I wasn't prepared for this

You love your friends and what matters to them matters to you, so of course you say yes when they invite you to come see their newborn baby. Of course. Over to the hospital you go. I am privileged to not be so familiar with these places but I recognize the elevator, the doors that open at the push of a button, the hallways that project medical ability, biological stability, hope’s reliability. Then into the room. Into her room.

And there she is. In her artificial womb of plexiglass and portals, wires and cables to monitors and screens, heartbeat over respiration over oxygen saturation and there is no normal but this one as you listen to the beep of alarm and watch it come back down to green before you breathe again.

Truth be told, promise not to tell? I generally think babies are kinda ugly. Amphibian creatures barely sapiens, born from a woman they promise but I’m tempted to look around for the spaceship retreating.

But this? This tiny person, swimming through the unfamiliar space of her newborn body, premature and perfect, this little girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And I scorn the scorn that whispers at the cliche because bugger me but it’s true.

And I don’t know what to say. She’s magnificent.

I’ve felt this way before, witnessing the small ones of kith and kin. Stood abashed before the splendor of creation. And I well remember the transcendent majesty of looking at my lady love’s son and feeling the gods’ gift of realizing “Yes, yes, for this I would die to protect.” And he wasn’t even mine.

And suddenly, on a normal Saturday night I’m feeling it again, the awe, the sheer dumbfounded reverence for what it is to bring a child into this world. Tomorrow I’ll rage at the idiocy that brings violence to remove them, as everyone is a child in someone’s heart, but for now I exist in little besides awe.

I am accustomed to seeing the Divine in Nature, the pulse of the universe in ocean waves, sand dune shifts, and sunlight through the leaves, but here I am in a concrete cave made by men and everywhere I look I see godliness. In the purpose of the space, the quiet skill and sleepless devotion of the staff, the faceless researchers who devise the tests and cures, and above all else: her, and the indomitability of her will to continue. What is god if not this newest person? Why would it be anywhere else?

Outside it’s a normal night. Cars each going to their own someplace, sports fans ribbing at each others laundry, friends talking too loudly on the lamplit street with words about nothing that manifest their love anyway. And it is a normal night. Another in the endless line of nights where somewhere nearby a miracle is breathing. And the awe overtakes me. I was ready to meet their child, but I was not prepared for this.

Something unexpected and totally normal happened today

I was well into my lineup of questions and answers, ordinal numbers and time sequences in class today, blue marker and red marker, hoping my students were getting something out of my antics when something unexpected happened.

She’s maybe three years old. She has the brightest eyes and incredible laughing smile, and she’d lost one of her shoes somewhere. She plays for most of my English class, blocks and panda bears, while her mother learns at a truly incredible pace, moving rapidly from knowing few words when she got to America two months ago to now, when she helps me teach the other Arabic speakers.

But the little one eventually gets bored and wanders off. She loves opening and closing doors, usually with herself on the other side, and the entire office knows her name and laughter, and soon someone will bring her back, a smile on their face, and deposit her at the table where she’ll look around, find her mom, and exclaim with the purity of a child’s joy “Mama!”

She’d snuck out during my lineup, somewhere around “Who arrived third to class today?” and I was just writing “Who got here next to last?” when she popped out from behind my white board easel with a giggle. Someone had given her a multicolored abacus, and she proudly presented it to me, setting it up with a three year old’s precision then stepping back to make space for my admiration and looking up as if saying “Can you believe this incredible thing!?”

And it was. It was an incredible thing. Because there I was on a Friday afternoon in Oakland, every cell in my body feeling heavy with the ominous portents for my country’s future, but here was this little girl, a Syrian refugee who had been through hell without even the words to name the horrors, and she was giggling up at me and presenting an abacus for my enjoyment.

It was something unexpected, and yet absolutely commonplace. I am privileged to spend some afternoons with these people, these incredible, beautiful human souls, and though the ostensible reason is so I can give them more English words and usage, the reality is that they give me hope, gratitude, and a love for our species that can be hard to grasp in the screen-shaped world.

So yes, I’m terrified for our country, but absolutely, I am confident in the human spirit. I am confident that we will continue to move forward. And I’m confident that we as America will continue to make this the kind of place people like this wonderful little girl and her mother want to come to for safety and a better future.

Perhaps prepared?

Good old SFO, at any time of day

In two hours I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to fly to Europe. Well, given that I’ve been to 34 of its countries, lived over yonder for a couple years, and work as a Best of Europe tour guide, I should amend that.

