The fucking laptop is doing an update as I begin this, so occasionally there is this pending expulsion of letters from behind the cursor; I keep typing, but the system just collects the words, like a chipmunk with…or a squirrel with acorns in its cheeks, before it finally catches up. How’s that for some opening lyricism?

I was in your neck of the woods this weekend, as I thought, formulated before I… What I mean to say is that I was thinking about what I would start with today and that sentence was it. I was down with Burt and myself, visiting mom and Bill and friends and…just…also seeing Mordecai Rame, the orthodox Jew teacher I had in junior high, who has since become a law professor and has burst out of the closet with a vengeance. Man, is that weird. And just fucking awesome. Weird because (as I was trying to tell him) you know you get these, especially when you know someone for a long time as a kid, these indelible impressions of who someone is, and all the contact and updating in the world isn’t enough to undo those impressions. So I still picture Mordecai Rame the junior high, the gifted junior high teacher, throwing chalk at students and being an inspiration for little pubescent boys over the course of…what?...over a decade. Anyway…

I didn’t think of you! I thought of you as we were landing at the airport, and then again tonight, but I really didn’t have the urge to drive by your place, throw someone…I meant 'something,' but that came out…at your windows, and squeal off. Or lurk at the top of the hill and spy down at you. Resisted that impulse…not really. As I said, I didn’t even have it. But for some reason I wanted you to know that I was close to you.

So going back to Platte is no longer a really positive experience. In fact, it pretty much reminds me of everything that I don’t have up here: friendship, family…and insofar as it is a time out from my life and thus offers the opportunity to sit back (yuck, [cliché]) and ponder, consider the shape of my trajectory, my current trajectory…it reminds me that I don’t have a great deal of professional…what?...heft. My friend Marco says that all that matters is that I’m writing every day, and I suppose he’s right, but I would much rather have that time to sit back and ponder my trajectory after I’ve accumulated that few pages a day into something of substance, of closure and completeness. I told Persis today that right now I feel like I’m in the middle of building something, and so I don’t want to be distracted with weekends and vacations and the like to “consider and reflect.” I just want the fucking week to go on and on so that I can write every day and not have these alternative expectations every six and seventh day. See, the reason God could rest on the seventh day is that he was already finished. Can you imagine, “And on the third day, God was dead tired from his labors, so he rested and considered the incompleteness of his creation. Then on the fourth day he began again.” Just doesn’t work.

All that said, I am seriously considering going back to work as an editor on a documentary project that my friend Kevin has gotten me…[or rather,] suggested me for and to me. A thing with the same guy who helmed the reality/docu show that I cut a couple of summers ago. And there are all kinds of alarms that go off in my head as I think about this, primarily the one that says, “But you’re just getting into a rhythm with your writing and now you’re going to throw it all away.” And then there’s the, “You will scar your beloved son for life if you do this, taking away his primary caregiver for thirteen weeks or so except for weekends.” I don’t have any good answer to that except, “Well, it sounds like a good project, and the fact of the matter is I have to figure out what it’s like sooner or later getting back to work.” And it’s a shame that it’s probably going to be cutting on location (i.e., not in Ecksville), but I’m definitely going to see what the flexibility is on that. Anyway, the big frustration is that Persis, similar to what she did when I first told her about and we first talked in depth about the blog idea (which she still doesn’t know is an actuality), she expressed provisional support for the idea at first but then after talking it through with me decided that it’s not a good idea. And I sat in the car tonight listening to her tell me about how hard it would be for Burt to lose me for that time, for five days a week, and I thought about all those – not even 'all' those, but [just] those specific women that I was talking about with Bill this weekend, those women that he knows who have essentially given up career and any apparent intellectual development to be moms and homemakers. And that is a choice that I respect even if I cannot fathom ever making it myself. And I see Persis sitting in the front of the car driving, and essentially telling me that she thinks that I should stay at home and not take this job because of what it will do to the children. And of course that goes right to my Boston Cream filling middle that’s just all mushy and sweet and that has no defense against the idea that I would be harming my child whom I love by doing this thing that would be an interesting opportunity, not just (as I’ve already said) because of what it’s about, but also because it offers us the opportunity to see what it would be like to have me working on a short project while trying to juggle childcare and all that. And of course I can’t write off the fact that it would be paying about… probably just under $3000 a week, and that it would essentially pay back all of the money that I’ve siphoned from our savings this past year, since the summer, since we moved.

I don’t know. I feel the same sort of hope that I don’t get it because that would make my whole world so much easier, so much less problematic. No change. What a nice idea. And to think about the upset, the upending that my going away for that period would entail. I get this almost heartburning sensation in my…you know, the solar plexus thing…and I recognize that impulse, that reaction that, when I pay attention to it (which sadly is most of the time), keeps me from doing anything “out there,” keeps me safe and comfortable and stable. And I’m at the point now where I feel like opportunities like this may not come around for me all that often, and the change notwithstanding, I have to follow this where it goes. I don’t think I would consider, like, doing something that would take me away for an entire year or more, but this is a 17-week (which probably means between 20 and 25) project that… Anyway, a good test case.

