Walking Home from the bus

City Walk

And, on the way home, I walk past a man with a pit bull on what I generously am describing as a leash, but what appears instead to be a blue piece of thick cloth wreathed around his neck. Like most people of a certain age, over eleven or so, the prospect of an oncoming pit bull or whatever in the company of a cloth leash does not engender much faith. I carry out various fantasies of fighting off the pit bull, trying to calculate the degree of damage I’d be taking in the process, and what sort of affect my new face would have on people I know. The owner crosses the street with the pit bull before he reaches me,  no doubt sensing how close my fantasy was to coming true, or being aware that people are often strange and distrustful around his dog.

And walking down the street comes the strong smell of fast food, enticing and sickening. What’s strange is that it’s stronger here across the street from McDonald’s than it is near the parking lot, and one can imagine the vast quantities, megatons of food each day that are reliant upon vats of grease and not wonder too much about the biological implications or reward mechanisms built in that tell us that such dense food is precisely what we need to keep ourselves alive, and what frail stick castles do these mounds of flesh turn out to be.

I walk down the DC sidewalk, past the street cratered with pot holes found in nearly every neighborhood, as if we are all living on the moon. I pass beneath a tree littered with birds, cacophonous with them, white streaks on the sidewalk to mark their incessant squawking. I hunch my shoulders as I duck beneath this strange tree, a one tree urban forest, as if I can steel myself against the shi-.

Relieved from the threat of imminent bird shi- I’m able to appreciate the precise beauty of the fall light that always strikes me this time of year. The light happens just before sunset come fall, turning everything golden, oaks momentarily clothes in the finery of kings, and even the old red bricks visible across parking lots bathed in shadows are given the sheen of Orthodox church walls and one expects almost to see a saint amongst them.

In our yards, the gossamer strands of a spider web stretch the four feet between power lines, made almost indistinct in the shadow cast by our house. This is the first day in six that I’ve not had a headache, and so it makes me thankful for these small things that have been hiding in plain sight. 

Brass tacks: potty training

We're actively trying to train some brass tacks to start using the toilet. No luck so far, but we remain ever hopeful. I jest, though not infinitely.

Unfortunately, S's complaints in mind, the potty training is going to fall to me. This means, like with most things that fall to me, that it will either a) not get done or b) be done in such a slipshod and fast way that the end result will likely be Sadie learning that it's just fine and perhaps preferable to pee in planters. I have little faith in how this is going to turn out.

Thus, I'm seeking out advice. Although, it seems strange to ask for advice on potty training.

"Put it in the toilet kid."

"When you pee, do it there." (Points to toilet).

I mean, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing for which someone should solicit advice. Therefore, I take it back. I am not soliciting advice. I've decided that the weekend of October 6th. Listen, I've managed to get Sades to poop on a couple of occasions, and though we wound up cheering, she hasn't exactly taken to it. Apparently the one thousand times we've opened her diapers and said "ooooohhhh" or "gross" has given her the idea that poop is not the sort of thing that one cheers for. While I'm happy about the proof of her intelligence, I'm less excited about our future prospects. In fact, just the other day as I was preparing her for a bath, she peed in the hallway, and when I opened the door she was standing next to the puddle saying, "dirty, dirty, dirty" and stressing out. As great as the Family Guy scene is on this, "We're Catholic" "Oh, then you'll want, you're sinful and that's concentrated evil coming out of you." I'm not sure that I'm happy that we've created that as a long term idea in her mind. In fact, I once had an Old Testament Scholar assure me that bowel movements were probably present in heaven as with all other good things. I might bring him in for a pep talk before the weekend.

I don't really doubt my ability to get this done. I just doubt my ability to stick with it. I tend to like my results quickly. I'm afraid if she doesn't take to it in an hour or so I'll wind up downstairs watching a game with her swaddled back in her diapers. But I suppose this whole parenting thing should be teaching me some patience. In fact, patience is what we're always trying to remind our precious little toddler of. Though, she has a tendency to say "patient" amidst rambunctious cries for things. We've learned the word more than the idea. So wish me luck as I'm certain I'm the one who will need it. Sadie will be fine, in less she dirties the floor with urine, or sin as we call it in our house. 

Potty training

For the record it's a course I already completed, though the degree was awarded at some obscenely late age, and I distinctly remember sitting in front of my grandmother's heater hoping that the pj's would dry out before anyone noticed. That's neither here nor there. The primary point is, we're not potty training.

