About a month ago, Nicole and I decided to read The Namesake together. I’m not sure why we picked this book instead of another book, but I’d read and admired some of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, and we both thought it’d be a radical experiment for us, to read and discuss the same thing.

So we went to Raven’s, found and purchased a used copy—and predictably, Nicole finished reading it about two days later. Now I’m trying to catch up. Back then, I had been reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a strange and frustrating but nevertheless compelling novel, and when I wasn’t struggling to finish that book, I was drowning in a project that demanded not only my free time, but my already-claimed time, and possibly even some time from a life I haven’t gotten to yet. So The Namesake wasn’t the priority I’d hoped it’d be, and I had legitimate reasons to fall behind—but still, I kind of resented how easily and quickly Nicole plowed through it.

What I sometimes forget about Nicole, even though I’ve written about it before, is that she can read while accomplishing any other task. She could broker peace in the Middle East while taking in all of The Feminine Mystique, if that’s what she decided she wanted to do. I suppose I’ve always known this, because I’ve seen her reading and folding the laundry, or reading and cooking dinner—but now that I’m finally several chapters into The Namesake, there’s evidence of her life’s intrusions all over the book. I feel like I am following a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest of her daily itinerary: the speck of chocolate flattened between pages, the paper puckered from when the baby splashed bathwater, the receipt from the oil company tucked between chapters, the corners folded where she left off and picked up again.

As someone who practically needs an isolation chamber to concentrate when he reads, I’m rather jealous.

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Maddie and I are somewhere in Act III of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I’ve been braying around the living room for ten minutes or so while she tosses wreaths and necklaces at me. In the middle of the room a simple makeshift bower forms, and Mason tucks himself under my arm and tries to pull the blanket over his head. He has agreed to be Puck, has no idea what that means, but is used to accommodating his sister’s whims, and besides, the roles in which he’s cast are essentially the same: sidekick, copilot, attendant lord, someone to swell a scene or two.

After I’ve adorned myself with all manner of crowns and jewelry and consumed large bales of hay and suffered the doting fairy queen, I urge us into Act IV. I’m pretty tired, after all, and hungry for some human food, and vaguely worried about scuffing up my new khakis with all this rolling around on the floor. So, finally, we move on: our Puck becomes Oberon, screws his thumb into Titania’s eye, and Maddie leaps from the swirl of blankets and pillows, stares for a moment at me, and screams. “I have had a most rare vision,” I offer, but the words are drowned out by Mason, echoing his sister’s hysteria. Elsewhere in the room, Eleanor claps her hands.

Then, for a moment, Maddie slips out of character.

“We should give some of the antidote to Bottom, too,” she says.

That’s not in the play, I tell her.

“But it’s not fair. Titania suddenly doesn’t love him anymore, and that must hurt his feelings. After all the attention the fairies gave him, he’s going to want to stay right where he is. So he needs something that will make him feel normal again.”

True, or maybe Bottom will think it’s all a dream, I say. I’m about to explain how, in Shakespeare’s version of the story, Bottom wakes up alone, restored to his original self. But Maddie’s too busy revising the Bard—not for the first time since this all began.

“No. We’ll give him some potion, too, and that way he won’t be upset when Titania kicks him out of the bower. Or, maybe Titania will realize that she loves him too much, even if he is a donkey, and they’ll get married. Or …”

I can see where this is going: before we’re done with Shakespeare and onto something else, she’ll have gleefully bastardized the canon, and we’ll be stuck deep in the apocrypha of Act IX, wherein Titania and Bottom move out of Athens, buy a house in the suburbs, get real jobs, and have beautiful freakish babies.

But Maddie is six, still working without a script as she rages across the stage, and I’d be an ass to get very much in the way.

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Last weekend I reorganized my bookcases, partly because there’s been a steady accumulation of dust since the last time I cleaned it, over a year ago, and partly because we were going to have guests over that evening and I wanted the books to look good. Yes, I am vain. So I emptied each shelf, wiped and polished the wood, and restocked the books according to various themes: genre, time period, matching editions, etc. After some deliberation, I decided to devote one shelf to short story collections, a principle I’d not enforced until now.

