Category Archives: Nate

Down by the sea

Around the world, Nate

Scene: Fisherman’s Wharf, Monterey, California. There is a six-foot tall wooden sculpture of an ice-cream sundae, advertising an ice cream shop. Dad and Nonna are admiring the many typographical errors in the shop window. Nate is admiring the giant sundae.

Nate: Dad, can I climb it?

Dad: Sure, honey, but don’t lick it.

Nate immediately licks the sundae, and giggles.

Dad (resigned): Nate, do you know why I told you not to lick it?

Nate (confidently): Because it’s made of wood.

Dad: No. Because it’s covered with seagull poop.

Nate: Oh.

Nonna laughs.

You’re not sleepy as you seem

Nate

Scene: Nate’s bedroom, at bedtime. Dad has just finished singing two lullabies and is administering goodnight kisses.

Nate: Daddy, can I please have another song?

Dad: It’s time for bed, sweetie, but we’ll see you in the morning.

Nate: Daddy, can I just have one little hug?

They hug.

Nate: Daddy?

Dad: Yes, my darling?

Nate: How does electricity work?

Five Years

Nate, Sarah

Five years ago tonight, Nathaniel was born.

Sarah had awakened me at five o’clock that morning. I had been up late the night before, assembling the crib, and I thought she was joking when she said it was time. I was not amused. But I quickly figured out that she was serious.

It was a long day. I took a few naps on the chair in her hospital room.

Nate arrived during the night shift change, so we had double the usual number of nurses on hand. The room was a flurry of activity. They bathed him, weighed him, squirted antibiotics into his eyes, and before we knew it, whisked him off to the nursery.

Suddenly we were alone. Sarah looked at me, and laughed. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re tired.”

I looked at the birth certificate. 11:11 PM.

Happy birthday, child. I love you.

Make a wish!

Just the two of us

Nate, Thanks

Nate’s teachers write a daily note about the various activities they have in class. One day, under “Math & Science,” it said, “Making a family chart and comparing how many family members live in our house.”

I looked on the wall. Sure enough, there it was. Seven of Nate’s classmates have four people in their household. Three of Nate’s classmates have three people in their household. And Nate himself is the only one with just two people in his household.

Later that month, the class made a Family Tree on one of the walls. Each child was given a round leaf, and they drew a picture of each of their family members. I found Nate’s leaf; there we were. I was green and he was blue.

But I missed an important detail.

You remember my good friends Beth and Paul? Parents of Nate’s friend Jennifer… and the lovely Caroline Sarah, named after my Sarah? The ones who take Nate overnight once a week, so I can visit the pshrink and recapture a few of my marbles? Yes.

Beth quietly pointed out to me that Jennifer’s leaf had five people on it, not four. She told me that when she asked Jennifer who they were, she said, “That’s you, and daddy, Caroline, me, and Nate.”

Nate sees it just as clearly, in his own way. When the class started working on their Mother’s Day books, he told me that he wanted to give his book to Jennifer’s mom. He said it in the same four-year-old, matter-of-fact tone that I imagine Jennifer used: what could be more obvious?

Indeed. Well done, my son.

Rejoice

Behind the scenes, Nate, Sarah

My childhood bedroom, circa 1977. Late evening—definitely past my bedtime. My father’s woodwind quintet was playing downstairs. I could hear his bassoon calling me, through the gap under my door. I slid quietly out of bed and tiptoed across the room. Very, very slowly I turned the cut-glass knob, opened the door, and crept silently down the hall. I lay down on the floor at the top of the stairs, hung my sleepy head down onto the first step, and let the music wash over me.

Performing Arts School of Worcester, circa 1986. My trumpet lesson was over, and I was waiting for my sister’s clarinet lesson to end. I had already finished my homework, and I had about an hour to kill. My friend Amy invited me to keep her company while she practiced. I was never a great trumpet player, but Amy was the star of the school. We went upstairs to an empty recital room, and I lay on the floor under the piano, and it was glorious. I felt the sound in my bones, in my stomach. I felt as if I were part of the instrument, and the music flowed through me.

First Congregational Church, circa 1988. My friend Suzanne had somehow obtained the key to the church, and permission to play the newly-refurbished pipe organ. Maybe she was going to be standing in for the regular organist for some reason, and she needed to rehearse? I can’t remember. But I remember the organ. The first thing we did was climb the narrow wooden ladder into the organ loft and admire all the neat rows upon rows of pipes, metal and wood, all perfectly lined up from tiny to huge. Suzanne went back down the ladder to the console and started to play, and I stood inside the music and wept for joy.

