INTRODUCTION TO THE NEXT 2 MONTHS
I’ve been neglecting this blog, because I’m in the midst of a late life crisis. At 64, I see most days obituaries of people who were younger than that when they died. If I were to disappear now, there might be a few regrets here and there, but no surprises. It is time, as the old-timers said, to put my affairs in order.
Chiefly this mean taking steps to make sure my life’s work in poetry is not lost. Most Vermonters who know of me consider me a journalist, or think of me as the author of Covered Bridges of Vermont. The journalism was to support the poetry; in all but a few cases, it takes about a quarter of the apparat. Thanks to my second wife, I finally had time to count the volumes-worth of poems I had written. Perhaps a dozen, I had thought; no, there were 18.
Too many to put in print. So I need to build a website (any volunteers?), and upgrade my computer and software to deal with it. Which will require new electrical service to my home office, which requires clearing and restructuring same, which means coping with huge quantities of paper, not all of which can be conveniently tossed into the recycling (here in Middlebury we have municipal recycling). A Herculean task—specifically, cleaning the Augean Stables.
But I’ve thought of a way to post daily blog entries and help publicize the poetry. I’m going to put on the web perhaps my strongest book, the one that concerns staying home to take care of my newborn son. I’ll start with the introduction to One More Good Day, then the foreword, then the first poem.
The setting is the early 1980s. Brandonites who lived back then may recall me pushing my son in an antique wicker baby carriage or carrying him in a backpack. No one thought of me as a journalist then. It wasn’t until my health went to pieces, then my marriage, that I began using the one salable skill I had to earn at least part of a living. These were the good old days.
----------------------
INTRODUCTION TO ONE MORE GOOD DAY
I know the moment at which my son was, in the truest sense, conceived. It was during the 1960’s, that time of so many quixotic enterprises, the time of my college years. A small art house cinema in Boston had decided, unpredictably and improbably and perhaps unrepeatably, to show all three parts of Satyajit Ray’s “Apu Trilogy” in a single showing. At the end, as I watched the young poet, his beloved wife dead, hoisting his young son to his shoulders to stride off into the world, I said to myself “Yes! This, too, must be part of my life’s work.”
The day would come when a young househusband out walking with his boy riding along in a backpack would become one of the sights of their small Vermont town. Wishes come true in odd ways: one year the centaur-like pair would lead the annual Halloween parade, the man dressed in his brother's Nixon mask and a striped prison suit from some high school play his father had directed, dragging a seven-inch reel of tape as ball and chain, his son on board, wondering at so many people watching him. Or going fishing—his choice day after day--watching while, in two summers, his father caught more than 1,000 trout from the local river. The day would come when "ultrakind," as his email address identified him, would say his visionary spirit animal had been that peaceful and supremely supervisory creature, the giraffe.
I did not think of child “bearing” and child “rearing” as something that had been done by everyone everywhere and for as long as anyone could remember. Rather, it seemed to me one borderland of what Shakespeare called “the undiscovered country,” that zone of possibilities which surrounds what we know. In part this had to do with the quest for change that animated the best of my generation, back when “rapping” was a type of conversation without rules in which two people tried to explore each other’s being as deeply as possible, trading revelations. For a significant number of us (though fewer than we thought amongst ourselves) it was of vital importance that we see through our own “hang-ups” and “blocks” and grow into greater awareness, higher functioning, more love. The truism was that people used only a fraction, perhaps as low as 10 percent, of their available mental capacity. There was also the truism, in the study of psychology, that one’s basic personality was set at an early age and did not change—in a saying of the Jesuits, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” That life sentence, I was determined not to live beneath.