In two hours I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: I’m going to fly to Europe in the company of a five year-old. Now that, that is going to be a new experience. Luckily for me, he’s a remarkable example of the kind (Dutch pun intended) and we are well stocked with a game-thingy, colored pencils, reusable pirate stickers, and as a backup: homeopathic sleep-assisting herbal spray. Left up to my own devices, I would bring one of those Amazon blow-dart thingymajigs, but the buzzkills at the TSA would probably “confiscate” it to give to their kids. But all things considered, I consider us terribly well prepared. Which begs the question:

Are we terribly unprepared? Will the other passengers reach Holland to the announcement “Please use caution when opening overhead bins, as contents may have shifted during flight when they were pushed aside to fit either a five-year-old captive or a thirty-five-year-old asylum seeker”?

What else should we bring? Now that it’s far too late to do anything about it. But I can land, near the dam on the river Amstel, and see if any of your perceptions, predictions, and predilections were accurate. And perhaps add additional supplies for the return trip. Are kindergartner-sized hamster wheels VAT deductible?

And in case that beloved foreign land below the sea (level) snacks on minutes and devours hours, as I know it can, I wish all y’all a very happy holidays. In whatever way that means to you as an individual. (And if the holidays are not as chipper for you as the advertisers whisper and wail is obligatory, you can check out four things you can do if the holidays are hard for you.)

Hogar Para Todos is still going strong, but could use a little help

If I could choose one topic to survive the irrelevance of archival old age that sets in for my blogs within two days of their posting, it would be Hogar Para Todos (AHome for Everyone), the orphanage in Azogues, Ecuador, that K and I visited in 2012. So when Ann Halsig contacted me about posting an update on the house, I was delighted. Here is her update:

For 30 years, Nancy Calle worked in adoption with some of the most vulnerable children in Ecuador. At the age of 63, when most people are preparing for retirement, she applied to register her family home as a “Casa Hogar” for children in transition. Some of the children now living here will be adopted, some will be reunited with their families once the court’s orders have been met, and a few will continue to live here, because their circumstances – or age – render them “unadoptable”.

But this is not a house of sadness.

The children at Hogar Para Todos are thriving with the support of an incredible staff, including a Clinical Psychologist working with a team of 5 interns, an Early Childhood Intervention Specialist, an Educational Psychologist, a team of specialist support workers, a Social Worker, and the “tias” of the house, who prepare meals, clean the house, ensure school uniforms are ready in the morning and much more.

At the age of 76, Nancy generally rises at 6:30 and weaves her way in and out of meetings and children and staff support until well after dinner is served. All of the children are engaged in education and both group and individualized therapy, as well as numerous other activities every week.

This is not a house of sadness.

But it is a house that has fallen on hard times. While the staff’s salaries and the food for the children are paid by social services and the provincial government, all other costs must be covered by donations: electricity, water, gas, general maintenance, toys, clothes, activities and more. The cost of this part of operations was $82,068 in 2013, $72,841 in 2014, and is projected at $63,558 for 2015.

Until this year a large percentage of the funds to cover those costs came from a Belgian partner organization that sponsored the Casa with donations from many individuals. This year, the director has retired and following the closure of this organization, the Casa has effectively lost 23,000€. For the past two years, costs have exceeded donations, and so there is currently a deficit of nearly $30,000, and it will worsen next year.

There are so many reasons to support this Casa – we have seen with our own eyes how differently it functions, how immediately one gets the sense of “home” here. But the biggest reason to support HpT is because it is invaluable to this community, where there are significant socio-economic problems leading to substance misuse, neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Whatever the future holds, in debt or with healthy finances, the existence of this place is absolutely imperative.

Nancy Calle is an extraordinary woman. But she is human, and will eventually need to pass the torch on to the next generation, who will continue the life-changing – and literally life-saving work – she began. But before she goes, she wants this house in order.

For many, $30K doesn’t sound like much, and with a little support from a lot of folks, it really isn’t. But is the world to the future of this organization. And this organization has, is, and will continue to improve the world for countless children.

If you can donate absolutely any amount at all, please go to Ammado, where with a couple of clicks you can donate any amount you wish.

And rest assured that this drive for funds is not an end-all effort. At the moment, several players are working together to ensure that in the years to come HpT’s finances are stronger than ever. The organization’s website will be launched in July, and volunteers from Holland, France, and the US are working together to fundraise in a variety of ways. One of these is developing a network of sponsors who can commit to giving a small sum every month. If this is something that might interest you, please let us know.

