Two weeks ago, we saw doubt and concern on our doctor’s face for the first time. It was a Friday, one of our weekly appointments. Our routine was pretty well nailed down at this point: On the days when we had an appointment, I would stay home and work for a few hours in the morning before we’d go to the doctor’s office. The doctor would examine my wife — an activity that seemed akin to dowsing as it appeared to involve nothing more than laying her hands at various angles on Keeley’s belly and asking how she was feeling. Once we’d answered and asked a few questions, my wife and I would head off to lunch together and talk about all the things we needed to get done before the baby was born.

As I said, routine.

Except for this one Friday a few weeks back.

I’d been staying up late that week to get Assam & Darjeeling ready for publication, working every night until about 3AM. I was pretty pleased to have finished up the Kindle version of the book and I’d made some progress on an iPad version as well. In addition, I’d been doing some good work on a new Jee story that night and I was looking forward to finishing it over the coming weekend. To celebrate, I’d made my self a fairly stiff drink and settled in to read for a while before bed. Honestly, I was spoiling myself a bit. I knew I wouldn’t get many chances for this sort of thing once the baby was born.

And, after all, I didn’t have to get up too early in the morning. I could always take a nap after the appointment. And there was the weekend when I could catch up on any sleep and work I’d missed out on. So I felt a little more tired than usual the next morning, but not debilitatingly so. Just a bit blurry around the edges.

I got a lot sharper during our appointment, when I saw the doctor pause with her hands on my wife’s stomach. Up until this point, the woman had been following a routine of her own. But something shifted somehow and I understood that I was no longer looking at her face.

I was looking at a mask, the thing you put on when you don’t want people to see what’s really there.

She made a few more measurements with her hands — a few more than usual, pressing a little harder than usual — and then she went over and leafed through my wife’s charts . . . something she had never done before.

I don’t remember the exact words she used, but the gist is that she suspected the baby was breech. This wasn’t too much of a shock, really. She’d mentioned it during a few previous appointments and, with three weeks to go, there was plenty of time to sort things out.

Only, uncharacteristically, she seemed unsure. She asked if we had time to stick around and do an extra ultrasound, just to be sure.

Ultrasounds are a lot of fun and the only plans we had were to get lunch afterward and, hopefully, take a nap together that afternoon. So, yeah, we could stick around.

The doctor sent us off with a nurse while she interrupted someone’s lunch break, so they could come confirm the baby’s position.

Once we were done, the technician sent us back off with the nurse again. “Okay,” she said to us out in the hallway, “I’m going to go get the doctor to come and talk with you. Based on the ultrasound, the baby is breech. Also, there’s zero amniotic fluid in there. So that means you’re going to have a C-section. And you’re going to have it today.”

Oh. My.

We had to sit for a while and wait for the doctor to come back to talk with us. She told us what we’d already figured out: That we were very, very lucky.

We were lucky that our appointment had been moved up from later in the afternoon, lucky that the doctor hadn’t been able to confirm the position of the baby, lucky that she’d ordered an extra ultrasound, lucky that we’d decided to skip lunch to do it . . . lucky that they’d checked in on our little girl before we’d gone another three weeks.

There are a lot of things that could be the source of the missing amniotic fluid but what mattered most was that the baby needed to come out as soon as possible. With nothing to protect her, the risks were very real. It’s never a great thing to hear your doctor say the word “stillborn”. No matter how many times she says the word “lucky”, you’re going to have trouble forgetting that she said the other word too.

We went to the hospital straight from the doctor’s office.

I called my wife’s parents once we were settled in, monitors keeping watch over my wife and our baby.

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked when I called her father. He said he didn’t have any plans. I asked if he wanted to drop by and hold his granddaughter three weeks early. They were there within the hour.

I called my parents as well. My father prayed.

I’m not very good at very many things, but my mind moves pretty fast and I do pretty well in a crisis. Also, my wife tells me that I look pretty good in scrubs.

A little while later, I tried to ignore a Caesarean going on over left my shoulder so I comfort my very frightened wife while we waited for our daughter was born.

But, in all honesty, it felt more like a rescue than a birth.

And so . . . at around 7:30PM, someone over my shoulder said “Do you want to see her?”

We did.

