It Takes a Community....

As I think about what to write for this blog, which, if it follows any chronological order at all, will be about Tercero's arrival into our little family, I find my mind wandering down parallel paths--a wayward tourist who refuses to follow the tour guide impatient of getting on with the day's agenda.

Last week, at my book club's regular gathering, we were discussing Ami McKay's fine novel The Birth House. As we talked about the women in the book and their support of one another's child rearing and other gazillion jobs that women have traditionally done, the subject of our own years as young mothers came up.

I briefly recounted being in a close and supportive community of young (and some not-so-young) parents. The book club members commented that I was fortunate to have been nurtured this way. I've had other conversations with people that indicate such an experience was not universal. Many folks did not have a community watching their backs as they struggled with life, kids, spouses, work, home, etc.

I've been thinking a lot about this--writing the blog has let loose those misty (and sometimes pesky) water-coloured memories, after all. But last week's conversation underscored a fundamental truth for me--what kept me sane all through the "tired years" (as my friend Claire calls them--you know the ones--all those days of running after kids, cleaning up, cooking meals, doing dishes--most days you didn't even get your face washed until supper time) was community.

Word freak that I am, I check with the dictionary to see what "community" really means and find that the word's Latin root is communitas, which is made up of cum (with, together) and munus (gift). Those Latins--always ready to provide roots for the everyday terms we toss around with such abandon. I am struck by the notion that "gift" inhabits the word "community." And "community" has become one of those words that is used a lot these days. Everyone is part of some kind of community, and there are all sorts available: gay-and-lesbian community, immigrant community, environmental community, arts community, seniors community--take your pick. I wonder if there is a folks-who-don't-want-to-be-part-of-a-community community out there somewhere. Likely so.

The ubiquitousness of the term leads me to believe that being part of a community is a very human thing. I think we all yearn to be part of something bigger--just remember Bogie's farewell "hill of beans" speech to Bergman in Casablanca. Many of us belong to several communities, all at once. To be human is, in some way, to be a joiner. What allowed our prehistoric ancestors to survive, according to the paleontologists, was their ability to cooperate, to, as The Beatles commanded, "Come together, right now!" (I never got what the "over me" was all about, but then I never understood the lyrics to "I am the Walrus" either).

We didn't have the sharpest teeth, the fastest legs, the strongest arms, the quickest time as we ran through the jungle (hmmm, first the Beatles and now Fogerty--interesting what pops up...). What humans did have was the ability to cooperate, which Richard Leakey says "must be a very basic motivation in human nature"(Leakey & Lewin, People of the Lake, p.121). I try to imagine those cave-days--"Okay you guys--Oog and Blorp will kill the mastadon, Trull will skin it, Kraab will drag it home--remember, it's the BIGGEST mastadon we ever saw! Everyone got it?"

But back to the gift of community--the munus, as the Latins say. The community of families we were part of back in Herbert was most definitely a gift. Many things distinguished this little community of young parents with oodles of kids living in fixer-uppers and driving balky cars. The cars were mostly old and European--one of several idiosyncrasies that distinguished us. Other peculiarities were energy-efficient wood stoves (this resulted in a spectacular roof-ballet involving Rollie on a cold winter day as he fandango'd two icy stories up trying to quell neighbour Bob's chimney fire), the men wearing sneakers with suits to weddings, a passion for playing RISK on weekend evenings (along with the requisite after-game play-by-play--"Oh why, oh why did I go for Asia SO SOON?"), and an open door/bottomless coffee pot policy when it came to visiting.

We lived within a seven minute walk of one another (ten if you ambled or were shoving an umbrella stroller along the uneven pavement). No one locked doors or phoned ahead. You just grabbed the kids (when they were little) or left a note (when they could read) and headed over. There was usually a line of strollers at the back door and a gaggle of kids in the yard getting dirty (summer) or in the house getting IT dirty (winter). The number of kids grew--they evolved into a pack intent on monkey tricks--a pack that Natalie dubbed "The Little Moron Club" after one of their more harebrained adventures. As the kids grew older, their range increased--they moved from the house and yard onto the streets, the school-ground, the railroad embankment, the fields, the creek.

Primero refers to his Herbert upbringing as his "Tom Sawyer childhood." He and his friends had the luxury, so elusive today, of wandering in the world. The Little Moron Club (membership ever-shifting) built forts, tree-houses, encampments. They played with frogs, newts, tadpoles. They hunted gophers, rabbits and stalked badgers. They ate dirt, bugs and carrots with sand still on them. They fell out of trees, off their bikes, into fresh pavement. Their legs in summer were criss-crossed with the scrapes, scratches and bruises of activity. They engaged in annual, epic green tomato fights (this was encouraged by Rollie, who hucked more green tomatoes than any of the kids--Dee was not happy--she'd been saving them for chutney).

What else distinguished our little community? There were some very strong personalities among its members, as well as a generous supply of eccentricities. Perhaps this is what made it so vital and so much fun. We also shared an understanding of being citizens of a rapidly shrinking globe. We may have been living in the middle of the prairie, but we had a keen sense of participating in a world community gradually waking up to its responsibilities and vast potential. We shared a belief that there was more to the world than met the eyes--that we inhabited a spiritual dimension as well as a physical one, and that we needed to nurture that dimension to be fully alive.

Most of all, I believe, we loved one another--not just despite our different personalities and backgrounds, but because of them. I believe we created, for a time, a web of relationships that cradled all of us in its silky, steel-strong filaments. I use the word "web" deliberately, for it is the master metaphor of all things text and textile--a web is made of the ties-that-bind, literally.

Joe and Allie still live in Herbert, but the rest of us, like dandelion fluff, have scattered with the wind. We're all over the place--all over Saskatchewan, all over the country. Most of us are still married to the same guy. In an age where the divorce rage is fifty percent, this seems remarkable. I'm not sure what it points to--perhaps the thought of jettisoning decades of training is too wearying to contemplate. After all, how many years did it take to get the toilet seat left down? Do you really want to spend more time teaching someone the proper answer to "Do these jeans make my butt look big?" And you are unlikely to find a male who will respond with something when you ask "What are you thinking?" It's been my experience that men's thought balloons are often empty.

So we stay in touch. Our kids attend each other's weddings. Facebook abounds with buddies sharing the latest news. The web filaments may be stretched across time and space, but they retain a tenacious strength. As we morph into grandparents, we hope this new generation of parents and children finds its own home-web, wherever that may be.

Back again to munus--to the gift of community. My mind circles this notion like a retriever who's lost the scent--is it human nature to look back with longing on those years? I remember (hmmm, will have to check how many times this phrase crops up in this blog) our neighbours in Herbert, Barb and Eldon, who lived across the street from us. Barb and Eldon were in their forties at the time--they'd raised five kids, a couple of whom we used as babysitters and all of whom became our friends. Barb had the real-life equivalent of a Ph.D. in practical parenting--there was little she didn't know. Possessed of a quirky sense of humour, she would minister to us younger moms with whimsy and wisdom and lots of strong coffee. "Now you girls remember," she'd say, "enjoy these years when your kids are young--little kids, little problems. You'll look back on these years with great fondness, so cherish them as they come."

We would look at each other in horror, consumed as we were by poopy diapers, pukey kids, messy houses (usually in various states of re-construction), empty bank accounts, overgrown yards, and think "It gets WORSE?"

Barb was right. And I'm thankful that I get to tell her so regularly, as she and Eldon live just up-island from us (I enjoy using the term "up island"--it sounds so Vancouver-Island-Native-speak), bless their great hearts. It's almost like having them across the street, only without the blizzards (for which I am endlessly thankful). I do look back at those years with fondness, and realize that I cherished them anyway, even if I didn't realize it at the time, what which being so busy trying to survive them. It's a great wonder how humans can do more than one thing at a time.

I cherish them still--along with the people who made them so memorable. My memory is full of the most amazing images (some of which Jack has managed to scan into his digital album, although at a snail's pace as he has not yet moved through the entire process of purchasing the doo-dad that will speed this up).

I remember whoever came home with a new baby (this happened a LOT for a while) had the first visit--along came the casserole and the toddlers checking out the new arrival. They would peer at the wrapped package and then go off to play, satisfied that the interloper would not interfere with the doings of The Little Moron Club for a while yet.

I remember Rollie dancing on neighbour Bob's roof, trying to put out the chimney fire as Duane and Jack raced over with their fire-extinguishers. Thankfully Rollie lived, as did the house. The stove was a bit of a mess, however.

I remember Natalie phoning us to come quick! We raced over to find her in hysterics as she scrubbed away the signs of yet another infamous poop party--Twins Evan and Luke liked to paint the walls with their poo, which wound up everywhere--on the walls, on the cribs, even little balls of it in their hair. If one twin didn't have any in his diaper, the other would scoop some out and toss it over. Laughing so hard she cried, Natalie said she'd rather howl than bawl.

I remember Joe, famously unable to handle the sight of blood, freaking out when Cameron stepped on the rake. Allie called Jack over to see if Cameron needed to go to the hospital, as Joe, running in circles and flapping his arms like a chicken, was all but useless.

I remember Dee dispensing level-headedness along with her coffee--Dee, our safe port in emotional storms.

I remember, me--just like all those Quebeckers on their license plates--so much more evocative than "Land of Living Skies" (the less-than-stellar Saskatchewan motto whatever it means--I've always thought "It's a Dry Cold" much more apt). As I remember, I am thankful for the gift that was my community of brothers and sisters who were moms and dads, just like us. Just learning about life, like we were. Trying to do a good job of raising kids without a manual, just like we were. We were each other's sounding boards, therapists, nannies, recreational coordinators, EMT's, caterers, wet-nurses (at times), mechanics, friends, allies, compatriots, amigos, etc. We shared our labour, our lives and, most of all, our love. Sometimes we got irritated with one another, with all those eccentric, strong personalities, but somehow we blundered through--it seemed to take more energy being pissed off at someone than to shrug it off. What with the ever-burgeoning Little Moron Club to ride herd on, we had no extra energy anyway.

