Days of Wonder and Delight
The four of us: Sierra, Pat, tiny Emma, me.
A week after our wedding, while acclimating to the first subzero temperatures of the winter, Pat applied for a spot in the university’s married student housing. Located on Hawkeye Park Road, on the west edge of the campus, the housing complex primarily consisted of two dozen three-story apartment buildings, but we were offered housing in the fifty-unit trailer park a half mile from the apartments.[1]
The trailers sat at the edge of the Mormon Handcart Park, also UI property, a thickly wooded ravine that led down to Clear Creek. An historical marker told us the park preserved a portion of the trail used by Mormons making their mid-nineteenth-century trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Salt Lake Valley,[2] where all that divine vision turned inward, dark and misguided. Although most made the trip by horse-drawn wagon, many poor European emigrants transported their possessions with handcarts.
We moved in at the beginning of the second semester. Depending on our mood at the moment, the single-wide trailer was cozy or cramped. The front door opened into the kitchen/dining room. If you took a sharp right coming through the door, you’d be in our living room. Sierra’s bedroom was at the east end of the trailer; ours was at the west end.
The lack of square footage actually worked to our advantage because what little we had in the way of furniture filled the space. If we’d wanted to, we could’ve transported our belongings via handcart. The one notable addition was a low-slung bed frame. I scored a stack of one-by-fours and cut them to fit the frame to make a platform for our five-inch-thick cotton mattress.
An access road ran through the middle of the trailer park, ending near our trailer, with parking spaces to the left and right, and sidewalks that led to pods of five trailers. We had the good fortune to be offered a trailer in a pod where our friends David and Annie Tucker lived. David was working on a Ph.D. in Japanese history. Annie was one of those people whose radiant presence rubbed off on those around her. Saying hello to her in passing usually turned into an intense galvanizing conversation lasting twenty minutes and resulting in some new enthusiasm or enlightenment. They had three kids – Naomi, Ben, and Eric. Sierra and the boys were close in age and became play buddies.
Ben, Sierra, and Eric in Sierra’s bedroom.
Forty years later, Annie and I are still having those “sidewalk moments” because she and David live next door to my girlfriend. “I have a story to share from our trailer park days,” she said recently, a playful glint in her eye. “Remember that Lakota couple who lived next door to us?” They often asked Pat to babysit their infant son when they both had student responsibilities or wanted an evening out together. When Annie ran into them at a workshop for mediators, they mentioned their son had married a White woman, jokingly blaming Pat for being so kind and gentle with him that he became partial to Wasi’chu women.[3]
That January was bitterly cold, not unusual for Iowa, but it snowed just about every day. More than a foot of snow lingered until a mid-February thaw, and the Alberta Clippers that whipped down from Canada and across the prairie sculpted large snow drifts in the countryside. I’d pick up Al Buck in the morning and head out Rochester Road[4] toward the home of Allan Kornblum and Toothpaste Press in West Branch. Snowplows were able to keep the ten miles of road open, but for stretches we saw nothing but snowbanks either side of us. It was like driving along the floor of a snow canyon.
Pat was taking a full load of classes, working toward her Dance degree. I was falling in love with the art of letterpress printing and bookmaking. While hand-setting lines of poetry in a composing stick,[5] I was learning the characters of typefaces – quirky classical Poliphilus, elegant Centaur, sturdy Goudy Modern, chiseled Perpetua, shapely sans-serif Optima. I was reveling in the creamy texture of the mould-made papers Allan printed on – Fabriano Ingres from Italy, Canson Mi-Teintes and Arches from France, Masa from Japan. I spent whole mornings in a kind of working meditation, sitting at Allan’s large dining room table and, using Irish linen thread coated with beeswax, sewing 24-page chapbooks into their wrappers.
Allan and me in the Toothpaste Press shop.
Patiently, sympathetically, Allan mentored me through my apprenticeship. He began letting me try my hand at printing small jobs on the Chandler & Price platen press. The smell of carbon black and linseed oil from a can of Van Son ink could still transport me to those days. I learned the proper amount of ink to add to the steel platen by listening for the soft hiss of the rubber rollers on the platen. I learned to make subtle adjustments to the makeready to ensure the type gently and evenly bit into the paper, leaving its inky impression. But also, I was learning about the challenges of turning a small literary fine press into a working proposition – something that paid the bills, and our wages.
