~b

During Lisa's labor, the clock dissolved and we kept time like this: contraction to contraction. The world dissolved too – a hot August night bubbled with after-bar life when we drove to the downtown hospital, and then all that seemed like a childhood memory after several hard contractions. We massaged Lisa. Put hot packs in the small of her back. Found different positions for her to weather her contractions in. Her body clock ticked on and on, and I remember looking down at the shining wooden floor at one point, thinking, "How great they put such nice floors in these laboring rooms." Then I thought, "Hey. There's sunlight on that wood." When did the sun rise? I looked out the window and I felt like I was on another world, lit by that alien sun.

On that far away world was the midwife room, Lisa, her pain, and how she wrestled with it. That's it. I remember holding her after the contractions doubled in strength. She blew my mind for the first of many times that day, because she handled it with such grace and I loved and admired her so much then. We just held each other and I tried my best to show her I was with her, too, on this severe planet of hers.

She doesn't like me to brag, but I do. Lisa was like a zen warrior through her 22 hours of labor. Midwives from other parts of the unit came to watch her work, even though she wasn't on their beat. It was typical to hear the cliché "You're doing great, mom! Keep going!" in big cheerful voices from the other delivery rooms. In Lisa's room, the voices were subdued, a little awestruck. "We should have a camera in here," said one midwife. "To show mothers how it's done." When the midwife who would eventually deliver Isaiah came on shift (Lisa's third shift of the day – the alien sun had set by this time), she asked Lisa if she wanted painkillers. "Because," said Maggie, nodding to the monitors showing how hard the contractions were, "these are screamers." But Lisa didn't want any. She did it clean from beginning to end, breathing out those screamers like they were so much smoke to her.

But that was her undoing too. By the time the baby had dropped into position, Lisa was pretty out of it. Maggie gave her an oxygen mask to give Lisa and the baby a boost of energy, and I could see in Lisa's eyes that she was pretty woozy. The midwives and our birth attendants (a mother and daughter team who absolutely rocked) started coaching Lisa to push, but it was like she didn't know what this meant. I thought that maybe it was the oxygen making her light-headed. Whatever was going on, Lisa wasn't getting the message. The mom-and-daughter doulas kept saying, "Come on, Lisa! Here comes Iko!" (our nick name for the baby before we knew the sex at birth). The three midwives kept saying, "Push! Right now!" I could hear them getting frustrated because Lisa kept breathing through her contractions, which had worked so well for the last 20 hours. I kept wondering why they didn't explain to her how to push? Didn't they see she was out of it, exhausted? Don't they know how to explain it? Can't they just say to her - ?

Then I realized. Oh. I see. It's me. I'm the one who's supposed to explain this because I'm the only one who sees the state she's in.

The room was full of women. Midwives. Doulas. Nurses. Strong, direct, competent women. And me. It occurred to me in that moment that a man could back off, that as a man, I had the privilege to not step up. This was Lisa's day, not mine. It wasn't my place to tell women like this what to do or say here, right?

That's when I heard Maggie say "c-section," and I said, "OK. Hold up. Let's try something else here." I stepped forward and took Lisa's hand and I just said what seemed right, not knowing if it was right. Just talking. "It's like taking a shit, baby. You gotta stop breathing these contractions out, and you have to bear down when it gets intense." She said, "I can't." I laughed and teased her (I'm the only person on Planet Lisa who could have teased her in that moment), "The baby's here, darling. There's no 'can't.' It's show time. You have to push."

The baby started moving after that. The head appeared, and just typing these words, I can feel it all over again, like the universe turning its face to look in our humble direction. The baby's head, just a scalp with a bit of blond hair. Oh my god. My blond hair. Lisa's blond hair. Our baby.

Then the whole head. Iko (still the gender neutral name at this point!) had a scrunched up face like an Olmec head unearthed from jungle turf. And he had one big head, man. Better to say an Easter Island totem. Then one more push and he was out, a slippery thing in the world, all blue-grey with unoxygenated blood.

