March 30th, 2005 - What a difference a day makes. Yesterday was cold and rainy and shitty, and all I could think of was the evil that men do...to themselves. Today, I awoke a little on the late side, saw the sun shining through the window and knew it was going to be a good day.

I celebrated the light and warmth by shaving and putting on a skinny tie. Then I went out to my neighbor Frank's garage where I freed my scooter from the confines of its shiny, black rain cover. And thank the risen lord Jesus for the stout engineering of the far east, for my scooter sputtered only once or twice before coming to life, none the worse for a few months of snowbound neglect. Out of the driveway I buzzed, letting the cool air buffet my bare hands as I throttled onward to 35mph and top speed.

Now, I know the traditional rejuvenation ritual has to do with one king dying and another rising to take his place (the king is dead, long live the king), but I have to believe there's a lesser element in this grand cycle of rebirth that has to do with scooters and skinny ties and sunshine, like that scene in Quadrophenia where Sting smarts off to the judge and all the mod kids cheer.

Work was work, though I somehow managed to get a lot done, clearing my backlog of proofreading and more or less guaranteeing a light day tomorrow. And even though the temperature dipped late in the afternoon and my ride home was significantly less revelatory, I still managed to feel good as I pulled into the driveway and the dog came bounding around the corner to meet me.

When I walked in the door, Brittney said I smelled of car exhaust. And then of course she toddled off to the gym with my sister-in-law, leaving me with the baby and my two nephews, but again, the pure exuberance of the day got me through till dinner time when we slapped burgers on the grill (THE OUTDOOR GRILL!!!) for the first time in 2005. After dinner I settled back on the couch with the baby on my chest and watched a soccer match.

Even now as I sit down to type these words I'm walking sunshine. I'm yawning a contented yawn and looking bedward. THE WINTER IS DEAD!! LONG LIVE THE SPRING!!!

March 29th, 2005 - I have not been writing because I have not been thinking. Or rather, my thoughts don't connect, one to the next, so I'm having trouble forming sentences that connect, one to the next.

I have not been posting pictures because I have not been carrying my camera, and I have not been carrying my camera because I have not been seeing things I want to take pictures of. Not being able to connect thoughts means not being able to conceive and frame pictures, in my head, or in the camera's lense.

So, accepting my current mental state, the product of not enough sleep, too much work and the generally overwhelmed condition of new fatherhood, let me not write about something in particular but rather about some things in particulate form.

Particle one: When I leave the office in the evening I walk out the front door, pull out my cell phone and call Brittney to let her know that I am on my way. One night last week, just as I was ending my call to her with an "ok, I'll see soon," a homeless man with an eye patch lurched out at me and said, "Hey, you got a cigarette?" And I said, "No. Sorry. I don't smoke." And then I said, "Sorry, hon. There's a pirate here, trying to bum a smoke off me."

Particle two: Again I'm on my way home. It is pouring rain. This is last night I'm talking about. I'm walking under the expressway on my way to the train station when another homeless guy calls me over. He's too drunk to stand up on his own, and he's got himself braced up against one of the massive, round pilings that holds up the highway. "Hey, can you walk me to the Pine Street Inn?" he asks. The Pine Street is Boston's biggest homeless shelter. "No," I say. "I'm late and I'm going in the other direction." He slurs something incomprehensible at the back of my head as I walk away.

Particle three: The train. On my way home tonight. Three young office people stand near me talking about brokers and asset allocation and making the jump from QC to development. There is a drunk standing just behind them. He's not holding onto any of the railings but trying instead to surf the motion of the train. He's stumbling back and forth and bumping into them. In one hand he holds a large Starbucks coffee. In the other he's got a bright pink plastic bag with the words PERSONAL BELONGINGS printed on it. Apparently he's just gotten out of jail. The office people joke amongst themselves about kicking his ass, careful not to let him hear. Eventually he finds a seat and sits down.

I don't know why these three experiences stick in my head tonight. I guess I spend a fair amount of time gauging my relationship to the people I see out in the world. It's not like with family and friends where the orbits are well proscribed, where roles and expectations are rehearsed and performed. On mass transit you encounter, well, the masses. And though you may not recognize it in any meaningful way while you're walking to the station or waiting for the train doors to shut and the whole thing to lurch forward, the mass of humanity writhing and seething around you finds a way to separate itself out into millions of individual impressions. In the shapes and sizes of other people we seek some reflection of ourselves. We try, unwittingly, to identify. And when we see the homeless or the publicly drunk, there is a moment when we identify in them the worst parts of ourselves, and sometimes we stare, in pity or bewilderment, but more often than not we shudder and turn away.

And far from being a sad or depressing thing, I think that turning away is a hopeful gesture, because the difference between me and the smoking pirate is that I'm still able to turn away from the worst parts of myself and he's not. That's not much of a cogent thought, but it's the best I can do tonight. It's the best I can do.

March 24th, 2005 - Before I say anything else, let me be clear that I don't know anything about architecture. I mean, I know that it has to do with buildings, but that's about it. Other than that I only have opinions. For example, I think the glass pyramid I.M. Pei built at the Louvre is an abomination. I think the proliferation of strip malls is sort of like the proliferation of an evil virus meant to destroy the human spirit. I'm sure you agree.

And if you've been reading this blog for a very long time (I believe I'm only addressing my father and my wife now), you know that one of the things I make a point of doing every day on the way to work is observing the Boston skyline, which is to say the skyline on the Back Bay side of the Longfellow Bridge, not the bit that encompasses the city's actual downtown area. The downtown skyline is, in a word, underwhelming. It's an indiscriminate mass of not-very-tall and not-very-distinctive buildlings huddling together as if for warmth but still managing to leave the observer completely cold.

The Back Bay side, on the other hand, is highlighted by the city's two best and tallest buildings the Prudential and the Hancock. They jut out of the city floor like two glass and steel stalagmites, their towering majesty knit together by the ruddy ribbon of brownstones that lines the river on the Boston side and the trees of the Esplanade that run behind them.

You know what, forget my description. Here's a picture I took from the train one morning last year:


The Prudential is on the right. The Hancock is on the left.

In the years I have been making the daily journey into town, I have observed this skyline in myriad different light conditions, shrouded in mist, dusted with snow and laid completely bare by the high summer sun. I have endeavored to divine the coming weather from a detailed reading of the way the clouds frame the buildings and the choppiness of the river as it writhes past them. I have studied some of the lesser buildings like the luxury condominium tower that sprang up next to the Prudential a few years ago, the one with the explosive burst of steel on the top. I love that building, too.

Yesterday I began an informal survey of which building, Hancock or Prudential (the Pru to real Bostonians), people liked better. Because this survery was informal and because I don't have a lot of time to walk around and talk to people about architecture, my sample size ended up as two, two people that is, my friend F and my wife B.

F said he much preferred the building with the light on top, not visible in the picture above, to either the Pru or the Hancock. The building with the light on top is 500 Boylston, I think. The light is blue or red or flashing blue or flashing red, depending on the weather forecast (yeah, I suppose I should figure out what light means what weather; that would save me from a lot of poor forecasts using my other, more subjective method). That building also has some light pattern for those times that the Red Sox are rained out. I suspect this is what F really likes about the building with the light on top.

Forced to choose between the two buildings in my survey, however, F chose the Hancock. He chose it because he had a bad experience at the Pru as a seven-year-old. Apparently his parents took him to mass there, and the priest gave him a hard time because he wanted to receive the host in his hands, not in his mouth.

I said, "So you didn't want to take the Lord in your mouth...what's the big deal?" I can seldom resist a joke like that, and then I added, "They give mass in the Pru? Really? That's weird."

F was busy and didn't have time to listen to me make jokes about performing oral sex on the creator, so he repeated that he preferred the Hancock for its absence in scenes of his youthful traumatization. This seemed a reasonable, if unsatisfying, argument, so I let it go at that.

Next, I asked the wife which she preferred. She likes the Pru. She likes the antenna on top, and the way they light it at night to spell words like, "GO SOX." Also, she pointed out, you can go up in the Pru. They have an observation deck that affords a pretty spectacular view of the city.

Now clearly the problem with a scientific survey with two data points is that it lets itself in for deadlock, for inconclusiveness. I needed another opinion. Fortunately, as I mentioned before, I am opinionated, and so I will cast the deciding vote in the matter.

The Prudential is the better building. Beligerent priests aside, the Pru just has more soul. It has windows you can see into. The Hancock is a giant mirror, both a blankness and a reflection of our worst narcissisms. Tour guides will point out that you can see the reflection of Trinity Church, a beautiful old building, in the reflective surface of the Hancock and that it presents a unique perspective on "old" and "new" Boston. This is marketing. The real value of the Hancock for ordinary passersby is the ability to identify when you're walking around town with your fly down without conspicuously gazing down at your own crotch.

The Pru is a mid-sized, '70s-style skyscraper. In fact, it's less a skyscraper and more a sky-pointer-at-er. It's a non-threatening building. And you can see it from just about anywhere in the metro area. I have often been surprised, driving down Somerville Ave in Somerville or Mass Ave in Cambridge, that the Prudential looms dead center in your Southern view, as if all roads lead to it, which they don't.

Roads in Boston seldom lead much of anywhere, but that is another subject altogether.

March 22nd, 2005 - S wrote me a letter, an electronic letter, not one of those old-fashioned paper kind. And S, who I thanked yesterday for encouraging my "small but fervent ambitions," is a writer who gets paid alot, so I should probably cut him a check for the two solid pages of input he provided me with.

I'm not going to share his words with you for two reasons. First, he didn't mention wanting his words sullied by digital association with my little, homemade web site, and second, why would I give the best advice I receive to you? All I need is to be competing for work with you. You're smarter than I am.

So what I decided to do was share my reply to him, both because it says some things about where my head is regarding writing in general, but also because it relates something funny that happened to me at work today.

