Our couch was the first piece of real furniture I ever purchased. Through law school we used hand-me-downs, and during those months I lived in the quad, I used an actual blow-up couch my parents gave me as a birthday present when I turned 22, dense and heavy in a 12" by 16" cardboard box. When I got my signing bonus and signed a lease for an apartment in San Francisco, I decided to buy a couch that didn't (1) smell like Nixon-era onions; or (2) lose several pounds of air pressure when someone's ass occupied it for more than three minutes. As luck would have it, the fanciest furniture dealer in SOMA was having its annual floor-sample blow out that weekend, so Wood and I walked around the sale shocked that furniture that had cost so much to begin with could still cost so much when marked down 75 percent. But in the very back of the store we found a gray Flexform sofa that we both loved, originally $5700, marked down to $1250. As I paid for it, the impeccable little saleswoman informed us that the delivery charge was $300. "Fuck that!" I said. "I'll tie it to my rear bumper and drag it through the streets before I pay a $300 delivery charge." She shrugged; she was one of that species of high-end salespeople who couldn't give less of a shit that you exist.
As I stood there pondering how many funyun-flavored couches I could buy at the Salvation Army for $300, I decided to walk over to the nearest U-Haul agency. It was a Saturday, so I had to wait four hours, standing around with all these Mexican day laborers before a truck became available. When we finally showed up to pick up the couch, everyone watched us as though they had never before seen anyone carry their own furniture. "They think we're poor," Wood whispered over our new couch as we maneuvered it through a selection of Artemide lighting. "Well, if they don't want us buying their shit they shouldn't have sales," I said. We got the couch home for less than $35.
In the summer of 2006, when we were preparing to move away from San Francisco, Wood suggested we sell the couch. I looked at it and grew hopelessly sentimental. This was the couch where years earlier, on so many Sunday nights, we'd fallen asleep early in each other's arms before waking at eleven to drive to the airport for the red-eye flights that took Wood away from me for weeks or months that year. The very day we bought the couch turned into one such night, in an empty apartment, a thrift-store television on the floor, a few DVDs, a pile of clothes waiting for hangers, and all I could focus on was how the only thing that has ever made me feel at home was hours away from leaving me.
Even after she moved out west, and we had a full bed, we would fall asleep on that couch watching crap on network television. We had a certain way of sleeping on it, a seasoned leg-and-arm tetris that allowed us to be comfortable even in such a small space. We'd been sharing a twin bed for years, ever since Wood moved into a shitty apartment her junior year and found a moldy old twin mattress and boxspring in her room. "I'll put a sheet over it," she said. I've seen mattresses on the curb after long, hard rains that grossed me out less, but I was sleeping with the hottest girl I had ever seen, so I couldn't complain. We always slept on twins. Until recently we've never had rooms big enough for anything else.
Every home needs a real couch, my wife believes---not a sofa or a loveseat---a couch you can stretch out and sleep on. In San Francisco, we positioned ours by the bay windows that overlooked the corner of Cabrillo and 2nd Ave, so we could sit there and watch souped-up 1991 Honda civics gun it from stop sign to stop sign out through the avenues. Some nights we would fall asleep on it only to be roused at 3:00 a.m. by "Ace," the homeless guy in a top hat who walked up and down our street fighting with his "slut whore-bag-cunt" of a girlfriend, or sometimes we'd be woken at dawn by the old Russian lady across the street beating her carpets on the fire escape. In the fall of 2004, with this daughter of ours expanding my wife's uterus, I lost some crucial real estate on the couch and could no longer fall asleep there. When Juniper was born, the couch became one of her favorite places. It was where we would play in the early mornings before I had to go to work, and it was where she would sit and watch out the windows for me to walk up the avenue. It was this couch where we retreated so many of those nights trying to get her to sleep, her crib in our bedroom, when any silence from her was suddenly as precious as those hours we'd once had on that couch before Wood had to catch a red eye.
I have some sympathy for compulsive hoarders; I understand illogical attachment to objects that incite memories. I don't get the people who keep old newspapers, but I know the unease in the faces of those people forced to throw away their old things on HGTV, the love for those small intimacies in an object's history. When we left San Francisco, we left the "home" where Juniper had taken her first steps, spoken her first words, done all those other treasured things that happen in the first eighteen months. We had to say goodbye to those walls, but I'd be damned if I was going to let some silly freight charges get in the way of us keeping that couch. It ended up costing less to ship across the country than that snooty store wanted to charge to cart it across San Francisco when it was still new, unstained by breastmilk, untrammeled by toddler feet. It's still here with us, and for over a year nearly every night I've fallen asleep there against the warmth of my wife, against my will to get things done. A vortex, she calls it, consuming the most productive part of my evening time, distracting me from all the things I'm sure I need to do.