Pat became pregnant that May. We were excited about this addition to our family. Using ultrasound technology to identify the gender of the fetus was in its infancy, but our midwife had no access to such equipment. We didn’t want to know anyway. We were quite happy to wait until the birth for a “gender reveal.” Although I would’ve been equally happy with whatever resulted from the roll of our genetic dice, I had a hunch, or wanted to believe, this child would be a girl.
I was writing poems that summer in anticipation of the arrival of our second child. Collected under the title “Daughter Poems,” they intertwined the mystery and wonder of childbirth with all the hopes and concerns of every expectant parent. In the evening, a great horned owl began regularly visiting us, sitting atop a utility pole at the edge of the woods and asking, “Who, h’HOO, whoo, whoo?” From Sierra’s bedroom window, we would gaze at his silhouette.
We’ll have no stories of princes –
none handsome, none dashing.
Just the facts: tall, yellow stalks of
mullein stood in the field.
One night, a great horned owl
flew out of the woods
& perched just beyond our dreams,
calling, calling, calling,
& now, you’ve arrived.
During her second pregnancy, Pat’s food cravings focused on sweet breakfast cereals, those cravings often coming to a head in the evening. I’d make late-night runs to the Randall’s Grocery on the Coralville Strip near First Ave. Either Sugar-Crisp or Honey Smacks would do the trick – in a pinch, Sugar Pops.
At first, you’re not sure this is home,
but the sun massages your blue skin
& unglues your eyes.
Then you feel your blood
rushing around, turning
corners at elbows & knees.
You’re the mystery guest
for whom we’ve been setting a place
at our table these nine months,
the one who brings us new appetites.
“Surprise! I’m pregnant!”
Pat, Sierra, and I spent a quiet, happy summer together as we prepared to become four. One sunny August day we picnicked at City Park and enjoyed a free music concert that included a sideshow of jugglers. Ten years later, in his teens, Sierra got into juggling, and became quite good. He bought two juggling fire sticks, and would give amazing performances for us in our dark front yard out in the country, tossing the sticks with their flaming ends into the night sky, twirling, twirling, before he caught them.
Welcome, latest wonder of the world!
Look at the everything of today!
Jugglers are able to keep various items
in the air & under their control.
Their most astounding feat is to
juggle a tennis racket, a delicious
apple & a machete –
the machete slices the apple
in midair.
The audience leaps to their feet.
Like a second mother to us, my grandma Duer had knitted booties for all her grandchildren. We lived next door to her during my first five years, and after we moved ten miles away, she spent every weekend helping to care for us. And now, at the age of ninety-four, she was knitting booties for my child.
For your magically small feet
with their hundreds of minute bones
as intricate as clockwork –
a pair of woolen booties
knitted by your great-grandmother
with the same care
as that shown by her mother,
a Swiss woman so small
she could climb inside clocks
to synchronize their gears.
During the dog days of summer, the trailer could become an oven. Our two window fans, at their best, stirred up a hot dry breeze not unlike the infamous Santa Ana that, Joan Didion wrote, “shows us how close to the edge we are.”[6] Two miles away, nestled in a bend of the Iowa River and blessed by tall shade trees, City Park offered a simple getaway. One day we watched skydivers landing in an open area near the entrance to the park. We were impressed by their ability to use their rectangular parachutes to steer their descent and aim for a landing spot. All the while my imagination was fast-forwarding the life of my unborn child toward adulthood.
Now men are falling from the sky,
twirling toward earth like maple seeds.
They write messages on the blue
as they descend – double helix,
birth, death, infinity,
I love you.
The most foolhardy one – feet barely
touching terra firma – will want
your hand in marriage.
I can’t wait to see what happens.
