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my boy fell asleep tonight like a small, curly-headed rock.

he and his father spent what must have been half of this true first weekend of summer running in the yard.   it’s the first time it’s been genuinely warm here…i know the rest of you have been melting, in more southerly climes, but i seriously only packed away the sweaters last week.  summer comes every year to the east coast of Canada like a shock…we draw out dampness and chill well into June, begin to lament and moan that decent weather will never come, and then…snap!  suddenly it’s beautiful out and acres of terrifyingly pasty Scottish and Irish-descended flesh is bared, en masse, to the public eye in a dazzling display of blue-veined wonder.  sunglasses are recommended if one wishes to brave the glare at the beach.  so is a thermal wetsuit, for that matter…but the freezing temperature of our waters is not my problem this year.  this year, my yard is my oyster, enclosed and enforced, and only those who venture into my lair must endure the shiny pallor of my tender, unexercised thighs.  bless their hearts.

Oscar is too young yet to notice that the yard is, perhaps, not entirely a complete and magic kingdom unto itself.  or perhaps it is, and it is only this year that i will be pinned, by circumstance and lack of alternatives, into taking notice.  certainly for Dave and O it seems to suffice.  they played kickball…Oscar learned to kick just this weekend and all attempts warrant a very intense goose-step, making him resemble a tiny mid-century soldier with eleven-inch legs, commandeering his yellow beachball about the property.  they somersaulted on the lawn.  they played up-down…wherein Oscar beetles up and down the two-degree-grade hill between our yard and the one next door, shouting “up!”, “down!” as he goes, pell-mell.  the subtleties of the game escape me, but watching a man in his thirties, perhaps a few years and as many pounds from the heighth of his athletic glories but as focused and intense about anything he does as the most disciplined, competitive pentathlete, sprint up and down a hill barely visible to the naked eye some hundred-ought times to the tune of a toddler was…charming.  and rather entertaining.

they climbed into the hammock Dave had suspended from a tree.  they repeatedly visited the marvel of the hose on the side of the house.  and they played airplane, my son hurtling through the air, laughter echoing in the blue blue sky.

i watched, sidelined.  i felt guilty, not being able to play, not being able to take my share in the parenting, in the fun, in the strange mix of it all that is both joy and responsibility at once.  but then i remembered…i don’t particularly like running.  or ball-chasing.  or most of the other physical delights a backyard offers…hence the reason i’ve never really enjoyed mine much before.  which is not to say i wouldn’t enjoy these things with Oscar…i think i might.  maybe.  i hope i get to, next year, and the year after, with two little laughing creatures zinging madly across the grass.  and sure, i realized, it would be nice to be able to do more, nice to not be sitting here with my leg muscles turning to jelly.  but it is still nice, this absently planting petunias into a pot on the back deck while half-reclined, watching my son and his father exhaust each other.  i am home, with the people i love.  the baby is still safely inside.  and all i have to do is sit, and watch.  the livin’ is easy.

even if i could do a hundred things with a Sunday, i wouldn’t have changed today.  when i am old, if i get to be old, i hope my memory retains the sight of that little boy and that grown one, giggling and panting their way around the young trees in this small backyard, with the June sky open behind them.

counting

he picks them with a zeal bordering on obsession, with a “wow-oo” of admiration for those most ripe, most worthy. those that come free of the ground with long stems he deems “biii-iiig”…those whose heads he pulls off, still unsure of the physics of this whole plucking art, are “babies.” he gives me the babies, sweetly, reserving the more impressive long ones for his own esoteric collections, scattered through the backyard like random floral shrines, Victorian and faintly eerie. and then he is off again, careening full-tilt on short, sturdy legs across our expanse of yellow-dotted lawn, hunting.

he has been so thorough we are beginning to run out of dandeliion cover. he’s better than a goat. we could rent him out to landscaping companies.

tonight the light was golden before bedtime and we found our first ghost dandelion of the season, wispy and white. i taught him how to blow. he inhaled most of it, but we laughed and tickled our noses with the remnants and dropped the stem into the mulch.  he looked back then, picked up the stem with its clinging half-cloud still intact, and picked another yellow bloom and introduced the two, touching their heads together, intoning words i do not understand.

and soon they will be gone, all these yellow weeds my son finds so beautiful, so magical…blowin’ in the wind, seed for another year.

and i look at him and his solid little body suddenly seems so fragile, ephemeral…this childhood so impossibly short.

