The Hope I Can Afford

You are two and a half now—two and eight months—and our life together in this home is warm and full even as the world turns dark. It’s a hell of a thing to raise a child at this moment when the culture is rot, when so many around us are selfish, hateful, shameless, and ignorant. I cast my vote for you, and for mom, and for my students, and their families, and for our friends and loved ones, and for the history I teach, for decency, for democracy, for the world I want for everyone, not just for myself. I am not sleeping well. Neither are you, it seems. Each night, after you fall asleep in your crib, with either mom or me on the floor next to you, reading to you with a book light in the dark, each night you wake at some point and want to come into our “big bed,” to curl up between us, with Apricot at our feet. And then when I wake up with a start, at two in the morning, or at four, in the dark and the cold, when it feels like it’s just me and the owl who lives over on Old River Road keeping watch over the earth, I feel dread. I feel at a loss, I think of you in the years ahead, in a place that can be so unkind. We are failing you.

Of course, you don’t know any of this now. Two nights ago you were petting Apricot on the couch, and you looked up at me and mom and said, “I love her tail. It’s so beautiful.” Then you gave Apricot a hug. “I’ll make you feel better,” you said to her.

You don’t know any of this now. Instead you just read your books. You do your 48-piece jigsaw puzzles, intently. You make jokes and make us laugh. Your vocabulary is vast and growing. You sing songs and improvise the words. You play with your friends at the park. You ride your lil’ racer, Geoffrey the Giraffe. We draw together. We kick the ball together. We listen to music together. We have dance parties in the living room and the three of us skip across the floor to Taylor Swift. You like your Spidey and Paw Patrol and Mickey Mouse and Miss Rachel. You want to read your big book of Daniel Tiger stories again and again and again. We play, every day. We play and through your eyes I see this world of beauty and discovery, innocence and adventure, building and making, hugs and I love you’s, singing and laughing, and every day I cling to those moments, one after the other. It is a better world than the one I see in the dead of night.

In 2002, when I was living in Austin, there was a song I listened to a lot called “The Beauty in Store,” by Beaver Nelson. It appeared on KGSR Broadcasts, Volume 10, an annual collection of live recordings by different artists made in the studio of the local radio station. The song is aching, rough, vague, and it moved me for precisely these reasons. There is a sense of longing, and separation—“one lone child sitting on a see-saw, Spending all the hope he can afford”—and of someone trying to help, to be there in all this pain and confusion, to go first and maybe light the way. The refrain: “I beat down the door, Tried to prepare you for, The beauty in store.” What is that beauty, though? The world in this song is blue and “black as the ocean floor,” a world of pain and joy, of eyes that never make contact, of gold in the dirt and blood staining your shirt. It is a “helping hand that’s been blistered raw.” Was there beauty on the other side of all this? Or was the loneliness and pain just part of the beauty? I was thirty two years old then, trying to write a dissertation, depressed and anxious, adrift, insecure. The country was at war, and spoiling for another war, and the culture was marked by division and hate and violence. I wouldn’t meet your mom for another fourteen years. I saw no beauty in store, for me or for anyone. Beaver Nelson sang of that beauty, but there was a twinge in his voice, as if he wasn’t so sure, either.

I think now that I probably banked that song at some point years ago, filed it away, perhaps waiting for it to reappear and make more sense. “That feeling you got that you can’t give a sound,” sang Nelson. “And every thought too fast to write it down.” A few days ago I put on that KGSR Broadcast CD in the car. I don’t know why I did. I hadn’t listened to it for probably a decade or more. “Beauty in Store” was the fourth track and… I just keep playing it and playing it. I’ve since learned that Nelson wrote the song for his young son. I did not know this back when it spoke to me in Austin. As a father now I understand what it means to try to prepare you for the beauty in store. Even in a blue and black world, I would beat down the door to prepare you for that beauty. Spending all the hope I can afford. Maybe with a twinge in my voice. Maybe with an ache, though an ache that’s different from twenty years ago. For all that beauty in store. In the meantime, you are not yet three, and we will continue to play and sing. And maybe other songs will return. You will hug Apricot and make her feel better. You will prepare me, too. You will call things beautiful, and I will try to make it so.