he stands in his crib
smiling and waving at me
where have ten months gone?
by James Brush
Tag: parenthood
The grackles returned as is their wont around the first of the month. They spread out this time of year thus I only have five or six come around so the mockingbirds and blue jays still get their shot at the suet feeders.
I haven’t been filling the platform feeder as regularly as in the past. Too many mammals coming around and with a little boy, I’m inclined to keep it that way for a while. So it’s just suet and finch feeders for the most part, which the mammals don’t go for. And, with fewer doves hogging the yard, I’m seeing more mockingbirds and cardinals come around.
There’s also a nest in the nest box by the porch. I saw a chickadee hanging around the other morning and the nest doesn’t look like a wren’s nest, which is what I usually find in the nest box, so I’m hoping we’ll see some chickadees unless I scared them away when I opened the box to check it unaware that there would actually be anything in it (it hasn’t been used since 2009).
I didn’t do Project FeederWatch this year, but the usual winter suspects came around: ruby-crowned kinglet, yellow-rumped warbler, chipping sparrow and orange-crowned warbler. No American goldfinches this year, but the lesser goldfinches are here as always.
So spring is springing and the birds are coming around singing and each day there seems to be something new to show my son as we stand out on the porch listening to birds, though his favorite activities are waving at the dogs and laughing at the wind chimes. Through him, I’m seeing new wonders everywhere. The world is chock full of them.
What to say about 2011? There are two 2011’s really, neatly divided by a Sunday in late June. Prior to that my year was filled with reading and writing poetry, birding, blogging, the occasional video. The other 2011 was the beginning of parenthood.
It’s hard to imagine any of my previous 41 years have been as life-altering as 2011. Becoming a parent for the first time in June changed every routine in my life. For the better, always for the better, though now that we’re 6 months in we’re finally starting to get some sleep and even a few moments here and there to do things for ourselves. For me, that’s blogging, writing and reading.
Anyway, as usual, here’s my end-of-year reading list. Many of these were chapbooks and most of my reading was done prior to June; in fact, all but the last four were read before June, and I’m not quite through with the last one. Still, here ’tis:
- Everything’s Eventual – Stephen King
- American Primitive – Mary Oliver
- The Planets – Dava Sobel
- The Gunslinger – Stephen King (reread)
- American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 1 – John Hollander, ed.
- Blameless Mouth – Jessica Fox-Wilson
- I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (reread)
- Scene of the Accident – Howie Good
- Disaster Mode – Howie Good
- Pay Attention: A River of Stones Anthology – Fiona Robyn & Kaspalita, eds.
- Speaker for the Dead – Orson Scott Card
- Xenocide – Orson Scott Card
- Shannon – Campbell McGrath
- Woods, Shore, Desert – Thomas Merton
- Love is a UFO – Howie Good
- The Happiest Baby on the Block – Harvey Karp, MD
- The Baby Owner’s Manual – Louis Borgenicht, MD & Joe Borgenicht
- Your Baby’s First Year – The American Academy of Pediatrics
- What to Expect the First Year – Murkoff, Mazel, Eisenberg & Hathaway
- Watermark – Clayton T. Michaels (reread)
- The Book of Ystwyth: Six Poets on the Art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins – Bonta, James, Selch, Urquhart, Davies & Youmans
- Tender Mercies – mark Stratton
- Dark & Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine – NS
- Children of the Mind – Orson Scott Card
- Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer – Robert Swartwood, ed.
- Greeks Bearing Gifts – Joseph Harker
- Postmarks – mark Stratton
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (reread)
…and a bunch of kids books…
There were no great obsessions this year like last year’s Dark Tower series, though I did go back and reread The Gunslinger. Speaking of rereading, the best book on the list was a reread: Cloud Atlas. Regarding new books, my favorites were probably The Book of Ystwyth, a book so beautiful, I didn’t want to stop looking at it much less reading it. Other favorites were Shannon, Dark and Like a Web and Speaker for the Dead. Of course the run of baby care books were probably the most important and certainly the most useful ones. At 6 months in, though, I find we’re referring to them less and trusting ourselves more.
And though I haven’t been blogging or writing much lately, I have been preparing a short poetry collection. Birds Nobody Loves will be available sometime in mid-January. I’ll post more about it in the coming weeks. Perhaps after I finish that, I’ll start blogging more.
Finally, to those of you who come round here, read and leave comments, thank you. And have a happy 2012.
so many acorns on the ground…
someday I’ll get to explain
these to my little boy
how they become trees
with nothing more than water
sun and a little help
from squirrels and blue jays
things about time and the
distance to the sky
and through years
how the trees will still be young
when he is old and
I am gone and there will
still be acorns on the ground
a trail of breadcrumbs
leading back to a forest where
we all grow toward the light
—
I wrote this last spring when my wife was pregnant and the ground was littered with acorns like I’ve never seen. You couldn’t walk down the street without a constant crunch-crack underfoot, and as I walked the dogs on those spring evenings, my mind was always on my soon-to-arrive son and I wondered—still do—what he’ll make of this world.
