Things Behind Things

“There are things behind things behind things/ And there are rings within rings within rings.” –Justin Vernon (Bon Iver)

Emma’s birth[1] initiated a shift in the direction of our lives. Sierra, one of the most self-sufficient five-year-olds I’ve known, was attending the Montessori School on the east side of Iowa City. Pat returned to her coursework at the university, taking Emma with her to classes. I continued my full-time job at Toothpaste Press in nearby West Branch.

Pat and I were figuring out how to coordinate and collaborate on childcare. I’d been around when Sierra was a baby, but there’s a difference between lending an occasional hand and fully participating in the work of child-rearing. Pat slept lightly and fitfully at best. I, on the other hand, was a virtuoso at sleeping through any noise and under any conditions, not a helpful habit for the parent of a newborn. Sometimes it took a shake of the shoulders, sometimes an elbow to the ribs, but Pat would eventually get me up when Emma awoke at night and didn’t need to nurse. I learned when it was my turn to put her back to sleep.

We leaned on a great support group of friends, many of whom were also new parents. Our good friend Pam gave birth to Zoe less than two months after Emma was born. When the girls were little, Pam and Pat went on regular excursions to the St. Vincent de Paul and other thrift stores in Cedar Rapids, bargain-hunting for baby clothes and canning supplies. Those trips were not complete without lunch at the downtown Bishop’s Buffet, sharing parenting stories and commiserating over slices of Bishop’s famous chocolate pie. Forty years later, Emma and Zoe are still close friends.

Pat’s mom, Elaine, was living in town at the time, working as a frat mom. Three months after Emma’s birth, she babysat our kids so we could have a night out. We went to see Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man at the Bijou, but halfway through the movie we heard our names being paged over the dialogue between Henry Fonda and Vera Miles. We wanted to say we were “the wrong parents,” but hurried home to bail out Elaine, who had realized she wasn’t up to the task of babysitting our kids.

Like many parents, I applied myself to developing parenting hacks: Folding clean cotton diapers became a calming meditation at the end of the day, the satisfying stack of soft white cloth ready for tomorrow. The little finger on my right hand, offered to Emma fingernail-down, could calm or at least distract her for five minutes until Pat was able to stop whatever she was doing to nurse her. I began to build a personal repertoire of lullabies – rhythmically simple and sonically soothing songs.[2] As I laid Emma in her crib, with the care and delicacy of a sapper defusing a bomb, I would fade out the song or continue to sing as I slipped out of the room.

Our second Thanksgiving at the trailer, with our friend Joan Harris

I thought I was an enlightened partner, a feminist. But I was also one generation removed from our culture’s prevailing patriarchy. Imprinted on me were memories of my dad coming home from his sales job, fixing himself a manhattan or martini, and regaling my mom with accounts of his day. Pat, bless her heart, never gave up on me, and never gave in. She let me know when my focus on my needs left me oblivious to hers, when I failed to ask the one essential question: How was your day? I could bristle at her criticisms, and we got into some heated arguments, but once I was able to distance myself from the moment, I always agreed with her and vowed to try harder. I began to realize how carefree my life had been up to that point.

This was the beginning of the real challenge of marriage, the mundane plodding work of raising a family, no days off, what my friend Bobbie has referred to as “putting one foot in front of the other every day and doing what we had to do to care for our families.” Downtime was precious but rare. I was still a dreamer, a poet, and whenever I could I drew upon that perspective like a resource. I enjoyed taking Emma for long walks – it usually calmed us down to get out of the trailer, and it gave me time to wander in my own mind.

Holding you in my arms,

we walk toward the woods

behind the trailer – shady summer

sanctuary, respite from the prairie heat –

listening to bird language filter down

through the vast green room of foliage.

The forest floor is dotted with foxglove,

blue phlox, and the diminutive violet.

Wood anemones abound in sunny corners.

I could swear that just as the phlox

began to bloom, your eyes also

flowered from gray to sky blue.

These woods stretch down to Clear Creek,

where at a bend stands an old cottonwood

whose trunk calls for seven children

stretched hand-to-hand to measure its girth.

I point out what amazes me so you

can see yourself as a part of it.

