Everywhere there are scars.

With a dear, elderly family member, one you’ve watched age, you know all too well what the folds of skin hide, the scars and liver spots and the signs of roads travelled roughly.

And so it is with this house: the old wavy glass bubbled and fractured in its agonizing, inexorable flow to the ground; the signs of rot, new and old, around the corners of things; the imprints of towel racks and toilet lids smoothed but not obscured by coat upon coat of paint; pits in the walls and floors; gouges in doorjambs. Around the rims of rooms the floor is dotted with the little footprints, hasty and frenetic, of old carpet tacks. The edges of windows, too high to touch, are darkened with the pocks left by a century of makeshift window treatments.

But still, this house is home.

The silence is deafening. I forget how silent the presence of snow makes everything. My room is dark, lit only by the glow of the best early Christmas present ever: my own miniature pine tree, complete with gingerbread ornaments and off-white ribbon.

I am covered over with a white down comforter and a fuzzy apple green blanket. I look across my covered feet to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the wall and a giant Georgia O’Keefe painting of my favorite flower. It smells like home. It smells like candles and pine and woodsmoke and snow. I wish I could bottle it and take it with me wherever I go.

As the clock downstairs chimes midnight and I hear a horse whinny in the backyard and my body is still warding off the negative-two temperature’s chill, I can’t help but think that it sure is nice to be home.

I don’t remember much about believing in Santa. But fairies…now I believed in fairies for a long time.

Often, I lived in places where there were lots of wooded areas. I remember little hollows against huge fallen logs covered in green moss. There were trees everywhere, allowing bits of light to fall onto the leaves. I spent hours in the woods, reading and writing. I would look for fairies, look for signs. I thought I could hear fairies singing and whispering when I followed tiny creeks. In my mind, I built villages for the fairies. I used to leave bowls of milk out.

As I grew older, I had to will myself to still believe in fairies. Then, at last, I could no longer do even that. Belief is a fragile thing. A moment captured in a crystal. Shattered so easily.

When he first left, I would wait. Every Friday night for three months, I would pull a kitchen chair up to the big window in the living room and wait. By ten o’clock, my mom would forcefully remove from the window and send me to my room. Even then I would wait. Lying in my bed, the room dark, I would wait for the sound of my father´s boots clomping across the kitchen floor. I would wait for my door to creak open, to see the silhouette of his face in the doorway.

During this waiting I would plan what I would I do when he returned. Initially, my plan was to run into his arms and sit on his lap. I would snuggle against him ,smelling his sweat and the oil from the chainsaws he ran all day. He would smooth down my hair and call me pumpkin. But as the weeks turned into months, my plans shifted. I would refuse him love. I would make him realize how much he needed my love.

Eventually I stopped waiting.

About six months after he left, I learned that I had received a scholarship to attend a Girl Scout camp. I was very excited, as I had never been to a summer camp. Thoughts of the camp crowded out thoughts of my father, but sometimes late at night I felt a familiar longing to hear his boots against the floor.

About a week before camp, my dad called my grandmother. He wanted me to spend the summer with him and his new family. I was overjoyed until I found out he planned to pick me up the night before I was to leave for camp. My mother left the decision up to me but made it clear that she thought camp was a better option. But camp seemed pale in the warm glow of the knowledge that my father wanted me. I chose him.

Friday came slowly, in the way that anticipation makes time freeze. Finally, the time came to go to my grandmother´s house. My mom, my brothers and I walked over, holding grocery bags with my clothes. At my grandmother’s, I packed my few clothes into her big blue suitcase. I ate supper with my grandfather, and then pulled a chair up to the window. I watched a slow summer sunset give way to increasing black. Every breath I drew took hours to fill my chest and escape again. Finally, my mother walked me home.

As I lay awake, I imagined my Girl Scout friends in their bedrooms, anxiously awaiting their first week-long camp. They would rise early to pile into a van. I would rise early to wait for yet another day.

