Six Months

Hiroshima day...

So Annika was six months old yesterday.

Didn’t sleep much last night.
Marin has been more willing to
wake me if Annika’s noodling at night.
“Would you be willing to do some reading?”

A good thing. Marin’s sleep is a disaster,
and she’s the one who has to work.

So I took the little one at 4 am,
not to do reading, I was not waking up.

By 5, it was clear she wasn’t going to quiet.
First she’s cooing that you’re lying there

close to her on the carpet, then she’s singing, then it’s shrieking.

Marin can’t sleep even if there’s a baby vocalizing
anywhere within a half mile.

So I put “Black Book” in the DVD player.
Dutch film. About a Jewish woman trying to survive
in Holland during WWII, working with the resistance,
sent to take an undercover role
with the occupying Germans, in the final months of the war.
Very intense movie. I love movies which keep the actual languages
even though I have to read.
Wow. I love Netflicks. I was still watching interviews
when Marin awoke at 7:30. Which is late for our morning routine.

Oops.
Now it’s tomorrow. The narrative is broken.

New narrative: If I start trying to write again,
I want to keep it up.

So I’ll post this and try
not to give in to the fatigue,
no, the exhaustion,
which comes from working
(I’m doing 15 hours at the Unitarian Fellowship
along with four guitar lessons each week)
and eating and sleeping and raising
two children.

Poopy Party Politics and Pool

Obama’s taken the bait, Bill Clinton’s goal to roil O’s visionary campaign is working. Bob Sheer admonishes Arianna Huffington on (Santa Monica NPR) KCRW’s Left Right and Center never to imagine that anything those two Clintons do is random, unscripted. Will voters get sick when they realize they’re in for at least four more years of this Washington insider crap if the Dems win? Mitt Romney says the worst thing of it would be having Bill rattling around the White House with nothing to do. Think of it.

Will America then (lacking a “change” candidate in the Dem’s Obama) go for the yellow-ribbons-of-patriotism candidate, McCain, just to “avoid admitting we were wrong after all in Iraq,” yielding another version of the Washington as usual game. See Frank Rich on Clinton/McCain.

Certainly it’s good news that Guiliani is running way behind, if not down and out, in Florida. The New York Times outed him today as vindictive and mean spirited. Whew, just in the nick of time. Even as the NYT threw support to McCain and Clinton. What?!

Looks like it’s all downhill from here. I feel like I felt after 2004 when Bush was swiftboating Kerry. What a mean spirited country we live in. While we do terrible things in Iraq, and to the environment, and to the poor, and to the Mexicans, and to the economy.

More than ever, we need someone who could bring us a New Deal.

Well, how about my other fixation, Matteo? He goes into swimming this morning giving no quarter to those of us who hope he’ll get off the noodle and swim with arms free.

But we get to the pool early, and Carolyn, the staff person who gives him candy canes, is in the water instead of on the side. Of course, he won’t come in to her. “Papa!”

After he gets his floaty pack on, he demands the green noodle. And kicks around for a while.

But then, somehow, after five minutes, he lets me eject him out on the side, he drops the noodle beside him at his feet, and jumps in, into my arms. He doesn’t instantly freak out. So I set him loose – noodle-free – as Carolyn (now on the side above us) and I both gush our amazement. He tools around like a sea captain in his element, not a care in the world. Carolyn catches my eye, and we’re both like, what just happened, anyway?

It doesn’t last. The noodle is called for, and recovered, and he reattaches. I play with the big ball, splashing like a whale as I leap out to make stunning catches. I get bored, and decide it’s time to re-engage. I move in.

There’s a teary interregnum during which he refuses to give up the noodle, and I stick to him. We become a poopy-party of sorrow and doom. It doesn’t end up being much fun having the noodle anymore, if it comes with a Papa clinging to it. This state of affairs lasts 20 minutes, half the pool time. During which I extricate him from the noodle. But it’s only when another mom and baby claim it, that the loss results in more tears and hopelessness.