….they are not departed or gone
they were waiting for me
when i said that i just can’t go on
and they brought me their comfort
and later they brought me this song…

- Leonard Cohen

yesterday afternoon, after my (lollipopless) doctor’s appointment and Oscar’s (also lollipopless, how cold is that?) trip to the audiologist where we discovered that my boy’s wee eardrums aren’t vibrating at all and are probably the reason for his delayed speech and struggles with pronunciation…and that there’s a three month waiting list for treatment…my mother and son and i clattered into my front porch.  i was thinking grumble grumble, moo moo despite the unprecedented if not terribly exciting two trips out in one day when i all but trod on a large package sitting on my door mat.  with my name on it.  postmarked “Australia.”

whee.

i ushered Oscar and Nannie in, and got O divested of boots and Nannie set up for the hour of Thomas the Tank Engine delights she was about to most graciously endure so as to allow me to do some much-needed lying down, and then i opened the mystery package.  it held a big, simple, elegant photo/scrapbook album…with photos inside.  of me.  and Oscar.  and Dave.  recent photos, entertainly captioned, against cheery backgrounds…and one, combed from the archives of the blog, of Oscar’s eleven-month old fat fingers gently touching his brother’s urn.  towards the back, more pages and scrapbooking materials waiting to be used.  inside the front cover of the album, it read To Bon, Dave, Oscar & Finn…love George, Will, Euey, & Aoife.  26/04/08.

i blinked back tears and then realized i was losing that battle and hell, i was just so damn touched and surprised and there’s been a lot of that kind of marvellous, random kindness lately and i gave up entirely and just lay there and wholeheartedly sobbed.

because this old friend of ours, half a world away, whom we haven’t laid eyes on in the three+ years since we left Korea, spent hours putting this together for me.  and sent it airmail, at no small expense, to get me started on something to do while on bedrest.  something for my children, something to pass on.  and she did this the week she herself was home recovering from a D&C after the miscarriage of their much-wanted third baby.

i felt very humbled.  and very grateful, and blessed in the people i’ve been lucky enough to connect with in my life.

just as i felt when a few weeks ago or so the delivery dude showed up at my door with an Amazon package, again with my name on it, and i thought strange, i haven’t ordered anything from Amazon but heck, maybe it’s a happy mistake, and i opened the box to find two fabulous, stimulating, challenging books inside courtesy of Jen, who just kinda thought i might need something to read these days.

just as i felt a day or two later when another box showed up from London, from an old, old friend who’d read my post about losing the bracelet Dave gave me, and had sent me another, one that reminds her of the beach she & Dave & i used to hang about on, lifetimes ago…and had stuffed the box with Marks & Spencer candies and a pair of Wonder Woman underoos, i shit you not, in grown-up size!  i coveted Wonder Woman underoos all through my childhood, dudes.  i am now living the dream.

back a few weeks before that, when i lamented about trying to stuff Oscar’s cute little round bumtail into skinny jeans, Mad mentioned there was a sale on elastic-waist pants at a store in Sleepytown, and what size did i want?  and she just…sent them.  just like she sent cookies before Christmas, homemade gingerbread, after my miscarriage when i was slow and swamped with sorrowing.

i’ve gotten a lot of emails lately, from friends far away just catching me up with their lives, readers delurking to say nice things, longlost friends popping up out of the woodwork.

jeebus, people.  you make an old couch troll feel…nice.  and loved.  and kind of embarrassed.

because i don’t really do stuff like that so well.  i don’t make stuff for people, or buy things and put them in the mail.  i don’t send so many of those personal emails (or responses) as i’d like to.  it’s a near-lost art, in my world…one sacrificed to delusions of my own busy-ness, i think.  my own self-importance.  and i am ashamed, suddenly, of all the times i’ve thought “oh, i’d like to do x for so and so!” and then promptly forgotten, because x doesn’t fall in the top five list of priorities that anal moi is trying to organize and accomplish and keep moving at all times, even from my couch…because that’s how i live my life, insular except for these words here.

