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with the release from bedrest and my fledgling return to civil society come privileges.  i can walk…slowly.  i can dance…sorta.  i can march out at any time of day or night and procure my own Nibs cake (insert favourite heartburn-inducing poison here).

sure, the price is high.  anyone who’s ever been pregnant will attest that with the whole going out in public thing comes…well, the public.  other people.  who note one’s advanced maternal state, and feel obliged to comment upon it.  or to touch it…it, of course, being me.  i don’t mind the belly rubbing…though it makes me feel vaguely like a shi-tzu being cooed over, however pleasantly…but the boob-petting is perhaps just a touch too familiar for me.  i shit you not, a middle aged woman patted my left breast last weekend and said, oh honey, they fall down after this.  i gave her my best Maidenform smile and tried to claim mine’ve bounced back smashingly, thank you very much, but i mostly succeeded in drooling lemon water down the front of my offendingly obvious cleavage whilst trying NOT to look like a member of Junior Prudes of America.  shock tends to send my wits packing for awhile, but the desire to impress the weirdos with my cool?  alas, that never leaves me.

coming off four months of bedrest and relative seclusion has left me vulnerable and awkward in the interchange of niceties between people in public.  i am too honest, too eager.  i’m so astonished by my good fortune at actually being out and about and still pregnant to boot that i feel like a kid on a blind date, all aw-shucks awkward in my own stretched skin and yet horny as hell, bubbling over with Too Much Information the moment the subject of the pregnancy is broached.  far, far too many people who do not read this blog now know about my pesky cervical issues, friends.

two years and a bit ago, when i was first sprung from the hospital after seven weeks flat on my back gestating Oscar, i was shocked by the invasiveness being visibly pregnant seems to invite in others.  it hurt, then, the cheery throw-away barrage of is this your first? and what do you have at home? that i could not answer honestly without causing the faces behind the banal pleasantries to shrink away in mortification.  i didn’t enjoy their embarrassment, their discomfort.  on the other hand, i didn’t enjoy pretending i was some sort of first-time birth virgin, either, and thus subjecting myself to knowing lectures about how i couldn’t possibly imagine what was ahead…nor did i enjoy negating my firstborn’s existence just to make people feel better about having pried into my personal history innocently expecting to find only sunbeams.  i wasn’t sorry that i only spent two weeks negotiating the Big Wide World after bedrest that time around.

this time, i’ve already passed the two week mark of happy Out-and-Aboutness.  i’m not so raw, this time, nor so unprepared for strangers’ well-intentioned curiosity.  and since i have a living child, my short but honest answers to people’s questions don’t thud all conversation to a halt quite so brutally as they did two years ago…the crickets still chirp, but we all generally recover before the tumbleweeds blow in.

in other words, even the one thing i dreaded about assuming this belated mantle of A Normal, Blessed Pregnancy is going pretty well dandy…even if it does feel like a circus act.  i bumble and beam and accept the boob-groping with what i hope passes for grace…because awkward as i feel, waddling my way down the streets slower than the senior citizens, i am nonetheless aware, acutely, that this is a state of grace i’m in.  i look around me, wary, wondering who – infertile, babylost, recently miscarried – aches at the sight of my swollen belly.  i look into the eyes of the old ladies with their uninvited stories of labours and grandkids and see longing for a time forever gone, slipped past.  i look in the mirror and sigh at the size of my behind, and then give my head a shake and straighten up a bit and run my fingers over the old and new stretch marks and breathe deep and dare to grieve that this will – knock wood for safe arrivals – be the last time i do this, this crazy terrifying journey that i yet will miss and mourn the end of when the day comes and i have to face up to the reality that i will never again walk this particular tightrope of want and love and holding my breath.

how is it that memory can feel more vivid, sometimes, than the present?

i am in Halifax, but not in the hospital…i am on a vacation of sorts. it feels more like time travel. i wander here in a soup of memories, bright and disconcerting and surreal, expecting to encounter former selves around every corner. these conjunctions of days and years all jumble together, knocking me off balance. the disequilibrium keeps catching me by surprise.

