by Ben George
And at that show, the kindly floor manager—the same one who had come and gotten the girls in Seattle—told the girls he’d see what he could do at this show.
True to his word, once the concert began he did indeed find them, and brought them up to the front row, made a place for these two girls, eleven and fourteen years old, rather than for the less chastely dressed twenty-somethings who were screaming and clamoring for those same places. And the country rock star at one point wandered over to my girls and leaned down, took each of their hands, and gave each hand a princely kiss, before continuing on; and despite my belief, my understanding, that magic, sweetness, goodness, can exist in the world, it did seem like over-the-top luck.
It occurred to me, driving back home, that early autumn night—four hours back up into the mountains—how strange and wonderful it was, that the girls should be able to continue to access such magic: of course their goals, their dreams, should be met; they were my girls, did I not want everything in the world for them? And this even though the object of their dream, the country rock star (or at least his management committee), had screened and deflected our ridiculous efforts for an actual meeting.
The world simply would not have that. And yet was there not plenty of magic already, for such things to be happening despite the deflections? And the most wonderful part of all—experiencing not the completion of the desire, but instead, the desire itself, unending.
And best of all, I knew these things—that we were trafficking in magic, despite our failure—even as the girls were unaware of it: unaware of this distance, in so many of our lives, between the sleepwalking world above and that magic vein, like a wild river, just below. The magic vein was still all they knew—where not only was almost nothing impossible, but better, where almost any noble dream was still attainable, or at least probable.
It’s been nine months since our last concert. The movie deal fell apart, as is, I am told, the natural order of such things—the contact who claimed to have the inside track was just bullshitting, stringing me along the way my agent and screenwriter friends said he was. I’ve come to a bit of a dead end, creatively, on this venture. The star got married, moved on to a new phase in his life, and in the meantime, our lives are moving on. Some days it seems that the ticking clock is becoming more noticeable—or as if certain other things around that clock are becoming quieter. It’s hard to explain—hard to pin down the absences of things that never really were.
Lowry, at eleven, is still a firm and full believer in miracles, but—and I knew this day would come—Mary Katherine is becoming increasingly a citizen of this world, in which there are other things to look at instead of, or in addition to, that strange bright river beneath us, which informs, or once informed, so many of our dreams.
I would still very much like to put it—a meeting, an interview, a story—together, not so much before the country rock star passes on to the relative oblivion and larger irrelevance that awaits all of us, but even more quickly than that—before a girl totally grows up. That part will be wonderful, too, but I still cannot help wanting a little more time.
There is an element of foolishness, and audacity, in any magic. You have to keep hoping and believing, and yet you also have to live a life. The desire for some magical thing can and will drift on. You can’t spend your life waiting for those strange little windows of magic, or near magic—moments made up of the curious and invisible fermentation of that sustained desire and belief, moments when the dreamer stands beside that river, moments when all the conditions for a miracle are ripe.
Instead, you go on with your life. You live your life, you wander the world. Hopefully, though, you don’t turn your back on that magic.
I think I want the girls to be great dreamers. I know that there are sometimes liabilities associated with such a thing, but I think I want them to retain access to that river, and to have the faith and belief that if they want to cross it, they can; that the world will occasionally accommodate, even support, such crossings.
The other evening at the house in town, where we stay during the school week, from out of the blue Mary Katherine—complete in her fourteen-year-oldness—surprised me at dusk by asking if I would go out on the lawn and play catch with her. It’s been ages since she has been willing to be so associated with me, and I fairly leaped from my chair when she asked. She had a new glove she wanted to break in, it turns out, but so what? Use me, please. More astonishing, she was in her pajamas: another decidedly uncool circumstance, with the full potential for spectacle, were one of her friends to pass by.
And yet there we were, in the spring twilight, on the new-mown lawn, an easy silence between us, tossing and catching, alternating high pop-ups with delicious leather-smacking zingers, and the snap of our gloves echoing smartly through the neighborhood.
We played on into true dusk, with the bright yellow ball somehow becoming more luminous, not less, as the light of the spring day faded, and as even the roosting calls and chirps of the birds in the trees around us grew quieter and then silent. We played on until it was absolutely dark, and then went back inside to get ready for bed.
My fear is no longer so much that the girls won’t ever get to meet the country rock star, but worse: that one day, and far too soon, it might no longer matter to them.
Did I really expend all that energy, trying to help them secure a little dream? Who was that man whose focus wavered a bit, whose eyes shifted slightly away from his novel for a moment? And yet: in these last years before they leave home, it is clearly the novel that should be at the perimeter of vision, not the center.
Slowly, I turn back to the idea of that novel, if not to the thing itself. Maybe this summer, maybe this fall, I will start making some new notes: checking in on it, as if taking care of an animal in a corral. Making sure it is still waiting there—perhaps patiently, perhaps not—at the corner of my vision.
I will continue to encourage the girls to believe in their dreams. It’s the trying that matters. I don’t mind holding on to this quality myself in middle age, and I certainly do not want them to lose it, when they leave the dream-filled territory of adolescence.
