The Pilot On His Frozen Cloud

Most of the time we tend to go about our business all hurky-jerky, with hardly a glimmer of thought going towards stuff that might be seen as. I don't know, 'poetic' or 'evocative'.

Our lives are busy, no matter who we are (unless by 'busy' you mean X-box, in which case you need to cut your mom a break and move out already) and we spend whole stretches of days stomping right by beautiful things without looking at them at all.

How many blue skies have we ignored as we blabbered away on our cellphones in traffic?

How many deer standing in a field staring at our car have we missed because we were all up in our heads thinking about dumb crap, whether or not we remembered to record Swamp People on the DVR or not?

We walk right by the same incredible graffiti twice a day on the way to the subway, for three years running now, and we have neever ever bothered to actually look at it.

Weird, huh? And kind of sad, too.

So the other day when my wife handed me an armful of tiny blue jeans and summer shirts that any elf could fit in and said, "Take these up to the attic with the rest of the stuff" I knew what she meant, but I had no idea what I was in for.

I wrestled and struggled with the door that seldom gets opened trying to not dump all of those clothes, and then I bumbled up the attic steps past last summer's spider webs, not even once considering that all of the super-skilled craftsmen.women who had spun those gothic masterpieces above my bedroom while I was downstairs dreaming the dreams of a under-sexed overweight man, they were probably mostly dead by now, entombed inside the walls of our house, or wherever spiders go to die.

No, I was all concerned with just getting up there in the wicked cold attic/untying the knots I knew I had tied on the trash bag full of outgrown toddler clothes/ and getting these new ones in there and then re-tying the bag before I froze my ass off. So, I wasn't really expecting to smash open a dam I didn't even know I'd ever built.

But, you know how it is: and that's how things went down.

I undid the trash bag and used my knee to spread out the hole in the top so I could just plop this new bundle in there when my eye caught  a pair of plaid shorts.

Eveything whooshed and I could hear the blood in my veins blowing through my ears like a thunderstorm river.

Oh snap, I though. Oh hellfire.

They had been Violet's, my daughter's shorts. They had been one of our go-to pairs, too, a pair of cheap Garanimals whose pink and yellow and orange little squares had decorated my kid's diapered summer butt so many times last year that just seeing them lying there on the top of the blob of stuff whose future was all thrift shop mystery, it unhinged something in my guts.

Dropping the stuff I'd come to deliver, I stared at these shorts and slowly picked them as if they might be alive, like a fallen bat in the attic corner, and right away, as cheesy and bogus as it sounds, I'm telling you the damn truth: as soon as I picked them up I could smell the way Violet's bedroom would smell on bright July mornings last year, a whiff of chilled-out 7 am humidity all mixed in with the ghost of some carpet milk stain somewhere, the faint sourness of some forgotten spill.

The shorts had been up here for months now, and probably no one in this solar sytemn or the next ones had even thought about them one time. It's a ridiculous notion, of course, I mean who the hell would ever think of something so fleeting and dumb? Yet, here I was clutching them in my hand and hearing the sound of my own voice calling out Violet's name loud and slow and clear just like the two or three days a week last summer when I would sit there on her purple shag rug, all by myself, calling her name and trying to convince her to pry her eyes away from Diego and come let me get her dressed for the day.

Hmph, I grumbled under my breath. You must be getting soft, dude.

But as I looked at the shorts and then down in to the trash bag at a pair of small suddenly familiar pants, their knees worn away to dime-sized holes, and then as I spotted the black Beatles t-shirt from Target my little girl had once worn at least a few times a week, to the point where it had become so familiar that I think I unconsciously looked forward to seeing it on her tiny frame, the guys all crossing Abbey Road/moving across that freaking crosswalk for the zillionth time in the dragging afternoon of pop culture history, but crossing it the best they ever could in my eyes, the fast fast train I had been riding on slammed its heavy brakes and took a good country mile or so of smoking and squealing to finally come to a full stop in this weird cold cob-webby place.

Jesus, I thought.

Time is gushing by me.

Every moment is already in the past.

There is something epic happening right this second, right here/ and right over there.

And these kids of mine, of ours, they are our life's work and in a lot of ways they are traveling due east or due west from us even as we stand there running our fingers through their freshly shampoo'd hair.

Moving ever so slightly toward the front door even as we stand there clenching a pair of outgrown Garanimal shorts on a frozen cloud hanging above our world.

Live From The Morning Battlefield

Henry will be two in a few days and I sure am proud of the kid.

He can talk a pretty wild blue streak for a young gun his age.I have whole conversations with him where I understand everything he's saying, and him me. I don't even have that with most adults I engage with.

Plus, without trying to sound too immodest, my boy is damn good, I say, damn good, at Rewind Walking™, which is that reckless but graceful system of sliding down the steps backward on your belly as if you were a country ham being slid down an icy hill in like 1913 Appalachia.