to Georgia, and Jen, and E, and Mad…and all of you with your generosity of words and humour and support…all of you who’ve befriended me and been good to me even though i’ve never sent you squat…thank you.  a big wet thank you, from the bottom of my little grinch heart.  because you’re helping, very much.  helping me stay mostly buoyant, helping me feel less alone, helping me remember how grateful i am to be on this couch in the first place, carrying this child i’ve wanted so badly.

…and in case anyone is inspired to send more bedrest delights, Dave asks me to mention how much i like beer.  hmm.  sometimes he’s not to be trusted, that one.

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this rush of positivity isn’t just the result of largesse and kindness…i also have more to look forward to in the next 72 hours than i’m accustomed to in, erm, 72 much longer measures of time.  tomorrow, we head to Halifax for my 20 week ultrasound, where we get to see the baby, which always makes me all sweet & squishy inside even if i have had, oh, two hundred odd utrasounds over the past three years.  tomorrow, we may even find out if i shall, as i suspect, become the thing i never ever imagined i’d look forward to with any kind of anticipation…mother to three boys.  yikes.  and yet…okay.  and thrilling just in the proximity to the big revelation.

also tomorrow, if the hospital lets me, i should get to dine with me Blog’Er mateys and the Upper Canadians bold enough to join us.  i’ve only ever met two bloggers before, and love them both.  tomorrow i meet seven more.  and we get to hang out all weekend.  and they’re going to get drunk and be waaaay more entertaining than those voices in my head that usually talk me through my days, so i’m psyched.

then…and i am still pinching myself on this one…on Sunday, we return home, where two old and dear and not-nearly-often-enough-seen friends will arrive at my house, and we will all head out to see Leonard Cohen.  Leonard Freaking Cohen.  who hasn’t toured in fourteen years.  who is playing in my teeny-weeny hometown, more generally reserved for such lesser events as Trooper reunions and high school plays.  i think Leonard knew i needed a little cheering up, that foxy old charmer.  i’ll be showing up in a wheelchair, but Leonard, baby…i’ll have bells on.

feeling pretty lucky, folks.  i’m betting Monday David Bowie shows up on my doorstep with cupcakes.  y’all are welcome to come watch.

small and sturdy, fierce and tender, he is a study in contradiction.

he communicates his needs and his affections most effectively, but with the vocabulary of a child much younger.  his consonants are few, clearly a struggle, and he has only one or two regular word combinations.  he builds puzzles, though, that would challenge a four year old.  he claps for himself when he completes them, and turns his face to his audience, beaming.  he knows most of his letters, can spell his name, but cannot actually say it.  he is more beautiful than i ever imagined a boy could be.

he is closing in on two with a rapidity that astonishes me.  he slams doors, sometimes shutting himself in his room in the midst of a meltdown just to be alone.  when he is done, he is tearful, snuggly, ready for comfort.  he kisses his trains goodnight as he lays them down for “naps,” pounds out violent scales on his plastic piano.  he has a wicked, full-body laugh and lives at full speed.  handed a telephone, though, he is all saucer eyes, shy and full of wonder at the miracle of the disembodied voice.

his favourite word right now is “mine.”  the cat walks across his dinosaur puzzle?  an affront.  mine.  mama folds his laundered pyjamas in front of him?  what you’re touching, woman, is mine.   we spend the weekend at his cousins’ house playing with their train sets?  he’s convinced the cousins are the interlopers…and those fine toys?  mine.  he’s easy to find in a group, these days.  he is the child hugging things wildly to his chest, squawking like the seagulls from Finding Nemo.

he is an equivocal kid, though, when not protecting his worldly goods - and yours - from the preying eyes of other living creatures.  he will befriend anyone who makes an effort, eat anything from raw tofu to zoodles, depending on whether it’s me or the babysitter feeding him.  he is gentle with babies, likes to bedeck himself and other surfaces in stickers, and is taking an interest in flowers suddenly, now that pale green shoots are beginning to peek through the soil of our backyard.  he is learning to ride his new trike, though his feet don’t quite reach the pedals.  he prefers to be pushed than to do the work himself.

