Imaginary Conversations That Lead To Real Events

Characters:
Isaac: a freshly turned two-year old with blue eyes. Able to compose short sentences such as "I wanna play DS" and "Bye-bye Daddy". Remarkable sense of balance. Short.

Tiffany: almost three; bright blue eyes. Doesn't speak using contractions. Tall for her age. Likes to play with dolls.

Aaron: concerned twentysomething parent who is busy upstairs. Finds humor in random things.

Setting:
Interior of two-story home; other children and adults milling about on second-story. Isaac and Tiffany are downstairs in living room. Isaac is holding a Nintendo DS; Tiffany a generic baby doll.

Isaac: Hey Fee! I'm playing DS.
Tiffany: I can see that Eye-Zack. You are having fun?
Isaac: Yuh! DS!
Tiffany: Well, I am playing with my doll. She is pretty. I am pretty.
Isaac: Yuh! Momma?
Tiffany: Mommy is upstairs, Eye-Zack. I need a tissue.
Isaac: Yuh! Tissue. Nose! (points to his own nose histrionically)
Tiffany: Yes, Eye-Zack.
Isaac: Bathroom. Yuh? Go.
Tiffany: Okay, Eye-Zack. We can go get tissues.
Isaac: Yuh! DS. Gross. Needs tissue.
Tiffany: So does my baby doll.

Isaac and Tiffany walk together to bathroom. Tiffany half-shuts the door behind her. The bathroom is dark, a soft yellow light filters slightly through the brown shower curtain.

Tiffany: Here you go Eye-Zack (hands Isaac a tissue)
Isaac: Nose. Tissues.
Tiffany: Tissues are cool. I use them on my nose. And so does my doll.
Isaac: I play DS. Nose!

Loud banging noise heard overhead. Aaron comes pounding down the stairs calling for Isaac and Tiffany. Sees the bathroom door half-open.

Aaron: Hey guys, what are you doing in here?

Isaac is polishing the DS with a handful of tissues. Tiffany is rubbing the dolls head with the tissues.

Scene.

A Memory: Earl and Marge

It always fascinates me, the things that jog and stir memories. The catalysts that can launch us into the seemingly insignificant, yet vivid details of our pasts. I was just heating up some leftover orange chicken (with rice)...

The engineers were discussing a recent funeral for one of the workers' great and distant aunt. A woman who lived to 97. But in doing so had outlived the people who knew her. And as a result, the worker had to be a pallbearer at her funeral even though he barely knew her. For some reason that reminded me of Marjorie Blundell. Struck to life an occurent memory: I was a pallbearer at her funeral.

Marge was a tall, thin woman. She wore vintage horn-rimmed glasses and had jet black hair that flared out over her ears. Small eyes; a round, sharp face. I don't remember ever hearing her speak, and if she did, her voice was too soft, too frail and unsure to leave an impact. Marge just had an air of lightness and simpleness about her. She could've walk on top of a snow drift, if the wind didn't carry her over it.

Then there was her husband Earl. The church's janitor. A grumbling curmudgeon with a large face, weighed with jowls, had heavy, hunched shoulders, the type of walk that made you wonder how he got anywhere before the day expired. Earl mumbled, seemed always to be talking to himself about something. He was a simple man as well, a simple, short man with giant hands and a massive heart. He was could've been much younger than he seemed. But at the same time, the aspects of devotion and loyalty he showed to Marge and the church couldn't have been learned in a hundred lifetimes. I knew that then and I know it now.

I remember my dad telling me to always respect Earl. To help him carry bags of clothes to the back. To tear down tables and put them back up myself if I wanted to use the gym; or the gym needed to be set-up for church functions I needed to do it for Earl. And anytime I could help Earl, I needed to help Earl. Even though his temperament scared me as a teenager.

And from that memory came a haunting piece of Scripture. A verse my father told me Earl expressed to him when asked why he continued to work well past retirement. A verse that was his life's verse. One that made him happy and summed everything up about Earl. And I remembered that verse.

My heart, for the rest of the day, was reheated by those memories of Earl and Marjorie.

On A Year: March 12, 2008 - March 12, 2009

Isaac woke up this morning a little early and very much cold. Seems he and his cousin messed with the thermostat the previous day, unbeknownst to all of us, resetting the entire schedule. Resetting it to 60 degrees. Not to mention his abject disapproval of socks on his feet while sleeping, he was very cold this morning, in the hour before dawn. So he laid in bed under the blankets with us. Warming to the day. Listening to us sleepily tell him Happy Birthday. 

When he got up he noticed decorations, multi-colored streamers, dangling from his door. Then more cloaking the back of his highchair. He flicked at them. Giggled. Then he noticed a giant Happy Birthday banner above the table to the right. He pointed to it and smiled and called out for Momma. He smiled real big and pointed to it. Real big. Today was going to be something a little different. 

I'm not sure it ever set in for him. Even though he peeled away wrapping paper on present after present. I'm not sure it dawned on him when we sang to him and convinced him to blow out his birthday cake. Not like it dawns on the Mrs and me. Our son is Two Years Old. 

Last year I penned lines about the abundance of love Isaac had instilled in us. How something very big had happened and transpired and transposed it's greatness so firmly into our lives that it had stumbled back into the past and was pouring out into the future. My point was to describe the magnitude of it. The infiniteness of it.  Another year has just exponentially increased infinity for us. 