Where some attempted to break their “imprinting” with psychedelic drugs, I gravitated to the regular practice of Zen meditation. With it came the realization that transcendence and acceptance were not necessarily contradictory, and that there was a kind of change involving the ground of all being, as much as the figures moving in relation, that could be more profound than any change in appearances, habits, and predictable sequences. (Likewise, though this shifts to a different area of endeavor, Herrigel’s “Zen in the Art of Archery” and other sources made clear there was no essential conflict between discipline and spontaneity, which for my artistic purposes was tremendously liberating.) Intrinsic, inherent, immanent—these I found to be signposts along The Middle Way.
When it became clear how obdurate and granitic the foundations of personality are, we looked to parenting as one hope for changing all that in the next generation. "The real generation gap," I remember vowing to friends, "won't be between us and older people. but between our children and other children."
So when it came time to give life to a new being, my thought was less to mold or shape or train or inculcate than to enable the necessary combination of freedom and self-control, assurance and questioning, peace and determination. My aim as a father, to the extent that I was not simply going in with an open mind and a willing heart, was not to create problems where there weren’t any, and as much as possible to instruct by example. The hope was that by the time the biological changes occur that seal over the receptive early brain, there would be an unshakable reserve. Of....many things....but the one that comes first to mind is the same that comes to mind in contemplating what is inside the deepest of insides and beyond the farthest of beyonds: an unutterably intense joy.
This was at heart no different than the way I have lived with cats, seeing them as equal beings with a different way of life, and helping them to live it. I have always gotten along well with children, and have astonished people with how well I have gotten along with their supposedly antisocial cats (“You PICKED HIM UP and TURNED HIM OVER and YOU STILL HAVE YOUR FACE?”). Those who are aware of the centuries-long shift away from the human-dominated viewpoint toward a truly environmental ethos may not think this a trivial observation.
What we did not expect was the degree of difficulty that could attend the birth process itself. I remember thinking, “Well, they’ve f...ed up the air and the water and the food, and f..ed up the way people get educations and earn livings and form communities, but they CAN’T have f..ed up something as simple and basic as giving birth.” Wrong.
Being literate people, when we learned that a baby was indeed on the way, we went to the local library. My wife came around a corner and saw me and stopped cold: there was a look on my face she had never seen before, of fatherly rage. I showed her the picture in Suzanne Arms’ “Immaculate Deception” in which the woman in labor is handcuffed to the operating table so she won’t contaminate her own baby. We began to rethink the idea that we should go to a “good hospital” because the last three friends who had given birth “needed” Caesarians.
Thus commenced a chapter in which I worked hard to support home birth and Vermont’s independent midwives. Though for several reasons we had to go to a hospital, one of those midwives did most of the prenatal care and her partner was at the birth. She played a major supporting role in making sure my wife’s heroic efforts--he was upside-down, and she went through 24 hours of hard labor without drugs--did not end in some kind of major intervention. The “doctor” at the hospital was actually an osteopath, colleague of another male osteopath who had done much to pioneer the modern home birth movement in Vermont. As for the majority of the obstetrical community, “Black Mass” is a small installment on a promise I made at that time, that some day they would be very sorry I was ever born.
I stayed home with the baby. Not much choice there: she was a college dean, and I was a poet, occasional writing teacher, and part-time desk clerk. But for me, it was a joyous arrangement. Thanks mainly to my wife, but also to the state of Vermont and the town of Brandon, the two of us led a kind of small town, back-to-the-land life that in retrospect, seeing how managed children’s are lives in early 21st century America, seems next to hallucinatory.
Nevertheless, other bedrock obtruded. Taking a college course in child psychology, I had come across another of those challenges to idealistic parents: a study showing that schedules and architecture had more to do with parenting styles than personal values. In this, there was much truth. And there were financial considerations, which made home schooling impossible, or even the Quaker summer camp.
Then, when he was four, I was diagnosed with a tumor—non-cancerous, fortunately--that resulted in the destruction of my pituitary gland. An endocrinologist, to whom I insisted on being referred despite tests “in the normal range,” caught it just before it would have consumed the optic nerve. I could trace its effects back to high school, when the pattern of my physical changes made me wish I could “have my hormone balance checked.” For at least 15 years and possibly longer, I was told, it had been slowly growing, a prolactinoma that was secreting more and more of a hormone that counteracted testosterone.
