In October Bloom

Tuesday morning bike to work. The trees haven't changed, but leaves are falling. The breeze ambles alongside, waking the skin on my face and forearms, shirt sleeves rolled up. It's a Phil Collins fall day, "no jacket required."

Fall is a return to school and to field hockey. I've been thinking a lot about what it means to raise girls, or kids in general, so that they grow up and become good people--caring, compassionate, connected; passionate, curious, critical thinkers. Individuals.

A friend shared this the other day, which seemed to me to put things into a solid perspective. Have them learn to care about something other than themselves, to find, for themselves, what is truly important in life.

I think about how much time kids will sit in front of a screen if you let them. That's not a statement about today's kids, we would have done the same thing, but Atari and Betamax can only hold your attention for so long. What makes me happy is how quickly they will leave screens in favor of something more fun, if they think about it, I want to make sure they think about it.

I'm a believer that kids being bored is a good thing, and that it is their job to combat their own boredom. That is where creativity comes from.

But kids model after the people around them, for better or worse, even (and especially) parents and grown ups, wrong as we frequently are. I dig that the girls see running, biking, skateboarding; I love that we play soccer, kickball, go paddleboarding, walk dogs, or that they can be surprised by dad's monkey bar skills :)

There is the active stuff. But there is also the aesthetic stuff that shapes their souls. Going to a concert to hear live music; watching a sunset from the shoreline; filling bird feeders and being able to name some of the birds that come; drinking hot tea; being able to sit still; knowing the names of flowers.

I love that they know what it is to be a part of a family and a community that knows each other, enjoys each other's company, and looks out for one another.

There are different barometers, small things, that overflow my heart. When the girls say thank you, unprovoked; when they turn cartwheels and play in the grass; when they laugh until they are out of breath; when I see them stop and notice something that someone else might walk by. Like a yellow rose in October bloom.

Notes to Anna on her 13th Birthday

Of the different life moments you picture, I'm not sure the day you have a teenager is one of them. Your oldest child's 13th birthday. I mean, really it's an odd birthday to get sentimental about. It ends in a 3, how big can it be? But as a parent it feels pretty effing big. You now have a teenager.

Today is older daughter Anna's 13th birthday. I can remember turning 13, going to the same middle school she goes to, This is one of those days that I didn't see coming, but I live for. I am writing this preamble, drinking from a coffee mug that she painted me two days after I turned 40 and had wrenched my back and landed in the ER. As a writer, it's never a good thing when I am at a loss for words. But let me try to get it together here and shift gears.

Notes to Anna on her 13th Birthday

On your 13th birthday, I feel like I should have some sort of profound or fatherly advice. I don't. But you are so much like me when I was 13, that I know you wouldn't listen to it if I did :) What I have instead are memories, stories, dreams, and love. I hope some of them will be of use to you.

I promise to dig for sand crabs for you and with you until I can't. There was a time at the beach where I did all the digging, and you would study and parade around with the findings. Now you are the queen of sand crab excavation. Where you watched me, your sister and cousins now watch you. When did that happen?

I have never cared much about raking leaves. Until you were old enough to love jumping in a leaf pile. I hope I can continue to make leaf piles, both real and metaphorical, for you to jump into. Life is too short to rake leaves without jumping in the leaf pile.

You and are both the oldest child. Don't tell anyone, but parents make all their mistakes with/on the first kid. How can they not? There is no guidebook. It's trial by fire. But if you bring this up, and call me out on it, you're still grounded ;)

I will race or chase you anytime. Standing challenge. Even though you now cut better than I do and I can no longer take it easy and speed up at the end to try to catch you. Whether for field hockey, lacrosse, or running away from your sister, watching you run is one of my life's great joys.

There is never a time that I don't want to throw the lacrosse ball. I didn't play field hockey growing up. But I did play lacrosse, which seems it will be the one sport that connects us, that we've both played, and I can't describe really the feeling of watching you use your off hand or watching you run up the field on a fast break. Don't move off of midfield--you are too fast to play defense :)

You are so much better at being a kid then I was; at least at doing the right thing. I think my loudest moments getting to age 13, and then for a few years after, were the ways I messed up or fell down. I watch you act as a good friend and peacemaker among your friends; I see your full years of perfect attendance and honor roll report cards without effort, and I realize you have this growing up game figured out so much better than I did. We do, however, need to talk about how you treat your sister...

Sing. There are things you have done, that I never had the nerve for at your age. Like singing in chorus. And I guess even if I did have the nerve, I've never had the voice. You have both. Find those things like singing, that you can do, and do them. Those are things worth doing.

