#310

So I wasn't great at describing parenthood in 100 words (#309). If I had a do-over, I'd put a phrase stolen from Vanity Fair in my opening sentence: "God hands you a soft, little, crying, pooping, attention-sucking vortex." That is precisely what you get. And thank you, because it's awesome. Except M 'n' m weren't very little; they were 10-pound newborns; think bowling ball, sack of potatoes, watermelon, something you'd prefer not to carry around all day long. But that's how it starts. And it works, because exhaustion and awesomeness are often bedfellows. Parenthood, the beginning. "It's a time of long days but fast years." I stole that line too, from my friends Greg and Katie.

"Everything has been said, but not everything has been said superbly, and even if it had, everything must be said freshly again and again."
     — Paul Horgan

As an adult, I enjoy reading what 'has been said superby' which I take to mean 'the classics.' Funny how they're awfully dull when we're young. Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Steinbeck, all dreadfully boring. Now I read them for pleasure. I've got "A Moveable Feast" by Hemingway in my backpack today. Last year I cover-to-covered Moby Dick. It's a beast, but remarkable. I savored parts of it like steak-lovers do buttery, seared ribeyes, the fat and meat perfectly marbled (a nice analogy for a good piece of writing, actually). When it comes to literature, I finally see what all the hubbub is about. Not so with other 'adult' things, like the pleasing bouquet of a California Cabernet, or a rare Kentucky bourbon. Those don't trip my trigger. What will M 'n' m gravitate to? Will they be auto or art or cigar aficionados? Coffee connoisseurs? Gamblers, fitness nuts, divers, world-travelers, yogis, poets, pilots, gardeners? Will they study and collect Japanese tea sets or 19th century shotguns or ancient Pompeian phallic art? (Yeah, not the last one I hope.) I could see M 'n' m collecting old, creepy-looking daguerreotypes. Michael used to love "Five Nights at Freddy's." I'm not a fan, but I see the horror genre is alive and well. Papa Mike still talks about the night he went to The Exorcist in the theater. Paraphrasing Papa, "People were crying, hysterical, freaking out; other people walked out in a mind-blown daze," I bet they were in a daze; it was the early seventies. Anyway, where were we? — I hope M 'n' m are themselves, original. I suspect eventually, we all get there. But why not find it sooner than later?

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart, and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.... Stay hungry, stay foolish."
     — Steve Jobs (who, we like to brag, called our house one time, to talk to
          Papa Mike and set up a meeting with him)

"I think whatever you read... affects your mind and your sensibility, and even your body in some ways and your senses... reading poetry and writing poetry has... made it second nature for me to pay attention to the sound of words and their arrangement in a sentence or on a page and their relation to each other in a way that reading ordinary fiction doesn’t encourage... poetry, once you internalize it, changes how you view language, you tend to see individual words more as objects, rather than beads on a string or things that just carry information. You’re more conscious of the music of the language, and the individual notes of the words.... And unabashed and unashamed honesty, just in every aspect of my life that was available to me, was important.
     — Russell Banks