A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A HOMEBOUND WANDERER, MASTER AVERY IN ATTENDANCE
SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS
For my wife and me, having a kid was never a make-or-break issue. We married relatively young—Ali twenty-four, I about to turn twenty-nine. We’d always entertained the idea, even toying with adoption; at the same time, we could also see ourselves living happily without children. There were enough kids in both of our families for us to interact with and love. We figured we had ample time to decide.
What we didn’t count on was for the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that Ali had been dealing with since her teens to move gradually into a more serious stage. Gone were the long mountain hikes, the late nights, the all-day road trips. Well, we could still do all this, but for the following few days (sometimes weeks) Ali paid the price physically. Slowly we changed our lifestyle to accommodate her condition.
When we looked into it further, we learned that having a baby would initially bring about positive effects for Ali; something about the whole process placed most women into temporary remission. But her doctor warned Ali of an intense, possibly yearlong postpartum episode. Ali wasn’t sure she could go through with such a pregnancy, and I wasn’t sure I could carry the extra load required of me. Since we both had relatives who had been adopted, and I had been mentoring a boy as a Big Brother, it wasn’t hard for us to return to the idea of adopting.
It wasn’t until Ali’s cousins and our closest friends, Marc and Ellen, adopted their lovely girl, Kira, that we realized that we wanted to do it ourselves. Our first thought was to go overseas, as Marc and Ellen had. But on a Barbara Walters special one night, an interviewee said, “People go all over the world to find babies to adopt when there are babies in our own communities who need good families.” It made perfect sense for us to do just that.
We adopted our son, Avery, in Au
gust 2003, when he was only seven weeks old. The whole thing took, from start to finish, eighteen months. Because we spent the last nine of those months waiting on a list, we didn’t feel all that different from our friends who were on their own journeys conceiving and having babies. And like a couple whose newborn arrives prematurely, we received our phone call earlier than expected. In fact, the agency told us that we had two days to come and get him. And we hadn’t even cleared out the room. His room! The next day we spent so much money at Sears and Babies “R” Us (car seat, stroller, digital camera, diapers, wipes, diaper pail) that the credit card company called to warn us that someone had stolen our card and gone on a spending spree.
We live in Asheville, North Carolina, where the Blue Ridge meets the Great Smoky Mountains—as the brochures like to say—so we had to drive the three hours down the mountain to Greensboro to pick up our boy. I remember being scared to change lanes on the drive back lest I disturb the newly beating heart in our midst. That first night, sleepless and awestruck, we peered into his crib, afraid our boy might stop breathing in his sleep. Those first few sweltering days were spent floating on swiftly moving water astride a bare futon raft. A revolving door of visitors cooking for us, checking in. Then came the run of whitewater rapids through those first weeks. All that parenting on the fly, with its slew of ragged, on-the-spot saves—little improvisations laced with love and fear and the hope that allows us to make it through all the turns, the changes.
About halfway through this eye-opening first year with Avery, I began to write morning lines—a paragraph or two jotted down for a three-way e-mail exchange with two of my writer buddies. Quickly I saw the lines as a way to hold on to a fast-receding creative life. If I couldn’t get to any of my larger projects, at least I could write a few poems, attend to my morning lines.
After more than a year of this back and forth, I found there were quite a few pages on daily life with Avery. In the pages that follow, Avery jumps over the hurdle of his second year, firmly stepping into toddlerhood. Ali and I trail behind, ready to pick him up when he falls. As I write this now, Avery strides deep into his fifth year, moving lithely in his newly sinewy body as he dribbles the soccer ball around the house. I can hardly believe he was ever so small, so young, so in need of our unconditional love.
OCTOBER
The morning dance with Avery can be graceful and easy. I feed him breakfast and make coffee while he sorts his food by color, shape, texture. (He insists on eating the yogurt with his hands.) When the local radio station follows the arts calendar with Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel,” I dance around to amuse my boy. Even Ursula, ever the Lab, joins in. The rain starts in, seasoned jazz drummer. Ali is up, the showerhead adding its percussion to the day’s banal playlist.
But this dance breaks down, too, its precarious balance toppling into a jumble. I drop an egg, whack my hand on the kitchen door; Avery throws his spoon on the floor and refuses his food. Inattention at every turn. After half an hour, I give up and bring the boy to his mother, retreat to the shower. Soon a gleeful Avery tosses all his tub toys at my soapy feet. Before I know it, the little monkey has roped me into his room to play blocks. There goes the morning.
A good friend laughingly dismisses the notion of a child’s first years as “magical.” She quips: “More like the relentless years.” I think, “relentless and magical both.” On my morning walk, two hawks hover above, tipping their wings back and forth in an elaborate dance. I head back to a day of writing, grading papers, housework, Master Avery in attendance.
Hurricane Katrina hit the coast two months before, sending heavy rains and evacuees our way. Ali and I keep trying to imagine what it would be like to be trapped down in New Orleans—no car, no money, no way out. We’d try to walk out, we agree, knowing nothing. Hating that we know nothing. We’d put Avery on our back and just start walking out. We’re being naive, we know it, but can’t stop imagining the endless hours in huge lines waiting for help to arrive that keeps not arriving. We’d need to move, find high ground, some sort of sanctuary. Trapped, no way out—this scenario is repeated up and down the coast for miles.