Here goes:

Dear S,

I have been thinking about what you wrote here for a day or two, and really it just leaves me confused. Not because you've been ambiguous or unhelpful, but rather because I just don't know what to do. I derive a lot of pleasure from writing (even advertorials...even emails), but I can't ever seem to convince myself to put my head down and barrell my way into some kind of full-time writing job. Full disclosure: that you and D make your livings writing makes me feel a little inadequate...like I wasn't quite good enough to make it happen, though clearly, you've both done the work, paid the dues, etc., and I haven't.

Having said all that, let me tell you what happened to me today. I was in my boss's office discussing some strategy when all of a sudden he reiterates an earlier request for me to put together a copyediting/proofreading test (I manage the ce/pr department now) for the developers in India (we're owned by an Indian parent company) to see if we might not export some of our work to them, you know, lower costs, bigger profits, and on and on. And I'm sitting there and this knot comes into my stomach and I look across at him and say, "You know what, Boss? I'm not going to do that. I'm just not going to participate in the outsourcing of my own job," to which he replies with a slightly incredulous stare. "Look, Emlyn," he says. "It's not as if they're going to be able to do the work. We just need to come up with a test that they'll fail, so we can move on." And I say, "Boss, you don't put a gun in your mouth unless you want to kill yourself. Me? I'm not going to put this gun in my mouth. If there are consequences for that, I'm happy to take them, but I won't help someone eliminate my own job."

S, I'm not even sure what to think about outsourcing and free market economics and trade tariffs and the rest. It's awfully complicated, and the old me knew what he thought, but the new me reacts on a more visceral level. To me, there's something vaguely criminal about being asked to train your cheaper, more eager replacement. I have nothing against India or Indians, and I don't begrudge them the right to make a living wage. But I'm not going to send them my job tied up in a bow either. If they want it, they'll need to come get it from me.

And really, who the fuck knows what any of that has to do with writing for a living, but, to me, they feel connected. I think deep down I believe a penchant for truth telling and a desire to be read will get me where I want to be. I'm probably fooling myself. And my job is probably going to Delhi.

All for now,
Emlyn

March 21st, 2005 - Not a moment to myself for four days. Work, work and work, then family on Saturday and family on Sunday, some freelance deadline convergence, my own fault, walking the dog, feeding the baby, cleaning the house, and just now, Monday night, I'm finally sitting down to share, my appointment with the silent, virtual shrink.

I really can't tell you what having a newborn in the house can do for any latent martyr complex you might be cultivating. In addition to late night feedings and diaper duty, I've taken to walking around the house, chanting in ancient Greek and whacking myself in the forehead with a board. I bought a hair shirt on ebay. In the basement I'm building a cross.

Alright, shake it out, shake it out. Sorry. I'm good at self-pity.

Anyway it's been a while since I wrote about what I've been reading, a possible sign that I haven't read anything worth the time in a while. But no, that's not entirely true.

Over the last year my reading habits have morphed a bit. I credit the New Yorker subscription I took out last April. When I signed up (at half price), it was with the idea that I'd read the fiction every week and pick and choose the non-fiction I was interested in. In practice, the opposite has been true. In fact, I almost never read the short story, and nearly always read the rest of the magazine word-by-word.

And lest you take me for some sort of New Yorker snob (which is exactly what I am), let me make clear my views on the magazine that never sleeps. First of all, I've had enough of John Updike. I like John Updike. I've read some of his novels. I've enjoyed some of his short stories. He's a good reviewer. BUT COME ON!!! Give one of the other kids a turn. We don't need Updike in every issue.

Also, I take issue with both the Fashion Issue and the Style Issue. I read the New Yorker to be an uptight wonk, not to bone up on the history of the relationship between Dolce and Gabanna, to gawk at anorexics and bulemics in clothing I wouldn't send a hooker to costume party in. Let's have an issue full of poetry none of us understands. That's what I'm really looking for.

And so I've let my New Yorker subscription run out. It was good while it lasted, but it'll be nice to get that weekly monkey off my back. The New Yorker kindled my interest in non-fiction and history, and for that it was well worth the price.

Speaking of history and non-fiction, I can't seem to get enough of the Civil and Revolutionary Wars lately. I read Gore Vidal's historical novels, Burr and Lincoln and loved them both. Neither of them is particularly new on the market, but then I was late to discover every good band that ever rocked its way across my turntable, what makes me think good writing should be any different.

Also, the novels of Raymond Chandler. That Phillip Marlowe is my kind of guy, a loser and a drunk but ultimately the last honest man. To me, Chandler is to crime fiction what Dick is to science fiction, a men among boys.

Finally, the subscription that survives, Granta. Granta is the sort of journal I might have picked up in college and carried around for a while hoping to impress a cute English major. Granta comes quarterly. It's not so nudgey as the New Yorker. The writing in Granta is also much more widely varied and less predictable. It's also bound like a book, so it sits on the shelf afterward like a trophy, and I like that because I'm insecure and need to stock my bookshelves with books that tell people I'm smarter than I really am.

So that's reading. Writing is another story. I've begun taking freelance work again, not that I have any time for it. I wrote the other day about "advertorials" and the toll they take on my soul, and I got a long and thoughtful note from my friend S, who is a "successful" writer and has been very kind to encourage my small but fervent ambitions. A concluding note of thanks also to those who have written in with kind words since Owen came into the world. As mentioned above it is difficult to find the time to record my thoughts here just recently, but I take great motivation from the small bits of human contact you've offered and I will soldier on with this blog, if only to preserve my withering sanity.

Good night.

March 15th, 2005 - Scatter shot today. Received the very good news that I am not such a total media whore as I thought (see last post). The pro-community hospital propaganda I crafted over the weekend will actually be running with a clear banner across the top letting the reader know that it was paid for by the community hospital which is the subject. Oh, and I still get paid for it, even though the publisher "edited it heavily" to make its bias even more over the top.

So let me just say this. I hope no one runs out and gets an elective angioplasty at an ill-equipped health facility on the basis of the words I wrote, but if they do, hey, it's not my fault. That was very clearly an "advertorial" and not a prescription for what ails them, unless of course they live in the Boston suburbs and have a partial blockage of one of their major arteries. In that case, my piece was both an "advertorial" AND a prescription for what ails them.

Speaking of "advertorials" (I keep putting it in quotes because I really can't take the idea of a bought-and-paid-for news story having its own name.), I have been stunned and amazed at the increasing coverage the federal government's rampant use of "video press releases" has gotten lately. In case you're unfamiliar with the "video press release," it's a preproduced, prepackaged news story circulated for easy use by local and network news programs. The GAO (General Accounting Office) has recently warned the feds that they are violating anti-propaganda laws with some of the stuff they're putting out now.

Normally what you'd expect me to do next is go off on a tirade about how wrong it all is, but I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to say is that it's pretty god damned cool that the national nightly news can run stories exposing the federal government's underhanded trickery without running the risk of being shut down by an unhinged autocrat (which is not to say that our current president isn't, by some measures, an unhinged autocrat). Our press isn't as free and independent as we'd like perhaps, but it's not as bad as we fear either.

So, in that spirit, remember to sign up for your complimentary angioplasty at Dr. Mobile's Rolling Cardiac Clinic and get a free car wash when you tell 'em, "Emlyn sent me!"

March 12th, 2005 - Today I made $150 writing an article about angioplasty. You know, angioplasty, the process of inserting a balloon into a clogged artery and inflating it to re-open the passage. Sometimes stents are used to prop the artery open afterward. Apparently, angioplasty became the most commonly performed medical intervention in the world in 1997. Dick Cheney had an angioplasty in 2001. Bill Clinton had one last year, just before his open-heart surgery.

But enough about angioplasty. You already know about as much about the procedure as I do.

The angle of the story I was paid to write, an angle dictated to me by the publisher in advance, was that community hospitals in Massachusetts should be allowed to perform angioplasties in more than just emergency circumstances, as they are now. They should be able to inflate balloons in everyone's hearts. The lives of thousands of suburban cardiac patients hang in the balance, as do the bottom lines of the community hospitals who stand to make millions from all the extra angioplasties they'll be doing.

Now let's get behind us very quickly the question of whether or not community hospitals should be doing these operations. Truthfully, I have no idea. The folks at the big teaching hospitals in Boston say no. The people at the community hospitals say yes. Today, the people at the community hospitals paid the publisher of the magazine that hired me to write an article in support of their position. This article will run without acknowledgement that it's been paid for by one of the interested parties. The hospitals will buy reprints of the magazine to circulate to legislators and influential members of the Department of Public Health to make their case.

This, I'm told, is how things work.

In total I guess I've done this about ten times, made about $1500. And each time I've said to myself, "well, I've just touted a new technology I don't know much about or extolled the qualities of a service I've never used, but the alternative technologies and services are spending money of their own to achieve the same thing. I'm only restoring the balance."

But am I? Or am I just contributing to the problem of money corrupting our most basic institutions, like healthcare? I ask because I really don't know. A few of you are real writers, writing for real news outlets. Tell me. Is what I'm doing wrong? Or are your newspapers and magazines owned by people with vested interests in what you write?

Is this really just how things work?

This blog brought to you free of charge by the way, by the sweat of my brow and the complimentary hosting of my Internet Service Provider.

March 8th, 2005 - One thing (there are many) that I am still unable to wrap my head around is Owen's utter blankness. Other than the urge to suck, he came fully unequipped to be alive. First there was darkness and moistness and comfort, then there was light and a fast running stream of new sensory input that was certainly too much to parse, the sights, limited though they were, and the sounds, suddenly much louder, jumbling together in a brain thoroughly bereft of context.

And here I've tried to express how unbelievably barren and yet fertile his little brain was (is), but I'm still not quite there, because describing his blankness is only half the equation. The other half is in trying, and mostly failing, to peal away the layers of context in my own head to form some kind of expectations about how he might behave at any given moment.

Each time I think he should reach out and touch something I have to remind myself that he still, after 9 weeks on the job, isn't completely aware that those soft, pink things floating around in front of his face are his own hands. Believe me when I tell you that anthropomorphizing the dog leads to more productive analyses of odd behaviors than ascribing some sense to what the baby does. The baby literally doesn't know which way is up, as demonstrated by the utter disregard he shows for Newton's best work by squirming off my chest and tumbling toward the floor.

