Dear people:
I’m sitting on the front porch of our multiple bedroom home overlooking the majesty of this sedate college neighborhood. As I ponder life and catch up on the latest news this sunday morning, I can’t help but notice the intrinsic beauty that is all about me.
Spring burns brightly in the morning sky as flourescent colored birds soar in the freedom above. Their aerodynamics are a reality thanks to the gentle wind which ambers thru the barren trees; still dressed for winter. The branches sway easily back and forth like the harmony of a Sunday School Choir.
The sky is so blue, it hurts my eyes to gaze into its interminable depths. I have to squint to take it all in. Way off in the distance where the velvet blue of the sky meets the black of space, I can see the vapor trail of a passing jet. It’s Journey is silent and mysterious as the small craft propels onward, its sleek metalic body casting shimmering blades of reflective light at my contracting pupils.
Somewhere off in the distance, a melodic Led Zeppelin ballad dances on an invisible zephyr. The notes are soothing and familiar, somehow proclaiming the emergence of life that is about to burst upon the threshold of spring. The music is alluring, transcending the physical boundries of my morning. Like a mental portal, each note brings me closer to a memory of long ago. As Jimmy Page blister’s his six string, the notes pour into my head sprinkling a myriad of brilliant colors against the blank canvas of my mind. The picture forms in the dark recesses of my skull. It is a vivid image of my youth. I’m physically fit, single and wrecklessly motivated towards random debauchery.
In this musically orchestrated memory, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m gazing out at the grungey back alley where I live. It’s downtown L.A. and the stench of Scarff Street is all around me. The flatulent odors of the city attempt to assault my senses as they float in thru the open bars that line the window. My nasal hairs, erect and on the alert, are wary of the impending danger on its way; a chemical invasion of carcinogens floating indiscrimanently on a southern wave of pollution. Though I feel the warming breeze on my face, the putrid vapor never reaches me. It is somehow purified just as the breathable toxins enter the room. Like a bunker protecting a soldier from desultory schrapnel, the musical notes of Led Zeppelin have somehow beat back the malignant molecules of hot stagnant air.
It’s against this back drop that I gaze into Dana’s beautiful face. Motherhood has given her an angelic glow, an intenerating sanctity that neither of us could have predicted. Is this the same girl that use to guzzle beers and chase down armed bandits with a shot gun in Centeral Los Angeles. Is this the same girl who I first got to know in the bowels of a Santa Monica Police sub-station. Is this the same girl who would tuck me into bed, and then party all night long with whatever Scarff Street derelict drifted in. Time is a funny equalizer of the human condition isn’t it?
Suddenly a loud wail broke this random purging of thoughts. It was Baby-Z crying out for attention. His little face turned a purpleish hue as his eyes clamped shut and his tiny thin lips quivered with the ferrocity of a humming bird’s wings. This was his way of announcing that One of his 50 or 60 cat naps a day was coming to fruition.
“Wattsa matter with the baby? Whattsa matter with the baby?,” Dana cooed as she hovered over the small Cordan with all the attention that a group of circling buzzards give to a dying carcass in the desert.
“Does Zander have stinky pants?, does Zander have sticky pants?”
Why is it that parents always say things twice to their children?, and always in that high falsetto voice that can only be described as annoying? Like Zander understands any of this interrogation at all!
“What’s wrong with the boy?” I asked in my best Homer Simpson voice.
“I don’t know,” Dana responded, “He’s hungry, or dirty or both or neither, Who knows; who knows?” With that she began to undue his tiny dirty diapers with the Disney Land characters dancing across the waist band.
Who knows, I thought to myself, Who knows. Those two words could, by themselves, sum up the equation of child rearing for new moms and dads all across the world. Who knows? Surely not us that’s who.
With a plastic rip, Dana pulled the diaper open. Her face became a melted group of flesh tones as I viewed her through a hazy vapor that was rising slowly out of the boy’s pants. Melted, piping hot liquified cheese clung to his chubby little thighs. A nasty viscous mess that had no beginning and no end. It had invaded his diaper and was everywhere like a cancer sucking the life out of its victim. How could so much liquified stink come out of a butt so small?, I thought to myself. Dana and I laughed that silent parental laugh as we embarked into the soiled never-regions of yet another toxic waste municipal landfill nightmare. Dana pulled out a little 3 by 3 inch piece of cloth desinged for wiping away the evils of baby. They’re called baby wipes, and they’re made by CHUBBS. What a fitting name. CHUBBS! It just sounds like the kind of company that makes something designed to de-stink a baby’s butt. CHUBBS: the advertising possibilities are endless: A little dab will do ya!. CHUBBS scrub so you don’t have to! When you’re on the brink, CHUBBS beats up the stink! CHUBBS. an alternative to using your hand!
I held Zander’s legs up in the air as Mom, as I now sometimes call her, began CHUBB-ING away at Z-man’s butt. She wiped repeatedly, searching for some sign of flesh, but the yellow matted custard ooze kept glopping up on the CHUBB cloth. Zander’s distended scrotum swung in the breeze as we continued mopping up the soupy refuse.
“We need a couple of those EPA environmental suits for this job!” I said flippantly.
