Goodbye to Claude, the Dominican, and Life Before Parenthood

Claude, our chubby, mischievous orange tabby.

While we were on what will probably be the nicest vacation of our lives, Jess’s mom called us and told us one of our cats, Claude, had stopped eating and drinking. The news that our cat was effectively dying, although we didn’t know it at the time, was not exactly surprising. When we adopted Claude in 2011, so too did we adopt the litany of health issues that followed: chlamydia in his eyes (didn’t even know that was possible), heart murmur, bladder crystals, and eventually the disease that strickened him worse than any other: diabetes.

He was diagnosed over the summer, a result of lifelong gluttony that we tried to curb but never could. We tried a low-carb version of the prescription cat food he was on, and he became crazed with hunger, jumping onto chairs at the dining table while we ate dinner, pawing at our food. This was, honestly, not much different than his normal behavior though. Weekly, maybe even daily, Claude would rifle in the trash, prowl the kitchen countertops at night looking for any scraps of food we might have negligently left out.

We tried disciplining him, but he always took our disciplines and came back for more. Not to mention that one look at him, at the wide unblinking eyes, that face so reminiscent of Puss in Boots’ puppydog face, that our anger would dissipate.

Jess and I adopted Claude a year after we had started dating. He and Flora, our other cat who we adopted a month before him, had joined us through nearly the entirety of our relationship, beginning when we barely made rent in a Lindsey-owned apartment complex in Russellville, following us to Van Buren when I got a job at UAFS, then to our house in Fort Smith when Jess got hired at UAFS as well and we had enough money to afford a mortgage and then some. He made the move with us to Fayetteville when Jess got hired at the University of Arkansas and we purchased a house here, already living a better life than I think we ever imagined for ourselves.

He was an orange short-haired tabby – a mischievous orange short-haired tabby. He stole flour tortillas from the garbage. He attacked our other cat, Flora, without remorse. He ate Fitz’s dog food while Fitz sat on the couch beside him, the crunch of the food alerting Fitz and sending him jumping off the couch to defend what was his.

He was an inconvenient pet, in a lot of ways, and maybe that was why I didn’t take his health issues as seriously as I should have when Carrie called. Maybe it was also the luxuriousness of the place we were staying, too. I was in the Dominican to be a best man in my good friend Devin’s wedding. The resort we stayed at was a complex of villas on the coast of the island, highlighted by a several thousand square foot mansion with countless balconies, couches and chairs overlooking a swimming pool and the beach and rolling waves beyond it. Not only did we get to enjoy this resort – we, the wedding party, got to enjoy it exclusively. This was the sort of locale – and the sort of wedding – that you see in movies. Except we were living it.

Photos don’t do it justice. But, here’s one to give you an idea.

Charlie stayed at home with Carrie, who also looked after our pets and administered Claude’s insulin shots. People asked several times throughout our four-day stay if I missed Charlie. Sometimes I was too drunk to remember my answer, but the truth was, no. I did not miss Charlie. I barely thought about Charlie. (It helped that he was not exactly missing us either, judging from the videos we saw of him playing, so I think the feeling was mutual) It was not that I don’t enjoy being a parent, but this was our first vacation since having Charlie 18 months ago. I slipped back into our old life, the one where Jess and I were a carefree parentless couple, more easily than I ever imagined. At that resort, with unlimited alcohol and amazing food and a waitstaff dedicated solely to our enjoyment, Jess and I were reminded of the freedom of a parentless couple. We drank freely and swam and sat down at the beach watching the waves build and crash toward the shore.  

Carrie called on Thursday, two days into the trip, to tell us about Claude. She had tried giving him wet food, milk, any delicacy he wanted, but his usual voracious appetite was gone. At the time, I did not take it as seriously as maybe I should. I figured he was sick similar to how he was sick initially with diabetes, something that a visit to the veterinarian would fix once I got back.

I did not fully grasp the situation until we returned home and I found him lying on the bathmat in the guest bathroom, something he had never done before. He was frail, thin – two pounds lost over the week, according by the scale. His normally wide, round eyes were narrowed, half-lidded. His breaths did not so much rise and fall as expand and contract his thinned frame.

We were exhausted, so I petted him, tried to offer him food, which he showed no interest in, and went to bed. The next morning, a Sunday, I woke up and found him exactly where he was the night before. Seeing him then, the realization hit me in full force: he was dying.

I made an appointment to have him put down with a vet’s office in Fayetteville that was open on Sundays. We wrapped him in a towel – in good health, we would have to wrangle him into a cat carrier, but now he was so weak he could barely stand – and carried him out to the Corolla we had bought four years before, when our family was just us and Claude and Flora.

The vet was located in a Quonset hut off Wedington. I went inside and checked in while Jess sang him “Amazing Grace” in the car. When they were ready, I went and got Jess, and she carried him into an exam room. The vet came in, talked to us, guessed ketoacidosis for the cause, and administered a sedative before giving us some time alone.

I held him in my arms and rocked him as Jess and I cried. When the vet came back in, we lay Claude on the exam table, the brown bath towel underneath him, the one my grandmother bought for me 12 years ago for my dormitory my freshman year of college.  The vet held a syringe of some pinkish fluid (I think it was pinkish, at least). They sprayed rubbing alcohol on his leg, matting down the fur to reveal a purplish-blue artery coursing down his thigh.