Yes. Relax. I catch him. What sort of monster do you think I am?

But seriously, are you getting me now? Are you seeing? Parents, especially first time parents, spend ALL their time trying to anticipate, to envision, what their child is going to become. They stare at their tiny lumps of infant flesh and strain with all their might to see some little flicker of development. "LOOK! He wrinkled his nose! He knows he farted! I told he's a genius!"

And what are we impatient for? For our kids to become productive members of society? For someone to help us do yard work? What is it?

I'll tell you what it is. What we all want is for our kids to grow up and vindicate us. We haven't (most of us anyway) won the Nobel Prize or played pro ball. And by the time we're having children it has begun to dawn on us that we probably never will. But wait! There's hope! We'll have children, and they'll do great things and our genetic makeup will thereby be validated, our greatness will have been part of the seed if not part of the bloom itself. Today the baby farts the alphabet. Tomorrow he plays Madison Square Garden.

I must remember to let Owen grow and develop in his own time, to become the person he is going to become, both because of, and in spite of me.

March 7th, 2005 - Julia, an excellent copyeditor and casual friend, asked me this morning how Owen is doing. Here is, roughly, what I told her.

Owen is well. He has a great appetite, eats often, spits up a lot, sleeps like he's dead. He's become much more smiley in the last two weeks, and now his mother and I feel less like the caretakers of a helpless, greedy alien and more like the parents of a human baby boy.

I said that the biggest shock during the very early part of parenthood was that we didn't, as I have mentioned here before, fall deeply and dumbly in love with our child the moment we laid eyes on him for the very first time. We went through a period in which we gave the baby everything we had, and he asked for more without saying thank you or even glancing at us appreciatively.

But now, as the smiles contort his fat, little face, and he fixes us with his faraway gaze, we begin to see ourselves reflected back for the first time. We begin to fall in love with him more and more every day. We lay with him on the couch, his small, warm body curled on our chests, his fuzzy head close enough to kiss. We find him awake in his crib in the half-light of early morning, cooing and looking around at a world he's only just begun to see. And in our minds we see him growing, and we see ourselves older, and the picture is entirely nice and comforting.

And that is how Owen is doing.

March 2nd, 2005 - This winter is slowly pounding my soul to a fine, white ash. Tonight I heard the weather man say we'd had below average temperatures for the last 13 straight days, and that there was more to come. Yesterday I learned that we've received 43.5 inches more than the annual average snowfall this year. It's as if the jet stream has abandoned us altogether, delivering our warm air to the mid-Atlantic where it does nothing but drive moisture back over our pummelled coastline.

Having Owen has made the cold worse too, because now we are virtual shut-ins. You can't take an infant outside when it's 25 and the wind is howling round the corners of the house. You sit inside, sinking deeper and deeper into the couch while the programmers of cable television dream up ever more boring shows. I'm developing a callus on my thumb from the constant, futile scrolling through 250 channels of shit.

Every year at this time I wonder aloud why we live in this place. What is the point of wading through the gray slush, because that's what the fluffy white stuff becomes once it's had time to lay on the street and soak up our urban filth? It gets dirty, then it melts and freezes and melts and freezes, until you're not sure whether you want it to stand, slick and solid as frozen mud or melt away in a syrupy mess to stand in broad puddles at the edge of the sidewalk, soaking your feet every time you breach the curb to cross the street.

Of course, spring in these parts is a brief spasm of temperate sunshine that only gives way to the tawdry heat of summer. But, oh how I dream of that oppressive humidity now. Just to pull on a pair of shorts and walk out the door, it seems impossible.

March has, as the saying goes, "come in like a lion." I only pray it will go "out like a lamb."

March 1st, 2005 - Two moments with Owen. Let me describe them for you.

First, it's 8:00 or 8:30 in the evening. He has eaten, been burped and had his diaper changed. He has cried enough now that he doesn't need to cry anymore. He's squinty, ready to drop off to slack-jawed sleep. I pull him onto my chest as I lay on the couch, and there he sleeps, his fat, little legs tucked up underneath him, his breathing muted and irregular. He's warm. I brush the back of his fuzzy head with my cheek and it's the softest thing I've ever felt.

Next, it's 6:30am. A half hour earlier I lurched from the bed, woken by the boy's first, plaintive cries and begun the ritual again. Now fed, burped and changed, he is nestled against my chest. But there is something wrong. His forehead wrinkles. His lips quiver, and then he shrieks. I pat his hand-sized back and make a steady shushing sound in his ear. He shrieks again, as if he's been stuck with a pin. I race quickly through the checklist of possible causes, tiredness, hunger, gas, a wet diaper. None of them is possible. More shrieking. The dog comes trotting into the room to see what's the matter. Owen has progressed from spleen bruising shrieks to a steady, hyper-ventilating sob that turns him bright red. With each wailing gasp he pushes all the air from his lungs and holds for a moment before breathing in again. He turns red. There is no way to stop it.

These are the two poles of my inchoate fatherhood, the sublimely happy and desperately miserable. And unlike the 14,000 miles that separates our Earthly magnetic north and south, the distance between Owen as sleeping cuteness incarnate and Owen as the devil's angry hammer of pain is short. He has, on occasion, travelled the entire interval in the time it takes Brittney to hand him over to me as I walk through the door from a day at the office.

February 25th, 2005 - All the world, or at least all the very small world that I seem to be living in now, has gone baby crazy. Baby is the new thing that was the new black until baby was it. Babies are hot. It's the year of living babiously. Baby! Baby! Baby!

In the last six months, my friends Dave, Ben, Hayden, Branon, Brian and Alejandro have reproduced. Shawn and Rachel are due soon. My cousin Hayley is having twins. Twins!! We are flooding the Earth with our simulacra!

When I go to work people ask me how the baby is doing. Everyone wants to know if he's growing big, if we're getting any sleep. I come home and Brittney hands me the boy and he screams in my face and then vomits. I dream about him when I sleep and then get up and feed him and then go back to dreaming about him until it's time to go to work again and have more people ask me how he's doing.

And the thing that rings in your ears the whole time is whether or not you're doing it right. Is the baby getting enough stimulation? Why is he spitting up so much? What color is his poop? Should we be letting him sleep in the afternoon? Should he be sleeping in the bed with us? In his crib? How often should we bathe him? Wait, did you just get water in his ear? Because babies are really prone to ear infections. Did you? No, seriously. It's important. I mean, it's probably not a big deal, I'm just saying. Well, ok. Try to dry his ear out then. I hope he isn't getting sick. Do you think he feels warm? Maybe he's hungry.

There is also an irresistable urge to discover the way in which your baby is extraordinary. He controls his head pretty well. Clearly he will enter the NBA straight from high school and be proclaimed both Rookie of the Year and MVP in his first season. He follows you with his eyes as you walk around the room. Clearly he will rewrite Newton's Laws of Physics as part of his post-graduate work at MIT. It is more likely, based on his current aptitudes, that he will win a pants-shitting contest during fraternity rush week his freshman year at state school.

I am resisting as best I can the vain hope that the boy will somehow be remarkable. If he is a normal, happy boy we will have been blessed with a miracle beyond the humble imaginings of our genetic contribution to his future. Let's be honest. It's garbage in, garbage out, and though his mother is smart and beautiful, his father is a skinny neurotic with boorish tendencies, an opinionated mouth-breather and malcontent. Please, please let the Punnett square of his future be filled with the dominant and preferable traits of his mother's chromosomal palette.

Still I remember the advice my friend Todd gave me. He said, "Forget about who you want your kid to be. Focus on who he is, and you'll be alright." Right now, Owen is a howling pants-shitter who will spew curdled breast milk all over your shirt if you get within five feet of him, especially if you're on your way out the door to work. He is like a baby hamster, newly sprung from its mothers tiny womb, soft, pink and bleary eyed.

It occured to me the other day that the pivotal event in his life thus far has been his birth, so he goes to sleep and dreams and shudders awake again dreaming of that cold afternoon when he was pulled roughly from his mother's stomach by a team of surgeons who paused every few minutes to count aloud the various surgical implements in use just to confirm that none had been left behind in his mother. Even my zombie-chased nightmares seem preferable to that dream sequence.

I had resolved to write about something other than babies, but people write me and want to know what's happening with him. And clearly, based on the last few entries here, my addled brain isn't capable of sustaining the thread of any cogent thought through a half dozen paragraphs on any other topic, so I might as well return to the topic of babies and parenthood and the miracle of reproduction over and over and over again anyway.

I feel as if I've had a babyotomy, which is a lobotomy where they actually replace your old brain with a new one that can consider only one topic.

February 22nd, 2005 - I wanted to tell you something about what I do for a living, what I do during the day when I'm not here confessing my sins to the world.

The world of el-hi publishing (that's elementary - high school for those of you not intimately familiar with the parlance of textbook creation) is, as you can imagine, one booty-shaking, disco party spectacular after another. It's like that show Sabado Gigante' on Univision, except it goes on every day of the week. It's like a never-ending rave complete with hallucinogenic drugs, glow sticks and glitter. It's like having your own private rocket sled and no where to go but fast, fast, fast.

Actually, it's boring as shit.

Let me just go ahead and burst whatever bubble of naivette you've been bouncing around in your whole life and say that the publishers of this nation's textbooks are leading our kids down the politically sign-posted path to total dumbassitude. That's right. Dumbassitude. You read from the same texts. I'm sorry. They're bad now, but they were worse when you were in school. You are, and I hate to be the one breaking it to you, not very well educated.

All the books are bad, but this is especially true of history and "language arts" books, where the true poverty of our children's literacy and ability to process the truth are enshrined in lovingly bound volumes, color-coded for easy reference by our underpaid, over-taxed teachers. The math and science books are a little better, but only a little.