he is suddenly, so clearly, ours.

for the whole first year of his life, love him though i did - and deeply - he was foreign to me, other.  this blond, curly-headed male child who could not sleep in my arms, who would not sleep past six am, who was genial and yet a still water i could not seem to fathom without language…he was so utterly himself, so entirely unlike me, so not any of the permutations i’d imagined when envisioning the mother-child duo.  no more.  and he has not changed, barely at all.  he still looks like a changeling left in our dark-haired gene pool by fairies, still wakes at ungodly hours, still can tell me very little - in words - of what is in his heart.  but somewhere along the lines, somewhere in the long months of learning to tolerate dinosaur puzzles and repeat “please do not throw your food on the floor” with a smile on my face, i have come to forget all that i ever imagined of children before i had them, all i ever hoped for this boy other than that he be who he is.

the little one is sick again.

nothing necessarily crisis-like but last week’s ear infection has morphed into a cough over the last few nights as the antibiotic packs its bags and takes its leave. his sitter’s little girl has been almost constantly sick since Christmas and so O picks up these bugs like a sponge, those vulnerable preemie lungs still lurking under the hale and husky toddler. the constant strain of illness running through the daycare situation frustrates me sometimes, setting off twinges of guilt…what kind of mother drops off her child in a pit of plague every morning? have a nice day, sweetie, try not to, ummm…inhale. but his sitter is kind and nurturing and clean and patient and he seems happy there, and thus he and wee Amelia pass their viruses back and forth while Dave and i watch inert, like flies in amber, unable to decide whether illness or change is the greater evil.

tonight, though, even with his inhalers in full force he has not yet slept for more than half an hour at a time, waking coughing and wailing, moaning in pain of undisclosed origin. around nine, i slipped into his room only to realize i was unnoticed, that this time he had not really, fully woken and was just mewling to himself. he was writhing in the bed, flailing and repositioning his body with the hopeless fierceness of the miserable. i crossed the room to his crib, murmuring sweet nothings. i reached down to pet him.

he batted my hand away, then stopped. warm little finger pads traced the back of my hand, feeling for the familiarity of silver bracelet, of rings. he noted these, declared “mama” and curled his hand into mine, settling, his breathing slowing into deeper sleep again.

and i stayed, holding his hand for awhile, through the next fit of coughs and whimpers, all the while whispering hush like i was auditioning for Goodnight Moon. Oscar’s small hand stayed in mine, and i rubbed it lightly with my fingertips, trying to soothe, to pass love and comfort through skin.

my grandmother spent seven years dying. she was the backdrop of my childhood, my second parent, the person i went to after school and on snow days and March break and all summer except when i was at camp, the person who watched my homespun one-girl-theatre extravaganzas with patience and encouragement, who took me to MacDonald’s every St. Patrick’s day for a bilious green Shamrock shake. she lived a long life, and a full one, but the end of her days was a slow and sometimes agonizing process filled with incremental losses of independence, with tears, with the physical pain of untreatable cancer, and with the indignities and loneliness of extreme old age. i lived away most of these seven years, though i did not leave the country until after she was gone. she was an anchor i would not quite pull away from. i knew there would be time, after. i feared losing her, this rock of my childhood.

what i remember now of those seven years, and especially the last two or three, the ones that stretched between hospital and nursing home and back again with the stench of urine and dying always in the air, is her hands. i cannot call her face up with any real clarity now, hard as i try, but her hands come to my mind’s eye like photographs, even still. they’d been small hands, in her day, but with knuckles swollen smooth by arthritis, marked by liver spots, the nails yellowed, the wedding rings that i wear now on my own ring finger gouged deeply into hers with the permanence of sixty-plus years. her hands were seldom rough, or sweaty…they were welcoming hands, good hands for holding. and that was what we did, whenever i came home…not often enough, i see now, my heart knows. there were visits where she did not know me, and ones where she did and cried for death and then collapsed into herself, shamed and exposed. through most, though, we just filled time, talked, in the early days doing the crossword puzzles from the paper or talking about my work, my latest move, my mom…later just sitting together, me telling stories if she was up for it. occasionally, wonderfully, she would become the lucid storyteller herself, passing on to my mother and i pieces of all our history, the women of this family. always i held her hand, rubbing it lightly with my fingertips…trying to pass love and comfort through skin, to memorize the feel of those light old bones.

