muchas nenas

Layla and I walking Julio around the neighborhood. Layla is barefoot. Right down at ground level. She’s in the details, all of them. Julio’s leash. The brick sidewalk. Geckos scattering in front of us.

I’m up in these other details. Getting ready for the move to Argentina. Calls to Bank of America. There are all kinds of distances people make between each other. They start with their own children. Their own parents. It doesn’t matter how far away you live. It doesn’t matter if you sleep in the same bed.

“Juilo’s goin’ to Argentina,” I tell her. She knows.

“. . tina,” she says,

“Who else is going to Argentina?”

“Mami,” she says. “Papi”

“And LAYYYY-LA,” I say. I hear this last part come out in a voice that doesn’t sound how I feel. Then I say, softer, “You know what’s in Argentina?”

“—”

“There’s all kinds of rios there. And mountains. We could walk like this and maybe see a ciervo. “

We keep walking.

“You know what else there is in Argentina?” I ask.

“Muchas nenas,” she says. Lots of little girls.

“Muuuuuchas nenas,” I say. “Muchissimas nenas.” I say this and we keep walking. We’ve been broken apart these last few weeks. Mami and Papi screaming screaming. Not as many trips with her to play with nenas at the parks. I look at her hair. I’m telling her what I want and she’s telling me what she wants.

We get to the end of the sidewalk and I ask her “cross the street or go back?” Julio stands there panting.

“Go back.”

eyes changing

Looked at Layla’s eyes today and thought ‘they don’t look like a baby’s eyes anymore.’ For maybe three seconds I could actually feel us moving downstream. When this happens you remember what it looked and felt like upstream too.

music

Mamá needs us out of the house to pack our clothes and picture into suitcases. She’s done this so many times. As always it doesn’t all fit. Layla and I go to the bookstore. On the way over we listen to the Caribbean show. Driving with your two year old daughter is all about musical education. “This is called Soca,” I say. I turn up the bass. “What do you think?” She says it’s good. Almost anything I ask her–she says good and she means it too. She always pauses just the right amount before she says it so that you know she’s really listening.

At the bookstore we see three adolescent girls. They’re laughing and jiggling and scared and pretending not to be aware of how loud they are and that they want everyone to look at them. They go towards the bathroom and then laugh even harder. Layla pauses again and says “nenas silly.” On the way back the Caribbean show is still on. “This is a like a reggae remix of this kind of cheesy song called Lady in Red by the Neville Brothers or something,” I tell her. “What do you think?

” ….Good.”

After she says that I reach back and give her a sneak attack squeeze on her feet, belly, hands. They play some other songs. One by Luciano. I press the button that opens the gate at Silver Oaks. For a few seconds I think of a poem I could write about all the different times you could listen to music. Music before paddling over a waterfall. Music while drinking the third glass of wine. Music played just before the bombs start falling.  I can’t think of one that would be right for waiting as the gates open to your parents’ gated community.

The gate finally opens though and the song changes to something else. Layla looks sleepy in the rearview mirror but we sit in the driveway for a couple more minutes anyway just listening to the song finish. I want to make this part of the day last a little bit more.

7 Oct 2009 – no flow

“when it gets like this she stops taking pictures.”

that’s the line i thought of today.

lau asked me the other night if i’d keep this blog going.

i told her claro que si.

before it’s all about not having any fluid loss. spotting. blood.

now that’s all we’re waiting for.

waiting for all of it to rush out in blood. gestational sac. embryo.

if this doesn’t happen they have to ‘vaccuum it out.’

if not there is risk of bleeding disorder.

the doctor comes ‘highly recommended.’

when it gets like this my default mode is anger.

middle knuckle of right hand swollen.

we’re visiting the accupuncturist again today.

this feels ‘totally desperate’ to me.

but there’s no flow.

lau is scared of going to surgery center.

they say 1 in 3 women have miscarriages

i’ve been repeating that too.

one of my friends have told me “this will get better.’

he mentioned ‘the duality of life.’

i understand how we’re still moving downstream ‘in spite of all this’ but it doesn’t ‘help’ at all.

my parents are on a Mediterranean cruise right now.

the people living here have no connection to us.

that’s the worst for me–there’s nobody around; it’s all on the fucking internet.

i hear them right now, my girls, opening the door to the pool.

layla is calling for food, queso, then changes her mind.

she wants to give the dogs a treat.

in 40 minutes we have to get in the car.