i am here alone. or not alone – my college roommate and i are crashing here together – but without O, without Dave, without responsibilities…just me and Susie, painting the town red. nineteen years i’ve known this girl, this woman, this friend i seldom see anymore. she’s a doctor now, which is promising if this now-31-week bebe gets any saucy ideas, but she still makes me feel seventeen again, goofy and light. and known. we pick up the common threads between us easily, gracefully, as if the time lapsed is only stories to tell. we are here for the wedding of another college roommate, entertainingly scheduled eleven years to the day after my own wedding, in this city i lived in during that marriage. i was packing to move from this city – packing up that marriage – when i first sat with Dave on my kitchen floor eight years ago yesterday and realized, hell, i am in trouble.

so i am seventeen and twenty-eight at once and yet very much the thirty-six-year-old mother and mother-to-be, as well, because the fact of this burgeoning body is not something i can leave behind for a weekend . and it is August now too and encroaching on what should have been Finn’s birthday three years ago had he not been born in this place and gone, all too soon, and so those shadows walk along the calendar with me this time of year, inescapably. and being on my own, sitting yesterday morning in the anywhere space of a Starbucks with no agenda but my journal to write in, called up all sorts of other echoes, other selves who’ve sat for hours with a black pen over an empty page, people-watching. lost in Vancouver, bewildered by the concrete and glass and the low, oppressive clouds, feeling alien and broke and hopeless. trying to make my way through weeks in Ireland on my own while i wished myself back in Korea with that troublesome Dave whom i looked for around every corner, no matter how many half-worlds separated us. Bangkok, Zurich, Istanbul. all places i’ve sat by myself in coffee shops and marked time and impressions on a page and tried to leave some trace for myself of a now i knew would never last.

i danced tonight, at the wedding, me who’s barely walked in months. When Doves Cry, Prince. because i could not stay in my seat. because when i was twelve this song was the first that gave me little flutters of what i’d someday understand as sexual awakening. because touch if you will my stomach, feel how it trembles inside brought different flutters now, as if that promise of twelve had come to full fruition and for the first time all weekend all those myriad, disconnected selves had consolidated into some, brief linear trajectory i could trace and own, and catch sight of myself in. it felt amazing to move, to rise. i was a sight, i’m sure. but i felt beautiful.

like Cinderella, i left just before midnight…to come back to an empty bed longing for the ghost of that boy who sat on my kitchen floor eight years ago to materialize, to make this vacation more than just a respite from the day-to-day our lives have become together and make the kaleidoscope whirl of all this memory less lonely, less strange.

weekend before last, in Halifax, we took Oscar and his cousins to the Public Gardens. sure, the place is a beautiful collection of Victorian arboreal exotica with rare trees, a few leafy survivors older than anyone i know…but those points of charm were of little interest to three boys under three. the Gardens is kewl because it has DUCKS, people.

free range ducks, the fearless kind.

my lumbering, slow-moving mother self was no match for ducks. Oscar was IN LOVE. or in glee, if glee is a state of being. fat fingers pointed and little feet stamped and there was squealing, and it wasn’t just me. when the ducks waddled off, Oscar chased them. with zeal. it became clear that if i did not figure out how to move faster, my son was going to topple headfirst into the murky water and come up baptized with green duck shit. luckily, his father materialized from parking the car and saved O from himself and from the excesses of duck delight, but still, the boy was twitterpated.

and he remains so. all week, in the bath, his yellow rubber duckie has been put through his paces, forced to bob and weave and lead O around the tub like a plastic pied piper, whilst cries of “duck! duck!” permeate the bathroom. O saw a pigeon yesterday, and wooed it with a plaintive “duck?!”…though i think he knew he was fooling himself.

i am becoming one of Those Mothers, indulgent and soft at the core.  or in the head.  i found myself wondering if we could keep a real duck in the tub.