You will be really pleased to find out that much of what appears in print in your kids' classrooms is influenced by the state boards of education in Texas and California. They've got the buying power, and the publishers cater to their whims. Texas. And California. Good god! Those people eat their young! And we're letting them choose our text books?

At the developer where I am employed (developers do much of the actual work of creating text books, under the direction and sometimes despite the direction of the publishers), we spend much time laughing over the asinine decisions and ludicrous delivery schedules handed down by the big names in educational publishing. We also very regularly pull their asses from the fire as their projects go horribly off schedule, off budget and off kilter.

Just now I am working on a middle school literature program that is not so terrible. Sure, it's way over budget and we'll never meet the deadline to get material to the printer, but some of the pieces they've chosen to use are pretty interesting and I make a little time to study them as I proofread. There's so much I missed the first time through grade school, I sometimes dream of redoing it just to have someone explain The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock to me again. One of the things about fatherhood that has me excited is reading what Owen reads as he moves through the US educational system.

Oh, yes. I should have mentioned that you need to be a massive nerd to be in the textbook business. And to be a proofreader you need to be one of those obnoxious people who cares about the proper use of semi-colons and decries the creeping awfulness of split infinitives. I am only modestly suited to this work, as evidenced by my poor spelling and ardent hyphenation, not to mention my egregious abuse of the comma. Fortunatel, proofreading is only a small part of what I do.

Still, there are upsides to working at an el-hi publisher. First of all, you don't have to be very cool at all to be the coolest guy in the office, which is not to say that I am actually the coolest guy in the office, just that I'm in a higher cool percentile there than I am on the street. Also, the whole publishing business is so fraught with incompetence that you don't have to work very hard or be very smart for people to think you know what you're doing, which I don't. Finally, my co-workers are so starved for some scrap of joy or humor in their lives that they laugh at almost everything that leaves my mouth, even when it's not designed to be funny, like when I point out that their masters degrees haven't even won them medical benefits.

I forgot to mention that part. The whole of the el-hi business is built on temporary labor, highly-educated, poorly-compensated temporary labor, or as we call them T.O.Ps, for term of project employees. I have been a T.O.P., by choice, for nearly four years. In fact, I'm negotiating a deal to come on staff full-time in the next few weeks, and I'm not actually sure why I'm doing that. Brittney's job provides us with health benefits, so I don't need to be an employee. Maybe it's the security I'm after, or the illusion of security, because that's all it is. The line between staff and T.O.P is so razor thin I'd be fooling myself to think it guaranteed my employment in any more than a theoretical way.

All of that is a not very clever or subtle way of segueing to today's big thought, which can be read below if you haven't already clicked away to some more interesting site, like this one.

Here goes: Working in publishing, despite its frustrations, has helped me realize that I will likely never write a great novel, that thus far, on the evidence at hand, I am not a very talented writer. And stop yourself before you write me an email telling me how much you've enjoyed some of what you've read here. This isn't a worm or a hook, and I'm not fishing. What I'm trying to get across is that what I do now is somehow divorced from what I wish I was, which is to say I am more of a mid-level employee at a textbook developer than I am a journalist or essayist of any import. And just because that's true doesn't mean I can't enjoy what I do here in this space or try to get some things published occassionally. It also doesn't preclude happiness, which I've come to realize is both the immediate and ultimate goal.

February 20th, 2005 - Eddie the Dog rolled in dead thing today. I think it was a raccoon that some other dog had savaged and left the remains of next to the fence at the baseball field down by the river. I yelled "NO!!" over and over, punctuated with "BAD DOG!!!" but he had the smell of it in his head and just kept grinding his skinny body in its gray flesh. When finally he desisted, I grabbed him by the nose and brought our eyes close before yelling "BAD DOG!!!" again. He sat delicately on the matted grass and lowered his head in shame.

Well, tough shit. I short-leashed him and we walked briskly home where he got a brusque and none-too-tender bath in the deep basement sink I use for washing out paint brushes. I towelled him off and then left him in the basement to think about what he'd done.

Do you know that smell, the smell of weeks old rodent carcass? It's slightly sweet and a little tangy, and once you have the whiff of it in your nostrils it sticks there, even once you're clear of it, which I wasn't until I had shampooed Eddie the Dog and then, upstairs, myself.

Eddie the Dog is having a tough time of it. He likes the new baby well enough, licking Owen's hands and, when allowed, his tiny head, but he's jealous as hell too. If I am leaning down to kiss my infant son, a thin white snout often intervenes, this from a dog who has never been particularly cuddly or affectionate. It's only that he wants whatever attention the baby is getting. And when he can't get it, he mopes, chin down on the floor with wide, staring puppy eyes turned upward in an attitude of mock tragedy.

Three years ago, Eddie the Dog travelled to this country from Puerto Rico where he had been born to a feral street bitch. A pair of soft-hearted women wait for puppies like Eddie to wean, then steal them away from their mothers, innoculate them and ship them en masse to friendly mainland homes. We drove out to a shelter in central Massachusetts, in a small place called Sterling, to pick Eddie from a cage full of look alikes. When we walked in, he, unlike any of his siblings, thrust his head through the bars of the cage and gave us his full and undivided attention. I reached down to pet him and he licked my hand. He slept in my lap as I drove home.

And a few episodes, such as today's brush with the fetid former-raccoon, aside, he has been a great dog. He is obedient, especially in light of the paucity of real training he's received, and in general he loves all creatures great and small, showing a special proclivity for women. In fact, the lick that sealed his future residence in our house has proven to be less of a one time show of affection than a complete and total obsession with bringing the material world in contact with his long, pink tongue. If you let him, he will give you a kiss that would make a Frenchman blush.

Eddie the Dog is narrow hipped and white, a mutt of unparalleled good looks. He seems to be part whippit and part terrier, though the street dogs of Puerto Rico, known as satos, all tend to be fairly slim creatures of 40-50 pounds. It has been suggested to me that perhaps they are of such mixed genetic stock that they have successfully expressed the average of all dogs, right in the sweet spot between the chihuahua and the bull mastiff. I think it's more likely they are built for survival on the mean streets, where speed, agility and the ability to go without are the winning characteristics. I have seen dogs faster than Eddie, but I have never once seen a dog catch Eddie, if you know what I mean. Also, he regards his food with almost casual interest, snacking throughout the day and night, as if to affect survival rather than fullness.

Because he's all white and rather handsome, people are constantly asking me what breed he is. I sometimes say he's part greyhound and part polar bear. Other times I say he's a new breed I've just started called 'little bastard.' When they don't laugh I walk quickly on, which suits Eddie just fine because quickly is how he does most everything.

Eddie's real weakness is his skin which bears the marks of his legion of allergies, to eggs and chicken and fully three quarters of the ingredient lists on the sides of most bags of dog food. His pale flesh erupts in angry red bumps which he scratches and chews until they bleed. Until recently we were pumping him with benadryl and slathering him cortisone cream. Now he's on a regimen of steroids and antibiotics that we hope will return him to the soft, white state of his pre-allergy self.

Eddie the Dog, for all his needing to be walked and maniacal barking in the yard, was our first child, the first one whose bowel movements and illnesses we fretted over, the first one for whom we hurried home rather than going out for after-work drinks with co-workers. In child birth class, the instructor told us we would be better off for having had a dog. We took no small solace from that.

If only Eddie would get up in the night and feed the baby, or serve as a baby sitter on those nights when Brittney and I have a hankering for sushi. He is twenty-one in dog years now. You would think he'd be up to the responsibility.

Eddie the Dog, who I also call Eddie the Alarm Clock, Eddie the Itch and occasionally Cuddles, just because he hates it, has not been forgotten. When we put Owen to bed in his crib, it's Eddie that trots into our bedroom with us to bed down in the special, cedar-chip-filled, flannel covered berth on the floor next to us. It's Eddie the Dog for whom we drive to South Boston to pick up fish and sweet potato kibble, the kind that, hopefully, doesn't upset his skin. It's Eddie the Dog who inspires us to pull on our boots and parkas on even the coldest winter days, for a morning constitutional and, if we're lucky, a plastic shopping bag full of shit.

You should all be so lucky to know someone as charming as Eddie the Dog.

February 16th, 2005 - Two ideas today, neither of them very large nor very clever, but then consider the source.

First, Shaun of the Dead. It's a movie, a romantic comedy that incorporates the basic plot line from the original Dawn of the Dead, you know, marauding zombies stalking the living in an attempt to make the whole world into Club Med for the undead. In this version, which we rented the other night, Shaun is a bumbling London retail sales clerk, nearly 30, whose girlfriend dumps him because, well, he's nearly 30 and still a retail sales clerk. He lacks ambition. He refuses to become an adult. Then the zombies, a clear metaphor for people who simply accept their lot in life and play the roles assigned them by a stratified consumer culture, show up and change everything. Shaun is thrust into the hero's part, and he spends the rest of the film just barely saving himself and his girl from the zombies' blood lust.

What can I tell you? It was a comedy, and some of it was pretty funny, but then I began thinking more and more about the idea of flesh-eating zombies, these stiff, limping killers who don't give you much of a real chase but whose real power is in their invincibility (how do you kill something that's already dead) and their dogged persistence (when are you safe from something that never stops being a threat?). Many of my worst nightmares involve being pursued by zombie-like attackers, the real terror of the dream coming as I realize that I will never be safe...ever.

And so, for me, Shaun of the Dead was sort of disturbing, if not outright terrifying. I hadn't yet equated the grinding wheel of wage slavery with relentless pursuit by an army of the undead. Fortunately, my sleep last night was free from memorable dreams.

Next, and not even remotely related, is a thought I had about the power of the human body and how its gauged.

I began thinking about this after Brittney recently expressed the not-uncommon feeling among new mothers that her body was no longer completely her own. Owen is responsible for most of that feeling, because he attaches himself to her breasts 8-10 times a day for up to an hour at a time. When he's not feeding, she dashes around preparing herself to feed him again, taking a shower or changing a shirt that has recently been soaked through with breast milk.

I have a lot of sympathy for her, and I believe, even in this space, I've described our young son as something like a cinder block chained round her neck twenty-four hours a day.