Further information is available via email in Spanish, French or English at ann.halsig.hpt@gmail.com, or in German and Dutch at w.croes@planet.nl.

It's not all bad for Maritza

I am supremely grateful for the privilege to write a few things for Altruvistas, the ethical travel company that facilitated my first Cuba and Venezuela trips, but sakes alive, this one from Peru (click here) is twice as depressing as I realized. I knew it was a bit heavy, but ay carumba. Let me tell you about later that day…

Yes, Maritza’s childhood has been brutal. She prowls around a room with an energy too much like a shark, too little like a child, but when she laughs, all that falls away, obliterated in the giggles of a seven year old. And her younger brother may have come to Casa Generacion barely able to speak, making sounds more than words, but after a few months of loving support in the house, he rushed up to me with a slew of questions, a couple answers, and an array of observations. Including:

“Señor Tim, we’re going to the beach now, and you can come too.”

These kids may come from harsh places, but they are still kids, as full of exuberance and enthusiasm as any, and the two young volunteers working that morning were happy to have another pair of hands to help out. Partway to the beach, surrounded by an electron haze of running children, I realized Maritza wasn’t wearing shoes and the pavement was burning her feet. Her brother ran up, kicked off his flip-flops for her, and held his little arms up to me.

Excellent problem solving. Beautiful sibling love. Happy kids, happy me. She slipped on the shoes and he began a stream of consciousness monologue that I could decipher just enough to find hilarious. Maritza walked beside us, corroborating or disputing his stories in turns.

At the beach, the kids splashed in immediately. Little brother took a turn in the floating dragon-thing that they’d carried down, and one of the older boys showed me how close he could come to a handstand. I was watching him tumble over when I felt a small hand tug my finger. I looked down and found Maritza, looking up at me, eyes bright and serious. In her hand she held a small piece of a shell, which she placed in my palm. I thanked her and admired the pretty pink color, and she wandered away.

Little brother had passed off the dragon floater, and joined two other kids to dig one of the pointless and delightful pits that filled my childhood hours on the beach as well. I was considering joining them when I felt another tug on my hand. Maritza was back with another shell. Together we admired the purple hue, and this time she smiled after I thanked her.

She continued bringing shells to show me, which I was careful to only drop back in the sand when she wasn’t looking. We played for a couple hours before I helped the volunteers herd the horde back to the house, and I was sorry to say goodbye to them a few days later. But it was time to move on, with admiration for the work the people of Casa Generacion are doing, and one little piece of shell in my pocket to remind me of a child’s smile.

Gifts in Granada

That last post about Tarifa came from an old journal, a paragraph not relevant enough to include in my book, but I enjoyed giving it a little life somewhere else. Another such moment popped up a day and a page later, in Granada. After a long morning walk among the flamenco byways and impressive graffiti of the Andalusian city, I had found a small neighborhood park to rest for a moment.

Losing all my own pictures and having
to use other people's is driving me crazy

Granada was messing with me, one moment of still sunlight would make me wish I’d worn shorts, then the next a winter wind gave meaning to my jeans-ing. I was temporarily in the warmer former, in that place where as much grass grew in the paths as between them, when a child ran up to me.

Yellow sweater, yellow stockings, and a green shirt...with yellow triangles on it. All eclipsed by hair so blond, Rapunzel read about it as a child. Given her gouda complexion, I was expecting Swedish when she opened her mouth to address me, but instead I heard Spanish.

“Hello!”

“Hello, how are you?” The words were the same as high school oral presentations, but the premise had never been: You’re talking to a strange ethereal five year-old in a park in Granada. Introduce yourself and carry on a polite conversation.

“I’m well. Do you speak English?”

“Yes I do.” To prove it, I switched to my mother tongue to say “And do you speak English too?”

An intent pause as she examined my face. A giggle. A solid look at my feet before continuing, in Spanish. “Why are you barefoot?”

Grumble. I liked my angle of this one better.

I sited the beautiful weather, and told her I’d walked a lot that day already. She considered this, then repeated her question, verbatim, and added “My grandpa doesn’t let me take my shoes off.”

Oops. I’d been in this situation before, the accidental bad example, during my hippie days at university when my ten-toed sasquatch presence implicitly countermanded the edicts of new-parent friends. Time for damage control.

“Your grandfather is right. There are a lot of stones here, you might hurt yourself on them...” I’m sorry grandfather, I’m trying.