As I aligned the hardcovers and paperbacks, I noticed the back blurb for Charles D’Ambrosio’s collection, The Dead Fish Museum. I had bought it around the time Eleanor was born, read a couple of stories while rocking her at night, but it seemed to me that the few stories I read were doing with mediocrity what Raymond Carver and (sometimes) Richard Ford did well in their stories. To be fair, I only read a few stories before March and April distracted me with their urgent business, and perhaps D’Ambrosio’s collection gathers momentum as you read more of it, or perhaps I was just in the wrong time and place to appreciate what he was up to. It would be discourteous of me to dismiss him and his work.

But the blurb, written by Michael Chabon in a moment of deep swooning, caught my attention last week, just before I slid The Dead Fish Museum into its new slot. Here it is:

Charles D’Ambrosio works a rich, deep, dangerous seam in the broken-hearted rock of American fiction. His characters live lives that burn as dark and radiant as the prose style that conjures them, like the blackness at the center of a candle’s flame. No one today writes better short stories than these.

What?

This is, of course, a heady display of admiration, gushy and obsequious and showy, and therefore disrespectful. It’s overstated to the point of meaninglessness, and his imagery—”dark and radiant”; “blackness at the center of a candle’s flame”—is so deliberately stylized, so forcefully literary, it seems as if Chabon is trying to outwrite in the blurb anything Charles D’Ambrosio may have written in his book. But Chabon’s metaphors are mixed, and I’m not sure that “broken-hearted rock” makes very much sense, unless Chabon knows something about American fiction that I don’t, and ultimately this strikes me as one of the worst jacket blurbs I’ve read in a very long time.

But then I wondered: maybe that’s what Chabon intended? Perhaps his blurb, so overwrought and ungainly, is an ironic commentary on the general vapidity of blurbs everyone, the ones you find on the back of nearly every book you peruse, all these grossly sycophantic bubbles of praise, crammed with superlative to the point of bursting?

I’d like to think so, but I’m not so sure.

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Two thousand and seven was the year of car accidents, plantar warts, empty oil tanks, overbearing bosses, and late nights at my desk, which is really the kitchen table, which is falling apart. Also falling apart in 2007: the furnace, the window panes, the toilet, the hot water tank, the dryer, the cold water faucet on the bathtub, the outdoor furniture, the raised beds of the gardens, and the entire exhaust system of my 626 as I drove on 91—metal scraping asphalt for a mile until I could get off the interstate and fasten the pipes to the undercarriage with a coat hanger I found in the trunk.

In 2007 I lost a summer teaching appointment, an extracurricular stipend, and my freelance television work. To slam us through the holidays, I took a seasonal job at a wholesale warehouse and injured my back, whereupon New England dumped six heavy inches of snow in my driveway. Meanwhile, Nicole was nearly arrested for breastfeeding our infant daughter at a shopping mall, then threatened with legal action by the company against which she filed a complaint.

The neighbors across the street were burglarized. The neighbors to our right were arrested in a drug raid. The neighbors to our left went through a divorce so ugly, the wife asked me to write a statement for the custody hearing, detailing the abuse I’d witnessed.

Hoodlums stole the pumpkins off our front steps, an iPod out of my car.

The cat did not get fleas this year, but she did urinate on my laptop, my camera, a beanbag, and the interior of Maddie’s closet.

And then, more difficult to itemize in a list, there was the looming sense of paralysis we felt, Nicole and I. All this work, inside the home and outside the home, and for what? Everything you do, you’re tidying up for the next disaster. We stagnated, sniped at each other, slipped into a kind of domestic torpor.

Understand: 2007 was also the year that Eleanor was born, the year Mason started talking, the year Maddie in her doubting, halting, backtracking manner began to write and read and swim and confront the larger world outside our home—and if these events and encounters were difficult, if the joy of lurching forward gave us whiplash, too, I think that we were at least awake to these changes and what they meant to our children. Despite our bouts of ennui, our long sessions complaining to each other, our manic text messaging and hyperlinking about ways to leave America and live in a culture with socialized medicine and shorter work weeks, Nicole and I knew the emotional terrain of our daughters and son, were present in their lives, and are therefore saved the awkwardness of resolving, in this new year, to be better parents.