But we're talking about potty training. We're like the pitching coach out on the mound signaling to the pen that someone should warm up. He's not actually calling in the pitcher, he's just having a polite discussion about the possibility of making a change. In my day, I don't watch baseball anymore, pitching coaches almost all had mustaches, and I'm picturing him twirling it as he thinks about whether to bring in Rick Vaughn.

We're talking about potty training because we've got a second child on the way and one thing you always here is how hard it is to have two in diapers.

"Two in diapers. Forget it. You might as well wade into a pen full of pig shi-"

"Two in diapers is like having a picnic planned, but it rains that day, and ants are taking shelter underneath the tree with you, and also two of your kids have poopy diapers." (Not everyone I've spoken to about this particular issue is knowledgeable or deft at creating metaphors).

"Having two kids in diapers is like having your left pointer finger sawed through very slowly."

I could go on, but I don't want to scare you. This is the sort of thing about which parents like to tell other parents horror stories. It's a strange thing and cal also create a weird sort of bond. It's probably the closest I'll get to a large number of people engaged in a similar sort of Very Hard Thing as I am. I'm not fit for war as the closest I've gotten was watching Sergeant Alvin York take down an entire battalion of Germans.

The fact of the matter is, and here I'm quoting from a piece of literature or errata that I don't entirely remember, is that kids in foreign countries are often potty trained by 1.5 years. This is apparently skewed by them not wearing diapers, a fact which apparently makes potty training easier, something about whisking away urine, which is the sort of conversation you'll find parents having, whisking away of urine. And if you're not having that sort of conversation then you're probably doing something wrong. (See, this is the sort of non-encouraging encouragement that parents give one another. "It's all worth it though.")

S is not sure that s is ready for potty training. Apparently it's easiest to do it when they are two and half. It's my understanding, from my wife's harangues, (probably not the most charitable word choice) that children, when they reach two and a half, suddenly develop the ability to comprehend what a toilet is for and why central plumbing was such an important invention for the rise of humanity in general. I imagine that the potty training is less a battle waged in the bathroom and more a polite lecture delivered in the classroom to a toddler who is suddenly transformed from someone who says "want it" roughly 500 times a day, to a scholar who wears bifocals and wants to know about the chance of having a composting toilet put in. This may all be fictional. I don't know. It's my first kid.

Ashes

And, the daughter, on her way out of the hospital, having collected what there was of his journals, laboring with the large red lawyer’s boxes to stuff them in the trunk of her Hyundai,  was stopped by a voice saying, “Hey, you.” And, at first, she didn’t turn, certain that in a place like this people were forever calling out in just such a way, but lord only knew who they meant. “You, lady in the red shirt,” the voice said, and she looked down to confirm what she was wearing before turning. An old black man with white hair and the wiry build of the still active older person was striding towards her across the pavers. “I heard you were wondering what your father…It was your father right?”  She nodded. “I heard you were wondering what your father spent his time doing every morning underneath that tree.”

“Yes,” she answered, noting the steel grey eyes, hooded by a furrowed brow. He stood with almost all his weight on his right leg, the left one being made of wood. “Well, I can tell you that both of those stories I heard the nurses tell you was right.”

“How do you know what they told me,” she asked, hunting his eyes for some cunning, some hint that it was a trick or a weird way of gaining power, for a man who was clearly powerless, a wooden legged janitor at a home for the dying. She found nothing.

“I have my ways,” he said, which really just meant that he was nosy and had a tendency of mopping outside the door when people came to collect the things of their deceased relatives, because the job got pretty damn boring and monotonous, even the crazy people tend to follow routines, and that the little opportunities of conversation provided him with a rare glimpse into the world outside the building, for he himself was blind, and had to operate by feel around the building, and use his acute sense of smell to identify things like a new visitor, and so, he slept on site, no longer capable of making it in the outside world, but hating the place he was trapped in.

“They were both right,” he said, clouds passing over his eyes. “Both of them.” There were morning that he prayed and mornings that he cursed. And, truth be told, I asked him straight out, I said, Mr. Dan, what the hell are you doing out there by the tree every morning waiting for the sun to rise?”

“And do you know what he told me?” he said, leaning conspiratorally toward her, and she, in turn, leaned toward him, the whisper implying a sort of felt intimacy. “I’m waiting for him to come back so we can wrestle more.”

