Pay Attention.

I was there when she was born, five weeks ago tomorrow. Re birth: I can’t remember what I thought it would be like now that I’ve seen what it was.

Zuzu. The top of her already-hairy head, visible and growing in the space Randa made for it.

And then in one sudden squish, like a squeeze of toothpaste, her long body gracefully appeared, with a gesture reminiscent of a baseball player sliding into home.

A feeling of relief filled the room for about one second, and suddenly, alarmingly, the nurse was grabbing at her feet and body (which was the approximate color and shape of an albino eggplant) kickstarting her lungs into the new and relentless motion that would sustain her for the next eighty years.

It started right there. Breathe, Zuzu. Then she did.

I saw it better than her mother. The eyes, open, black as the womb, blinking at the light of the world, at me.

They say the way you do anything is the way you do everything. I expect my daughter will address all forthcoming challenges with the same adroit grace displayed in the moment of her world premiere.

She did not wail nor bleat nor whimper. She looked around — at her mother, at me, at the women rudely rubbing her feet. She realized what the audience wanted, expected, and she gave it to them. A simple cry of one long syllable, to indicate that yes, her lungs were working, the machinery was in order. A courtesy cry, demure and helpful.

I am fine, she said.

Somewhere in there I took a ten second video. I’ve since watched it so many times a tape would have already worn to glitches. Her first moment. The one that began it all.

I felt a hand touching my shoulder and it was the midwife and she was beaming with honest-to-god tears and she said congratulations to me and I felt it strange to be touched by a doctor-type in what was feeling like a holy moment but then I realized that it was her holy moment too, because that’s what it is when a child is born.

I remember a laugh in the room, it might have been mine. Congratulations someone said. I was crying suddenly. God I’m crying now just remembering it. Zuzu’s body — so long and weirdly clean and dry except where a thin cream-colored paste had congealed in the folds of her neck and hips — curled against her mother’s bare chest with a sausagey arm pulled up into a fist against her mouth and her head already lolling in the first indications of individual will.

Me with nothing to contribute but the witnessing. I cut the cord. Do you want a picture a nurse asked. No the cutting will be fine.

Randa looked at me and her face spoke wonders and exhaustion like how it is at the end of a feelgood movie and then in a surprise moment from another genre a great glop of blood shot out and splashed audibly on the linoleum and made a puddle and covered with an angry purple stain the panted legs of the nurse sewing her up.

Randa must have seen the expression on my face because she asked if everything was okay and I wasn’t sure but the nurse said oh of course and then she asked if I wanted to see the placenta. I did.

The nurse had it gathered into a large white bowl and she showed it to me and it was very gross, a cross between a veiny pancake and an giant mushroom. I remembered incorrectly that you are supposed to eat the placenta when you get home and for some reason I asked this aloud and the entire room of three medical professionals and one new mother and her infant looked at me like I was some kind of barbarian man from a steppe country of old but I didn’t care nor was I embarrassed I was just glad I didn’t have to eat something so unpleasant and bloody from the body of my own wife.

From the perspective of the history of the world, giving birth or witnessing birth or being born is no special thing. It is the life equivalent of required reading. But from the perspective of me and my family it was a sacred and solemn and wondrous event and forgive me for this sudden leap from life to its opposite but it reminded of death, which is also the same everywhere and for everyone but absolutely singular in its specific instance.

I looked at my newborn daughter already nudging with great interest the breast that would sustain her and for some reason I thought of the moment I saw for the first time my little sister lying dead in her casket. It was the day before the funeral and her skin was waxy and not at all like the skin of the living and her hands were folded over her chest and it was very obvious that there was nothing that was ever again going to animate that particular body. My awareness of that, the immediacy of the grief, splintered my heart with a memory that will last forever. Her, dead and lying still and my mother in her own grief reaching out to grip the dead hands in her own and cry out I love you Kenna I love you and no she was not asleep and she was a dead body. But that was to everyone else else. To me and to my mother and dad and brother she was our family, our sister and daughter and it was all so terribly specific.

This was like that. This birth, like that death, was a profound moment of life, the likes of which, good or bad, you only get a few times.

