Autumnal Grace

I love the Fall. The cooler weather, fog and changing colors around here have recently brought in my favorite season. Spring is pretty, but the riot of Autumnal colors and rich, warm tones mixed with the cooling air really makes me feel like a cup of tea and a good book. Being as that this is what I do for a living, read good books and talk about them, it’s a good time of year for me, when that which I have to do and that which I really want to do meld and no library is safe.
I was born in the Fall. I wonder sometimes if this has something to do with it. All star charts aside, it wouldn’t surprise me if the season in which you first become aware of seasons, in that your own birth is celebrated, becomes special to you. For some people, the year starts in January, with the promise of new beginnings, for some its Spring with its rituals of rejuvenation. Sunbabies may worship the warmth and freedom associated with the summer months, family vacations and heat swimming up from the streets and sidewalks that loosens bones and poems and late night rambles.

Me, I’m a Fall girl, born in early September, just in time for school to start. As a kid I was an inauspicious student. A lack of discipline and a preference for thick novels scuttled all but my English classes often. I had bad habits, frankly. As a babe, I’d ather skitter round the yard chasing a red ball, or a soccer ball, or mooning about some adventure I wish I was on. As a teenager, I read trashy sci-fi novels in the leaves of my Warriner during class. Same with Algebra. I drew, I painted, I wrote notes to friends, short stories and an occasional essay. Biology homework was somehow a bit beyond me, though Fall made it fun for a while. There’s nothing like that change of season and the fruition of so many living things to get you excited about the natural world. But come winter that fades; Dickens novels do not.

Fall came late this year and its still not uncommon to head out in the fog of the morning with long sleeves and jacket to come home dragging jacket and rolling sleeves in 60 or 70 degree heat. This makes it harder to settle in, to drink tea and read books, to flee the chill for the library. But alas, the weather has changed, the fogs have come and the books beckon.

My son, a piscatory sign born in the late winter as the frosts were melting like our transported-new-parent eyes spent too much time in the warmth to use many of his long-sleeved shirts or thick winter sweaters. I think he had one. Had we still lived up North, he’d surly have had his own stadium suit – the ones that make infants look like tiny blue Michelin men. I do wonder, though, what his sense of the seasons will be, which he’ll most associate with, which he’ll love best. He spent a good part of his pre-baby hood swimming with me in the cool blue waters of the local pool. His nature seems to be as easy going and inexorable as a wave. While certain objects fuel a deep-seated and unrequited desire (the TV remote, the telephone, my cell phone,) he generally bops around the living room like a spider-monkey, butt in the air and a bit of fuzz clinging to one sticky cheek. He loves people and gatherings, and seems equally at home in my arms as in those of Jason the Argonaut – a good friend and his first babysitter. Until he gets tired and wants his Mom, that is.

After a Thanksgiving week where we spent a great deal of time together uninterrupted (and with a cold driving him into whining and fussing when often he’s smiley and giggley) I came back home from my first day of work missing him. He must have missed me too, cause he threw his little baby arms around my neck and squeezed. After changing clothes into my sweat pants, we clambered round the floor together for a bit, laying out on the rug and playing with his toys and books. I hope he’ll feel the same way about his books, come Autumn, that his father and I do. But looking forward to his first Christmas, I have to admit that he might have been endowed with other gifts.

The Art of the Deal

It’s 9am on Tuesday and I get five minutes to do this blog. That’s the deal. I didn’t write last week cause it was a hell of a week and I trusted neither my wits nor my civility to do anyone or anything justice. So here I am, 5 days late with five minutes on the clock and that’s just one of the new deals I’ve made with myself today. I’ve been cutting deals all week and some have gone well, others have gone poorly and others have taught me that you really can’t bargain with an 8 month old or a dying cat and to try sidesteps the facts of a rich life, even when you’d rather.

Okay, yeah, so after the rest of the shit that happened last week that I’ll eventually get around to euphemizing, my 19-year-old cat, my friend and companion from my adolescence to my maturity, through four states, three degrees, countless boyfriend and two husbands finally got too sick this weekend. He had been pacing the house and howling for a couple of days so I took him to the vet and got a prognosis of growths in the jaw that were preventing him from eating. It wasn’t going to get any better and he wasn’t probably going to survive surgery at his age, weight and condition, so the only humane thing to do was to give the poor faithful animal to his peace. Even knowing it was the right and honorable thing to do, it sucked. I cried and the vet was very kind and respectful, but I felt like a ten-year-old again, snuffling and petting his head. He looked godawful, too: skinny, hairless, snaggle-toothed and unwashed. Even his fleas left him. Sad state of affairs for such a magnificent animal to come to that. Especially after the death of The Fish, I was just bereft. Now I keep thinking that I’m seeing cats underfoot, but it will be a sweater thrown on a chair, or a trick of the light or my own black socks.

