Lord, What Have I Become?

I was at a store the other day, buying a new pair of used shoes. I'm waiting in line for way too long in a store that's way too loud, and suddenly this little girl, 'bout three and a half, starts howling. She's five feet away from me, fifteen feet from the door, clinging to her sippy and wailing away.

The old me, the sensible me, would have rolled his eyes. He would have thought sarcastic thoughts inwardly and groaned outwardly. He probably would have taken this opportunity to make an already unpleasant situation more unpleasant.

But the new me? Something twanged inside my belly. I started to wonder if the kid was lost. I looked around for something that might look like a parent. I swear, I was even thinking about going up to the kid, kneeling down, and asking if she was okay. Seriously.

Clearly, fatherhood changes a man, and not always for the better.

Am I Really That Easy?

Wrig: It's four days until chocolate night, but it's only three days until Saturday!
Me: What's Saturday?
W: Eleanor's birthday party!
Christie: You gonna go?
E: Um ... No.
W: But, Ed, you might get a piece of cake at the birthday party ...

Where Ya' Been?

1. Back in the middle of July, we went to a conference for children's writers down in Netarts, OR. I had a great time talking with an editor, an agent, and published authors about my writing. It turns out, unfortunately, that praise is totally debilitating to me as a writer. Sigh. Christie and Wrig joined me at the coast, where they spent five solid days playing in the sand.

2. We returned home to a heat wave and an invitation from Jeff and Cindi to join them at the beach. So we washed a load of laundry, piled into the car, and headed back to the coast. The bonus time at the beach was very cool: I got to help Jeff repair a deck and I got to rock out on my guitar with Jeff's friend Eric (who can actually play songs and stuff); Jeff accompanied us, of course, on the accordion. Party on, dude!

3. About 15 minutes after we returned my dad arrived from Phoenix for the beginning of a month long visit. Two days later, Mom joined us. We've been very busy in town - swimming, cooking, playing blackjack, eating out, walking around. Wrig has had four sleepovers with Grammers and Gramps, which means four - count 'em, four! - dates for Christie and me. We went to a baseball game (the Beavers got killed), rented a movie (I'd forgotten what it was until Christie reminded me that it was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It was pretty amusing but not exactly memorable), went bowling (Christie rolled a 147 on her first game in five years, but her back has been complaining ever since), and spent three - count 'em, three! - hours at Powell's (actually, we spent three hours and $130 - expensive, but way cheaper than a massage). Grammers and Gramps are heading home tomorrow and they'll definitely be missed.

4. During the visit, the nuclear family (or nuke-u-lur, if you attended Yale) headed east to Camp Creek for another weekend of camping (we really are that sort of family, now). Wrig had a great time exploring the creek and splashing around in Trillium Lake with Mia and Miles, and the parents had a great time trying to stay out of the cold water. Up at Trillium Lake we found hundreds, if not thousands, of butterflies. You'd think you could find one lousy poem amidst a thousand butterflies, but no such luck.

So that's about it. Back to school is breathing down my neck and I haven't even opened the bag of files I was planning on perusing over the summer. I hope there wasn't anything important in there ...

Big Finish!

This is another poem from Oswalt West. I feel kind of bad posting two poems with "birdsong" in a single week, but that's the kind of camping trip it was. If I'd written about our trip to Beverley Beach, I would have had a lot of "frogsong" imagery. You build with the tools you've got, right?

All Women are Beautiful

All women are beautiful
while camping:
hair styled by
birdsong and breeze,
perfumed with
campsmoke and dust,
makeup lovingly applied
all night long by
shooting stars.

Guess Where This One was Written

Poem Behind Ponytail Falls

I wonder how fast the water
must flow to make it thunder so.
Perhaps I will bring a high school
science class here to conduct experiments,
clanking their way to the top, laden
with beakers and balances. I wonder if they will care,
or if they will notice the way the leaves
change color as they flicker in the breeze.

I wonder how deep the pool is.
Or rather, was, before the eager
water pounded away at the stone.
If I donned scuba gear and flippers,
I could measure the generations:
here is the time before cell phones,
the time before television, and even
deeper, the time before poems.

I wonder if we will swim here, you and I,
naked in the nighttime, our legs twined together
against the icy water. We will spin in lazy circles
beneath the stars, kissing once for each star
and once again for each drop of water.
And I will wonder which tastes sweeter:
snow fresh from the waterfall
or the honeyed milk of your kisses.

We Interrupt Ed's serious series with....

find your inner PIE @ stvlive.com

I usually do get sidetracked and take these quizzes (as long as they are short - ugh to those who write long ones), I never post my "results" because I just don't think I post frequently enough for you to have come all this way just to read some cheesy thing that made me smile. But Pie? Pie is serious stuff.

For the record, apple pie is the apple of my eye, but I am okay with being blueberry pie.

This is Turning Into a Travelogue

This poem followed me home from our trip to Austin over Spring Break.

High Above the Blanco in Hill Country

Vulture is an ugly word,
bitter on the tongue,
hunched in the back of your mouth
when you dare to say it.
And it is a foul business, after all,
the cleaning of meat from bone,
funeral rites for the animal kingdom.

But the vulture in flight,
high above the Blanco
in Hill Country,
hovers as elegantly as any eagle,
its arcs mathematical, methodical,
its patience that of the saint,
not the gravedigger.

And to see a vulture
perched on your rooftop,
high above the Blanco
in Hill Country,
is not an omen
of impending doom,
but rather a symbol
of flight, of light,
of unexpected grace.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Blogcast For This (Heart)Breaking News ...

I got bad news this morning from, Kathy, a friend of mine at work. OCHS has lost its third student in a year. By lost, of course, I don’t mean misplaced, though that seems likely to happen in a school with over 2,200 kids. By lost, I mean died. Danielle died in a rafting accident this weekend.

The headline in the Oregonian read “Teen did everything right on rafting trip,” which pretty much sums up Danielle’s life. She was a sweet kid, but somehow a little bit jinxed. A lot jinxed, I guess.

As Kathy was telling me about the accident, I was sad, but not shaken. I’m worried for the survivors. They will have a lot of shame and guilt and anger to deal with. Danielle knew a lot of kids, so a lot of kids will have a hole in their lives. I can’t imagine how awful the adult supervisors must feel. There is the weight of gravity and then there is the weight of responsibility.

But that’s just pain, after all, and pain I understand and accept. Pain, I expect.

Then Kathy told me about what she called the “little miracles” afterwards. A boy ran up a mountainside to try to get cell phone reception. One of the parents on the trip flagged down a train. She made a train stop. What kind of courage, what kind of sheer will power does it take for an ordinary person to make a train stop? I’m reminded of Superman. Maybe Everyman is Superman.

Other things, too. Little things. A couple of doctors on a fishing trip happened upon the accident and helped the other girls set up camp, helped them not think about their missing friend. After the parents of the survivors were notified, they rushed to the woods and managed to find the kids in the middle of nowhere by sheer … luck? Divine intervention? A miracle?

The pain I understand. The tragedy I can deal with. It is the kindness in the aftermath of disaster, the confluence of the decency of human nature and the capriciousness of Mother Nature, the meeting of good luck after bad fortune, that kills me.

Christie and Wrigley went to Jamison Park today for a birthday party. A total stranger brought two garbage bags filled with miniature beach balls and dumped them into the fountain for anybody and everybody to play with.

Danielle’s death doesn’t make me want to cry; that stranger’s kindness does.