And ends abruptly. “I’m better now,” he announces, and pushes off to swim to a ball floating by. He gets it, and swims around with a ducky in one hand, the green ball in the other, for the rest of the time.

New Deal?

Falling Down Day

Thursday: First it was Matteo. There was a slight assassination attempt on him at day care. The little boy behind him, Liam, saw an opportunity. The doorjamb was coming up fast on the right as the line of children moved from one room to another. Liam must have known that Teo was in a weakened state, owing to his running nose, his coughing, and his mouth breathing. Suddenly, looking away, shove – BLAM! Matteo trips into the doorframe, crumbles, dissolves into tears, and Marin is called.

Marin checks with how Teo’s teacher, Karis, feels about his status. Bump on forehead, already iced, straightline red bruise, no broken skin, he’s in my lap, the startled breath- catching sobs have turned to whimpers, he’ll survive.

Second was Marin. While adjudicating his recovery, Marin’s preparing to go to her ObGyn exam. These are coming at a fast clip this last month of our pregnancy. On the way down the stairs at work, she’s talking to her coworker, Naomi, over her shoulder, and – oops – missteps, and finds herself in mid-header. Whoa! Severly pregnant woman bouncing down the stairs.

I get a phone call as she’s driving to her appointment. Characteristically, she tells me of Teo’s misfortune before revealing why her voice is shaky. She’s all adrenalined up over her topple. Initial diagnosis, bumped knee. Really? YIkes!

Suddenly I feel like I’m in the wrong place. How can I help, what can I do, just say the word!

Apparently, at the doctor’s, they belted Marin up with a fetal monitor to hear how our little trooper is faring, head down with teeny fingers poised on the starting line waiting for the go. All well.

Finally, it was me. But only existentially. The boys from the LDS Church (Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints), whom I kept standing in our entryway the first Sunday in December, finally got through. The original followup visit I got suckered into they canceled for being late, then we kind of didn’t pick up whenever we saw “Church of Jesus Christ” on our caller ID. Then last week our caller ID was out for two days, and I ended up agreeing to meet yesterday at 4.

In short, my fall was to my knees. In two ways. The first was how I always end up admiring the system which brings me these fresh young people, sitting in my living room, talking about their lives, their faith, and trying to interpret scripture with someone like me who knows more about what they’re doing than they themselves know. I almost feel like an academic advisor.

The second was in prayer. Elder X (they never tell their first names, which would help the memory) prayed us into their bible study. Then, after learning really interesteing stuff about their families kneeling together and praying before bedtime (I just found that so sweet, though, of course, I’m projecting), their lives of doubt, competition and conversion, the quality and intensity of their missions, Elder X reads some scripture which is essentially wierdly irrlelvant, and asks me questions on the reading, which I answer.

That’s when I tell what I really think about Jesus’ resurrection, about the new intensity of life his followers discover in his absence, and how that “new life” is supposed to play out in Christian churches. I realized, a moment later, that my “Christian” story, no matter how different from the mainstream “Christian” doctrine, is over their heads. Just as their ideas are essentially “over my head.”

Because, it turns out, the “resurrection” for them means Jesus visits folks (Lehi’s decendants who sailed to America in 600 BC) in the New World, and that the “failed” system of prophets and apostles which, in Christianity, “crumbled” upon Jesus’ death, was revitalized among Lehi’s decendants, and led to the golden tablets which Joseph Smith discovered, dug up, and translated.

Hm. Okay. I listened politely. After all, what would Unitarians need to do to get our kids to become “our missionaries of Unitarian freedom and truth-telling in the Ural Mountains” as Elder Y had been for the Mormon “story.”

The prayer came when they asked me to close the session. They asked me to pray. Which turned out to be fun. It’s such an odd, wonderous thing, like someone coming up to you and saying, “could you make up a spontaneous gratitude poem so we can close our eyes together and enter a place of profound openness.” And then, what you say is welcomed, gratefully.

As I bid them farewell, holding my newly received “Book of Mormon,” I walk down to invite Marin and Teo to reinhabit our living room. In effect, we all have gotten up from our falls, a little different than we were before.

