Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [63]
It isn’t a vacation by any stretch. There are some concerns early on—the baby is a shade jaundiced (Donna fixes that by sunning her in a chair beside the window), she has trouble with sucking (failing to establish, as I come to learn, a proper “latch”—what an apt application of the term!), and I am on the phone to Leah more than once this week with concerns about the comfort of both baby and mom.
There is also the matter of naming the child. We’ve been waffling for months. While Anneliese does her best to invest the decision with spirituality and ancestral reverence, I am largely concerned with scansion and assonance and the potential for naughty playground rhymes. Furthermore, it has always seemed to me that a child’s name should be reducible to one crisp syllable for what I call the “freeze-factor,” to be used when you wish to arrest the progress of the child in a precipitous manner, like when he is about to stick his fingers in the fan or she is sneaking out the bedroom window, in which case you want a name you can crack like a whip. “Pollyanna!” for instance, has no freeze factor. It got to be a bedtime game, the name list: Anneliese would read her latest choices, and one by one I would bat them down. Then she would do the same for me. There were some doozies, but I will not reveal the list of rejected monikers, because somewhere out there is someone else who dreams of naming a child Ezekiel Storm. Zeke! (I practiced.) On day five or six of our young child’s life it becomes a matter of some embarrassment, and so we take the form the government provides, and—in honor of a family member—write “Jane.” Then I try it out: “Jane!” The kid doesn’t flinch.
Within the hour of Jane’s birth, I snapped a photo of Amy holding her newborn sister. It wasn’t posed or arranged, I just pushed the button. When I looked at it later, it took my breath away. Without realizing it, I had captured Amy just as she inclined her head to kiss her sister’s brow. Her arms encircled the baby, her eyes were closed, and her lips were just brushing the crown of Jane’s head. For her part, Jane is asleep in a nest of blankets, her chin resting on the curled knuckles of her left hand. I stare and stare at the photograph, my eyes wet. I am feeling blessed, blessed. But I think too of how so much of this world is the equivalent of busted concrete and twisted rebar, and I am jolted at what parents are charged with, and how limited our powers may be. Thankfully, Amy has a way of perforating my direst pretensions and lightening my worldview through the application of humor, intentional or not. Shortly after the beatific image was taken, she phoned her father Dan in Colorado, and fairly busting with pride, announced, “Well, you’re a dad again!”
One lives in the glow of the miracle of new life and then rather harshly discovers that the electric bill is due again. We had our wonderful cocooned week, and even in the wake of that I was able to skirt deadlines and remain mostly home, but now real life presses back in. I have a raft of backlogged writing deadlines, volumes of unanswered e-mails, the usual stack of bills to pay, and I am returning to the road soon. I have always loved the road, and am still eager to feel the wheels beneath me, but nowadays my heart turns homeward sooner than in the past.
We plan to get the pigs when I return from this next round of travel, so I’m trying