If wishes were fishes, we'd swim all day long. But wishes we do have, for a'that (as Mr. Robbie Burns might say). And I wish, for all new moms and dads out there, many of whom are former members of The Little Moron Club, the same kind of safety-web we had when we were learning to be parents while still trying to keep the ability to play. Because we did play, and had a lot of fun. I remember (there it is again!) backyard wiener roasts, camping trips, cross-country-ski junkets, RISK tournaments, Hallowe'en parties (some memorable costumes--Duane's dirty old man fondling Natalie's prim prom-queen comes to mind--maybe Jack has a slide?), pot-luck dinners (so many people sometimes that the plates were passed, hand to hand, like pails in a bucket-brigade), and many conversations over coffee--philosophical conversations, spiritual discussions, nonsensical musings, emotional sharings.

I am thankful to all my brothers and sisters, my cum plus munus. While we no longer live within seven minutes of each other (ten if we amble or are shoving an umbrella stroller along the broken pavement), you all live in my heart, where it takes no time at all to come together.

Blast From the Past

Since beginning this blog, I've had some great feedback from family and friends--you all know who you are. Many of you were there, at the beginning. Some of you are new to our little eccentricities.

Anyway, you may be seeing photos posted soon. Jack, who never needs much encouragement to buy a doo-dad of some sort, has purchased a scanner that turns slides into digitized (is that a word?) photos. Of course, he had to research this on the net--consumer reports, industry reports, Gallup and Ipsos-Reid polls, etc. Those of you who know Jack will understand that this is a crucial and often lengthy process in itself. Then he had to scrutinize Craig's List, E-Bay, Used Every-city-on-the-planet, etc. to see what used units were going for. Then he had to buy a new one, bring it home, try it out, be dissatisfied with it, take it back, lose his bill, argue with the guy at the Service Desk, persuade the guy at the Service Desk to give him a complete refund sans bill, and return to the used sites. Then he had to find one, enter into heavy negotiations with whomever to make the deal as sweet as possible. Our boys will know that this will now become the saga, soon to be oft-told by Jack, of "how he got the best deal ever on the best used scanner in the universe".

To make a long story shorter, he now has the scanner thing-a-ma-jig. But the process doesn't end there. He had to figure out how to hook it up to his computer, make it run, and turn all our slides into digital photos. We have a LOT of slides--when we were young and broke, slides were the most economical way to take photos--processing was cheaper, and the colours! Just have a listen to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome"--he says it all.

Last night, after much cursing and swearing at a balky key-board, touchy software interface (I pick up these terms from time to time--am taking a shot in the dark here about how to use them), finally managed to scan five slides--all in only four hours. Apparently there is another doo-dad out there that will scan several slides at once--he's in the research phase right now.

Anyway, the photos are, quite literally, blasts from the past. Of course we have photo albums, but we didn't start prints until well into the Eighties. For the B.C. (Before Children) shots, we only have the slides.

It's a bit disconcerting when your husband of over thirty years looks at a photo of your younger self and asks (with an incredulous note in his voice), "Holy cow, is that YOU?"

You burst into tears, flee into the bathroom, lock yourself in and peer into the mirror. "Holy shit!" you say to yourself, "WAS that me? And is this me NOW?" You may have thought those morning glances in the mirror to check whether there's toast in your teeth reveal the same face you've had for the last thirty-odd years, plus a wrinkle here or there. But you, my friend, have been kidding yourself. It's not the same face at all. That face lies beneath the one you've got now--WAY beneath--and it is disappearing at an exponential rate.

While your face has gone south, your body likely has been accompanying it. Try getting into your wedding dress, if you still have it. You may be able to wedge yourself into it, but zipping it shut is a whole other thing. Or try getting into those skinny jeans you saved from the Eighties (as a fashion artifact, you told yourself--maybe I'll wear them if they ever come back in style). Well--now's your chance--skinny jeans are back--try yours on--I dare you. Or try running up a set of stairs (remember how many times a day you took these while doing laundry, running after kids, cleaning the house, etc.?). You may wish to consult your physician before this last one, however.

Anyway, back to the slides (our culture punishes us enough for getting older--why am I helping it along?). I am thinking that no generation has been so relentlessly documented, filmed, photographed, video'd, as our kids. While we baby boomers had our fair share of eight millimeter home movies (you remember those--where everyone is squinting in the blinding light, frozen in place because the guy on the other end of the camera has just ordered them to do something funny), slides (and the accompanying rite of passage for all teenaged dates--the FAMILY SLIDE NIGHT), photos, etc. But our kids have lived through slides, photos, videos, and now digital cameras, cell-phone cameras, shoe-phone cameras, etc. Their every move has been scrutinized and documented. Babies of baby-boomers, this is your life! And more of your life! And yet more life!

Jack has been following my blog--he is registered as an official follower, as "Jack"--the quotation marks are a self-referential nod-and-wink, but it's him, all right. Since he's become a follower, he's turned into a bit of a pain-in-the-ass (well, okay, MORE of a pain in the ass that usual)--"Why don't you put in the part about blah! blah! blah!" "That's not right--what really happened was blah! blah! blah!" "You forgot to talk about blah! blah! blah! blah!" (All you wives out there will know what I mean).

The Breakfast post seems to have really set him off. He wants to engage Primero in an online continuation of the bacon-cooking debate. He also wants to add more pointers about cooking bacon and eggs. I told him to go get his own blog (among other things).

Anyway, the reason for Jack's purchasing of the scanner doo-dad was so that photos of our collective life could be posted to illustrate the blog posts. I told him to go ahead (sometimes it's easier to just agree), thinking the process of research, search, buy/return, wheel and deal would proceed at its usual glacial pace. What I didn't figure on was Jack's desire to participate in this memory sharing. He worked his way through the entire process in record time--as mentioned, by last night he had five slides done.

Besides the photo of myself (and his sensitive comment) that sent me sobbing into the bathroom, he scanned a couple of photos of the boys as babies/toddlers in our first house (remember the hell hole?).

"Wow," he said, looking at the untaped drywall, the rusty tub that stuck out into the dining room, the torn fibre-board that backed the taps, "It really was a dump, wasn't it?"

There's no way we would move into such a place now. I wonder, if we were young again, would we do so again? I don't know. Do young couples just getting started move into dives and dream of fixing them up? I'm sure they do--I think it's a function of youth and energy and vision and time. When you're young, there's all the time in the world. When you've used up more of that time than you've got left, your priorities shift. You also tend to look backwards a lot. This may simply be human nature--after all, you've got more material to look back at than you have to look forward to.

Jack wondered about posting these pictures--"The kids might be mad at us for forcing them to grow up in a dump!" he said. I pointed out to him that they had plenty of other stuff to be mad at us about without resorting to raw drywall and shabby bathrooms. I also mentioned that he'd worked hard transforming the hell-hole into an actual house. The process, while lengthy (at times it seemed endless), was never dull. I can put up with many things, but boredom is not one of them.

As for the boys, I don't think growing up in a construction zone has emotionally scarred them. Physically, yes, especially Primero, but that is another story. In fact, all our boys have turned out remarkably well (aside from the odd eccentricity). They have good work ethics (now that they've moved out, that is), they have chosen amazing life-partners (except for Tercero--he's adamant that nothing will happen in that direction until he hits forty--we'll see--he does have three sisters-in-law, after all). They all evince the many virtues that we, as parents, hope and pretty much know are lurking beneath sometimes recalcitrant exteriors.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. As a writer, I'll take the thousand words any day. But sometimes pictures are worth a great deal--perhaps not words, bit in their ability to conjure up past reality, photos have few equals (except for, perhaps, the sense of smell--read your Proust!). And so Jack's project of turning a part of our past that is not easily accessible (you need to find the slide projector, the screen, and the battered suitcase that all the slides have been shoved in, and WHO was last in there messing up his organizing system, anyway?) into images that can join the stream of binary digits ("billions and billions of them" as Carl Sagan might have said) that circle the virtual world, binding us together into McLuhan's global village (hmm--Sagan and McLuhan in the same sentence!).

So the slide-scanning continues--it just may become, for a little while at least, Jack's "goddamn raison-d'etre" (to quote Nathan Arizona Senior). For us, it is a way of seeing our past--did we really look like that? Did we really live there? Were those kids ever that small? Why did the mullet last as long as it did?

I wonder how the next generation, our grandchildren's, will experience the documentation of their lives? One thing I know--it will be thorough. Sixty-odd years from now, when they are living on the Planet Zircon colony, they will beam their holographs into the air, look at each other and say, "Holy cow! Is that really YOU?"

Breakfast, The Most Important Meal Of The Day, Any Day, All Day

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, then, if you are Jack, you will reason that breakfast (as in bacon and eggs) can and should be eaten at any time of the day. Jack may have been able to build an entire house, but for years bacon and eggs was the only thing he could cook. This has changed somewhat over the years, but it is still his signature dish. For our household, breakfast always involved the dynamic duo, plus a revolving supporting cast of fruit salad (in season), hash browns (maybe), pancakes (although this was Uncle Walt's specialty), waffles (seldom--especially after Tercero took apart the waffle iron), toast, juice and--indispensable item--coffee, lots of coffee.

Bacon--The Great Debate:

For Jack, bacon has always been, and always will be fried in a frying pan: lay out the rashers (great word, that--veddy British) flat in a cold pan. Turn the burner to medium. Stand in a daze with your fork or tongs raised, positioned nicely to receive the brunt of the spattering grease. (Note: a cup of coffee taken before frying the bacon will help you dodge the worst of the spatters.) Turn the rashers in the pan until they reach the desired doneness. (My spell check has just informed me that this is not a word--however, I think it should be).

If you have customers who run the gamut of wanting various degrees of doneness (see? second usage makes it a word in my book) you will have to remove some slices while still limp and leave others to crispify (hah! another non-word about to enter the lexicon!) in the pan. Remove all rashers to a paper-towel-covered plate. Guard from filchers, as the smell of frying bacon tends to bring them out of whatever woodwork they are lurking in.

Once all the bacon is fried, carefully pour the remaining fat into a can with a tight-fitting lid. (Note: The tight fitting lid is crucial!) Store this for future use, such as frying non-bacon items. One memorable use for bacon fat had been tossed around by Primero and Tercero for years--bacon mayonnaise, the ultimate (in their minds) bacon product. Finally, they decided to field test it. I am happy to report that the results were spectacularly unsatisfactory (enough said).