But then it occurred to me that you might view the breast feeding dynamic the other way round, that is to say, Brittney isn't actually having something taken from her all the time, but rather she's giving something. She's nourishing another human being with her own body. There is a lot of power in being able to do that.

It reminded me of the final scene in my favorite novel The Grapes of Wrath. In it, the Joads are flooded out of the abandoned box car they've been living in, and, penniless, foodless and hopeless, they scramble up a slope in the torrential downpour in search of shelter, which they find in the form of a small barn. Inside the barn there is a young man and a much older one. The older man is starving to death and won't survive the night without some form of nourishment. It's then that Rose of Sharon, who has recently lost a baby, saves the old man's life by nursing him from her breast.

A lot of people with whom I've discussed the book with have said how depressing they found it, and that has always surprised me, because, especially in this final scene, I think Steinbeck was trying to portray the miraculous power of the, forgive me for using this phrase, human spirit. Rose of Sharon's ability and willingness to give very literally of herself, when neither she nor her family seem to have anything left to give, is, to me a very moving and optimistic statement about humanity.

So, returning to Brittney and her sore nipples, it seems to me that her body is actually more her own now, now that she's giving it in so tangible a way (and so willingly) to another person, than it was before, when she didn't have to share it with anyone (other than me, occassionally, and in a much more limited way).

So anyway, those were my two ideas for the day. I bounced them off Brittney tonight while we were cooking dinner and her response went something like this: "How many pints are there in a quart?" and then, "Now what were you saying?"

February 14th, 2005 - I'm sick. It's a cold. Or the plague. Not sure which.

It is not good or fun to be sick like this with a newborn in the house, a newborn who still doesn't like to sleep through the night, a child who stares up at me beatifically at 4am as I'm giving him his bottle, oblivious to the fact that the whole world is sleeping but for a tiny baby and his beleaguered father. I need not tell you that it is funereally quiet at that time of night. Occassionally a single car slips past the house, and I always wonder, "Who the hell are you, and what possible reason could you have to be out driving around?"

The whole thing started with sniffles, last Wednesday or Thursday. Then I could only breathe through my right nostril (doesn't that drive you nuts?), and I figured perhaps I'd only get half a cold. But then both nostrils were plugged, and mouth breathing begot chapped lips, which later became split. Then I felt tired and achey. Then tiredness and achiness progressed to a point that the words 'tired' and 'achey' no longer seemed sufficient to express the depth of the fatigue or the intransigence of the ache. I couldn't stay hydrated because I was always breathing through my mouth. I couldn't put on enough chapstick to keep my lips from splitting more. I made the mistake of taking "non-drowsy" cold medicine before bed Saturday night, and it turns out that "non-drowsy" cold medicine isn't "non-drowsy" because it doesn't have the drowsy-making ingredients in it, but rather because they put some sort of speed in it that overcomes the soporific effects. So ask me about the bedroom ceiling some time, because I learned all about it in painfully minute detail while the baby slept blissfully next to me.

Last night this ebola-like, flesh-eating virus moved into my chest. As a result, today was a very, very bad day.

Oh, just to be clear, and in case you were having a hard time getting it on your own, I am a bad sick person. I whine. I feel sorry for myself. Full stop.

And if I'm making some effort to be humorous and self-deprecating here, it only belies the fact that the last three or four days have been utterly miserable from a physical and mental health point of view. I am not sure how much more I can get up in the night with the baby. I am not sure if I can go to work tomorrow and dispatch my duties without breaking down in tears. I am not sure because I am very close to the edge of my ability to function and not a little scared about what comes next.

Did I mention that Brittney has the sniffles now? When she falls ill and I have to pick up the slack, what will become of us?

Ok. Ok. Back away from the edge, Emlyn. You've somehow made it from humorous and self-deprecating to morose and melodramatic in two paragraphs.

Perhaps it's just that we've arrived at the hardest part of the new baby project, the part where a night's sleep is no longer the cure for what ails us. Perhaps this is the part where our brains break and reform, where we forget our old lives once and for all and accept parenthood as an immutable and terminal condition. I'm reminded of that scene in Clockwork Orange where Roddy McDowell is strapped in a chair, his eyes held open by forks while scenes of horrible violence play and massive doses of electricity are administered in an effort to cure him of his taste for "a bit of the old ultra-violence."

It's 4am, and an unabashedly beautiful baby boy is staring up at me. His eyes say, "there is no cold, and there is no fatigue, and there may never be again." Outside, a pair of headlights turn the corner and slither past the house, and I don't even notice. I don't even care.

February 10th, 2005 - Sometimes I really hate the State of Massachusetts and I wonder why the first puritanical outcasts from Europe were allowed to besmirch what was once, presumably, a pristine coastline wilderness with this post-industrial mess of a city. Greater Boston is a collection of towns whose interwoven bureaucracies make the cart paths that serve as roads seem like a wide, orderly grid of transportational joy.

I've just returned from the Somerville Office of Parking and Transportation where I'd been summoned to pay an old parking ticket as a condition for the state renewing my seldom-used driver's license. When I stepped to the window, one of those glassed in affairs with a perforated metal disc that allows sound to pass back and forth, albeit poorly, I found out that the ticket in question was from 1996. 1996!!. That's nine years ago for those of you without a calculator handy.

And furthermore, I had paid the ticket in early 1997, just five months after its issuance, but apparently the Town of Somerville had levied interest in the amount of $30 on the original $20 ticket as penalty for my late payment without ever letting me know. Again, for those of you without an abacus or above average math skills, that's a 150% mark up over the original retail price of the ticket.

WTF?

Aren't there federal laws against usury that apply in this case? Who charges 150% interest on a payment that is really only four months late? And who tracks your ass down nine years later to pay an interest charge on a bill that you actually paid off when you were still in your twenties and the notions of marriage and parenthood, both since consumated, were but theoretical flickers on the wide screen of your still-struggling-to-pay-the-rent consciousness?

I plonked my $30 down in the sliding metal drawer beneath the window, understanding fully why the oft-defrauded public is separated by such a sturdy partition from the emotionless city employees on the other side, and walked out with a paper receipt and the assurance that I would now be able to renew my driver's license.

I felt like whipping out my cell phone and calling the police to report being mugged by the municipality. I wonder what the corpulent civil servant behind the glass would have done? Would she have smiled? Or would she have told me what she told the woman in front of me in line, "Look, if you want to arrange a hearing with the hearing officer, go ahead, but I can't help you with your problem. NEXT!"

This is how Kafka felt, just before he went home and turned Gregor Samsa into a cockroach.

February 7th, 2005 - I'm not altogether sure I know why I've not been writing lately. We're not dead. We're not even struggling to survive with the new baby and going back to work and having a parade of relatives tramping through the house to chuck the young 'un under the chin and declare him cute.

I have made a habit over the last two years of thinking about things, coming to this space and then regurgitating the digested remains of my thoughts for your reading pleasure (and sometimes pain). I think my recent absence has something to do with my inability to fully process what's happening in my life now. I don't have anything smart to say about being a parent. I am thus far incapable of wrapping my head around fatherhood.

There are but a few things I have discovered about myself since Owen was born that might be worth sharing. I can tell you that lack of sleep doesn't make me tired. It makes me angry and irritable all the time. I have too often told Owen, crying his eyes out on the changing table at 3 o'clock in the morning, to "shut the hell up." I have threatened, only half jokingly, to duct tape his little mouth shut and put him in the dryer down in the basement. Mostly I don't take my frustration out on the baby. Mostly I talk to the television or mutter under my breath out on the streets. I have become that guy, talking to himself on the subway, scowling at innocent passersby on the street.

I have also discovered that spit up smells like curdled milk (go figure) and that I don't like that smell at all. My brother professes a great affection for it, but he's odd. Anyone will tell you that.

For the most part, thoughts rattle around my head like the ping pong balls in the big plastic hopper they use to choose winning lottery numbers. If I squint I can just make out a four or a six, but then maybe it was a nine. I don't know.

I haven't made an entry here for nearly two weeks, but I have been writing, in my head, every day, far more sparkling and interesting prose than this. For some reason I've found neither the time nor the inclination to sit down and pound it out. I've felt guilty about it. I don't want to neglect you, you my internet friend.

I've also been thinking a lot about the editorial direction of this blog and the site in general. When I began, I seldom wrote about myself. I wrote about ideas. I wrote about things I'd read or current events, always with a personal slant, but never as pure diary. But things have (d)evolved. Leading up to Owen's birth, I felt compelled to share what I was going through, as if to write about anything else might deny the importance of the blessed event. And since his arrival, I've felt obligated to write about him and post pictures of him and generally to continue in the same vain. I suppose it's natural. The conception, gestation and subsequent birth of your first child is, of necessity, front page news in your life.

At the same time, this is MY space. And while I will certainly continue to share my experiences as a parent, I think the Internet probably has enough people cataloging each of their children's bowel movements in Hypertext Mark Up. Similarly, the Web is already littered with candid shots (are there any other kind with people who can't yet control their own bowels?) of babies. If you are related to me or are particularly interested in Owen's growth, send me an email occasionally requesting the latest snaps. I'll be taking them, even if I'm not posting them here all the time.

In the meantime, I'm going to go back to taking pretentious photos of street lights and pigeons. I'm going back to ranting about Social Security and discussing the vagaries of human thought. I will, without being able to help myself, be writing about my family, and they will certainly be appearing in my photos. I love them, and no writer every stops writing about what they love.

And so finally, for those who have been coming here seeking news of the prodigal son, Owen is growing like the national debt. He has, at 5 weeks old, outgrown all his 0-3 month sleepers and now looks dapper in 3-6 month wear. He smiles sometimes, mostly in the morning. He eats a lot and sleeps pretty well, though we aren't quite sleeping through the night yet. He looks like neither of us, though we have been told that there are hints of both my father and Brittney's father in his cheeks and in his lopsided grin. Everyday I hold him on my chest, as I am doing right now while I type, and I kiss the impossibly soft top of his head, and I look at his innocent and vulnerable little face and wonder how it could possibly be, how he could exist. If I had to give you one word to summarize parenthood to this point, it would be disbelief.