Which makes me worry for Avery, now tottering toward the river. I lift him on my shoulders and bring him up close to the flood damage. Trees piled along the ruined trail. Sand and sludge jammed into the bushes. Everything dead-brown and sad. All except for the old cold mud pit at the bend, which has somehow sprung to life, as if spring-fed, water saturating the mossy earth, lapping at tree roots. Avery passes, blissful, ignorant, into our very own miniature Eden!
DECEMBER
Ali’s off for the weekend, so it’s just me and Avery moving through the day—and a restless dog wondering where the walks will come from. The weekend opens up as a great expanse. We walk out into it, alone, together. Fittingly, Garrison Keillor celebrates Rilke’s birthday on his morning radio Writer’s Almanac, quoting: “It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. To love is good, too: love being difficult.”
I dread weekends like this, alone with Avery. I know I am being selfish, but what’d you expect, I’m a writer! I need time to get my work done, turn to my daily lines, pick up a book. Does it sound like I am blaming Avery, bemoaning being a parent? Maybe I am. But also the phone is on the fritz, the whole house a mess. It takes half the day to bring some small semblance of order to the familial chaos. And the only reason I do it is that if I don’t, I’ll start to scream or shout or run out the front door. “Breathe, man. Breathe!”
Tonight we’ll eat the rest of the leftover pasta. Maybe a basketball game will be on. I have papers to grade. Anyway, Ali will be home in the morning. I fill a tub for Avery, pick out pajamas, three books to read. Check, check, check. “Oh yeah, brush your teeth, Avery. Where’s your toothbrush?”
When he falls asleep, I’ll return to my writing. Solitude is difficult. Love is difficult. Gradually, piece by rooted piece, I work to transform routine into the charged attention of ritual.
Picture the snow falling softly, no wind, not too cold. Picture the sky a cool curtain of gray. Cars in the driveway dusted with a layer of wet snow. Now a winter-jacketed man comes out and begins changing a tire. A dog, let out to romp in the snow, runs off to relieve herself under a tree. Another man comes out, hat on his head, to throw sticks for the dog. A hooded little girl joins the scene, wandering around the yard happily, tasting snow off the tip of her gloves. Inside, a mother dresses her boy who has been at the window, mouth to cold glass, watching the girl and dog. The first man has now jacked up the car, two tires in a pile. The other man has retrieved his son, decked out in snow pants and bright red gloves. The dog is running in mad circles, kicking up snow. A woman comes out to help with the tires. The mother stays inside and makes herself an omelet to go with the bacon on the sideboard. Coffee brewing. Someone has put on Chopin. Outside, the snow has turned to sleet.
When the dog grabs one of the boy’s gloves and tears around the yard, one of the men stalks after her, mock growling. The boy climbs along the fence imagining a great fall below, arms out like a high-wire walker. The second tire on. The snow converting to its first falling. And, as these things go, the boy’s hands get cold and the whole group decides to go back in.
Someone turns off the Chopin and puts in a video for the children. One of the men has brought in the paper, the dogs two clumps by the fire. Picture this scene. Underneath it, place a caption in your mind that reads “Happiness.”
JANUARY
Ali and I argued last night, the open bottle of wine between us acting as interpreter. We wondered aloud how to create a consistent response to the testing of a willful child, but we sit on opposite ends of a philosophical seesaw. How to punish misbehavior, reinforce positive acts? The books all say something different. Ali says we should stop Avery at each small crossroads and tell him which way to go. Teeter. I want to let things slide, attend to the problems as they arise. Totter.
Another hour of hard talk, and around about midnight we forge a middle way: we’ll use Ali’s method for a while but combine it with a reward system that we dole out together. We go to bed still disconnected, each a little hurt by the tussle. No kiss before bed, only a light touch on a turned shoulder. So of course I wake up dry-mouthed, wounded, weary.
Master Avery rambles around the bedroom, as is his wont: picking up books, exploring the closet, manhandling Ursula, who has sneaked onto the front edge of the bed and is slowly pushing my feet out into the chill.
Maybe it will help to think of the morning’s task list as farm chores. Empty the diaper trash in with the bathroom garbage and bring the smelly bag downstairs (trailed by the boy, curious). Set the boy up in his booster seat with banana and cheese, put on his new favorite video (“Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes”), then drag the garbage to the curb.
The bed sure is warm. I could be downstairs opening a new box of freezer bags, dumping coffee beans into the grinder, chopping Avery’s tofu into bite-size pieces, or pouring food for the dog (making sure she gets a little wet food so she’ll eat it straight off and Avery won’t come later and send the dry food in a shower across the floor).
I think about writing these lines and how, behind them, three student poems and two stories await my response. I have been resisting them again. The spare poem bereft of visual detail needs to be dressed by the class; the poem decked out in all manner of fanciful language redressed.
Soon I will go about the day’s work, step by step.