It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  If I were God, there would be hell to pay for that kind of insensitivity, and I would also make sure that every one of those plastic-helmeted motherfuckers in Devo had about five kids with Down’s syndrome that they had to one day explain that song to.

  But, you know, if I were God, I’d change a lot of things.

  Anyway, with that one horrifying exception that happens at the end of the party, the music is cool, the kids are bowling and having fun, some of the adults have beers, and all of this is so unlike the usual kids birthday party, where you usually stuff a whole bunch of kids into someone’s house and play really horrible music and they all get squirrely and overstimulated and everybody goes home a little crankier than when they came. We eat great pizza, not that cardboard shit that the chains throw in front of kids because they can get away with it, and it is really nice. I like Rowen’s classmates a lot, and I am in awe of this party.

  And as we with there and eat our pizza, I get this uncontrollable urge to cry. I run to the bathroom, and I stand there and just cry and cry. I am just so sad. There is something about the fact that this party doesn’t suck that makes me miss Kirsten so much it almost physically hurts. Hell, it does physically hurt–it makes me cry in a way that I am unable to hold back, which almost never happens. I want her here, enjoying this party with us. I want her back, as Michael Jackson said. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Ooo-oo Baby.

  Out of the Mouths

  Driving home from the party, we have to go by our old house. When we turn down the street, Rowen says, “Hey! We’re not going to the old house! We’re going to our new house!” and I say, “Yeah, but we have to go by the old house to get to the new house from here. Believe me, I don’t even want to be on this street.”

  She digests that for a moment and says, “Why don’t you like the old house? I liked it.”

  “Well,” I say, “It’s complicated. One day I’ll explain the whole story of why we had to move.” We have tried to protect her from the horrible reality of the Troll, especially since we don’t really want her to know that it was her walking around that set him off, because God knows how that information could screw up a kid’s mind.

  She, however, is a smart kid and will not be put off. “You can tell me now,” she says, and I come back with, “well, there are a lot of reasons,” still trying to stall, and she says, “Tell me what they are.”

  “Ok,” I say. “Well, you know how three people owned that house, and we were one of the people? Well, it’s just easier to make decisions and stuff when only one person owns the house, and we are the only ones who own our new house.

  “Also,” I decide to go for it, because why not, “remember that guy who yelled at Mommy?” And Rowen says, “No….” which is nice, because we were convinced she was scarred for life by that whole incident, and I say, “You know, that guy who yelled at Mommy in the driveway one morning when you were going to school?”

  “Oh yeah!”

  “Well, that guy was just not a nice guy, and he used to do stuff like yell like that, and we just didn’t want to live around him anymore.”

  She digests that, then says, in this totally matter-of -fact, almost bored tone,“Well….I guess he’ll probably yell at other people now.”

  I just start to laugh. “Roo,” I say, “You are so right….” and I am still laughing, and she adds, “He will probably yell at the people who moved in after us,” and all I can do is say, “Yes he will,” and laugh some more.

  I Got the Luck

  My mom seems kind of contrite the day after her outburst. I come home from work and find the house filled with a delicious smell–she has made black bean soup, and it turns out to be surprisingly good. I gave up on black bean soup a few years ago because I just couldn’t make it interesting, but this has a little extra zing, which she reveals comes from a can of tomato sauce. Plus there is liquid smoke involved, and I love liquid smoke so much I could probably eat it over ice cream.

  We have a very nice evening, and things seem back to normal–we are relaxed and enjoying each other’s company, laughing and joking and generally having a pretty good time. She makes a couple of conversational salvos about yesterday–“Yesterday was a tough day for me” and such like things, but I don’t take the bait because I don’t want to ruin a nice evening with a Meaningful Talk.