On her slow drive back from the outskirts of town, past bare wires populated by crows, and old graveyards dotted with grey slabs of stone detailing the lives of people she’d never known, couldn’t even have imagined, she reflected on the three stories that she’d been told about her father, about how he’d spent his mornings beneath the grey scrim of sky, waiting for bits of light to appear in the dark, and she concluded that it had been the second woman who had been right; he was still gone; knowing didn’t help at all. And she drove down the old road and stopped at a gas station for apple juice, and walked by an old vendor to pick up some popcorn that she ate absentmindedly as she drove halfway back up towards the old manor where he’d spent the last few years of his life, pulling off onto the shoulder of the road, near a dry culver, ringed by a thick ream of wasted elms. And, without thinking twice, she’d dumped the ashes of her father into a pile of leaves along the side of the road, tapping the urn to make sure that no part of him remained, and then she drove back to her home, listening to pop music on the radio and thinking about all the things she’d have to do at work on Monday. 

Do you remember the good times

Her father hadn’t related any of this when he’d returned back from Africa. Rather, she’d found it in his journals after he’d passed away at an old folks home in Missouri. She had gone out to sign the papers, her mother long gone, and discovered that her father had kept copious journals, and she’d spent the next few months sifting through the remains of his life as captured on the pages. A life that had remained largely obscure to her during her childhood, her father had just been gone one day, off on his mission trip, and he’d not returned again until she was seventeen, eleven years after he’d left, and no one in the family had talked about where he’d been or what had happened. Rather, it seemed as though any conversation of the sort would have been deemed indecent.

On this particular day her father had a long journal entry recalling the afternoon where he taught the boy about the Holy Trinity, three divine figures made manifest in one. The school room had been small and square, lined by mud, and capped by a collection of large leaves, though the structure itself was made from the wood from the banyan trees, and was really quite sturdy. And her father recalled, with something approaching reverence, the upturned face of the boy, the quick and intelligent look in his eyes as he repeated after his father the Greek words of the Septuagint, and she could picture, his daughter, or perhaps she’d read it, the dizzying flights of flies in the room, spiraling down from the ceiling to alight on the desk, or the arms of the child, dodging a loose attempt at a swat, and circling back to bang against the corner of the wall. She could feel the oppressive heat in the room as her father stood over his son, beaming at the fine work that he was doing.

The nurses in the hospital all thought that her father was a foreigner. He spent a good deal of his time there wandering the gravel paths lined by box elders offering discourses to himself in the African dialect of his middle years, sandals crunching down, but his mind thousands of miles away and living years in the past. They didn’t know where he was from, the insane old man with the beard who spoke some strange African dialect. He would often arise early and sneak out into the yard to watch the sunrise from a lonely wrought iron bench beneath an oak, on a circular path. And it was there that the orderlies would collect him in the misty green light of the morning, taking his elbow and guiding him gently back towards the main hall where he was supposed to be eating breakfast.

Naturally the girl had asked if anyone had known just what her aged father had been doing out in the damp morning admiring the sun, or the scrim of clouds hiding that same son. One of the nurses, Helga, said that she thought that he’d been praying, that she’d heard one of the orderlies mention that he was mumbling something under her breath, and she’d wondered if Mr. Dan might not have been a religious person, and, upon hearing this confirmed, she told his daughter that he’d been praying most mornings. And yet another nurse said that she thought he’d been well past his prime in terms of mental health because she’d had it that he spent those same mornings muttering curse words under his breath, and that the orderlies would often come in from outside with Mr. Dan trailing between them, having a good laugh over the things he said about the “sun being a no good damn dirty whore, or pieces of gravel being no more than little sons of bitches concocted by an insane God to torture his poor feet.  

And the nurse, poor Edna, was very sorry, but she saw all sorts of people come through the hospital, she said, gesturing to the white walls and white rooms, in that sort of condition, and that it wasn’t really the sort of thing that was possible to make sense of. It just was a thing to live with, or live through. That, in fact, even if she did know what he’d been thinking about all those mornings, it wouldn’t bring her any more comfort or closure, that death was closure enough, life was just a myriad of emotions and instants, a brief stop-over. Her language didn’t entirely mimic myriad of emotions, but the equation could easily be drawn. 

She kept telling him the story

And after five years her father had been writing less frequent letters home and begun sleeping with at least one of the women with whom he’d fallen in love. And he said things to her when they were lying in the heat afterward, sweating, that if he was to suffer eternally for a sin such as they were committing, he would count it a blessing rather than to suffer one more second without her, which felt like a thousand infinities piercing his skin. He said and believed things like this, because he really was in love with the woman, who he called Rachel.