Stay goofy and profound. Think the thoughts and ask the questions that make your brain tingle. You wrote the following in second grade. It came home in your weekly folder, it has since been thrown away, but I wrote it down because I loved it:

Go play baseball right now!
Do not tuch that fish.
The frog is green.
How heave is that rock?
The hen is laying eggs.

There are Zen masters who might randomly recite that to students. Keep in touch with that part of yourself and allow yourself to be loose, silly, observant and deep all at the same time.

Remember, you are brackish. You are growing up around the water. It's a part of you. You are centuries connected to the place you live. Sometimes it can feel suffocating, many more times it can feel deeper than oceans.

As you turn 13 today, you don't need my advice. I'll still give it to you when I have something to say, and maybe sometimes you'll listen. I won't hold my breath ;) But on this day and every other, you know the one thing you have of mine, that you always will, is my heart. I can't wait to see where life takes you, actually, scratch that--where you take life. I will do everything I can to help you drive it. I love you Anna Louise, and happy birthday!

And I guess one quick question: how the hell did you get to be a teenager already???

Saturn and other Digable Planets

Sometimes reality is what you thought it was when you were a kid. Your perception then was maybe sharper than it is as you get older, as we learn to filter how we see things through books, through science, through "facts."

As a kid, who doesn't draw the planet Saturn as a circle with a ring disappearing behind it? But that's just a kid drawing, that can't be reality, right? Fast forward to about 15 years ago. We had a group of writers on a writers' retreat weekend at an Audubon sanctuary. An astronomer among us set her telescope up under the night sky and dialed it in on Saturn for all of us to check out. The telescope wasn't quite as powerful as the photo from the one above; it looked even more like what you draw as a kid. I remember looking through the lens and thinking, "Holy shit! It really does look like that!"

Nine-year-old daughter Ava has been drawing like crazy of late. I bought her artist pads of blank paper, colored pencils, crayons. She checks out books on how to draw from her school library and sets to work. She isn't finished until she has between 10 and 20 pictures drawn and colored, and then she makes a cover, and staple binds them all together into a book. Her most recent is titled, "Ava's Drawings of Halloween Costumes." It is on my coffee table.

She has also been requesting Digable Planets whenever she gets into the car. She wants to hear "Cool Like Dat" and "Nickel Bags (of Funk)." Funny aside, I was playing that same album in the car when her older sister Anna was two years old. Ava wasn't born yet. Nickel Bags was playing as we got out of the car in a parking lot in Ocean City. Two-year-old Anna got out, singing/saying, "Nic-kel bag, Nic-kel bag," like she heard in the song. Ava likes that story, which is why she digs the song. It's catchy.

I catch something new every time I listen to the Planets.

Refuting time and space in rhymes.
What would you do, if time belonged to you?
A heavy thought is,
that it DOES.
Now hip somebody else.

When you are a kid, time is more relative than it is when you grow up. Anna and Ava would both say "yesterday," and mean anything from yesterday to last year when they were younger. It all streams together. And then we start looking at watches, and we have schedules to keep, and our sense of time becomes regimented, predictable. But like drawing Saturn, what if how we think about time when we are young is a better representation than how our clocks and watches tell us to think about it now?

When I want to know about the shape and size and mystery of the Universe, I sometimes turn to Tracy Smith.

After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being--a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Blind to the future once, and happy. Maybe it goes back to floating under the stars. Refuting time and space the way we did when we were kids. After all, (in the span of time) "we're just babies, man."

Honeysuckle and Ether

Honeysuckle mainlines spring. For the nose, tongue, eyes, it shoots straight into spirit, into memory. Walking to work in Anacostia, DC, I walk under 295, next to a highway and I smell it blatantly. There shouldn't be honeysuckle here, but there it is, growing in a stand of trees between freeways. And it takes me two places.

Over the weekend, Anna went back to the corner of the yard, where honeysuckle grows on the fence. She picked some and sat on the deck with me, dissecting each piece to suck its sweetness. She's done this for years now, anywhere she finds it.

Growing up, honeysuckle grew at the shoreline in our back yard, but even more so in the marsh behind our neighbor's. And we harvested it for the same fleeting sweetness. You had to get bunches to make it worth your while. Kids housing honeysuckle is timeless.