he’s just so friggin’ infectious, that kid.  my kid.

out. Saturday morning in the zoo-like crush of the local farmer’s market. old ladies and old hippies sweep by me, children push past. all our bodies are just a little too close – and mine just a little too large to accommodate the dodging i attempt – but the thronging mass is cheerful, busily engaged with wax beans and homemade sausages and shawarma with tabouleh, please.

i am standing, Oscar in my arms, his hands snaking over my shoulder to swipe at the display of chocolate chip cookies behind us. i am balancing my market bag and the giant lettuce i’ve just purchased – from which i half expect a Cabbage Patch Kid to emerge, yellow yarn hair and all – when suddenly i realize that i am actually doing this, this perfectly normal, multi-task-oriented, socially and commercially engaged juggling act. that i am standing holding thirty pounds of squirming kid on one hip with thirty pounds of bedrest and more offspring spread across the general middle of me and juggling a wallet and organic lettuce and the cookie that i seem to have managed to buy and begin to nibble on without even noticing, and that i am carrying on three conversations at once, and that it is all, like an intricate act of magic, working. my legs are holding. my back has not collapsed. i have not dropped the child nor the lettuce nor – god forbid – the cookie. and despite having not been out in public for more than four months, despite having hardly made chitchat with anyone in the interim, i’m saying hi to an old acquaintance and babbling about tomatoes to a vendor and keeping Oscar from stuffing his entire half of the cookie in his mouth all at once, and it is easy. natural. sheer body memory.

until i pay attention. then my eyes grow wide and glazed and Oscar leaps from my arms and runs into the crowd whilst i trip over my own bags and lettuce tumbles around me. suddenly, mechanisms exposed, it is all too much, exhausting, this press of people, this exertion. this normalcy. and for a second i want to flee screaming from the market like a bat out of hell, and retreat to the safe predictability of ye olde couch, sanctuary.

i mentioned to somebody early this week about how coming off bedrest is both exhilarating and discombobulating at first, because simple acts that you’ve taken for granted most of your life have, in the duration, become curiosities, foreign and unaccustomed. how they play themselves out in living colour, almost assaultive, because your protective filters have been turned off for so long. the response?

i’m sure it’ll be just like riding a bike.

i laughed, which i think confused my friend. but this friend has not known me so long as to realize that twenty-three years ago this week, at thirteen, i managed to fling myself over the handlebars of my bike on my way to work the very last morning of my very first summer job, a three-week all-day babysitting gig. i landed on my face. smashed the left side of my jaw into smithereens. split my chin open, and re-graded the gravel road with the lower half of my visage. knocked out a tooth that my just-removed braces had been working hard to align for years. bent the frame of my bike enough that it was unridable. spent three months with my jaws wired shut, carrying little scissors in my pocket to unleash the steel facemask in case i for some reason needed to vomit and wanted to avoid choking to death. had my first taste of the relief that is morphine, and the nastiness that is withdrawal. started grade nine looking like Bride of Frankenstein.

i have been on a moving bicycle exactly twice in the twenty-three years since. and both times, it felt both utterly normal and terrifyingly bizarre, all the intangibles of that delicate balancing act wrought vividly visible by the fear and cloistering that had separated me from the act in the duration between. i ride a bike like most of us would walk a tightrope; in a state of acute awareness and surreality.

this morning, i dusted myself off, caught my errant child, retrieved my enormous, slightly bruised lettuce, wiped some cookie crumbs from the shelf that is my belly, and headed back into the crowd, smiling to myself. i was nodding, noting internally, with great interest, heck, it IS exactly like riding a bike. it’s fun, and probably doesn’t look strange from the outside. but dude, it’s also crazy as shit.

as of 4 pm yesterday afternoon, i’m free.  the bedrest is officially over.

