Last of the Porch

It's an amazing fall day in Columbus. Radios and televisions this morning were awash with reports of an Indian Summer, and like a lot of people I tossed on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and headed outside. Jen and I puttered around, working on small projects we had been putting off with her recent sleepiness, my constant laziness, and the cold snap that sent us indoors. We got some dead flowers trimmed, potted plants disposed of and their baskets put away for the season, and I took a broom to the collected cobwebs around our front and back doors.

Now, we're on the porch. Jen suddenly has plans for other projects ("Maybe we should trim these hedges today.") and I agree to all of them knowing that it won't be too long before she runs out of steam and ideas. These days she's still good out of the gates, but not much for stamina.

Out of necessity, cigars are an outdoor vice for me, so this may well be the last good day to sit on the porch, have a beverage and a smoke. The sun warms the lawns, and the winds are strong enough to kick leaves out from under the hedges, rattling them down the street sounding like children playing tag in tap shoes. Planes come and go from the airport, but I've barely noticed them after living here the first month...they're just more background noise, part of the constant hum that surrounds the condo.
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We proctored an SAT Test this morning, a job that allows us to pick up a bit of cash, help out one of Jen's coworkers, and gives me four or five hours to sit and read. It's a fun gig for me, because I get to roam around from room to room and watch kids as they stress over bubbled answer sheets and scribble furiously in the margins of their test booklets. They're all so young, and trying to figure out who they're going to be, but as I watch them I imagine that I already know.

It's easy to pick out the ones that will have too much fun in college. It's also pretty simple to see those who will have too little. The girls are all straight-haired and pony tailed, and the boys are all casually and carefully rumpled. I make up little stories about some of them as I half-heartedly scan the room for cheaters. None of the stories I come up with for them are very nice though, so ashamed I stop and go back to reading.
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Jen and I have had a couple of doctor appointments, and they've gone well. We got to watch the twitching fussing fetus for half an hour on the flat screen in the doctors office as they took dozens of measurements. Jen cried when we saw him reach for his nose. I found myself groping backwards for my chair, not wanting to take my eyes off the screen where she just kicked away from the prodding ultrasound wand. A few days later, in another office, we heard the electronic chugging train of her heartbeat, and we laughed as everything became even more real.
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Fortunately, Jen has forgotten the hedges and suggested a walk. I'm down with a stroll around the woods, so it's time to throw on some jeans and go see the sun while we still can.

Closed Circuit Future

I can't remember if it's been raining for days, but it feels like it. It's that slow, cold, purposeful rain that soaks through tree bark, and slows everything that ducks and hides from its drippings. I stepped out the door this morning, and immediately smelled the worm holocaust on the sidewalk. Having finally given up going deeper into the earth to hide from the rains, they stretch bloated and dying across parking lots and walkways.

Fall showed up big over the past two weeks. Normally, I'm on the watch, studying tree lines for blotches of yellow and red, but this year the season snuck up on me. Today I noticed the orange along the highway, rich and full as any Bob Ross landscape, and it seemed to be even more noticeable against the dishwater skies.

I've been distracted, to say the least. I've been sitting back watching the cliches shared over the years by parents become a welcome truth. I'm smiling more. I often can't remember what I was working on the moment before. I'm thinking 529 accounts, nurseries, and how old a person should be before they sit down to listen to Kid A.

I've become nothing else but these disjointed thoughts mixed with panicked calls to my insurance provider.

I posted the picture of Smudge, but if it weren't for the doctor's guidance, I literally wouldn't have known the baby's head from its ass. People asked me later if I cried when I saw the heart flickering in glorious black and white, but I didn't. I stood amazed thinking that it was beating just like I had always imagined a hummingbird's heart would.

Jen and I held hands and looked at the screen, and when the doctor stepped out to let her get dressed, we held each other and laughed. Call us victims of our generation, but in some ways the pregnancy wasn't real until we could see it on television.

With all of the recent change, I find myself shutting down in some ways. Until tonight, I've not had the focus to sit and write anything. Instead I've spent hours surfing the web reading about what's going on in my wife's body, or looking at Ramones onesies (hells yeah!), or watching The Big Lebowski for the 400th time. I plot and plan, but do nothing constructive. Yesterday, I got a nice box of new records, so I know I'll be in the den a good part of the weekend lost in all the No Age goodness sent my way.

I'm just waiting. I'm waiting for this suburban life to become amazing. I'm waiting for everything to change, and for the first time, change really is coming.

Parent in the Hood

The hours spent in Cubicle Land buzz drunkenly like a fly, sleepy and slowed by winter air. Time has somehow stretched and I live a hundred lifetimes between 6:00 AM and 5:00 PM five days a week.

I was really bad at my job last week, and am struggling to make it right. I'm having a hard time staying focused these days.

One night, a few weeks ago, I was sound asleep as any rational (read boring and old) man would be on a Thursday morning at 3:00 AM, when I heard the sound that I've feared for months. Someone was coming up the steps. Not just walking, but running. Big bounding thumps that pulled me out of my sleep. Burglars. Burglars who will hold me at gun point and take my records and whiskey. Burglars who were giggling and laughing all the way up the stairs. Giggling? I was trying to put it together still when she jumped up and down on the end of the bed laughing.

Jen.

"It said yes!"

"Huh?"

"It said yes, the test said yes."

She laid it on my chest and I fumbled for my glasses so I could see the digitized word "YES" on the little display panel.

I hadn't really thought about how I would respond at this moment. When I had pictured it, I had always imagined that I would be conscious and not fighting the confusion that sticks with me for a good 45 minutes after waking. In my mind I had pictured me telling her that I love her and that she's amazing and all those things that would come so naturally with such good news. But my reality is usually less than ideal. Instead, the lone thought that came to mind was "I have so much I need do." Then: "Crap, I bought a two pack of those tests. What am I going to do with the other?"

We discussed it over the next couple days and decided to keep our news a secret for the most part. We would tell some immediate family, but otherwise wait to tell everyone else. Within 24 hours of telling our secret, it had literally made it to Baghdad and back.

Some people suck at playing guitar, or driving, or being polite. Other people suck at keeping house plants alive or not talking during a movie. My family just happens to suck at keeping a secret. What you gonna do? So, as a result, everyone knows that Jen is in "the family way" much earlier than we would have preferred. At least that's what we tell ourselves.

You see, we're the couple that can't wait for Christmas morning to open presents. We are the king and queen of immediate gratification. We've never waited for a thing in our lives, but still we tell ourselves this is something we would have kept under wraps. I don't buy it, even though I'm the one selling it. It would have happened sooner rather than later, regardless of how indignant we are now.

And so, immediately it seems, we've changed. We go for walks each night at our favorite metro park and talk about how we're going to handle what's coming. I get the impression that Jen is less freaked than I am about certain things. There's a strange contentment that's come over her, and while I'm normally the laid back one, she's saying things like "Millions of other people have done it. We can't screw it up that badly." Yeah, that's what she thinks.

Jen's at work tonight shuffling parents around the school's Open House, and I'm doing what I do when she's not around. I'm up in the smallest of our three bedrooms (the room we refer to as "The Den") listening to Wilco, drinking a whiskey, and churning out a couple of words here and there.

It's really the first evening I've had on my own since she broke the news to me, and I just realized as I was writing this out, that I'm perfectly content about what's to come.