In the living room, after I have a beer or two, sometimes I bust out the soccer ball and the kid sure can kick. Yeah, sometimes he misses the ball outright and does a Charlie Brown/Lucy deal where he lands on his tiny soft ass on the floorboards, but when he does connect, buddy, I get the hell out of the way; I'm still pretty fluid for a guy my age, but I'm no Liverpool goalie or anything.

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Oh Henry.

Oh my boy. You sure do make your pappy beam.

But you are a mystery to me, too.

 Sometimes I swear, I'll be standing there looking at you just quietly gnawing on the side of a cracker or a Matchbox muscle car and my heart does a little flutter that sort announces to the rest of me that I sort of run out of bravado and machismo and tough guy sauce when you're around.

Down in me, I feel twittery when I watch you quietly staring up at Patrick Star, your short brown eyes glittering at the screen.

I sigh, a little love sigh, I guess. I'm man enough to admit that.

You hear me sigh.

Then, to be perfectly honest: I don't know what the hell happens.

Your eyes swing around and you spot me spotting you and you fling your weird snack towards the wall and, I don't know if it's the fact that I surprised you or that you wanted to have a little Henry Time without Dad doggin' you that un-glues the cute kid wrapping paper from the package in the playroom to reveal a two-and-a-half-foot Kodiak grizzly with an attitude.

Maybe it's the possibility that with all that new circuitry lighting up a collision of sparks behind the thin walls of Outer Henry these days, the expanding horizon of feelings and universal truths and realizations and internal ponderings going off up in your Air Traffic Control Tower and down in your Boiler Room sometimes end up driving you stark-raving Raccoon -With-Rabies crazy?

Either way, when you snap, little man, you sure do snap.

It's actually kind of beautiful.

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Okay!

Here you come barreling across the room at me and I think to myself,"Here we go."

"Noooooooooooooooooooooo!," you scream as a twist of winter snot shoots out of you nose like locomotive steam.

I honestly pity your tender heart as you charge me; I know it sounds weird and all but I sort of picture a baby clam doing push-ups in a one-bulb gym and that's what I imagine your wee heart to look like down beheind your ribs when you are this freaking upset.

I watch you move with the quickness and for whatever reason, I am looking forward to you getting over here.

And then...dammit to hell: you fall over the pink beanbag on your way across the long battlefield of the playroom floor and I just want to run out there and rescue you from yourself, but I don't dare. A regular mortal man cannot just dip down out of the sky like a freaking angel or something and pluck a true warrior from the smoky chaos, right?

Hell no, he can't. So I don't and that's that.

As soon as you flop down on the ground you are picking yourself up off the beanbag and without even missing a single kick of your camouflage slipper-sock, you pick up your journey right where it fell off, hollering your war cry.

"Nooooooooooooooooo!"

For an instant, just before our meeting there in the doorjamb, I watch as Sponge Bob flips another Crabby Patty onto a roll.

"I wonder what they really taste like?," I am thinking to myself at the exact moment of impact; a bit of odd clarity in the middle of battle.

Your tiny hard noggin slams into my crotch with all of the hellbent fury of a young north wind seeing how much shit he can blow up. Limits, rules, lines, boundries, laws, and pecking order will all come in due time, I know; me and your mom, we work hard on those things with your sister and you, but it takes a lot of patience, my friend.

Wait til you have your own kids someday...you'll see what I mean!

My pain is real, but I saw it coming so there's that. I wince and I pretend to cry because at times like this, one mindfuck deserves another and besides, looking down at you looking up at me, I see the waiting scrawled across your eyeballs: you know what you've done and you want me to react; you need it.

You grabbed the lightning in your guts with two tiny fist and you rode it, Kimosabe, and now what, Dad?

Well alright, fine then.

I gurgle and sputter and fake some tears and your face quivers in wonder? I love that about you, you cannot hide from your heart no matter what. Your face is a hoodlum rat and he gives you away fifty times a day. From a human cannonball you turn on a damn dime and that transition alone is enough to keep me hooked on this stuff for the next 500 years or so.

It's pretty thrilling for me as I watch you process things as best you can in a split second or two, your trapezey soul wavering out there on the line somewhere between a weak smile and genuine concern.

Then, right on queue: BAM!: you hit your endgame.

You wrap your stubby arms around my Walmart pajama knees and bury your face into me one more time.

"Don't cry Daddy!" you shout, all muffled up against my fake flannel.

I fake weep, like the script calls for.

You pull your head out. "Don't cry! Don't cry, Daddy! I kiss it!"

We don't waver from that script too much these days, but that's just fine with me and with you, two dudes standing out there on the edge of the smoldering Tuesday morning battlefield.