not only that, but i’m done with the IWK…that strange, cloistered otherworld where i’ve spent more than ten weeks of my life, where my first child was born and died, where Oscar and i spent our long, still wait together in ye olde Craftmatic, where this pregnancy was saved by a stitch in time.  at last count i’ve had at least twenty-four ultrasounds on the seventh floor of that hospital; Dave and i have made an almost equal number of four-hour drives to their doors and back.

it is finished, now.   barring delivery sometime in the next couple of weeks – which Miss Cervix Universe is giving no signs whatsoever of succumbing to – i get to spend the remainder of this pregnancy as a regular ol’ pregnant lady, waddling to my local doctor for checkups, getting my own water and groceries, picking up my kid and panting after him.  i get to relearn to sit up for long periods of time, get to train my poor calf muscles and enlarged carcass to walk around the block again without getting winded.  i get to carry my own bags.  i get to stop being dependent, stop planning every moment of my day around economy of movement and the boundaries of how far to push myself.  i get to stop asking for help all the time.  and i am profoundly relieved.  last night, at a rest stop on the trip back home, i was able to haul Oscar from the car and bring him into the washroom with me, lift him to the changing table, prop him up to wash his hands.  simple things, but it has been four months since i could do them for my boy.  walking back to the car with O on my hip, his legs wrapped around my awkward middle, my chicken arm holding him up, i felt ten feet tall and a hundred pounds lighter.

amd yet…and yet.  i hadn’t expected full release from bedrest until 32 weeks, another eighteen days away.  i had them counted; i was eager.  but i’ve spent the last seventeen weeks in an imaginary birdcage cobbled together of proscriptions and fear and uncertainty, and having it opened early has left me startled.  pleased, about all i can suddenly do,  but shaky.   i stood on my doorstep this morning, foot hovering above the step, blinded by the wide open space.  i froze.  for weeks, i have been sneaking tiny sojourns into my days, little walks halfway up the block, a drive to the pharmacy around the corner.  i’d become adept at balancing tiny tastes of freedom with my restrictions…took pleasure in responsible stretching of the boundaries. but having them melt away entirely leaves me feeling anxious, exposed, lost.  i feel pressured suddenly to revert to the normal person i have learned how not to be, and finding my way back is not so simple a matter as flipping a switch.  the who am i? of all this taunts me, shames me.  i have a little Stockholm Syndrome, friends.

i mourn not the reality of captivity, but the safety i had to convince myself it offered in order to abide by it.  they have freed me, declared that this baby no longer needs the birdcage.  this is success, i know.  this was the goal, and i am grateful beyond measure to have brought us both safe thus far.   but the panic that rises in my throat as i perch on my doorstep with the whole world open and dizzying before me reminds me that coming out the other side will be as complex and strange as the shutdown of accommodating myself to bedrest.  i am free.  i can do.  now i have to remember how to slip the bonds i’ve bought into, and free myself.

just before bed, every night, with Oscar all cozy under his blanket and his baby doll and stuffed rabbit in his arms, we read Guess How Much I Love You or Goodnight Moon or some other board book with little animals heading to bed. the Boynton one if he’s particularly giggly, the “goodnight little mouse” one if he’s been sad and needs a little extra last bit of sweetness to carry him off to sleep.

tonight, though, i left the animals behind, went for a slightly bigger book, thinking we’d change it up a bit, read something we’d never read before.

this moment of parenting genius didn’t precisely result in a bedtime story, per se, but in Oscar’s mother’s total breakdown into a hulking, gasping, weeping mass of snivelling snot.

i tried to read him The Giving Tree. aloud.

there was snorting and nose-wiping, then whole pages read in hoarse whispers with long pauses between sentences as i attempted to collect myself. then outright sobbing and honking. night night, honey. mummy’s just going to go bawl/collapse/slit her wrists now. a comforting picture, i think. just what the toddler set needs before sleepytime.