But now, again, my position on the couch has eroded away, the wombling and his mother need it all to themselves. This is it, I think: the last trimester is almost here, the last chance to spend these hours in some pursuit other than the pure delirium of sleep, or the inevitable exhaustion of his coming infancy. Soon he will be here. I'd better get some things done.
I need to take the kid on a school field trip to the pumpkin patch today. We've already been to so many apple orchards, pumpkin patches, haunted farmer's markets, and spectral cider mills this year, I don't know if I can take another goddamn hay ride. If I make it back, I should have a real post up later this afternoon.
I had intended to post my favorite Halloween story this week, but when things started getting bad for Wood's stepdad earlier this month, I wrote it up knowing I wouldn't be able to post anything else for a few days. If you haven't read the haunted house story, that's good, because I originally wanted it to be read today. Please read it. It's not just about ghosts & such. There are hookers, too.
And this year Juniper chose her own costume(s), without any input from us. She couldn't decide between Medusa or a robot, so we're going to do both (one for school and one for trick-or-treating). You can imagine how delighted I was.
Jim likes to go around taking pictures of every piece of broken stained glass in every abandoned church window along with every strand of ivy overtaking decades-old graffiti. This is Detroit, so he has a lot of ground to cover before he'll ever be done. He could drive around all day every day for months and not run out of subjects for his camera.
He usually brings the dog, who loves these photo trips, because most of the vacant buildings smell like various types of pee and there are always at least fifteen different ways for him to get absolutely filthy. They usually do this during the two-and-a-half hours that Juniper spends in preschool, but occasionally she'll go along for the ride when they are going to an area that's not all that dangerous. I find it hard to believe he's willing to drag her along, because I know exactly what a pain she can be in the car. The other day, he called while they were out driving through the neighborhood of Detroit known as Delray, a strange-smelling little area of abandoned storefronts and homes along West Jefferson Avenue right before the River Rouge separates Detroit from the downriver suburbs. Unlike most of Detroit, Delray has an array of ethnicities clinging like mollusks to a neighborhood constantly encroached upon by industry and blight. There are gorgeous old Hungarian and Polish churches floating on islands surrounded by shit-filled sewage-treatment ponds and meticulously-maintained homes with chicken coops in the back yard. It is beautiful in the way my husband finds things beautiful, which is to say that most people would think it tragic, or sad, or just downright depressing. But he loves it.
From what I understand, Jim got Juniper to behave quite well during this drive by promising to take her to the toy store when they were finished. When he told me this on the phone, I was confused. What toy store? There aren't many in Detroit, and certainly none in Delray. I don't think you can buy anything in Delray except for lung cancer and malt liquor. "You're going to the suburbs?" I asked.
"Nah," he said. "I'll just stop by the Salvation Army on the way home. She thinks it's a toy store."
He is pretty proud of that, I can tell. He spoils her, in his own way: he lets her buy whatever $1.49 piece of crap she latches onto after playing with every single gooey, germ-ridden broken plastic toy that has been thrown away by children who weren't sired by mangy, over-educated Dutch ex-lawyers with a thrift-store fetish. To this day, Jim will buy a pair of pants at the thrift store and wear them for weeks before washing them, something he's done since high school. It's a wonder he doesn't have scabies.
When I got home from work that day, Juniper was still napping, and Jim showed me some pretty cool pictures he'd taken. When she woke up, I discovered the toy she'd chosen: a somewhat-tattered naugahyde heart attached to a little basket carrying a stuffed bear. It read: "HEART-AIR BEARLOON."
It was clearly a cheap valentine's day gift some guy bought for his girlfriend at the Hallmark Store back in 1992, probably right after he bought her a box of Fannie May chocolates. But, as with anything cardiovascular, Juniper grew attached to it immediately, and at the end of her nap I found her adorable little cheek resting on it."Jim," I yelled, "What is this THING she's sleeping on?"
"Oh, that's her new heart-air bearloon. She could have had one of those trikes with the handle on the back, but she wanted that."
"It looks like it has HIV on it."
"Yeah, I was going to wipe it off with one of those antiseptic wipes, but I forgot."
"She's using it like a pillow."
"Awwww."
I've heard some wives of stay-at-home dads have anxiety about not being as needed around the house. Not me, I thought, as I scrubbed that damn heart she's since slept on every night for a week. I'm as necessary as ever.