The vet slid the length of the needle, barely thinner than the vein itself, into Claude’s vein and depressed the plunger. A few seconds passed. I held Claude’s head in my hand, stroked his nose with my thumb. His chest was still rising and falling, and then his breathing shallowed. The vet placed a stethoscope to his chest, and a few terrifying moments passed, his body still. I did not want the moment to be over, the last moments of Claude’s life, but I also did not want this moment, with all its grief and sorrow, to continue.

The vet looked at me, nodded, and told us that he had passed. It took fifteen minutes, at the most.

Carrie buried him at the pet cemetary on her land, a few hundred feet from the house where he had spent a summer of his life while Jess and I lived in Washington, D.C., where I worked at ACE Hardware in Takoma Park and Jess commuted to the city for an internship.

Reflecting on it the next day, the sequence of events seemed surreal: an insanely extravagant vacation giving us a taste of the life before kids before returning to not only say goodbye to the Dominican, but to a friend who had been with us throughout our relationship, who also signified a goodbye to our lives before Charlie. Even my best man’s speech, about life being short, about living in the moment, about the power and individuality of places and memory: it was all the kind of convenient convergence of theme and meaning and occurrence that happens under an author’s pen, not in real life.

Claude died two days before Christmas. On Christmas morning, Jess and I awoke early, made coffee and sat on the couch. Claude’s stocking still hung from the fireplace mantle, feather toys sticking out its top, toys he would’ve loved. Lately, Charlie had enjoyed taking the toys and swinging them, giggling in delight as both cats tried to swipe at it.

When we got the chance, we liked to sit and drink coffee like this in the mornings. A reminder of those days from before, when we were just a couple, when we would sit on the couch with a whole day of freedom ahead of us. Later that Christmas day, we would play with Charlie, laugh with him, tickle him, feed him, bathe him, love him, and try to enjoy every great but sometimes challenging moment with him. But now, we cherished the moments before he awoke, when we could have a small taste of the simple life.

Except, without Claude, it wasn’t the same house, the same mornings as it was before. It didn’t feel the same. It never will again.

The Joy and Sadness of Visiting Family

Libba and Charlie.

Last week, because we didn’t learn our lesson from the Tulsa Zoo trip, Jess, Charlie and I flew to North Carolina to visit Libba (my grandmother), Jamie (my aunt), and Allie Maria (my first cousin). It was a normal trip as family trips go – we arrived Wednesday and left Sunday, spent most of the time watching Charlie explore Libba’s house where we stayed and play with Libba.

But Saturday night, as we were getting ready to put Charlie to bed and prepare for an early departure the following morning, and Libba said for the hundredth time how precious and sweet Charlie was, she began to cry.

“I just wished y’all lived closer,” she said as she wiped at her eyes.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my grandmother get emotional. And it wasn’t one of those weird moments like seeing your father cry, when your mind is trying to process seeing something its never seen before.

Instead, that moment reinforced a thought that had been swirling in my head the whole time we had been there, each time I watched her face light up at seeing Charlie, and each time he walked over to take her hand or play with her: that this may be the last time I see my grandmother.

Don’t get me wrong. Libba is eighty-six, but she’s in fantastic shape. Her mind is still sharp, and she gets around without help. But at that age, any ailment however trivial can become serious.

“You just don’t realize that the family you have now may not be the family he has in the future,” Jess said later that night as we wiped away our own tears.

Allie Maria, Jess and Charlie playing at the Kalideum in Winston-Salem.

My other grandmother is ninety years old and stricken with Alzheimer’s. My mother isn’t in great health either, and there are other family members on both of our sides with medical issues. Charlie could grow up with every single one of them. Or his family landscape could be drastically different from the one we’ve grown used to. Either way, when Charlie graduates high school, it’s safe to say at least a few relatives will not be with us anymore.

This is something you don’t think about. That as you reap the rewards of your child growing, you’ll also see the consequences of that time passing in other ways. And that includes the death of your family members. (Pets as well, but that’s for a different blog post)

This is a sad realization. But what makes moments like these so fleeting is also what makes them so beautiful and so valuable. I don’t think, and I certainly don’t hope, that this is the last time I will see Libba. Regardless, I am so happy that we spent the money for her to see him, even if it’s the only time she will. There is an immense reward in bringing happiness to a relative with something as simple as a child. That his mere presence is enough to brighten her heart in ways he doesn’t realize. To see her face brighten each time she saw him, to see how often he smiled at her, the reciprocal joy they gave each other.

I will cherish those memories so much.

In the airport on the way home, Jess received a call from her mother, telling Jess her grandfather was in the ICU with pneumonia. We were standing in line to go through security, and Charlie hung, face-out, from Jess’s chest in a baby carrier. He loves people watching, and he stared at the variety of people ahead and behind us in line as Jess expressed relief that “at least grandpa was okay.”

Charlie looked over at me. I was still thinking about Libba and how she had cried, and how tears had sprung to my eyes as well. I smiled at him, my default expression when I lock eyes with my son.

And he, not knowing what his mother was talking about on the phone behind him, not knowing why his great-grandmother had cried the day before, smiled back.

