-1791, and was dying as he composed this Requiem. In no small sense, he wrote it for himself.

Every artist worthy of the title bases every part of every work on her or his own experience alone. But Mozart's requiem is urgently so, filled with the intensity of a person about to die. Verdi's requiem might be far bigger, and Brahms' more imposing and dreadful overall, but no requiem mass approaches Mozart's for immediacy, force and delicacy of emotion.

I'm not going through the entire mass. For one thing, after the Lacrimosa, it's not even Mozart's work, and even though it's not bad, it becomes somewhat more dance-hall music until the final movement, when the follow-up composer quoted the opening movement at length. (The version commonly used now was completed by Franz Sussmayr, one of Mozart's contemporaries.) Second, I'm barely a musician, hardly able to read notes. I've raved a bit about the Tuba Mirum movement, and how the bass solo which leads it off is one of my favorite phrases in music.

But now for the Lacrimosa, my favorite movement of the whole piece, and really, the climax and beating heart of his whole Requiem mass. It begins delicately, plaintively with just strings sighing out disconnected chords, as if from so many people lying or sitting on the ground in pain and anticipation. The text runs:

Lacrimosa dies illa

qua resurget ex favilla

iudicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce deus

pie Jesu, Jesu domine.

Dona nobis requiem

Amen.

Translation:

Tearful that day

when from the ash will stand up

risen man to be judged.

Therefore spare me God

holy Jesus, Jesus lord.

Give us rest

Amen.

That segment of the poem is about the day of judgment itself, when some will be saved and others will not. The tears are for and from the cursed, because they have been cursed. Mourning is barely even the beginning of this movement. I think there might not be a movement in all of music (mind you I'm no well-versed musician) with so many densely mixed emotions.

The piece is a farewell to life, full of foreboding and some hope as to what comes after. It begins with the bleakness of waking alone on a cold and desolate morning and slowly swells to a full chorus. Always the sopranos are riding above the other three parts, adding the pity and sense of tragedy which permeate the whole thing. The "huic ergo..." sentence, sung softly, is a last, quiet, desperate prayer for safety, after which the grandeur of the "Dona nobis", sung in a good strong forte, floods in. "Nobis", us, is a prayer for all humans, but of course it includes the individual praying. It could refer to the chorus singing, the orchestra playing, the audience listening, the whole world of people.

You don't need to be a Christian to understand the urgency of that prayer. "Rest" doesn't even need to mean heaven--it could refer to forgetful oblivion, the lack of all consciousness whatsoever. You can think of yourself during the "dona nobis" passage, or you can think of those you mourn. And this life, for all its joys and triumphs and beauty, still ends more often than not in pain, with the dying person alone, mourned by those who will survive him or her. And it is in the memory of the survivors that the pain of death lives on, and that is why prayers for the dead to rest quietly remain so strong.

Mozart was staring his own death in the face. He might really have feared going to hell--I won't try to imagine what was in his mind. He composed the Lacrimosa out of his own hope and overriding dread of death. This translates easily in each of us into mourning for those already gone, and yet to go in the future.

By the time the chorus reaches the "Amen", I'm frequently in tears, and the only thing which keeps me going through it is to keep breathing. When your voice starts to falter during a song, return to your breathing. Breathing is the engine that drives you through all trouble.

Goulash II

My last goulash post was well over a year ago, but since I don't want to repeat myself too often, I'll just make this second in a series. (A random series of nothing in particular, but we've all watched TV, haven't we?)

It's a cloudless, breezy, and none-too-warm (43 deg. at 11:30 AM) Sunday, and Kate and I are preparing for a park/supermarket expedition before Eva chows down for lunch and drops off for her afternoon nap. (To say nothing of Kate, who hauled herself groggily out of bed today around quarter of ten...though she did make a kick-ass breakfast, and was sadly gracious when I told her that I dislike the cheddar she loves adding to scrambled eggs. So she responded by saying that she despises the olive oil which I love in scrambled eggs. Ah, married life...)

Anyhow, this post will span the midday shopping trip for Eva's exercise and the family's basic food (and again, the Crock-Pot has become our salvation. Easy, energy-efficient, tasty and complete meals...this is not an advertisement--it's more of a gloat). But as I type Kate's nearly ready to head out the door.

As I wait out the unemployment, having applied to dozens of jobs for which I'm marginally qualified (being more of an offshore geologist, not onshore), I'm letting my spirit sing by delving into the literature I've neglected for a long time. And the list of things I want to read is still long. Homer in the original (not translated). Dante in the original (made it through the Inferno a few years ago). The Aeneid in the original. But right now I've devoted myself, in addition to a little math, to two of the most hard-core writings in the west: Joyce's Finnegans Wake, as I've been posting about for a week or so now, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

The Wake is all about dreams, about the things which emerge in our minds when consciousness, filled with light, bounded by rules and littered with goals, is absent. The unconscious, at its most primitive and paranoid, rules the nighttime of sleep. No human can verify--as Joyce himself realized--that Finnegans Wake is an accurate reproduction of a complete cycle of sleep. Most likely it isn't. However, the fragmented and repetitive aesthetic and the timeless, funhouse-mirror versions of events are based on the brain's activity during sleep. As the title of one prominent commentary states, the Wake is Joyce's book of the dark.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804. He was an intellectual giant of his age who wrote about philosophy, astronomy (he discovered that the earth's rotation is gradually slowing down) and history. He is most remembered now for his theory of transcendental ideas, or you might even say fundamental ideas: aspects of perception which exist in the human mind before all experience begins. Neuroscience and prenatal research didn't exist when Kant wrote, so we have much more to say now about the development of the human brain, but Kant's two transcendental ideas within the brain are time and space. Without an inherent awareness of these two things, all experience, including everything we learn, would be impossible for us.