i knew better. the very first time i read The Giving Tree was to a class of kindergarten kids. i was a green young childcare worker who’d never seen the book before, but thought the line drawing of the tree on the cover compelling. i picked it off a shelf, perched in the middle of a semicircle of four year olds and proceeded…and then collapsed into a sobbing heap halfway through, gulping “and the tree…blubber…heave…loved the BOY!!!” until little hands were reaching out to pat me and mercifully, the damn story was over.

apparently the fifteen years in the interim haven’t toughened me up any.

it’s a confusing book. it troubles me. the tree in its welcoming vulnerability breaks my heart, and the presentation of the boy – who is “the boy” throughout, though he becomes an old man before the story is ended – seems intentionally pitiless, leaving room for one to wonder if perhaps if the tree hadn’t been so goddam selfless if the boy might have treated her better in the first place. i have never figured out if Silverstein meant it as a paean to the love that marks parenthood at its best, or a cautionary tale about sparing the rod…or even if it might not be about parenthood at all, but about love and forgiveness and human-ness in general. the story is flawed, i think, but i cannot figure out exactly where. and yet, in the way it encapsulates what it is to love and the need to love, the satisfaction and sorrow in loving for its own sake, it is also one of the most melancholically beautiful books i have ever read. i bought it for Oscar for his first Christmas and inscribed it so, though i knew we were years from reading it together.

we are, apparently, still years from reading it together, unless i want to spring for therapy for post-traumatic-bedtime-syndrome.

what i want to know is, if you’re familiar with the book, what do you make of it? can you actually read it aloud without melting into a puddle?  if so, are you simply made of stone or are there other books you can’t get through without boohooing like a faucet?

i think tomorrow we’ll return to the Boynton books. or maybe Long Day’s Journey into Night, or something cheery.

last night i rambled through the neon streets of a nameless north Asian city, lost and utterly foreign and happy as a clam.

like any dream, it made no narrative sense. i was simply elsewhere, escaped, otherworlded. it was vivid, a montage of sense recollections and body memory, smells and sights and pace all propped up like rusty actors on a stage that seldom has much call for them. they fought for their star turn, elbowing in on each other in rapid succession, costumes dusty but still perfect in form, bizarrely familiar in their forgotten but once-intimate Otherness.

it was day and night both in this dream, and Seoul and Osaka and Beijing and Busan and Daejeon all together…a hundred human habitations of relentless urbanity merged, distilled…all these but never Shanghai, nothing so recognizable and coherent to the occidental eye as the grand old Whore of the Orient with her Art Deco facades. there were piss-ridden alleys and sterile fusion bars, ten-lane thoroughfares with whizzing cars and motorcycles and scooters, both sides of the street jammed with a cacophony of lit signs that disdain all notions of harmony and makes Times Square look tame. i do not know what they hawked, in my dream, but then i never knew what they said when i was there, either. the in-jokes of signage were lost on me just as the Engrish hilarity of neon proffering “pork catlet” – cutlet – was presumably lost to those who lovingly promoted such wares. in my dream were colours, so many colours cutting into the dark in bright clean lines, blurring into a haze, and the graceful arc of the few old buildings that remain against the cigarette-box-design of the new, thousands of them, disappearing into the horizon in a sea of unending ugliness made vibrant by the tang of sugar or garlic or vinegar or liquor from the street vendors and the fetid waft of garbage and sewage beneath the open grates of the alleyways. and always, for months, the fallen cherry blossoms lingering. in the dream they were underfoot and all the paving tiles were shaped like diamonds.

girls with kewpie-doll double eyelids, surgically created but so ubiquitous that the under-thirties appear utterly genetically different from their elders, bestowed stewardess smiles upon me as i plowed along, eating up ground in this imaginary Ur-city too big to be outwandered. people thronged, fifty thick on the streets. fish flopped in plastic basins, pigs’ heads and carcasses with paws grinned glassy-eyed at me from market hooks. the modesty of appropriate dress perched alongside the gaudy love hotels, grinning at me, sex unmentionable yet discreetly everywhere, vending machines with cock rings displaying their wares like cans of coffee or goggle-eyed stuffed animals. cartoons everywhere. i felt a little, on waking, like i’d been in a cartoon, some strange cigarette-smoke and plum wine-laced anime tableau designed for aesthetic impact…but then remember that i always felt that way, there.