In the near future I hope to move this site to another server with more space and a more charming domain name. Emlyn.com is not available, and I suspect yourfriendemlynfrombostonbywayofalabama.net is too long and confusing. I am considering theemlynproject.net and eisforemlyn.net. If you have any preferences or better ideas, please, please, please email me and let me know. I am very open to suggestions and very loyal to my readers, whoever they are and wherever they live.

Thanks for your patience.

January 27th, 2005 - What can come of drinking so much milk? Owen is packing on the ounces as he bellies up, over and over again, to the dairy bar. His breathing is so mucusy by now that he fairly gargles in his sleep. It's sort of gross. I weighed him this afternoon though, and he's up to 10lbs 8oz. I'm going to begin entering him in baby wrestling matches.

Still, I'm not quite sure he's a baby yet. Anti-abortion and pro-choice advocates argue over when life really begins. The former, by and large, think things commence shortly after the first date. The latter tend to believe birth signifies the true beginning. I would suggest that things actually kick off much later than that.

Owen does this thing when he's hungry called rooting. He opens his mouth wide and sort of bobs his head back and forth trying to make contact with nipples. He does it instinctually, so that he doesn't even need to be in Brittney's arms to begin rooting around. I can be holding him, his little hands curled in tight fists, and he'll begin working my collar bone, searching for milk.

"Sorry, buddy," I say. "Dry town."

It is hard to look at your infant child, lips splayed, head thrashing, and believe that he's more than an advanced remora or lamprey. And that's not to disparage remoras and lampreys. Owen is just cuter. I'm thinking life shouldn't properly be said to have begun until the kid can tell the difference between male and female nipples. Mine are covered in hair for chrissakes.

To be fair, he seemd to take a developmental step forward yesterday. He began following things with his eyes, things like people's faces and the white blur of the dog. He also gained some control over his, to that point, anarchic head, so that for the first time he was able to lift it and look around a bit. It is unclear how well he focuses on the objects he spies, but nonetheless, it's hard to escape the conclusion that he is now participating with his environment in a more intentional way.

Of course he's still crapping himself. I'm led to believe that will go on for a while though.

Nighttime continues to evolve. Some nights we're up once, others Owen needs an additional feeding. We begin with the three of us in the bed, the dog on the floor. If Owen drifts mercifully off to sleep after his first suckling, then we all stay in the bed. If not, I take him into the nursery where I have a special device that allows me to rock him to sleep while I doze on the couch. I call it the Owenator. First I turn on the humidifier, which gives off a loud whirring sound that babies seem to find irresistably anaesthetic. Next I wrap him tighly in a blanket and nestle him in a horseshoe shaped breast feeding pillow called a "Boppy." Once he's immobilized, I put him on the ottoman that came with our glider chair. It too glides. I push the ottoman over next to the couch so I can rock him back and forth with one finger, which I'm nearly able to do while sleeping. In another week or so I think I'll have it. No baby can resist the soothing effects of the Owenator, except sometimes really that's not even enough and I end up pulling him onto my chest and rocking him until one or both of us are out cold. Luckily, I haven't smothered him accidentally. Yet.

Brittney, of course, still has the worst of it. She's actually got to wake up to do the feeding, which takes about an hour. I doze then, though sometimes I get up for the between boobs diaper change.

Brittney's mother has been staying with us for the last week. She helps out by holding the boy while we do things like shower or go grocery shopping. It has been an enormous help.

January 24th, 2005 - It's not that I've been too busy to write, more that I don't quite know what to say. The days have taken on the tone of a long plane flight. We read a lot, take care of the baby, sleep in short, uncomfortable stretches and, when we can, amuse ourselves with a rented movie.

I think parenthood is making me dumber, too. I have trouble sustaining conversation now. I'm sure it's something to do with the lack of real quality sleep, but perhaps the reordering of my universe to include a child has something to do with it as well. At least I've got the easy part, diaper changes and snuggling. Brittney has to feed the tiny tyrant every two or three hours. For her, he's like a 9 pound brick hanging from a chain around her neck, except softer and cuter.

More about him. He squeaks and sighs while he's breastfeeding, and his mother, even in the wee hours of the morning, lights up with a heart rending smile every time he does it. He also shrieks like a duck that's been hit by a car when he's hungry, which can be very upsetting when you're asleep and he's swaddled in a tight bun next to your head.

When you've got his impossibly small shirt off, like when you're bathing him or changing his clothes, you notice that his back is pink and marbled with fat, like a country ham. He has broad hands that don't really match his body. He keeps his legs, suprisingly strong little legs, tucked up under him most of the time, and his face and head are changing shape and evolving almost by the day. We're still not quite sure who he looks like, other than Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

What I'm finding out about fatherhood is that mostly I feel useless. I am little more than an occasional babysitter, a wiper of ass, an assistant at bath time. In order to allay my guilt over being able to give so little care, I have been cooking frantically, big pots of black beans with bacon, giant pork roasts, a pumpkin pie with fresh whipped cream. I make breakfast, lunch and dinner and deliver it to whatever only-marginally-comfortable chair Brittney has found for the latest feeding.

Fatherhood is also physically alienating. On top of not having milk-producing breasts with which to quiet the shrieking child, I am no longer really able to touch my wife, whose breasts will leak milk if she is hugged too aggressively and whose belly is still fragile from abdominal surgery.

My one real physical consolation is the time in midafternoon when Brittney is tired of having the boy attached to her front and she passes him, deeply asleep, to me. I take him on my chest and lay back on the couch and we doze together, me with my ankles crossed and one half-lidded eye trained on the television, him in a warm bundle with his arms stretched wide as if hugging me.

The prospect of returning to work continues to loom large. I should probably go back next Monday. We visited the office last week, and I stood back as the office women stood in a circle oohing and aahing over the lad. "He's beautiful," they said. And I felt proud and happy. It was also confirmed that they want me back, that there's plenty of work to be done, and really, the sooner the better.

I guess I'll go back, but what use I'll be when I get there remains to be seen.

January 18th, 2005 - This is not parenthood. This is an extension of the days after Owen was born when we lived in the controlled, if frenzied, environment of the maternity ward at Beth Israel Hospital, days when we had nothing to do but care for our soft, pink baby. True, now we are at home with books and magazines and rented videos, but our situation is not that much altered. We sleep when the baby sleeps, snatch at meals in between, and talk of nothing but his bowel movements, screams and apetite.

This is not parenthood. It's the departure lounge for parenthood.

I am not sure if Brittney has yet begun to contemplate the day, roughly two weeks hence, when I will return to work, leaving her alone with the tiny tyrant for virtually all of the day's light hours. I know that I am thinking of it constantly, wondering how we will care for the baby and hold down jobs. Even more terrifying is the day in the first week of April when Brittney's maternity leave comes to an end.

As much as possible I am trying to do as the self-helpers would have me do, 'be here now,' which mostly means laying on the couch with the boy asleep on my chest, snoring softly, as I read or watch TV, counting the minutes until his next feeding commences. On a very productive day I will both do laundry AND shower. The pure luxury of this time is not lost on me. When will we again have a month to simply be together as a family?

I am thinking a lot about trying to alter my career, to work harder, to return to the ambitious ways of my twenties, in order to afford Brittney the possibility of staying home with young Owen, not that she has expressed any interest in said possibility, nor that I am capable of becoming the earner I once was. Still, I am thinking about it.

January 14th, 2005 - I am probably more tired than I think I am, but not nearly as tired as I thought I would be, if that makes any sense. Virtually everyone, upon hearing that we were going to have a baby, said, "get ready for some sleepless nights," and laughed a smug and condescending laugh. Well, we haven't had a sleepless night yet, and maybe I'm just setting myself up for the sucker punch, but so far this whole baby thing seems fairly manageable.

We've been going to bed around 9:30 or 10:00, and the last thing we do (or the last thing Brittney does really) is feed the baby. The baby then wakes us up some time between 12:30 and 2:00 to be fed again. That takes about an hour, so we're back to sleep around 3:00 and then up again between 7:00 and 8:00. He has, once or maybe twice, required another feeding at night, but even then, we can go back to bed after the 8:00am feeding and get up at 10:00. We're getting a reasonable number of hours sleep each night; we're just not getting long stretches of sleep. The conventional wisdom is that we are therefore less rested because we're not getting as much deep sleep, the kind of sleep you only reach in the third or fourth hour in the Land of Nod. But I don't know. I feel more or less the same.

Don't get me wrong. I hate like hell getting up in the night, but it's not the worst thing. My job is diapering, swaddling and getting the little whipper snapper back to sleep. It sure beats having him gnaw on my nipples for an hour.

Of course, tonight Owen will not sleep for two consecutive minutes. His screams will shatter the windows in the bedroom and the howling, arctic winds will blow in and freeze us all to death. In our final living moments, just as the cold feeling leaves our limbs to be replaced by the numb warmth of hypothermia, we'll hear that smug laughter one last time, "get ready for some sleepless nights...MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!"

I have flown to close to the sun here. My hubris must surely be punished.

I can report that the dreams I'm having in my foreshortened slumber are suitably odd. Last night I was fishing in a large, concrete pool. I could see these enormous brown trout, and I found a big, silvery spoon of a lure, so I cast it out into the crystal clear water. The trout chased the spoon, nipping at its barbed hook, but then, out of nowhere my dog, Eddie, would jump in the water and gobble the bait. I kept having to remove the hook from his whiskery lips, two or maybe three times. It was very upsetting, but eventually Brittney showed up in a van and drove us home.

When Owen dreams he squeaks and shudders and contorts his face in a myriad of expressions, none of which he employs during his waking hours. At 11 days old, he's not yet capable of smiling or smirking or frowning or raising his eyebrows in surprise, at least not in response to any of the environmental cues you might expect to elicit any of those responses. Ah, but when he's asleep he looks like he's reenacting a Spanish telenovella. It might be titled Los Jovenes y los Manchados, the young and the soiled.

