Summer Fragments
While Waiting for You to Be Born
What is your name?
I wish you would tell me in a dream. I’ve been seeing you there every now and then, not as I just close my eyes but somewhere deep down. You wait until I’m sunk in before coming out to say hello. It’s a little game that makes it that much harder in the mornings to remember what we did or how you looked, or by what name I called you. Still we were together and that sticks with me for a while.
I am jogging, and a hispanic gentleman in a Kentucky Wildcats t-shirt acknowledges me as I run by. But he does more than that. He stops his self propelled push mower and salutes me while I pass. We are one.
Why did he do that?
Sarah Orne Jewett wrote one of the great American novels but no one believes me. In Country of the Pointed Firs, about a hundred and thirty years ago, she says,
So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
So we die before our own eyes. Is this true or do we more often fail to notice it altogether? Maybe a better way to say this is that others die before our own eyes if we are careful enough to look and then we realize we are dying too.
But I can see now that it also goes the other direction. I’ll die because you are coming into life here before me. Your first measure of somethingness sits on the horizon, which is, simultaneously, cruelly, your first step back toward to nothingness. So soon?
Annie Dillard says, “The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die.”
It’s not bittersweet but astringent. The taste of oversteeped black tea, of poorly drawn espresso, a mouthfeel that defamiliarizes and contorts and then rebounds into awareness. A taste that dries out the mouth before subsiding into a cool comfort.
So we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
You are my next chapter. My favorite chapter yet just came to its happy conclusion, naturally and peacefully, like a faithful old man passing away in his sleep. I have a feeling the next chapter might be even more beautiful. Like the comfort of a blank recto and verso after a flourish of words, like an intuition of paradise on a deathbed.
The friend and then the nurse and then the nurse practitioner and then the doctor ask us if we’re interested in induction and we don’t know what to say. How to explain nicely that we’re waiting patiently? It somehow feels irreverent to pencil you in, like a line item on an agenda. There will be plenty enough weigh-ins and checkpoints and percentiles to cross off later. For now it feels right to rest. Neither the day nor the hour.
A date? But we don’t even know her name.
Once there was a man who walked slowly down a beach. He knew everything. Or, at least, he knew he could know everything, yet still he enjoyed his walk on the beach. Something felt suspended in him but he didn’t reach to unhook it. The sand clipped his rough brown ankles while he walked, and his eyes scanned the horizon of the amber blue lake for nothing in particular. For, again, he knew everything, or at least he knew he could know everything, and so there was nothing for him to discover or learn. He walked on nevertheless. What drives this mysterious man forward?
These words came to me while in church and so I wrote them down quickly. The man is Jesus Christ. Do they make any sense? I am trying to understand his simplicity, because I think he was simple. That is what scandalizes us. When what drives one forward is love and love alone, there is nothing to look for on the beach except opportunity to love. Not even knowledge or wisdom, which are false ends themselves. He looks instead for fishermen to love only and fish to eat together with the fishermen.
I know you will know this love deeper than anything else. Even now you know him, for you are closer to his simplicity than any of us, coming from the other side so freshly. What a strange feeling to cocreate ex nihilo. I’ve done everything I can, which happens to be next to nothing. Yet it is still cocreation, for even a small child can be said to have helped paint a masterpiece when applying a single brushstroke.
We would name you Marilynne after my favorite author but the name doesn’t roll off the tongue. We would name you Willa after my other favorite author but it doesn’t sound right. What is it that he called you when he called you forth from nothing? Or was it a gesture, a look, a hug?
Does a frog have a sense of mystery? For some reason I feel like you could tell me. Years ago I lived in a house with a screened-in front porch. Some nights I would sit there at a table, trying to write poetry, and listen to the ribbit ribbits of the neighborhood. What a seamless world.
I’ve been going on walks lately in the evening and they separate me from everything but also steep me in it like a tea bag. When I walk I feel like I am in a stream outside time.
What will you be like?
I want you to be like the man who saluted me for no reason whatsoever. He did something utterly groundless, unless the ground is the promise of reciprocity.
I watch your beautiful mother carefully arrange the small world you’re coming into. Comparatively I am a grunt in this operation, carrying and building and painting and cleaning. We create this home together, but again, I do so little, and she does so much. It is her and God. I stand over here and pray that things go smoothly and keep well enough productive so that I can say at least I was a stagehand in the miracle. Day and night her whole being builds itself around you and sacrifices itself to keep you safe. She tells me if I was in her position I could do it, but I think she’s being nice. I can sense that you will be generous just like her.
“What are these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” Marilynne Robinson asks.
So you’ll come and knit together our little family, and life will not be waiting but sitting together in the yard, rocking you to sleep at hellish hours, playing together in the garden, listening to the frogs sing their strange songs as the night seeps in. And maybe one day you’ll ask us how we decided to give you your name. By then this story of waiting will be over and we’ll know what to say.