Primero, unlike Jack, maintains that bacon must be baked in the oven. His credentials as a chef incline me to his view, as does the elimination of the morning spatters. His advice: line a rimmed cookie sheet with parchment paper and lay the rashers (yoicks!) on the sheet. Bake in a pre-heated medium oven (350) for twenty minutes--this will produce a medium-crisp rasher (tally ho!). For limper or crisper bacon, subtract or add five minutes.

If Primero and Jack are present, there will be a huge argument about how to cook the bacon. This will go on for hours, but the method is always determined by whose house the bacon is being cooked in. Me? I'm happy to have someone cook anything for me--I don't care how it's done.

Eggs--Apparently It Is Rocket Science:

Who knew you had to be an engineer to cook eggs? Apparently this is the case, particularly when it comes to frying them. Or so I have been told. Being a non-engineer, I have never learned to cook eggs properly. I've been told this as well, although my fried eggs taste okay to me, but what do I know? Nothing about frying eggs, it appears.

As a non-engineer, I can only provide the following instructions from observation: Take a frying pan (can be the same one you've cremated your bacon in). Put a glob (engineering term) of butter mixed with a blob (another engineering term) of bacon
fat from the can with the tight-fitting lid (again I stress the tight-fitting lid thing--you do not want to mess around with a can of bacon fat whose lid is loose). Turn the burner to low-medium. Wait for the grease mixture to sputter and pop, again splattering you and your surroundings with flying globules of hot fat. Another cup of coffee will help you dodge these as well.

Take an egg--it must be brown, free-range, dark-yolked, laid by happy chickens, and very expensive (you'd think happy chickens would produce cheaper eggs than depressed ones). Crack the shell and slide the egg carefully into the sputtering grease. If you break the yolk, curse and swear because it will not taste as good as an egg with its yolk intact. (This is what I've observed; for myself, a broken-yolked egg tastes as good as an intact one, but again, what do I--a non-engineer--know about these things?)

If you are a real engineer, you will not break the yolk. Repeat this maneuver until the desired number of eggs are sputtering in the pan. Wait three minutes exactly. THIS MUST BE PRECISELY TIMED--if you have access to an atomic clock, all well and good. If you do not, you could use a sundial for all I care. Once the three minutes are up, pour one and one-half teaspoons (again, must be exact--if you don't have an atomic teaspoon, try the little scoop that comes with the coffee--should work)of water into the pan. Slam the lid on and count to three hundred and twenty nine--say "Mississippi" in between the numbers. It must be exactly three hundred and twenty-nine--remember what happened on Lost when they didn't hit the button in the hatch on time.

Remove the lid and lever (yet another engineering term) the eggs onto plates. Serve with any bacon the filchers may have overlooked.

Scrambling eggs is my preferred method--you don't have to be an engineer, it does not spatter nearly as much, and you can get creative by throwing stuff into the eggs. The following recipe is for one dozen eggs--this will feed a normal family of six, or two of our boys: Crack one dozen eggs (unlike fried eggs, these can be white, laid by unhappy and incarcerated chickens, and do not require a bank loan to purchase) into a bowl. Add one/half cup milk (or whipping cream, if you are Tercero). Beat gently until whites, yolks and milk are incorporated evenly. Or, if you haven't had any coffee yet, and are pissed off at family members, you can beat the crap out of the eggs--either way, it doesn't really matter. After all, we don't have to worry about intact yolks--hence the word "scrambled".

Let the beaten egg mixture chill out in the bowl while you do the following: chop four green onions, medium-dice one small red bell pepper, thinly slice four medium mushrooms, grate three/quarters cup cheddar cheese.

Take a frying pan, turn element to medium. Melt a glob of butter (no bacon grease this time) in the pan. Once the butter is spattering modestly, throw in the green onions, red pepper, and mushrooms. Saute for two minutes (get out the atomic clock again--you might as well buy one--see how often you'll use it?). Once the veggies are sweated (this, I have learned, is a culinary term--I don't think it's an engineering one) pour the egg mixture into the pan. Once the egg mixture starts to solidify (I think this is an engineering term), start stirring with a wooden spoon. (Note: do not use the wooden spoon you threaten your children with--this induces needless breakfast trauma.) Throw in the grated cheese. As it melts, keep stirring the eggs--don't stir too much or too little--stir just right. As you will likely have no Goldilocks on hand to help determine this, and there is no atomic clock that regulates this, you'll have to figure this out on your own.

Once no more gross-looking liquid is oozing from the eggs, they're done. Sprinkle with some chopped fresh parsley, chives and/or basil. Scoop out onto plates and serve with any bacon that hasn't been filched (good luck with that!).

There you have it--bacon and eggs--our food portfolio breakfast. You can serve it with toast or pancakes. If you are Uncle Walt, your pancakes are made from scratch, are light and fluffy because he is an engineer and takes the time to beat the egg whites and fold them into the batter. Me? Now that the kids have left home, I've discovered the joys of pancake mix--Aunt Jemima--the kind you just add water to. If you want Uncle Walt's recipe for pancakes, you'll have to ask him.

Food

Food was (and is) enormously important to our family. Well, I suppose food is important to everyone--take it away and you die. But food, while a necessity, is also far more, as we all know. Witness the revolution in food-as-entertainment over the last few years. Celebrity chefs, The Food Network, diets, cookbooks, locovoria, exotica, herbology, grow-your-own (food, that is), etc. Food is an integral part of life, culture, family, history, etc. In a crazy world, at least we can hang onto the food.

Of course, like so many things, our relationship with food is complex--good and bad and everything in between. We have become consumed (no pun intended--well, maybe just a little) by food in some form or another--food makes us fat or thin, healthy or sick, beautiful or not. It is our go-to drug when we are upset, happy, depressed, joyful. It is our reward--Pavlov tricked dogs with it, Skinner sent rats in circles for it--and our punishment if we don't treat it right. We eat too much of the wrong stuff and not enough of the right stuff. We squander carbon to get strawberries in January and pour on the poison to get pretty produce. As Joni Mitchell said, "Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees, please."

Food gives us those Proustian moments when we smell cinnamon or baking bread or tea-and-madelaines and are transported back to grandma's (or auntie's or la mere's) kitchen. Favourite foods evoke experience--time machines of taste and scent. And yet, and yet, we are killing ourselves with food instead of nourishing our lives. While we make ourselves sick with it, we also look to it to give us health and protect us from disease. No wonder we have such a complicated relationship with it.

For me, when faced with something so complex, so complicated, I adopt the Scarlett O'Hara strategy (no, not the one where she swears she'll never be hungry again, although come to think of it, I've been living that one all my life). No, I, like Scarlett, vow to think about it tomorrow--in short, don't worry, be happy, as Bobby McFerrin warbled years ago. (Hmmm, Bobby McFerrin and Scarlett O'Hara in one paragraph--you never know where an unruly metaphor will take a person.)

When we were saddled with small children and a small paycheck, putting food on the table demanded time and effort. Early on, we discovered that any processing was best done by ourselves--it was cheaper. Armed with Recipes for a Small Planet, we knew even then that such food was healthier for our bodies, our souls, the planet and our bank account (such that it was).

Cooking from scratch established a pattern early in our family life--food was something that took time to prepare, so we learned patience (more or less). Our boys also learned to hang out in the kitchen and snitch bits of vegetables, fruit, cheese, etc. as I slaved away as prep cook. Any carving of birds or roasts became a race between their guerilla-like filching and the dinner table. Rapping knuckles with the blunt edges of knives had no effect, nor did scolding or throwing of wobblies. The annoying habit continues to this day--when we gather for family dinners, there is always a flock of male vultures snatching tidbits. While this vexes me enormously, I have learned to accept it for what it is--a gathering at the family hearth and an opportunity to bug the shit out of mom for old time's sake.

I remember the first Thanksgiving turkey I ever cooked--Jack and I were living in Edmonton--he was going to school (this was before Herbert and the kids). We'd invited some expat Saskatonians to share the feast. For some bizarre reason (there must have been one--who could conjure up such a lame idea on her own?), I put a sheet of foil between the bird and the pan. I know, I know--what was I thinking? Not much, apparently.

Of course the foil baked onto the pan and stuck like, well, welded aluminum. It took ages for me to pick the bits off the bird and the bottom of the pan. Even so, we were biting down on teeth-shuddering metal slivers throughout the meal. The gravy was particularly deadly--lille foil sea-mines just waiting to shiver our fillings.

But we survived, and I got a lot better at cooking, mostly because I like to eat. I love food and have come to love cooking and cookbooks, The Food Network, sexy kitchens, gadgets, doo-dads, weird and wonderful ingredients, ethnic cuisines, and more. When we travel, I am invariably drawn to grocery stores, and not the cute tourist markets, but the supermercados where real folks shop. I will come home with all sorts of salsas, sauces, spices, mixes and produce, if I can smuggle it in. And, of course, cookbooks. There's no such thing as too many cookbooks (unlike too many cooks). Jack disagrees with this, for he is the one who must construct the shelf-space to house them.

I still have the first cookbook I ever bought--The Four Roses Flour Guide to Good Cooking--twenty-fourth edition, published in Winnipeg by Lake of the Woods Milling Company, Limited. The spiral binding is bent, the cover long gone. Pages are torn, missing, dog-eared, ragged. They are smeared, bleared (sorry, Gerard Manley Hopkins) with chocolate (Basic Brownies page), egg white (Lemon Meringue Pie page), soy sauce (Sweet'n'Sour Sauce page), grease--likely butter (Prize Butter Tarts page) and all forms of gunk and goo. Pages have fallen out and are shoved back in willy-nilly. The book is held together with a big bulldog clip. It's irreplaceable.

Over the years, a family develops a repertoire of food--holiday treats, everyday meals, snacks, party treats, camping food--favourites of all kinds. Some pretenders to the favourite throne never quite make it, but hang in there, like Prince Charles, ever hopeful of making the top tier. Others enjoy a brief moment in the sun, only to fade away (where, oh where is Princess Fergie now, you ask? Still shilling for Weight Watchers?). Some, yeomanlike, keep their heads down, do the work and stay their humble course--the Prince Edwards of food. And some achieve legendary status and staying power--remembered fondly always--the Queen Mums of cuisine.