Each day I go into the ether. The ether is what I've taken to calling the realm of the internet. There is no cell phone reception in our building, so the internet and email is all you have. Somewhat cut off. But really the ether encompasses all of our virtual worlds. The world where we experience reality on a screen--computer, laptop, tablet, cell phone. Where people are profile pictures or avatars. Where emails, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, allow us to hide, to filter, to present ourselves as we want others to see us.

There is no honeysuckle in the ether. The photo has no smell, no taste, can't get you there, and words and images can't put those things there. They can't create it.

I like the ether. I better, since by virtue of reading this, that's one way you know me. I get to expound what's on my mind and have you read it. I dig it. I work as a writer, in communications, in public relations, so I sure as hell better be down with the ether.

But I can't live in the ether. I can't smell coffee, or go for a run, or drink a beer. The ether won't let me dance in the kitchen, or steal a kiss, or ponder the moon from the front steps. The ether can't stand waist-deep in the river with my daughters paddleboarding, feeling both sun, water, muddy river bottom, and hearing their splashing laughter, watching them learn. The ether has no blue in its night or morning skies.

Those things live in the honeysuckle world. The sensory world of our experience.

I am cognizant of my ether addiction. Of how much time I spend in it. Of how I need it to do what I do. And how it can connect me with people I have lost, and how it can enable me to do my job and make a living. I am thankful for what it can do.

But I am more of the honeysuckle world. That's the world that connects me to my childhood. That connects me to my daughters. That connects me to my senses. That connects me to Nature.

On my morning walk into the ether, I smell honeysuckle in the city. Where it shouldn't be. And I breathe in. And I remember.

Weekend

Weekends are silent. Listen. Nothing. But I'm still up at 4:30am. Restless. Weekends are silent, except for coffee beans grinding.

Except for lacrosse and Anna's eyes big, heart pounding as she clears up the sideline and passes to a friend.

Weekends are silent. No Microsoft Excel, the fu**ing scourge of all programs. I cringe when I open it. Be quiet, Excel, it's the weekend. No listening for traffic. No morning radio shows.

Weekends are silent. Except for the aluminum crunch of beer cans opening, and contemplating the blue of a Dale's Pale Ale can--does the blue change as the can empties?

Except for the bounce of the trampoline and girls screaming earlier than neighbors might care for.

The other day I wrote this in a notebook. Bouquets of blue. Or maybe I didn't, but it seems like I should have, blue being on my mind and all.

If the weekends are silent, then I have only what Merwin says, "I have only what I remember." There is no record.

From what I can recall, silence is golden. Maybe we need more of it. When I run without music, I can hear my feet hitting the pavement, feel my heart beating, like Anna's must. I speed up over the last mile, trying to leave nothing, spend it all. My breathing is becoming ragged, shorter, strides faster, arms restrained, low, shoulders working with legs, running hard until I cross the tree in our front yard that marks my finish line.

Weekends are silent. Until they fill themselves with sound.

A decade of Anna

"Anna" is another word for "life-changer." At least that's been my experience. I can still remember the shirt I was wearing to the hospital, ten years ago today, when Robin had her. I've written here before about her hearing my voice. If you'll indulge me to quote myself, it serves as an introduction, the first time I met Anna:

"When our daughter Anna was born, her left arm was a little slow to get moving. The doctors weren't overly concerned--this can happen to a C-Section born baby--but they noted it, and I went with them as they rolled her down the hospital hallway into a room to check her vitals and her arm. She didn't care for being prodded and was screaming (those who know her can attest to her lung capacity) over the doctors and nurses, until I talked to calm her. When I spoke she fell immediately quiet and moved her head and unfocusing eyes toward my voice. She stayed quiet while I spoke and the nurse commented that she knew and responded to my voice (read to your babies in bellies). Homegirl (Anna, not the nurse) had the keys to the car from there. I knew from that second, and holding her looking out our hospital room window that night as she slept that there was nothing cooler than being a dad. I've thought so countless times since."

All the moments and milestones since and my mind hangs on that moment the longest. A decade moment. A lifetime moment.

I have said before that I have enjoyed every year of our girls' lives more than the previous year, just watching them grow and learn and seeing who they become. That's true still. But your child hitting double digits gives you pause. Fuck "gives" you, it MAKES you pause.

My life over the last decade has been co-defined. Many of my greatest moments are moments Anna made--things she said or did or thought or spoke.

I have cried more, been more emotional over the last decade. Many of the tears are the good kind, but that depth of experience, of experience shared with a soul/person in your care, growing and changing and looking to me/us for opinion, answers, solace, laughter. Perhaps I neglected to read the "free tear duct fill-up with birth of baby" sign.