Perhaps in tonight's episode the young protagonist will keep his parents up all night, crapping himself and wailing like a city car alarm. Stay tuned.

January 13th, 2005 - My boy Owen isn't much of a conversationalist. He communicates in satisfied grunts and piercing screams, one to signal he's getting enough milk, the other to signal the opposite. On occasion he squeaks a loud squeak while sleeping. I imagine he is dreaming about his birth. What else does he have to think about, even subconsciously? Oh, and he belches and farts.

In fact, his farts are amazing. I once thought that the loudness of a person's farts was roughly proportional to their body size. Owen has shown me just how wrong I was. He has also demonstrated that it is not absolutely necessary to laugh a a self-satisfied laugh after a particularly loud fart. It is possible to offer said flatulence and then strike a pose of beatific repose. Owen's farts have a Zen-like quality. They are like koans, opportunities for spiritual enlightenment.

Owen craps thick, coarsely ground German mustard. I have begun bottling it and selling it as the finest Bavarian import. If only we could get him to increase the volume, and believe me the volume is already shockingly high, we might actually make some money.

When I am changing his diaper I imagine myself working like the most finely tuned NASCAR pit crew. I unsnap the snaps. I raise the rear end. I dab. I wipe. I apply the fresh diaper, then lower the rear chassis, button him up and send him squealing, quite literally, out of pit row.

With poop, Owen performs miracles. He turns liquids, for his diet consists entirely of milk from his mother's breasts, into solids. There is a water to wine parallel here, or perhaps loaves to fish. I'm not sure which.

And by virtue of his constant suckling at Brittney's now ample chest, he is also performing a miracle of transformation on her body. Not only is she chestier now, but the roundnesses and curvatures that had accumulated over the nine months of his growth inside her are veritably melting away, so that today she looks hardly as if she's been pregnant at all. Gone is the swelling in her lower extremities, shrinking is the belly that once fairly spilled forward from her front. She is nearly in bikini shape again, just ten days after freeing Owen from her womb.

My sense of what milk is has been fundamentally altered too. Milk now issues forth from my wife's breasts. It is white and only slightly viscous. Left to sit, it will settle out into liquids and solids. This is the same milk, with only species-specific differences, that comes from cows' udders or the nipples of a nursing sow. Ten days ago I would have called it strange and wonderful that milk could be manufactured and distributed from the fleshy globes on the fronts of women. Today I find it inarticulably odd that we go to grocery stores and buy this stuff in gallon-sized plastic jugs, odder still that we press soy beans with water, imbue the mix with stabilizers and sell it as "milk," though I've been putting the stuff on my cereal for some years now.

At the moment, Owen is not particularly interactive. If you are lucky, during the middle part of the morning when he is most alert, he will fix his bleary gaze on you, hold you there for a moment and clench his fists as if reaching out to you. Too often though, he follows this routine with a low rumbling and the unmistakable sound of thick, German mustard hitting diaper. People tell me we'll enjoy him much more later, when he can focus better and smile in response to idiotic faces and embarrassing baby talk. I take them at their word.

In the meantime, I am spending a lot of time staring into my child's almost impenetrable countenance and wondering, often aloud, just who the hell this kid is.

January 10th, 2005 - When you have our particular brand of health insurance, they give you four days after a caesarean section to lay around in your room on the maternity ward and try to recover enough to go home. When first we entered our "maternity suite" I thought it seemed like a fairly comfortable place. There was a smallish area just inside the door with a sink, counter and linen closet. Then there was a privacy curtain behind which lay the adjustable hospital bed in which Brittney would learn to breast feed and bond with the baby. A TV hung from the ceiling. At the back of the room was a narrow alcove with a recliner in it for erstwhile, if not proud, fathers, and the door to the tiny bathroom containing toilet, sink and stand up shower.

We arrived in our maternity suite just after dark on Monday night, still reeling from the activities of the afternoon. Shortly after settling in, I walked down to the nursery to collect Owen and we began the process of getting to know our son.

The first thing I want to say about that is that we did not fall in love with Owen at first sight. I don't know who the crack-headed marketing person is who came up with this idea of love at first sight, but clearly their children were delivered by a happy fucking stork and their minds were so uncluttered by other emotional detritus that the whole experience glimmered with sparkly joy. This is not how we experienced birth, and gazing down at tiny Owen as I wheeled him down the hallway to our room, I was hardly able to form a fully articulable thought or to identify a single, discreet emotion in the roiling mess of my consciousness. What I was able to tell "at first sight" was that Owen was a baby, and further that he was THE baby with St.Germain (Brittney's last name) written on the little plaque on the side of his buggy.

Owen does not look like me, nor does he look particularly like Brittney. It has been suggested that he looks a little like my father, though I don't see it. This lack of family resemblance is not a problem for us, but I think it might have played into our overwhelming bewilderment in those first days of parenthood. I spent many, many hours with him cradled in my arms, his head nestled in my hands, staring down into a tiny, tiny face that, despite it's size, I was still wholly unable to take in. When I closed my eyes, I couldn't reconstruct it in my imagination. "Who the hell IS this kid?" I thought over and over.

The first night Brittney was still deep in an anaesthetic fog. Bev, the night nurse assigned to our room, bustled around, fluffing pillows and explainind the floor's safety procedures. "Only people with pink ID badges can come and see the baby. They must always bring one of these rolling cribs. No one will ever come here and carry your baby away. The baby has two ID bracelets on his ankles. The numbers on those bracelets match the numbers on the bracelets you're wearing now. You will have to show your matching bracelet in the nursery any time you want to take him out. You can keep him here in the room with you as much as you want. You can drop him off at the nursery any time, too, but if he starts to cry, they will bring him to you to comfort. Crying babies are not allowed in the nursery. Dad, you'll have to sign in at the desk every morning, even if you've never left."

And on and on.

The nurses on the maternity ward were excellent. Bev was very nice. She got us settled, and that couldn't have been easy to do. After Bev came Dee, who basically stripped and showered Brittney on day two. After Dee came Amanda. Then we met Yachi, who made Owen pee when he was dehydrated by sprinkling some warm water on his little winky. and then Amanda came back again. Dee came by once later, then Yachi again, then finally Amanda on our last day. Each of them was spectacularly spectacular, and if they had been our only care givers in those three days, then the whole thing would have been a hell of a lot more pleasant.

But they weren't the only people we saw. We saw an OB resident every day. We saw a nurse practitioner from our health insurance group every day. We saw the OB on rounds from our health insurance group every day. We saw the hospital's pediatrician every day. Brittney had blood taken five different times by three different phlebotomists. Each day an anaesthesiologist came by to check on Brittney's pain. Once an anaesthesiology resident stopped in to check on all the same stuff the staff doctors had already checked, twice. The hospital photographer came to see if we wanted portraits done. The Baby Carriage, a mobile baby goods purveyor, came by every morning. Three times a day Brittney and Owen had their vital signs taken. Once in the night, every night, a nurse from the nursery came and took Owen for weighing. Because one of the doctors or nurses in the OR during the c-section stuck themselves accidentally with a syringe, a representative from the hospital's HR department came by to request an HIV test, for which Brittney had more blood drawn.

On the third day a woman came to the room asking if we would like to participate in a breast feeding study being conducted there at the hospital, and where normally we'd be up for pitching in in the name of science, in this case we ended up saying simply, "no," and leaving the woman to slink awkwardly from the room.

It was all way too fucking much. Every five minutes someone new was knocking at the door. At a time when all we wanted to do was rest and recover from a fairly harrowing physical and emotional experience, we couldn't seem to get more than about ten minutes peace. Before leaving I harrangued one of the nurses about it. I told her I understood that the hospital was concerned about our health, but for chrissakes there's a chart hanging on the door with answers to all the questions we were being asked over and over again.

We decided to leave a day early, because the hospital just wasn't a restful, relaxing place to be, and also because when you leave a day early they send a visiting nurse to your house to check on you, and the idea of someone seeing us in action, with the baby, in the place we were actually going to raise the baby, seemed like a good idea. For my part, I was well beyond stir crazy, confined to a recliner at the back of the room, and I had been working myself over with anxiety for nearly 72 hours.

Of all the things I experienced with Brittney's pregnancy and Owen's birth, the only one that no one had mentioned to me before, the only one for which I was completely unprepared, was the mind bending anxiety I experienced in those three days in the hospital. I wish I could tell you what was on my mind or why I was constantly on the verge of tears, but I can't. I don't know.

There was a stretch, each night, in which I sat alone with the baby while Brittney slept, and those were the most difficult times. Owen required constant rocking and soothing and refused to sleep. Poor Brittney was so exhausted from surgery and the sleep deprivation that I was hell bent on getting her some quiet time, but it was so hard, the room dark but for the LED clock on the VCR, my own lack of rest leaving me dizzy and desperate. I began to wonder if I was going to make it, thundering bouts of depression followed by crippling doubts about my ability to raise a child. I couldn't catch my breath. I could barely muster a smile, even holding Owen in my arms, staring down at his perfectly innocent face. All I could figure was that maybe I was still working my way through the torrent of emotions unleashed by the birth itself, my fear for Brittney, my joy for Owen, and the resulting confusion.

We were both afraid to leave the hospital, for obvious reasons, but in the end I was more afraid to stay there. Coming home spawned its own difficulties, and I'm not sure we're sleeping much more now, but our decision to leave early was a good one, and I think we're finding our feet as parents now, enjoying Owen much more and feeling optimistic that life has not actually ended with parenthood.

The thing that really sticks with me when I reflect on Owen's birth and our experience at the hospital is that it really sucked. It was nothing like anything I read or anything anyone told me. The hospital, despite being one of the world's preeminent medical centers, really had no clue how to bring us through our little medical miracle with any sense of well-being or security. The child birth class we attended a month ago filled our heads with utopian dreams of natural, easy childbirth, free of complications. The whole thing pisses me off.