It takes time to build such a portfolio. Claimants come and go, some stay, others disappear, but there is always a dependable cadre to call upon. As you can guess, I am fascinated by the relationship between food and family, culture, memory. I recall a New Year's Eve party at our house--our friends, a pretty diverse group, were sitting around a crowded kitchen table (why, oh why do people always congregate in the kitchen?) swapping stories about memorable family dishes--what our grannies, babas, kokums, omas, abuelas, madar bozorgs and mormors made for those special dinners.

You could see it on people's faces--their eyes shone as they recalled the dishes--reciting the ingredients, invoking the gods of hearth and home. I wish I had taped the conversation--it was memorable, it was magic. There we were, a microcosm of the planet's cultures, remembering how food made by tender hands made us feel like we belonged somewhere special.

As I said, food was important. Our boys grew up liking all food--they were the most unfussy of eaters. In fact, they were very good eaters--a while ago, in a fit of boredom, Jack and I attempted to calculate just how much food money the foursome cost us over the years. As the amount quickly grew to dizzying proportions, we abandoned the project. If we had poured millions of dollars down their gullets, we didn't want to know about it. As our friend Rollie's old dad used to say (Rollie grew up in a farm family of seven children), "You can't begrudge the bastards food!"

Three of our four boys have worked at some time in the food industry. Primero was a chef. Tercero and Cuarto worked in restaurants in various capacities--server, food-runner, prep cook, dishwasher, etc. This comes in handy at family potlucks. I don't believe many engineering students make risotto with homemade stock (ya gotta roast the bones first, says Tercero, then simmer for at least eight hours). Cuarto's chocolate cheesecake is so rich it must be shaved rather than sliced or it will induce coma. Segundo's Tom Yum soup says it all. And we always look forward, with salivating mouths, to what Primero decides to throw together.

All families have their food portfolios. This includes recipes--usually from cookbooks with the gummed up important pages. But it is more than this--each recipe is also a history of meals anticipated, planned, prepared and shared. Each recipe will have famous successes, infamous failures, odd substitutions, interesting variations. The food portfolio is an unfolding story of a family's nourishment--physical, cultural, spiritual, historical. It is a work in progress, always-already (thank you, Mr. Derrida) being written and re-written. For we only stop eating when we die, and when we stop eating, we will die. Even then, someone will inherit the cookbooks. I still have my eye on my mother-in-law's pristine (how did she keep it so?) copy of The Four Roses Flour Guide to Good Cooking. Not one stained or missing page, no bulldog clip holding it together. My sister-in-law now has it. If she doesn't go first, I may have to steal it.

Here is our portfolio--you will have to provide your own grease stains.

TO BE CONTINUED

Segundo Redux

By hour twenty three, I was getting sick and tired of the whole thing. What bonehead decided to give this no-medication thing yet another go-around? It didn't help to know that I was that bonehead. What was I thinking? If, by some sliver of a chance (and at that moment, the sliver was shrinking like a sno-cone in the sun) I EVER found myself in this situation again, I was going to ask for every drug in the pharmaceutical arsenal.

Hour twenty three and a half--m sluggish cervix finally woke up and started moving into Stage Three. I was so tired I don't remember much about this Stage Three, other than it was thankfully much shorter than Primero's Stage Three. Apparently my cervix decided to follow what all the books had told me.

After a scant twenty minutes of hard pushing with Jack once more hoisting up my back. Doctor Heather, backed up by the nurses doing their baby cheer, hauled out a gigantic head--this time, with no assistance from the Rube Goldberg suction machine and its little metal cup.

I was too tired for the moment of cosmic connection we'd had with Primero (or maybe we had it, but my eyes were closed, trying for a second of sleep). Segundo was suctioned, weighed, APGAR'D, and brought over by the nurse. "He's a big one," she announced. "Ten pounds and half an ounce."

He was a big one--a giant, Thanksgiving turkey of a baby--big head swathed in fat rolls, cheeks that obscured chin, neck and upper chest, downy black hair (not as abundant at Primero's, who'd been the darling of the newborn nurses who tried all sorts of hairdos on him)and the longest fingers I'd ever seen on an infant. These weren't the tiny pink shrimp I remembered circled in Primero's little fist--these were splayed starfish hands--constantly moving in invisible ocean currents.

Childbirth had fooled me again--this one was very different from the first, yet so similar in the pressing contractions, the waves of pain (yes, PAIN, dammit--I consign your discomfort to the ninth circle of labour hell!) There had been a workmanlike aspect to the entire procedure--a "been there--done that--let's get the job done" feel. But the complex and deep joy was the same--here again was a wee, small life breathing our combined air, and he was a baby brother to boot!

Segundo was too big for the newborn nightgowns. The nurses raided the pediatrics ward for clothes that would fit him. When we took visitors (cheerfully encouraged by this hospital) to the nursery window and surveyed the rows of bassinets with their neat little bundles, we would point out Segundo squashed into his.

"Wow, you poor thing!" was the consensus of the female visitors. "Wow, what a bruiser!" was invariably the male response. It is comments like this that lead be to believe (reluctantly) that there really is something to the gendered brain--all my feminist sensibilities bristle at this, and insist it's all about culture and environment. However, years of living with male brains (such as they are) have forced me to concede there may be more to it than conditioning.

Primero's reaction to his baby brother was completely in keeping with his generous nature. He was excited, but a bit disappointed we weren't going to call the baby Poopie.

The day before we left the hospital, Jack and I went out for dinner. The nurses said to have a good time. What a difference from before--this was more like it. At last, a hospital that didn't treat you like a prisoner or a patient--just a mom who needed a babysitter. We were able to get groceries as well as grab a burger--it was all so normal.

And so we were four--if we'd had an ounce of sanity, we would have stopped there--after all, there were two of us and two of them. We'd have had a fighting chance. And for two more years, we did--have a balance of power, that is. Segundo and Primero quickly bonded into a unit of two distinct personalities. Segundo's spectacularly fat cheeks invited strangers to pinch them in grocery stores. He would scowl at them from the cart--skewering them with his glare. "Oh my," they'd say and move off. From an early age, Segundo refused to be pushed around.

Having more than one child taught us a great deal. We soon learned that children with identical genetic makeup raised in identical environments will be anything but identical in THEIR makeup. I'm still gobsmacked by this truism. For me, it suggests that if there is a defining human quality, it is the differences we share. I know, I know--that sounds like a contradiction, but it is profoundly true, and the world would be a better place if we would cherish and nurture those differences and understand that they deepen our essential unity rather than compromise it.

And so for one brief shining moment (to borrow a snippet from Camelot, the musical), things were good--the hell hole was being transformed into something, if not quite heavenly, at least it was heading up through purgatory towards earth. And we had a little time to run the show--two parents, two kids (and small ones at that). They were healthy, we were too. We had friends, meaningful work to do--this was life. It was ordinary, unspectacular, but rich and wonderful, for all of that.

Segundo

Primero celebrated his first birthday in our new house (or the "hell hole", as I came to call it with no affection whatsoever). That April was warm and sunny, unlike the frozen month of Primero's birth. While April's weather wasn't cruel that year, settling into the hell hole was.

By now there was a proper door on the bathroom, so visitors could actually stay for a second cup of coffee. Jack had torn out the divider (two hacked-off pieces of ubiquitous paneling nailed over a frame of popsicle sticks, or so it appeared to me) between the miniscule dining room and living room, both made even smaller by the swirling orange and green shag that hid and grimly hung onto bits of everything, even when pummeled with the vacuum cleaner.

Primero's birthday party was attended by family and friends--there was a flock of kids in attendance. Rollie and Dee's two boys Rollie Jr. and Nicholas were six and four--we already had them pegged as future babysitting material. Duane and his wife Natalie's twin boys Evan and Luke were a year older than Primero. We'd met a couple who lived across the street from our hell hole--Joe and Allie, whose boy Cameron was also a year older than Primero. For a one-year old, he already had a lot of friends.

And of course there were assorted grandparents, aunts and uncles--even a cousin. Jack's brother Walt and his wife Nancy had just had baby Jessica--a two-week-old scrap of baby girl with red hair and blue-black eyes. Jack's sister Chloe and husband Duncan were there, Chloe four months pregnant with Anna.

Then there were Gramma and Grampa (Jack's parents) and Nanna and Poppa (my parents). Primero was the first grandchild on both sides, and within easy range of being spoiled rotten. Thank God baby Jessica had come along to take some of the heat. Gramma had baked her signature angel food birthday cake--the kind with the big hole in the middle, which she'd filled with a giant candle.

There we were--sitting on the ratty back lawn behind the crumbling stucco of the hell hole's back wall. We perched on lawn chairs and on logs artfully arranged around the fire pit made from broken concrete slabs we'd dug up in the back yard. The kids were crammed into the sandbox--a gigantic tractor tire filled with sand. All that was missing was a trailer and some pink flamingos, although I thought the house stood in quite nicely for the trailer.

As I look at the photos of that first birthday (the first of years and years of birthday parties, noise, goodie bags, noise, hot dogs, noise, cake, noise, ice-cream, noise) I am struck by how young we all were--in our twenties, with little money and prospects of making more still years away--and by how much fun we had together in that shabby yard. And how many kids there already were--crawling, toddling, staggering, walking, running. It seemed there were kids everywhere--and there would be more to come.

Primero was one entire year old, so we started thinking about the second child, the spare. After all, we were established--we had a house (of sorts), friends, family, lots of love and attention to spread around--we needed another kid to soak some of this up. And we were getting the hang of this child-rearing thing--we were the pros from Dover.

That summer, Jack tore off the paneling in the living room, raised the roof, added the front entry, re-framed the walls--we no longer lived inside a small chocolate.

