The studied notes of our genome

My son, my epiphany, was born at 0300 December 24, 1990 at Balboa Hospital in San Diego. I say my epiphany because I was not prepared for the amount of hit-me-in-the-heart love I would feel. I liken it to the moment the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. Yesterday I was reading a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and there’s a line, A hundred doors spring open and I thought yes, that’s it. 

My son has become a conundrum rolled in a cloak of silence. He was a happy baby, a happy boy, a loving child. He was teamed perfectly with his sister. She was (is) bold and headstrong and he was restrained and calming. Both smart, creative and full of laughter and light: children.

Both are grown now. Both have made their own marks in the world, their own lives, in wildly different ways. You think that you’d always feel any hurt like a web vibrating to the fly’s touch. But the news of disappointment comes the same way, if at all, dribs and drabs, piecemeal. I guess it feels like what Ellis from No Country For Old Men says, “What you got ain’t nothing new.” Families are tentative.
 
Here’s something I wrote recently, called Palindrome, that thing that is the same forward and back. You can’t get back what was taken, you can work to repair what is still possible. My son is thirty and silent, my father is dead; I’ve never shut the door to possibility.

PALINDROME

One of my warmest memories of my father is when I am three or four. It’s evening, my father is home from a day in the woods. He’s settled into his chair smoking a pipe and watching TV. I curl up in his arms my head in the cradle between his shoulder and chin. The tobacco smell is sweet, he wears Old Spice and the remnants of this smell is always on him. He bathed after coming home from work; he does not shave in the afternoon. When I move my head or he speaks his whiskers graze my cheeks. He wears a flannel shirt which is line-dried and smells of apple and sky. I feel his heart beat, I hear his breath.  This memory ends there, because I always fell asleep.

This particular memory loomed when I held my son when he was small as he placed his head beside mine or rested where he could hear my heart.  By that time my father had excised me from his life and my son would only meet him once, though I tried to tell each of the other in halting and strange ways. They would have gotten along. My son would have loved the endless tools and building, he would have taken to welding (which he did later in high school) and mechanics. My father may have found someone who was content to sit and learn. To learn the names and ways of all the tools and motors. To be content in the silent hum of machine and a man.

~~~

And here, also, a poem. Indulge me, it's a tough day:

A semi-explanation for our continued disorders
 
Here is stardust disguised as bone:
vertebrae, wrist, cup of hip,
time secreted in tibia and femur.
The moon’s shadows have nothing on us.
 
Things that hold the half-life of joy
stay buried deep in the marrow;
we carry this as our inheritance.
A collective grief waiting to be stirred.
 
Here where wonder hesitates, dreams
pretend to sleep. Who knew sadness,
was a recessive gene? Inertia like a hidden
blood disorder, shyness passed down like a lazy eye.
 
Better to believe in prayers and spells
than the studied notes of our genome.
I can apologize in advance but I cannot
give you the cure that will heal us.

~~M.E. Hope