Fortunately Owen is born and with us now, and it is likely we will forget how bad this whole thing has been. It is likely we will look back one day and think of it as a real miracle and tell everyone that we fell in love with Owen from the very first moment we laid eyes on him. Life, I'm guessing, is like that.

January 9th, 2005 - On Sunday night, the 2nd, around 7:30, Brittney's water broke, not with a gush, but with a trickle. In fact, so innocuous was this first sign of the coming of our child, that we debated even calling the doctor, though we did, and what we heard set us on the path to sleepless parenthood almost immediately.

"As long as it's only a trickle," the doctor said, "sit tight through the night and call your OB first thing in the morning. If there's a gush or you go into a full blown labor, then, of course, call us right back."

That was about 9pm. Neither of us slept for more than hour that night. Brittney began having small erratic contractions around 3am. In the morning I got up, butterflies in my stomach, and walked the dog, thinking, "well, we're probably going to have our baby today, and I should get Eddie some exercise while I can."

While I was out walking, two giant mute swans came flapping up the river towards me, their long necks stretched forward at least two feet from their bodies, their broad white wings beating the air audibly. When they reached the spot where Eddie and I stood, mouths agape, they banked hard around us and flew back down the river where they'd come from. I'm not sure I have ever, in my life, seen such large birds flying at such close range. I smiled down at Eddie and said, "If I believed in omens, buddy, I'd say that was a pretty good one."

Back at the house, Brittney was on the phone with her doctor's office making an appointment for 9am. We each showered and finished packing hospital bags. Then we left the house, for the last time, as a childless couple.

Part of the protocol at the OB's office is the taking of blood pressure and checking of the baby's heart rate, and since about week 36, a pelvic exam had become part of the fun, too. Over the last few weeks, Brittney's blood pressure has been rising, and often they ask her to lay on her side for a few minutes to lessen the effect of the baby pressing on vital arteries. This particular morning, her pressure remained high, and since her water had broken the evening before, the nurse practitioner called the hospital to find out when the OB on duty there wanted to see us.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the answer came, "right away."

So we got in the car and drove downtown to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. I had been anticipating this drive for some time, you know, your wife says, "it's time" and you pack the car nervously and head out. I tried to make small talk on the way, but really the enormity of the situation, of what was about to happen, kept me mostly quiet.

Because Brittney's contractions were still fairly far apart and not overly intense, she told me to park in the garage instead of dropping her off out front. She didn't want to be away from me, and I was somewhat relieved, because I didn't, at that point or any point later, want to be away from her either. Somehow we got the car parked and our bags out and got in an elevator and went up to labor and delivery on the tenth floor where we registered and were shown to our room. I don't remember much of that. I think I was trying not to cry or throw up.

In your labor and delivery room, you have one nurse whose job it is to monitor and manage your progress toward birth. Our nurse was a large and voluble woman who did a good job of calming us both and getting us settled in for what we both assumed would be a long day.

Enter the doctor.

Dr. Squiggy (not his real name, but he always burst into the room with a verbal flourish, just like Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley) was fired up right from the start. He wanted to "get some labor cooking." He had Nurse Voluble stick Brittney with an IV and begin a Pitosin drip. Now Pitosin, in case you're not fully aware of the intricacies of obstetric medicine, is the medicinal equivalent of oxytosin, the hormone that tells your body to eject your uterus's current tennant.

Once the Pitosin started, Brittney got really very uncomfortable, moaning and groaning with contractions that began coming every three or four minutes. The more uncomfortable Brittney became, the more voluble Nurse Voluble became, the more impatient Dr. Squiggy seemed. Everything was progressing more quickly than we imagined it would, and I was less and less able to take the edge off Brittney's pain with persistent back massage and witty repartee. She requested an epidural, a local anaesthetic administered through a catheter in the lower back, and I was asked to leave the room so that the catheter could be placed in a "sterile procedure."

I didn't like leaving, but then I didn't like seeing my wife groaning in pain either. For the first time since arriving, we were separated, and neither of us liked it. I filled the time by calling friends and family with progress updates. She filled the time by having a squirrelly resident put a needle into the lining around her spinal column. While this happened, they stopped administering the Pitosin.

When I returned to the room, Brittney seemed quite comfortable, if a little freaked out. The pain was manageable now, almost negligible, and the contractions began rolling by on the monitor without Brittney really seeming to notice at all. Things were under control again, or at least they seemed to be.

Discouraginly though, as Brittney mellowed out, so did her labor. The contractions slowed down and became less intense. I started to hunker down for a long day, and Dr. Squiggy ordered the resumption of the Pitosin drip.

Then the baby's heart rate dropped.

At first, this didn't seem like a big deal. With each contraction, and we were watching the contractions as they charted on a monitor next to the bed, the blip-blip-blip that represented our child's heart beat would slow and become erratic. Nurse Voluble came and turned off the Pitosin drip. "The baby doesn't like the Pitosin apparently," she smiled, "but I think you're bombing along anyway. I don't think you need it."

Unfortunately, Dr. Squiggy did not agree, and a further pelvic exam showed that Brittney's labor had stalled at 5cm dilation, about half the distance to the goal line. Dr. Squiggy suggested that perhaps the baby's head was compressing the umbilical chord and straining its heart. "This isn't an emergeny situation," he said, "but I think we should go in there and get the baby before it becomes one. I want to perform a caesarean section. How do you feel about that?" He said all this in a fairly calm, almost blase' way. Though concerned, we thought things would continue to move along slowly and methodically.

They didn't.

This is where things got very confusing and terrifying, very quickly. Brittney looked at me and said, "Are you ok with that?" And I said, "I think if the doctor thinks it's best, then it's what we ought to do," though I clearly said it in a half-hearted, I-can't-believe-this-is-happening kind of way. Then, before almost anything else could be said, the room was full of doctors and I was being pushed out the door to allow Brittney to be prepped in a "sterile environment." I was told it would take them twenty minutes to prep her and then I would be brought in the room, outfited in scrubs and mask, to be present for the birth.

A few minutes later, Brittney came wheeling out of the room with a battery of doctors and nurses on her way to the operating room. All I could do was stand and watch her go. Our eyes only met for a moment, but I could see she was afraid.

Another nurse showed up with scrubs for me and told me how to put them on. She said I should get our bags and move them to the recovery room. Then she left me there to wait for someone from the OR to come and get me. I think she told me not to worry, that everything was just fine, but I was having trouble parsing speech at that point. I don't think I've ever been so scared and worried, so suddenly, in my whole life. I sat down in a rocking chair there in the recovery room and tried not to cry. The only cogent thought I was able to form was that crying would be a bad thing to do just before heading into the operating room where it would be my job to calm my terrified wife. With some considerable effort, I kept it together.

There is another gap in my memory here. Next thing I know I'm in the OR, sitting on a metal stool next to Brittney's head. Her eyes are wide but glassy, and she is blinking a lot. She says, "I can't feel my legs. Is that ok? That I can't feel my legs?"

A blonde doctor peers around the blue curtain separating us from the action and says, "Yes. Everything is fine. You're doing really well." I repeat everything the doctor has said, as if Brittney can't hear it herself. This is my best effort at giving comfort.

Next she says, "I can't breathe. Is it supposed to be like this? I'm having trouble breathing."

Now I realize there is an anaesthesiologist standing next to me, right by her head. He smiles. "Yes. Everything is quite normal. Don't worry."

The blonde doctor reappears. "You're going to see your baby soon," she says. Brittney and I both peer over at her, bewildered. We have forgotten what we're here for.

There was more, blood spattering against the divider, Brittney's body being tugged back and forth as the medical team pulled the baby out, the sucking and whirring of equipment.

Then, someone, a female voice, said, "You have a baby boy. Congratulations." And in that moment there was a cosmic grinding of emotional gears, what was naked terror mixed with curiosity, incredulity and somewhere, deep down, the first flickers of happiness. I turned to my left and saw a tiny creature with a head as pointy as a football. It was covered in a sort of fine gray powder and streaked with blood, and two more doctor/nurse people were with it, cleaning it with a towel and finishing it under two big heat lamps.

I staggered, reluctantly, over to where they were, too conscious that I was leaving my freaked out wife strapped to a table behind me. I glanced to my right and saw her internal organs resting on the outside of her body as a group of doctors chattered back and forth to each other about what to do next. I turned back to the baby and someone was handing me a large pair of surgical scissors for cutting what remained of the chord. I said, "Forgive me if I don't make a speech," then snipped the chord and turned back to Brittney whose head was now turned toward me and whose eyes were wide and curious.

Someone swaddled the baby and handed it to me. Dr. Squiggy, now fully involved in putting Brittney's guts back together, said, "So what's this baby's name?" to which I replied, "I don't know yet."

I carried the baby over to Brittney who still had no use of her arms. I tried to put the baby down close enough to her face that she could take in the enormity of what had just happened. I think the incredible emotional whiplash of first being rushed into surgery, then coming face-to-face with your first child was just too much for both of us. We managed smiles, but only just. I asked her if she thought this baby boy might be named Owen, and she looked at him and said she thought so. I announced to the room, "This is Owen St.Germain Lewis." The doctors made various comments about the name Owen. We paid no attention to any of them.

Soon enough we were back in the recovery room where I'd been choking back tears of terror only a short while before. Now I was dialing cell phones and telling parents they were grandparents. Brittney was holding Owen and regaining use of her legs. Doctors and nurses visited us in a grand procession, each asking the same questions, each ending with, "Congratulations."

This is how our child was born, not at all the way we'd envisioned it. Over the next few days, spent downstairs on the maternity floor, our anxieties and incredulity, not to mention physical pain and exhaustion, mixed together to produce a very strange and not altogether joyous introduction to parenthood. I have not had a more intense emotional experience in my life.

More about that soon.

January 6th, 2005 - We are home. Mother, baby, father and dog. There is much, much more to say, but I am far too short of sleep to say it now. Thanks to everyone who has written with kind words. Your good luck and congratulations went a long, long way. We feel very, very loved.

More later.

- Emlyn