Her mother named her after the Greek word for wisdom. And I’d like to think that there must have been an owl whispering in the doctor’s ear that afternoon, sent from Athena to nudge us all in the right direction to make sure that ultrasound happened.

It did. And now we have Sophie.

Nothing to it really, once everything was said and done.

With chaotic detritus from the recent move still littering areas of the new house (and my own psyche), we celebrated my fortieth birthday a bit early on Saturday night by escaping to my favorite restaurant, Tres Lobos.

No one took a picture, but I’m sure I was grinning like an idiot. I love Tres Lobos for their excellent Camarones ala Diabla (a dish so good I am unable to bring myself to order anything else on the menu) as well as the guy who roams between the tables on Fridays and Saturdays, singing the hell (and his heart) out of Mexican karaoke standards. Unfortunately, I forgot my video camera and was unable to record it when the singer (bribed by my father-in-law) came over to sing for my birthday! Alas.

You’ll just have to settle for this shot captured on my iPhone and take my word for it how awesome it all was.

The month of June showed up, wandered through and pointedly reminded me that (a) It wasn’t quite my birthday yet, and (b) I still had a lot of unpacking to do. Ninety-five percent of everything in the new house is squared away, of course. There are those boxes in the attic to organize, sure. And that old roll top desk isn’t going to take itself to the salvation army, no matter how much I beg it to.

But it’s really that little room in the basement where most of the trouble is — and by trouble, I mean books . . . boxes and boxes of them. They’re teetering everywhere, spilling out their contents like roadkill left in the tracks of the moving van. And unless I get them sorted out and put away, that little room in the basement won’t ever become an office where I can actually get some writing done.

I have a wishlist of things I need to get in order to make it a bit more homey, a bit more of a working space (a rug, some better lighting, a comfy chair) . . . but it’s really the boxes and boxes of books that are keeping it from being more than just extra storage in the basement.

I’ll get it there, eventually.

Saturday afternoon (before the evening’s festivities) I went to go see my daughter perform in her end of the year ballet program and ended up enjoying it much more than I expected to. Apart from the typical parade of positions and exercises, the company also performed a number of pieces and — to my surprise — I actually enjoyed them. A few of the older students were really quite good. I’m judging this based on (a) My lack of interest in (or enthusiasm for) ballet in general, and (b) How much I enjoyed watching them perform.

Best of all was a boy, maybe twelve years old, who completely, utterly, and obviously loved what he was doing so much, it just lit up his face and (by extension) the whole stage every time he was on. I tracked him down in the lobby afterwards and said “Listen kid, you don’t know me at all but I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your dancing. You were obviously having a lot of fun and that made it a lot of fun for the rest of us.” A little old lady overheard us and came up to tell him, in essence, the exact same thing.

And he just beamed like the sun, bright as anything.

I never quite understood the parents who absolutely forced their kids to do ballet or sports or theatre or music or whatever. They might say it’s to teach them discipline or expose them to the arts or show them ideas of teamwork and fair play, but more often than no, it seems like most of the kids don’t really want to be there. They’re enduring it, of course, because their parents are forcing them to do it.

That looks like a perfect recipe for aversion therapy to me.

I’m not saying that these things aren’t important. I’m just saying that your precious little offspring aren’t necessarily cut out to be ballerinas or a concert pianists or a champion quarterbacks — so lighten up, Santini . . . and let the kids have some fun every once in a while.

As a parent, I think it’s my role to light as many lamps as possible and then step back to see which ones draw my kids in, which ones kindle that same light within their eyes that I saw on that boy’s face this past weekend.

As a parent, that’s what makes me proud of my kids, seeing that light pouring out of them — whether or not they win the state championship or perform a flawless arabesque.

All of which is a roundabout way of blaming my mom and dad for all those boxes of books. They had things they wanted me to try out (piano lessons, freshman basketball) . . . but mostly, my parents influence is that they left books lying around everywhere. It seemed like everywhere you turned someone, everyone in the house was always reading something. But, of course, my parents never sat me down, forced a book into my hands, and said “Read, goddamnit.”

Books were stacked on the nightstand next to the beds, the shelves in the family room, carried in briefcases to work. I snuck them into church. We packed them up to go on vacation with us. They were everywhere.