  The next day, Rowen and I are walking home from school holding hands, and she is in a really good mood, and we are talking and laughing, and these are some of my favorite times, when the two of us are not really doing anything but enjoying each other’s company. As we reach our street, out of nowhere she starts doing a little dance and chanting, “I got the luck! I got the luck! I got the luck!” (This bears a strong resemblance to her “I’m the bomb” chant and dance that she did a few weeks earlier) I have no idea where this came from or exactly what it means, but I look at her smiling and jumping up and down on the sidewalk and I am just so full of love I could explode, (and I know that’s one of those sappy parent things to say, but it’s really true) and I think about how I have this great little girl, and a mom who is cool and who I really love, and a wife who I love more than anything, and my own cozy home, and even though Kirsten is in the hospital I feel really happy and blessed and I just start jumping up and down on the sidewalk with Rowen, the two of us going, “I got the luck! I got the luck! I got the luck!”

  Kirsten, Baxter, Newt

  “They finally got me a new pump,” Kirsten announces over the phone one day. “I love it so much. I think I’m going to have to leave you for it.” She has been agitating for a new pump basically ever since she got in here. She has had three or four things pumping into her at all times, and each substance has its own pump, and each pump hangs on this pole that is huge and sturdy, and Kirsten must wheel the entire thing, which probably weighs at least fifty pounds, with her every time she goes to the bathroom or gets out of bed, and it’s a gigantic pain in the ass.

  But now she has gotten one of the brand new pumps that can pump three things at once. This is much lighter than three separate pumps, so it can be attached to a much lighter pole, and it continues to be amazing what constitutes good news these days, but there you go. I go and visit her and she is just elated. She still has to drag a pole with her everywhere she goes, but it is much easier than before, and it feels like a partial reprieve to her.

  I look at the pump and notice that it’s called the “Colleague 3” and I tell Kirsten that she really should have told me she was leaving me for a colleague. The company that makes the pump is called Baxter, so she says, “Yeah, his name is Baxter. He’s been pumping me all morning.”

  We laugh, and then she says, “I’m sorry, but I just felt like I had to preempt you before you pulled a Gingrich on me.” Newt, you may remember, the stalwart of the family values party, served his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital undergoing treatment for cancer. And while I rolled my eyes at that factoid when I first heard it, now I really understand in my bones what a complete asshole you have to be to do something like that. And that makes me almost wish I believed what all the lunatics who loved that guy believe, because then I could at least take comfort in the knowledge that Satan is devising some really horrible punishment for him as we speak, but as it is I’ll have to content myself with the knowledge that he is fat and out of a job, and if he would only lose his home and get addicted to crack and have to beg for change on the streets that might start to even things up as far as I’m concerned, but of course he is probably pulling down fat speaking fees and doing all the lucrative shit that failed politicians get to do, while, for example, the guy who wrote “96 Tears” is probably pushing a broom somewhere.

  Anyway, I am in no danger of pulling a Gingrich. Kirsten’s Baxter joke just reminds me again, not that I really need reminding, that I am lucky enough to have found the perfect woman for me, and how many people in their whole lives ever get to say that?

  Cruel to Be Kind

  I go over to see Kirsten one day, and after passing t
hrough the airlock, I see Dr. J. I spoke to Kirsten earlier, and she told me that she had gotten up in the middle of the night and almost passed out, and that in the morning the nurses were saying things like, “you really gave us a scare last night,” and other such reassurances, so I decide to ask Dr. J what happened. She is her usual friendly, upbeat self, and tells me that Kirsten has low blood pressure, once again using crystal clear analogies (she compares blood pressure to a gas gauge, by way of explaining why they keep taking Kirsten’s both standing up and laying down) and speaking in a methodical but not condescending way, and reassuring me. She is both incredibly knowledgeable and good at the people stuff, which, to judge by our encounters with everybody else, is basically unheard of in the medical profession.