Over the last decade, I have watched more kids movies than I ever thought possible. I have learned the names of toys and books and TV characters because, well, that's how I roll.

Over the last decade, I have seen myself, outside myself. Anna is a morning person, like me (Ava prefers sleep, like Robin). Anna and I share some of the same hang-ups, same tendencies, same inclinations. I'm not sure what to say about recognizing yourself in another, but it is an experience without parallel.

Over the last decade, I have gained a respect, admiration and sense of wonder about my father, my parents, and how the hell they raised and dealt with us (me, really, my sister was much easier) and seemed to always be in control. We, as parents, certainly do not.

I think it's fair to call the last ten years, the decade of Anna in our house and our lives. Over that time, she has given me a new identity, a new responsibility, a new perspective and a new name: Dad. I think it is my favorite of my names.

Happy 10th birthday, Anna! Can't wait to see where you/we go next.

Lunch break

The window is too public for a voyeur. The seat in the coffee shop requires you to be a part of the scene, not apart from. Would never do. That's okay, I'm not into voyeurism.

Plain sight hiding places. Flannel shirt, jeans, boots or running shoes--coffee shop camouflage. In view, but unnoticed. An espresso-sipping notebook scribbler, like the rest. Easier to find than cream.

Used to be, I stopped in here before work or at lunch. Knew most of the people. Worked in town and was dailed in to what was going on. Now my work world is across the bridge, inside the beltway. When I look at downtown Easton, I can't see it as a place where I can work. Where I've grown up, where I live, where I will live, but not as a place where I can find a job doing what I do.

The rain outside isn't cold. But makes inside the better option, makes you have to want to go out. The coffee shop is comfortable, but feels almost sterile. Nothing of note. It's also not why I am downtown. Pull up hood, pick up coffee, jet. Rain letting up. Walk down Goldsborough.

I hear the soundtrack for Frogger, waiting for cars to go by, hop through the opening, up the sidewalk, around the corner.

I left Easton to make a living. We stay in Easton to live. The last time I hit the coffee shop was Waterfowl Festival weekend. Nine-year-old daughter Anna and I were downtown to hear Chester River Runoff. It was hands-in-pockets cold. No idea how you pluck a banjo with cold hands. Between sets, Anna and I grabbed hot chocolate and coffee. The band was there, too.

This time Anna is the band. 4th and 5th grade chorus. Christmas concert at the Festival of Trees at the Tidewater Inn. As I get to the Tidewater, her class is is stretched around the building like Christmas garland, filing their way in. I see her before she sees me; a friend points me out to her, and at nine years old it's still cool to acknowledge me.

As we all go in, Easton High School's chorus is performing. We had friends who were in Mr. Thomas's chorus. I flash-forward in my head and wonder if Anna will still be singing when she gets to high school. I knock that shit off, because picturing our girls growing up too quickly wrecks me and dudes don't ask for tissues at Christmas concerts.

The Easton Elementary chorus goes on. There is a full slew of kids, and Anna is in about the middle. We find each other and she smiles every time I hold up the camera. Flashes glances over while singing. They sing "Winter Wonderland," which is a favorite of mine.

They finish to applause and file off stage. I head out, back to the rain, but Anna catches me from behind, to say thanks for coming and see you after school. These life moments keep coming: concerts, field hockey games, field trips, award ceremonies. As kids, we had our first dances in the same room at the Tidewater. Easton reaches back across generations of my family, and reaches forward.

Writing, life

Anna ditched her scooter and followed on foot. "Not riding your scooter?" "I'm the writer, dad," she flashed her notebook and pen.

She does this frequently. She writes articles, newspaper articles--extended questions, descriptions, observations--some she gives to me, some she keeps.

This is a big deal in daddy-daughter relations. I never pretended to be an accountant, per my father, growing up. There is something about writing, being a writer, that holds sway for her. For Christmas she wants a pocket notebook and a camera.

She knows I am a writer. That I do it for a job. But she also knows that I carry a notebook in my pocket wherever I go and get up early to read and write, and that that is something beyond a job.

If I won the lottery, I'd write more than I do now. I'd flush out that big project that is waiting, buried, that I haven't made the time or effort to unearth. The statement. Testament.

Watching Pearl Jam 20, reading Roberto Bolano and Franz Wright, and thinking about legacy, that's when I struggle that I haven't unearthed it. Haven't found it and committed. That I need to start digging deep and make the time.