Then a big wooden plank clouted me in the head, and I laughed and called down to her: “Could you please turn off the tremolo?”

Memorial Chapel, Northfield Mount Hermon School, December, 2004. Nathaniel was sixteen months, and old enough to attend Christmas Vespers at Sarah’s beloved prep school. We stood in the foyer at the back of the hall, because we knew he would eventually start to squawk, and one of us would have to take him outside for a walk.

The house lights went down, and the chapel was completely dark. The door in the back of the foyer opened, and the choir rustled up from the basement, jostling each other to get lined up just so. We were surrounded by robed angels, each holding a candle. Nate’s eyes shone as he stared at them.

A single note was struck on the bells, and the soloist began to sing from the chancel:

Veni, veni Emmanuel;
Captivum solve Israel,
Qui gemit in exilio,
Privatus Dei Filio.

And the whole choir, all around us, burst into song:

Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,
Nascetur pro te, Israel!

And as the music filled us up, Nathaniel’s eyes opened wide, and he gasped in awe and wonder, as if to say: You never told me—I never dreamed—that anything could be so beautiful.

Listen:

The motion of the ocean

Nate

Twice a week, Jen comes to our house in the wee dark hours just before dawn. She takes Nate to day care, so that I can catch the early train.

We just started this a couple of weeks ago. When I picked Nate up from day care after the first day, he was very excited. “Daddy! Jen bought me a doughnut this morning! And she says if I behave and don’t dawdle, she’ll buy me a doughnut every day!”

Now, this sounded a little fishy to me. I asked, “Is that really what she said? Two doughnuts a week is a lot, even for a big guy like me.”

“Well, Jen can decide.”

“No, actually. I will decide what you eat, because I am your father.”

He didn’t like that very much, but he promised to talk to her and get more details about the plan.

Last night, when I picked him up from day care, he pulled me down so we were face to face. “Daddy. I talked to Jen about the doughnuts. She said she would get me a doughnut on the first or the second day of the first.”

I was baffled. “I don’t know what that means, Nate. I think I’m going to have to talk to Jen myself.”

“Dad,” he said, very seriously. “You can’t stop the doughnuts.”

Laughing all the way

Nate

Scene: Nate’s bedroom, around 7:30 in the evening. The lights are out, and Nate is tucked in bed. Dad has just finished singing a lullabye.

Nate: Daddy, I want to sing a song for you. I want to sing Rudolph.

Dad: I would like that.

Nate (singing): You know Dasher, and Dancer, and… Kermit… and… Piglet… and Gretchen. But do you recall… the most famous reindeer of all?

You’ll know what to do

Nate, Sarah

I decided to take it very easy this Christmas. Somehow, I always get overwhelmed. So this year, I am allowing some of the more time-consuming traditions to fall by the wayside. For instance, we always used to drive up to Freeport, Maine, to do some Christmas shopping. Well, I’d love to, but I don’t think a four-hour car trip would be much fun for Nathaniel. We’ll pick that up again someday, when he’s older.

Then there are the ornaments. Sarah was a collector, God bless her, so there are approximately four times as many ornaments as we could possibly fit on an eight-foot tree. We do have a cathedral ceiling in the living room, though, so maybe someday we’ll find a fifteen-foot tree that isn’t too wide at the base, and put up all the ornaments. Sarah always used to talk about getting multiple trees, and having themes for them: this one would be fish, shellfish, and other undersea creatures; this one would be nautical; this one would be Peanuts (she loved Snoopy); and then the main tree for all the rest (travel souvenirs, hippos, manatees, etc.).

In the past, for some reason, we would have to unpack all the ornaments in a blizzard of tissue paper, and lay them out on every available flat surface, and only then could we hang them on the tree. This was more than a bit stressful to me; I’ve never been diagnosed with obsessive/compulsive disorder, but there’s definitely a part of me that wanted to whimper and hide when Sarah would get going with the ornaments. I also never understood why it all had to happen in one night.

This year, I took it at my own pace. I left all the glass ornaments in their acid-free storage boxes, because I didn’t want Nate to feel left out. Perhaps tonight after he goes to bed I will hang a few of them; the tree is half naked, but the important thing is that we took it slow and easy and everyone had fun. We’d unpack one, decide whether to hang it and where, and then move on to the next one. I gave him metal ornaments, wooden ornaments, and plastic ornaments, and he hung them all on the same branch, whereupon the branch buckled and dropped them all on the floor. And several ornaments went directly into the trash. I never liked this one; even Sarah never liked these, but they held some precious memory or other for her, now lost forever; and here is an entire bucket of oh my God those are ugly.

