I dreamed I held you in my arms

Two years ago tonight, we said goodbye to one of our dearest, sweetest friends. She was in such bad shape at the end, she could barely hold herself up. Watching this tiny cat bravely face her end and still have little mews of encouragement for us …

We felt such anguish that night that we never imagined feeling joy again.

When I was young, my mother had the horrible responsibility of having to put down two beloved dogs. I never knew how much of her own pain she shielded her children from.

We have a video of Kali’s last night; it’s hard to watch, not just because of any emotional reason, but because it’s just dark. Lights off, music on; we were trying to comfort Kali, and ourselves, the night before we took her, finally, fatally, to the vet.

Tonight, we decided to give this song another layer of meaning, one that I hope will celebrate Kali and Julian both. I feel deeply sad that they never met, these two beautiful, clever creatures that we love so much. Julian is walking now, as you’ll see in these clips, and Jen and I are both convinced that Kali and Dubby both would have totally adored this little stumbler.

Julian is already deeply, deeply in love with Junie and Kirby, and one day, he’s going to have to say good-bye to them. That day, I’ll be in my mother’s shoes, teaching a young child how to deal with grief and pain. That might be the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do.

I dreamed I held you in my arms

Two years ago tonight, we said goodbye to one of our dearest, sweetest friends. She was in such bad shape at the end, she could barely hold herself up. Watching this tiny cat bravely face her end and still have little mews of encouragement for us …

We felt such anguish that night that we never imagined feeling joy again.

When I was young, my mother had the horrible responsibility of having to put down two beloved dogs. I never knew how much of her own pain she shielded her children from.

We have a video of Kali’s last night; it’s hard to watch, not just because of any emotional reason, but because it’s just dark. Lights off, music on; we were trying to comfort Kali, and ourselves, the night before we took her, finally, fatally, to the vet.

Tonight, we decided to give this song another layer of meaning, one that I hope will celebrate Kali and Julian both. I feel deeply sad that they never met, these two beautiful, clever creatures that we love so much. Julian is walking now, as you’ll see in these clips, and Jen and I are both convinced that Kali and Dubby both would have totally adored this little stumbler.

Julian is already deeply, deeply in love with Junie and Kirby, and one day, he’s going to have to say good-bye to them. That day, I’ll be in my mother’s shoes, teaching a young child how to deal with grief and pain. That might be the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do.

When we moved in to our new Brooklyn apartment, we got Cablevision hooked up, for cable TV, Internet, and phone. I mean, I don’t give a shit about having a landline number, but getting it makes the bundle cheaper than just having TV and Internet, so whatever.

But I give so little a shit about it that in our last apartment, in Providence, we didn’t even have a phone plugged in. We had a number we never used and actually couldn’t use. But here, we have a couple of reasons to have a landline, so I bought a cheap cordless phone yesterday and plugged it in.

About an hour later, the phone rang. I was so startled by the novelty of this, that I actually grabbed the phone without thinking. I checked the caller ID and saw it was some sort of energy company.

Here, you can choose from any of a number of companies vying hard to supply your power. ConEd gets the power to your house, but ConEd isn’t necessarily the company supplying the power. They’re UPS bringing an Amazon package to your door.

So the call was from someone trying to get me to change my power supplier. And I couldn’t get this guy off the phone. When I answered the phone, Julian was awake, in his crib, and happily chattering. As the call went on, he got crankier and crankier, and eventually was just openly screaming. And I still couldn’t get this guy off the phone. (I’m not good at just hanging up on people.) He wanted to know who was currently supplying my power; I didn’t know. Would I find my bill and tell him? No, I don’t know where it is.

He told me, at this point, that I needed to put down the phone and find the bill. He didn’t ask, he ordered. I carried the phone into the bedroom and let the baby scream at him, and then I said, “Look, I need to take care of my child, and I don’t have time to dicker with you about this.” Then I hung up on him.

I picked up the baby and calmed him, and as I was doing so, the doorbell rang. I answered the door, and there was a representative from a different power supplier, asking me to find my bill so he could tell me how much I’d save by switching.

Yes, two of them within about five minutes. I closed the door in his face and made sure it was locked.

It reminded me of something that happened about 18 years ago. I was out of work and desperate for any sort of job. I went out for a position at a progressive social-action network. They wanted people to canvas neighborhoods, gathering signatures on petitions and soliciting donations. Part of the application process was to spend an evening shadowing a team of canvassers. I approached one door, and rang the bell. I immediately heard a dog, inside, begin to bark and then a baby begin to wail.

A woman yanked the door open, screamed at me for waking up the baby, and slammed the door in my face. Now I finally understand her rage.

This of course is my first Father’s Day with Julian. Thanks to the move, money’s a little tight, so whatever whiskey and medium-rare meat Jen might have had in mind will have to wait, and that’s fine with me.

Even remembering that it’s Father’s Day at all is a big adjustment for me. As I’ve noted here before, my own father died when I was five. My mother never remarried. I had uncles and a grandfather who served as great male role models, and my mother of course stepped up and became as much father-and-mother as she possibly could. But my uncles especially always made it clear to me that they weren’t my father and could never fill that role. So I grew up without a father, and I grew up never paying much attention to Father’s Day.

