Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
I’ve never worked the day after Christmas, before. Ian and Kelly are both on vacation, but I’m at work. Early, because we have a plane to catch on Friday afternoon.
We gave Ian a soccer ball for Christmas. We took the ball to a park yesterday, because it was sunny and fifty-four degrees. Today’s not as nice, but that wouldn’t have mattered.
I was spoiled yesterday, with a refurbished PS2 and Guitar Hero. Ian slung the guitar over his shoulder and swung his hips in time to Message in a Bottle. He was terrible, so I played with his hands on mine; he didn’t stop dancing. He played air-drums when it was my turn.
I wrote Kelly and told her that I didn’t like being here, that I missed Ian. She said that Ian woke up and asked when I’d be home.
Only a dad with a tired face,
Coming home from the daily race,
Bringing little of gold or fame
To show how well he has played the game;
But glad in his heart that his own rejoice
To see him come and to hear his voice.
Only a dad with a brood of four,
One of ten million men or more
Plodding along in the daily strife,
Bearing the whips and the scorns of life,
With never a whimper of pain or hate,
For the sake of those who at home await.
Only a dad, neither rich nor proud,
Merely one of the surging crowd,
Toiling, striving from day to day,
Facing whatever may come his way,
Silent whenever the harsh condemn,
And bearing it all for the love of them.
Only a dad but he gives his all,
To smooth the way for his children small,
Doing with courage stern and grim
The deeds that his father did for him.
This is the line that for him I pen:
Only a dad, but the best of men.
Ian’s class shares a writing kit, which each student takes home for one week. Assignment #3 was to create a menu and act as a server for a family member. The former half of the exercise didn’t make for exciting viewing, but the latter was better—if only to hear Ian’s ‘job’ voice.
In the car, returning from breakfast. Ian has yet to find a gift for Mommy. He and I are going, shopping, that afternoon.
He doesn’t want to.
‘An electric can-opener and thermal socks,’ instructs his mother. ‘That’s what I want.’ Shopping with Daddy will be painful enough without thermal socks.
‘Oh,’ rescues Grammie, ‘you can have my can-opener. I never use it.’
Silence, while he churns. ‘Mommy, what kind of socks do you want’ he asks, setting us up, building his case.
Every few minutes, he wants
to march the trail of flattened rye grass
back to the house of muttering
hens. He too could make
a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh
it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it
to his ear while the other children
laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,
so little yet, too forgetful in games,
ready to cry if the ball brushed him,
riveted to the secret of birds
caught up inside his fist,
not ready to give it over
to the refrigerator
or the rest of the day.
Posted on December 10, 2007 by Jared in Fatherhood
We’ve been taking Ian to church with us since he was born. He had a few stints in the nursery, but for the most part he’s been with us in the sanctuary. We wanted to worship as a family, and let him feel the warp and woof of what it means to worship God.
And learn to sit quietly.
We are not naive. We understand that sermons from a seminary professor are slightly out of Ian’s grasp, and that sometimes it’s difficult even for us to concentrate during a lengthy prayer. He sits/kneels/snuggles quietly enough and draws with his markers and crayons. He sings with the hymns, and he picks up the basics.
But he’s four years old. Yesterday I watched him color, kneeling on the floor and using the cushioned pew as his easel. Was anything getting through?
‘How many of you,’ our pastor asked, ‘enjoy looking at pictures of space?’
A flash of movement beyond my own upraised arm: Ian beaming toward the pulpit, fingers straining to reach the ceiling. He was nearly on his toes, and his hand stayed in the air long after the point had been made.
Still waters. Congregations beware: our children are listening.
An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow
glimmered in the deeper reaches
where my son and I could hear the slub
of water riddling through the muck.
We’d stumbled on it following a stream,
his first cave made stranger still
by a chill that closes on the goblined heart
of a boy inflamed by stories where
gnome-clans hoarded underground
bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland,
and eel. And so, grave Hansel
paying out his last scraps of bread,
he inched inward looking back
and gathering himself as he devolved
step by step along the wet-ribbed walls,
the omphalos seepage of a subterrane
that dreamed us into its kingdom come,
where like some secret dreams
make known the burnt-punk smell
of marijuana cluttered up the air,
and just beyond, just close enough to see,
a spur of light that like a dwindling
eyemote disappeared. Then the sound
a human soul makes as it slips out
from the throat. Composed in darkness,
my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent
to whisper we could turn back now,
but his voice was there before me saying,
“Something’s here.” And something was,
something that in that instant rose,
and moved off from us, or drew up close.
In either case, my son came to me
almost weightlessly at first, then hungry
for what was filling up my arms,
the startled, upriding bodyweight
of a boy I’d never before felt rock
so solidly into the place I was,
blind and hunkered in the earthen air.
I held him only a moment there.
We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze
of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears,
for weeks to come, settling him back
to sleep at night, or waking him
from some troubling dream, I’d hear
the soft concussion of an outsized heart-
beat I could not decide was mine,
or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to.
Or if what happened would happen again,
years from now, when he is grown,
and I have grown newly strange to him.