That’s pretty much what my house looks like now. I’ve got forty years of books . . . and this birthday, my family happily added a few more to the stacks: Crowley and Steiner from my wife, vintage comics from my son, and an Amazon gift certificate from my parents that will almost certainly get spent on even more books and comics. All I have to do is find a place to put them all.

Also, I need to read them.

One of the things that hit me during this past move was not just how many books there are, but how many I’ve either not read in years or (gasp) never read at all. I’m going to need to remedy that, I think. As much as I love reading, I see no reason to hold books and comics hostage — especially if they’re not ones I plan on ever reading again (if at all).

Also, it’ll free up some space on the shelves. Which would be helpful as I am almost certainly going to need it.

At work on Monday, they sang Happy Birthday and there was a big chocolate cake with Batman on it. Yay.

The company I work for doesn’t allow people to work on their birthdays, so on Tuesday (my actual birthday, for those of you keeping track) I spent the day with my wife and had a wonderful time going out to breakfast and pushing the cart while she loaded it up with plants and flowers from the local nursery. Back home, I caught up on the overwhelming birthday wishes coming in from everyone online, read a bit from the Aleister Crowley biography that Keeley bought me, and then took a very very very long nap.

I woke up to more well wishes from the Internet and the smell of a fresh rhubarb pie baking downstairs. While my most excellent wife got a special birthday dinner started, I went off to collect the kids from various locations. My daughter brought a key lime pie to add to the mix, my son found some vintage comics for me, and my wonderful in-laws arrived. Together, we all demolished the beef stroganoff my wife had prepared.

And that, more or less, was that.

Not a bad way to spend your fortieth birthday, when you stop to think about it.

Lying in bed a few weeks back I found myself drifting in and out of a vague dream about a clone on the run from some sort of shadowy government agency. In my half-waking mind, the components of a story started to come together. Upon waking, I was surprised to discover that it held together pretty well. For a few days afterward, I’d find myself returning to the idea and playing with it further.

After a week or so, it occurred to me that I’d (quite by accident) developed an actual, honest-to-goodness idea for a series — well suited to either television, animation, or comics. The closest thing I can compare it to is Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing — but I should probably leave it at that, for now.

I say “by accident” because it’s not the sort of thing I do on purpose. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever done it before. Although I’ve had ideas for individual episodes or issues of an already established, ongoing series — the world will perhaps never know the joy of watching, for instance, my “lost” season of Mad Men — I’ve never really come up with something new that was obviously an ongoing series.

The reason for this is, I think, because most of what I read is finite. Novels, plays, short stories, poetry — they all have an ending. Even in the world of comics, my favorite series tend to be the ones that are standalone volumes or finite storylines: Sandman, Cerebus, From Hell, Promethea, the various Gaiman/McKean collaborations, etc. As I’ve gotten older (no, I won’t say “matured”) as a reader, I’ve found the endless story arcs, crossovers, and reboots in most of the mainstream comics increasingly tedious and even insulting.

So it’s strange to have this sort of story coming together in my head . . . but it’s also a lot of fun, as well.

And it’s perfect timing, really. My work on Pantheon has been a little slow of late, as it’s difficult to find the time with everything else going on. We’re moving households in about a week and it always seems that there’s something else that needs to get done first. But it’s been good to have a nice little idea to play with for a while. Once things settle down a bit, I expect to have a strong outline and treatment that I can share with a few connections. After that, we’ll see where it goes.

It’s been nice too, talking about it with Keeley. My current project (the aforementioned Pantheon) began life as a collaboration with her. So it’s been fun to tell her what I’m thinking and then bounce ideas back and forth. In addition to the clarity that comes from simply talking over a story with someone else, she’s given me a lot of little things to consider around various chacters and plot points. I’ll owe her a story credit, when the time comes.

It’s a science fiction story, by the way — at least, on one level it is — and that’s a nice change as well since that’s not a genre I usually spend much time in (either reading or writing). I wouldn’t say it’s hard SF, at all. It’s more of a technological thriller, which sounds a bit odd even to me. Again, not typically the sort of thing my mind immediately comes up with.

But, so far, it’s working for me. At the very least it’s a good exercise to go through in the midst of the moving cyclone.

