Some Assembly Required (25 page)

Jax’s body and gestures are like ours, as he expresses things that have been zinging around his mind all these months. He can produce more grown-up sounds now, with intonation, emphasis, and question marks, instead of a monotone. This staggers the mind—from ticker tape to nuance in mere months.

“I’m part of the vertical world now,” he’s announcing. “I stand up, and hold on, I look you in the face, and I stare into your eyes, and then after a minute, breathy bubbly stuff with sound comes out of my mouth.”

Jax can kiss now, openmouthed and ethereal, like an elderly sea anemone, or a bubble wand, or one of those pink chiffon octopuses that look like Eve Arden. His kisses leave a light film behind.

I took him out to lunch at a Mexican restaurant with a girlfriend today, and he was very easy, shoveling in massive amounts of avocado, plain beans, flour tortilla. But on the way home he pooped, and from the front seat it smelled like a sick walrus had gone to the bathroom in the backseat, or died. When I got home I laid him on my bed to change him, and said, “Wow, honey! This one is the new gold standard,” and he clapped solemnly.

He pulls himself to his feet, holding on to table edges and chairs. He is going to walk any day, soon, maybe when Tom and I are in Europe next month. I told Sam and Amy, gently, “They don’t walk
towards
you.”

This year was the first time I got to celebrate Father’s Day as the father. In past years Father’s Day has always been an improvised event. My mother isn’t even a fan of Mother’s Day, supposedly her big day, so creating a tradition for Father’s Day was about experiment and imagination. I had great male mentors—my grandfather Rex, or Papa as I called him, who died when I was six; my uncles Stevo and John; the gay uncles; my Big Brother Brian; my adopted grandfather, Bill Tooley—and my mom and I always took the day to show love and thanks to the men in my life who looked after me and helped guide me on my journey, and still do. But I didn’t get to do a heavily fatherly Father’s Day with my dad, because I didn’t meet him till I was seven, and I usually saw him only once a year, for Thanksgiving week, so it was always makeshift.

Now I’m the dad, and Father’s Day was a blank canvas for whatever I wanted to make of it. I woke up Sunday with a whole day full of plans, but that morning, none of them were what I wanted to do. All I wanted was to hang out with Jax all day, doing nothing, together. My mom always taught me
that there was no shame in claiming a day completely for yourself, and informing everyone around you to be extra nice because it’s your day. She would announce that it was International Anne Lamott Day, or Sam Lamott Day, and you got to call the shots, and you got to say your choice was to play catch or dinkum tennis in the driveway (me), or eat carrot cake frosting while watching disaster movies on TV (Mom). Amy was totally hands-on about doing all the unpleasant daily jobs so all that was left was pure guy time with Jax, my perfect hilarious little son.

I was really happy on Father’s Day. I hung out with Amy and Jax, and it was great except for one thing. I wanted to talk with my dad. He and I had always done a pretty good job of staying in touch, but we hadn’t talked in a few months—I was busy with Jax and school—and I was a little nervous to call. I had to leave a message for him, sort of discouragedly, but he called me back in fifteen minutes. We had a genuine conversation; it felt like the first time we were talking as two adults. We talked about how we were doing and what projects we were working on. I got a chance to tell him sincerely how grateful I was that we are in each other’s lives and futures. I told him how our lost time together when I was young ended up playing such a huge part in my finding the strength and courage to stay in my son’s life, no matter what. That’s the most important fact of my life: that even though I was too young, and too terrified and confused, to be a dad, I
promised God and Jax that I would show up and be the best father I could be.

The other important fact was that I got a clean slate with my father when I was young. So many kids I know were almost destroyed by being caught in the middle of the damage of their parents’ drama, the parents hating or badmouthing each other. My life so far has been light-years away from the Disney images of families, but I wouldn’t trade it, because getting to be a father, at the same time I get to have a relationship with my father, is such a blessing. I am getting to know Jax, my dad, and me all the time. What helped this happen was that my mom put me before herself, and had the class not to speak negatively of my dad while I was growing up, and she supported me and him in our relationship together, and that left a space for me to come up with my own opinions of him. He’s odd and not perfect, but he has a big heart. He’s unusual and very sensitive, which I grew up to be, which I hate—my mom is, too, so I got double-whammed. He and I have an understanding of how much we are to each other. We both mean really well, and we have both really screwed up. Nothing will ever change the fact that I had a single mother, but I forgave my father for the stuff or time he couldn’t give me; I just dropped the bad feelings at some point. Well, you know, mostly.