So…





In other news…what? I had far fewer complaints about my mom this weekend than I thought I would. I told Reinhardt on Thursday morning that I was really anxious about the visit (and certainly we can attribute most of that to my growing distaste for change as I get older) because my relationship with my mom has become a little attenuated since getting married and certainly since moving. I feel like she’s always probing and trying to get at what she thinks is there in me, rather than just talking to me. I feel like she’s such a stranger in those moments when it’s like she’s playing therapist on me. I don’t feel like she’s trying to know me as a son, but rather as a patient. And she has this stupid way of asking leading questions, like when she inquired about Burt’s drooping eyelid and said something like, “Have you talked about what to…”, or maybe it was, “Are you going to do anything about Burt’s eyelid?” Which set me off – I snapped back some response to her – because it sounded like she was assuming that there was something wrong with his eyelid beside the fact that it did not conform to the typical. I mean, sure, I look at his eyelid all the time…but, it’s interesting: when I do, there is a shadow of fear, of worry that it is a symptom of something bad, or something that he will be teased about. But honestly: I love that drooping eyelid. It is so cute and it makes his face so loveable and human. Like a puppy with a droopy ear. And even at the same time, I know that it is not - okay, I’m sorry, I have to use this word because it’s convenient - normal in the sense that you would notice it as a distinguishing feature of his face, and that there is therefore an impulse, an inclination as a parent to worry that maybe it is something that requires correction. But the thought of submitting Burt to surgery to correct a problem that is merely a distinguishing feature and not something that is harmful to him (should it ever get in the way of his eyesight, of course, that’s another issue)…I am resisting making a really…well, the truth is that I look at his face, and in fact, his drooping eyelid is because…or it seems to be because of a lack in one eye of the epicanthian fold. [Pardon me. I guess ‘epicanthic’ is the right term, and it’s its presence, not lack, that distinguishes that eye…though when I looked at it again later that actually wasn’t exactly the issue. Oh well.] And so that eye looks quite asian, as people have said that my eyes look. Maybe it’s just that Burt has one eye from me and one from Persis. And so I look at his eye and…you know, as a stupid white guy, I sometimes look at asian eyes and wonder (oh, I’m so ashamed) if their eyesight is ever impaired by it. (This is not new; I was tempted to throw this little aside out as a joke, but in the effort to be taken seriously, even in my…well, I don’t know…maybe it’s stupid to wonder those kind of things…anyway). So anyway, I don’t see Burt’s eye drooping and obscuring his vision any more than the lack [presence] of the fold obscures vision in an asian person’s eye, so… So anyway, I can’t…

I’m trying to articulate a feeling that I have about this that I haven’t quite gotten out. And it is this combo feeling of intense love tinged with sadness, and the love is for Burt exactly as he is, and the sadness is the simultaneous recognition that ‘as he is’ may cause him pain or embarrassment at some point in his life. I mean, I am virtually certain that he will at some point be teased about this feature, that kids or a doctor or even he will look at his eyelid and wonder what is wrong with it, treat it as if it is something wrong, and try or want to fix it or suggest that it needs to be fixed. And if he ever came to me…well, not ‘ever’…see, my fantasy is that he will, as his Bar Mitzvah approaches, come to me and ask to be…what?…circumcised…joined into the covenant…become party to the covenant between God and Abraham. And that that will make me so, so happy. That was a fantasy that I spun almost in order to become okay with the idea of not circumcising him. And I recognize that that may come and bite me in the ass once his thirteenth birthday approaches and he declares himself in love with his noble uncircumcised penis (I think about his little erections, and how I can see the head there beneath the foreskin, and I imagine what it would look like circumcised, ordinary but unproblematic.) And of course…well, what I was about to say was that I have this idea that I will not let him alter his body until after his Bar Mitzvah, seeing that as the point at which his body becomes his to alter (circumcise) as he wishes. And that if, after this thirteenth birthday, he desired to conform one eyelid to the other, I would not stop him, though I would have some serious conversations with him about that. So the love is there with this awareness that here is this quality about him that I love but that some stupid fucking hick eight-year-old will make fun of him for and that he will come home to me crying about why did God make him this way and all I will be able to tell him is how gloriously beautiful he is to me and to his mother and simply mouth those inept words that parent upon parent has mouthed fruitlessly to try to erase the sting of shame from a body part or body aspect that someone has heartlessly…you get it.

I love that eyelid. And I wish that…it’s like his cheeks and his eyes. I look at them and I see how beautiful they are and I imagine that all the world would think them beautiful and so I never really… But the eyelid. It makes him…makes me want to scoop him up in my arms and kiss him all over…but it also makes me want to protect him from other people rather than show him to them. That’s a key difference there.

Anyway, so my mom made this casual and…you can tell that there’s some baggage here, so in her defense, I don’t think she knew what she was walking into. But she makes these kinds of comments or asks these questions that assume a particular perspective or answer, and when she does that I just feel like staring her in the face until she is embarrassed by the question she has asked and that [so] she has to sit back and parse the question to find out exactly what in it gave offense.

But that didn’t happen this weekend because she was so busy monopolizing Burt that she and I didn’t really have much of a chance to talk. I talked to Bill instead, and that is almost always good.

I’m really glad that she and Burt are getting a chance to have such a close relationship. But part of me…I don’t know. I see what she does and imagine how I would do it differently, and I just make the decision to not say anything. I’ve learned from Persis the, that it’s a dead end trying to make anyone, and especially your parents, parent like you do. Persis never resists that impulse to talk though. Honestly, I don’t know if she ever resists any impulse to talk. That was low, sorry.

So what else? Good times with Marco and Charlie. Though I got really embarrassed because I … [Perhaps I have some distance from this now, so I can complete this thought. I put the kibosh on it because…well, because I knew Charlie would be reading, and it involved a comment I made to him and his reaction to it. I don’t want to take the time to trace the whole situation – it is complicated both in terms of what happened and the feelings it invokes in me – but suffice it to say that it involved my proposing the choir that I recently joined as a target for a charitable donation and then instantly regretting having done so. More perhaps another day…] They, my conversations with them prompted me to wonder whether I’m so addicted to understatement that I just naturally self-deprecate and describe my situation up here as more depressing than it is, and that maybe I do that with you, too.