Unpunctual in 2024
“Was everything beautiful so bold?” she asks. And always the answer is yes. There is always a daring to beauty, a perfection of act lifted whole from ordinary knowledge, installed forever in the archtypes.
—Kay Ryan, in a 1988 review of Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood
Hello and a happy New Year to each of you.
Some of this newsletter was written about 10 months ago… and 9 months ago, and 8, and 5. But each time I sat down I never got around to finishing it. So now I’m finishing it, and hoping to get back to these newsletters with more regularity in 2025.
Thanks for reading!
In January 2024, I basically died and went to heaven…
Sure, there is a lot of shitting and sharting in heaven. Plenty of pee and puke, flying up or splashing down. The need for sleep is greater than ever. And no, not every tear has been wiped away.
But still, it is the kingdom of heaven nonetheless.
Just ask these two enchanted souls:
Said the poet Robert Frost, "We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes." It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real and desirable — that the child himself is real, and cherished.
— Mary Oliver
I’m tempted to assume that having your first child just before your 39th birthday comes freighted a little differently than if it had happened 20 years ago. Though of course, I don’t really know how true that is. I’ve certainly wanted to write something about this wild and ever-bubbling freight of emotion I carry around inside me now — to jump down some “sudden vista of the vain attempt.” But so far the language, and the energy and the time for it, has mostly evaded me, and I’m afraid whatever words I’d find would spoil it.
Will’s tiny, explosive life certainly comes with one of the deepest senses of anti-merit I have ever felt. There is — to my surprise, I think — not even a feeling that “we made that.” Yes, there’s the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees, and the moon up above, and a thing called love. But my son is, to me at least, as much a gift as any miracle ever attested to in history. And I have not felt it or wanted to feel it in any other way.
Pure, pure, pure gift.
What a fast, slow year it has been!
The months since those early days have flown by, already blurring the memory of the little boy who fit snuggly and lightly on one forearm, and who I now carry around like a sack of potatoes.
And those same months have also stood nearly still, seeming to contain in their short span all the life I have ever known or cared about.
Everness
One thing does not exist: Oblivion
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day’s two twighlights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe;
Whoever through its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only from the sunset’s farther side
Shall view at last the Archtypes and the Splendors.—Jorges Luis Borges
And, oh yea, that picture reminds me…
We’s married! To each other, etc.
Of course, half the people reading this already know. It was another thing I meant to newsletter about in August… and in September… and never got around to it. And then the moment passed and, well, I practically forgot it even happened.
We had a smallish-as-possible ceremony in Bristol and were most excited to see some disparate groups in our lives get together and meet for the first time. It was a blur, of course, and, for various reasons — not least because of how out of order we’ve done things — it doesn’t even feel like our wedding was just 5 months ago. (Our favorite wedding card simply said, “I could’ve sworn you guys were already married.”) Before the day was even over, it felt like a memory of this important thing that had happened with us. But it felt and feels very… non-punctiliar. Like a historical rewrite and suddenly it’s a thing that has always been.
This is the always has been. What we do
is home. And this is I and you.
—Anne Stevenson
We spent most of the year enjoying the ability to sit still, settle in, and just be close to home. I don’t think I had ever really thought about how long the road to “settled” can be. Up to now, I have wrestled almost exclusively with the choice to settle down. But there are many other factors to growing roots besides a willingness. This is an ongoing crisis trial, of which I will have more to say eventually.
Unfortunately, in my line of work, local hospital wages simply don’t pay the post-pandemic bills. We toughed it out until September, then I took a travel job in New Hampshire. For now, we’re hoping that it’s only a stop-gap while we figure out a more affordable way to live in our “cute little town.”
Jack is a living a hard-knock life these days. With the extra busy days, zero hikes, and the lack of any dog parks nearby, the walks he does get are shorter and more hurried. And this has not escaped his notice. (Hang in there, Jack. There are more hikes in the near future, we promise.)
But, even if I’ve had to saw down and sand the wooden alligator a hundred times to remove the teeth-gouges and splinters, a grouchy Jack is still a great big brother — who sometimes infuriates his little brother by slapping him in the face with his tail. (In Will’s defense, it’s never the first, second, third, or even fourth slap, but the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth that push him over the edge; in Jack’s defense, he’s just tail-waggin’ excited.)
And Meghan is, of course, lovely. I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned it, but in the past she had expressed a fair amount of uncertainty when it came to parenthood. Whatever doubts there were, though, I can hardly even recall them. A more natural, thoughtful, fun mother you could not find.
I’ll do some catching up on the commonplace blog in a future newsletter, but for now, here are a few things that are worth your time:
- “What’s it like to care for Yellowstone during its quietest — and coldest — months?” — This was such a delight to watch, and Steven Fuller such a delight to listen to. His first brush with fame was in a 1978 Nat Geo story, just 5 years after he started the job.
- Somewhere at some point in time, Alan Jacobs wrote a short piece about not needing to have an opinion about The Thing That Happens To Be Going On at any given moment. The punchline was a riff on a Jack Benny line: When told by a robber “You’re money or your life,” Benny hesitates. When the robber grows impatient, Benny shouts, “I’m thinking it over!” As far as I can tell, that piece is no longer on the internet, or my search skills are just too poor. But that’s okay, because my friend Jeremy has made the same succinct argument and made it better than I remember Jacobs’s being. Take Jeremy’s advice, add Jack Benny’s humor, and we’ll all have done something to improve our “politics.”
- Several thoughtful folks recommended the movie Paterson to us. And it’s absolutely lovely and worth every second of your time. Here is a brief thought on one reason why.
Talking with Meghan at the kitchen table just now, I think Paterson is the only movie we watched all year. Many nights, we can muster a lower bar of attention for an episode of Raising Hope, but movies are rare. With any luck, we will find some time this year to watch Perfect Days, which those same fine aforementioned folks also recommended. -
Though I have not read it since last year, I recommend Justin Smith-Ruiu’s essay on “reasons” for convertion — or reversion, in his case.
But a posteriori the calculations fade away, and you are left simply with the fact of the love, and the absurdity of any argument in its defense.
Sometimes, “This’ll do” is experienced not so much as “settling”, but as the hard-won apprehension of a great transcendent truth.
Instead of a poem to end, a quote, from Frederick Buechner’s The Alphabet of Grace:
I pick the children up at the bottom of the mountain where the orange bus lets them off in the wind. They run for the car like leaves blowing. Not for keeps, to be sure, but at least for the time being, the world has given them back again, and whatever the world chooses to do later on, it can never so much as lay a hand on the having-beenness of this time. The past is inviolate. We are none of us safe, but everything that has happened is safe. In all the vast and empty reaches of the universe it can never be otherwise than that when the orange bus stopped with its red lights blinking, these two children were on it. Their noses were running. One of them dropped a sweater. I drove them home.
And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of how the dead leaves lie in drifts around the front door, of how this particular house smells when you come into it out of a gray and lonesome October afternoon. Time would fail me to tell of how it annoys me that my wife hasn’t bothered to get the morning’s mail out of the mailbox yet and how it annoys her when I tell her so, and how in secret we both enjoy the annoyance which is solid and real and reminds us that our lives are wondrously linked.
Thanks for reading! For more commonplace stuff, you can go to tinyroofnail.micro.blog. Or you can email me at tinyroofnail@hey.com. Or you can just wait for next month's newsletter.