  I think once again about how lucky we are to have her on Kirsten’s case. And then I think that it might not all have to do with luck. In some strange way, having Dr. J in charge of Kirsten’s treatment is the result of some small nice thing I did years ago. Kirsten and I were on the membership committee at church, and one of the things we were working on was being more welcoming to newcomers. See, after church we have this coffee hour thing where everybody socializes, and the people at our church are, as I keep saying, these really nice, kind caring people, but everybody just ignores the newcomers and they stand there, coffee in hand, with this pathetic, “won’t somebody please talk to me” look on their faces while all the nice, kind members of the church are running around to talk to the other nice, kind people and leaving these people feeling like the kid who didn’t get picked for the kickball team.

  Now I have become one of those people who ignores newcomers, because I have to chase Rowen around, and I want to check in with the seven nice people that I only see on Sunday, and also I spend so much time in church school that I’ve had a few embarrassing conversations where I go, “So, are you new here?” and they answer, looking kind of annoyed, “Well, I’ve been coming for six months.” But we met Dr. J pre-Rowen, and Kirsten and I remembered all too painfully how much it sucked to stand there in coffee hour feeling invisible because we did it for weeks, so we made it our mission to talk to people we didn’t recognize, and one day I wasn’t really feeling like it, because the fact is that these conversations frequently suck in the way that first conversations tend to: “So, do you live in the neighborhood? Oh. What do you do for a living?” Ack. It’s an ironic feature of the Unitarian coffee hour that religion, which is, after all, the one thing you may have in common with someone you meet for the first time at a church, is never discussed. This is partly I think because Unitarians are so afraid of offending anybody that we welcome everybody with a vaguely religious leaning into the church, so you have Christians and Buddhists and even atheists (go figure) all coming to the same church, so talking about religion can be opening a can of worms, but also I think it’s that Unitarians tend to be college-educated liberals, and we are sort of embarrassed by our religiosity, like talking about God will immediately make us seem like one of those Bible-Thumping, gay-hating, secretly-dating-a-hooker guys you see on TV.

  Anyway, one morning I wasn’t feeling like having any awkward conversations, but Kirsten poked me in the ribs until I went up to talk to this lady I didn’t recognize, and this turned out to be Dr. J., and as I mentioned, she was a “church friend” for years before she became Kirsten’s doctor, and she always says that my saying hi to her that one morning was the reason she joined the church, because she was on like her third Sunday of standing there feeling stupid, and she said she had decided to never come back if someone didn’t talk to her, and I did.

  And in the middle of all this shit, this horrible shit that has made me question just about everything I or anybody else believes, here is something good, something that makes sense: one day I did something nice, admittedly more out of a sense of duty than sheer friendliness, and also to stop the sharp pain in my ribs, but still, I did something nice, and as a result we have this incredibly bright and kind person in charge of the fight against Kirsten’s cancer. It’s kind of humbling, in a way–how often do we have opportunities to do some nice little thing, but we blow it off because nobody’s elbowing us to do it?

  I have an opportunity to find out a few days later. It’s the last day before vacation, school is out, and I am running up the stairs to go get some free food, and I see one of my advisees on the stairs, and she has been having a real crisis lately, like a really super hard time, like a time as hard or maybe harder than mine, and she says, “Oh, my bus pass!” just like that. And I get annoyed because she wasn’t in advisory to get her bus pass because she always spends advisory time with another advisor, and as stupid as it is, I think that must feed my sense of social insecurity, and I know that’s pathetic–who’s the seventeen year old here anyway? I am running up the stairs and she expects me to run back down into the basement without even bothering to ask me politely. So I say, “Yeah. Your bus pass is downstairs,” and keep moving, and she gets mad and storms out of the building, and I immediately feel like a shit, remembering that I’ve just been shitty to a seventeen year old in crisis, and I have this vanity about having a good relationship with the kids, and what have I done here except shit on somebody a little lower down in the shit than me. What I said may not sound that bad, but it was–it was, and as Unitarian I use this word carefully, a sin because I was deliberately cruel. I knew as I was saying it that I was going to piss her off. I’m like the little brother who kicks the dog because there are no people younger than me, and while I have been pretty proud of the way I’ve held it together during this whole thing, today I am ashamed of myself. One small act of kindness had big repercussions in my life. I can only hope that one small act of cruelty doesn’t.

