First Words

He's a kid with problems.

Ewan didn't come out that way.  He was the 8 pound 10 ounce picture of health and vigor.  The kid suckled with exuberance and put on exactly three pounds and six ounces before his body quit figuring out what to do with mother's milk.  For five months his insides failed to pull from my milk whatever it needed to add to his flesh.

Nothing.

Skinny.

Lethargic.

Crying.

And then 10 ounces disappeared.  Poof.  The boy was beginning to vanish and the doctors began to materialize in concerned haste.

They say when a baby is starving - without using the word starving - that the brain quits doing anything but surviving.  So, while his sweet cousin, baby Ava was figuring out how to sit up, Ewan was laying quietly on his back working with all his might just to 'be.'  When cousin Davy was learning to respond to his parents singing "Popcorn Popping", Ewan was burning whatever calories there were to keep his insides functioning.  When his new little friend Penny was crawling throughout our house begging to climb up our stairs Ewan was lying on his stomach pulling with all his might to scoot himself forward just a few inches.

The kid is late to the party.

But it's ok.  He's had some "developmental delays" in gross and fine motor skills as well as speech.  He is now receiving free, in-home therapy for both.  And while one might think, how could a 14-month-old possibly need speech therapy, I have been amazed what kinds of things I can do to help develop communication.

Despite all this, Ewan loves life. He is happy.  There is nothing he likes more than going outside to feel the earth around him.

Which is where his first words came from.
We developed a routine that went like this:
cry,
hold,
console,
go outside (day or night),
point at everything and say "Oh Wow."

Oh Wow.

This is the first thing he has to say about the world he lives in. His first words.

Bird - oh wow!  Wind in the leaves - oh wow!  Baby kitten on our porch - oh wow!  Squirrels scrambling up the tree - oh wow!  Lights that turn on and off - oh wow!

He's right.  There is a whole lot of 'Oh Wow' everywhere I look.  I see it so often that it loses its wow-ness in my lack of perspective.

Oh to live life in awe.

There is elegance in my chaos.  I can stretch my pointer finger out like Ewan does and touch beauty.  Oh Wow.  Not just in the goodness of my life and family.  It is in everything.  I don't know anything about String Theory Physics, but I think it merits my respect.  The recipe of a Virginia forest.  The art of collecting a string of characters together on a  page until your eyes see them as the words your mouth speaks.  To read.  To speak.  To put your fingertips on the keys of a piano and dance.  To extract from a swab of my cheek the deoxyribonucleic code that is the essence of me.  Oh Wow.

Some people do great things because they know how to touch the oh-wow-ness of life.

I read recently that while Steve Jobs was battling through the very end of this life his last words were "Oh wow."  A requiem true to the zeitgeist of his Jobs-onian existence.  No demi-god, but a man who sought elegance, and lived in the realization of ideas.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  From womb to grave it is 'oh wow.'

Someone Who Needs Somewhere

". . . . a song for
        someone who needs somewhere
        to long for . . . ."

If there were ever a light cast across a piece of earth more beautiful than the one on this particular June evening in a little corner of New York state, I have never seen it.

This light came with restoration to our weary souls.
Did we leave our friends without proper goodbyes?
Did we drop tears onto the skinny face of a sick baby?
Did we feel homeless before we ever left home?
Did we drive 2000 miles?

We could answer "yes" honestly, but the whole truth of it would be lost somewhere in the bleakness of the question.

We have friends, we have a baby, we have a home, we are together!
Yes, these patch up the spaces that felt empty in the question.

As lake Ontario laps soothingly at our feet and the sun throws warm, low light across our faces we begin to be happy.

We trust,

In all of it, I see two things.

I see where my Dad is not.  He is not sitting on the bench next to my Mom, with a book in his hand, or a laptop on his lap, or his hand resting softly at the nape of her neck.

I see children who build.  I think Jonah told me they were elves making a shelter because he became ill.     Nowhere to live?  Nowhere to rest when your body is spent?  They pull from the unmade space as we do in time of need.  Here a stone, there a stick, a piece of driftwood drug from the water.  All buttressed against a small rise of earth.  The whole thing a bulwark of youthful ingenuity that protects against element and distress.

It is the blueprint to the weeks ahead.

Fallingwater

You are a place of old age, a place of cracking cement and rusted metal, old glass and old ideas.  You are a place to find metal cups in metal cabinets, orange polyester party goers, and coral lipstick.  

You are Fallingwater.

Which means, really, you are a place fresh and vibrant, ahead of your time.  You are straight out of the 1950's before there were 50's.  Born in 1936, when the world was still building boxes, Mr. Wright was building beauty, and you are IT.  