A Coming-of-Age Moment, in Tunica

We talk about coming-of-age stories like they’re restricted to just children and their transition to adulthood. But in truth, we have many coming-of-age moments throughout our lives, and one of them happened to me last weekend.

My parents are avid gamblers. Since I was young, I can remember driving to Tunica, staying in the Gold Strike, playing NFL Blitz in their arcade and swimming in a pool with a faux cliff-face and waterfall looming over the side.

On my 21st birthday, I was baptised as a legal gambler by a trip to Tunica. A few years later, my friends and I went on a trip together, and what started as a tradition among my family also became a tradition among my friends.

Last weekend, we made another trip to Tunica again for my friend Devin’s bachelor party. (Sidenote: I’m Devin’s best man, marking the third time I’ll be a best man in a wedding. I am a terrible best man, and I have no idea why people keep picking me. But at least I threw a bachelor party this time.) Ryan, Nick and Ben came along with me and Devin. My parents, always looking for an excuse to go to Tunica, drove there as well and met us in the casino.

Normally, I approach trips to Tunica with the mindset of strategically stretching out my $2-300 over the course of a weekend to maximize free drinks and spend as much time as possible with my friends. But this time, I was excited. Gambling has a certain thrill to it, a high that really can’t be topped when you’re winning. There are few feelings better than literally being handed money for being lucky, and I wanted to capture that magic again this trip. It had been a year and a half since I had been to Tunica, and I was craving that magic feeling again.

Fitzgeralds (Fitz), a casino/retirement home. 

Unfortunately, there was no magic this trip.

We were staying at Fitzgerald’s, which is basically a casino/retirement home, so we opted to gamble at the Gold Strike when we first got there to be in a more exciting atmosphere. After an hour stint at the blackjack table that saw me up $35, I was feeling confident and ready to capitalize on a strong start to the trip.

Then we moved onto a $10 minimum craps table, where Nick, my dad and I sevened out immediately. In five minutes, $100 was gone.

We got comps for the buffet and then went back to the casino. The $10 craps table was still open but empty, and with visions of winning thousands on a heater roll, I walked over and bought in and began rolling by myself.

Ten to fifteen minutes later, I had lost $150 more, which left me with $50 left on the trip, which promptly evaporated at the craps table back at the Fitz.

I went to bed at nine that night. The next day, I lingered around the casino, penniless, subject of ridiculing by my friends and feeling terrible about myself. Just as winning money is an immeasurable high, losing money while getting nothing in return is an immeasurable low. I went to bed early again that night, and the next morning, we woke up and drove back home.

I wasn’t the only one to lose money, nor did I lose the most among my friends (Devin won $600 and Nick won $100, so it worked out for them). But it seemed as if all of the losers had a lightbulb moment that can only come from losing hundreds of dollars while getting nothing in return.

“I don’t think I’m going to come back,” Ben said to me the second day of the trip. Ryan mused that he could’ve been playing Factorio all weekend instead of losing money. Nick, who was making his first trip to Tunica, felt the same way, even though he left a winner.

I had been thinking the same thing myself. Part of it might just be regret over losing, but there was a different, more final feeling that I felt as we drove away from the casino. When we started going to Tunica, I was in my early twenties, with disposable income and no significant other. Now, I just turned 31 years old, with a wife and kids and debt and all the annoying responsibilities and bills that come with being middle-aged and a father.

I’m too old for this. And that was the coming-of-age-moment I had at age 31.

I just wish I hadn’t had to lose $300 to realize it.

Book Review: Miller Brings Greek Mythology to Life with Circe

It’s become cliche to say that an author has brought a certain subject matter or historical period “to life,” but the expression is warranted in the case of Madeline Miller’s Circe.

The stories of Greek mythology have a flatness to them, a lack of dimension that while captivating, severely dates them, driven by the delightful twists and turns of their plots rather than the characters themselves. Reading Circe, then, was a revelation. The story of the title character, and the canonical mythological tales it weaves in along the way, instills a richness into her tale that is more than a retelling.

Miller pulls back the layers of the Greek canon, exposing the emotional roots underneath. Her narrative fleshes out the cast of characters in Greek mythology, imbuing a deeper, emotional dimension that Edith Hamilton and other retellings lacked.

Here, the struggles of Circe are on full display, Miller giving her the same treatment John Gardner did with Grendel. Here, we see the vulnerable side of the Greek witch – her upbringing by disinterested parents, who saw her as the black sheep of the family, overshadowed by a manipulative sister. Her search for love with the mortal Glaucus, which led her providing him a potion to become a god, and his subsequent rebuttal of her in favor of Scylla. Her crafting of potions to turn Scylla into a sea monster, resulting in her banishment to a deserted island by her father Helios.

The incident that drove her to turn men into pigs, an act painted as sadistic cruelty by Homer, is retold here as an act of necessity to save herself from a captain and his crew shipwrecked on the island who attempt to rape her.

She continues turning shipwrecked crews into pigs and slaughtering them until Odysseus and his crew stumble ashore, and an affair ensues driven by love for Circe and convenience for Odysseus. Even so, in Miller’s interpretation they end their affair mutually, Circe referencing the tale that rose out of the hero’s visit to the island – that he tricked her into turning his men back to humans, that they fled the island to Circe’s wailing anguish.

