two years.

The house was quiet after mommy left for work and you were asleep. The upstairs hallway was cool and bright from the morning sun. I opened your door subtly as I usually do in the morning when I think you may still be sleeping. Though the doorknob sticks and squeaks as it turns back. You do not wake, still. You have always been a good sleeper.

You were on your left side. You’ve outgrown your brown blanket, the one that you’ve grown attached to since you first came home with us. The blanket you refer to as “bankit.” You’ll ask for it once again when I lift you from your bed to change you. I’ll place it on my shoulder for you to lay your head on for a moment before I’ll put it back into your bed.

As you’ve grown, I’ve started to see a lot of your mother in your face and expression. The way you roll your eyes, your patent laugh, your precocious, unassuming determination. I see her in the way you say “no.” I feel her hand in yours as we walk down the stairs together.

It’s in the few times that I observe you sleeping that I see part of me in you. I see it in how you sleep, sprawled out with your feet out from underneath the blankets. Your right arm up and left arm back. Even your sleeping scent is familiar to me.

I remember the first time I met you; you were in that hospital room all by yourself. You had those gadgets linked up to you, beeping screens monitoring your unique anatomy. God gave you a heart like no other is what I used to tell you when you were still inside mommy. It was a bright sunny day like today. The window in the room allowed a lot of light into the room. You lay on the bed, your name written out in colored markers above you, new and hallucinatory. I approached your bed station with a sense of fear. I remember wishing mommy was able to meet you too with me right now. I still wish for that sometimes when I think back on those first few days of you.

I held your tiny hand knowing that that would be the only time I would see you as you first were. I remember touching your chest and head. Your tiny fingers so incredibly tiny around my finger. Your sleepy breathing like feathery whispers. Your head conical. Is this my son? I remember the ultimate, simultaneous rush of disbelief and certainty. That you were here with me now, in plain view. After months of anxious deliberation and trepidation you were here. All I wanted was to hold you and bring you to mommy. How amazing it was to have you here with us finally.

You turn two today. You know now how to say two when I ask you your age. The bunny ears raised from your fingers, you exclaim toooo! as I prepare your breakfast. I don’t know how we got here so quickly when in many ways, I think we are still sitting there with you in that hospital. Waiting for the news you will be released and joined with us. You are and I remember this now. Yes, Sullivan, that’s right. Two.

the deceptive routine.

There are these times now, marked by deceptive routine in the morning with you that I become a machine of myself. Your repetitive requests for omelet, blanket, bubbles, fork, hug all siphon down into my eroded ear canals. They bounce around in there and I register the mispronunciations, yelps and exclamatory successes into polyphonic syntax. My eyes dull, coffee, coffee, butter, eggs, come here, Sullivan. Let’s not get upset. There you go.

This morning when you yelled and screamed and rubbed your eyes and would not come down the stairs, I was running late and your hair was messed in its brilliant sun white blur. I held your hand and walked with you and used my low gentle voice which I hope every moment is gentle more than it is demand. But I often fail and mornings seem like the perfect time for both of us to fail in getting into our days.

I do not like the morning when it is an early exit of itself. Morning should be stop time before we rush out. That’s the struggle you and I feel, I think. We need that pause. I like to think back even to just 20 months ago when you were still small and able to fall asleep on me. Those times are over and gone. I hope one day they return in a way that we both remember and recall to one another. The top of your head still smells the same.

But I am wiping your face now and your snot is greenish yellow, but mostly clear. I cannot wait for those tubes that they say, will clear your ears right up. Never-ending ear infections, a long winter, when spring I thought, would carry them away. But here I am, down before your face. You are still small enough for this and I cannot forget that. Bended down, we look at one another and I ask you if you need a hug. You nod. Your eyes are glassy, intense blue. You really are an eclectic mix of tenderness and temper.

scotland, backpacks, beer

Last night, Sarah and I dropped the boy off at the beloved in-laws for a few hours and got out for some outstanding wings and great beer. We were celebrating Sarah's new teaching position at a much better school in Philadelphia this upcoming fall.

The night marked back-to-back nights of my love affair with Belhaven Wee Heavy Ale. It has easily climbed up into my top five favorite beers. It has so many great qualities: malty, earthy, this really amazing clean fruit/caramel taste without bitterness or bite. A seriously complex beer without being uptight. You could easily drink it during any time of the year and some element of it would fit that season.

I first was introduced to Belhaven beer when I visited Scotland in 2002 with my buddy, Jesse. Many of my friends are well-acquainted with my obsession with my Scottish heritage and my dream to one day backpack through the Highlands. I love the idea of stopping through local towns, stopping into local pubs and exploring all there is in northern Scotland.

And of course, drinking more Belhaven.

burning the serious.

I would really like to commit myself to this blog. And I know right then and there, when I admit this, I have broken one of the unspoken rules of blogging. You know, the rule that you should never talk about how much you wish you wrote more or did more with your blog, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I am at my office right now and my brain feels stuck. I need some inspiration and time away from a routine that has really made me feel a lot older, but not necessarily wiser. I feel stupider actually. I'm not reading much at all, except some Neruda every now and then or maybe the latest Esquire. My wife and I rarely watch movies anymore with our work schedules and parenting. When I do have some time to myself, I usually become preoccupied with things that need to be done on the house or on our finances.

It hurts my brain to even type this right now.

All I know is that I/we really need an adventure and some good company. Some time to just step back, knock back something cold and watch the sun go down. Ah yes, the old cliché monster rises over me and bites my head off yet once again.