But I look at our girls, Robin, our life. I look at Anna and her eyes as she makes her thoughts words. And I know commitment

Mosaic vs. map

It's like a map, the story. If I take out the narrative thread, I will probably lose myself. You will probably get lost at sea--how else would you find your way? The story is the GPS, it gives you directions for which way to go.

And yet, we don't work by story alone. We improvise, intuit, fly by impressions. We don't have to understand something to like it.

Impressionist paintings make shitty road maps. You aren't likely to arrive at your destination. You are getting the feeling, the take of the artist. There are writers or musicians who do likewise. They string together impressions, ending up with a mosaic, not a map. Fragments that don't equal a story, but reveal the intersection of reality and one particular soul. And if it works, our soul recognizes both the artist, the impression, and itself--our soul regarding another and itself.

Our daughter's impression of cool. Jeff Tweedy as musician. Joe Flacco or Hines Ward as football player. Ryan Zimmerman as baseball player. Living on a farm, with her friend and collecting eggs from their chickens to eat, as adulthood, self-sustaining. Working at a bank, because that's where money is. That's their plan for when they turn 18.

Childhood seems to oscillate between impressions, the mosaic, and coherent narrative, the map. Come to think of it, so does adulthood.

Source materials

I'm always digging for source materials. The foundation that holds someone or something up, or the clothespins that hang them/it on a line.

If a writer, musician, artist or athlete I am a fan of sheds light on inspirational source materials, I'm taking that walk. If it resonates, I'm starting the dig. So when I read that Jeff Tweedy pulled some fire from William Gass's "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," I reached onto my bookshelf to dip back into a book I hadn't picked up in a while (Gass's "On Being Blue" occupies one of the strangest, but most coveted places on my bookshelf)

And when poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi cited Robert Pogue Harrison's "Forests," and then followed up by warning me, "it's so good it will melt your brain," well, I've gotta take that chance. That's the tangential nature of my reading, writing, music, etc. I'm frequently following a thread.

For a few years now, Wilco has been one of those source materials, artistically speaking, for me. A band I can't get enough of. And as mentioned last week, our nine-year-old daughter and I went to see them this past Sunday.

A no-duh-cartoon-brick-to-the-side-of-the-head realization is that, for me, the building blocks of my source materials are first-hand experience, more than books or music. And our girls are some of the source of the source materials. So here is a concert from a main band, with oldest daughter for her first concert. When you cross the streams of that many sources, what you have is a life moment. And it was. And Wilco delivered. And Anna and I both ate it up and levitated at the same time.

So for the moment, I'm soaking in and re-sorting the source materials. Listening to Wilco, reading Forests and Gass, and laughing and remembering with Anna.

Wilco, Little Boy Blue & the Man in the Moon

I've said recently and frequently that the two bands I'd most dig seeing live are Wilco and The Black Keys. I've been in a listening frenzy. And then I go and win tickets to Wilco this Sunday through a WRNR 103.1 Twitter contest. Color me stoked in vibrant, groovy colors.

It's a Sunday evening concert and Robin bows out, so I am roledexing my friends for big Wilco fans. Meanwhile the band played on Letterman on Wednesday night and I am watching the performance Thursday morning. Anna, our nine-year-old is next to me watching and I mention to her that I am going to see these guys on Sunday.

"Can I go, dad? Please, please, please???"

SOLD! Instantly I hear Cat Stevens singing, "The cat's in the cradle with the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon...," and think about five to seven years when she won't want anything to do with dad at a concert, unless it's transportation. I think about how she digs the music I listen to, always asking to hear Black Keys, going to Pre-K asking for The Raconteurs and Jack Johnson.

She wants to go to a concert, with dad, and it doesn't involve sitting through Britney Spears or Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. Color me amped, in a cool daughter way, who will get to hear real music performed live, by an awesome, challenging band. I have said before, there is hope for her musical soul. And to boot, we get to go up a little early for a private performance by the band, for WRNR contest winners.

So Sunday will be a time to see a great concert; a time to spend daddy-daughter time; a time to build the kind of memory, that if you don't start early, will likely go the direction of little boy blue and the man in the moon.

Color me a heavy metal drummer.

At Chick Fil-A

We've got Chick Fil-A all to ourselves, Anna and Ava barefoot in the play place, Latin jazz strumming over the speakers and the girls are choreographing their dance moves in step, one then the other copies.

I just got off the phone with my dad, called to wish him a happy birthday, which is today, and we talk about the Ravens, because it's fresh and that's what we do.

A steady rain outside, with a hint of ice or snow to come. It's nasty, but the coffee is solid and I'm kicked back with Terrance Hayes's Lighthead, but mostly watching the girls.