We take what surrounds us

into the very core of our beings.

Someday, you’ll find your own words.

You will point out to me, “Look at that!”

And I will turn to find you there.

Trying to show Emma how to snap her fingers

Pat’s university instructors and fellow students were supportive, but she realized she couldn’t keep up that pace, her heart was leaning more toward mothering than studying. Even though she was within a handful of hours of a degree, she dropped out of school. This marked the end of our access to married student housing, which was just as well – we were bursting at the riveted seams of our trailer home.

By August, we had moved into an apartment at the end of North First Street in West Branch, a five-minute bike ride to the press. Even though rents were more reasonable in West Branch than in the college-town housing market of Iowa City, we couldn’t afford an apartment much bigger than our trailer. One upgrade was the relief of an AC window unit. And West Branch Elementary School, where Sierra would soon be starting kindergarten, was just four blocks away.

It must’ve been around this time that I wrote these lines: “In Marriage// There is heat and chill/ There is the heat/ And there’s the chill.” Not my best poem, I know, but it felt so true to me I needed to write it twice, I needed to remind myself of the package deal of our partnership. Pat could be passionate, she could be hot-tempered, and when she was pissed off at me, when I’d get lost in my thoughts and stop thinking about our family, her shoulder could be cold as ice. In retrospect, I might say Pat’s mercurial temper was exciting in its unpredictability, but that wasn’t generally my feeling back then. If Pat were here, she’d say, “That was mostly on you, buddy.”

The following March, Pat and I left the kids with her mom for a night and drove up to Minneapolis to visit our friend Jim Becker and go to a Laurie Anderson concert. Lying on a futon that Sunday morning, we got into an animated argument about some thoughtless comment implying my needs took precedence over hers, eventually ending in my apology and makeup sex. In the heat of the moment, we neglected our usual precautions. We later laughed when we realized we’d conceived our third child that morning.

Laughter couldn’t drown out our concerns, though. I wasn’t bringing home the kind of paychecks that could easily put enough food on a table for five. Pat hadn’t been able to find a job that paid more than the cost of childcare. She’d started a catering business with her friend Sharon, but the work wasn’t steady. However, she was savvy about stretching our money as far as it could go. Once a week, especially in the summer, she’d take the kids to the Coral Fruit Market, on the west edge of the Coralville Strip,[3] where she’d pick through the box of flawed (and free) produce to glean ingredients for smoothies, cobblers, crisps, pies. A watermelon always made its way home, along with the imperfect produce. One of Pat’s talents was being able to judge the ripeness of a melon by tapping and smelling it. She was never wrong.

Late that summer – five months into Pat’s pregnancy and after a modest raise – we moved to the downstairs apartment of the house next door. We finally had room to breathe. The apartment featured an enclosed front porch that faced east and enjoyed the full pleasure of the morning sun. Thanks to a sturdy wooden desk I’d scrounged up, the mudroom off the kitchen also became my writing study. We still had only two bedrooms, but the kids’ bedroom offered room for three beds with enough open floor left over for the inevitable strewing of toys. We had a key to the exterior basement door, which gave us access to an array of tools and gardening equipment. I built a sandbox for the kids in the backyard under the mulberry tree.

By this point, I’d been with the press for three years. Allan had begun making changes that would grow the press, working with offset printers to produce some of its books, adding more fiction titles to its list. In an effort to build credibility as a serious literary publisher (and weary of having to explain the press’s name), Allan changed it to Coffee House Press. He handed me the responsibility for producing the Morning Coffee Chapbook Series, letterpress editions that would be sold individually or by subscription. With his oversight, I began to select the authors and manuscripts and design and print the books.

That September, Allan reserved a booth at the 10th annual New York Small Press Book Fair. He had many connections in the city, having attended classes at New York University and workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. He’d published collections by many of the second-generation New York School poets.[4] After packing Allan’s car with books for sale and a small tabletop platen press on which he would print complimentary poetry broadsides, the two of us hit the road Thursday noon and drove a thousand miles straight through. Emerging from Lincoln Tunnel into Midtown Manhattan on Friday morning, bleary-eyed, I steered the car through traffic, Allan directing me toward Madison Square Garden. According to an essay in the New York Times Book Review,[5] among the 200 independent presses from across the country were some “serious publishers with very playful names such as Full Court Press, Permanent Press, and Toothpaste Press (just renamed Coffee House Press).”