That fall, I became pregnant with Segundo. It's strange, but when you are pregnant with your first kid, everyone is extremely solicitous. People insist you get lots of rest, will not disturb you in case you're sleeping, drop off meals and groceries and other treats. However, get pregnant more than once and you're on your own. When you could really use some solicitousness, there's none to be found. It's assumed that you are no longer a rookie--training period is over. You are now a mom and should be able to handle a toddler and pregnancy and housework and cooking and all the daily requirements of life. Sleep? That's for amateurs--the real pros don't need no stinkin' sleep!

By fall, we had a new living room and front entry. One day in November, Jack's parents came to visit. Sitting at the table, Jack told his dad his new plan--to replace the dining room thermal pane with a bay window so we could grow plants.

"Window?" said Jack's dad. "That's for pikers--why not add on a greenhouse?" Jack's dad was also a chronic renovator--what Jack didn't learn at Close Enough Construction, he learned from his dad. Apparently there is a renovating gene and it too follows the male line.

All winter, Jack drew and re-drew his plans. I was dubious, but was finally convinced because he told me all the mess would be outside (the first time I fell for this, and, alas, not the last) because he wouldn't break through the wall until the addition was completely finished. At that point, I didn't realize that completely finished to Jack was different from any normal understanding of the term. But I would learn. As they say in the mystery novels, usually just after the murder, "early days yet." (I also learned to triple all time and money estimates of Jack's to at least make it into the ballpark's lower level bathrooms.

That spring was early and hot--rare for the prairies. Rollie and Jack spent days digging out yards of earth for the see-ment pond and the greenhouse foundations. By May, I had planted petunias and the walls were up on the greenhouse. Jack spent all his evenings and weekends in a sweat to get it closed in. By June, it was--just. "Close enough," said Jack, and took a break.

We'd read all the baby books about preparing the older sibling for the newborn's arrival. Primero helped us set up the crib (he watched, anyway). He picked out teddy bears and arrange them on the dresser. He offered suggestions for names. His favourites were Oscar (at two, he was a die-hard Sesame Street fan) and Poopie (I think he just liked the sound of that one).

One bright, hot June day, we'd gone into town for my regular (and hopefully last) check up with Doctor Heather. She assured me that next time I saw her, it would be in the hospital. Heather, to my delight, had switched hospitals. The previous one (where I'd had Primero) ran its maternity ward like a prison--no visitors other than "hubby" (as the nurses burbled cheerily), no leaving the floor, no having friends visit, no nothing. The day after I'd had Primero, I was passing the nurses' station, heading for the elevator and the main floor's gift-shop for a magazine. "Where do you think you're going?" demanded the grey-haired nurse my roommate and I had dubbed The Angel of Death. "Uh, downstairs?" I ventured. "Not allowed!" she barked, turning to her paperwork. Chastened, I crept back to my room.

But the new hospital had no such medieval procedures. Plus it was two blocks from Jack's parents' house--Primero would stay with them.

By late afternoon, the sky was a brassy blue, and the day's heat still hung close and heavy. On the way out of town, we stopped for take-out--I didn't feel like cooking and it was too hot, anyway. As Jack paid for pizza, I took the grease-spotted box, headed for the car, and stopped in mid-step. "Uh oh," I said.

"What?" said Jack. "What? Is it the baby? What? Now? What?"

A twinge--no more than that, but now I knew what those twinges meant--labour, and lots of it. It's strange, but you quickly forget what contractions actually feel like. Doubtless this handy amnesia is a way of perpetuating the species. If women really remembered what childbirth really felt like, there really would be no second children, ever. Husbands might become endangered as well.

"Uh, I think we should go to your parents'--I think it's starting." We knocked on Jack's parents' door, pizza in hand. Primero was thrilled at spending the night with Gramma and Grampa. I ate a half-slice--pepperoni--all I could manage, as the contractions got stronger. Finally, we headed for the hospital.

What a difference from the wild ride down the icy highway two years ago. A leisurely five-minute ride saw us pull up to the Emergency Room. The long June dusk seeped into the deep blue night sky--it never gets completely dark on the northern plains in high summer. The air was still warm from the heat of the day--late blooming lilacs scented the air.

This time my water hadn't broken early. No one seemed to be in a hurry, so I thought, well, okay, who am I to buck a trend? I'll just relax and go with the flow.

Jack and I had decided to give natural childbirth another try, despite eighteen hours of hard labour. Everything I'd read suggested that second labours were faster than first ones. The cervix is all limbered up from practice and raring to go, or something like that. My bag had been packed by month four--this time I remembered the tennis balls--and stowed in the car. We'd done this once--number two would be a piece of cake, and I would have the tennis balls in case of back labour. (I still had no idea of what back labour was, but I was about to find out).

The new hospital didn't "prep"--I loved the place already. The nurses just popped me into a backless gown and into a bed--again, the monitor was attached. Again Jack became completely absorbed in the monitor's read-out. As the first really big contraction hit, the memory of what they felt like came flooding back. "Damn," I breathed. "That was it, alright."

"What?" asked Jack, frowning at the feedback strip. "It doesn't look like a particularly big one--those don't come until later." Jack loved being in the labour room--he loved being part of the delivery. If there was such a profession as itinerant labour coach, Jack would have applied. And if the nurses had let him, he would have wandered the halls on the lookout for lone women in labour, bent on offering his service. Thank God the nurses didn't let him.

"Thanks for the reminder," I muttered. I had made him promise to eat no stew--beef or otherwise, or any kind of food his mom might send him, no matter how hungry he got. He reluctantly agreed, although I strongly suspect he slipped out several times for peanuts from the vending machine down the hall.

And so I settled down to surfing the contractions once more--while the memory might come surging back, so does the ability to surf the waves. Hours and hours passed, doctors and nurses kept checking me to see how much I had dilated. This was taking a long time.

After about twelve hours, a new doctor stopped by--apparently I was outlasting the shifts. Checking my stomach, my cervix, my monitor, he asked, "Are we experiencing discomfort yet?"

I was far too busy surfing to respond to such a moronic question with anything more than "Whaaa..?" It has stayed with me, though, all these years--that daft transmuting of a perfectly clear, single syllable into that banal weasel-word. Discomfort indeed. "I'm in PAIN, asshole!" I roared inside my head. Outside, I could only breath deeply, trying to keep on top of the waves.

I kept asking Jack for the time, convinced that this baby would be born in less time than Primero. The eighteenth hour assumed talismanic proportions--it would be over before then--second labours were faster--all the books said so.

The eighteenth hour approached--no land in sight for me yet, as the waves kept surging higher. The nineteenth hour came and went, as did various doctors and nurses. My stubborn cervix, obviously not practiced or familiar enough with the books, had opened only so far and decided it was in no hurry. Nothing to do but ride it out, announced the latest doctor on the ward. "Sadistic bastards," I muttered.

TO BE CONTINUED

The House That Jack Built--The Never Ending Story

And so began the twelve-year renovation. (Actually, thus began the life-long process of renovating houses--and building them).

The original house was six hundred square feet, all on one meager story. By the time Jack was done, it had expanded to twenty-four hundred square feet on two floors, and we from one boy to four. The growth of the house was intimately connected with that of our family--as each child came along, Jack would slap on a room, wing or story. Segundo came between the front entry and the greenhouse (which had started as a modest bay window in the dining room but grew to become a large sunspace). Tercero showed up just after completion of the "big addition's" main floor. By the time the addition's second floor was finished, Cuarto had arrived. Of course, I use the term "finished" loosely--finished means there were walls, doors, windows and usually something on the floor. Trim, baseboards, taped drywall joints, paint and electrical switch/outlet covers were optional.

Family photos show untaped drywall, untrimmed windows and door/drawer-less kitchen cupboards. Segundo had callouses on his fat knees from crawling on the plywood subfloors--by the time we could afford carpet, he was walking--it was likely incentive.

Those twelve years of renovating and child-rearing/bearing are a collage of visual memories. It is strange what sticks out--a strip of pink insulation at a ceiling's peak sprinkled with dead wasps behind the plastic--the final trim strip didn't show up for years. I remember the day the plastic went up on the newly-configured ceiling, trapping the angry wasps--opportunists who'd built a hasty nest in the new roof-line. For years I would look at their dead little bodies, a moment of irritation at Jack's inability to finish at least ONE room. A moment of irritation for me, the end for the wasps. Time has given me some perspective on these matters.

I remember being pregnant with Segundo on a hot summer day, watching Rollie and Jack dig the foundation for the sunroom's under-floor pond. Jack, an early proponent of energy efficiency, had a scheme to heat the sunroom with passive solar and with heat from the livingroom's woodstove--the pool under the floor would provide something called thermal gain. An ungodly amount of dirt needed to be excavated to accommodate what we came to call the "see-ment pond". Because we had no money for a bobcat excavator, Jack dug it by hand with Rollie's help. Over the years, Rollie and Jack dug, pounded, sanded, nailed, demolished and moved tons of stuff in each other's houses. When you are young and broke, it's helpful to have good friends and lots of energy.

The summer of the big addition, a huge project for which we revisited the Credit Union for more money, I was pregnant with Tercero--it seems I was always pregnant with someone, or nursing someone, or diapering someone's rear end--I fantasized about the day when there would be no more diapers and each kid could get in and out of his own snowsuit without my help. One evening, the ceiling caved in on Primero and Segundo, who shared the room with the window (by then it had been fixed). Part of the addition was being built above this room. A thundery and rainy summer was prodding Jack into a frenzy to get the roof on and everything closed in. He'd enlisted the help of more friends. That night I'd just put the boys to bed. We said our prayers and had a cuddle, listening to the tromping and banging overhead. (One thing living in perpetual construction did for my boys--they could and can sleep through anything). Then the roof caved in--literally. A section of ceiling drywall tilted, spilling its load of dust, wood shavings and God-knows-what kind of critter droppings all over Primero. "Oops!" said Harry, Jack's friend from work who'd kindly offered to help, peering down from the gaping hole in the ceiling. He took one look at my face and said quickly, "I'll clean it up!"

"That's it!" I shrieked. (I did a lot of shrieking, hollering and screeching in those days.) "I am out of here!" And I was--I cleaned off Primero. (I can still see Harry, a big bear of a guy, carefully vacuuming off the boys' teddy bears, not daring to make eye-contact as I raged around the room, packing up toys and gear.) I went into the city and stayed at my parents until the roof was on and it was safe (relatively speaking) for me to come home.