Miller’s prose flows like poetry, her mastery of language as good as any of her peers. Reading the book is like listening to a modern-day Homer and was made even more enjoyable through Perdita Weeks’ excellent narration in audiobook form. Her descriptions of the cast of characters in Greek mythology feel freshly-realized rather than reintroductions – strong, graceful Athena, sly Hermes, obedient Daedalus and his innocent son Icarus, noble Jason and his jealous wife Medea, and cunning Odysseus.

Still, the gods of Madeline Miller’s novel are faithful to their roots. They are brutal and selfish, and humans are but pawns and fodder for their entertainment. Miller explores this dynamic deftly, with Circe alienated by both gods and humans – gods who look down on her as inferior, and humans who either fear her power or, unaware of it, see her as an object to be used.

Ultimately, Circe has the depth and richness to appeal to lovers of Greek mythology while also weaving a captivating tale for those unfamiliar to the canon. The story is a compelling study of what it means to be human, its beauty and its pitfalls, and is a reminder that all of us, even the witches who turn men into pigs, have their own story to tell.

Don’t Take Your One Year-Old to Disney World. Or Anywhere Else.

Well, after the last post, I figured we all needed some comic relief. So I’ll talk about another fun adventure in parenthood: going on vacations.

Jess loves planning for vacations more than actually taking vacations. Disney World is the most popular locale. It’s become a once-a-month occurrence that she’ll text me a screenshot of a Disney World ad that came up on her Facebook feed or an offer she received in the email, accompanied by pleading emojis and bitmojis.

I do not want to take a trip to Disney World. Not right now. Not for a $3,000-plus trip that my son won’t remember. Call me a cold-hearted jerk, call me a bad father, call me whatever you want. I fancy myself a pragmatist.

I tell her as much one day when she asks me if I would rather take a trip to Vegas or Disney World. I answered like any logical gambling addict would – Vegas – to her surprise.

“Wow,” she said, in a tone that made it obvious I was doing her and my family a grave injustice.

“Yeah, because he won’t remember a family vacation.”

“You won’t remember a trip to Vegas!”

She gets mean when I stand in the way of her vacations.

We decided to test out how vacation-able Charlie was last month, when we took Jess’s mother to the Tulsa airport for a flight and decided to make a trip out of it. We made plans to stay overnight at an affordable hotel, planned to go to the Tulsa Zoo, and enjoy some local restaurants.

If you’re not a parent yet, one thing you don’t think about that radically changes your life is the Nap Schedule (capital letters are intentional). The Nap Schedule dictates all. It is the harsh, mustachioed Russian dictator of your life, and it takes the form of an over-tired, crying/screaming baby rubbing at his eyes.

(Side note: I didn’t even realize that becoming over-tired was a thing, or if I had known of it, I had forgotten it. It’s so counterintuitive. Once he starts showing signs of sleepiness, we have about 15 minutes to get Charlie in a crib to go to sleep. Otherwise, his body decides to give him a shot of adrenaline in the form of a second wind, because babies are pretty much engineered to make you miserable in innovative ways.)

Charlie in the pool, yawning even though he has no interest in sleeping

If you want to go to the grocery store, you’ll either have to schedule it within the bookends of the morning and afternoon naps, or you’ll have to go before one or the other.

All this is to say, that we expected Charlie to nap in the car on the drive to Tulsa. Except that he didn’t. He didn’t have an afternoon nap, either, ostensibly because he’s not used to sleeping in the car.

This was slightly concerning to us, but he wasn’t cranky, so we soldiered on with the day. We took him swimming, went to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, where he stared at the people sitting next to us the whole meal, and then went to Target.

Charlie and I at the Tulsa Zoo. We both looked how we felt.

We were driving home from dinner when we noticed a conspicuous silence in the backseat. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his eyes closed, pacifier sticking from his mouth, chest rising and falling in the rhythm of sleep.

Halluejuah! began playing in my head. But now, we had a bigger issue. We had to keep him asleep.

When Charlie does sleep in the car, he sleeps fairly well. The problem is, he normally sleeps well when we are driving on the interstate or for some prolonged period of time sans constant breaking and accelerating. We didn’t have that luxury in the middle of Tulsa, waiting at a stoplight.

So instead we decided to go to Target, keep him in the carseat, and wheel him around the store. At the time, as we shopped, I was banking on a long nap from Charlie and an early bedtime, meaning I could catch some of the NBA Playoffs and a little bit of reading before bed.

He woke up after maybe 20 minutes in Target. Still, we saw this as a temporary setback, because we thought he’d be ready for bed. We put him in the portable crib that was in the same room as us. He fell asleep for a few minutes. Then woke up. So we picked him up and put him in the bed – big mistake.

We play with Charlie on our bed often. So when Charlie is put on a bed now, he thinks it’s play time. He bounces up and down, smiles, babbles. Which is very sweet, unless it’s two o’clock in the morning and you’re trying to sleep, in which case the sweetness factor is reduced by a considerable amount and replaced with a “please-for-the-love-of-God-go-to-sleep” factor.