Back home, we were awaiting our third child. As with Pat’s previous two pregnancies, the fetus was in breech presentation. This time, the midwives were unable to maneuver it into a position suitable for natural childbirth. In those final weeks before her due date, we had to face the fact that this child would be born by cesarean section. Pat was extremely upset. Even though I urged her to think otherwise, she never forgave herself for failing to give her child the best birthing experience.

The surgery was scheduled for the morning of December 4 at Mercy Hospital. How different it was from our home birth experiences. When I was permitted to enter the OR, I sat next to Pat, holding her hand and cradling her head, even though I knew she was under general anesthesia. I never looked away from her to catch a glimpse of the surgery. (Watching St. Elsewhere, I’d close my eyes whenever a scalpel appeared in the shot.) When the obstetrics doctor removed the child from Pat’s uterus and announced it was a boy, I was torn between staying with Pat until she was sutured up and in the clear and going to see and celebrate my son. As it was, the nurses wouldn’t let me get close as they busily swabbed him clean, checked his vitals, weighed and measured and swaddled him. But I could see he was a beautiful healthy baby.

That evening, as Pat and I sat in her maternity ward room and she made a first attempt to breastfeed our son, we discussed names. We hadn’t gotten far with this earlier, only agreeing on the idea of a gender-neutral name. Our top choice was Robin. I started lobbying for the name August, like Emma, a throwback to a simpler time and place. When I admitted my hopes of calling him Gus, Pat promptly vetoed that name. We began to gravitate toward Jesse, and that became his name: Jesse Paul. I went home that evening to help my mother, who had driven from West Virginia to be with Pat through her long recovery process. The next morning, I stopped by the press long enough to share the news with Allan and print a birth announcement on leftover scraps of a beautiful mould-made paper.

Our son Jesse lived for 39 years and two months. Walking across a divided four-lane road in northeast Austin, twenty minutes before sunrise, he was hit by a pickup truck.[6] It’s been a year, five months, and one day since he died. I don’t think about Jesse every day, but I think about him often. I recall those last days Sierra, Emma, Cecile, and I spent in the hospital with him, intubated, heavily sedated because of his spinal cord injuries. I recall when the nurse withdrew Jesse’s life support and we held him as he fought for his last breaths with what little strength he had left.

The musician Justin Vernon spoke recently[7] about going into “the garage of your soul” to fix or heal yourself. “You have to move this to get back there, but you block something else and it’s overwhelming. A lot of despair could be in there with that stuff, a lot of pain.” Sometimes it feels too awful to relive memories of Jesse, and I instead get absorbed in the trivial tasks that fill my days: washing my dishes, tending my gardens, paying my bills. But I keep coming back to Jesse, moving all the rest out of the way so I can hold on to him as long as I can.

Footnotes

[1] “Old Paint,” “Hush Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word,” “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” Rosalie Sorrels’ “The Baby Tree,” Loudon Wainwright III’s “Samson and the Warden,” John Prine’s “Paradise,” Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain,” Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Lather,” Pete Seeger’s “Sweet Little Baby.”

[2] Near the current site of the Coral Ridge Mall, a decided downgrade in human commerce.

[3] Among them, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, Paul Violi, Joseph Ceravalo, Dick Gallup.

[4] “14,000 Small Presses: Something More Than the Sum of Their Parts,” by Caryn James, December 23, 1984.

[5] We thought the two names went well together, but as is often the case, names carry the weight of people we associate with them, and the name Paul made us think of our good friend Paul Bergmann.

[6] Speed limit on the road is 40 mph; most vehicles travel at closer to 50 mph. The sidewalk is next to the road, with no median separating the two. See the CDC report on the rising U.S. pedestrian death toll: “Pedestrian and Overall Road Traffic Crash Deaths — United States and 27 Other High-Income Countries, 2013–2022.”

[7] On Being Project’s podcast interview of Justin Vernon, “Being Bon Iver,” April 16, 2025.

Days of Wonder and Delight