tonight, with O’s hot little hand under mine, i felt my grandmother’s too.

there is a lot about mothering that i sometimes feel unequal to…a lot where i wonder if i’m lost and floundering, and if a good mother would just go ahead and find a new sitter already, dammit. but this core of it, where you sit with another human being when he or she is vulnerable and small, and where there is nothing to say but i am here and i love you dearly, hush, it’s okay and most of what is communicated is spoken tenderly and silently, through the stroke of a finger…this part i know.

someone’s child or someone’s mother, holding hands in the dark of a sick room, abiding, is when i know most surely i am blessed.

there are castles here, and it is green even in the winter, pansies blooming in the city flowerbeds.  things are far older than they are where we live, with medieval fortifications and giant hewn Tudor beams and 300 year old pubs to wither my notion of Canada having any history whatsoever, and yet the place feels way more hip, too…i could take up residence over a Marks & Spencer grocery with its unlimited supply of wee bocconcini salads and organic food options and local roasts and puddings and seriously never cook again.   we climbed the 275 steps of Yorkminster tower this morning, an age ago already, time inflated and bloated by the strange vivid circuitousness of travelling, of watching, of waiting for schedules and rushing for trains.  but from the top of the tower under the low, gray sky, removed from the immediacy of being a sycophantic tourist and holding my trusty pink hat tight to my head, all i wanted to see was over the hills way way west to my boy, and way into the future when we could bring him here and he too would be old enough to find these narrow, winding staircases magical.

and while i was laughing at myself and thinking about how we all seem to want to give our children our own personal versions of a happy childhood, Oscar was at Emergency with his grandmothers with a fever of 102.

he has an ear infection.

and suddenly the pansies just look out of place and out of season, and i am wishing we were home, wishing for the dullness of our small, provincial town where nothing is terribly old or cool, but where a small sick boy has a sore ear and might be wanting his mama.

dear David Bowie,

dude, your birthday again…many happy returns.

because this little torch i carry for you is a flame of true and undying fidelity, and because some small, secret part of me still believes that one of these days you’re actually going to show up on my doorstep and beg relentlessly for my charms (note: i go to bed earlier these days, so if you could kindly start the anticipated wooing production before eleven whenever you’re coming, that’d be great, thanks), i wanted to let you know that we did something really special here at my house for your birthday this year.

nope, i didn’t eat an entire cake for you this time…much as that was a very good year in our relationship, David, the old college-era stomach just ain’t what she used to be. sorry.

no, i didn’t sing you my own acoustic version of Ziggy Stardust on guitar. my neighbours threatened to call the authorities if they caught me ‘making a joyful noise’ ever again. apparently, when you do come to woo me, you should bring voice lessons.

nah, didn’t go to school in my best imitation of you from the Blue Jean video. dude, i was thirteen. and makeup’s never been my strong suit…looks better on you. let us never speak of this again, ‘kay?

actually i got the whole family in on the present for you this year, David. more of a ’shower’ present than a usual birthday present, i suppose, but you’re an unusual guy. and i bet nobody else has honoured you in quite the same way, at least in recent decades, so really we’re all quite proud of ourselves here at Chez Crib.