He would sleep for a little bit, but never for long. That night was a blur of snatches of light sleep, broken up by sights of Charlie sitting on his haunches, slapping his hands on Jess’s or my legs, smiling and cooing, done with his brief nap and ready to play again.

We tried putting him in the crib a couple more times to no avail. We all woke up the next morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted, and made to be at the Tulsa Zoo when it opened at nine.

We went back to Target, got some Starbucks and some sundries for the zoo visit, and drove there, yawning all the way.  We put Charlie in the stroller and stumbled into the zoo (an admitted exaggeration, but the image is funny, isn’t it?) took him to look at the monkeys, then lizards and spiders in glass displays.

We were at the zoo for about an hour when we looked down in the stroller and saw him asleep, his face peaceful. It was 11 o’clock, an hour after his designated nap time.

We looked at each other, shrugged, and decided to leave the zoo and head home.

And ironically, he woke up a few minutes after we put him in the car. He stayed awake for the whole ride home, until we went inside and deposited him into the crib, where he rolled onto his stomach and fell asleep almost immediately.

That night, we all slept like babies – a mixed metaphor maybe, given the experience I described above – in our own beds.

And Jess hasn’t texted me many Disney World ads lately.

To Charlie (And Any Other New or Expecting Parents)

Friday, June 29, was my son’s first birthday. I wrote a letter for the adult version of him, if/when he decides to be a parent, explaining some of the things I learned and the complex emotions I’m feeling on his first birthday. But it’s also for any other young or expecting parents, about the challenges and revelations of the first year of parenthood. Maybe you can find some wisdom or some commonalities in it.

 

Charlie,

Today, June 29, marks your first birthday. Your mother and I woke you up this morning by singing “Happy Birthday.” You crawled around the house as usual. You pushed your baby-sized shopping cart across the living room, smiling at us all the while.

This morning, in the shower before work, I cried. I’m still not sure why. I think back to when you were younger, how quickly you’ve grown, and your mom crying in bed last night saying that “It’s moving too fast.” I think about how, before I know it, you will be 18 and graduating high school. I think about how wonderful this small, innocent stage of your life is, and how quickly it is passing, and how it reminds me of how quickly my life is passing.

Charlie as a newborn

Before you were born, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a parent. I wasn’t sure I wanted the responsibility, or the time commitment. And I’m assuming that someday you may feel the same. Someday you may be in the exact same situation that I was, a 20-something early in his career indifferent toward parenthood. Or, maybe you’ll be in the exact same situation that I’m in now, ruminating on your child’s life in lieu of his or her one-year birthday.

In either case, I wanted to draft a letter to the future you – and any other soon-to-be parents or those considering parenthood – about some things I’ve learned in my first year of being father.

3 months

Before we had you, I never realized just how much I had taken my own parents for granted and all the sacrifices they made for me. The first night after you were born was hard. Before you, sleep was the blissful interval between night and morning. The first night with you, I awoke to your cries an hour or two after falling asleep. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, we cared for you, went back to sleep, awoke again – rinse, repeat.

Those nights continued for another six weeks, interrupted by a brief hiatus where you started sleeping through the night. And then, a few months later, you got your first ear infection, and thus ensued six months of on-and-off infections, teething, and who knows what other ailments that bothered you at night. We woke up two to three times a night, all while I commuted two hours a day.

On those sleepless nights, when a tooth was coming in or one of your many ear infections caused your head to throb, after your mother had held you for too long and needed a break, I would hold you and try to console you and often fail. I struggled with that, Charlie. I got frustrated. I was exhausted, and the only thing between me and sleep was your bawling that rang in my ears.

6 months

And then I would imagine myself at your age, my face pinched as I bawled due to some inscrutable discomfort, and my parents consoling me. And I realized that the only reason that I’m here today is because the two people who took care of me thought I was worth the effort.

And you’re worth the effort, too, Charlie.

Another thing you’ve done for me is give me a sense of humanity that I’ve never felt before. Anytime I get mad at other people now, I can easily disarm my frustration by imagining them just as you are now, crawling about the house. You don’t use words that cut or sting – instead, your language is a soft babbling, a cipher yet to be decoded. You don’t know hate, just a raw anger you feel whenever you can’t express yourself. Instead of your personality having already been taken and shaped by the world and its occurrences, you are putty yet to be molded, navigating a world that will reveal itself to you in layers, each one more honest and brutal than the last.

I keep struggling with that. With just how small and innocent you are, soon to be introduced to a world that is neither. You’ll start walking soon, then talking, then reading. We’ll start playing video games and sports together. You’ll go to school, then before we know it you’ll be graduating and going to college (if that’s what you want to do). And along the way you will gain a complex spectrum of emotions, both good and bad. You’ll face all sorts of challenges – broken hearts, dissolving of friendships, sadness, an increased awareness of just how infinitesimal you are in a massive and complex world.

But you’ll realize the happiness, too. The blind joy you have now will evolve into something more sophisticated, one that will have the immeasurable pleasure of getting to read Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings for the first time. The same one that gets to travel to new places, to also find joy in the world’s tangle of cultures, sights and history. The joy of getting your first pet, of falling in love for the first time.