A moment more careful examination, then she ran off, returning with a double handful of stones. She showed them to me, then dribble-dropped them at our feet and cheerfully informed me: “Rain!” A solid giggle. Warmer than the sunlight.

But it is a good thing I'm not the only one
who noticed Granada's beautiful street art.

“Wait for me!” And she ran off to my right, disappearing behind a bush. I stood blinking, dazzled by the sun and the unexpected contact with an unfamiliar age group, then she was back, appearing from my left with a handful of leaves and twigs. She sang me an unintelligible tune that ended with a shout of “Christmas!” and the plants flung in the air. More giggles. She repeated the loop-song-toss cycle, first with grass, then with rocks. The last round, the ditty may have been about someone’s culo de caca, not sure what the deal was with that one, though it still ended with “Christmas!”

I was about to ask her about it, but she ran back to play with the other children, and left with her grandfather a little while later. I resumed my journey, so did she, so did the entire city, but it’s nice to remember a golden moment of a giggling child on a sunny day at the end of winter.

Trick or treat? Or not.

Granted, I have no children. This places me solidly in the spectator box when it comes to child-rearing, but I noticed a pattern when asking friends if they would be giving out candy to kids this year:

I'm gonna be bold and suggest that if we're worried about
violence and kids, maybe allow the trick or treating, but cut
back on the stabbed-in-the-head costumes?

“We don’t get them in my neighborhood.” Not a pattern, really, more of a uniform chorus of the same sentence. So...where have all the kiddies gone?

“Our neighborhood is full of kids. We see them come out of their houses in full costumes and we get the candy ready, then they get in cars and drive to the mall.”

Wh- Wh- What? The mall?!? Wh- Why? (In my opinion, kids should never be allowed to go to the damn mall, but that’s just me.)

“They do their trick-or-treating at school. People come in, set up a trunk or a table, and pass out candy there.”

Th- Th- That’s not trick-or-treating! That’s grocery shopping.

Why the shift? I feel like in the 80s we were plenty scared of kidnappers, razor blades and poison in candy (the latter of which has never happened, by the way), not to mention ample cause to bemoan, in our pre-adolescent voices, the reflective tape totally messing up our costumes! We’re gonna stay on the sidewalk, mom, there are no cars there! Gawd!

But we went. And we had a barge-load of fun every year. Running door to door, swapping insider tips with friends met along the way as to who as giving out the best stuff, and mapping out the neighborhood in your mind for optimal candy-ation. I would not be surprised to learn that whoever created mapquest was inspired by childhood candy-mapping.

“Skip the one-sided cul-de-sac, it’s not cost effective!”

It seems sad to me that people are so scared of each other these days that we’ve taken this experience away from our kids, especially given that we actually live in the safest time in human history, it’s just that we also live in an age tragically miseducated by the 24 hour news cycle. (Note, that US media article still manages to focus on violence. But unless you think your kid is at risk of engaging in a holy war, the Brits were a little more on track.)

But as I mentioned, I ain’t got none of them little critters, so I don’t really get to talk.

Well. There is one. A certain four year old, whose continued well-being feels like arguably the single most important task of the planet today… Would I want him trick-or-treating? The answer?

Shit yes! He’s going to LOVE it!

But then again, he lives in a small town, and has two responsible parents to chaperon his tiny Iron Man butt.

Big city? Packs of kids wandering loose? Would I want him in one of those in a few years? I….don’t know.

What about you? (Vote in the poll on the vagabondurgres.com version of this blog.)

Hemoglobin, non-terrorism, and adorable despite a little racism; in Panama City

Arterial roadways and Panama City

I was a happy little red blood cell. Biding my time before entering the veins of Venezuela, I was promenading through the pulse of Panama, crossing arterial roadways to meander beside the lymphatic mud flats of the capital’s southern, maybe eastern, western-ocean-facing harbor. It’s a tidal maelstrom of a place, Panama City. Currents of South America hit the breakwater of Northern dominance, while the West Indies just try to get through to reach the Orient.

"A great friend of Panama"
statue was downtown until
it was damaged in a protest.

And I was just another particle, a nutrient perhaps, life-giving at best, parasitic in the end, and enjoying the ride in the meantime. Franklin Delano Roosevelt surprised me, baptized in pigeon shit, cracked by revolution, and now exiled by urban planners to a scenic and irrelevant perch between oncoming and outgoing traffic.