ah, the sometimes beautiful invisibility of being Other, of being so hopelessly and irredeemably different that there will be no true belonging, no amalgamation. all is pardonable or ignorable, chalked up to the barbarity of skin rather than individual indiscretion. no history, no ties. my feet were shod in army boots, then in the plastic bathroom slippers one would never sully with dirt from outside one’s apartment. but i went marching, marching, flashing through corner stores and chicken stands and grand public edifices to historical events i do not really understand, all in hard pink plastic footwear bearing homonculous-shaped toy rabbits on it, and my legs were strong and did not ache.

i could have walked all night long through those kaleidoscope streets, dreaming. and when i woke too early to the sound of “mama” echoing through my bedroom in my house in a town i have known all my life, i felt suddenly, incongruously homesick.

the almost-in-laws are visiting this week, tackling long-moldering tasks like painting our living room and recycling Dave’s overgrown beer bottle collection and helping build a playhouse for Oscar in the backyard.

bless them…they are very welcome guests. no, i’m not sharing them. renting…? maybe.

yesterday’s tasks involved a long list of doctor’s visits. in the morning, Oscar and his grandmother and i trekked to the ear clinic for a three-minute viewing of O’s inner ears that culminated in the decision to get tubes put in. in the afternoon, he and i both had separate visits at the hospital – his at the pediatric clinic for a follow-up on the immunity deficiencies he’d been tested for six weeks ago, mine at Labour & Delivery so my doc here could actually use the existing u/s machine to check my cervix along with ye olde manual grope. the u/s was unofficial, of course…because our province won’t pay for an OB from here to take a four-week leave to train in Halifax under the perinatology experts, and though the perinatology team from there are willing to come here for short sessions to train our folks, neither province can agree on who will pay their flights. the joys.

anyhoo, the hospital is a sizable edifice, sprawling and vaguely Memories of Star Trek in its design. since i am generally restricted from walking further than thirty feet or so, and since i’d already trod triple that just getting in and out of the ear clinic in the morning, i asked Oscar’s grandmother to drop him and i off at the front door, where we’d appropriate one of the wheelchairs that are so thoughtfully made available. she’d park, and then the three of us would wheel down to the bowels of the building where the pediatric lair clinic lurks, then waaay back up to the opposite corner where L&D is located.

the hospital, it so happens, is under a major MRSA crackdown these days. neon-green bottles of anti-bacterial handwash everywhere, and only one visitor per patient, nobody under twelve. i’d already made arrangements for O and his Grandmaman to drop me at L&D after his appointment and then beetle on home without me, because the birth unit is currently closed to children already born.

so when Oscar and i strolled in the big front doors and up to the main desk to wash our paws, i wasn’t shocked when the candy-striper in charge of the Very Important Bottles of Handwash glanced in alarm at the two-year-old and inquired, with officious panic, where we planned on going. she didn’t seem quite as relieved as i would’ve expected when my answer of “pediatric clinic” thus saved her launching into her spiel about The Rules and No Small Visitors, but we went about our germ-killing business without further conversation. until i asked her about wipes for the wheelchair.

she looked at me. she had very large, watery blue eyes, ringed in a silvery liner. they reminded me of fish.

wheelchair?

i explained that O and i were just about to grab a wheelchair. it happens that my mother works at the hospital, and had assured me that they keep industrial-strength wipes there behind the desk, so that the chairs can be wiped down between uses. having just seen a poor sickly soul deposited at the door in one, and having noted that neither candy striper nor commissionnaire had leapt up to clean the departed conveyance upon that person’s exit, i figured it was on me to wipe down my intended chariot myself. and were there any wipes, please?

is it for you? her eyes goggled at me, wetly.

the wipe?  no i came in clean, thank you very much, retorted the little voice in my head, but i told it to shut up. “the chair? yes it is, i’m on maternity bedrest, not supposed to walk…and i just want to wipe down the chair as the little guy’s likely to touch every inch of it and with the MRSA alert…” i trailed off. insert sweet motherly smile. show teeth.