By my last count, I think I’ve moved about 20 times in my life (that’s 20 separate residences, not including different dorm rooms in college). At the time, it never seemed like that much . . . but it adds up, apparently. The end result is that I’m very, very good at packing. Especially books. There’s about forty-five boxes of them now.

Also, it’s taught me how to plan ahead so that the week leading up to the day when the truck shows up isn’t a hectic mess of last-minute preparation and stress. Oddly enough, we’re only moving one block away. That’s all. But you still have to go through everything, no matter the distance. So I’m disrupting my life, my writing schedule, my peace of mind, and the delicate psychic landscape of my offspring to go one block south.

But we need the room. The kids are getting bigger and we’re all starting to bump into each other a bit more than before. And sometime next year our family is likely to get even bigger, so there’s that to plan for as well. The timing couldn’t have been better. Just as we started getting serious about looking, our landlord had a bigger place open up down the street. That it has a pool table in the basement wasn’t the only deciding factor, I assure you. But it did help take the sting out of the idea of moving again.

As did the realization* that, with a little bit of imagination and some elbow grease, I could have an office again. It’s been a long time since I had a separate space where I could spread out and work — the past few years, I’ve set up shop at the kitchen table after everyone’s gone to bed. It’s been fine (I got two books and a full length play done that way, after all) but it’ll be nice to have things be a bit more grounded.

(It’s also the room right next to where the pool table is, so that’s okay.)

*It wasn’t my realization, of course. I’d been thinking that the back room would end up being storage. Keeley was the one you said “You know this could be an office…” and, as usual, she was absolutely right.

Out at Aurohn Lake last week, I got the chance to prove my devotion to her. Down near the southeast side of the lake there’s a spring where watercress grows in thick, abundant beds. The terrain gets a little swampy down there and one wrong step will find you sinking fast. No one’s entirely clear on how deep the mud goes, but (as I found out later) the rumor is that a cow was lost down there back when the angus beef farm was still in operation.

While Keeley was picking her ‘cress, I went off to take some photos of an interesting mold formation on a nearby tree. Coming back, I watched her shift position and loose her footing. She grabbed an overhead branch and I immediately went into rescue mode, taking one huge step into the seemingly solid center of the watercress.

I sank immediately and my knee boots were suddenly filled with water and mud. Trying to pull out one leg only made the other sink deeper. My main concern was that if I sank to my waist, my camera and my iPhone would be ruined.

As I am somewhat smarter than a cow, I was able to get back to solid ground eventually — all without losing my precious tech, but soaked from the thighs down. As I dumped the gallons of water and mud out of my boots, my only regret was that we didn’t capture the whole thing on video. Ah well, next time…

I will say this: based on the salad my wife made later that night, the watercress was well worth the risk.

We have lunch with the cast and, once again, I forget to record the conversation. People keep showing up throughout the meal and Bob introduces them to me: “This is Telemachus, this is the Merchant, this is…” It’s hard to reconcile the faces, the street clothes, with the characters I’ve been carrying around in my head for almost five years.

We eat, they ask questions — some very pointed ones, actually — and I realize that they’re the ones who have had to do all the heavy lifting on this project. It all comes back to me from my college theatre days, how In The Dark you are when you sit down with a script for the first time, trying to find a character in there.

I didn’t give them much help, I’m afraid. The script was written in a near-vacuum with Bob breathing some fresh air into it every once in a while. I wrote it for his eyes. It never occurred to me that actors might be looking at it.

I eat lunch, I answer their questions as best I can, I tell stories, I hope I’m not repeating myself too much.

“I have a question.”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Have you seen the costumes? The masks and the set?”

“I have. Bob gave me a sneak peek backstage.”

“What do you think?”

“I think they look great. They’re wonderful.”

“Do they look like what you pictured in your head?”

It’s a good question, one that I’m going to have to answer four or five times before I leave.

I realize, answering it, that they don’t in fact look like what I had in my head. But that’s because I didn’t have a play in my head while I was writing. I didn’t see a stage and actors and mask . . . I saw Hermes arguing with Calypso in her cave two steps ahead and half a day late . . . I saw Athena — pale and owl-like, almost luminous — nagging her father, Zeus, sculpted from living marble — I saw Poseidon, streaming green rage, riding on the clouds, pursuing Odysseus…

I didn’t see any of them and I feel a little embarrassed about that. They’re there, obviously. They’ve done the work. They’re the ones who deserve the applause (and they will get applause) and I didn’t write one line thinking about them.