This was an unplanned pilgrimage.  Matt and I were in Pennsylvania for a CES Couples Conference  staying at a Mennonite camp retreat that turned out to be just 30 minutes from Fallingwater.  I insisted. Matt obliged. 

We pulled into the car park and stopped for just a moment before getting out of the silver Chevrolet rental.  

"I don't know that you understand just how big a deal this is for me." I said to Matt.

"How come," he asked?

"It's like doing something vicariously for my Dad that he never got to do for himself."

Matt obliged and then he engaged our tour guide so intensely that she asked him if he was an architect.  Matt is the master of questions . . . and observation.  Despite pressing our guide to the very fringes of her allotted minutes in each room she still failed to mention to us that we could be part of the "in-depth tour group" starting shortly after ours.  Matt's interest was heightened such that they should have offered and "in-depth-after-hours tour" just for the two of us.

My Dad made wood do the bidding of his hands for a living until his hands betrayed him and then he taught high school kids how to do those things.  It wasn't the "perfection of the life" he might have hoped for, but it provided for his family.  In my early years - many of them - like the years from birth to about eight years old, my Dad was a student of the Industrial arts as well as anything else that caught his fancy.  Which was everything.  Which made graduation a thing always on the distant horizon.  

Somewhere in those years my Dad studied architecture.  If you study architecture you are introduced to a fellow called Frank Lloyd Wright.  Mr. Wright is more than an architect, but I do not know his words or work well enough to render any interpretation of what he is.  

I will let him speak for himself:

A philosophy is deduced from nature, and if according as the philosophy is parallel to the truths and processes of nature, it endures.  Without philosophy there is no understanding of anything.  Man is a phase of nature.  And only as he is related to nature does he matter, is he of any account whatever above the dust.

He is well known for works such as Fallingwater, The Robie House, Taliesen West, and most notably, The Guggenheim Museum in New York City.   I knew these words as a very young girl.  My young mind was the keeper of images so unique they could vary in a hundred ways and every one of them be a Frank Lloyd Wright signature, as recognizable as a Coca Cola logo.  The lines and circles of his leaded, stained-glass windows.  

You have seen them.

They might bring to mind words like "art deco" or "arts and crafts".  While not a student of architecture myself I am pretty sure Wright can be found somewhere in the midst of those words, or perhaps those words can be found somewhere in the midst of Mr. Wright.  At any rate, there is some correlation.

I tried to  walk through Fallingwater with my father's eyes.  I tried to invite him into my fingertips to say "I have touched it.  This cantilevered thing of genius." I tried to give his ears the sound of falling water that can be heard from every part of the house as a river flows beneath it and down through Pennsylvania woods.  I took one leaf from one rhododendron that fills the forest, to put in my journal and write - Here is a living thing from a living memory that my father gave to me.

You are Fallingwater.

I know your name from my Father's tongue and your beauty from my own eyes.

Keeping Vigil

You have a memory.

You were in a place.

Getting ready for work, eating breakfast, driving. You were watching the Today Show, listening to NPR, sitting in class. You were in an airport, on a plane. You were in the office, you were sending your kids to school.

And then, in the quotidian momentum of a day where the sun was pushing you forward into the familiar steps of a Tuesday morning, you stood still.

Something was happening that began to wrap its cold grip around your lungs until you felt the absence of your breath and the absence of your hallowed American security. Something had made a hole in our impregnable United States.

You own your memory of that moment. There are many millions of them; that moment when we learned of the planes that were plowing through the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, into the soil of Pennsylvania. A surreal pause in the spinning of things.

This morning, on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 I am listening to the memorial service at Ground Zero in New York City. For the past two hours they have read the names of those who died that morning. Each giver of the names is a loved one of the deceased. They read several names then offer a message to their own beloved who was lost.

They are young, those reading the names. Some of them too young.

No, that little boy could not have been alive on that day. He cannot possibly own one of those where-you-were-what-you-were-doing memories that the rest of us have. And indeed he was not.

"Sebastian Gorky," this little boy says into the microphone. "Who I never met because I was in my Mom's belly. I love you, Dad."

So many fatherless.

"Winston Arthur Grant - My father; a good, kind, godly man."

"Geoffrey Hike Hardy - Dad, I'm still learning to cook. I'm working on it. We miss you."

"Joseph Gridlack - His physical presence and bushy mustache are missed. Semper Fi. I hope you dance."

"James Patrick Ladley - Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will stay with me forever."

_____

I remember a blue and empty sky

For so many days

My empty sky

This was our fear - our almost . . .

Such determination to deny that we are changed

But who can look into this empty sky and think

We are not afraid of you

Our lips so close to calling the bluff

Something has changed

Something . . .