I was running from the walk-in fridge to the kitchen, attempting to scourge the remains of the week’s perishables with rapid-fire cleaning. We all wanted to go home before 2am. I had a pile of fishtubs- shallow, square plastic storage buckets – to open and then dump the hidden food scrappings in the trash, sanitize the box, repeat. I was moving quickly, in a rhythm of peel open, toss, rinse, wash. Wilted brown lettuce, clanking chicken bones, stale crusty bread crumbs, greasy remains of beige fleshed fish.

I opened my last box so quickly – 1:40 a.m. – that I almost didn’t register what I was looking at. The nude head of a lamb, pink flesh glistening and mottled with red blood stains. Naked peels of ears hanging shrunken on its scalp. Its huge globous eyes, staring blankly, were beginning to ooze in a gelatinous gel. It looked surprised, to be found there by me, so early in the morning. It was as if I disturbed it from a deep fishtub sleep. And it stopped me in my tracks for a moment – we stared at each other – a fleeting contact with the reality of the food chain – until I disengaged my eyes and with a quick flip of the wrist, tossed the head into the trash, stuck the box into the sanitizer, and finished mopping the floors. A fleeting, but jarringly surprise encounter.

When I finally got home and into bed, exhausted, it took me a minute to get the image out of my head: those unflinchingly black eyes, staring out of the dumpster behind the restaurant, watching the black night turn to morning.

I nearly killed Stephen Hawking once. I turned the corner of Pembroke Street in my little red Renault and there he was, in the middle of the bloody road. I tell you, he’s a terrible driver.

That might have ended my academic career, don’t you think? Can you imagine the headlines?

The worst thing is, after I parked the car and stumbled into the department, rather shaken, I confessed my near-miss to a colleague.
“Oh” he said. “I wouldn’t have worried. He did all his best work twenty years ago”.

G roovin’… but not on Sunday afternoon. It was 9:30 on a weekday night in June, and I was leaving work to head home…. I did not want to go home…. I don’t want to go home still.

I was the last one in the gym at work and had stretched out my routine as far as it my body would let it, and there was not anymore procrastination to be had. Steel door clanking shut behind me, the bright moon careened recklessly off the reflective glass of the faceted 3 story building, sending nighttime shadows in all directions. I walked, still sweating, up the deserted path to the lot. As I walked I saw a man in the building, walking in the same direction. He walked just like my father. (My dad walked like Jason Bourne though a Paris street; quick, boxy ‘Shotokan’ staccato steps, but with a graceful flow in his arms and shoulders. Fast, purposeful and defiant….) It was twenty yards before I realized it was me, reflected in the glass by the moonlight. I was humbled, seeing him in me…. and in thinking, I pictured him leaving the refinery after a second shift, walking like me, towel and dirty clothes rolled under his arm, heading home to my mom. At home my mom would be in a house coat an curlers, waiting diner and a kiss before turning into bed anticipating her own 7am start at a local factory, us kids… in bed or watching TV. I thought of her and wondered what she would think of the mess her remaining son had made of his life.

I pressed the button on the key fob and the Explorer lit up and unlocked. Left foot on the ground, I threw my right leg over the unneeded step rail and onto the leather seat. Key in, three electric motors whirred and all the windows and moon roof were opened into the warm summer nights air. A piece of gum and selection of theme music for tonight’s voyage… Rascals… and doing fifty through the empty plant I was soon released on the general public. Baroquenhorse rides, another runner in the night. I could have been doing eight …I could have been doing eighty… through the old farm roads, now lined with Mac Mansions the house monster had spit out into that farmer’s corn fields. I was lost in thought and time until I hit the Turnpike toll and sped up and around the ramp. I topped out at eighty five for this lonely ride tonight and spent most of it musing over the feel of the wind in my left hand as I held it out the window. I could feel the wind. It was tangible. It blew my hand off course as I tried to move it. But I could not see it, anticipate it with my senses or grasp it. It took its own course in spite of my will or efforts. I had no influence. The CD plays…”I can’t imagine anything that’s better…The world is ours whenever we’re together. There ain’t a place I’d like to be instead of….. Groovin’”

Like the wind in my hand I had no influence on, my home greets me with the uncut lawn, the garbage and sink full and a large pile of fresh bills on the kitchen table. The kids are out. As I place my keys, watch and wallet on the fireplace mantle, my wife sleeping on the couch, turns and drunkenly slurs, “sspaghetti is on the stove….”