The drive to the kid's preschool downtown is short, but still takes a few minutes with the traffic. Some days she spends the whole ride sobbing, other days she just interrogates me about what owls eat. Things have been inconsistent with the transition. Once at school, she either runs right past me into her classroom shouting, "See ya, pops!" or the sound of her crying only stops once I'm out the front door of the building. Either way, her teacher says she's fine while I'm gone. We're extremely pleased with the changes we've seen since she started. She's much bolder and assertive at the playground. At her grandpa's funeral, she was so polite and well-mannered to adults she didn't know that we went looking for the pod from which this unknown creature inhabiting our daughter's tiny body had crawled. Where did she learn all this? Her proud answer, whenever asked where she's learned anything new, is school.
The mornings, though, are still hard. She cries through breakfast. She cries while I dress her. "I don't want to go to school today," is her snot-nosed refrain. Some days I pretend I can't talk, and for a while this amused and distracted her, but she quickly grew frustrated with the mimery and just started screaming louder. Some days I talk like a robot, but she just starts telling me in a robot voice that she doesn't want to go to school.
On the drive, we pass a weeping willow tree, and I tell her the tree is crying, and that when we pass the tree she has to stop crying. I always put in her favorite Music Together cassette, and that helps, though every day I forget to take it out after dropping her off, so I find myself rolling through the streets of old Detroit singing along to some numbnuts' sluggish-bongo version of "This Old Man." Some days Wood doesn't have to go to work until later, and I'll drop her off after Juniper, and we'll both sit there in the car, so stunned by this brief moment together, alone, that we don't even realize we're kissing goodbye with "The Eensy Weensy Spider" playing in the background.
This whole thing started years ago on a near-empty 4 Sutter bus somewhere between Fillmore and Presidio, the kid asleep in a bjorn on my chest, the three of us returning home from some sortie into the Tenderloin; in those few short blocks, my wife suggested that we start a blog. I had been reading political blogs for years, and she had grown hopelessly addicted to reading the ones kept by new mothers when she was pregnant and had nowhere else to look to catch a glimpse of what her life might become. "What would we call it?" I asked.
"Sweet Juniper," was her first suggestion. I immediately agreed. Despite a general annoyance with exclamation points, I suggested we add one. That way it seemed more like a curse, an exclamation, either way, more than just something about the nature of our hippie-named daughter: It was a battle-cry, a barbaric yawp. Removing a shitty diaper? Sweet freakin' juniper berries! Toddler refusing to eat that tofu-and-pea scramble you just made her? Sweet juniper, why in the hell won't you eat this, it's covered in melted cheese! No longer able to differentiate between diaper contents and tofu-and-pea scramble covered in melted cheese? Sweet juniper, get me a vicodin and a gin and tonic.
"It will be good for you," my wife said, "To write again."
"What will we call ourselves?" All the political bloggers I read used aliases, the interesting ones at least. They seemed to recognize that blogging was inherently an embarrassing activity, like designing clothes for K-Mart or ripping wet farts on a public toilet. These were things best done anonymously, without announcing to the whole room who you are. I never had the foresight to think that more than a few close friends and family members would ever read this site, but I did know that if I attached my real name to it, it would be googleable, just like the names of all those poor second-year law students I used to interview every year (though when I found one applicant's blog entry about dropping acid every day for a week, I actually viewed that as a positive thing: "Very openminded," I wrote on his review. "Willing to experiment and consider new ideas.") Truthfully, I wasn't so worried about future interviewers as I was about old friends from high school or college googling me only to learn that I'd become that guy. As I wrote to a friend a few weeks before the kid was born: "Well, I'm about to turn into that guy who says, 'you just can't know until it happens to you, but it's the most beautiful thing in the world, etc.' It was nice knowing you." I felt relative anonymity might help prevent everyone who's ever known me in real life from gagging up their lunch in disgust, or worse: delight.
"I'll be Wood," she said, which was easy: it's the first syllable of the last name she never gave up when she married me. I have never had a nickname. I tried to think of something about me that was as lame as the very idea of having an alias. "I'll be Dutch," I said. The newly-christened Wood approved. It was that poorly thought out. And for more than two years now, this name has been the freakin' albatross reminding me of how lame I have become. Well, I've been thinking for some time about giving up the pseudonym for good. It only makes people from the internet I meet in real life uncomfortable addressing me and it makes me question my own sincerity when signing e-mails. Besides, there are plenty of people now who know my real name is Jim.
But that brings me to the bigger issue, and that is once child #2 is born, should we or should we not change the name of this website. I am inclined to keep it, because I'm lazy and can't think of anything better. Besides, I paid for the domain for like five years, and though I may slowly drop the pseudonym Dutch, I can't as easily rid myself of the cheapness in my Dutch genes. On that bus, years ago, we never set out to have this site be as read by as many people as it is now. I just thought of it as a place to write about the things that were important to me while I worked a job that wasn't. Now it has become something else entirely. As time goes on, I plan to write less and less about my daughter, in order to respect her privacy and protect a child who is no longer a baby. We may decide to change the name, eventually. Either way, we feel extremely blessed and lucky to have these issues to work through.