______

The Jewish have a tradition whereby they do not leave the body of a dead person to be alone from the time the spirit departs to the time the body is buried in the earth.

September 11th left so many bodies - not even bodies - remnants. Unidentifiable.

The young Jewish women of local Stern College kept vigil with those remnants for seven months while DNA testing was done to identify remains for internment. They were girls, students, who set up rotations such that no possibly Jewish body was left unattended, day or night, for seven months.

All of it; the terror, the death the heroism, the colossal waste, the fear, the empty skies, tells me to keep vigil with the people God grants me as loved ones in this fragile mortality. Day and night, for years on end, I stay close to the living bodies of those that breathe in my house.

What do you remember? What have you learned?

And consider participating in this project.

9/11 Memorial

Even Sick Babies Are Perfect

Not even a year old and our little Ewan is facing the pharmaceutical regimen of an octogenarian.

My Friend Jackie and I both have four children. The last two (mine and hers) were born three days apart from each other. She and I have many times sat in the unladylike manner of two women very large with child and spoken of the charmed and bless-ed nature of our lives thus far. Though neither of us inclined to pessimism, we mutually admitted a growing sense of dread that with each child we add to our family there is a greater likelihood for tragedy - or hardship - illness- death - disease - something that doesn't feel quite so easy as a healthy newborn.

And newborns are SO easy.

Her fourth was born early and spent a fair bit of time in the NICU while she went back and forth from home to hospital trying to mother all of them in her postpartum delirium. Except Jackie doesn't actually suffer from delirium, or anything like unto weakness. She's kind of like the female Chuck Norris - you know, her tears cure cancer. It's just too bad she never cries.

I wanted to help her family while she was jockeying this trial, but as luck would have it my own very pregnant body was in the throws of a painful and protracted prodromal labor. And I am no Chuck Norris so I mostly kept to my bed.

Plus it was Jackie's fault because she fed us barbecued garlic chicken which produced nearly identical results just over two years before. Wives and husbands talked and laughed and ate more garlic than is healthy for intimacy of any kind. Kids played in the sandbox - then badda bing - Jackie's got a baby by morning and my Cecily comes three days later. 26 months later we do the whole routine over again - barbecued garlic chicken, badda bing, Jackie's baby by morning and my Ewan three days later.

Ewan came healthy. Ewan came big - 8 pounds, 10 ounces. He ate fine, he smiled, he slept, he grew, then he stopped growing. For five months Ewan not only gained no weight, but lost 10 ounces. He was diagnosed Failure to Thrive, which in medical mumbo jumbo is really just code for "this child has . . . ?????"

After many tests, including a full endoscopy at Primary Children's Hospital where I saw his pretty, pink insides we got more than a question mark.

"Eosinophilic esophagitis" said the very kind and hurried pediatric gastroenterologist on the phone just a week before we left Salt Lake City for a new home on the east coast. "Pick up this prescription, give it to him once a day, and good luck out there."

I gave it to him. He woke up. Ewan had a latent personality that emerged when suddenly his pain was suppressed and he could EAT. He gained five pounds in two months - which still leaves him soundly off-the-chart-small, but it is better than wasting away to nothing.

We finished Ewan's meds two weeks ago and I was feeling a bit liberated until we saw a new pediatric gastroenterologist last week. He sent me home with a new phrase - "chronic disease", and a slew of new meds that I have been afraid to start because they are so many and so specific in their requirements that I need a detailed chart of when and how much and before or after food and gargling with water to prevent thrush after this one.

Cause every one-year-old can gargle.

I'm pretty hopeless with a medically pedestrian round of antibiotics. Administering medication of any kind with consistency is for sick people - not me. But my son is sick, all 17 pounds of him, all 12 months of him, all the cherubic yumminess of him is chronically sick. I am the only person on this earth that will make sure that his mouth is rinsed out after taking budesonide to avoid an oral yeast infection. I have to do it.

So there it is - my diminishing returns on the ability to produce procreative perfection indefinitely. It is my "tragedy" which, for reasons unknown, seems more frightening at night when every one else has gone to sleep and I am left to eat massive helpings of worry all by myself.

My Mom pointed out to me today how lucky we are it is not something worse.

"It could be so much worse" she said.

"It could be," I agreed.

She was right. There was my little boy smiling at me, trusting that, come bed time, I would rinse his mouth out after the budesonide.

And I did.

Just a Place To Lay My Head

Some times, some of us arrive at a place of desperation. Here is a small Cecily, having arrived at that place. What it looks like to her - that desperation - is a wearisome day trailing along behind so many wearisome days with no bed to call her own.