The house was mostly done by the time Cuarto came along--of course, windows and doors still needed trimming. The house incorporated parts of the old Herbert school, demolished shortly after we arrived in town. A lovely old building with a bell tower, it was smashed to bits to make room for a staff parking lot. We'd signed a petition to keep it, but to no avail. Feeling conflicted, Jack, Rollie and our friend Duane--all of whom were fixing up their houses--bid on the salvageable materials. They spent weeks deconstructing the old school for its beams, joists, flooring and shiplap.

The flooring Jack had scrounged from the school still needed refinishing, but the house was complete enough to be comfortable and handsome. Jack by now no longer worked as a carpenter--he had finally found a job in his technical field. But his sojourn with "Close Enough Construction" (as he liked to call the company) taught him a great deal about building sustainable, efficient and elegant structures. He'd earned the sobriquet "Mr. Seal" for his fanaticism about the integrity of the vapour barrier.

The house transformed from an ugly box built on the cheap into a generous house with foot-thick walls, an attached greenhouse (alas, the seement pond scheme never worked--by now the water has likely evaporated from under the greenhouse floor--at least, I hope it has), four heat sources (gas furnace, wood and coal stoves, electric baseboards), large rooms, big windows, designer kitchen, "movie star" bathroom (as our friend Treena liked to call it--the double-sized tub was a hit with the kids), and too many other nifty features to list. It was a practical house--if the power went off in a sub-zero Saskatchewan winter, we wouldn't freeze. We could grow stuff inside the greenhouse. We had space and light. The boys had nice big rooms to mess up with sturdy doors to close upon the mess.

While there were some close calls accident-wise, during the interminable construction phases, everyone survived more or less intact (there were, however, a few memorable trips to the emergency room--Primero was continuing his run for the title). Our boys learned how to use tools, and which ones to stay away from (eventually). Baby Segundo was happiest left to hammer nails into the plywood subfloor. he may have been punishing it for all those splinters in his knees. The boys grew up knowing that people, given the right tools, can make just about anything. They learned not to shy away from big projects. They learned that they can do for themselves.

Building a house was, as I look back on it, a luxury grounded in time. It seems there was always time to work on the house, read to the kids, putter in the garden, help out the friends, have coffee, walk to the store (always accompanied by a flotilla of kids), go camping in the summer, cross-country skiing in the winter (we were in Saskatchewan, after all), pump out the yard in the spring, make pickles and lay in the wood supply in the fall. The rhythms of living close to the economic bone--have to do for oneself, grow and gather food and fuel, build family's shelter --these are skills that we still use today, and cherish.

I remember the work bees--our friends in Herbert were all of an age--we had our kids, bought our first houses, fixed them up, worked in our gardens and on our cars all at the same time. We shared our time, energy, expertise and enthusiasm. While the men worked on various roofs, sheds, vehicles, foundations, the women made coffee, ran after the kids and offered running commentaries--usually hilarious--on the particular activity underway. We had an ironic understanding of the conventional gender roles thus perpetrated--while we understood that we were being oppressed by these roles, we didn't worry too much about it because the kids took most of our energy. Later on we'd flex our feminist muscles. For now, the shingles needed to be put on, the car fixed, the garden dug, the foundation poured, the wall built. We made the coffee and the lunches and the dinners. We herded the kids out of the way--we fed, watched, changed, bandaged, cleaned, refereed--that was a full time job in itself. We did it collectively--it was easier and more fun. Four or five pairs of eyes could spot an escaping toddler far better than one.

And so, we lived for twelve years in the house that Jack (assisted by a host of friends and family) built. It started as a tiny shack and grew into something more--a home. As we grew, so did the house. Child by child, floor by floor, board by board. I think of Emily Dickinson's poem:

The props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter--
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life--
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness--then the Scaffolds drip
Affirming it a Soul

Our collective family life, perfected or not, is grounded in a past of Plank and Nail. Slowness--when the children were small and demanded a different rhythm--meant there was always time for small things. Often it didn't feel like slowness--it felt like fatigue. But, for whatever reason, life had a different pulse then.

We've dropped some of the old scaffolding--no more house full of kids. The little community of friends has dispersed, although we are still in contact--some friendships are for a lifetime. Jack still builds beautiful structures--it is, once again, how he makes his living. Strange how some things come full circle. Or perhaps it is a spiral, because we never return exactly to where we were.

Our house has no small children living in it, although a small grandchild comes to visit from time to time. It seems we've redesigned our scaffolding, or perhaps are in the process of building one that will safely see us through the next stage, whatever that may be. If Emily is right, however, we are still left with our souls. On that structure, work never ends.

The House That Jack Built

We brought baby Primero home to our apartment above the converted store in the tiny village (population 500 on a good day) of Herbert. (You won't find Herbert on a map--this name, too, is fictitious).

Herbert sits on Saskatchewan parkland--the great swath of broken meadow and poplar bluff that separates the true prairie from the northern shield's rock, lakes and muskeg. Herbert is thirty-odd kilometers outside of Saskatoon--easily commutable. The road shoots straight as an arrow's path, except for one lazy S-curve that usually keeps drivers from falling asleep at the wheel. Luckily the ditches are shallow.

We wound up in Herbert because it had cheap housing. Our apartment was huge--we could never afford that space in the city. Also, our dream of home ownership was equally unlikely in Saskatoon. We had one meager income and no savings. We were, as the phrase says, "just starting out".

And so, with a kid on our hands, we began looking for a house. Herbert had fewer than two hundred of them, so the search wouldn't take too long. Most of them were small--that was fine with us--our income was small, too.

One day, our friend Rollie asked Jack to go along to see a house. Rollie and Dee, his wife, were also searching for a house to buy, but they'd actually taken the step of contacting a real estate agent about a small house on the edge of town. (Actually, in Herbert everything was on the edge of town--the town centre was on the edge of town). Rollie was a sculptor who was working on his graduate degree in Fine Arts. Herbert's cheap housing made commuting economical, but Rollie wanted studio space, so he was looking to buy.

Rollie wanted Jack's advice on the house's structure. Jack was working as a carpenter in Saskatoon and so had some knowledge. I didn't go along--I was at home with ten-month-old Primero. Having a child at home meant I had to carefully calculate whether an outing was worth packing up kid, diaper, bottle, wipes, spare clothes, blanket, etc. Unless the trip was really compelling, I stayed home.

Life with Primero had blurred by. He was developing a personality--I was amazed at how quickly this showed up. He was cheerful and sweet-natured, a fairly low maintenance baby, except for the trips to the Emergency Room. It was during his first months that we became acquainted with this activity. I had no experience of this, but Jack was an old hand at Emergency Room visits, having racked up an impressive number of these as a youngster. Apparently there is a gene for trips to the Emergency Room--it travels along the paternal line.

Primero's first months yielded two trips to Emergency--one for croup and the other for a nasty hydrocele ("water on the bulbs" as my friend's Baba called it--you can look it up--hydrocele, that is--I very much doubt you will find anything for "water on the bulbs", but you never know--you're welcome to try).

Little did we know that trips to Emergency were to become a life-long habit for Primero. Adulthood has not slowed him down. For a while, it was a race between Primero and Cuarto for the Emergency Room championship. Cuarto led for a while. Primero, however, has emerged as the all-time title holder in the "Childhood and Beyond" category.

Back to house-hunting with Rollie and Jack. I know the story from both accounts and came to know the house itself intimately. Given that both Rollie and Jack are inveterate story-enhancers, I have edited it for believability.

The house was a repo that had been moved some years before from a farmyard to its present location in town. It was tiny--one bedroom with a windowless shed addition along the back--this apparently was listed as a second bedroom. The inside was hideous--dark paneling everywhere and orange shag carpet everywhere else. It perched on a shaky foundation over a basement of three cracked concrete wall and one dirt embankment that had crumbled all over the floor. The basement was filled with junk and mud and, as we later discovered, a wild kingdom of spiders and assorted amphibians. (We actually caught a salamander down there when we were cleaning up. We named him Bing and kept him in a goldfish bowl. Bing escaped after he bit Jack, or so Jack claimed.

Back to the house--after the showing, as Rollie, Jack and the real estate agent were leaving, Jack asked Rollie if he was considering buying. Rollie looked at Jack and said, "Are you kidding? This dump? Why?"

Jack said, "Because if you don't buy it, I'm going to."

Rollie was sure Jack had turned insane. Being a good friend, he refrained from pointing this out. Years later, we found out that all our friends thought we'd turned insane when we purchased this hovel, but never let on. Where would we be without friends? I have asked myself more than once in this particular case.

I never saw the inside of the house until after we'd purchased it. I had peeked through the smeared windows. The decor looked terrible, bit I thought with a bit of paint and some new flooring, it could be quite cozy. And we could always pop a window in that second bedroom for luxuries like light and air.

The house cost eleven thousand dollars--1980 dollars, which we didn't have very many of. Somehow we wangled a mortgage from the local Credit Union and the house was ours. Thus began our lifelong affair with renovating.

Once the house was ours, I thought I'd better have a look before we moved in. As Jack led me from room to room, my heart sank. The living room ceiling was just over six feet high and covered with the same dark-brown paneling as the walls. It was like being inside a chocolate--a very small chocolate with no headroom. The bathroom was crazy--the tub stuck into the dining room and had been clumsily boxed in with more paneling. The bathroom door was a folding closet door that stopped a foot shy of the floor--you could check out what socks the person on the toilet was wearing. As our friends objected to this kind of scrutiny, Jack had to put a proper door on before people would stay longer than twenty minutes.

The kitchen counter was covered with stained linoleum. Bent nails held shut the cupboard doors (and I use the term "doors" loosely). The only real bedroom had a broken window covered with cardboard. The second windowless bedroom housed the fuse-box. This had a giant dent in its cover, as if someone had driven over it, and it would emit buzzing and sizzling noises from time to time.

And then there was the basement. As mentioned, one floor was mostly dirt that had collapsed all over the floor. The other walls, cracked concrete, leaned ominously. All kinds of thinks lurked in the mud--we identified a moldy mattress and a sodden bag of garden fertilizer. The ceiling joists were completely furred in spiderwebs. It smelled like a swamp.