Thinking about birthdays and fathers and kids--Anna's birthday is Monday and Ava's is less than two weeks away.

Generations of consciousness and smiles. The creativity the girls are turning loose in the play place matches the flamenco finger picking of the guitar.

Ava comes out and asks to sit on my lap to finish her yogurt. Anna walks out reciting, "six salamanders, eight chocolate chip cookies, 11 trees..."

I think about the girls and my dad and being a dad and my heart knows, in this moment, I could not love any more than I do.

Sunday Afternoon

Sitting on the back deck, Mother's Day, heavy wind has dislodged and claimed three baby birds, rolling fodder for our Golden Retriever.

Anna wanders the back yard clipping random branches, compiling a nest of sorts of her own. She's barefoot in cold grass with kinetic hair reflecting a dancing mind in motion. She skips by, reads what I am writing, smiles, and is off.

The wind is central, primary, pervasive. Last night it was a loud lullaby laughing through open windows. Today it flung sailboats along the river and applauded our sea glass hunt along the beach.

Sometimes when time presents itself, I'm not sure whether to read, to write or just be still.

Shared Spring

A found robin egg. A leaf plucked from a branch they couldn't reach last year. A proud smile riding a bike on two wheels.

Avid explorers of the mundane, the mud--the incredible when examined through the lens of eight and five. Every day discovers a new skill and invents a new game.

Top of the lung screaming and laughing, running full-tilt in the breeze, bare feet on spring grass, newly cut. The girls orbit around us in impromptu firefly shapes, lighting parts of the yard as they go by.

These are things that bind our childhoods, mine and the girls'. A spring day in Oxford for me was in a marsh, building trails and forts til sundown. Or a bike ride to Doc's Quick Shop or Bringmans or the park. Skipping pieces of oyster shells on the Tred Avon.

It's funny being now the one who cuts the grass and warns for cars, while still remembering clearly my own Huffy, Big Wheel, tree climbing rumpus days.

Raising kids where I grew up, I think about them smelling the same smells, shaded by the same trees, ankle deep in the same water, but all different for how they see it and all new now, because it is.

The girls run over yelling a name I've only had for a few years, hands cupped around a cracked blue robin's egg and I cut the mower off to listen to their story and what it is and what they'll do with it and I know, in that moment, why I am alive.

Saturday Morning

Present

I can see out two windows from my favorite seat in the house,
the corner of a room we put laminate flooring in,
on the corner of a couch with a reading light.

It is generally dark, between 4:30 and 6am, winter, and
there is steam rising off a cup of coffee in one hand
with a book in the other. I'm the only one up and there is
a short stack of books on a makeshift bench of a coffee table.

The books determine the view out the windows. They propel
the mind, the couch, the house, often times so much that
I have to put them down, and the coffee,
and pick up a notebook and pen and scribble
thoughts that I didn't have yesterday or this morning
when I woke up and that I won't have tomorrow
or any other time but right now.

Past

This morning it is light out. Anna is up with me, bouncing back
and forth between writing or working in her reading practice books
and creating a tyrannical funhouse world for the cats.

"When did Pop die?" she asks, remembering my grandfather
who died a couple years ago.

Her memory of him is as an old man with a great heart and laugh
who couldn't see or hear or walk well.

My memories of him span thirty-some years--as chauffeur,
as recovered alcoholic, as lover of the Baltimore Colts and
the Evening Sun paper and Robert Service poetry.

I remember him with me on the ice of Town Creek in Oxford,
with most of the town after a winter storm from the late 1970s.
It's a view of Town Creek I'll hold as long as my memory allows,
one of my favorites, though I've only seen it that way once
and not again since. He helped make that memory for me.

Thirty-some years of memories I have of Pop. And yet
he lived to be ninety. My time with him was a fraction of his life lived.
A part of my life that I haven't even come to yet.

Anna has turned the TV on and asked for a drink.
She has moved on with her morning.
Mine is still with Pop.

Photo by David Stevens, taken at our wedding, June, 1999, Holy Trinity Church in Oxford, Md.

First Questions

The car locked in a parking garage, walking now, the sidewalk cracks tick by under the stroller. The grown up minds are focused on the mall.

"Why did God make us?" Anna pulls from the air or her heart
since there is no graffiti anywhere to that effect. She is five.

"You mean like us--you, me, mama and Ava? Or us like people
and the world?"

It is important to understand the question.

"You know why I think?" She offers up.

"Why Anna?"

"I think God made us because he was lonely."