Miss Fish Gaze suddenly morphed from Keeper of the Handwash to Guardian of the Entire Domain. she looked over the row of ten empty wheelchairs spaced out across from her, then back at me. but you walked in, she said, half-accusingly, half-stunned

my mother likes to lament that she tried to raise me with manners. i don’t think she has any idea to what level she succeeded, or how much i resent her for it sometimes. because i did not reach across the desk and beat that poor teenaged girl’s head into her little green bottles of anti-bacterial handwash until her fishy-eyes splattered all over the desk, no i did not. pity. nor did i grab my child, fling us both into the wheelchair and proceed to do loud papa wheelies all over the lobby of the hospital, which was clearly what Miss Fish’s tone insinuated that someone as hale and mobile as myself must have in mind. yeh, those maternity bedrest patients, you know what they’re like. yet i refrained. instead i cocked my head and looked her straight in the eye and said, “wipes?”

the surly teenage girl high on the power of her candy stripes caved. she handed them over, with the same misplaced self-righteousness that she’ll display forty years from now when she’s a bossy, squat matron shooing kids away from the plates of squares at some local church supper. i wiped down the wheelchair, settled myself and Oscar, and waited for Grandmaman to materialize. when we whisked past Miss Fish’s desk on our way to the elevator, i was tempted to reach out and steal a bottle of handwash from under her nose, just because.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the appointments turned out well. my cervix has its eyes on the prize once again, and my doctor is making noises now about not even taking the stitch out until 38 weeks. since i’ve never carried past 36 and am terrified about going into labour with the damn thing still in, i kind of hope we can come to some further accommodation on that matter. but the fact that she’s even talking about 38 weeks is pretty amazing. and Oscar’s chickenpox vax apparently didn’t take, but otherwise he shows no signs of an immuno-suppressed system and is as healthy as an asthmatic two-year-old with chronically infected ears can be. all dandy. praise be.

now i’m just going to stay peacefully in my house watching Dave and his parents spruce the place up and fantasizing about ways to inappropriately and flagrantly misuse hospital wheelchairs on my next visit.

he called Sunday night, said he wanted to check on how i’m doing with the ongoing bedrest saga. you’re just jealous, i said, of me getting to do all this laying around.

no no, he laughed, i’ve got enough of that going on myself. it’s terrible.

it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow, i said. i think i’m in good enough shape to drive the whole fifteen minutes outside town. you want to lay around together?

and he responded with something Child Protection Services would not approve of a grandfather saying to his granddaughter, and we both laughed and winked on our respective ends of the phone line, this arch repartée as old for us as the dirty jokes he’s dragged out and dusted off for every family dinner since my grandmother died and left him a second childhood.

that was how i came to sunburn my legs yesterday afternoon, reclined on the porch of my grandfather’s old plywood cottage on the shore just opposite the finest homes this city has to offer. even the old tumbledown cottages over on our side of the river are sprucing up, despite the fact that the land is rented in perpetuity and no one will ever be permitted to buy…two new facades have sprung up where there were once weeds and rot and paint jobs older than i am. the cottage next door has been a peeling-yet-bright minty green for as long as i can remember. yesterday, suddenly, it was faced in subtle brick-red siding, tastefully trimmed, gutted, a new deck gracing the view over the cliff.

my grandfather and i leaned back in our respective lawnchairs like two old coots. we gossiped, talked of our aches and pains, wondered at the state of the world and a few of my relatives. we watched a duck dive for fish, and marvelled at how far they swim underwater. he smoked his cigar, most courteously, with his right hand so as to keep the fumes out from under my nose.

