A foggy morning, sort of distant fog, can see across the street to the little park, but not a lot further. The trees stand like dark ghosts there, dissolving out of the slow fog. There is no wind, dead calm, with the splat of dripping moisture, leaves glazed with it, the trunks of the crepe myrtles shadowed with streaks of wet trickling down. The maple with its layers of leaves, almost fully formed now, is losing the brightest green and slowly growing more somber but still fresh. There is a small forest of white new canes rising like spear heads from the leaf litter and the margins of grass. A cardinal sits in the bush, running through its various songs . . . it always amazes me that birds have a song for every reason and none as well. What you think might be half a dozen birds turns out to be the same bird just practicing every song it knows.
Today is the birthday of my oldest son, the first born, the one you make all your first mistakes on, the one that survives your new terror and inexperience. I can't really say the one you make all your mistakes on, because there are always more mistakes, you run across new ones for every child. You do learn things, like they will survive most anything, that they are not as fragile as they seem, that nothing is more important to them than knowing you love them, and that love covers a multitude of sins. When you have three children, each unique, the opportunity for unique blunders is there for each of them. Still, they are more joy than anything else, even now, even grown, they are still good company, still the kind of people I am glad to know. There is a little triumph in that, small victory over all those errors!
Even though Michael is grown now, you never really forget that first moment, all those firsts.
First Born
Nothing is so deep a revolution
As carrying another life,
A change so permanent
It can be read in the bones
And abyss crossed
That cuts your life
Into two countries,
Before and after.
Before, a singular view,
Before, the body unmapped
It’s life shared only
In that intimate opening
That makes another life
In soft pink light
In the heat of summer
In the heat of discovery.
After the two of us
We are three
And I am two of us
And the world enters,
The body measured
Mapped, explored
ten thousand ways
in every light.
And the months
Grow long and large
And there is new
Strange terrain,
Shifting and making
Landmarks of events
In the body and blood
Under the skin and heart.
Even after the exploration,
There are new territories,
Futile work of muscle
The new life caught
Trapped by bones,
Exhausted both of us,
Freed finally
By the surgeon’s knife.
First born,
Both joy and terror
From first glimpse,
Blue, swollen, dented,
Marked by hard passage
Into a country of love
We must all survive
And discover together.
S. Crowson
A poem I wrote for that discovery, that we all live in that country of love and are still exploring it, from the first terrifying moments, until now, when I get hugs and conversation and explanations for technical issues that are beyond comprehension, and another window on the world with his own view of just about everything. That's what you get when you have children, more windows on the world, more views, more opinions, actually when it comes right down to it, more just about everything that you wouldn't have wanted to miss. You also get these things from all your children and other people's children, and that is such an amazing blessing, from my sister and Brian's Sam and Winonah, from the children's friends, from my friends, from the students at school, so many windows, so many different worlds!
How can we ever be bored in such a world? How can we ever run out of love with so much giving and taking and exploring?
So today it's . . . Happy birthday, Michael!
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