Evening

He sat at the kitchen table, near a vase of wilted flowers, waiting for the light to return to the window.
Snow fell outside, fine flakes pushing against the  pane.
He had a certain feeling, brought on by the yellowed petals, floating at eye level,
that if he waited long enough, something would change, his phone would beep or ring.

His feet were warm.
He wore thick green socks all through the dead of winter.
The space between the flakes of snow seemed infinite.
If the light came, it would be green.

She wore slippers to bed
and watched television in the dark.
He thought of her small brown fingers, the chipped red polish near her cuticles.
Thinking of her never passed the time as quickly as he'd have liked.
He wrote her a letter and edited it immediately, until it had only three words, all useless.
The light would come soon to the window, pawing at it softly, of that he was certain. 

Success

Great moments in parenting.

During prep for bath time, Sadie, every time she has her diaper off and is finally free to be nude, upon being set down immediately sprints across the room like her pants are on fire, except she has none. I don't know what it is about being nude that makes the child sprint, maybe she's afraid that someone will see her, maybe she's channeling dancing around a fire in the Great Rift valley, who knows? She just loves to sprint in the nude. I guess it's faster without all those clothes holding you back. Anyhow, she generally sprints to our bedroom and stands by Steph's bureau. I don't know why. In this great moment in parenting, Sadie, sprinted across the house, stood by the bureau, and peed. Now, rather than clean the mess up, Lord only knows what Steph was doing, it was allowed to remain on the floor. In the meantime, Sadie, sprinted back into her bedroom, probably to say "yaya" and hug the little blanket that she loves at least twice as much as both of her parents. Anyhow, realizing that she still had one last wind sprint, she tore across the floor into the bedroom only to slip and smack her head on the hardwood floor when she hit the puddle of urine. The moral to the story is either, don't pee on the floor because you might fall and "don" your head, or, don't sprint in the nude, or if you're going to pee make sure that your parents clean it up or you might slip on it. I'm just sorry that I didn't witness it firsthand as I would have laughed.

I took Sadie to the park today. I did it because I'm a good dad, and also because I wanted to go to the park. Anyhow, I don't want Sadie to turn into a wimp, so when she decided to climb up towards one of the high slides, only to begin backing down the stairs saying, "down, down" I picked her up and put her in my lap and prepared her for the amazing trip down the slide. The thing is though, due to some article S made me read, I pulled up Sadie's legs to make sure they weren't fractured or something, which meant my legs were up, which meant that when I got to the bottom of the slide and wanted to stop before hitting a giant mud puddle, I couldn't. This made me sad. Sadie was unfazed.

We continued on to the other playground, and I let her slide down a big slide, which was incredibly slow, three times by herself. At that point, Sadie, being a smart little child, realized that the slide was lame, climbed the stairs again and positioned herself at the top of a silver slide that went nearly straight down. At first I pulled her away, but she did that awesome going entirely limp thing that toddlers learn to punish their parents for having them, so I decided to buck up and take her on the slide. And, using my new method to avoid injury, I slid down the slide with lil s on my lap and careened right of the thing at the bottom, taking a hard fall on what we're going to call my tail bone. Sadie said, "boom" and then got up to repeat the trick. I didn't follow. The main point of the story is that you shouldn't every take your kids on a slide, because you'll likely wind up with a bruised tailbone, and I'm fairly certain that tomorrow, when I can't get out of bed, I'll have that damn silver slide to thank. And Sadie, who learned today that when music is playing it's fun to play the "drums," which she sort of pronounces as bums.

The rain falls in sheets, in veils, while we sit on the screened porch swatting flies.
We spent the afternoon talking about flowers, though I all I could recall was the hyacinth garden from a poem I'd read at an impressionable age. I don't even know what hyacinths look like, I said. "They're very beautiful," she replied, to pass the time.
We moved onto politics, stirred packets of sugar into our coffee, while the water made puddles in the garden path, reflecting a bruised sky.
 "Politics are best left to the rich and handsome," a woman I'd once wanted to sleep with said.

Small packs of tattered clouds are hung like clothes across the sky. We talked about our dreams. She said that once, as a small child, she'd dreamed of being an astronaut, of walking upside down on a planet of her own.
All my dreams are in silver, and I hoard them in the recesses of my mind. And when I wake up in the morning, I close my eyes and swim back through the silvery light of them, flickering like fish or light on a garden path.

The conversation has ended. We are all leaving for the afternoon, making plans to see each other after the season has changed. All of us are excellent liars. 

