This is the first time I am addressing you, my unborn child, directly in any form. So remember this. Hopefully, by the time you are able to read, and hopefully appreciate subtle humor–and perhaps a bit of irony here and there–computers will still be around and will not have been replaced by some new form of technology that will be incomprehensible to us 'old folks' who triumphantly struggled through the days of meager Dual 2.5 ghz power macs. Ha! your generation will laugh at us when we talk about these days, much in the same way we chuckle incredulously when the old folks haunting this joint talk about a time before television, when people sat around and stared at a radio(that also functional as furniture) So... after this brief intro to me, your father and his temperament, let me continue by describing the physical surroundings of where you are about to begin your childhood.
A yellow school bus has just passed on the next street down 'Centre Street." We live in Upper Nyack, NY now in a small cozy California ranch. I am sitting on our deck made of wood from a Cedar tree, which is quite sought after because of its natural immunity to weather and insects, and even more for the way it changes from the brutal sun so gracefully growing a silvery patina. It is unforgettably cedar, with its delicious scent–unmistakably cedar. It always reminds me of Nana and Papa's cedar closet in their 6 wayne avenue home, the home your aunts and I grew up in. It was a magical place where April and I would play hide and seek, a place of mystery packed in small boxes. A hanging museum of outfits from Nana and Papa's past lives, before April and I were even a tugging at the back of their minds. A time when it was simple May and Tom Daly––he in his soldiers uniform and she in her leg cast from a ski accident from Hunter Mountain, before the first snow board was inented. Relics from a time when life happened in a series of square images glued in a book, covered in plastic like so many couches in my childhood memories.
A minyan of tall proud trees surrounds me now as I write. Locusts are rattling in the tree tops marking the sacred boundary where earth passes the baton to the sky in the race toward the edge of time. Here we are, little one we do not know yet, but who we will soon love like no one else alive. Fate has chosen the three of us to spend a little time together here on this beautiful sphere filled with so many different creatures. A bluejay has just hopped from one branch to another. And now another. Before me, a line of trees stands in front of a backdrop of morning sun. A great opening can be felt, the Hudson River valley, not more than a quarter mile from here; a gouge in the earth created by a glacier, brimming with history and progress. Battles and brick yards, sailors and ship yards, and simple folk making a living. Ema is down at the Art Cafe which is a small oasis in Nyack, built from nowhere by Safta Dita. She is amazing, with her vision and the drive to realize that vision. May you inherit all the best traits from all your ancestors, those you will come to know as well as you know yourslef, most often better than that, for they will know you better than you know yourself, for they will be able to see themselves in the corner of your smile, or the wrinkle of your brow, and will suddenly realize all that has passed, and all that will come again.
Waiting patiently (without fingernails)
Daddy
No comments:
Post a Comment