Someone yelled "A boy!"

And I looked at Lisa and shouted, "It's Isaiah!"

Later, while we stayed in the room, listening to the sounds of other deliveries taking place, I heard a male voice, the only other male voice I would hear during our stay in the midwife unit. It was a very African-American voice, tres Barry White. At 430 in the morning, he started yelling, "Come on, baby. Come on. Keep pushing. You're doing great!" Then. Then. A pause. And the Barry White bass shot up into its upper register, yelling breathlessly, "Oh my god! Oh my god! There it is! Oh my god!"

And I thought to myself, "I know what you just saw, brother!"

There's more to tell, a million more stories. Isaiah in ICU for Five Days. The Diabolical Doctor Who Wouldn't Let Iko Go. The Tale of the Dysfunctional Suck. Barth Confronts a Ghost on the Third Avenue Bridge. Maybe I'll tell them here, I don't know. I wanted to tell this one because when I looked at Isaiah this morning, it seemed impossible that he was ever not here. How did he "get" here? Wasn't he always on this planet?

I write this in complete honor of how hard Lisa worked to get this gem in our hands.

i get emails from people (friends, family, and "equaintances") offering testimonials from politicians, talking heads, and historians about what's really happening in iraq, the "real" iraq that the liberal/conservative media (depending on your voting record) won't cover.

here's my two cents. read the blogs. the two examples below are by iraqis. from either one you can jump to other blogs kept by people living in the region.

Where is Raed? http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/ :

"Our house was searched by the Americans. That happened almost ten days ago. I wasn’t home, but my mother called the next day a bit freaked out.
They came at around 12 midnight they were apparently supposed to do a silent entrance and surprise the criminal Ba’athi cell that was in my parents house..."

Baghdad Burning http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ :

"Some raids are, quite simply, raids. The door is broken down in the middle of the night, [US] troops swarm in by the dozens. Families are marched outside, hands behind their backs and bags upon their heads. Fathers and sons are pushed down on to the ground, a booted foot on their head or back. Other raids go horribly wrong. We constantly hear about families who are raided in the small hours of the morning. The father, or son, picks up a weapon- thinking they are being attacked by looters- and all hell breaks loose. Family members are shot, others are detained and often women and children are left behind wailing."

then there's this bit of sobering web-ness, which covers an aspect of the invasion and occupation of iraq that gets short-changed daily in what passes for american journalism.

Iraq body count http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

i had a dream last night in which i was convinced that football used to be played on horseback. in the dream, i was remembering watching football as a little kid and seeing certain players on horses and thinking "what happened to the horses? when did people stop playing football on horses?" the dream was complete with old NFL Films black-and-white and grainy color footage of guys in old leather helmets sitting on horseback, the kicking and return teams on horses (rushing at each other like the charge of the light brigade), and one clip of a quarterback on a horse taking the hike shotgun from center.

the dream was so real - i mean, come on, film footage?? - that i can't shake the feeling that it might be true. weren't the first 2 super bowls played on horseback? wasn't bart starr also a skilled cavalier?

in the dream, i saw my dead step-father, and i'm not sure if i was remembering this or if this was real-time or if he was a ghost or what (all three things crossed my mind in the dream), but i asked him if he ever remembered a time when horses were used in football. jack considered the question very seriously, rubbing his beard and looking thoughtfully at the ceiling. finally, he lowered his voice in a very confidential tone and said, "barth, i was the captain of the defense on my high school football team, and i don't ever remember horses being used."

i woke up in that half-dream brain, convinced that jack was wrong. i mean, i'd seen the footage! i remembered it from childhood! i'm sitting here, now, drinking my first cup of coffee and i'm pretty sure that if i googled the subject, i'd discover that sea biscuit used to play for the st louis cardinals.

so i've finished another chapter in the tarot novel. and i did it with abject thievery, stealing minutes for a few hundred words here and there.