Anyway, I forgot I’d written this one and so many months later, when there aren’t so many acorns lying about, here ’tis.
This blog turns six today. Much has changed in that time, especially in the past few months as I’ve become a dad and find less time for writing. A lot of things in life suddenly seem to… I don’t know… shine?… in new ways. Everything I do and see comes filtered through this peculiar prism. Shine isn’t quite right, though because there’s murkiness too, flowers lit by starlight. An opaque shining, if such a thing can be, because it’s a matter of depth too. There are layers to every decision, every action, and every thing I see or read about that weren’t there before. The recent death of a good friend, a news story about a child abduction, species sliding toward extinction, this infernal drought.
And so I’m not always quite sure what to write or even think about these things. The world is strange and different now, and that is wonderful for someone like me who likes a healthy dose of the unknown out there in front of me. But as much as there is to process and contemplate, I find on most days that I’d rather sit around and play with my almost four-month-old son than sit in front of the computer trying to make sense of it all. Maybe sense shouldn’t be made, at least not yet.
Since the little guy was born, we’ve had to rethink every aspect of how we do even the most mundane things. Not why we do them but the actual mechanics of getting out the door to go to a restaurant or over to someone’s house. The dishes or dinner. I used to buy corn tortillas and fry my own taco shells, now they come from a box. Finding time to read or write is trickier than ever. Still, I’m a writer and a writer’s gotta write. Right? (Ouch, couldn’t resist).
That’s still there, then, albeit slightly submerged and waiting to be fished out. Perhaps that’s why I find myself writing more these days on scraps of paper and in the notes app on my phone, but lately, I’ve been wanting to get back into writing and photography and posting more regularly. I still have this love affair with blogging, I guess, and I miss it even if blogging feels more and more like a transitional moment, the CD step between analog and mp3.
Now, at six, I’m hoping to get back to posting more regularly, at some point if not right away. This blog has opened too many doors and led me to too many interesting people and places, so I’m not done even if I may have been a little quieter of late. So, thanks for reading, you happy few who come ‘round here still. As always, I do appreciate it.
How many times to sing
“Redemption Song”? The first
song I thought to sing him
when he needed singing in the NICU
Some other parent sang nursery rhymes
in curtained spaces with beeping monitors
to metronome the time
Not knowing any rhymes, I went with Marley
it stuck and now it’s ours
Quiet, now, he settles in to rocking
my voice trails off to mumbles
this song of freedom…
Moonlight, thunder moon
streaming in through the live oak
the passing hours marked
by moonlight dropping down the blinds
The dogs dream
their twitch-footed dreams
the squirrel finally caught,
whimpers and low growls
The fan spins
beneath its spider shadow
ceiling jungle
Dim lines trace frames
black pictures on the wall
beyond the room… I can’t see them
but I imagine what they might be
surely not the same images
hung there years ago, not
at this hour. They’ll have shifted
become things I can’t conceive,
ideas of things that can’t exist
in morning light
Everything is strange now
and somehow more easily understood
His breath slows against my shoulder,
he sighs much like the dogs,
and I watch the late minutes tick
through this room of simplest
dreams
Every summer, it takes a little more time to get used to the heat, but this summer it’s come on so fast and blinding, I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it. Late last month (where did that month go?), when I walked down to the pond after work on Friday, it was 102 degrees out. I joked that I was going out to look at the vulture and grackle and that’s mainly what I saw, although down by the pond, I did see a pair of black-bellied whistling ducks. It’s only the second time I’ve seen whistling ducks in the neighborhood, the first being May 27, 2009. Two years to the day. I couldn’t help but wonder if it’s the same two ducks. What do they make of the heat? Maybe this is just a stopover for them on the way to somewhere cooler.
The paper says that in the next century Austin’s climate will come to resemble that of San Angelo as the Chihuahua Desert continues it’s slow eastward creep. I like deserts, and don’t care much for Austin’s humidity, but damn, I’d hate to see this town turn into a desert town and I shudder to think what the effects might be on the golden-cheeked warblers and black-capped vireos not to mention all the other less-endangered wildlife.
That’s a lot of heat to get used to, but I usually do get used to it. It’s not uncommon to go cycling when the temperatures are in triple digits, though that gets harder with each passing year. I like to think that’s because the heat is just more brutal, and I think I’ll keep telling myself that.
I don’t know how often I’ll be posting in the near future. Between the writing and the posting of this we had a baby. We’ll call him Fox Mercury around here, though I doubt I’ll write about him much on the open web. Still, I’m a father now and already that awesome responsibility and awe is settling into me and so it’ll likely inform my writing and it’s already impacting how I think about and see the world. It’s odd… we’ve known he was coming for months and yet everything changed in an instant.
Here at the beginning of this new adventure, it seems appropriate to be looking at these pictures of the neighborhood trails I can’t wait to show him. But first, lots of sleeplessness and tired wonder. It may be quiet around here in the coming weeks, but I’m still writing (but behind on posting) my daily stones at a gnarled oak, but that’s not about the blogging.