9 months

As I write this, Charlie, I’m starting to realize why I cried this morning. Because on a day like today, I know why parents cry when their child gets married or graduates college or passes some other milestone in their life. Because those parents are thinking back to their children when they were at the same age you are today, and the sheer blissful innocence, and think back to all the days in between and every ounce of time and energy and effort they poured into raising them.

If we could choose otherwise, would we as parents want our children to eternally stay as infants and toddlers? And that’s also why I’m crying, Charlie. Because the answer is no. One day, you will have to face the Real World. Because I know that you have no choice. Part of the reward of parenting is watching you grow into the man you will become.

So whenever you become a dad, and you’re holding your child one night when he or she can’t sleep and you’re exhausted and frustrated and you have to go to work the next day on a few hours of sleep, I want you to think back to this fact. That your mother and I thought you were worth it. That our parents thought we were worth it, and their parents, and their parents. That you and your child wouldn’t be here today without generation after generation of your relatives, or someone else who loved you dearly, thinking you were worth it.

Your child is worth it, too.

I love you so much. Happy Birthday.

Dad

1 year

“Positive” Thinking: I’m Going to be a Dad

One night in late October, I was drifting to sleep when my wife spoke four words into the darkness.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

She said it as she might have said, “I think I forgot to put the leftovers in the fridge.” And though I couldn’t see her in the dark, I assumed she said these words with eyes open, staring at the ceiling, hands resting in her lap as she contemplated whatever sixth sense gave her this impression.

Jess had a habit of doing this, especially early in our relationship. I would be nearly asleep and, out of the darkness, she would bring up a topic of conversation, hoping to discuss it before we went to bed and getting angry when I would only mumble half-responses. Once, she asked me to tell her, “something that you haven’t told me before, but if I knew about it, it would upset me.”

Unfortunately, I was already “asleep” by the time she had asked this, so I wasn’t able to give her a response.

But this night was different. I could tell she had been thinking about it for a while as some circumstantial symptoms accumulated.

I will spare an intricate narration from here, as you no doubt have picked up on where this is going. A trip to Walmart – accompanied by an about-face from Jess, who kept saying that she wasn’t sure why we were going, that she was sure it was “all in her head” – followed by an anxious few minutes pacing in the bathroom eyeing the test on the counter.

But the test came up positive.

So, that’s it. I am to be a father. It’s an odd feeling – it’s a new feeling, something I thought that I couldn’t feel at nearly 30 years of age (I know, the old people are laughing at me right now).

Immediately afterwards, I was shellshocked. Jess and I have always talked about having children, but it had remained a goal in the distant future, something we would always plan but that seemed far away. We had always said we would wait until I was 30 to have a kid, and I had told myself that I would finish a novel before then. That had become somewhat of a milestone in my life for the last few years – that I had to “make it” as a novelist before we had a child, because afterwards there would be no chance. Any free time I would have available would be absorbed by the baby the same way a sponge absorbs excess water.

And I had not reached that milestone. Although I had finished drafts, the elusive Final Draft of a novel had not come yet. Distantly, the pregnancy became a reminder of that failing.

This is not to say that I am disappointed by the pregnancy. On the contrary, I’m very excited. I’m excited to read books with my son (oh yeah, spoiler – we found out the gender last month), to watch him play sports, to watch him grow. To hopefully be a better version of me – if that’s what he wants, after all.

We found out the last weekend in October, and told our parents. The next few weeks we went through the motions of expecting parents – buying books, doing research – but we did so dogmatically, as we didn’t fully believe the news yet (even What to Expect When You’re Expecting lists “not believing you’re actually pregnant” as a symptom).

That symptom was exacerbated when we went to the doctor for our first appointment, and the doctor couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat on the Doppler device.

With smiling reassurances – “I’m sure everything’s fine!” she exclaimed several times – we were escorted to the ultrasound room, only mildly freaking out at this point. We were both thinking the same thing: were we really pregnant? Could the test have been wrong? Is there something wrong with the baby? There were tens of explanations for why she hadn’t been able to find the heartbeat, and our minds grasped the most terrifying ones first.

Jess sat in a chair, her shirt pulled up to reveal her stomach, and a nurse rubbed a wand-like instrument over it. An image corresponding on the television screen in front of us: a small, baby-shaped thing, black-and-white, jerkily kicking within the confines of the uterus?

Looking at it, I could not help but smile. We were going to be parents.

We are going to be parents.

(On a side note, this is the first of what I’m hoping to be regular blog posts again on here. So stay tuned for more in the future.)

 

Responsibility and Sarah McLachlan: Reflecting on Dog Ownership

For a long time, I have been torn between wanting a dog and not wanting the responsibility of a dog. This is because I like my life the way it is – being able to drive to Fayetteville on the weekends or do whatever Jess and I want to do without the baggage of another living thing to care about. (We have two cats, but they don’t count – they’re like robots that you have to feed every once in a while.)

The first dog I almost kept was outside of Carrie’s – my mother-in-law – former office roughly four years ago. I remember he (I’m assuming it was a boy) looked like a Gremlin (in a cute way), was lovable, and made that satisfied blissful face dogs make when you scratch them in the right spot.