it's the only way i can make it work now and i like it actually. my slow, lingering mornings of writing, drinking cup after cup of coffee/tea before heading into the co-op are long gone. now i write on my lunch break, long hand, which i haven't done for almost 15 years, and i keep the spiral notebook with me at all times: the right hand page is for prose, the left hand page is for notes. so funny. this feels positively stone age after more than a decade at the computer. once all the prose and dialog were written, in total collage, stream-of-consciousness style, i steal time to type it into a first draft while isaiah and lisa are asleep - i get an hour at most that way.

it's really changed my voice, i think, but it's hard for me to be objective right now. i've shown the first three chapters to my agent, kris o'higgins, who thinks it reads faster, with more hook. strange, since it seems choppy to my ear/eye, but probably because i see each paragraph and am reminded of where i wrote it. "that was stolen at cafe barbette. that one came from diamonds cafe. i swiped that bit in the wedge's employee parking lot."

i think this new "process" - eek! - that word sounds like therapyspeak - let's say "method" - this new method keeps me from what dave dachelet calls my incessant noodling with the prose. forces me to throw it down and be done with it.

maybe that's a good thing.

kristin's dress: ivory and classic. with her red hair, she looked like a goddess. alan and barzak's tuxedo's were crisp and classy, too, but as it should be, the bride was a vision.

i hope barzak will blog his best-man story. (hint: frodo he aint...)

fun to meet alan and kristin's families. i think kristin's dad is all too comfortable lifting a glass and making toasts for a throng. old friends and new were there, too. david lomax, a chum from clarion 98, showed up (a surprise for me - i hadn't heard he was coming!). rachael and david. burke and sam. cindra and barry. kelly and laura. susan groppi made it from san francisco. karen meisner, per, and their delightful boy jeremiah. kelly link and gavin grant.

most surreal moment: the ceremony itself was held in the posh summit avenue enclave of st paul, near the state capitol. just before the ceremony started, a group of 10 or 12 protesters, picketing for the repeal of anti-marijuana laws, marched by the wedding with bright green pot-leaf signs.

kelly mccullough and gavin grant (and kelly's wife, laura, too) all showed up in formal kilts. FYI.

the meal was superb and the open bar, dangerous. but it fueled a hell of a dance floor that peaked with a polka that very literally rocked the house. it also clearly delineated who grew up in small, german-american towns - most of the wedding, it turns out! frightening mobs of polkateers, kids bobbing from foot to foot, old folks outclassing the young - and, smokes, who knew dave and rachael could polka like that??

so great to be on a dance floor with barzak again. and alan and kristin. brought back great memories of how we all met, that summer at clarion. so fitting that dancing is an integral part of this wedding.

isaiah did great. he loves to be held while we dance at home, so he was fine on the dance floor. it just slayed me to see his blueberry eyes peering over the hem of his sling. can't wait till this kid is old enough to tear up the floor with super-nova toddler energy.

i felt a little subdued, being at a wedding of this calibre with a baby for the first time. i mean, i absolutely love weddings, the whole mish-mash of very different groups of people letting their guards down and merging for the sake of two people whom they love dearly. and this was a grand wedding, deserving of shakespearean revelry in the baudiest sense, which i usually take on with glee. oh well. that sacred/profane duty falls to non-dads for a few years. (ok. i admit it. i did one shot. ok? but it couldn't be helped. the corrupt barzak and equally corrupt miss jackie, well, corrupted me.)

but oh how i loved seeing old friends dance their wedding waltz.

so i'm getting ready for the organic inspector to come through the wedge this week to review us for our organic certification (our co-op is one of the first stores to be org cert'd in the country).

organic inspection isn't like health department inspection, though grocery workers get all freaked out like it is. every year, the inspector and i sit around together for two days, drink coffee, and discuss the system we use to keep organic and conventional product separate, the cleaning regimens, the organic paperwork system so that we can verify the organic status of every product we carry in the store, yadda yadda yadda. at the end of this coffee klaatsch, he writes a report for the certifier who makes a decision on our certification based on this guy's observations and opinions.

