Aesthetics

One of the great joys of having children is to look at how cute they are and to coo at them and generally feel that you never imagined yourself cooing at something for such an extended period of time without wanting to take an ice pick from brain to eye. It's adaptive of course. If kids weren't cute the constant pooping and their insistence on crying instead of just being proactive and learning to speak are two primary examples. This leads us to pay an inordinate amount of attention to them and give up our own dreams of synchronized figure skating. And one day you're sitting in an old folks home and watching the sky, full of low clouds, purple tinged, and you can't even remember the names of these little things that derailed your dreams. Or so you pretend.

You know when kids aren't cute? In utero, early on. S apparently felt the pregnancy a bit more than I did, perhaps because it's in her stomach and kept sifting through pictures of what a child looked like in the extremely early stages of development. One such picture, roughly recreated above apparently created different reactions in the two of us.

S: Look at how it's developing.

M: What the heck is that?

S: Our baby.

M: Really, it's kind of ugly isn't it?

S: (Cries)

S: (Calls her mom later in the day) Andrew said our baby was ugly.

M: I meant to say aesthetically unpleasing.

Sure at some point the kids start developing things like a neck and hands and the like, but I'm not going to coo at amorphous blob. I'm just not....Do you think it would like a game of hide and go seek? I'd argue that that's why the good Lord didn't create things like sonograms but instead made babies. And that when we look inside a woman's stomach and notice that strange little thing, we are clearly violating some sort of ancient prescription and if I had my way, we'd have those machines brought up on charges of witchcraft. But, I don't always get my way.

Fiction

The crow was out in the yard, perched on an old tire, its charcoal foot and long black talons gripping the worn rubber, amidst the brown remains and rutted holes that had once been a fine Bermuda, laid down by the old man himself, some years ago. The crow’s black beak is darker still than the rest of its night sky body and charcoal leg. The late fall light is plentiful, and coming down in arcs, creating a sheen on the feathers, which when examined closely as if through the sight of a gun, carries a hint of green, that brings to mind an oil slick.

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