The Final Nine

My oldest daughter couldn’t stop crying the other day, which was surprising. She doesn’t cry nearly as much as she used to. Broadly speaking, this is a good thing. The sound of your child’s inconsolable sobs can cause physical pain; a sonic cocktail of fingernails on a chalkboard, an injured dog, and Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park.” As a young child she cried often. Rarely did I understand the reason. Even more rarely could I get her to stop. When she wailed, I would experience a gauntlet of emotions, from sad to befuddled to frustrated to enraged. Too often, I heard myself venting to an imaginary parenting coach, “She’s crying for no fucking reason!” Sometime during my parental maturation process, I realized that no one cries for no reason, least of all a child. The failure to understand your children is probably not a failure at all. And if it is, it certainly isn’t a failure on their part. A child’s job isn’t to make itself understood. In fact, I’m beginning to bel...

It must have been 1994 or 5. My ex-girlfriend was home from college for Christmas. We had begun sleeping together again, as we often did when we were both home over holiday breaks. Her mother was living in a one-bedroom apartment on Sutter and Jones in the City. The neighborhood, which later became known as the Tendernob, was a uniquely urban one, bordered by Michelin-starred Fleur de Lys at one end and St. Anthony’s soup kitchen at the other. In between, theater goers in Wilkes Bashford suits and I Magnin gowns mixed blithely with drunks, junkies, and tourists, in a delicate Herb Caenian romance that may never have existed but is clear in the age-enhanced memories of 20 th Century San Franciscans. I climbed those hills, arm in arm with a woman I suspected I would marry, our sweat cooled by Carl the fog. We’d sneak in, close to midnight, through their medievally heavy door at the end of a carpeted third-floor hallway.   Her mother slept on the couch when my ex was home fo...

            “So what do you think we’ll do today?”             My son asks this question frequently.             His grandfather sits at the round table with the checkerboard pattern. He methodically works the New York Times crossword puzzle, periodically throwing clues in H’s direction.             “Winnie-the-Pooh catchphrase?”             “Uhm…honey?”             “Eight letters.”             “Uhm…”             “We’ll come back to it.”             H circles the table peripatetically...

The native brown path bends be endlessly fore me like an infinite serpent. On either side, a tightly woven carpet of winter’s afterbirth in shades of onlygreen, frosted with the downy death of last summer’s meadow. The foamy shoosh of waves a thousand feet below harmonizes with the wind whispering through the oaken hollow, begging me to be quiet and just listen to the sound of nothing, the deafening din of the absence of all that is not me but daily plays the part.

You can be anything you want to be, is what the semi-anonymous adult always says, If you put your mind to it and work hard. And in his limestone eyes I see the longing of a mariner at sea these many years, catching a distant glimpse of a coastline to which his ship is not sailing. Anything I want to be, you say? Let’s face it, oddly invested non-stranger, You are talking to yourself.

I’m sorry I set you down on the bed a little harshly But there really is no excuse for crying that much Especially when Clearly All your needs had been met Honestly That shriek  That wail A weasel caught in a combine Over And over And over And over The one that genuinely hurts my ears As I tenderly hold you on my hip My spine slowly turning into a question mark My mohair voice persisting In vain attempts to comfort Then suddenly rasping into a giant Waitsian fuckyou Love briefly becomes rage and you bounce lightly But not lightly enough On the very expensive mattress we bought through the mail And I know that in a few minutes I’m going to feel guilty But for now It almost seems Like you deserved it

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class that covered, among other things, the way human beings measure the passing of time. One method, which in my dimmed memory was called something like “astronomical time” or “real time,” referred to measures of time that are rooted in celestial events. For example, a day is a day because that’s how long it takes the earth to revolve on its axis one time. A year is a year because that’s how long it takes the earth to travel its orbit around the sun. Long before there were people, there were days and years. Some things happen whether or not we’re paying attention. There is another kind of time. I wish I could remember what the professor called it. Human time? Invented time? These are the measures of time that humans create. Epochs and eras, ages and empires, months and hours. Perhaps they are not quite arbitrary, but they are most certainly invented. We think that a year has to have 12 months, but it doesn’t. A day could just as easily b...