But it's true. Of course it is. That's the cliché monster. Doing his best to make you feel stupid for admitting that one thing and in that moment of admission, bores you to death. Double boredom.

So if there is anyone out there that does read this, give me your best recommendations for summer fun. Anything. Books, music, beer, locations, activities, et cetera. Whatever it is you would prescribe for me. Give it to me!

remembering the now.

There is promise in tiny things. Little buckets filled with jealous memories, scattered links to this thing you had steadied and secure before you stepped foot onto the cataclysmic. There is danger in comparing seasons or voyages; each one is whole unto itself. The comparing is the problem. Really, the deepest trouble is trying to make one more seismic than the other.

When I step back, as I am right now and finally discover these lost pockets of photos of you and I and then you and I and our beautiful boy, I wonder what in the world I have missed and simultaneously experienced. Time is not a wheel or even a book. It is a big awful explosion of simultaneous beginnings and endings bound by distance and arrival. We are thrown and lost in the belly of some kind of fleeting, hungered giant. He wants to eat me whole but also offers me the possibility to join him on his back. I could look out and see my own life pass me by and while realizing this in lucky seconds, make the mistake to think I can snip the wings and let this thing stop in front of me.

I cannot. I look through these seconds and hours and years in these really amazing photos collected that I have not looked on. They have been stuck inside a hard drive.

I look now and see the past two years and see something I forgot about even though really, two years is nothing novel or even all that interesting on the surface. But there can be no judgment in time. How different my face looks. Softer and mild. My eyes seems to be thinner, my jaw like a blotted line beneath my cheeks. I am not old. But I know my youth is much younger than I remember it. I see you now in this picture, stuck in that episode between chest openings. I see my bride pass unto bride unto companion unto friend and onward in masterful beauty.

I like to think of God as the circuit and the sea. A passing scent of salt and peach. Like this sweetness every human knows and discovers in the silent time when we look at each other across drink, bread, awkward glance. There's no secret with the mystic tolerance of our eyes. How corny I sound even to myself to write this now. I guess that's the joke on me.

I'm stuck on this thing of passing. I remember you everyday I come home and every morning that I leave. What is left of life but remembrance? I do not think living is anything but the remembrance of now and the forever. It is hard to swallow the truth that that is all.

an outlet.

I don't utilize this blog like I should. But here is something I wrote yesterday in response to Obama's Inauguration:

I can't say this on Facebook, cause well, it just wouldn't go over so well. Nor would it really serve much of a purpose other than to satiate a need for something that cannot be satiated, that is the need to just get under people's skin and maybe get people to think I am more crazy than I really am.

What annoys me most about today is the incredulous, knee jerk reaction from many "statuses" of my friends/acquaintances from past seasons of life, within the forum of Facebook. I am tempted beyond any temptation (and have succumbed on several occasions) to respond to the inanity of their thoughts and the banality of spiteful rhetoric in their shallow reflections on the Inauguration of someone that represents something that no one has the right to judge or place some kind of superficially, candy-appled, kindergarten-wassled response to such a momentous occasion.

Let's get something straight: Hope is not synonymous with messianic arrival. Because people have embraced the man, Barack Obama in a way like none other in my lifetime does not deem that people look to him as savior. We look to him as a figure and symbol of possibility; as a relief in many ways from the thing we despise of ourselves and what we represent in a world that is complicated and fucked up (sorry bad language, I'll regret this later). We as a collective of individuals admire the man for the differences he embraces and represents to a world that in so many ways today, seemingly tries to simplify and detain.

A man or woman, a child or grandparent has the right and privilege to see someone in their lifetime that inspires change for good in their earthly citizenship. I am thirty-one, young I know, and feel privileged to see Barack Obama enter into office. But more than this is the knowledge that he represents something that goes far beyond me and my lifetime and the lifetimes of many others that have lived and endured before my lifetime.

I have little historical perspective on what today really means. And yet, on the same hand, I like many others, have a full presence of mind to feel and understand the barriers and ageless prejudices that this new president represents to countless generations. Moreover, I have enough to know in my bones that it feels pretty awesome. Outside of political dialectics, how on earth can anyone not feel joyful today? It is something that is rarely witnessed.

If anything, I am content to know that our country has a clean slate with foreign relations. We have the opportunity, again the privilege to change relationships, to better relationships with others that think differently or alternately than us. And that is something that I value more than anything: the ability to live and breathe and enjoy the benefits of persons that I can call brothers and sisters that speak differently, dress differently, eat and pray differently than me. That is what it means to me to be happy and to know the enjoyment of creation and difference.

I am a skeptic. Even a skeptic of my very own deepest, most intuitive thoughts. But there is nothing in me that cannot appreciate this day. To not appreciate it, to question it, to bring in this unpalatable comparison of people worshiping a new messiah is denigrating not only to true historical weight of this moment, but is a shameful representation of faith.

spaced-out.

Reading this over my lunch today gave my imagination a spacey ride. What if what we were seeing light years beyond was not another solar system, but the ghost of our own? Would it be possible to witness the footprints of our own system through light-year segmented space? As if our perspective were centered on 6 o'clock and we were able now to look back at 12 o'clock unaware initially that we were looking at ourselves millions/billions/trillions of years ago?

Anyway, the idea is not at all that original. But it is still fun to play around with. At least on a dull, uninspired Monday morning it is/was.