As we emerged from the depths, I whacked my head on the stairwell opening. Pain, you will remember, makes me mad. Shock made it worse. Clutching my noggin, I burst into angry tears and howled, "What have you done with our money?"

Jack didn't answer--he might have said "What money?" as it was the Credit Union's money he'd squandered on this piece of crap. However, we were on the hook for it. Jack looked hurt. I realized that he didn't see the house's many deficits--he saw its potential. The house would become his canvas and he would create something wonderful. Jack has always been, and will be, a visionary builder and renovator. Over the decades of our marriage, we have lived in many houses that Jack built, renovated, added on to, or changed in some marvelous way. Currently we live in a house that Jack built from the ground up--it is unfinished, of course, but it will be finished if and when we sell it. In the meantime, what is completed makes it a house of beauty and comfort.

We moved in--we had to--we'd given notice and were into the Credit Union for eleven thousand 1980 dollars that we would have to fork over in monthly installments. Thus began our twelve-year renovation project.

TO BE CONTINUED

Primero--part two

(continued from previous post)

I glared at him because I was in the trough between the tops of my contractions. Labour pains are like waves. You have to ride them--they build up to crests that froth and spume pain (excuse me, "discomfort') before they come crashing down into a lesser sensation of hurt--but like waves, the action is never over--even the troughs are always slipping and sliding with sensation (as in "pain").

Before I could respond to such an inane question, I started sliding up a trough, heading towards the crest. "Hey," said Jack, looking at the monitor's feedback strip of paper. "It looks like a contraction is starting." To busy to comment on THIS inane observation, I practiced my deep, focused breathing. My labour coach (as in Jack) was too busy examining the monitor's parts and checking out its feedback to help with my breathing. Riding the wave of a seriously strong contraction, all I could do was breathe, focus, breathe, focus, breathe. Finally it ebbed. "Wow," Jack commented, reading the squiggles on the paper strip. "That was a big one."

This pattern (including Jack's commentary on the technical prowess of the monitor) seemed to go on forever. I lost track of time, and also of Jack (lucky for him). I was too focused on the squeezing and tightening and crushing sensations that chased themselves across my abdomen for hours and hours. Every so often, I returned to my surroundings. The first time this happened, I heard screaming. A voice nearby was shrieking "Cut me open! Get it out! I can't take this anymore!" This was followed by more screaming. Apparently the young woman in the next labour cubicle had no coach with her--she was all alone, or so the nurse had informed Jack. "Gee," he said, "I wish I could go and help. It's not as hard as I thought it was going to be. I think I'm pretty good at this!"

I closed my eyes, not having the energy (or trust in myself) to answer. Back to surfing the waves. When I surfaced again, Jack was eating something out of a bright yellow Tupperwear container. I croaked, "Could I have some ice chips, please?" Ice chips were all you were allowed back then. Apparently water was deadly or something.

Jack spooned ice chips into my mouth. I could smell beef stew on his breath. I'd been in labour for about fifteen hours by now. His mom, concerned and helpful, brought him some dinner. He needed to keep his strength up.

Remember what I said about all the senses being heightened during labour? Smell is one of them. The aroma of beef stew was too much for me. I punched Jack on the side of his head and he reeled back. Apparently labour hadn't affected my aim. "That stinks!" I hollered. "Get away from me!" and promptly threw up on the sheet. Jack managed to catch the last of it in the wastepaper basket.

The nurse, having just come in for a peek, quickly whisked away the soiled sheet and tucked a clean one around my legs. She peered into the wastepaper basket and said, "Next time use the kidney basin--it's the blue thing in the bedside table cupboard."

It's funny the things you remember--we felt completely chastened because I'd barfed into an improper receptacle. When you're young, you can get buffaloed by the darndest things.

More breathing and focusing went on for what seemed like days, but were, in reality, hours. Every once in a while, a nurse or doctor would pop in and check to see if I was fully dilated. That was another term I was becoming intimately connected with--dilation. It meant, was the opening opening or was it staying closed?

Apparently mine hadn't budged for quite a while now. Another doctor came in--he looked like the actor Walther Matthau, but I was fairly sure it wasn't Walter Matthau, although by then I was pretty out of it. It could have been Walter Matthau for all I cared. I just wanted the opening to open and pop out its load. If Walter Matthau could make that happen, I was all for it.

By now, the screamer next door had delivered and wasn't screaming any more. I didn't think this was fair. I'd been behaving myself--hadn't sworn at anyone, hadn't screamed, hadn't done anything wrong (except maybe for slugging Jack and puking into the wrong container). Why hadn't I been rewarded for good behavior?

Walter Matthau did something--I don't know what--I was too busy surfing the waves to notice. Apparently something was blocking the cervix (a term for the opening part that wasn't opening enough). Walter thought it might be part of the amniotic sac. Of course, I didn't know this at the time--I couldn't understand anything at that point. This is what he told Jack, who was finally earning his coaching stripes.

They wheeled me into a delivery room--looked pretty much like an operating room to me--giant overhead lights, steel instruments, masked people milling about. Jack put on a mask and trotted alongside. He kept patting my arm, his eyes huge above the green mask. "It'll be okay, it'll be okay! Don't worry, it'll be okay!" He was starting to annoy me again. This is what I discovered spousal labour are really for--to store technical information and be emotional lightening rods. It's an important job.

Walter Matthau did something else--again, I was off surfing. I later found out that he'd punctured a small bulge of amniotic sac, releasing the last of the waters I'd left on our kitchen floor hours ago. Walter left, and things moved quickly after that.

We'd arrived at Labour Stage Three--the pushing part. All the books I'd read assured us that this stage, while the most intense, was also the shortest. Again, theory collapsed in the face of practice. I spent ninety minutes pushing--over and over again, a contraction would come, and my family doctor, who'd finally arrived when it looked like things were starting to move, kept urging me to "Push! Push! Just one more!" Doctor Heather Morris "one more'd" me all through this stage, coaxing me on from between my legs at the end of the contraption I was lying on. Jack had my back, literally--he shoved me up and held on as I bore down with all my might. I got oxygen from time to time--puffs of coolness that kept me going. The nurses cheered on from the sidelines. Team baby--go team, go!

I remember announcing that I'd had enough, thank you very much, and was ready to go home. This wasn't working out--maybe next time, so sorry, but 'bye now. Not wanting to be a quitter, I knew when enough was enough.

By this time, they'd decided to haul the baby out. "No forceps!" I cried, remembering all the horror stories I'd heard about babies hauled out using these giant salad tongs.

"Don't worry," said Heather. "We're going to use a vacuum extractor instead of forceps." Somehow this didn't sound any more reassuring. They were going to hoover the baby out?

Something was wheeled up to the table--a silver cup dangling by a metal chain. Jack said afterwards it looked like something put together in a basement for a ninth grade science fair. Maybe it was.

Heather did something with the metal cup. She pumped a valve, frowned at the gauge, pumped some more, frowned again. "Darn thing!" she said. "There's no pressure here!" She tapped the glass front. All of a sudden, the needle jumped. "Whoops!" she said. "We've got suction!"

Heather "one more'd" me once more. She coaxed, cajoled, urged and finally ordered me to push, push, push. Jack reported that the look on my face as I pushed these final few times was scary. And men wonder why women aren't thrilled at the thought of being videotaped during labour.

"Head's crowing!' announced Heather. "It's coming! Keep pushing!"

By this time, all thoughts of going home were gone. I could see the finish line. I could do this. And so I did.

"Here's the head," cried Heather, as she removed the silver cap from the baby's noggin. There was a strange bulge on the top of his head. "Uh," said Jack. "That'll go away, right?"

"Sure will," said Heather. "It's just from the vacuum extractor--maybe a wee bit too much pressure there." We looked at each other, remembering her finger tapping against the gauge before the needle jumped. "Not to worry--he'll be fine."

Okay then. (We are happy to report that the bulge did disappear and left no ill effects.)

"One more push for the shoulders," she said.

As Jack leaned into my back, holding me up for the final push, we looked down and saw the baby's head--it was looking right at us! I know, I know--babies don't look around before they're out--but this one did. His big, dark eyes blinked and locked onto us. "Holy cow," said Jack. "He's looking right at us. Hi baby! Welcome to the world!"

It was at this moment that we realized here was a creature fresh from another world--a tiny space alien beginning his terrestrial journey, and we were his native guides. That second when our eyes locked seemed to last forever. To this day, I have no idea how long it really was, but it was a moment of reverence for something primal and mystical.

"One more," ordered Heather. One more and the rest of the baby slithered out. "We've got a boy and he's a big one!" she crowed, cleaning out his little mouth so he could start hollering, which he did--loud. The nurse bundled him off to the side, where they performed something called the APGAR test. Apparently he passed, because in a few seconds he was laid on my chest, still waxy and wrinkled from his soujourn inside.

What also must be experienced, and cannot be communicated in words, is the feeling of holding the safely arrived newborn. Happiness is too thin a word. It is far deeper--it is joy, bliss, elation, exultation, rapture, wonder--these all fill the breast while the newborn face is contemplated.

I remember our three faces close together--Jack's, mine and baby's--our breaths commingling as his tiny lungs took in their first puffs of air.

We checked him out from top to toe--loads of black hair, huge eyes, a lovely round head with tiny determined chin. The arms and legs were sturdy, robust. The fingers and toes were impossibly small--fingers like tiny pink shrimp curled into fists. Toes were small balls of pink plasticine stuck onto fat little feet. The genitals proclaimed "male"--they looked so large on the tiny frog-body. "That's my boy," murmured Jack proudly.

A warm blanket, heated in some blissful hospital oven, was wrapped around me. There is was--the fruits of labour--an infant, a partner, a warm blanket, and an end to pushing.

The three of us, together in that little space, became, for a brief span of time, the world. As John Donne states, "For love all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere." ("The Good Morrow"). We stayed in that little world for an eternity, and for all too brief a time--the moment would never come again. (Of course, NO moment ever comes again, but the really good ones you wish could).