We were staying at Carrie’s house that night, and as we fell asleep I talked to Jess about taking the dog home with us. It belonged to the neighbor’s, Carrie said, but it was an outside dog they didn’t take care of, and they wouldn’t really miss it if it was gone.

“If you want to keep him, then let’s go get him,” Jess said.

But even as we talked about it I knew it wasn’t a possibility. We lived in a 500 square foot apartment in Russellville. On top of that, the apartment didn’t allow pets. On top of that, we had already adopted two cats that were living in the apartment (yes, we were rebels).

Bringing a dog into that situation was simply unrealistic, not to mention that we didn’t feel ready for the responsibility, both personally and financially. Jess was still in college, I was cobbling together adjunct instructing and freelance writing. We could barely make ends meet as is.

In short, it wasn’t the right moment in our life. The stars had yet to align.

So we didn’t adopt it. Months later, I asked my brother-in-law about the dog, who said he had disappeared sometime before. He attributed his disappearance to an apparently common phenomenon in Huntsville, where dogs are regularly abducted and, he said, “experimented on” by some unknown sociopath.

The second dog I almost kept I nearly ran over. I lived in Russellville at the time, and the dog sprinted across the street in front of me, causing me to slam on my brakes. I got out and corralled the dog, which was small and black with beady eyes, the type that looks pathetic in an incredibly cute way.

I took it to my parents’ house and kept it in their backyard. It actually broke out of my parents’ backyard, causing me to come back over to recapture it along with one of our neighbors, who volunteered to take it to the pound.

I remember handing the dog to the neighbor, feeling that I was sending him to his death. The Russellville Animal Shelter is known more for its euthanasia rates than its adoption rates. I faced the same dilemma countless people have faced before – the impracticality of saving the life of an animal when you don’t have the means to do it.

But at that point I was worn down by fate and at the same time motivated by it. I often thought about these dogs afterwards, imagining how their lives played out, most of the time thinking in worst-case scenarios. After that, I told myself that the next stray dog we happened across we would keep.

That didn’t end up being true, however. I got a job at UAFS, and for a while our lives were stray-free. This fall, however, I would pass the occasional stray dog on the way to work. I would watch them watch me from the side of the road as I passed, then I watched them recede in the rearview mirror. Sometimes they stayed where they were, other times they began stepping their way through the high grass beside the road in the opposite direction, in pursuit of more interesting (and safer) endeavors than car-watching.

Then, just over a month-and-a-half ago, Jess asked if I wanted to do the Doggie Weekend Getaway at the Sebastian County Humane Society (this program is essentially “rent a dog for a weekend and see if you want to keep him”).

Even after all I had said about wanting to adopt the next dog I came across, I was reluctant. I thought about it in the most hyperbolic terms possible — Do I really want to give up my free time? Do I want my life to change? As if all my free time would be taken up caring for a dog.

Getting a dog was like the point of no return. And where it was taking us was out of the realm of young adults and into the land of grownups. And it was life-changing. This was more than simply adopting a dog. This was taking the first step in burdening ourselves with the responsibility of Normal Adults. This was the trial run before having kids. This sounds hyperbolic, but it’s more true than you think – adopting a dog was the first step in growing up.

It was the natural next step. I wanted fate to bring the dog to me. But maybe fate was doing just that, in a weird way. Life had moved forward fairly steadily for Jess and I. We were now married, both of us with full-time jobs and our own house. We had the means to care for a dog.

So we went to the humane society. The room with the small dogs was in a small room the width of a hallway, cages with dogs lining one side and glass lining the other, so people could look in without having to enter the room. We had seen several dogs on the shelter’s Facebook page that we liked, but some of them weren’t available for adoption yet, and others barked and did other things we found obnoxious.

I noticed one dog that stood out to me. He was a dark-haired dog, his eyebrows long tufts of hair that drooped in front of his eyes. He stood on his hind legs, resting his paws on the wiring of the cage. Where other dogs barked, he simply observed.

I could feel Sarah McLachlan singing to me as I looked at him.

We took him home for the weekend, took him back Monday, and adopted him.

This is Fitz. You can see his eyes, now that he’s gotten a haircut.

There are doubts, of course. When you’re debating something that changes your routine, something that gives you yet another responsibility, you always think in worst-case scenarios.

But most of those concerns quickly faded. I could insert all the stuff here about how we fell in love with him, about how we couldn’t imagine life without him now.

But I’ll leave it at this: we gave an animal a better life. And that makes me happy, even if it is our responsibility.

We are already weird dog people that buy our dog raincoats and sweaters.

 

Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling

I’m a little late getting to this one, but oh well:

J.K. Rowling had good reason to shroud her detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under a pseudonym. 

Sure, it is a Rowling Novel in a lot of ways, boasting several of a Rowling Novel’s trademark qualities: a myriad of colorful and well-realized characters, sharp dialogue, and a masterful use of language. 

But we didn’t fall in love with Harry Potter just for the characters, or the descriptions. We became enamored with the series because it was full of adventure and mystery — and engaging storytelling. 

In other words, it had a plot. 

So does The Cuckoo’s Calling. The only problem is the plot moves at a glacial pace. The stage is set early enough, with the brother of a famous and wealthy supermodel who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances coming to our protagonist, private eye Cormoran Strike, convinced that she was murdered. He asks for Strike to investigate the circumstances surrounding her death. 