Because, I mean, I have Jax, and having had my exact father helped give me that.

Sam, Amy, and Jax came over for a final Cousins dinner, to say good-bye, as I leave on vacation tomorrow. Tom and I are flying to England for a few days, and then we’re taking a cruise ship to Eastern Europe with some sober friends. Besides Sam, Jax, Amy, we had Clara and Stevo, Neshama, Ricky and his girlfriend, who brought presents for Clara and Jax. Clara got colored pencils, and Jax got three crayons, tucked inside training crayon holders that look like gearshift knobs. He immediately ate part of the green crayon.

Our family was like a nutty circus in the living room. Ricky, who is tall and skinny like his father, is still mourning, but not acutely. We will all miss Millard forever. Clara drew with Jax. Amy sat next to him as he stood at the coffee table. I’m so glad Jax got her rich dark skin. She’s lost at least half of her baby weight, but is still heavier than when she came to us. Three years ago, Amy was a size 00, and the parts of her were all struggling to hold together, after she had left her parents in North Carolina, her bigger family and best friends in Chicago. She and Sam were so in love, and they were between being kids and being adults. She was a full-time student at a cosmetology school in San Francisco, Sam was working full-time as a carpenter, making a living for both of them, while he waited to begin art school.

Now, a year after Jax, they have grown up: you see the
utterly transformative effect of their becoming parents, even though their youthful appetites and wildness must still be a part of the mix. Amy is knit together by her focus on and love for Jax. But it is hard for her to feel whole, with so much of her heart two thousand miles away.

Stevo, and then Sam, tossed Jax in the air. This is such a guy thing—maybe it’s like vertical football, or vertical catch. Anyhow, Jax laughs hysterically. He has an irresistible loose, silly laugh, like those Japanese cow noisemakers you tip over that make a metallic hiccup sound.

Neshama said later that Jax is the photographic negative of Sam as a baby—the dark hair and eyes and skin; all of towhead, fair, ethereal Sam’s qualities spill out, spelled out with dark hair and olive skin.

They share deep powers of observation and focus, but Sam as a baby was more edgy in his watchfulness, while Jax has a sturdy, calm peasant quality.

Sam always had a solid workman’s nature, and a plan, and Jax does, too: This is where this goes, we could shove
this
in here; now we should put this in our mouths, chew on it a minute, and now, on the count of three, fling.

Jax is unflappable, whereas Sam was quieter and reached for you like a koala bear, to watch from a safer post. Jax thrives in the midst of the Lamott family circus, with the big dogs lumbering around him, kissing him to within an inch of his life.

I try to stay with the delicious package of him, right here,
right now. You have to keep looking at what you got right here: Jax, examining his universe methodically, centered and comfortable in his skin. He’s busy exploring and inventing, moving things forward, fitting things together, then hauling himself up to a standing position, and clapping at his own prowess.

He’s doing what a baby needs to do, to find out everything about life being lived around him, within his grasp and beyond. Our job, I guess, is simply to help keep him safe, support his explorations, and not have a complete collapse all the time from loving someone so deeply.

Tom and I flew to London today. We will spend a few days sightseeing with my cousin Robby, who is my age and has lived in London for ten years, and then fly to Stockholm with our friends for a cruise of the Baltic Sea. Tom got us upgrades to business class with the miles he has amassed by doing talks and workshops everywhere. He said that today would be about celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of my being clean and sober. That worked for me.

Our plane took off at two. We had a good meal, and he was acting like a semi-normal person for once: he had not said anything loud and awful about my heretical beliefs, or my butt, or how everyone on board is worried sick about me.

But at four, he dusted off his hands and said, “Your birthday
is over now.” When I protested, he tapped his watch and showed me its face. It was set to London time, where it was midnight. He went back to his book. I went back to mine.