This should streamline the process even more for next year. The house can only hold so much clutter, and I am getting to the point where if something doesn’t bring me or Nathaniel joy, then I don’t see any reason to keep it around. We go to Goodwill every week on our way to the grocery store, and Nate has been very helpful in identifying baby toys that he doesn’t love any more.

On Tuesday, I took the day off from work to bake Christmas cookies. This was always Sarah’s department, and I skipped the tradition last year, just because we ran out of time. But this year, I bravely got out the mixing bowl and set Nate up on a stool by the kitchen counter. We mixed and mashed, and eventually got to the point where I realized that someone was going to have to roll the dough into balls. Uh, wait a minute now. You want me to touch it, like with my fingers? The answer was clear: ain’t nobody else gonna do it. Even Nate was horrified at the idea. But I am father and mother to him, I realized, and Sarah would have done it without a second thought. So I dived in, and you know, it wasn’t so bad. She would have been proud. At least until the point where I burned 24 of the 36 cookies into little peanut butter cinders.

We’ll try again today. Top rack only, this time.

4, 3, 2, 1

Nate

Scene: the bathroom. Nate is ready to wash his hands, but he is not quite strong enough to turn on the faucet. Opa, Nate’s paternal grandfather, is supervising.

Nate: You have five seconds to turn the water on for me.

Dad (offstage): Nate, you may not speak to Opa that way. Please apologize, and ask him nicely.

Nate: Opa, will you please have five seconds to turn the water on for me?

What’s in a name?

Behind the scenes, Nate, Sarah

Thanks to everyone who expressed their sympathy over the loss of Sarah’s jewelry. I think I am basically over it. It’s not as if I had intended to wear it, after all, and I still have the memories. I cancelled the maid service and changed the locks, and I (tearfully) gave the charm bracelets to Sarah’s nieces. I still have the first piece of jewelry I gave Sarah, a silver Tiffany bracelet with our initials engraved on opposite sides of a silver heart. That will have to do.

In the comments of the last post, Peg raised the question of how my blog got its name. It’s not quite as simple as she guessed.

Sarah’s totem animal was the manatee. She loved homely animals, and the manatee topped the list. She had manatee jewelry, manatee socks, manatee mugs, just all kinds of manatee paraphernalia. This made it easy for me to pick out gifts for her. A manatee trinket was shorthand for “I love you.”

When we met, I didn’t have a similar obsession. This made it a bit more of a challenge for Sarah to pick out gifts for me.

One day, when we were packing for our first overnight trip together, Sarah presented me with what she called a “travel animal.” She explained that one of her ex-boyfriends had been in the military, and he introduced her to the concept. Apparently it’s traditional for an infantryman to carry a small plush animal in his backpack, to be his “eyes behind” and help look out for danger. He shared the tradition with her, and now she was continuing it with me.

My new travel animal was a Beanie Baby: Happy the Hippo. I was completely delighted. Happy has accompanied me on every trip I’ve ever taken since then. He’s been all over the world. As time passed, however, we realized that this gift was much more than it seemed. It had revealed my totem animal to me. Any time I saw a picture of a hippopotamus, it reminded me of Sarah and how much she loved me. Soon the hippo-themed gifts began in earnest. We even made a pilgrimage to Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, where we took the Animal Adventure Tour specifically so we could go backstage and feed the hippos. (Of course, we also visited the Lowry Park Zoo and hung out with the manatees for several hours.)

The suffix -potamus entered our vocabulary fairly quickly, but it really took off when Nate was born. When he was hungry, he was a hungrypotamus. When he was sleepy, he was a sleepypotamus. When he was spitting up, he was a messypotamus (from Messypotamia, of course). And when he was cranky? Obviously, he was a crankopotamus. And when he woke us up in the middle of the night, we were all crankopotamuses together.

Nate inherited the (dozens of) plush manatees, but they’re not his thing. I await with interest the revelation of his totem animal. At the moment he loves penguins and turtles, but it’s still too early to say.

As for me, I still love hippos, but my collection has slowed way down since Sarah died. We saw a great wooden hippo puzzle while on vacation this summer, but in the end I just couldn’t bear to buy it.

I miss my wife.