Distant Star and In the Heart of the Country

I turn up the pages in books I read. And, as I read, I wonder what small collection of letters, what thought, or sentence, or paragraph captured the attention of the previous reader, the uknown known. I follow in their path, seeing trail markers and ignoring them, avoiding in my mind the certainty that their fingers have touched these same pages, eyes passed over these same words. We are intimates, the previous reader and I, without ever knowing it we are closer than the person who I sit next to on the bus, and if I met that previous reader, man or woman, young or old, I am certain that we could sit down over coffee and pastries and talk about how quickly the world passes us by.

Distant Star by Roberto Bolano

"A few strands of cloud appeared in the sky, which half an hour earlier had been absolutely clear. Drifting east, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, the clouds were black and white at first, when they were still over the coast, but as they veered towards the city they turned pink, then bright vermillion as they headed up the valley.
For some reason I had the impression I was the only prisoner looking at the sky. It might have had something to do with being nineteen years old."

I have turned up all the pages now, only this one excerpted above remains, tracing my own path through that same book, but the ghostly outlines of the previous reader's pages remain, like late summer light in the leaves of green trees.

In the Heart of the Country by William Gass

"I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I'd follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hand."

"Billy closes his door and carries coal or wood to his fire and closes his eyes, and there's simply no way of knowing how lonely and empty he is or whether he's as vacant and barren and loveless as the rest of us are--here in the heart of the country."

"The shad is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, teh roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to love anywhere else in the world."

"The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection."

"That fall leaves had burned themselves out on the trees, the leaf lobes had curled, and now they flocked noisily down the street and were broken in the wires of my rake." 

Raising a toddler

Here's the thing about having a toddler, it's really easy. Everyone will always be saying things like, "Oh, my little one thinks he can walk downstairs without help and swim underwater, and sometimes he takes off his diaper with poop in it and swings it around his head like it's a rope and he's going to lasso someone, but then the poop is just everywhere, and he doesn't even know how to lasso. The kid is terrible at it. What am I doing wrong?"

Listen, I have a child, which makes me pretty much the authority on children throughout the world. I'm not going to give you this bullshi- proto-liberal, everyone is entitled to their own opinions and mine is just a tiny grain of sand on some vast beach. No, Plato and Socrates didn't aim small. I don't go to a class on Micfrofinance or kite flying to learn how I should live my daily life. So, here you go.

1) Buy a giant bubble and put your toddler inside it. Make it volume adjustable, so if they're crying or something and you're trying to cook dinner or watch the fourth quarter of the game you won't be disturbed. I'm not a bad person. The bubble has got to have some access, toss a box of Cheerios in there and maybe a few books if you're feeling generous. This bubble will allow you to appreciate your child in a whole new way, in a way that was impossible when you were worried about them standing on a stool for no damn reason except to make you think they were going to fall, or pulling the front of the dish washer down and then falling and crying, or running towards a set of stone steps like they were going to perform the long jump. I'm just saying, try it. And if you don't like it, if it makes you uncomfortable, then move back to Russia you communist. Apologies, I end all rants that way.

2) Indiscriminate random spanking. Sure there are a lot of ideas floating around out there about whether you should spank or not, or whether it should be as a warning, or punishment, public or private, in anger or calm. All these ideas are like the damn dandelion spores that float through a warm spring breeze and screw up my lawn. They're awful. Here's how you discipline a child, haphazardly. They never know when they're going to get spanked, so they'll always be looking over their shoulder, not knowing what will bring it on. This will eventually lead to them doing nothing wrong, and it will allow you to reveal the vast plotting that you've done in order to facilitate their good behavior and later in life, when they're at the psychiatrist, they'll have this quasi-breakthrough moment about what a great parent you were, and how they're sorry that they said all those nasty things about you when you were still around, and got drunk and threw up on your anniversary and briefly married a clown just to piss you off, and they'll realize that it was all for this moment, right now, the couch curving to their back like the back of Moses in a bed of reeds, the memory of your hands a warmth on their skin.

3) If you're not comfortable with either of these tactics then you're soft, and your toddler knows it. Kids are like sharks. They smell blood in the water. If this is the case I can only suggest that you outsource. Certainly there have got to be some people poorer than you somewhere who know how to discipline a child. Don't say things like, "people poorer than you" because it will make you seem callous in a way that we don't like to be perceived. We prefer to shape perceptions like a master worker of glass, working on creating the perfect stain, so that when the sun strikes the glass, the prism of light on the floor looks near perfect from all sides. Art is life, or life is art, something along those lines. Write yourself a letter to the person you thought you'd be when you were twenty. Seal it up and send it into the past. When the letter arrives, go down to the nearest coffee shop and order something warm, tea is just fine. Run your fingers across the name from the future. Open it carefully, slowly, do not crease any part of the letter. Make sure the light is tepid and that everyone knows you are not to be disturbed. Read it closely, this is the last chance you'll have to change your life.