Tom and Robby hit it off and were jabbering away a mile a minute about English history. I tagged along behind them like a Smurf. They are both brilliant students of history, and I could not keep up. However, I had the gum and a bottle of water, so they had to be nice to me.

In the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, Tom especially wanted Robby to admire the marker of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems Tom has been sending me for the twenty years that we have been friends. The epitaph over the monu ment is
“Esse quam videri,”
which Tom translated as “I am that I might see.” His understanding was that it meant: “In order that I might see Life, with a capital L,” as in the divine. He quoted Hopkins’s famous lines: “The World is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”

Robby asked, “What does that
mean
? I’m a Jew.”

“It means that I might see the presence of God, the breath of God, the movement of God in our lives, the Love, the tasting of all of this. Hopkins is going beyond Annie’s tense little friend Saint Paul, who wrote, ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God,’ which was very radical at the time,
because, well, it was Palestinians and Jews sitting down to lunch. These are the same people today. Paul was saying that everything connects us to love, like a tether. Whereas Hopkins addresses the
rhythm
of God—it goes fast, it goes slow, whatever. There’s a heartbeat just beyond listening.”

Stockholm is as fabulous and watery a city as Venice, fourteen islands set on a clean and expansive body of water. Who knew? I’m an American—we don’t have to know this sort of thing. It is magical beyond words, medieval, mystical, friendly. I could stay here a long time. I went walking with my friend Ann, who was on the cruise, an old pal of Tom’s. She can walk as fast and for as long as I can. Tom is good for an hour, max, so we left him behind. We crossed bridges from one island to the next, and saw castles, towers, parapets. At dusk, we asked a blond man—they’re all blond—who jogged past us for instructions to the royal palace, and he shouted back to us over his shoulder, “No, no, free Swedish theater in the park! Free Swedish theater in the park!” We looked at each other, shrugged, and followed after him, until we came upon a great sprawling park, in the center of which was a stage surrounded by hundreds of people of all ages, babies and ancient old folks, too, many with picnics, who were watching an upbeat musical play unfold. The scene was Ingmar Bergman meets Abba. I ached for Jax to be there with
me, up on my shoulders, clapping, babbling away in his native Swedish.

My annual herring needs were met midway by early evening.

Ann and I walked and walked until our feet ached; we were blissed out on the sights, the views, the people. But the best part of the visit was when I huddled alone with Tom before dinner. After my nap, we sat in the hotel lobby, looking at a catalogue of flowers that Tom would plant at his house and mine in the fall. He wanted me to pick out my favorite color daffodil for him to plant, but I said, “Don’t they just die in four or five days, and not come until the following spring? So what is the point?”

“The point is those four or five days,” he said.

Ann, Tom, and I spent today in Helsinki, trying to find shade from the heat wave in gorgeous and very orderly parks, then hiking to the great Uspenski Cathedral. It’s a Finnish Orthodox church, built during the reign of Czar Alexander II, when Finland was part of the Russian empire. The outside is red brick with thirteen gilt onion-shaped domes, thirteen for Jesus and the twelve apostles. Inside, it’s Romanesque arches and gold leaf everywhere, to inspire the same awe with which we will enter heaven. There’s an ornate screen of painted wood, with angels, saints, even Saint John
the Baptist holding his own head. Ow. It gave me a new perspective on the mild headache I have had for a couple of days. Above and behind the screen is a marvelous deep blue dome ceiling with stars, like a medieval planetarium, and screens to protect the priests from the sight of us while they conduct services, because we on this side are too revolting for words; I certainly felt this today, fat and sweaty, with a limp like a clubfoot, from a blister. Tom looked, as usual, like a wino hippie, wearing a Mexican wedding shirt and an expensive Australian hat.

The art was Byzantine—all icons and saints, which Tom said was very fourth- and fifth-century, all the gold paint, the intricate mosaics, the hammered silver over small oil paintings. I got mesmerized, lost Tom briefly, and wandered around in the corners and clusters of tourists like Quasi modo looking for Esmeralda. I finally found Tom outside, talking with a man who was a chemist from Holland, about—as Tom put it to him—this business of God.