Process XXI

"You know how you call a guy whose wife died a widower? Or, if your parents die, you're an orphan. You know, there's no word for someone whose kids die. Because it's like the worst thing that can happen." - "Falcon & The Winter Soldier" 3/19/2021

Yep, that was part of our Friday night TV viewing. We actually laughed.

The comic book I am creating will require no fewer than eight pages. I am taking a short play I wrote a few years back, and adapting it into the comic. Each short scene from the play will take one page. 

What this means is I need to edit a scene, which may take five to ten minutes in performance, and bring it down to fifteen panels. Subtlety gets thrown out the window.

Which is fine. But the strip I meant to have completed by last Saturday night is dicey, a lot happens, and it delves into some issues for the characters … I found it very difficult to distill in this way.

I’m still feeling overwhelmed, or maybe just whelmed, you know?

Wednesday afternoon my wife and I received our first dose of vaccine. I did not cry, though I might have, I was texting a colleague who was anxious about doing so themselves. I was helping to ease their anxiety.

If I wasn’t striving to ease someone’s anxiety every day of this pandemic, I might have cried all through that, instead, too.

Are we on our way out? Is this the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end? It is hard to lament a lost year when I have been so creatively active: productions in Cleveland, California, Chennai, writing a full-length play, a one-act play, a ten-minute play adapted into a screenplay for production.

But that’s just me. I lament what my daughter has lost, her senior year spent at home. Such a social and active young woman, confined to the strict conditions of the COVID-19 Pandemic. What she’s been through may define the rest of her life.

But so. I have drafted another page. Moving forward. Happy first day of spring.

How I Am Spending My Summer (2018)

last nite.

And what's it you do again?
Oh I'm a reminder
The hobbled veteran of the disk shop inquisition
Set to parry the cocksure of mem-stick filth
With my own late era middle-aged ramblings
- tonite, LCD Soundsystem

Sitting on the porch of Barnstable (or to some, “The Barnstable”) on the day after my fiftieth birthday, I am weighted with a feeling of loss. Not merely the loss of an old friend, or that sorrow that has followed our family, like a train, as we have lost fathers and heroes and our sense of hope for the future.

It does not help that I am currently reading Lincoln In The Bardo.

Topsail Island

This place is filled with memories, but also doubts. I carry with me the fear that I have failed or continue to fail in my efforts to be an active, engaged parent. As years pass and traditions fall by the wayside, or as I watch the moments tick by in which I am not actively creating or facilitating an activity, like fishing, or a game, like a treasure hunt.

Those moments in which I have intentionally passed on the opportunity to hold my children in a form of stasis, have encouraged them to grow up too soon, to make their own play and not to lean so heavily on mine. It is like a crime. I have such regret.

Seriously, I may need to set this book aside.

Each summer is marked by moments, those events we have scheduled and look forward to, signposts which I see approaching fast by the side of the road, and then catch in the rear-view as they pass at one thousand miles an hour.

With Joseph Morales (A.Ham)

Theater camp, outdoor Shakespeare, then North Carolina and Virginia. Pre-college, Hamilton, and now Maine. My birthday come, now gone, and we, too, will go, in forty-eight hours time. One million miles an hour.

The women were unavailable to attend Girl Camp this summer, and so for the first time since my son was five we have no opportunity for Boy Camp, which has always been a strange mystery. We will make up for that in other ways, at least I hope we do.

And yesterday I was gifted with tickets to see David Byrne at Jacobs Pavilion in two weeks! Another signpost. I am looking forward to that. And then, more or less, our summer will conclude. We are blessed with love and activity, but not enough time.

Play a Day: Living Creatures

Ashley Rose Wellman

For Saturday I read Living Creatures by Ashley Rose Wellman, and available at New Play Exchange.

Having a relationship means risking part of yourself. Having a child means risking all of yourself.

My daughter has a severe peanut allergy. She is smart and diligent, she's fifteen and can care for herself. Always very careful about checking packaging, she doesn't fool around with that. She won't eat any baked good if she doesn't know where it came from.

And yet, things happen.

When my son was less than one year old her had a fall and fractured his skull. I was on watch. It required surgery. He's fine. Scar on the back of his head, when his hair is long you can't even see it.

It didn't have to happen that way. It could have been worse. A fraction of an inch. It could have been debilitating. It could have been fatal.

And before that, we were expecting a baby. Just the two of us, our first child, and he died before he was born. Like that. Things happen.

Having a child means that every day, every moment, is an opportunity to die. The fact that it becomes less fraught as they grow doesn't mean the terror goes away. You just get used to it. It's right there to destroy you if something goes wrong.

Wellman has composed a chilling fable about the helplessness of parenthood. Part ghost story, part aching lament, she taps into the primal fear of child loss, creating a contemporary mythology, not to explain the afterlife, but rather what happens to the living when someone they have put their heart into is gone.

The anxiety, the misery, the bargaining, and the utter impossibility of acceptance, of "closure." We want to believe that one day everything will be okay, that everything will go back to the way it was. But the only way through is forward.