This came hard after a weeklong negotiation for time. I think this must be the purview of new parents – you always have to negotiate for time. I traded dishes and laundry back for two hours a day. It might not sound like a good deal, but my brains are mush by the end of the week. I can do dishes and laundry; I can’t grade or hold much of a sustained thought (and grading essays – even the Freshman variety – requires sustained thought). So far, it feels like a good trade. We traded our family friend, the Nanny, a dollar an hour raise for Fridays. If I can get through this week and next, I might live. Hopefully, I’ll be saner than when I began. Sanity is worth an extra dollar an hour and laundry on weekends, believe me.

And this year we’re doing those terribly suburban Christmas cards with the photo of the family on them. It took a couple of hours yesterday to take a bunch of photos with our friend the photographer (but we all had a glass of wine and it was fun). Those hours, too, will save me a great deal of time when I go to do Christmas cards this year and don’t have to inscribe each with these long scrawling letters written in haste promising a better letter. We haven’t descended to the family letter yet, but might have to, just to fulfill my desire for written correspondence over the holidays. I can hear Papa Zook’s vehement objection already, nonetheless, as soon as I get the mail merge sorted out on the computer, days of Christmas cards will be reduced to hours. Because that’s another part of the deal – starting Christmas in November so that I can have a decent December. The shopping is more fun when it doesn’t resemble a Battan Death March with a Visa and a travel schedule that looks like Bob Hope on a bender.

So we’ll plunge into the holiday season with more time to experience it with Connor. The Grinch he loved, but it kept him up a little late, which was fine because he slept late. In fact, we’ve been folding real food into his baby cereal lately: little bits of roast chicken and potato, asparagus, broccoli, carrots. Yesterday, I mashed up some stir-fry and fed him nearly a half-cup of food before his eyes glazed over and he started in on the Banana Mango Surprise. He slept again last night, all night. I awakened to the sound of my alarm clock, which has been really only an extended snooze button for 8 months. So his dinners have gotten more substantial and so has my sleep. A nice tradeoff, I think.

It’s all just in the art of the deal.

Like No-one's Lookin'

Last Friday, I sent off the manuscript to my book. Well, returned it to the publisher after edits is more like it. That piece of work has taken years to produce and years to refine. Then another year to re-vision, take apart, put back together and send off with a wish. I’ve heard other writers refer to their books as their “children,” and indeed I’ve had this one longer than my living child, with whom it is now in competition for attention. When I began the revision process, Connor was just born, mewling and drinking in the sounds, visions and sustenance of his new life. Poor baby, he already had competition.

I found partway through the process that I was enjoying the work again. I thought I might never go back to that kind of academic pondering, testing and concluding. I thought that perhaps my time for such things and patience at building that work was past. I’m delighted to find that I’m wrong, that I still have a life of the mind that burns, not with a hard, gemlike flame, but the reassuring crackle of a hearth fire. This isn’t anymore where I have to prove myself a genius, but an intellect still on fire. Not the consuming sort, but the warming sort, that is sustaining and not scorching.

Not that it’s not still immense effort that the last push of effort required a great deal of fuel to consume. My grading slowed down to a two-week-turnaround, my drycleaning is still where I left it down the street, and I’ve been eating my lunches out of cans and off the salad bar at the school. For whole days I’ve fretted and twitched, while others I sat comatose with the effort. Nonetheless, the troublesome creature is off my desk.

But then I found my son underfoot, absent-mindedly picked him up and found that he’s turned into a very different creature. He’s about to walk, is fascinated with everything from the coasters off the living room table to the candy box I put on the end of my fingers a few days before Halloween. He claps his hands, giggles when you blow on his belly and bounces. A lot of babies love their bouncing chairs. This baby is a veritable bouncing machine. He bounces in his bouncy seat like there’s no tomorrow to bounce in. He bounces when he’s happy, when he wakes up from his nap, and to express pleasure. He bounces like no-one's looking, to quote a colleage. I am overwhelmed at the sheer force of life in his little legs and the little bright eyes bobbing over his pacifier as he bounces through the living room, standing first near a chair, then near the coffee table. His energy confounds me. Like his father, I’m feeling the effects of months of broken sleep and too many early wake-up calls. Like his father, I’m still entirely smitten with this little creature.

There are days, now that the manuscript is done and shipped off, where I put on sweats and just clamber about the living room with him while he bounces from one thing to another. The up and down, stretching of limbs and backbones, kneebones acclimating to his growing weight and the enthusiasm of his joy is good for these old bones.

And life goes on. Life without the manuscript is a hazy thing, unmarked by the passage of completed chapter revisions, the clear goals and easy markers of success. From here, life is marked in soups made and consumed, stacks of papers graded and replaced with others, dinners made, parties thrown and cleaned up after, conversations had and added to. And someday, maybe even someday soon, there will be a new project, with new markers of success and new challenges.

In the meantime, I think I’ll bounce a little. I think I'll bounce like no-one's looking.