Oscar tinkled in the potty tonight, in honour of that most special of holidays, David Bowie’s birthday.

it was a pretty random bit of business, methinks…but kismet and the generous heart of a child, they’re like that, surprising you with joy and firsts when you least expect them.

probably won’t happen again ’til next year. mama don’t care. mama just wants to offer up the gift.happy birthday, o celebrity boyfriend. in the nearly twenty-four years i’ve been faithfully stalking venerating you, i can’t say i’ve ever clapped more on your birthday.
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and in other shower news, less tinkly but still celebratory, i’m totally heartened and excited by all the willing responses to my shout-out for potential co-cribcasters. i will call. if you said yes, then i will call. um, as soon as i set up a schedule and stuff. and get your numbers. and, uh, learn to webcast properly. yeh, that. topics for conversation? suggest at will.

but we’re going to start with a shower. i’ll bite the bullet by starting this up waaaay earlier than i’d ever planned, in honour of another special upcoming holiday. this Thursday marks the thirteen-month anniversary of the Just Posts, and Jen & Mad are being thrown a social justice “baby shower” of sorts, brainchild of their Maid of Honour, Andrea.i’m going to webcast the party. 9 pm EST, Thursday January 10th, you can listen live here…and join us in the chat room to talk about social justice and non-consumption and community and volunteerism and, erm, probably kids. there will be virtual wine, i promise.

you are so welcome. you too, Mr. Bowie. you know you want to.

snowbound on this New Year’s Eve and it is naptime, sweet silent naptime. the flakes float down like feathers, nesting on us, forcing us to nest in on ourselves, and there is coffee aplenty - with Bailey’s Irish Cream, to be festive - and oatmeal on the stove in this yellow kitchen.

oatmeal’s for remembrance, isn’t that how Ophelia rhymed it off?

for me, at least, oatmeal is “Auld Lang Syne” and snowfall, all wrapped up in one: thick hearty scotch comfort food to line one’s ribs in case of power outage and call up all the days and generations gone before, making one misty with the smells and textures of childhood, of heritage, of cultural memory.

or maybe that’s just the Bailey’s in my coffee. really, i’m a shame to the race and ought to be drinking the single malt Dave’s got squired away in the cupboard with the Tupperware that doubles as our liquor cabinet…but i come from a long-line of Methodist teetotalling Scots, so my drinking genes got stunted in that regard, and i struggle to appreciate the liquid gifts of the old country and its usquebaugh quite in the way i appreciate oatmeal.

i suppose a New Year’s resolution to learn to like Scotch whisky isn’t really concordant with the rest of my procreative hopes for 2008…

but it is still 2007. and not only do i have drinking on the brain, but i’m not quite ready to look ahead to the new year, to forge blindly and boldly forward, with hope or trepidation. i am not ready for New Year’s resolutions. rather, here in the last hours of 2007, a different sort of resolution calls me…a looking backward, attempting to pull together the threads of the year gone by, to resolve and cohere what is being left behind.

because when this year is a long-ago memory, deep in the realm of the bygone, its legacy, i think, will be mostly one of contentedness and coherence. of the events of the year, last month’s miscarriage still resonates heaviest right now, a fresh footprint and a scar on the plans i’d stored up in hope and wishfulness. 2007 contains within its bounds the brief existence of the little Junebug who will never be. and always, in looking back on the year, i’ll nod to that little wish, raise my glass. but the year itself isn’t summed up in melancholy. overall, it has been a good year, in its quiet way, a year of healing and growth in which Dave & i’ve gone from two tired, grateful, frazzled people with a baby to a fully-fledged, integrated family of three.

last January 1st, Oscar crawled forward for the first time, scooted his way across a friend’s floor early New Year’s morning. 365 days later, he runs and shouts and plays in the snow, lines up his farm animals and firemen in an orgy of pretend play, expresses wild indignation if his demands for more milk are not met NOW. he kisses (sometimes bites) and pats and generally interacts with us as a member of whatever group we happen to be in, which was not so much the case back in far-off 2006, which seems, suddenly, a lifetime ago.

and on January 1st last year, i had no idea most of you existed, those of you whom i do not know in person. now, you feel like friends, ringing in the New Year around the world…not auld acquaintances, perhaps, but true ones, fine ones. cherished ones.

happy new year to this old world of ours, spinning faithfully. may the year bring you all good things, and may tonight bring you all a little fun, however you celebrate.

us?  we’ll be the ones partying with shovels and oatmeal.  wheeee.

sometimes running away from home for a few days is just the very best thing in the world.  except maybe for coming home again.