  What You Need

  My mom has a 6:00 a.m. flight, so she needs to get out early. We call for a cab the night before, and it’s supposed to come at 4:45. Ugh. The plan is that she will sneak out and get into the cab and be on her way and not wake anybody else up. This is kind of key for me, because Rowen had woken up at 4:30 the night before crying about being scared of monsters, and since it was after 5:00 by the time she got back to sleep, I never really got back to sleep, and the fact is that Rowen has woken up in the middle of the night scared of monsters for the last five nights in a row, which I guess is her way of dealing with the stress of missing her mom. I can’t really complain, I mean her very attractive teacher told me the other day that they haven’t noticed any change in her at all at school, which is good, because, you know, she’s four, maybe she would start biting or throwing poop or other horrifying anti-social behavior. But she’s not. She just wakes up crying every night. And this wears me out. When I finally do get an uninterrupted night’s sleep a few nights later, I am amazed at how much difference it makes.

  So I am a mess. I am getting through at school because I have taught this stuff before, but I am feeling guilty because I’m not really at the top of my game, and since I am going to the hospital during all my free time, nothing is getting corrected, and the last week before vacation is tough under the best of circumstances, but it is wearing me down right now. Anyway, I hear my mom leaving, which is difficult to avoid given the fact that we live in five rooms and the door is right outside my bedroom. No problem. But then I wait to hear a little honk, or the heavy thunk of a cab door, and I don’t. After several minutes, I hear her come up and go to the bathroom and then go back down the stairs. Minutes go by, and I still hear no thunk. I am clearly not going to get back to sleep until I satisfy my curiosity, so I throw some clothes on and head out into the hallway. I see my mom standing by the door. She says, “I may need to press you into service. They still haven’t come.” It is now 5:15, half an hour after the cab was supposed to come.

  “Did you call them?” I ask. “No,” she says, like it didn’t even occur to her. Now it’s not that driving her to the airport will be such a hassle–there won’t be much traffic at this hour, and Kirsten’s mom is also here to look after Rowen, but Jesus, how long was she
going to wait before calling them? I get that annoyed, “Why do I have to do everything?” feeling, and I call them and they say they will be here in five minutes. They haven’t come after five minutes, so we go get in the car, and just as I am starting the car, the cab comes. I don’t really feel like driving, and anyway I know the cab will bust all eight cylinders of his monstrous vehicle to get to the airport as fast as he can and probably get her there much faster, so I put her into the cab and come back inside and lie in bed and don’t sleep.

  Later that day I am on my way to the hospital and I call to make sure she got in ok, and she did, and she tells me that my aunt Margie cleaned her entire house while she was gone, I am talking about scrubbing the kitchen, flowers on the table, the whole deal, and my mom is literally crying because she is so touched.

  And I know this makes me a bad person, but it is all I can do to not say, voice dripping with sarcasm, “Yeah, it sure is nice to have someone take care of you, isn’t it?” Or I guess maybe I’m not such a bad person because I don’t end up saying every shitty thing that comes into my mind. I am annoyed, because being taken care of is what I really want and need at this point. I am getting up in the middle of the night every night, I am running around trying to do everything, I am exhausted, and I just feel like I really would have liked to have someone take care of me. And my mom just can’t. I mean, it’s not like she did nothing, she did a lot of things–she hung our Christmas decorations, she took Rowen to school every day, she went grocery shopping, but the logistical support was not overwhelming the way that my aunt’s scrubbing my mom’s house was. Stuff got done at a maintenance level, which is admittedly more than I could have ever done on my own, but I never had that “Relax, I’ll take care of everything” feeling. And I was keenly aware the whole time that my mom had this agenda about bonding with Rowen, and as her outburst showed, she can’t really take care of me emotionally, so I just feel like a petulant little kid when I hear that someone has done this overwhelming nice thing for my mom, because that’s what I want.