despite how blase i saw sound, i'm sort of freaked out about this myself. in a way, i've been prepping for this for a whole year.

interestingly, in the course of my prep, it occurred to me that i have a real problem with the National Organic Program's requirement for retailers to keep cleaning logs: every time workers use a knife or cutting board to cut conventional product, they have to clean it and initial a cleaning log saying that the knife is now ready for use with organic product. this happens FAR less often than you'd imagine, since we have separate organic and conventional tools and surfaces.

yep, when you buy organic food, you buy into a whole regimen that supports clean food. and it's nothing compared to what organic farmers have to record for their certification.

my problem with the cleaning log (apart from the fact that i wonder how it really supports organic integrity) is that we've had a woman working for us who comes from west africa. she's functionally illiterate in her own language, let alone english. how can we expect her to meaningfully fill out the cleaning log? and what about workers with different levels of ability? we've hired folks with downs syndrome in the past. and what about the burgeoning somali population in minneapolis? will we only hire immigrants to bag groceries at certified stores? sets up some interesting class issues in the liberally-minded organic certification system.

moreover, organic farms hire functionally illiterate people all the time - immigrants from around the world feed america, after all. but these workers aren't the ones doing the recording on organic farms. a farm manager or the owner of the farm would do that.

i guess the assumption is that grocery workers are all of a certain educational background and ability - especially in groovy health food stores that want to be certified organic.

personally, i think the strength of organics is in its positive, environmental impact - enriching the top soil, growing stronger more flavorful crops, reducing synthetic pesticides and, as a result, the staggeringly high incidents of cancer and infertitlity in rural america - not in the cootie mentality that keeps your bad food away from my good food.

a few months ago, it seemed to me that america's red-white-and-blue lust to kick iraqi ass was akin to a drunk guy in a dive-bar getting sucker-punched. this guy then reels about the saloon looking for the bastard who punked him, can't find him, and instead picks a fight with the nearest, smallest bastard he can grab- and beats the crap out of him in a very public and bloody one-sided fight.

looking at the polls it seems like americans are finally beginning to have a squirmy, uncomfortable fit of conscience. maybe invading iraq wasn't such a cool idea, the numbers seem to say. maybe there wasn't a war "plan" after all (who plans a blind rage?). maybe we shouldn't be waging war abroad when there are equally serious problems here at home, as the prophet isaiah once told his king.

but i'm here to say that in the days after 9/11, my cynicism about america took a back seat to my wonder. i had just visited new york the week before the attacks, for the very first time, and i fell in love, hard, sitting atop a brooklyn warehouse during a late-night party and getting the lay of new york city with good friends, the skyline half-draped in fog before us. i couldn't believe, a week later, how new yorkers responded to the attacks. my calloused cliche we midwesterners have of new yorkers was shot to hell, and i was proud of how tender and passionate they were with one another about their loss, the damage to their city, their pride. i couldn't believe how well giuliani put words on the city's and the country's shock. it was a wonder, from my vantage out here in the safe prairie.

my friend emily was in berlin 2 years ago yesterday. she told me how 10,000 people turned out with candles to honor america's loss, the outpouring of love that europe felt for us, and their sadness for the end of our age of innocence. so easy for me to think that the world hates us for our arrogance. "are you kidding?" emily said to me. "america is the world's hope. it really is. that's how berlin felt about us anyway. ten thousand people! that's how most of the world feels. they hate seeing this happen to new york."

how quickly we exhausted that love from our allies. just two years later, rumsfeld is calling germany and europe the "chocolate-makers coalition" because they didn't support our blind rage against iraq. poor europe is like the sober friend who tries to calm the rampaging drunk in that saloon - and who gets decked for his best efforts.

after 9/11, there was a period of grace. i don't mean a grace period. i mean, there was a sense of many americans understanding the lesson of that attack. our common humanity. the fact that we have to help each other - a common good for the common wealth. unapologetic materialists usually, americans seemed to touch the brevity of life, recognizing that our time here is so short that even our tallest buildings may not outlast a human's short span. it was a time of candles in windows and handshakes with strangers at bus stops - even in my city, far away from ground zero.