So Kant was into metaphysics. Metaphysics through the centuries has referred to many things. In Aristotle's time, metaphysics basically meant astronomy. In the time of Aquinas it meant theology. Nearer to Kant's own time, and later, it referred to psychology. But Kant himself stepped outside psychology, avoiding the mechanics of how the brain apprehends, remembers and imagines things, and explored how it is that humans can apprehend and imagine things at all. By thinking along those lines he developed his theory of transcendental ideas.

Thoreau and his buddies--Emerson and others--were known as Transcendentalists, for their devotion to Kant and to the very active reality that ideas play in our daily lives. In writing Walden, Thoreau was trying to make a transcendental, idea-driven life as actual as possible. Devotion to ideas, in Thoreau's mind, meant simplifying his life and living as much in harmony with nature as he could, while not ignoring human society.

I find it intriguing that while Thoreau discusses many works of fiction and at least Hindu philosophy, he never overtly discusses Kant anywhere in his published works. Writers don't always disclose their models. It's commonly thought that Dante received the idea of writing about a journey through hell from at least two Muslim works, the Isra and the Mirage. Especially worthy of notice here is that the lowest circle of Dante's hell, the ninth (where Satan is a prisoner), is frozen. Ice doesn't occur in writings about Christian hell until Dante; but it was not unknown in Muslim writing. And you can sure bet that Dante wouldn't concede an Islamic source for his supremely Christian work.

Not that Thoreau feared charges of apostasy or heresy, or even of being a hypocrite, by admitting that he admired the writing of Immanuel Kant. I think it more likely that he so thoroughly incorporated Kant's thinking into his own, that to discuss Kant would be beside the point, as if he were merely cataloguing his own bones and muscles: better to use the bones and muscles to go on a walk, and talk about the things seen, heard and smelled, than to dwell on his bones and muscles. He simply treated the philosophical structure as a given and spent his time on other topics.

I respect that, and it makes me all the more eager to read Kant for myself and understand what he wrote about. The little I've written above is from the first chapter, the bare introduction. Things get complicated quickly after that.

But another thing appeals to me in deciding to tackle this book of philosophy now: the contrast with Joyce. Kant wrote in the mid- to late 1700's, before much of anything was known about what we'd now call psychology. (The 1800's saw many writers exploring the human mind, like Blake, and finding many different, warring aspects within each of us. Much later, Joseph Campbell wrote about how 20th century psychology merely stamped the "QED" ("Quod Erat Demonstrandum", or "We've proven what we set out to prove") on 19th century literature.) But Kant wrote in a time when most still thought dreams to be divine, prophetic gifts, and not products of our own brains.

And he wasn't concerned with any of that. Kant wrote about the fully wakeful, highly rational mind, and how it can perceive things. Reducing his philosophy to a simplified cartoon, Kant wrote about the day, while Joyce wrote about the night.

So that's what I'm doing now: reading and trying to understand the daylightiest and darknightiest works from our civilization.

Hey, it's a way to cope with unemployment!

Spring is nominally here, and it's certainly warmer, but the three of us went to the park this morning and within about ten minutes Kate's and my fingers were pretty cold. Eva, whose fingers are smaller, had red hands, but she was oblivious. It's still not all that clear how aware she is of her different body parts. She's futher along than she was, say, four months ago, when she was closing a toy plastic phone on her thumb, and crying about the pain at the same time. She now has the sense to remove her thumb. But she doesn't have the language skill right now to tell us that a specific body part is, for example, cold. If she hits her hand, she will often hold it out as she cries. So the awareness is dawning, but with anything other than sharp, immediate pain, it still seems to Kate and me that we need to be pretty vigilant on Eva's behalf.

This is the case especially now with physical accidents. As Eva grows more mobile and her inquisitiveness has longer legs and longer arms, she has a vastly increased ability to get herself hurt. She reaches for drawers now, including the ones with sharp knives. Other than closing the drawers again and firmly warning her away from them, Kate and I have yet to take any action on these (like putting in smaller versions of the plastic safety latches we have on several cupboards). But most worriesome right now is Eva's tendency to approach an open door from behind, peek through the open crack at the hinges, and sneak her fingers through.

Since Kate and I commonly keep Eva away from the open side of the refrigerator door when we're getting something, this is her way of still getting a peek at things. Even more worrisome is when she does the same thing at the pantry. If Eva were to sneak her fingers through the crack in hinge side of the refrigerator door, at least the rubber molding would cusion the pressure on her hand and prevent serious injury. But the other night Eva got behind the pantry door and snuck a hand through while I was getting dinner fixings. I didn't see her and if Kate hadn't yelled I'd've shut the door firmly on my little girl's right hand, and I would've broken or possibly severed all four of her fingers. Needless to say I never would have forgiven myself and the thought that I very nearly maimed my own daughter still gives me chills.

Wow, are kids their own worst enemies at times! (I was my own especially in college, but that's not worth dwelling on now. Or maybe ever.)

So Eva has survived past her eighteenth month. Every time Kate and I look at her early ultrasounds, where her spine and teeth within the jaw are visible, it seems always more and more miraculous.