1 Oct 2009 name

Since Lau got pregnant again we’ve had premonitions. Lau said something was wrong. This was early on. Pain. Spotting. She told me she’d had bad dreams. A baby born feet first. I told her it would all be fine. But I also felt like something was wrong. There just hasn’t been a good flow since we’ve been down here. We’re down here to see my parents but if we’d had enough money we would’ve figured out some other way to make this transition down to South America. I hate writing that but it is true.

La naturaleza es sabia is what we’ve been teling each other. When we walked into imaging place I thought ‘this is where people get really bad news.’ At that point I’d already gone into movie-mode. Everything you look at compressed down to two dimensions. There were several obese elderly women in the waiting room. An older black man came in and got a barium shake and instructions on drinking it before coming back tomorrow. Even on the drive over it seemed like I was watching a movie of us driving. I  put on some P-Funk to try and make us levantar el animo. Lau said she was nervous. When the technician cut on the ultrasound there was no heartbeat.

Yesterday I was looking at our old weimeraner Kali. She’s almost 14. I remembered her as a young dog. Thinking about the litter. How crazy! She’d been inside her mother once too. Now she was so old. She’d never had a chance to give birth.

It doesn’t feel like a movie right now. The ceiling fan is on high. The shade is pulled down. It’s already October. The embryo was 1 cm long. Some of us never get a name.

30 Sept 2009 – You become momentous.

It was 10 degrees cooler today. I went outside and imagined fall. Fall was happening in other places. In my mind I could see leaves.  They overhung the five falls of the Chattooga River. Here it was just cooler. I went to get the paper. I’d been up since 6 writing. For some reason I was pissed about something.

Later Layla and I went to the beach. There was an offshore wind blowing. Tiny mini-barrels formed in the shorebreak. I pointed to them and told her ‘tubitos.’ On the ride over we’d been listening to Alan Watts. It was a lecture from the 1960s about zen.  He described how you could drift with all of the current. When it happened, “you become momentous.” It seemed like I could feel that Layla was calm and happy in the backseat.

Now we were in the little tubes. Layla wanted me to carry her out further where there were pelicans. “When you get too close they swim away,” I said. We tried going under a few times. Layla is not afraid of the water.

23 Sept 2009 – Bienvenida Mariel

What’s better than welcoming someone into the world?

bienvenida mariel from David Miller on Vimeo.

20 Sept 09 –

working on post tonight for the notebook about leaving things behind like all the old notebooks and publications that we spread out on the bed this afternoon. Layla wasn’t very interested in them and I don’t blame her.

Very hard week this past week. Layla stays stoked it seems like. Kind of a mini buddha.

11 Sept 2009 – baby casa

This morning in bed with Lau and Layla–Layla touching Lau’s belly button: “baby casa, baby casa.”

9 Sept 2009

Layla and I drive to Potter Park. The radio has a show about animals. We pull into a parking space under a silver oak. I take my time getting out. 10 minutes ago I was g-chatting and typing and reading emails. Now we’re out here sweating.  Layla grabs ‘baby.’ We walk to the playground. There’s nobody else here.

I sit on the mini-bulldozer that pivots and shakes on a spring. All above are long-needle pines and spanish moss. I get off the bulldozer and sit down. Layla gets on the bulldozer. I play with the pine needles. Layla comes over and plays with the pine needles. “See how they fall from the branches, the needles?” I say. I realize there’s a layer of brown needles beneath the green needles. I’ve never noticed it before. I feel like I could sit with her and be any age. Some other people are coming–a man, woman, and baby probably 1 year old. The man has a tattoo on his shoulder. They walk 50 feet from us but don’t look at us. Layla senses they’re not interested in us and doesn’t look back at them but knows they’re there.

We go over to the balance beam. She puts ‘baby’ up there. I pretend I’m surfing up there. Then we get on the tire swing. “Hold onto the chains,” I say. We swing and laugh. I think about tire swings. They seem ‘innately good.’ I think about us having one on our land down in Patagonia. We need to plant some trees.