in the course of the past 2 years, i totally forgot about that moment of grace. going to anti-war rallies and watching the country slide slowly into that patriotic rage put me right back in my most cynical posture. the president would have us think only of our fear and hatred, our wound, our "patriotism," and our vengeance. he's capitalized on it well, too, but in his long drumbeat to war, the swift blitz to bagdad, and now this horrible vulnerability we bear as occupiers, the president has shrouded something far more powerful than our collective fear and hatred.

he's hidden our humanity from us.

on september 12th, my friend melissa told me that someone put up a battered flag across a street somewhere in soho. people in her neighborhood sat under it and talked. new yorkers talking in the street, listening to the radio, and just being. she said that when she rode her bike down that street, she could stand on the pedals and just touch the fringe of it.

so kristin and alan are getting married next weekend, which promises to be one of the best weddings i've been to in years. summit beer. a dandy white wine for dinner (i'm not a white fan, but this one's good). why, the dancing alone will spur the transfer of thousands of MBs across blog-land for years to come.

but wait. as we face the unusual situation of a minnesota wedding with temps in the 80's, the suspense mounts. did kristin envision this when she bought her dress several months ago? did alan, when he bought his groom-suit? will the hall be air conditioned? will the cake melt? will the wedding party melt? will best man chris barzak and his best babe jackie dunk themselves in the keg ice (that's even money for those taking bets)? will kelly and gavin do their infamous "crawl" on the dance floor in this preposterous heat? will dave hoffman-dachelet and son rowan spontaneously combust together on the dance floor? in a tux, will kelly mccullough be confused for china mieville? will karen meisner be sucker punched by me in another game of mafia? (no wait. that's wiscon, not a&k's wedding-con).

and more immediately...what on earth will i wear? linens? the cool, white jacket though it's post-labor day? am i relegated to tank top and bermudas? what? and no jacket? at a wedding?

to quote oscar wilde: "the suspense is terrible...i hope it lasts."

i'm trying my damndest to carve out a time and head-space to write, but, man, it's so very hard. having a baby is like taking hallucinogens for a month. afterward, you have to somehow "go back to work" (whatever that is) and "get back to reality" (huh?). even very simple tasks like shopping or bathing require napoleonic strategy.

pre-isaiah, i used to wake up at 5 am to write, every day, like i had an alarm in my skull. and i did have one. it was called "the book" and it kicked me out of bed with a set of subconscious agenda items to write about, whether i wanted to or not. but now my bodyclock has been utterly reset. i got up at 830 am today and it was the earliest i've risen since isaiah was born (that's as much from a small bout of anxiety-insomnia on my part, as it is from the boy's late-night squallings). luckily, in the last weeks of lisa's pregnancy, i wrote hard and finished the first three chapters and outline for my next book, so that i'd have something to build on afterwards. i also stole a page from chris barzcak and kept a novel-journal, which has been a life-saver. consequently, on the other side of daddy-hood, it's possible for me to read the novel-journal, pick up the thread where i left it, and return to the mindset i need for writing this particularly story.

(note for a future con panel: how do pro novelists physically write their books? what software do they use? how do they organize it on their computer desktops? how do they order their drafts?)

so i'm taking the maureen mchugh approach and just trying to write 1000 words a day. today, i wrote about 120. yep. it's like that.

i imagine my childless writer-pals who have a good discipline going are reading this in horror and swearing off procreation. maybe that's a good idea, i dunno. frankly, there's no horror in my reaction to the baby coming along and rearranging my life and brain. i'm totally zen about it. i mean, i wrote my skinny 120 words with my toe on isaiah's bouncy chair and kept him asleep the whole time. maybe tomorrow i'll get my 1K. maybe it will come the day after. but it will come. i know, because i've been very disciplined in the past, and the writing is part of who i've been for the last 20+ years. and i'll be a better dad to isaiah by doing what i do.