The floatable tools of tenuous livelihoods were stranded in the muck of low-tide, pretty and hideous, colorful and infinitely drab, appealing to my eye but forbidden to my camera in this post 9/11 world, where armed guards were too bored to acknowledge me, but their supervisor, obliged by rank, called me back from lens distance. “Why are you taking pictures of the harbor?”

Panama City harbor at low tide

“Cuz it’s pretty.” Did not satisfy him. So I pointed out the circles of oil drums against the linear wanderings of boat hulls, the prehistoric muck of the ages patiently reclaiming the trappings of modern conceit, the camaraderie of hulls at rest.

He waved me away. A nearby Rastafarian found the show hilarious, and called me over. His skunky smell and laugh-lined eyes made me feel at home, though most of his words were unintelligible. I’m pretty sure we agreed that nowadays people take themselves too seriously. He’s my friend.

Playground they were ignoring

It was too early in the trip for loneliness; I was still lubricated by the renewed flow of travel vivacity in my veins, jolly in my joints, melancholy unable to find a place to oxidize. This made it easy to dance with the kids, finding joy for themselves aside from the paternal provisions of playground planners. These kids had too much swing in their steps to need swingsets for their butts.

“Hello!” They cried like seagulls as I approached. “Hello! Hello!” Then in the precision of classroom lessons transferred to the real world, word by word, they added “Where. Are. You from?” Laughter as punctuation.

My Panamanian pals of the promenade

I answered, and as politeness decrees, returned the question. “We are Panameños!” replied a big voice from a small body. “Except him” and a tiny finger pointed to the boy in the blue shirt. “He is African.”

A glance at the face above the stylish blue collar showed this was not true, was not welcome, was another incidence of the scraping search for understanding of childhood, accidentally abrasive, sharp with the latent racism of Latin America. The boy in blue hid most of his reaction well. It’s probably not the first time.

What do you say? How do you push back, perhaps instruct, be a nutrient and not a parasite? Tiny feet were ready to run off again, my seconds clicking short. “I’m African too” was my best try. This paused their feet. Is the gringo crazy?

“I am African. So are you. We all came from Africa.” I’d neglected to pack my notes on the migration patterns of early humans, but I dare to remember a slight smile on a darker skinned face, and there was no malice in the laughter of any.

They held the pose for 1/32nd of a second

Besides, more important concerns were on hand. Namely, a request for a co-photo so vulnerable, so tender and murmured that it very nearly broke me with its innocence.

Race relations, cultural exchange, personal evolution. Nascent love. We’re all doing the best we can, for ourselves and for each other.

What would you have said, in the face of a child’s unhateful brushes with the legacy of inequality?

A home for Alvaro

Alvaro and his daughter

“My daughter is a musician,” were Alvaro’s proud words as we shared a taxi into Caracas. He was the program coordinator for the Witness for Peace delegation that I had come to Venezuela to attend.

“Oh?” I asked, “What does she play?”

“Drums, mostly.” I nodded politely, but I confess, my inner cynic was sniping: Yeah, sure. Everyone’s kid is a brilliant drummer, just like everyone’s kid is a young Picasso. But a few days later, during which Alvaro manouvered, facilitated, and orchestrated our Venezuelan experience with virtuoso skill, something happened that made me question my snark.

We were in his hometown of Barquisimeto, so his wife and daughter had joined us for dinner. While we waited for the pollo to become asado, Alvaro thumped out a rhythm on the table top with fingers and palms.

His daughter, a five year old cherub with more than a sliver of impishness in her smile, looked at his hands for a moment. Maybe a moment and a half. Then her tiny hands were thumping the tabletop too, in perfect sync with her father. I was impressed; maybe she was a musician after all.

Sanare, "The Garden of Lara" (province)

The delegation proceeded to the hill town of Sanare, where Alvaro wrangled meetings with women’s co-operatives, community organizers, and the local radio station. One afternoon I rode with him to run a couple errands, and he pointed out the chaotic scribble of thick black wire that hung on the electrical poles.

“People connect their own wires to steal electricity. Then the power company comes by, installs meters on the lines, and starts charging them. It works, because they don’t have to do all the wiring themselves, saving everyone money and time.”

How’s that for a capsule of Venezuela: people doing what they can to get by, using their own wiles and agency, and a pragmatic government that works with things the way they are to bring everyone into the system. I was marveling at that when we stopped so Alvaro could go run a mysterious errand. “Eh...wait here, okay?” was all he said.

