We've returned from the other side of the state where we said hello to my sister's beautiful baby and goodbye to my wife's beloved grandmother. Birth, death, I know, I know: it all sounds like that song by the bald guy with the braided rat tail. That's not what this post is about.
At some point my wife and the kids decided to stay with her family while I returned to Detroit to get some work done. During the 48 hours I have alone I go grocery shopping without children for the first time in years. Remember that moment in Spiderman where Peter Parker discovers his superpowers? Or that point where Neo stops the bullets and starts seeing the green text inside the Matrix? Yeah, that's some weak shit compared to how you feel in a grocery store without children. Standing behind a childfree cart you swear you have eight arms. You are dancing Shiva, the destroyer of worlds, flinging a perfect avocado, a can of coconut milk, and coffee beans into the cart before the downward stroke of the butcher's knife slams through the bone, before the bubble gum bursts on the lips of the girl pricing bags of black beans, before the fly buzzing on the potato salad flaps his wings a second time. . .
At home, you are stunned by the silence: hour after hour of silence. Where is the incessant whining, that droning didgeridoo of discontent, that soundtrack of your life as a stay-at-home dad? You turn the volume up on the stereo. Music sounds good again. That Dirty Projectors song is good, after all. But you crave the silence. Where are the filthy-faced urchins whose petty needs always come before your own? You sit in the silence as one might sit in a steam bath. Your mind reboots. You have thoughts that last more than two minutes without getting interrupted. This, you realize, is why so few of your old friends want children. This state of decadent self-centeredness feels so foreign, though you spent 27 years in it. Childlessness is wasted on the childfree.
It is their bedtime, but unlike any ordinary day your body does not feel drained of blood, like a limp sacrificial offering slumped on the couch wishing there were no obligations to guilt you away from blacking out. You are exhilarated by the silence.
Then you hear crying from the computer across the room. 200 miles away your wife is requesting a video chat with your daughter on her lap, sobbing. "She's inconsolable," she says. "She misses you." And then, just like that, you would give anything to have her tears drying in the fabric on your shoulder.
Man, these two stewbums really need their mid-morning cigarette. Either that, or this photo was taken just before they had the four drams of rotgut they need to get through a day of replacing bobbins down at the mill. Don't worry lads, you'll be as stiff as a ring-bolt 'ere midday.
There's still a little time to enter the contest of for the new Sandisk slotRadio. Leave a comment here before noon EST today and I'll update this post to announce the winner after noon.
*UPDATE*
Random date/time generator result: 09-Jul-2009 13:20:51
Winner:
Even though there are so many new books I want to read, lately I've been picking up old ones. As I scan the pages, trying to decipher the notes made by my 19-year-old hand, I realize that I never really understood as much D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce as I liked to think then. Ulysses hasn't changed since 1996, but I certainly have. And how many stanzas of Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens had I read without discerning any meaning? Still I refuse to believe I did not take something of value from the words themselves.
I think about this often at bedtime, right at that cusp of freedom that sleeping children provide. Before I can sit down with a book of my own, I often read both of them books way above their heads. In my daughter's case, it's now stories with fewer pictures, more new words and concepts that challenge my ability to explain without doing so recursively. A year later we have nearly worked our way through The Rattle Bag, and have moved on to selections from the Oxford Book of English Verse. I find I have a lot more patience for poetry now. Some of it is knowing my daughter is grasping for any meaning among the words, while I emphasize only their sounds. My son sits silently on my lap alongside his sister for picture books he cannot understand. This patience for lovely nonsense is, I think, a sort of skill, not unlike fearlessly sounding foolish in a foreign tongue. It is one way we learn.
Sometimes I go back and read cringe-inducing things I wrote over a decade ago, occasionally encountering a particularly delicate line and wondering where it came from. Did that come from me? I wonder. The same dope who wore his pants at his knees and listened only to the Wu Tang Clan? Have you forgotten how powerful it feels to stand in awe of what hasn't yet been written, that limitless universe of language in front of you. Have you forgotten how fun it was to be bold and reckless with words? As one ages there are few things as annoying as precociousness. But sometimes knowing too much is a disadvantage.
* * * * *
We are riding in the car and talking about her beloved friend; her teacher describes them together as "like an old married couple." She tells him what to do; occasionally he kicks her in the shin. But mostly there is mutual devotion. He wakes up in the night and tells his mother he misses her. She chatters on and on about their friendship in the backseat: "I do not think he will ever lose his love for me," she says with such earnestness I cannot laugh.
Then: "You can lose your balance. . ." she says. "But you can never lose your love."
