Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.
In 1997, I backpacked in Venezuela to a place I thought was called The Abbys. Instead, it was the abyss. Looking down on the Brazilian rainforest with two macaws flying overhead beneath a full moon. I swear I could hear every living creature down below slithering, chirping, moving. And there was a breeze coming up out of the abyss. All I could do was sit for hours and look at this, feel this most amazing energy. I slept only a few hours - maybe 5 - and when I woke in the morning, the breeze was coming from the opposite direction, as if the earth was inhaling and the day before it had been exhaling. The memory still makes me tingle. Most extraordinary experience of my life.
Susie, the grandson of our mutual friend was in a horrible bike accident in his home in Japan
He rode broadside into a garbage truck and was in the ICU for a couple of days, needing surgery to remove fragments of skull from his brain. When I saw a picture of him yesterday sitting in a wheelchair, smiling, and flashing the victory sign, tears of relief and joy flowed .
All the tension and exhaustion of 25 hours of sitting at my wife's side in the labor room, then the sudden terror of the fetal monitor's racing beep, me yelling in the hallway for a doctor, the doctor rushing in, "the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby's neck!", him pushing the baby back up inside the womb with his hand!, the nurses rushing my wife to the OR for an emergency C-section, them telling me I couldn't go with her into the OR which about tore my heart out. .
Standing outside in the hall 10 minutes later, peering anxiously through the two small wire-meshed windows in the swinging doors, hoping to get a visual cue of what was happening, my mind racing through a thousand terrible futures.
Then my first glimpse of a newborn, carried at arm's length from the OR by a nurse. A button nose. Pink skin, a wisp of red hair. Her mouth wide open yelling her head off. I knew instantly: My baby! That's my baby! And all the hour's of suppressed anxiety at my wife's labor pain and our shared fear, all busting out in a flood of sobbing, joy and anguish and disappointment and relief.
And the final news a minute later: wife and new mother was fine, baby was fine. I went out to the waiting room to tell my family. The joy and tears on their faces.
Sometimes, it amazes me how much struggle accompanies birth. It's a wonder that mothers and fathers and babies, too, can carry all that into the world. You really captured the unknowing in this story and the energy of wanting life so very much.
In 1997, I backpacked in Venezuela to a place I thought was called The Abbys. Instead, it was the abyss. Looking down on the Brazilian rainforest with two macaws flying overhead beneath a full moon. I swear I could hear every living creature down below slithering, chirping, moving. And there was a breeze coming up out of the abyss. All I could do was sit for hours and look at this, feel this most amazing energy. I slept only a few hours - maybe 5 - and when I woke in the morning, the breeze was coming from the opposite direction, as if the earth was inhaling and the day before it had been exhaling. The memory still makes me tingle. Most extraordinary experience of my life.
You really took me there. I especially love the word slithering. It's wonderful how an experience like that can alter your life.
Susie, the grandson of our mutual friend was in a horrible bike accident in his home in Japan
He rode broadside into a garbage truck and was in the ICU for a couple of days, needing surgery to remove fragments of skull from his brain. When I saw a picture of him yesterday sitting in a wheelchair, smiling, and flashing the victory sign, tears of relief and joy flowed .
So glad to hear that. It's remarkable to me how many different emotional states result in tears. I hadn't even gotten around to relief.
I wish I had something more original to say, but the first sight of my newborn son leapt to mind immediately.
Originality is overrated. What's deep and what comes unpremeditated is what matters.
All the tension and exhaustion of 25 hours of sitting at my wife's side in the labor room, then the sudden terror of the fetal monitor's racing beep, me yelling in the hallway for a doctor, the doctor rushing in, "the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby's neck!", him pushing the baby back up inside the womb with his hand!, the nurses rushing my wife to the OR for an emergency C-section, them telling me I couldn't go with her into the OR which about tore my heart out. .
Standing outside in the hall 10 minutes later, peering anxiously through the two small wire-meshed windows in the swinging doors, hoping to get a visual cue of what was happening, my mind racing through a thousand terrible futures.
Then my first glimpse of a newborn, carried at arm's length from the OR by a nurse. A button nose. Pink skin, a wisp of red hair. Her mouth wide open yelling her head off. I knew instantly: My baby! That's my baby! And all the hour's of suppressed anxiety at my wife's labor pain and our shared fear, all busting out in a flood of sobbing, joy and anguish and disappointment and relief.
And the final news a minute later: wife and new mother was fine, baby was fine. I went out to the waiting room to tell my family. The joy and tears on their faces.
Sometimes, it amazes me how much struggle accompanies birth. It's a wonder that mothers and fathers and babies, too, can carry all that into the world. You really captured the unknowing in this story and the energy of wanting life so very much.
They set such a sterling example, both singularly and together.