We were on the brink of an amazing thing--a sea-change in our lives because of this little creature from the black uterine lagoon. It was the end of Jack and me, and the start of a family. It was the beginning of a journey that would go on forever--a chapter in the human story--for we are all begotten, born and die, to paraphrase Mr. Yeats. We are all part "Of what is past, or passing, or to come." ("Sailing to Byzantium")

A friend of ours, given to black Celtic visions, reported that upon the birth of his first child, he looked up in the delivery room and saw his ancestors crowding around the birthing bed. While I didn't experience such a vision, I did feel, as I held that scrap of humanity on my breast, a profound sense of the generations--each of us, encoded in our DNA, carries parents, grandparents, great-grandparents within us. We exist because they came before. Passing that along makes us conduits of something ancient, something imminent. This infant was a hostage to fortune, indeed. Here was another small sailor beginning his way to Byzantium--we all go there at some time, and await those who will come after.

Primero

If April is "the cruelest month", as Mr. T.S. (as in "Tough Shit"--in college I really had to plod through "The Wasteland") Eliot says, then April 1979 was cruel AND cold--winter would not budge. Daily the temperature crept up to almost freezing, and nights sent it scuttling back down into sub-sub-zero land. Mornings, a hard sun would glitter on the blue-shadowed snowbanks that no thaw had touched yet. I started praying for snow--anything to soften the implacable sun and the iron air.

Baby was late, just like the warm weather, and we waited impatiently. Everyone around us said to enjoy the quiet before the newborn storm broke--"Once that kid comes, you'll never sleep again!"

The third week in April came and went--no baby, no spring, no contractions, no melting. I started to seriously consider castor oil. A few Braxton Hicks squeezed my abdomen, but other than that--nothing. Until April 28, just after midnight.

I woke from a deep sleep thinking I'd wet the bed--swell, I thought, the huge baby-bump was now making me incontinent. Careful not to wake my husband, I tip-toed to the bathroom. We lived in an apartment above an old converted store. The bathroom was the furthest possible distance from the bedroom--any further and it would have been across the street. In the dark, I crept through the bedroom, the living room, the dining room--aiming for the bathroom just beyond the cavernous kitchen. Once I hit the kitchen's cold linoleum, wetness gushed out in great surges.

"Uh-oh," I thought, "THIS must be water breaking." Not that I really knew what that was, any more than I knew what Braxton-Hicks were, although I liked the term--it sounded official. No, at that point, baby terms were something I knew only through theory. However, that was about to change.

I hustled into the bathroom, leaving a trail of puddles on the floor--handy in case my husband got lost on his way through the apartment. Once on the toilet, I started hollering. Being in a bathroom a building away from the bedroom meant I had to holler so loud I made myself dizzy.

I started to get mad--no one likes to feel helpless on the toilet--and was about to get up to see what was keeping my husband (let's call him Jack--why should the kids be the only ones to enjoy the protection of anonymity?) when I heard the patter of feet and a mighty thud. Jack had hit the first puddle.

"Jack?" I asked, opening the bathroom door wider. "Are you okay?"

I heard groaning. It seemed to be coming closer. Jack slowly crawled through the bathroom door. He may have been wounded, but he was moving. Good enough.

"HURRY!" I shrieked. "We need to get to the hospital NOW!"

There is an unforgettable tone that women use when motivating partners into immediacy. Just ask any husband who has heard it--he has been trained to respond to it, but lives in perpetual dread of ever hearing it.

At the time, we lived in a tiny village out in the country--it usually took forty minutes to get to the hospital in town. That night, we made it in fifteen. I remember the black road and a blur of silver--I think there was a moon, and the sky was clear, stars glittering like ice chips. Normally I would have been screaming in terror with Jack driving like that--I am not a good passenger. I am a dashboard clutcher, a ghost-braker, a hand-hold grabber.

The contractions were about seven minutes apart and were starting to assert themselves. I checked the backseat to make sure my overnight bag was there--for weeks the bag was open on the dining room table--every time I read an article or another book on natural childbirth, I ordered another item to be put in. "Did you remember the peppermint sticks?" I asked Jack, who was hunched over the wheel. "Yeah," he said as we barreled down the empty highway. "Good," I said. "What about the tennis balls--you bought some the other day, didn't you? I hope you put them in." No answer.

"Jack, did you pack the tennis balls?" I'd read that tennis balls were good for back labour--they would massage your lower back if you lay on them. (Not that I had a clue about back labour--at this point, we were still working from theory). "Jack, did you pack the tennis balls?"

"Uh," he said.

I took a deep breath and shrieked, "What'll we do without the tennis balls? What if I have back labour and we don't have the tennis balls? We have to have the tennis balls! Oh God, oh God, oh God--how could you FORGET THE TENNIS BALLS?"

A contraction hit--lucky for Jack, that one was much more than muscles tightening. It shut me up. "Whoof," I said, clutching my stomach, tennis balls forgotten.

"What?" barked Jack in alarm, not taking his eyes from the road--a good thing, considering our speed. "What? What? Is the baby coming? What? Is it time? What? Can't you wait? What? What?" The tennis balls tirade had obviously spooked him.

I was already annoyed at his forgetting the tennis balls. Now the contractions were starting to bug me--pain affects me that way. Some people cry, some people moan, some people put up with it--me, I get mad. Usually I start by getting irritated, then move to angry and wind up somewhere in rage country. I was definitely on my way there now, and Jack's "What? What's?" weren't helping. This wasn't looking good for the whole natural childbirth thing. Because, of course, we had decided to go that route--no drugs, no medical interventions, no nothing. Just us--a team approach--we'd work together and cherish the experience. After all, who wouldn't want to be completely awake and aware for every second of such a momentous thing?

Suckers.

We'd taken the childbirth course--along with fifteen other pregnant couples--and made it through the film without too many bad moments. While there was a definite ick factor at the movie's climax, we felt sure we would handle everything with grace, style and natural aplomb. Now, however, with the contractions getting serious, I was starting to rethink our decision. "Oh man," I moaned, "This is starting to hurt!"

Jack glanced over at me, white-faced in alarm. He knew pain's effect on me. He drove faster.

Finally we were at the hospital. I threw myself into one of the wheelchairs clustered at the ER doors. The doors whooshed open. I remember the light and warmth spilling from the ER into a silver mist as they collided with the frigid air--now I was going into that light.

Jack zoomed up up to the desk where a lady sat typing, looking bored. It was a slow night in the ER. Blinking in the glare of the fluorescents, Jack announced breathlessly that we were having a baby.

"That's swell," said the lady, shoving a clipboard at us. "Fill this in."

I don't believe any forms were every filled out faster in the history of humankind. I could be wrong, and there's no way to prove it, but I stand by my statement.

Maternity was on the third floor--a fast elevator ride and we were at the nurses' station. Maternity wards are the most cheerful parts of a hospital. Even in the middle of the night, there was a sense of drama and expectation. The station's counter was covered in flowers. Pictures of baby humans and animals were all over the walls. Even the fluorescents seemed sunnier on that floor. Maybe these are again misty water-coloured memories, but they're pleasant, so we'll keep them.

Things dimmed a bit when I got prepped, however.

Anyone giving birth some decades ago will remember the various indignities used to "prep" (such a chirpy little word) women for labour, as if contractions, swollen ankles and freaked-out husbands weren't bad enough. These steps have gone the way of the dodo bird, and good riddance! Some may remember clutching the back of a hospital johnny with one hand, holding up a contracting belly with the other, and attempting a knees-together speed shuffle to the bathroom (ALWAYS down the hall), trying to beat the high colonic administered minutes before by the cheery nurse.

There were also razors involved, which I will not go into here. It is sufficient to say that soon the contractions drove the discomforts of prepping far from my mind. Einstein was right. Everything is relative.

The labour room was a small, glaring cubicle. This was before comfortable, hotel-like labour-and-birthing rooms. The nurse hooked me up to a contraption that monitored my contractions and the baby's heartbeat. I'm not sure where all the parts and probes went--I wasn't interested because by this time, things were starting to seriously hurt.

Jack unpacked my bag, hauling out the various labour-saving devices we'd tossed in over the last few months. He carefully lined up peppermint sticks, cologne, candles, incense, and a small cassette player. In addition to the tennis balls, we'd forgotten to pack cassettes.

I wailed, "We forgot the tennis balls!" The nurse looked at our stuff, at Jack and at me moaning about tennis balls. "First time? Natural childbirth?" she asked. Jack nodded. I was busy riding out a contraction. "Heh, heh!" she chortled, leaving the room.

Now it was just Jack and me and a baby trying to push its way out. We looked at each other. "Do you realize," said Jack, "that this is the last time, the very last time, you and I will ever be alone? Ever? God!" He flopped back in the vinyl armchair, which made a whooshing noise. Funny the details you remember. From my experience, labour heightens all the senses, while at the same time taking you onto a plane where you don't really care about all the sensory input--you're too busy working on your output.

Before I could answer Jack, another contraction came along. A few words about contractions. My ideas of labour and childbirth came from novels and movies. At that time, these were still fairly reticent about this process. of course, the classic childbirth narrative came from Gone With The Wind and Melanie's agonizing ordeal. I was pretty sure I wouldn't have to worry about the hospital burning like Atlanta. And while Jack, just like Prissy, didn't know "nothin' about birthin' babies", there were folks who did, and they were just down the hall. In fact, they kept popping into the room.

The film that the natural childbirth classes provided showed a lot of blood and fluids, crowning heads, stretched flesh and happy parents, so it was pretty useless in conveying the real goods on contractions. Friends of mine who'd had kids said, "You have to go through it to understand it." Swell--I had no idea what to expect.

When my contractions started at home, I experienced them as a tightening and squeezing across my abdomen. "Hmmm," I'd thought at the time (oh, such a short time ago), "I can handle THIS..."

However, once the distractions of admission and prepping were over, and I could concentrate, the contractions quickly morphed into what the hospital staff liked to call "discomfort" and I liked to call "pain".

Jack pulled his vinyl chair up to my hospital bed. Decked out in hospital greens, he looked like an intern. At least they hadn't given him a mask. "Are you okay?" he asked.

(TO BE CONTINUED)