* * * * *
If only that were true, I think. But then again what do I know.
The mother of one of my daughter's friends asks, "Is she not supposed to play princess?"
I have never told my daughter she couldn't play princesses. We may have had a few conversations about how princesses aren't good role models, but I've NEVER said she couldn't pretend to be one. Apparently while playing at her friend's house, my daughter whispered, "My dad doesn't like princesses. He says they're lazy goodfornothings." Then she proceeded to pull one of those prefabricated princess gowns over her torso and said, "I'll just tell him I was being a fairy." This pleases me, because it shows she is beginning to understand that her highly-opinionated father can be quite difficult, though easily appeased by doing whatever it is he doesn't approve of once well out of sight. This will prove a useful skill as the years go on.
When told this happened, I felt a tinge of guilt. Then the other little girl stood up and said to my daughter, "I AM THE BEAUTIFUL PRINCESS. You must do my bidding. Go and fetch me the finest flower in the land." My daughter reacted with a look of incredulity that could only be translated as, "Fuck that, dude." Or, perhaps less crudely, "My father was right: princesses are bossy and not very nice." She refused the quest, and the princess sulked.
I looked down at them in their ill-fitting polyester costumes, stained with mulberry juice and globs of yoghurt. I could have delivered the coup de grâce right then: I could have pointed out that their threadbare, shoddily-made dresses of imitation satin and tulle made them look more like Courtney Love at the tail end of an Oxycontin binge than any representative of The Crown. But I didn't. As Benjamin Disraeli once said, Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.
"Worry not, your Highness," I said, winking at my daughter. "I shall fetch my steed and deliver thee the loveliest dandelion in all Detroit."
At day camp pickup yesterday, one of the instructors reminded me that we need to bring a white t-shirt today because the kids are going to make tie dye. When I remembered to tell my wife last night, we had forgotten that the kid and I turned every piece of plain white clothing we owned pink last summer during our own tie dye adventure. The neighborhood wig shop sells white tees, but they only carry XXXXL and above for that population of young dudes who seem to enjoy dressing like giant babies. So what did my wife do? She went down in the basement and sewed the kid up a white linen skirt for her to tie dye at camp. Then, when our friend called (a fellow Detroit parent in the same predicament, asking if we had any plain white shirts) my wife said, "Sure, I'll find something." Then she went downstairs and sewed the kid's friend a pair of white linen pants until midnight.
"So, tie-dyed linen pants, huh?"
"Yep."
"You are a true visionary."
Today my talented (and busy) wife has written a powerful post over at Woodcraft about the quilt she is making in memory of her stepfather. It's the longest post she's ever written there and I hope you'll check it out.
Also, we just brought home a painting I commissioned from our friend Kathy Leisen and posted it on the inspiration page. There's a video of Juniper there reciting the myth portrayed in the painting.
A few moments ago I held my baby in the rocker and listened to his murmuring around the mouth of the bottle. Every afternoon for over a year now I have done this until he falls asleep, at which point I set him down in the crib and creep out of the room. Today he just pointed towards his crib and said, "In." I put him down giggling and chattering, sure that he wouldn't be falling asleep any time soon. Still, I sat in the rocker next to his crib, reading a book, hopeful that my presence was at least comforting to him. A few seconds later he looked up at me and said, "Bye bye" while waving his arm.
And now that little boy is asleep.
This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed.
In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren't designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go.
It is an urban legend on many college campuses that many sidewalks and pathways were not planned at all, but paved by the university after students created their own paths from building to building, straying from those originally prescribed. The Motor City, like a college campus, has a large population that cannot afford cars, relying instead on bikes and feet to meet its needs. With enormous swaths of the city returning to prairie, where sidewalks are irrelevant and sometimes even dangerous, desire lines have become an integral yet entirely unintended part of the city's infrastructure. There are hundreds of these prescriptive easements across neglected lots throughout the city. Click on the photo at the top of this post to see just a few of them in greater detail.
Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.
Academics around the world argue about whether the first paths were created by hunters following game trails. There are scientists who study ants to better understand highways. They have created mathematical models for trail formation. When the great cities were built, sometimes roads were built along ancient paths. The Romans imposed grids on every city but their own. In Detroit many of the streets are named for the Frenchmen whose ribbon farms stretching north from the river were covered in asphalt: Beaubien, Dequindre, Campau, Livernois, Chene. In many cities, there are streets named for dead men once revered throughout the land but now mostly forgotten (Fulton, Lafayette, Irving) and others named for men no one remembers.
In Detroit, there are streets no one has named. And they belong to anyone.