We will still write about life with our daughter. We will write about how a second child changes that life. But I can't deny that the Nerve Media nightmare a few weeks back really rattled me. I'm going to be more cautious. One good thing that whole mess did was make me turn the camera away from the kid a bit, and find some inspiration and beauty here in Detroit. I've been sharing those images on Flickr, and I will continue to post three new pictures there every day. And I will continue to post pictures of Juniper. Just not as many.
I have had it with talking, with explaining. "I have a kid's book coming out next fall," I say to Wood's millionaire Shanghai-sweatshop-running Uncle, who's smoking a cigar while I'm singing Juniper to sleep in my arms outside the funeral home, and he's pestering me with all kinds of questions about what a person---who is by all accounts a man---does with his days when he no longer has a job. This is the man whose white-gloved driver once gave us a tour of turn-of-the-century Shanghai back when Pudong still seemed like it had suddenly emerged from the muck, while he was off cracking the whip at the Chinese street urchins who knit the sweaters he sells to Land's End and JCrew. I might as well have told him I had taken to wearing adult diapers and playing video games all day.
Wood's mother has seven siblings, and all six that are legally allowed to return to the United States made it to the funeral. It must be something to be a part of a family that big. As the night grew long and the bottles of scotch and rum emptied, the conversations grew louder and louder, and you could almost imagine yourself back forty-some years in the days when seven kids between the age of eighteen and one sat around a single dinner table. They always tell stories of communal childhoods one or more of them haven't heard, like how their mother used to tie one of them to a tree in the front yard when he was a baby because she couldn't watch him and the others and do laundry and make supper all at the same time, or they discuss how another one wasn't circumcised and how the rest of the sons gave him such a hard time. So one child who was there will tell a story and the others who were also there pipe in to tone down hyperbole or outright falsehoods, and the ones who were babies or in the army or working as stewardesses at the time sit enraptured as though listening to the stories of some other family who grew up on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka. "Do you remember the night I had to watch the youngest five while mom and dad went downtown, and I thought someone was breaking into the house because I kept hearing these loud booms at the front door?" Some admit they don't remember the story, so she continues: "I had to call the restaurant where they were eating and dad rushed home to find a blind man at our front door, banging a broom handle against it over and over. I guess mom had bought a broom from a blind traveling salesman, and I mean, he's blind, so he didn't know it was the middle of the night I guess when he tried to drop it off." Then the sisters launch into a fifteen minute conversation about who used to wear whose clothes and how they tried to sabotage such thievery or conceal it.
One of Wood's aunts lives in Hollywood; her husband is ten years younger than her, a television editor who used to work on Family Matters and send Wood autographed photos of Steve Urkel. They have two young daughters, and they used to lavish them with princess birthday parties and carefully arranged meetings with the Olsen twins. Now, it's all about Hannah Montana, who is apparently the Elmo of the 8-14-year-old set. This aunt is one of the family's dominant storytellers, so everyone was regaled with tales about how her husband "got tickets to the Hannah Montana concert because he knew somebody who knew somebody, and this is like the hottest act in Hollywood right now---we even heard John Travolta couldn't get tickets---and would you believe it the next day we were shopping at one of those chic boutiques you always read about in Us Weekly and in walks Miley Cyrus and her entourage, but she was totally down to earth and signed autographs" for her girls. Clearly, Hollywood aunt is a "cool mom." Remind me to keep Juniper away from her in about six years, lest I be forever known as the least cool parent in history. Hollywood aunt is, as I write this, packing up a box of "princess outfits" that no longer fit her youngest, postage paid to Detroit, Michigan.
As with any family of eight, along with the millionaire sweater magnates and Hollywood gossip queens, there are sisters who drink too much and brothers who never got a break in life. But for all their craziness, every few years or so these people come together and prove they really are family, bound by something greater than themselves. Weeks like this one help me to better appreciate my mother-in-law, the median child, to better understand why she sometimes repeats things over and over as if she doesn't believe she's ever going to be heard. It can't have been easy to have been born right in the middle of all of this. Weeks like this do also help me appreciate the inherent virtues of family, those people willing to travel to you from all over the world to let you lean on them when you are so close to falling. And there, at his own wake, after hours of increasingly drunken stories, I found an even greater appreciation for Wood's late step father, a man who lived for twenty years on the periphery of this family, working his way into their hearts, until one day, like me, he must have realized he was a part of it. And, as a true measure of his character, he didn't turn tail and run.