And after three more years he’d had a son by Rachel, and nobody in the village had said anything about it, well aware that the pastor Dan had been carrying on for a while with Rachel. And they’d applied a system of non-judgmentalism that he’d rigorously taught them, that Christ was the first to forgive, that he said to the Sanhedrin who stood around the adulteress woman, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” And most of them remembered the sins of their former lives, which were now rooted firmly in the past, and they saw that they could not call Dan to account for things, which they, in their heart of hearts, would have done as well. Rachel really was quite beautiful and a number of the men wished that they’d been the pastor themselves, wasting away the afternoon between her legs.

Rachel, for her part, thought that the priest was silly, but she liked the things that he said to her, the poetry that he said to her as they were nearing the end, or shortly after they’d finished. She wasn’t using him precisely. She just found the elocutions beautiful. And she’d have him read to her from the Song of Songs, “Like a lily among thorns, is my darling among women.” And she’d stop, and have him explain just what a lily looked like, it’s precise parameters, and she’d ask him if he truly regarded her as a lily amongst thorns, and he’d tell her that he did, and she’d be reassured that he thought so little of the other women in the village.

And as he walked by the shores of the water that day, on the sun scorched earth, cracking in the sun, as in images he’d of Africa that he had as a boy, he appreciated the smooth curve of his beloved’s back, bent like a swan in the water, the descent of her hips into the water, the round curve of her back when she stood up from the water. And next to her, was a little boy, his son, swinging a stick into the water, making it splash up on the shore, fighting some imaginary war.

The boy mostly took after his mother. Though is father had tried to begin teaching him from a young age about the old church fathers, Origen and Tertulllian, if just so the boy would have some knowledge from whence he came, he was interested instead, as most boys are, in walking about with a stick of some size and whacking rocks with it, which he pretended were lions or elephants, or occasionally whacking other boys with it, and having it taken away, because that was not how a civilized person behaved, though it was obviously, sort of universally how boys behaved.

And so the little boy stood in the muddy ground beneath a green leafed tree beating the water, arcs of it lifting out and splashing down in the distance. And Dan thought of calling down to the boy, of asking him to come up and read a passage of the Scripture with him. He felt somewhere in his heart of hearts that this boy would be the death of him, and he wanted to know why. The feeling was Greek, and it was tragic.  Instead he called down to Rachel, who was, for all intents and purposes now his wife, reminding her that the grandeur of God was made manifest in all things, and she smiled back up at him, and he was happy. 

He asked her to tell him a story

He asked her to tell him a story, and this is what she said. Her father had been a missionary in Central Africa, some war torn country whose name had now been wiped clean from the map. Her father had been working there for years, converting the local tribesmen to a branch of Christianity called the Brotherhood of Christ or something, putting in years learning the local dialect, translating the entire Bible into a working copy of their language, learning their customs, really, himself becoming more a part of the village than a part of the world that he’d come from.

And after years of putting in work and converting a good number of the tribesmen to a working version of Christianity he felt satisfied, content, certain that the work that he had done would be pleasing in the sight of the Lord. In the mornings he wandered down to the lazy dun colored river, overhung by thick swaths of trees, and frequented not only by the villagers but by various animals that you’d find in a typical African body of water, crocs, hippos, etc.

And, on this particular morning, her father remembered the sun as a ball of red steel, burning through the dusty air, burning through the women shaking bits of dust from blankets on the stream side, burning the already dry and cracked ground, and everyone from the village was at or near the water that day. The same water where he’d baptized a good number of the villagers. His particular branch dividiens, didn’t believe in infant baptism, but they were full believers in full immersion and not the sprinkling of water that had been passed down into a number of Protestant churches. And so, the dun colored river, Heraclitus be damned, really was more than just a river, but a seat of holiness, God made manifest in the world, a living example of the goodness of his creation.

And her father was walking by the river watching the children playing, and he looked down at a woman that he’d converted within two years, the very first woman, a woman with a beautiful and quick smile, dimples on her cheeks, washing her clothes in the river and humming to herself a spiritual hymn that he’d taught her, a simple hymn praising the sun rising in the morning. And really, that’s how he’d taught them in the beginning, by using the example of Saint Patrick, pointing to the elegant light falling in arcs upon the river, of the plants that grew so profusely along the banks of the river, of the tattered clouds in the limitless blue sky. Truly, and he meant this, this was the most beautiful place that he’d ever been during his time on earth, which is to say, he played to their vanity. What man, when told he is beautiful, denies it? Only the wise man and there are very few. In fairness, this particular village set on the water really was quite a treasure, like a diamond inlaid in white gold and the people generally a happy and agreeable sort.