It occurs to me that I never have. When I write plays, I don’t see a set. I don’t see actors. I see the characters and the place itself — am I the only one who does this?

At any rate, we finish lunch. I manage to hide my ignorance (I hope) and they manage to hide their disappointment.

They must be disappointed. I’m not nearly a real capital-W Writer at all. Just a guy willing to dare to wear black in Northwestern Iowa.

Back through the maze of buildings and hallways after lunch. The most excellent Jonathan tracks me down and hands me a sheaf of papers explaining how to connect to the wireless network in the theatre building. For a PC, it takes sixteen pages to explain. It takes two sentences for a Mac. Case closed.

Bob heads off to grade papers and, I assume, get some relief from my delighted babbling. I check e-mail, relieved to be able to do so but also annoyed that none of my e-mail is worth reading. I fire off a few of my own to coworkers and clients and even one to my attorney (it’s almost like being a grown up, folks) and I’m grinding my teeth over a late-night drunken rant that someone sent me the night before when the Director walks by with an envelope and says “Oh, hey, I’ve been carrying this around all day and almost forgot to give you your royalty check.”

Oh. Um. Yes. Thank you.

I’m so shocked to be paid that I forget to even open the envelope — something I’ll forget to do until after I’ve been home for three days, so it’s not like we do it for the money or anything.

But still . . . to be paid to tell stories?

It’s a good job, if you can find it.

I abandon the e-mail and go wandering through the building, worrying over the next class I’ll be teaching — well, facillitating. It’s not a class, more of a workshop really. A writing workshop that either four people or forty will show up for.

I start wishing I’d brought some hand puppets with me.

Keeley and I prowl through the lobby, looking over the lobby display. There are costume and make-up renderings, a model of the set, and this article that appeared a week earlier in the student newspaper…

Vaughnahue’s Top Ten Reasons to see “The Odyssey”
by Vaughn Donahue

1. A brand new adaptation – Homer’s epic in its original form is not an easy read. While this might be a major reason for being wary of the play, have no fear! The script has been adapted by playwright T.M. Camp into a hilarious and pleasing modern masterpiece.
So despite what you remember from high school English class, this play is actually about love, murder, sex, revenge and redemption. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

Ahem.

You gotta love a preview that’s got a Your Mom joke in it.

The director walks by and hands me a copy of the latest edition of the student newspaper, which has a yet another preview of the show.

It’s opening night. I have a writing workshop to give. I collapse onto a small, um, divan in the lobby and talk to Keeley and wish I were taking a nap.

I have a writing workshop to give in a half-hour. I assume that my subconscious mind is working on how to take the two or three things I know about writing and extend them into a meaningful hour or so of workshoppy things.

After a while I go and buy two cans of Mountain Dew and go in to get ready for class. This mainly consists of playing Tom Waits on my laptop and shotgunning the two cans of Mountain Dew while Keeley assures me it will all work out.

Then student start to come in, some of them I recognize from the morning class. And from lunch. My repertoire is suddenly very limited.

Bob, the Director, introduces me and then leaves me in charge of thirty-plus students (and a few faculty members).

I am John’s spastic colon.

We muddle our way through. I do a few exercises which, it becomes painfully apparent, they already know inside and out — at least most of them — and I read a few somethings from one of my own exercises which, even more painfully, sound flat and stale.

When all else fails, change the rules.

We split up into groups, writing together, one line back and forth.

A few minutes go by and it suddenly feels like there’s something happening. Keeley and I slide a pad of paper back and forth, the sheets dripping with my own fear and flop sweat.

Eventually I call time and a few groups read what they came up with. Some of it is very good and, yet again, I miss that Writer’s Group I used to meet with.

I end off by reading “The Face Game” and asking for a response.

Everyone confirms what I have know since college: You can hide a lot behind a good performance.

The truth is, I love reading my work out loud.

All in all, not too bad a way to spend an afternoon in Iowa.

Afterwards, I realize that I completely forgot to record the afternoon session, too.

Then it’s off to the hotel to primp and get ready for a department potluck followed by (!) Opening Night.