Interesting enough, although somewhat standard fare for a detective novel. Strike, who is strapped for cash and who bill collectors have on speed dial, accepts the case, less out of interest for the case and more for the exorbitant payment the brother is willing to provide. 

In a Rowling Novel, you would expect the novel to take off from here, wouldn’t you? You would expect maybe a thrilling chase between Strike and the would-be killer at some point, you would expect the mystery rising to a crescendo that is finally resolved in a satisfying and unlikely fashion. 

Instead, you get — nothing. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. You get scene after scene after scene after scene after scene after scene after scene (repeat this fifty more times in your head) of Strike talking to various people who knew Lula Landry, the supermodel. Each of them opines freely on Landry and the other various characters surrounding them, with each of them liking and disliking various characters (that makes them more complex!). 

The first three-quarters of the book are like this — tedious, plodding, and peripatetic. Our hero spends nearly every scene going to restaurants, homes, photo shoots, and clubs to talk to people. And scenes with just people talking is fine, until you think about all the other things that normally happen — and should happen — in a novel in between people talking.

As I said before, Rowling has a gift for characterization and making those characters come alive through dialogue. While those skills are on full display here, the problem is that she doesn’t employ her characters in any dynamic way — characters just sitting around talking don’t make for very engaging fiction. 

After the talking, the novel ends in generic detective-novel fashion, with Strike becoming the Detective Who Knows All, stringing together a convoluted theory that conveniently ties together all the loose ends in the book. Still, the ending is somewhat satisfying, if not predictable. 

Strike, for what it’s worth, is a fairly interesting character. He’s an Iraq veteran, having lost his leg in the war, replacing it with a prothesis. He’s smart, resourceful, and perceptive. He’s a hero we can root for in a detective novel. 

If only he could’ve been placed in a better story. 

Any review comes back to the question: Should you, Dear Reader, read this novel? If you’re looking for a mystery replication of the magic Rowling had with Harry Potter, it’s not here. It is, however, a solid, by-the-numbers detective story that could’ve used better pacing. Ultimately, it’s worth a read if you’re a fan of Rowling. Just make sure to curb your expectations. I can’t help but wonder if Rowling was sending a message by publishing The Cuckoo’s Calling under a pseudonym, to avoid having its deficiencies held under the same microscope that The Casual Vacancy was. 

Score: C+

A Good Thing, In a Bad Way

It’s probably a good thing, in a bad way, that the only real arguments my wife and I have are about fingernails.

I am an inveterate fingernail biter. I freely admit this is a disgusting habit, but I have accepted that fingernail biting will forever be a part of me. Trying to stop fingernail biting would be like trying to stop a tick from sucking blood or a monkey from flinging feces. And yes, those are intentionally disgusting similes.

My wife, on the other hand, has not accepted this fact. In fact, she has undertaken a crusade to stop me from biting my fingernails once and for all. She has waged the War on Fingernails for the last four years, and it’s been about as successful as any of our government’s War on [Insert Bad Thing Here].

Most of my fingernail biting — or, attempted fingernail biting — occurs when I drive. She will be sitting in the passenger seat, watching the road, while I glance her way to see if she is paying attention. Then, I will subtly begin biting an overgrown nail — as subtly as you can bite a fingernail, that is — all the while glancing in her direction.

She will be looking at her phone, or staring out her window, or something equally oblivious. Then, like Mr. Miyagi reaching out to snatch a fly, her hand will shoot out and slap my hand away from my mouth. Or, she’ll go the more subtle route, asking me if I’m hungry.

“No,” I reply. “Why?”

“Because you must be if you’re gnawing your fingers off.”

And so on.

But if there’s one thing fingernail biting has taught me, it’s that a person is like a house. When you buy your house, you invite Murphy into your house to wreak havoc. If you’ve got an older A/C, get ready for it to go out. If the kitchen faucet is leaky, get ready to have to replace it.

What I mean is, houses are susceptible to things going wrong.

It’s the same with people. I read and write nearly every day, I exercise regularly, I am learning how to cook, I’m trying to become more of a woodworker. I’m happily married. If you asked me, I’d say there’s not much wrong in my life.

Then I go to the dentist, who tells me that I’m an excessive teeth grinder. Yes, I am slowly grinding my teeth to nubs. Also, I repeat myself a lot. Like, all the time. And I talk a lot. And I’m socially awkward. And I have road rage (I’ll save that for another blog post).

It is really, really hard — impossible, really — to be the person I want to be. In life, you have to pick and choose what you’re going to like about yourself, and then come to terms with what you dislike.

I could be a billionaire who donated 90% of his salary to charity and spent 80 hours a week working at a school for blind deaf schoolchildren; I could be the healthiest person on the planet, cooking every meal for myself, exercising daily; I could have an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, be the smartest man alive.

And still, at the end of the day, I’d be a Fingernail Biter. I’d still be driving down the road and still have my hand slapped away from my mouth when I noticed a particularly savory nail protruding from the tip of my finger.

If awkwardness, teeth grinding, loquacity and road rage are the worst things I have to accept about myself, I’d say that’s a good thing. In a bad way, of course.