Hope, Born in the Bone

George W. Bush is traveling in the Middle East ostensibly to move things along in the Israeli Palestinian peace process. He’s obviously worried about the end coming. What will be his legacy?

He actually believes that history will celebrate his stubborn commitment to his wars, and all the clandestine renditions and torture, the shredding of our bill of rights, the disaster of Katrina, the stolen elections – history will prove him right. Mr Bush says history is always evaluating data, that people are still disagreeing even about the legacy of George Washington. Right. The father of our country, the face on our one dollar bill, after whom DC and the State are named, whose face is on Rushmore.

Bush’s only hope is martyrdom – maybe that’s what’s behind this Hail Mary trip – and even that would only quiet the flood of corruption and profiteering revelations a couple of weeks. And the tide of impeachment would definitely rise around President Cheney pretty quickly. Keith Olbermann, the Barak Obama of the news media, (MSNBC) opens every evening’s newscast with a countdown, the number of days left in this desperately retrograde regime.

Many link the Clinton campaign’s tumble in the polls to the fact that Mrs Clinton’s closed, calculating style is simply too reminiscent of the Karl Rove White House. Hillary is reminding people of those Clinton years, the fighting, the legal battles, the right wing echo chamber. This sour taste in the mouth isn’t her fault alone, but it’s really time, after all these years, for something a little less false, less self-serving, more above board and morally uplifting.

Ever since Reagan, (and that’s 30 years ago!!) many of us have felt powerless, living in a country that wasn’t ours. Corruption, militarism, Star Wars stupidity, the Contra debacle, killings in Central America, the whole enchilada. Bush pere covered his implication in all that by ginning up a war against Saddam, and otherwise dissembling for the next 4 years. Then the Clintons, who botched their opportunity the first time round, led us, unwittingly and unwillingly, but nevertheless – into the bitterness of end-game partisanship, which has risen to a loud assault on hope and reason through the younger Bush years.

Here, in the real reason for not having family dynasties, W is always triangulating off his relationship to his father (mother?!), whether it’s with criminal tax cuts, or starting a war to finish what his Dad didn’t. He certainly trumped his Father’s perfidy, yielding in the process a devastating assault on democracy, the environment, and hope. Our way of life, the continuation of life on earth itself, is now on the line. And we're a big part of the problem, not the solution.

Legacy. What a sad, tragic King Lear Mr Bush has become. He’s in the storm, he’s broken nearly everything that matters. But no insight, no repentance, no change to hear in his howlingly empty reassurances as real people are killed, broken, and pulled down by his self-absorption. Does he even recognize how much he was “taken” by the Roves and Cheneys for their own ends, and left hanging when his utility ended.

Can we survive the three hundred seventy seven days.

But it led me to think about legacy. My legacy. Now that Matteo is here, he’s it. I guess.

But he probably won’t care much about the stuff I’ve thought, written, done, the photos I’ve taken, people I’ve loved, the failures I’ve faced, the joys the successes the hopes and fears. So, are our legacies our descendants, and that’s that? I’m Esther and Sterling’s legacy. And my sweet memories of them floating atop the less sanguine ones - that's it for them?

Okay, maybe I need to cast the net a little wider... But then I have to say, I don’t believe that “history” will be kind to people like me. We ruined the environment, we sat quietly by while lobbyists and corporations and their front men gobbled up our American dream, like the henchmen surrounding Mr Hitler took the German culture, discipline and economy and rode it into infamy. (Note, the Chinese leaders and businessmen are doing precisely the same to the Chinese today – a report about a deepening Chinese rage against what is being done to their land and water).

Like I wrote yesterday, how can we love, deeply and desperately, give our lives not just to secure our comfort, our personal safety, but to join with others in a spiritual revolution? That’s why Obama is winning. Can we come back to life after decades of sleeping at the wheel, while corporations and their lobbies have grown like a silent cancer to devastate our body politic? Can we still dance, to a beat of hope, born in our bones?