Dave & i took off from his parents’ place in the forenoon on Boxing Day and drove the six hours to Quebec City.  by ourselves, just the two of us.  Oscar stayed with his doting grandparents, who, in thus providing us with fifty-three hours of uninterrupted, non-working, non-nap-scheduled time, gave us the very best post-Christmas present ever.  we spent two nights and one whole wondrous day wandering around historical, atmospheric Vieux Quebec, which we’ve both been to but not for a decade and never together.  we checked out museums and architecture and boxing day sales and as many restaurants and cafes as we could humanly manage, all while gentle snow fell.  we even rode the Funiculaire, the almost 130-year-old elevator rail line that scales the old city walls.  we walked more than we’ve walked in months, cumulatively.  for that matter, we got a lot more exercise in a myriad of ways than we have in months, actually.  ahem.  i do love a king-size bed.

but the very most marvellous part of the whole trip for me, other than possibly the three ridiculously bone-chilling minutes i spent in the hotel’s not-nearly-heated-enough outdoor pool with snowdrifts blowing onto my nekkid neck while i dog-paddled around its circumference gawking at the city lights, was the drive.  the road trip.  the glorious adventure of being just two fools in a car with gas, coffee, and a pile of cds.  oh, and Grandpapa’s borrowed GPS, which admittedly took some of the terror out of my attempt to actually drive into the city myself without panicking and throwing myself into the Saint Lawrence when confronted with seventeen different off-ramps at once. 

in the nearly three years since Dave and i shed our expatriate backpacks and became settled, pregnant-and-or-parenting dwellers of my smallish hometown, we’ve driven a lot.  to exactly two destinations - his parents’ house in northern New Brunswick, about four and a half hours away, and his sister’s house and/or the IWK hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a shorter trip by about an hour.  the landscape on each road has become so familiar that new potholes are noteworthy, but overall, it’s monotonous, destination-focused travel, the stuff of survival.  we load the car with sippy cups and diapers and try to time our drives for optimum napping.  one of us usually ends up performing a puppet show from the front seat for part of the trip, whilst we debate whether the Velvet Underground really counts as lullaby music.  it’s family travel.  i love it, with all its labour-intensive cheer.  but it is not - i repeat, NOT - a road trip.

Quebec was a road trip.  we had a choice of routes to take, open road in front of us allowing options, freedom to flip a coin.  neither of us had been on either highway in nearly ten years, so the low mountains and snow-capped woods were all a discovery, a fresh landscape, dotted with cheese shops and gas stations selling pain au chocolat.  we could blast the stereo as loud as we liked, whenever we liked, or lapse into long, introspective silences just watching the expanse of forest wind away from the road.  we could stop when we wanted, or not at all, and not once did i feel bad for failing to entertain Dave with a lively chorus of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, complete with hand clapping and nose beeping.

it was good.  out on Highway 20 where the high road and the low road merge, i drove past ghosts of my younger self in different cars, spinning up and down the highway, a passenger in cars and lives that intersected with my own for a moment, or a season.  spring break 1991 i hitch a ride with friends to a ski hill even though i cannot ski, half an ounce of hash on us as we cross from Quebec into the US.  December 1992 and four girls in a beatup borrowed Volkswagen drive all night to a funeral for our roommate’s father, suddenly dead at fifty. summer 1993 and fall 1994 i take the train through these parts, running along the Saint Lawrence parallel to the highway, wild-hearted and broken here, riding the bar car to a new life in Vancouver there.  August 1997, my honeymoon, spent mostly camping or visiting in-laws, with one memorable night in a hotel so skanky the only furniture in the room other than the bed was a bench seat from a car, bolted into the concrete floor.

i saw Dave too, on his way to Neil Young concerts and the Lilith Fair and probably countless other trips i don’t know about or have forgotten the tales he once regaled me with.  i heard him, in the cds we played, the full collection of neglected oldies and burnt mixes from the Napster heyday.  i heard us laughing at 3 am, back in Korea in the early, early days of our romance, drunk on bad wine and each other, sharing tunes from our respective formative years, convinced that a mutual taste in Kris Kristofferson had to be some kinda sign.