Still: change is needed. So, last week, before the New Year holiday, Nicole and I went out for drinks and, after the alcohol had loosened us up and made the topic less formidable, discussed 2008, how it could be different from the quagmire that preceded it. We drafted schedules that gave structure to the week. We decided to throw more social gatherings at our house. We listed and prioritized goals, drew flow charts in the air, bandied around words like “self-actualized.” It was both sincere and ironic, and all very sexy.

So we may be out of the rut, or on our way out. She’ll be teaching childbirth classes at a local hospital this year, which a few times a week removes her from the cyclone of runny noses, toys and stuffed animals, laundry and dishes, emails and phone calls and text messages that overrun her days now—plus, it puts money in our bank account. And we’ve brokered an arrangement with friends of ours, also parents, to watch each other’s children once a month, freeing up some evenings for adult interaction. We are not old, Nicole and I, and it’s too soon to be acting as if we are.

As for me personally: I made resolutions, actual New Year’s resolutions for 2008, and I made them without irony.

1. I will brew at least one batch of beer in my own home. Back in July, Nicole and I were invited to a summer party in the backyard of some friends of some friends, and the man who lived there, a pony-tailed bearded fellow, brought up from his basement a pitcher of hoppy ale, which in the shade of his porch was the most memorable beverage I drank that season. It meant something, I think, that he had made it and offered it, that I had accepted it and enjoyed it as much as I did—and I’d like to be on the other end of that interaction, someday.

2. I will read at least two novels or short story collections a month. In 2007, I read very little except what I was teaching. There were months, in fact, in which I was reading nothing but magazine articles and synopses of television shows at TwOP. I blamed my schedule, which I suppose is justifiable; however, if I get in twenty minutes before the first class, a half-hour at lunch, and a half-hour before bed, I won’t compromise myself and will begin to put a dent in the backlog of books I’ve accumulated. (An easier way of saying this is: I need to start reading like my wife reads, in snatches of free time instead of long stretches.)

3. I will take one photograph every day for a whole year and assemble a digital portfolio of the result. I still haven’t articulated an organizing principle for the project (which is a popular one, I know), but it’ll force me to aim the camera at something besides my own children, and to become a better photographer. (I’ve already slapped up a photoblog, actually, which can be reached via a link at the top of this page.)

4. I will direct my culinary vision beyond the grilled cheese sandwich, which I have long ago mastered. This resolution will perhaps be the most challenging to realize, because it requires a paradigm shift: currently, the kitchen seems to me a space, often messy with spills and crumbs, for the dispensation of meals; it must become instead a more comfortable place, small but familiar and large enough to accommodate a glass of wine and the traffic of my children.

I had made a resolution to stop swearing, too … but that’s already kaput. Four resolutions is enough.

Let’s see how we do.

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When we found out that Nicole was pregnant with a boy, I worried. Frankly, I was disappointed, and tried to mask that disappointment with jokes about Corinthian shepherds and Prince Hamlet and Luke Skywalker—examples, more or less, of the essential problem of fathers and sons as I understood it. Everything in my experience told me that a son would be destined to depose me, despise me, construct a life for himself in which I was the symbol of everything he hated. In moments of less melodramatic introspection, I reflected that my own father was a man who disappointed me, that I disappointed him, and that the disappointment was both inevitable and intractable.

To assuage my anxiety, I started writing letters to Mason, wrote them before we knew what we’d name him, and looking back I can see that they were really letters to a younger version of myself. In them, I told the story of all the men in my family: the ones who went to war and came back damaged; the ones who built hotels and restaurants and lost them to violence and jealousy; the ones who were bootleggers and gunslingers and rotten drunks; the ones who were suicides; the ones who found Jesus; the ones who never knew what they were, just drifted west and disappeared. It was the women who cleaned up the blood and the vomit and kept the families going when the businesses collapsed and the money was gone and the men shriveled up, all squinty eyes and bent noses and slack-jawed mouths that chewed on nothing.

It wasn’t happy stuff, and I found it pointless after a while.

And then Mason was actually born, born with his eyes open, looking around as if he were game for anything. He was so alert those first few weeks that, when Ella was born and slept for one month solid, I thought something must be wrong with her. She was pacing herself, I guess, but Mason arrived fully formed, it seemed.

