I have never been the child of a writer, nor been a writer who had a child. (Being a writer who has a baby is really nothing like being a writer who has a child.) But I was once taking care of a three-year-old child, my niece, while I had no choice but to, in at least a minimal way, be working as a writer at the same time. It was the first time I was having a story of mine published in a major magazine, and I had to go over edits on the phone at a specific time, a time which overlapped with my picking up my niece from her preschool and then passing a couple hours with her, in a nearby Starbucks, until her parents were home — I didn’t have a key to their apartment. My niece was and is an unusually easy, flexible child. I took her to the designated Starbucks, though the original reason for going to the Starbucks, which was Internet access (this was more than a decade ago), proved dysfunctional that afternoon. Regardless, I opened my laptop and tried to take the editorial call. It was a call, then calls back, it was going back and forth. My niece was annoyed that I wasn’t speaking only to her. I promised I would speak with her soon. I continued to speak on the phone, with the editor. At one point, in between phone calls, my niece told me she wanted to go to the bathroom, so I brought her to the bathroom. Once were in the narrow stall, she took my phone from my coat pocket and threw it in the toilet. The phone did not work after that.
It is nice for children when their parents have offices outside of the home and are not seen to be doing work, I note to myself today, as the puma weeps while I speak on the cellphone, briefly, for work.
In Flagstaff, one
I am outside with the young chicken, in front of our conspicuously nice rental in Flagstaff, Arizona. The rental is an assemblage of shipping containers, insulated by a special ecologically sound paint, and oriented just so to the sun, etc., and on the sidewalk in the distance, I see a woman approaching with her two young daughters, who are dressed beautifully. There’s also a man, a few paces behind her, carrying an open cardboard box of canned and boxed goods. The man waves, somehow too soon, from too far away, and too familiarly. It’s weird. It makes him seem drunk or high. I wave back. A short time later, the woman waves too, as do the children, who, as they near, approach the young chicken with interest; the young chicken is shy with them. The older girl kneels down to be on a level with the young chicken; she asks her mother if she can give the little girl one of her gummy bears; the mother tells me that the gummy bears are organic; the chicken doesn’t take the gummy bear, and the mother tells her daughters not to worry about it, that not everyone likes gummy bears. The girls are Kaysia and Shalia, the mother says, they are three and seven. The man is standing a few feet off, grinning widely. The mother asks me if I live around here and I say that I don’t, and then I ask her if she lives around here and she says that it’s complicated. The children, along with the chicken, have wandered about ten feet away, to the driveway of our rental, and their mother is explaining to me that although she was born in Pennsylvania, she was kidnapped by her mom when she was eleven months old, after which they lived in Canada, in Mexico, eventually in Los Angeles, until, when she was three and a half years old, the authorities caught up with them. “My brother thought my dad was a ghost,” she tells me, laughing. Then they returned to Pennsylvania, lived with their dad. Her mother was in jail in Pennsylvania, so they could visit her. I didn’t know what to say. I asked the woman, How were things now with her parents, did she get along with them? She said that in the past year her dad had died, and that her mom is in Phoenix, dying of cancer, she is taking care of her, it has been a difficult year; she said that the father of her youngest was suing her for $10,000 in court, and she couldn’t afford that, she is still a university student, studying to be a math teacher, she loves math, always has, she lives in Phoenix now, not here, she is just in Flagstaff to visit her old friend, Ray; at this, she gestured to the man with the box who was still standing a few feet away. He was still grinning, and he still didn’t approach. The mother is an unusually pretty woman. Somehow we are still standing there, together. The chemical equation between us seems to be off, as if atoms are going to shift from one side to the other, because that is the law. It has to balance out. She’s still chatting and chatting. Then I hear my daughter crying. She is lying on her back on the pavement of the driveway. The two young girls are looking at their mother, and at me. The older girl says, We were trying to help her stand up again and that was when she fell over.
In Flagstaff, two
The oviraptor is one of the small Mongolian theropod dinosaurs. Its name means, more or less, “egg thief.” It turns out this name is unfair. The first oviraptor fossil was discovered near a nest, which is how the name came about. But years later it was decided that the oviraptor was most likely near its own nest when it died, that the eggs in the nest were most likely its own eggs.
I learn this from a label on a model of the original oviraptor fossil at a gift shop labeled Museum Gift Shop Information, located just outside of the Petrified National Forest. The gift shop has stones, fossils, mugs, moccasins, key chains, polished quartz, unpolished quartz, Navajo-style blankets for $10, and Navajo-style blankets for $400—it is about 4,000 square feet of floorspace organized like the attic of a nostalgic geologist. We are the only customers there on a bright, clear day. There are two people working there, a very thin woman wearing a thick blonde wig, and a young man who appears to be her son and who inspects my driver’s license to coordinate it with my credit card for a very long time; though we came in for a map, we are buying a toddler-sized pair of red moccasins. When we ask how long the drive is through the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert, the thin woman says that we shouldn’t miss the information booth, the official one, which is just inside the park. She says, So many people think that this is the information booth, because we have the word Information on our roof, but the information booth is just further in, and there you can find a map.
New variety of depression
It’s true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.
A baby is an ideal vector for a revenge plot
In some sense, The Tale of Genji has no plot. Genji is born, then this happens and that happens and then he gets old and he dies and other people continue on, living their lives, in which further thises and thats happen.
But in another sense Genji has a perfectly rounded plot: it describes a simple triptych with the unavoidable ambiguity of paternity as its hinges. Genji is born to the most beloved of the emperor’s consorts, but she dies shortly after Genji is born; because she was of low status, her son Genji is also of problematically low status. But the emperor then marries a woman who looks like Genji’s deceased mother, and later Genji has an affair with that stepmother, and he and the stepmother then pretend that the resultant child is the emperor’s. That child eventually becomes emperor. As emperor he grants status to Genji, his real father. Genji, by this time, has gone on to marry a woman he met when she was a young girl and whom he raised as if she were his daughter. Later Genji’s third wife has a child with Genji’s evil nephew and they pretend that child is Genji’s. That child, who becomes a basically mediocre and evil man, lives on after Genji’s death with the status of a son of Genji.