Dana laughed as she dropped another exausted CHUBB into the waist bucket near the couch. I looked into the bucket tenuously. CHUBB refuse had solidified into a soiled concrete yellow mass. It was chemically bound by theorems not yet explainable to mere man. The bucket of baby waste was heavy and dense. It somehow sucked up all the light around the rim of the bucket like a proton star imploding on itself. It was strangely scientific; A living undulating bucket of protoplasm-poop that would grow beyond the confines of its container one night while we slept. My mind raced wildly as I imagined a 6 foot tall yellow poop man standing above me in the middle of my bedroom laughing like Charles Manson.
“Try and eradicate me, will you? human!. I can’t be killed by a mere CHUBB. I’m proto-poop man.”
Just my luck, be killed by a 6 foot pile of baby-doo in my sleep. I can see the headlines now. “Crime fighting journalist killed in sleep mysteriously. Only clue authorities have to go on was found at the foot of the bed; a glop of yellow solidified toxin stuck to a piece of cloth.”
“A.C., help me will you.” Dana was pointing for me to get another Diaper out of the handy dandy econo-pak. A mountainous pile of soft foam rubber stacked 54 to a case like some kind of mutant sardine can.
Z-man was going thru these things like greased lightening, or should I say poop-lightening.
Without much further fan fare we went about the proposition of changing Zander. His little face cooed a happy relief as Dana walked towards the kitchen to dispose of the badly beaten diaper. She held the saturated plastic at arms length tilting her head away from it as she walked. Her face was squinting as if she was walking barefoot across hot coals. Baby waste disposal can be nasty business don’t you know?
Just then, the familiar wailing of the boy-king resounded throughout the room. It wasn’t enough for his majesty to be nice and clean; no he wanted more. Always more.
I picked him up under his tiny arm pits and held him high over my head. “What is it little man,” I asked.
He stopped his howling and stared at me with that who-the-hell-are-you look he gives me every so often. I could see his little mind working. Infant synapses super charging and overloading on too much quantum data. He eyes rolled around in his head as a mucousy river of saliva or stomach bile or whatever, began slithering out of his mouth. It dribbled over his quivering little lip and then dangled off the edge of his lip heading for the floor. It moved with a slow motion elasticity as it elongated and stretched downward. It was hypnotic. I knew that I should wipe this drool from the boy’s face, but some how it was fascinating to me. I stood motionless and let the moment devour me. This was my true moment of being dad, one of many more moments I’m sure to come. Zander looked at me casually. He neither expected or cared if I wiped the milky goo from his face. As if his stomach was in turmoil, another pussy supply of drool joined the already elongated string. It was thick and almost chunky. “Wow, this new batch has some real weight to it,” I thought to myself. Obviously the new addition of drool was too much. The drool now, out of control, raced to the floor in a fluid rush. SPLATTT!. The floor and the top of my high tops were now a frosty white pasty color.
Before too much more bad could happen, Mom popped around the corner.
“What the hell’s going on?” Her question rang down on me like a hammer striking a nail.
Play innocent I thought, “What do you mean, like, you mean right now what’s going on?”
Dana rolled her eyes around and moved towards my position with her arms outstrectched.
“Give me that Child before you kill him.”
I handed the boy over. Her maternal power was too great to resist.
“What’s your daddy doing to you?,” She said in that high pitched baby warble that causes dogs to howl in the street. “Is he being reckless with you again? You think that guy’s a lunatic don’t you?”
I sat there blankly and watched. What could I say? I mean there was only me and her in the room. It wasn’t like I could look around and point out another lunatic to the boy. He was, afterall, too erudite for that nonsense. I guess this is the part in the letter where I should pretty much lay it on the line. You know me pretty well, so what I’ve just relayed to you probably does not come as much of a shock. Dana is the rock of Gibraltar. She is the calming influence on Baby-Z. She supplies his nourishment and is the face he sees literally every waking moment of his day. I am, on the other hand, the crazy guy who leaves in the morning and comes home when its dark again. I’m the guy who does sit up’s with the boy on my stomach. I’m the one who plays Speed Racer with the little guy’s carriage while he’s trying to relax. I’m the guy who dances with him when a good song comes on a commercial on t.v. I’m the guy who belches louder than he does. I’m the guy who holds him by his armpits and swings him from the torso down so his dangling feet can kick soft pillow footballs that I have so patiently tee’d up for him. So far, his baby input probably thinks I’m either cro-magnon man or an escaped convict who is hiding out from the authorities. Since I’ve never been dad before, I don’t exactly think I’m acting inappropriately. I kind of make it up as I go. Why should I treat child rearing differently than everything else I do in life? I figure after a year or two of pulling him away from a milking boob in the middle of a suck, he’ll get use to me. After a year or two he’ll probably get over his initial embarassment of having me as his dad. If I’m lucky, by year 3; he’ll introduce me to the other pre-schoolers as dad, not the the weird guy who lives in the house also. Never fear, I’m re-writing the manual. Masters and Johnson or Dr. Spock or Zeuss or Whomever had better get another chapter ready in their continuing series on child rearing, because my loins have produced life: Anything is now possible.
Be prepared for more colorful tales of poo poo in the weeks to come.
Yours in parental wisdom…the Cordans.