He’s still that way: intrinsically good-natured, affable and sociable, eager to amuse and be amused, generous with his attention, playful and sweet—and not in the phony way of child actors on soaps and sitcoms, but with his own quirky style, as when he suddenly hits Ella on her forehead with the open palm of his hand, not enough to really hurt her, but to give himself the opportunity to comfort her when she starts crying. Still, I relate better to Maddie, who is moody, dramatic, uncertain, too sentimental and frequently grumpy, because really, the world doesn’t make a lot of sense when you stop and think about it. Mason, on the other hand—well, one gets the feeling that he’s going to be okay, that he’s somehow above the painful absurdities of life, floating too high to get caught in the existential quagmire that had his older sister throwing tantrums at his age.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. But, though I am baffled by his disposition, where it comes from or how it works, it puts me at ease. I worry less intensely about being his father.

Today was his birthday, and we spent most of it in Haverhill. The morning was uneventful, except when he fell off a chair in the hotel room, smashed his head on the table, the arm of the chair, and the table leg before finally collapsing on the carpet. For the rest of the day he sported three bright bruises on his forehead. He recovered quickly, though. See, Maddie would have exploited the injury for a week, examining the myriad ways the universe (and we her parents) had orchestrated the circumstances that made the accident possible, nay, probable; Mason, on the other hand, had forgotten it within minutes.

In the afternoon the city closed down for a Christmas fair, and so, when we had finished our lunch and stepped out of The Tap, the streets were transformed. We saw balloons, street vendors selling fried dough and chowder and sausages, pedestrians walking their dogs, actors dressed up as reindeer and snowmen, trains tooting up and down Washington and Merrimack. We met Nicole, whose conference had finally ended, and walked back to a place called The Enchanted Bake Shoppe, where all they make are cupcakes. We’d been there already, and the girl behind the counter knew Mason by name, and soon everyone in the bakery was wishing him happy birthday. It was as if the spectacle of the city were entirely for him, and in this way, Haverhill turned out to be the perfect place to spend this weekend.

Happy birthday, son.

 

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If there is one theme running through the many things that Mason says all day, it is this: You are moving too slowly! Pick up the pace! Stop hindering my exploration of the world!

Or, as he puts it, “Come on, daddy! Let’s go! Hurry! Come on!”

He did slow down for lunch, which we took early this afternoon at a cafe called Heather’s, where they’re proud to serve Boar’s Head deli meat fresh off the industrial slicer that hums on the table behind the counter. Mason had a bagel and cream cheese, which is to say he had cream cheese, one lick a time until he wore it like a goatee. But he was quiet and still for a good twenty minutes or so, and Ella, though drowsy, kept craning her head to stare at me chewing my roast beef on rye. When we left I took a coffee and gulped it walking the two blocks to Nicole’s conference, so she could nurse Ella.

Later they fell asleep in the car and I drove around Haverhill, parked here and there and took pictures of buildings I liked—vacant, dilapidated buildings just off Merrimack Street.

I’m not sure, but this may be one of the old shoe factories that Haverhill hopes to revive as part of its renaissance project. The conversion of abandoned factories into retail outlets and residential units can be economically viable; I’ve seen it done in Easthampton, anyway, and it seems to work. It does make for an odd aesthetic—all this towering space, all this brick and glass, packed with chic restaurants and clothing stores and luxury condo suites.

In Western Massachusetts our ubiquitous discount furniture guy is Bob. His cheaply produced commercials are everywhere—on radio and television, on billboards, in newspaper fliers—and his shtick seems to be that he’s a luckless goof whose one earnest desire, dog gone it, is to save you money. This is not original. Incarnations of Bob exist everywhere, and it appears that Norman here is the Bob of Haverhill. We ended up here when I turned onto a narrow road that runs along the Merrimack River until it dumped us behind all the buildings.

Out on Washington Street, though, things are happening. You can even get a haircut in a Harley-Davidson themed barbershop, if that’s your thing. (Click on the image to view a larger version—looks better that way.)

But the best urban moment in Haverhill—and it was just a moment—came in the evening, when Nicole, Mason, Ella and I were leaving a restaurant called The Tap, and someone at the bar had decided to play “Here Comes Your Man” on the jukebox, and in the time it took us to get though the door and vestibule and down the steps, onto the sidewalk and into the cold again, Haverhill seemed like a very cool place indeed.

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