Along came a flood and washed us all away. It swept a small Cecily right out of her crib, right out of her mother's arms who called her "my baby" and rocked her slow, and laid her down with a Boppy and a blanky giving her over to a night of sweet sleep. This flood lapped relentlessly at the bottom of our stairs and the fringes of our sanity until we turned our backs on our dear old red brick friend we now refer to as "1010," which was as true a home as we have ever known.

And so sleep becomes a borrowed thing - putting children's bodies on the floors of loved one's living rooms, and basements, and extra bedrooms. Sleep becomes a thing of thank you to those who open their doors and say "stay as long as you need, and then stay a little longer, because your kids are lovely and we have missed you, and this is what family does, and even because we need the blessings that come with being able to do this little bit for you."

We are nomadic for a spell. Having packed up the movable bits of our life into every corner of a white Toyota Sienna we go East on I-80 looking over our shoulders at the valley full of all the moments of my babies being born and all the driving back and forth to houses full of people we love, and so many warm afternoons with our toes in the cool water of City Creek, or running the brick path through our very own Narnia between Main and State just above North Temple.

We look north, straining to catch the spires of the Temple that is so off center in the sprawling valley and so dead center in the scheme of it all. From those spires it is just a bit to the west and only a few blocks north where, if you are a person who has climbed to the top of Ensign Peak, you will see the green trees lining the streets that take your eyes to the chapel at 8th North and 12th West wherein lies the heart of Rose Park. Wherein lies my heart. But only for that last fleeting moment before Parley's Canyon closes in around us and we live in Salt Lake City no more.

Oh Cheyenne, Lincoln, Chicago, Cincinnati, I admit, I am content to leave your hotels, your Steak and Shake, your Wendy's, your countless gas stations, your badlands and bad breakfasts. I can drive past your many hundreds of miles of corn stalks and not feel the pine of leaving it all behind. I am still raw from parting with Isaiah's blossoming desert. Every mile I have put between myself and the place "at the top of the mountains" makes rosier the lens through which I see it.

Oh Utah, had I the facility of a welsh tongue, I would christen you the source of my own "hiraeth" that weighs heavy in my bosom, like a tether, like an apron string pulled taught and straining inside me.

But straining as they are, these apron strings loosen well enough when finally, after five days of in and out and drive and drive we tumble out into Palmyra's green humid hills, into my sister's house, into my Mother's arms. Ah, I see, home has traveled with us without my even knowing it.

____

July 24th, no coincidental day of pioneering, brought us all the way to a little clearing along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Buena Vista is an afterthought to the places we call towns and cities. At dusk we arrive with just enough light to drive by the new, red brick house that will buttress all our efforts at familial life. It is our refuge, just as soon as we turn it inside out with enough elbow grease to render it Matthew's "bane" no longer. It needs work . . . and love . . . but mostly work with a stern voice and a hand on the hip.

April 7th was the last night I put all my babies in all their beds and felt like a fit mother for offering them stability and peace. 144 nights of musical beds followed, that mostly consisted of a blanket and a pillow on someone's floor. Tonight they lay their heads on their own pillows and sink softly into new mattresses with crisp, clean linens knowing that whether it is Virginia, New York, cursed Wyoming, or blessed Utah, home is in the bosom of their parent's love, which has a surprisingly pliant circumference.

How Soon We Are Put to the Test

{ Excerpts from my journal }

17 December 2009 Thursday

Mom calls me from the hospital sobbing. "He's irascible and mean. He says I'm stubborn and unforgiving. He's yelling at me and at the nurses. He tried to walk out of the hospital but the nurse finally told him he has wires inside him all the way to his heart that the doctor must remove first, and if he leaves his insurance won't pay for anything."

Way to bully the bully, Nurse Ratched.

Somehow I know that what my Mom needs is for me to take charge and tell her what to do. She and Aubrey do this for me when I call in hysterics.

"Pull it together, Mom," I demand. "You know this is up and down. You know who Dad is and you are dealing with him under the worst circumstances of his life. Don't act like it's falling apart. You get it together and be there for him. Just let it roll off right now, and give him time to make changes."

She calms down, "Okay, okay, you're right."

They have been waiting all day to be discharged from the hospital and my Dad is desperate to see the kids before we leave for Utah.

Chani comes over and we all make a "WELCOME HOME" sign for Dad. We start a fire. Clean the house.

Eventually they get home. Dad is wonderful with the kids. He shaves his beard and mustache first thing. He looks DIFFERENT. I have never seen his hairless face. It is part of his new self he says.

Cecily and Caroline sit in his lap, as they did the night he left for the hospital. We have come full round, bringing countless stitches, weakened bodies, and stronger spirits with us. He is finally at peace, eating the best smoothie of his life and holding grandkids.