Our trailer park was in one of the flight paths of a hot air balloon company doing a brisk business on the east side of Cedar Rapids. Relaxing after breakfast one Sunday morning, we began to hear frantic shouts and the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of what we soon learned were the firing up of propane burners. We rushed to the emergency door exit in our bedroom to see a 90,000-cubic-foot balloon floating just above our trailer and then skidding rather inelegantly to a halt twenty yards west of us.
A balloon is being filled with helium.
Its peacock colors puff up –
a celebration of air.
It begins to grow light & graceful,
ready to float off,
& then deflates.
Don’t ask me why, but our wishes
often come true like that.
The last day of February, I went to work and Pat attended her classes. She called when she started having contractions late that afternoon; by the time I got home the process was beginning. Our midwife and good friend Amy was on her way, as were our friends Mary and Joan, who would assist Amy and keep five-year-old Sierra occupied by playing with him.
My job was to be there for Pat – hold her hand, rub her back, massage her neck. The length of this second labor was much shorter but its pain was more intense. I have no way of measuring or understanding what Pat went through, but I know it took all her strength and stamina to push an eight-and-a-half-pound bundle of pain out of her body. Throughout her labor, I sat at the foot of our bed, my back against the footboard, Pat’s back to me as I straddled her. She leaned against me, sometimes pushed against me, as she strained to deliver our baby. At a midpoint break in the contractions, I tried to get up for a minute to stretch my legs. Through gritted teeth, with a ferocity I rarely if ever heard in her voice, Pat said, “You’re not going anywhere!”
That evening, on the same mattress Sierra was born on, Pat gave birth to our daughter, Emma Claire. I was awestruck by the moment. When Amy asked if I’d like to cut the umbilical cord, I could barely answer, “No, no, you do it, please.” I think I was afraid I’d hurt Pat or the baby. Not long after this, Annie came knocking at our door to let us know about the beautiful pink orb of a Snow Moon rising in the eastern sky, only to find us admiring a different new body of light.
In our world, day eventually
gives way to night,
& this is the moon,
as orange as the silken scarf
tied round your waist.
The secret of the moon is a song
that seduces sailors
to forfeit their sanity & jump
in the deepest part of the ocean.
I suggest you learn this secret –
it might come in handy.
The birth announcment I printed at Toothpaste Press.
Pat and I had been discussing names for a while. Emma was her choice, an old-fashioned earthy name, the name of pioneer farmwives.[8] Claire was my choice, French for “clear,” a name I associated with sky and flight. Together, the names seemed to promise a healthy balance. I hardly slept that night as Emma lay between us. I wanted to snuggle her to share my warmth but was afraid I’d smother her.
The next morning, while Pat was showing Emma how to latch on to her nipple and nurse, I walked to a young oak at the edge of the woods and buried the afterbirth. Not until I stood there watching the dark red placental membrane settle into the hole in the ground, was I able to let out a long sigh of relief and exhaustion.
I hope you’ll remember this moment,
this storm rocking the trailer,
rustling papers & plants,
this night stretching across
the plains of America,
from Saskatchewan to San Luis Potosí.
You can taste the wheat chaff in the air.
You can hear the sobbing, the cries
of sod-busted women.
Some things can’t be explained,
they can only be named.
Thus, in the end, we have injustice
& the will to defy it.
I can’t promise you a better world,
just your own chance,
just another crack at it.
Footnotes
[1] Those trailers would be razed after the floods of 2008, and replaced with student rec soccer fields.
[2] Located in the arid godforsaken Great Basin, it was Mexican territory at that time.
[3] A Lakota term for White people, often used disparagingly.
[4] Also known as Herbert Hoover Highway, in honor of the man born in West Branch, a much better head of the wartime Commission for Belgian Relief than President of the United States.
[5] Minding my p’s and q’s, because it was so easy to confuse those letters when the type is set from left to right and upside down in the stick.
[6] From “Los Angeles Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).
[7] Both the Ojibwe and Tlingit peoples traditionally call it the Bear Moon, the time when bear cubs are born. Among other native peoples, the Dakota call it the Raccoon Moon, and the Cree have named it the Eagle Moon.
[8] Of the most common names given to baby girls in the U.S. that year, a year of Jennifers and Jessicas and Amandas and Ashleys, Emma was not in the top 100, maybe not even the top 300.