the familiarity and yet the novelty of it, all this silly road trip freedom, made us giddy…and filled us, reaffirmed us, in a way that a hundred days at home couldn’t have.  i felt all those fragments of foundation and vagabond days as a gift, a reminder that life has not always been Elmo and organized overpacking.  i felt twenty, and twenty-five, and thirty all collapse in on me, rejuvenating this almost thirty-six.  i felt like a friend and partner, and like myself, all my selves, all carried within.  i put my feet up on the dash and revelled in the joy of selfishness, all the way there.

and most of the way home.  until we got about two hours away, at which point we two overgrown wish-we’d-been-Deadheads began to long aloud for the little boy we hadn’t seen in two days, and then the game was up.

Oscar’s smile met us at the door.  i saw nothing more beautiful in Quebec City, nor in all the years i rambled.

but his parents brought back deeper, more rested, connected smiles to him…and so the trip was a raging success.  tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way home from Grandmaman & Grandpapa’s, a family ride, fully stocked and carefully timed.   i think we will try to teach Oscar some Iggy Pop tunes along the way.

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs.
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

a long time ago, lifetimes ago, when i was someone i barely remember, i knew - and had the arrogance to tell him, sitting on my kitchen floor at 3 am well-past halfway through a bottle of Southern Comfort - that a part of him belonged to me.

because i knew it was the truth, and i knew it was the bravest thing i’d ever said aloud.

we didn’t touch then. we never did. we were spoken for, both of us, lives long entwined with others, and the twines of friendship with each other suddenly grown tight and choking and ill-fitted…too many taboos between us to call it love, to even begin to understand this thing that shone and confused and compelled, made me look for my own reflection in his eyes.

he left my kitchen floor, and went halfway back around the world. and a month later, in the fall when all was unravelling around me, he sent me this tune, these old Woody Guthrie lyrics set to song by Billy Bragg and Wilco…just the kind of thing we’d always sat up late and made the world spin with. we who would not look on love. we with this impossible, futureless tie. and i thought he was a fool, for not knowing it was a love song. and i thought i was a fool, for wishing it were.

i thought, in that wretched September seven years ago, that if all i could have of him was our own metaphorical mountain bed, even if it were a kitchen floor, and those frozen moments of connection and actuation, even if ours were chaste, that it would be enough. better than never having. better than never making it up the mountain at all. yet i believed the dichotomy the song sets up, even though i’ve seen Bound for Glory and know Guthrie was relentless, a womanizer, and of course he wrote it like the mountain bed and the true love that feeds one’s soul is a place away from the breast of one’s woman and child. of course there are two women, and never the twain shall meet. and she, the muse, the friend…i wondered where she went when she came down down from the mountain bed. i wondered if anyone noticed the leaves in her hair. and i wondered if this were what he was trying to tell me, sending it to me. and yet still, i knew it was our love song, flawed as it was. flawed as we were, and hopeless, still we had made each other more just in the knowing.

i remembered all this tonight, uploading pictures to flickr. of Oscar, covered in leaves this afternoon in the backyard, his father raking them high and spraying them forth in bursts, the crinkly decay of fall in the air, the shrieking of O’s laughter in my ears. and behind that, these chords, still burned on me. and though i never got to smell his hair that night on the kitchen floor, he washed over me again, these seven years later, suddenly and urgently, the minute i allowed the word “leaves” to play on my mind. and i laughed.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.

i laughed because Woody Guthrie was wrong. but so was i. the threads of muse and partner are not necessarily ones that cannot be woven. and the impossible can come out of heartbreak, heartbreak several times over. we made our way, he & i, through many more bottles of various comforts and many more nights on floors all over the world…and the seeds have not been scattered so much as distilled. down to little faces, and earlier nights. but still, a part of him belongs to me, and i to him. and i would never, never have believed it…but here we are.

our mountain bed never existed, except in the eyes of two people who saw something in each other that both desperately needed seen, and not flinched from. and it is the place where Oscar was born, all the very same.
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