Then you lean in deliberatlely and kiss my knee, as if a kiss from you any old place would make me all better instantly.

Which, funny enough, it does every time.

Soul Tar Feather

I hear Henry crying in the other room.

That's basically like me saying, 'I smell bacon when I'm frying bacon," because, like, no shit. Of course Henry's crying in the other room.

It's not that he's a cry-baby or anything, but he's almost two now, that age when there is a fire born down inside of a child which can only best be explained as the actual birth of their very soul, you know? See, by two years old the little body has been around a bit/seen some things/ got a few nicks in the enamel to show for all that living the kid's been doing.

But it's the soul, THE SOUL!, ya'll, that pecks its way out of the great speckled egg down in that nest of nitty-grittiness known as your heart and cheep-cheeps its way out onto the big bad boulevard of broken dreams called your fucking life. There, it takes one look at that squooshy lump of baby fat you had become and immediately starts rearranging house with game-changer moves.

Babies get born.

They slobber and stare at you clueless, as if you were a fifty foot high pile of neon sheep shit.

Toddlers get Soul Born.

They hurl themselves down staircases and use streaming tears of manipulation to break your heart so they can get you to get the fuck out of their way while they are trying to get a running start across the room so they can take a flying leap and land with their miniature wangs into a low socket. (Bic pens for girls).

Babies shoot out a moist tunnel and into your hearts.

Toddlers shoot out of a Soul Cannon into your face.

So, at this point, hearing Henry crying in the other room is normal. It's when you aren't hearing him in there making a racket that you have to worry about what's up.

"Hen-REE!" I call out his name that way. I do that for a change sometimes.

No response.

I can hear him fussing around with his stool in the bathroom, so I figure he's probably in there trying to get up on the counter to eat some toothpaste, something I am a bit hesitant to call his 'first hobby,' but I'm not really one to mince the truth. Anyway, the last I saw him, a few minutes ago, maybe five, he had a lollipop in his hand and he was tearing through my room with blue lollipop glue all over his cheeks and lips looking like a small candy-coated squirrel on the make.

I hadn't expected tears. His sister is downstairs, she has an alibi. Something isn't adding up.

I wait but he keeps crying, a little harder now and I want to ignore it, let him tough it out,  but whenever the crying pitch increases, say from a 'there's-a-thumbtack-in-the-soft-sole-of-my-foot' to something like 'help-there's-a-piece-of-my-own-poo-lodged-in-my-left-nosehole', I get a little worried, a little jittery. I think back to the time when I went to investigate his increasingly fevered cries to find him stuck sitting inside the sink with the hot water running full blast and maybe ten seconds away from getting seriously hot.

There are times when you know something is really the matter. It's a gut instinct; or a chip floated into you head by insurance companies. Either way, as a parent: you know.

This might be one of those times, I start thinking.

He's crying harder now and he's not running to my calls, which is unusual given that the very nature of his damn sobs are generally meant to curry influence and favoritism. I get up from my work and head into the bathroom.

I turn the corner through the door.

Whoa.

Holy shit!

Henry has long gorgeously sliced ribbons of toilet paper trailing from each of his fingers and his thumbs. It seems ethereal; at first I think he is playing some kind of a boy wonder trick on me, crying to get me to run to see his fairly astonishing toilet paper art.

But then, no, I notice that some of the paper is still attached to the roll and the poor guy isn't trying to create anything cool on purpose here. He's literally tarred and feathered himself with toilet paper and lollipop gunk.

My heart aches a tiny bit for the kid as I laugh out loud, which makes him start bawling even harder with frustration.

What a guy, I think to myself. What a spectacular friggin' kid moving in spectacular circles of magical soul.

In his 'big boy' effort to pull off some tissue and wipe his own snotty nose, like I've been teaching him lately, his lollipop fingers were basically candy corn nubs dipped in SuperGlue. The more he touched the toilet paper, the more it stuck to him! Now, here he is and he's sad to the point of fury.

He bites his own arm as I stare down at him. That's how he handles his anger, a chip off the old block.

I try to hold my laughs in, but it's hard and I want him to know what a genius I think he is.

I lean over and whisper into his ear that it's okay, we'll fix him up. I help him over to the sink and I can also start to make out, just by osmosis, that a good part of his upset is also because he was really enjoying the hell out of that lollipop and all of this dumbass paper came out of nowhere to screw it all up.

We turn on the water and I show him how easy all this stuff comes off with just a few splashes and some gentle rubs.

After a minute or so, his tears dissolve into misty whimpers, the kind where he's kind of caught out there on a hiccup between old sadness and happy again.

And just as I catch a fleeting glimpe of us in the mirror, his brown eyes twinkling above his blue shellacked nose, half his noodle barely peering up over the vanity top, I am aware that I am watching him being born for the second time.