he’s eighty-eight. he fell this spring and tore the muscles down his back and they’re not healing. he still goes into work every morning, at the autobody shop, still works a bit on ambulances and grants inspection stickers, but mostly i think he oversees or just sits, because work is somewhere to be. i come by my Really Useful Engine propensities naturally.

by noon, these days, he cuts out and heads home or to the cottage, because the pain is too much. that he’ll admit it, too much, so frankly and without pity sets off a panicky fluttering in my gut. i have a sneaking suspicion that his “too much” would be my “kill me now.” but painkillers wreck his appetite and he’s already lost twenty pounds, and so he sits on the florid vinyl lawnchair pillow with an icepack stuffed into the back of his flappy pants and nurses a rum for a few hours and watches the water to see if it calms.

any other year, he’d have hoisted the inflatable dinghy over his head already and made his way down the twenty feet of stairs that cling to the red mud bank, his white chicken legs comical, and rowed out to the small power boat that’s moored just where the high tide floats the motor. and like the Pied Piper, his appearance would have caused children to materialize around the raft, clamouring to waterski and kneeboard, and the afternoon would have been spent zooming across the water in ever-patient arcs, the second and third generation of skiiers and boarders he’s taught to lift themselves out of the water and balance and spin and spray all trailing behind him.

but this year, only one kid came around, just to see if he needed to be rowed out to the boat, if he was planning on skiing. i smiled at the kid, just growing now into his man’s body, still gangly and awkward. i remember holding the same boy steady on the kneeboard when he was all of five or six, a wild little towhead who forgot to let go when he fell off and might’ve been scared silly except my grandfather took most of the rest of the afternoon to make sure he got a proper ride and wasn’t left fearful. he’s a bit of a sour kid, or has been the odd times i’ve caught sight of him in the intervening decade. but yesterday he was polite and considerate and i beamed at him, full of gratitude at his offer, his remembrance.

they did not go out on the water, though. my grandfather’d had his rum and the wind was up a bit. maybe tomorrow, he said. and i realized, with a start, that even if they do ski tomorrow i cannot. he taught me when i was eight, and i have skiied behind him almost thirty summers. but not this year…if my doc does not approve of walking, no waterskiing probably goes without saying. as does the maybe never again.

i pretended there was cigar smoke in my eyes.

and then we sat there in the breeze and kept each other company, a matched set of shut-ins parked in the sun, enjoying the afternoon in spite of ourselves. and i have not felt either so useful nor so understood in months.

Oscar after his nap…soft around the edges, little body still bleary and warm.

i love this photo. alas, i did not take this photo. Kate came over for an afternoon a few weeks ago, and the lens she pointed at us offered up faces of my son i’d never seen before. she has a wicked eye. she also has a wicked camera.

i once, in the last days of film, invested a few years training my own eye to frame and capture photojournalistic images of the lines and structures and stories that hid in plain sight in the exotic places i journeyed…i have a photo essay of the sectarian murals of Belfast, one of the rooftops of Busan, South Korea, and one of the cats of Istanbul. but i never did master the details of focus and aperture and lighting enough to get my old warhorse K-1000 to take great shots of people, particularly children…they’re twitchy little creatures.

i’d like to try. Dave & i have been talking, and the truth is there’s not much we plan on buying for this new baby. some kind of nursing rocker, oh yes o aching, withered core muscles, oh yes…but beyond that, we’re into hand-me-downs and intend for O and Bebe to share a room, at least for awhile. so we thought maybe we might spend on this child in the place that second-borns – or second-brought-homes – get notoriously shortchanged: photos. we’re in the market for a good camera.

what we have right now is a little hp Photosmart R817…fine for snapshots, but slow, and the light and focus are never great. i want something i can manually adjust. i want something quick, that can capture a first smile rather than the blur of a turning head three seconds later. it doesn’t have to be top of the line. it doesn’t have to be the deal of the century, either. i want advice.

what’s your camera?  what do you like about it?  what doesn’t it do well?  got any recommendations?