But the grandeur of that love is felt most deeply in the tiny, yet infinite space we have traversed between 1 and 2.  It's in the little things, the infinitesimals, that I have loved Isaac most this past year. Tickling sessions. Simple words. Running. Jumping. Sentences. Dancing to songs (even if it is All The Single Ladies! (and Ray LaMontagne!)). Reading books. Animal sounds. Brushing his teeth. Riding bikes. The first year was about the largeness of it all. This year was about the glorious details emerging.

Tonight, weary and up way past bed time, I rocked him to sleep. He puts his head into the crook between arm and shoulder, and arches his neck just a little. His body relaxes and collapses. But his eyes are open in the darkness. And he is looking at me as his day fades under heavy eyelids. I sing to him. In one of those little moments. I sing to him Happy Birthday. And I ask if he wants me to sing it again. "Yeah." So I sing it again. Quietly into his ear as his eyes disappear. 

I put him in bed. 

His bare feet creeping out from under the blanket. 

Happy Birthday Isaac.

How I love you.

On Reading The Bible

For around a month now I've been reading the Bible. I've tried in the past. Never getting much past Exodus, at times hardly through Genesis. The Bible is a difficult book to read. An anthology of short stories, epics, poems, history, cultural hieroglyphs like Leviticus. It's hardly cohesive in style; wildly, powerfully cohesive in theme. I've tried, in the past, to read the Bible from a certain vantage point. From a theological perspective. A devotional perspective. An historical perspective. This time around, it occurred to me to read it as a book, from a literary perspective if you will. Even picking up a literary approach to the Bible version(which, for the most part, I've abandoned for the convinence of my iPhone's multiple versions and ease-of-read on-the-go. I only revert to the actual book form at home).

This all seems simple and rather obvious. After all, it's the Greatest Story Ever Told. But it's not an easy read. It's an anthology and who reads anthologies of Mr. Norton all the way through? The final four books of the Torah alone can trip you up. Lure one into negligence and absolute boredom. Make one rethink or all together abandon the desire to read the Bible. But get through it. Skip parts if you have to (especially since it repeats soooooooften). And once you are through it -- into the promised land of stories-- you will never want to put it down.

This gets me to why I've become more engaged by the iPhone version. Because I can read it anywhere at anytime. I can, effectively, never put the book down. And sure, with a cup of coffee and a dark, cool spring evening, I will flip through the actual book form. But, for the most part, the bulk of my Bible reading has occured on my phone.

Anyway. I love Genesis. Parts of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The final four you should read because Moses is a fascinating character. Truly fascinating. I was abjectly depressed when I found out Moses couldn't get into the Promised Land -- even though I already knew he didn't. And knew why he didn't. I mean. It's just sad. Just really, really sad. Joshua is enjoyable and rewarding -- hey, we're finally here!. Judges is awesome, horrible, terrifying, morally weird but filled with stories you will never forget. Like my Dad says, it's a Western. And I love Westerns.

Ruth is my favorite book. As this funny and enjoyable Slate reviewer summarized brilliantly:

No smiting. No prophecies. No laws. No kings. No God. Just the story of one family and its two good women.... it shows Bible laws in action... Ruth is the quietest of all Bible books, a short story that manages to combine extraordinary power and extraordinary serenity.

I agree. I love Ruth. It's details. It's romance (Rebecca and Isaac is still the best though. When they look up and see each other for the first time...) Love where it is juxtaposed where it is in the Christian Bible (as opposed to the Jewish versions) because 1 Samuel starts off where Judges seemed to end. But Ruth. Ruth is just a great story. In a much greater story.

So that's where I stand. Looking forward to 2 Samuel and beyond. David is in the picture now. I have felt the coming of this man. Felt him coming in the LCD pages before.

And that's the sign of a great book.

It's A Girl. It's A Girl. It's A Girl.

I went not expecting to know. I went not expecting to have the opportunity. I went not thinking my life was going to change. I went to bring her dinner.

But sure enough we ended up with a few minutes and an empty trauma bay (the same one that welled me when I was sick with pneumonia two years back). The Mrs was ready to know and so was I. There, the ultrasound machines are LCD screens. Far from the gray-scale flickerings of the OB/GYN office. It was portable, so we wheeled it over to the trauma bed. All this with the happenings and ringings of the white-walled, tile-floor hospital buzzing just beyond the room’s amniotic sterility. Just beyond the double doors.

Within moments there she was. Clear as day. Bottom up. Bones highlighted in the sound waves. There was her femur. There was her spine. There was her skull. From the side she was kicking. It was eerie, almost in slow motion that the white on black highlighted bone reflected out into the screen and back. She was moving… And she was clearly a she. We made sure. Went over and over the image. Then over and over our daughter’s sound resounding image. In the silence. In breath-taking irony of the trauma room.

The Mrs didn’t trust her eyes, nor mine (which, believe it or not, have been subjected to numerous x-rays and ultrasound images over the course of my life and our marriage. I saw Isaac’s broken leg on the x-ray easily, for example). So there I was, sworn to secrecy, sworn to keep the secret that we were having a little girl. A little, beautiful girl whom I had just seen for the first time. I went not expecting… and left absolutely certain that there are these things in life that amount to all the beauty I can take.

Yesterday it was confirmed. All gray-scale and hazy and on a monitor the size of my phone. But there she was. Isaac’s little sister.

Our little girl. She who carries our love.