So, in the wide white light of the delivery room I thought: pay attention. Pay attention to this. What Zuzu looks like in her first minute alive. The curl of her fisted hand. The color of her eyes, which, in the weeks since have lightened to the first hints of the blue I hope they become. See the expression on her face, on her mother’s. What does it feel like? Pay attention.

I was loathe to write about these first weeks as a new dad because — ask anyone — it’s almost impossible not to slip into the obvious cliches of sentimental parentage, but this morning I woke up with a hopeful feeling. Maybe there was a chance I could say something worthwhile.

I’ll tell you one thing: being a dad makes me more determined than ever to be — to put it plainly, directly — myself. Since the beginning I was blessed with an unabashed love of life. My own in the singular, and life writ large — and have an almost savage need to live it with all the me-ness I can muster.

I want my daughter to have the same demands of life as I do — I demand to be shown everything, the sorrow and the joy, the pinch of regret and the hope of correction, above all, the bravery to live all the way up, and down. Show me all the flavors that I may pick the one I like best. Demand I act in accord with my own heart, without worrying about or bending to the opinions and judgments around me. In short, let me leave this world knowing I put my entire body and mind and heart into it — not merely easing the pain of others, though that is a part — but living, actually living, all the way to the end.

Later that night in the hospital room with Randa and the baby asleep and a machine ticking away in some room beyond the door, I was looking out the window at the light snow falling on the dark wet pavement three stories down. I caught a man in a thick winter coat walking across the lot. He stopped walking and raised his fist to his mouth to shudder a cough.

Suddenly I was filled with a wild and frightening thought: what if I am happy?

Not the happiness of freshly washed sheets or a good meal or a funny show that makes you laugh so hard you have to grab the remote to watch that part again, but the happiness of this private moment, secreted away from the eyes of the nameless anonymous indifferent world. A man and a wife and their new baby.

I can hear her tiny breath in my mind’s ear, and I remember the last time I held her small lumpy body against my chest and it was only an hour ago, after I changed her little diaper whispering while I worked my chapterless story about the bunnies in the front yard who laugh in the grass and call her by name Zoooo Zoooo. And I already can’t wait to hold her again. I see in her eyes the unfolding of the flower of consciousness, the question in them. What’s this, dad? The impossibly tiny fingers. The fingers alone merit a poem I can’t figure out how to write.

I am a man in love, is what it is.

This beautiful little girl. Delight in what she is, hope in what she will become.

___

And this, this fatherhood business, with its redoubled determination to show by example an authentic approach to life, to dance with the partners and problems of our time, involves you too.

I have great hopes for you, see. I hope that by throwing myself forward in a rhythm of invention that some sparks will fly. Will hasten your own fire.

In a few weeks I am releasing new music. I am playing new shows. Actionable details for both coming soon.

I have a new collection of short stories I am hopeful will be published later this year.

My first draft of my first novel, Signs Following, is almost done.

The Morse Code Podcast continues its weekly exploration of contemporary creativity as located in the hearts and minds of the individuals who there move forward in their own public and private mysteries. I am proud of the work we’re doing, the community we’re building, and I’m particularly excited about this Thursday’s episode, with novelist Adam Ross, who just published a book — Playworld — which is at this moment setting the literary world on fire. Next week is author, actor and activist Tyler Merritt, who is about to release the follow up to his sensational I Take My Coffee Black.

I’m doing these things because I love doing them. That’s all. It’s selfish. I love people and I love this particularly charged community I live in. Grow where you’re planted, someone once said. The world is a good place to live and even if it’s not, I’d like to make it so.

There is no pain beyond your ability to express it. And when you express something, it leaves you and makes room for something else. I promise this is true.

Korby

If you didn’t catch last week’s episode with artist and painter Ryan Rado, here is a 10 minute excerpt. My only New Year’s Resolution is to post a separate ten minute clip on the Morse Code Podcast YouTube Channel in addition to every full-length episode because 1) it is the hardest thing for me to do and 2) the thing most necessary to channel’s growth. Funny how those are so often connected.