August 11, 2006
Morning
Back in Panera Bread again. Listening to Mozart now. I have a satellite radio, and I desperately need people to stop talking to me right now. The stations I usually listen to (baseball and politics) are full of words, and I just have too many words in my head right now.
We’re going to have to teach you words someday, won’t we? Hundreds of them, thousands of them. Millions of them? Do humans know a million words? Maybe. It amazes me that anyone can learn English as well as we do. There’s so many rules, and exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions. Yet we manage to make ourselves understood, somehow.
I just finished a wonderful book called “Night of Power”, by Spider Robinson. It was wonderful, but heartbreaking as well. It’s about race. Someday you will notice that your Mom and your Dad, and me and your Aunt Debbie, have slightly different skin colors. It’s really a very silly thing, but we adults make a very big deal about this, even though most people, to be polite, pretend not to. You’re going to have to learn about this too, but I don’t know how to teach it to you, because I don’t understand it either.
For me, falling in love with your Aunt Debbie was as natural as taking a drink of water when you’re thirsty, or eating a sandwich when you’re hungry. I couldn’t NOT do it. I bet your Dad felt the same way about your Mom. Letting skin color enter into it would have been as unthinkable, to me, as letting the day of the week, or the amount of dirt on the sidewalk, to enter into it. To paraphrase Lisa Simpson-I know what the word racism means, but it still doesn’t make any sense.
An awful thing happened yesterday. Well, I guess, to be perfectly accurate an awful thing DIDN’T happen yesterday. British police announced that they caught 21 people who had been planning to blow up airplanes as they flew towards America. The fact that it didn’t happen is good. The fact that it almost happened is bad.
I don’t know what kind of a world this is to grow up in. Heck, I’m almost 35 years old, and I’m still not grown up yet. But there probably isn’t a GOOD time to grow up. I guess maybe you just make a baby and hope for the best. Is that what people have always done?
Sigh. This is turning into a downer. I don’t mean it to be. But its hard not to talk about life like this and at least be a little bit sad about it. There’s so much misery and awfulness and unpleasantness and cold and bitterness and rage. I don’t want to expose you to it. I didn’t want to expose Rick to it. But I did, and your parents will too, and there’s nothing else to do. There’s no way to protect you. And as I said, there is nothing that scares a parent more than that right there.
I made it onto page 7. Somebody told me that once I got to page 100 or so, that will be enough for a good book. I’m trying to put out one page per day, that way I will have time to get it printed and ready to give to your parents before you are born, which is about 200 days or so from now. So I have time, but I have to make myself keep at it, or I’ll put it off. I have a bad habit of doing that.
Despite this world with so much meanness, I guess I keep believing in the goodness of people. I don’t know why sometimes.
Yes, I do. I know that to believe the opposite makes someone ugly, and hard, and cold. I don’t want to be someone like that. You have to believe in people, have faith in their good nature. Sometimes the only reason I do that is because I don’t like where the road of NOT believing takes me.
So far that’s been enough.
Maybe your arrival will help me keep believing. Hard to imagine, you helping me? Well, if I can keep telling myself that YOU are depending on me, maybe that will make me keep going. I know Rick depends on me, too, but he’s going to be a teenager soon, and they are hard to like. So I guess I will keep striving, keep believing, for you, and for Savannah (Rick’s other cousin, who is my brother’s daughter).