Wheelies for Bolivar

The next day was Simon Bolivar’s birthday, and you’d better believe Venezuela takes notice of The Liberator’s cumpleaños. I sat down to dinner after watching the town celebrate in the tidy plaza, and Alvaro’s secret errand was revealed when he carried out a massive birthday cake. It was birthday season, I guess, since in our five person delegation, two of us had birthdays that week as well. Kathy and I shared space among strawberries with Simon. Birthday solidarity; how wonderfully Venezuelan.

Alvaro and company drumming it out

Stuffed with information, experience, and frosting, we made our way back to Barquisimeto the next day, and Alvaro informed us that his community center had prepared “a little presentation” for us.

Every coastal province in Venezuela has its own Afro-Venezuelan traditions and heritage, with particular rhythms, songs, and drums. This community center performed them all. Grinning faces, welcoming words, and flashing hands from throughout the community piled into the room, and the drumbeats, singing, and guitar chords rose to the rafters.

My cheeks were already sore with enthusiasm, and my foot tingled from ceaseless tapping, when Alvaro’s daughter climbed up to sit on a drum far larger than she was. I thought it was sweet that everyone would indulge the five year old, but then she started playing.

Por dios! He wasn’t kidding, she IS a musician! She thumped and thwacked right along with the best of them, pixie grins breaking out only between songs, as the music filled the night, almost as loudly as the welcome.

I am indebted to Alvaro for all his hard work, both with our delegation and with his community center, which also organizes a massive summer camp for local kids every year. And I just genuinely like the man.

That made it that much worse when I heard that Alvaro’s house collapsed a couple days ago. He, his wife, and their daughter are now on the street in Barquisimeto, and need help raising the funds to rebuild their home.

If you can spare anything to help, I urge you to do so. This is a good man, doing good work, and I have seen firsthand how selfless he is, working tirelessly without pay for his community. Please see his fundraising page at: http://www.gofundme.com/AHomeForAlvaro

A tangible reason to care about the future. In San Diego.

San Diego is paisley from above. Curls and loops and whorls of housing developments; conceived at desks, proposed in meetings, and built by contract. All those lives, churning away down there, unknowable, each ostensibly unique, yet seemingly interchangeable through an airplane’s porthole window.

One of those roofs, somewhere in the pattern, shelters my brother, his wife, and the newest bodacious audacity in my familial web: a niece. The niece. The first, perhaps the only, member of our next genetic generation; our reach for eternity; our most tangible reason to care about the future.

The niece

I’ve met enough of our multicrazy species to know that not everyone actually likes their siblings; blessed to genuinely like all four of mine, it feels like a waste not to take advantage of this fact. So as I caught the 992 bus at the airport, transferred to the trolley among beach boys in flip flops and Navy men in spotless dress uniforms, and disembarked in their neighborhood, my enthusiasm was tripartite at the upcoming reunion with a brother and dual introductions, to a new sister and a new baby.

Oh baby, the baby. What is it about babies?

I don’t personally plan to spawn, but that doesn’t mean I am blind to the sacred burble of the baby. I adore those soft tiny creatures, with their jiggly focus and massive craniums. To be in the presence of an organism with its whole life ahead of it is a reminder to love your own days, and to witness the curiosity that knows only relentlessness and insatiability, that exists in a state of genius-level observation, processing, and adaptation, is to have first row seats to Potential.

The niece is teething

Plus their laughs are like Christmas presents a week early; unexpected and pure.

I arrived just after midday in the vigorous San Diego sun, and my brother informed me that things were good, and/but that the wee one had gone down for the night at….10:00 that morning.

Oy. No, no plans to spawn.

But soon she was awake, all bright eyes and damn-bursting grins. Then she was sitting on my arm, a finite package filled with infinite meaning. Looking down into those eyes, I could immediately feel the compulsion to put this creature’s welfare before my own, to undergo hardship and do uncountable things, so that she might have the best life possible.

The niece flies

I can’t imagine what it is to be a parent. Terrifying and glorious. And utterly exhausting, down to the particles of fear, hope, and dedication that fill a parental bloodstream of anemic steel, worn out and indefatigable both.

The niece and me

Three days and one wedding later; one more sibling’s partner wholeheartedly welcomed to my family affection; and caffeinated with enthusiasm for The Niece, I again rose over the paisley whorls of San Diego. I still couldn’t tell you which roof was theirs, but knowing the treasure that lives below it, I couldn’t help but smile at all of them.