I stood frozen looking at her as she lay. She is a pretty woman. I gave so much. Perfection is a dream, I know, but, oh, just a little effort. It shouldn’t be like this. As a team, so many of weights would have lifted easily, so many mistakes we would have dodged……. and dreams…. dreams we could have made and met…..and in so doing bonded deeply together. What we could have had. What we should have had…. damn…. what we got….. If she had just tried…just a little…..

“Life could be ecstasy, you and me endlessly . . .Groovin’ “

My first kiss was with Michael Something-or-Other, both of us aged four, in a homemade fort made out of a quilt thrown over a clothesline. I gave him my allowance, he showed me his wang, I decided he was good enough for me to kiss. (I’m talking about kissing HIM, not his wang. Geez, I was four.)

My worst kiss was with Rickey N. – he ripped up my lips with his braces and smooshed my face so hard I thought he was actually going to push his braceface right through the back of my head. Kisses shouldn’t cut a person. I’m just saying. I mean, I like a little pain with my pleasure but I don’t need you to draw blood. I’m not Angelina Jolie.

My funniest/weirdest/most disturbing kiss came from Steve S. – it was our very first (and last) kiss and it took place outside my friend Kathy P.’s house, on the hood of her car (klassy). Steve came at me with his eyes half-closed and his lips cartoonishly puckered and when he got to my mouth – HE BLEW INTO IT. Hard. Why? Oh, that’s a lovely question, to which I have no answer at all. He gave me a raspberry – inside my mouth. It was one of the more unpleasant experiences I’ve encountered so far in my life. The funny thing was, he apologized profusely afterwards and claimed he didn’t know what possessed him to do it. ONLY WOULD HAPPEN TO ME.

My saddest kiss was actually two – kisses on each of my cheeks from my dying Grandfather, to say goodbye.

My best kiss is the one I haven’t had yet, but am waiting for…

I have found myself over the last several months drawn toward the pictures of the child I was before the damage began. Before my father began his betrayal. Before I began reminding my mother of the trouble I was. Before I reminded her of my father. Before I formed my own opinions that differed from her own. Before I began seeking and creating ways of removing myself from her presence and household once my father left.

The pictures of the child I was and the child I grew to be become markedly different as I grow older. It’s in the eyes somewhere. Some spark or fire grew steadily dimmer until you have to look hard to see a light anywhere in those small eyes. When I look at the Undamaged photo, taken when I was still indeed undamaged, I smile because I am reminded that the flame was only hidden while it needed protection.

Shortly after my wife and I got married, we started trying to have a child. My wife was 38 when we started trying to get pregnant. Shortly after she turned 39, we visited some fertility specialists. The first fertility person said there was absolutely no way we were going to have kids that were biologically ours. No chance. No hope.

The second fertility specialist told us we could *possibly* have a child, but that the odds were very, very slim, and we were at a much increased risk for having a miscarriage. He told us that fertility treatment probably wouldn’t work, and that we shouldn’t have unrealistic hopes.

Around this time we changed our brand of toothpaste, as the toothpaste. Then four weeks before we were to start fertility treatments, my wife got pregnant. Nine months later, a healthy baby boy was born. He’s now over a year old, and is healthy and cute and a damn lot of fun.

We’ve told this story to many of our friends and family. What have we heard from them?

“I guess you proved that doctor wrong.”

“Had you changed your diet?”

“There must be something in your water.”

I retort that it was the toothpaste. I think this effectively makes my point, which is:

There’s no way to put a causal relationship on any of this. We had a baby, even though the odds were against it. Millions of women have my wife’s condition. Thousands of them will become pregnant. Less than half of those thousands will carry their baby to term. My wife happens to be one of the lucky ones, and we remind ourselves that every day. That’s the only viable conclusion.

I tell this story to anyone who tells me that reiki “works for them”. That echinacea “cured their cold”. That homeopathic belladonna “cures their son” every time. Pass it around, would you?