A prolactinoma that affected me to the extent that I felt my wife’s milk come in, three days after the birth, in my own chest. Thus this book, rather than being simply about raising a child, also adds another chapter to the literature of gender variation and blending. Perhaps that is just as well, given that gender issues are an important part of the ongoing glacial transition out of the Ice Age of either-or thinking.
In the tumultuous aftermath of eight-hour brain surgery, two weeks of hospitalization, a month of profound weakness, five weeks of radiation, and another operation, a marriage that had seemed a pillar of strength to friends inverted, its weaknesses coming to the top. Today, it is a commonplace that depression is a treatable disease; at that time, we knew nothing, just as initially we had had no reason to suspect a medical cause for other failings. At seven, my son began a dual life, going each weekend from his mother’s house in a new town to his father in the old homestead.
To the immense credit of Amy Clare McGill, without whom this book could never have come into existence, we did not divorce. That would have subjected us to child support rules so inappropriate, given my tenuous situation trying to support myself and the old family place on freelance pay, that I would have been beggared by them. She wanted her son to have a father, she said.
Likewise, she carried me on her insurance, which paid most of the cost of several very expensive, absolutely life-essential medications. When he was 18, and we were beyond the State’s wisdom, we cut the last ties.
But without two parents present, television became a surrogate, and that opened the way for peer group pressure of a kind I had never experienced while growing up. There were many weekend adventures for my son, but not what I had envisioned as a way of life. For my part, the pituitary and the glands it had controlled were replaced by inferior artificial substitutes, and a substandard metabolism helped my weight to balloon. Journalism, the only field for which I was qualified, gradually withered with changes in technology and economic crises.
I had counted on sacrificing three years or so of my literary career for the sake of my child. As many female writers have found when their marriages ended, it takes a lot longer.
As a young adult, my son had to endure the constrictions of a society far colder and crueler than the one in which I came of age. Despite its limitations, he has become his own man; the best I can do now is to admire his independence, determination, resourcefulness, and what one of his female friends told me: “I can’t say anything bad about him.”
So the undiscovered country of those earliest years remains to be mapped, or perhaps will never be, though I remain convinced that nothing enduring will be done in the realm of politics until children come first, and childhood is the primary experience rather than a preparation for "real life." But the surest way of getting there may be for each generation to have its day, its one more good day, rather than creating a New Way for others to follow until it is trodden into dust or mud. In any event, it all awaits you--you, the parents of the future--all the mystery and magic and magnificence, all the stresses and strains and sleepless speculation, all the joy..
I cannot tell you how much I wish you well on that greatest of great adventures. Thoughts of you, the better parents to come, will be part of what comforts me in my hour of passing. Asa nisi masa.
This book is dedicated to the parents of children who have died—that when they say it is you who should mourn, for what you will now never know, you will believe them.
1. Lightning Rod
Waking
I close my eyes
again. I can imagine
Back...
back in...
one...
by one...
of many...
any of
The beds we have shared.
Then I remember the one
Step further: this
room I lived in as a child,
this room I called mine,
this room
I never owned, coming of age
venial to mortal,
lonely to alone...in which, at least
There was a radio
Beside me in the darkness: late at night
with its antenna, the antiquated bronze lightning
rods of the barn, galvanized, spiraling, spinning
to a thread the hazes of
Boston...
New York...
Baltimore...
St. Louis...
I would listen into
the flight path of your arrival
Though never as far as Houston.
So once more I reach to my left,
this time
Straight through the dial,
straight through the wall behind it,
on through
Our covers, all the way
through your heart to where
my hand comes to rest
On the side of the bed
where we made love last night,
(opening my eyes)
Perpendicular to my former desires.