I wonder sometimes what that’s going to mean, in regard to my relationship with Julian. Will it be harder for me to be a good dad because I’m kind of making it all up on the fly? Or does it mean I can go my own way, and be the kind of father I want to be, and that Jen wants me to be, without having to contend with the baggage of my own father’s successes and mistakes.

What I do know is, I always felt, from the time I was very young, that the universe was profoundly unjust and even sometimes cruel. To the extent that anything in life is ever fair, it’s certainly not fair for two children to lose a parent to cancer at a very young age. It’s not fair for a wife to lose her husband at a time when they’ve just started building a family.

With Julian, I feel like I have a second chance at a father-son relationship, and I honestly never expected that anything like that might ever happen. I resisted the idea of kids for so long in part because I couldn’t even consider the idea that it might happen.

The only answer I have for any of my questions is the same answer any of us has. To even say it is to say something so obvious that it sounds like a cliche, but it’s the only thing I can cling to. Day by day, step by step, just be there for him. Remain involved, don’t leave at the end of the day to go to some other house, don’t lose interest when he’s 14 and start doting on someone else’s kids, don’t lash out when he cries or screams or poops a diaper.

To say we all have complicated relationships with our parents is to say that the sun is hot and that water’s wet. I’m not a special flower. In a way I’m lucky. I never saw my parents argue, at least not that I recall. I never heard one of them leave in the night and come back days or weeks later, if at all. I was never abused.

Carving out my own path as a father is no different from the ways in which any parent has to figure out his or her own role in a child’s life.

The next day, the 26th, we were to sign a lease for a charming 2-bedroom apartment on Westminster St., in Providence, two blocks from our apartment on Sycamore. That might have been one of the easiest moves of our life.

Instead, we kept our appointment, and we told our leasing agent that we suddenly had other plans.

Our cute little place on Westminster, the place a parallel-universe version of ourselves might have landed …

That was through the Armory Revival Company. I want to talk about our experiences with Armory for a few minutes.

Armory Revival is in the business of buying up properties in “distressed and deteriorating neighborhoods,” refurbing those properties, and increasing the quality of life in those neighborhoods. I’m sure that, as businesspeople, they also want to increase the property values of these houses and neighborhoods, but that’s just smart business.

When we moved to Providence in 2008, we looked at some of Armory’s properties. We liked everything we saw. Our choice not to rent with them in 2008 had nothing to do with the properties.

Armory’s renos are excellent, keeping the historic feel of the buildings (most of which are over 100 years old) but still providing modern touches. The exteriors of every space we saw, in 2008 and four years later, were spotless. The common spaces inside were always clean and very well kept. Armory puts a lot of work and a lot of pride into its pr0perties.

I often felt that Rhode Island was a reactionary place, in many ways, unable to step away from old and broken ways of doing business, governing, and providing social networks for its citizens, especially its minorities. So whenever I saw true progressives in Rhode Island, I always appreciated what they were doing, especially because I felt they were swimming very hard upstream against strong currents. Armory’s right there, truly improving Providence, and making its neighborhoods better places for everyone who lives there, whether an Armory client or not.

Armory worked hard to guide us to the right place for a couple with a baby. When they had a property they thought wasn’t right, they pointed us to another, for the same price, in the same area. No gain for them, just gain for us.

So when we decided we couldn’t just end this with a phone call or a text message, it was because were so impressed with their honesty and candor, we felt we needed to step up and provide the same.

Pack up the apartment. Figure out where and how to move it, and who’s going to do the work. POD? U-Haul?

Find a new place to live.

Give notice at work (Jen only).

Hm, two weeks’ notice would take us well past 5/31 to 6/8. Even if we find a place in New York, where the hell are we going to live between 5/31 and 6/8? And what happens to our stuff during that time?

Yep, shit is real.

Jen’s situation, up until Thursday, May 31, was this:

5:45am: Wake up, nurse Julian, shower, dress, and get ready for work. Nurse Julian again and then …

6:40am: Head out the door to catch the bus to the Providence train station.

7:12am: Catch the MBTA Providence-line commuter rail to Boston South Station. Walk from there to her office.

4:30pm: Leave work, walk back to South Station, and catch the Providence line. On a day in which everything worked as planned, she’d get in at 6:10.

6:10pm: Arrive at Providence Station, grab a bus home.

6:40pm: Walk in the door, nurse Julian.

On a day in which everything worked as planned, Jen was gone 12 hours a day, every day. (And yes, strangely, it was always almost exactly 6:40am – 6:40pm. Just the way it went.) Twelve hours out of the house, to work an 8-hour day (8:30 – 4:30). With a nursing baby at home. A late train, a missed bus, or even worse, a broken-down train would throw all of that off.

One night, she got home at nearly 9pm.

I don’t want to talk right now about why we discounted the idea of moving to Boston. In brief, Jen’s lived there and didn’t want to move back permanently, for a number of very good reasons.

So we started looking at other options. We thought very seriously about moving to the D.C. area for a long time. Jen’s brother is there, with his wife and daughter and soon-to-be son. Jen’s parents hope to relocate there after selling their house. Being close to at least one family would be helpful.

But Jen had a great job in New York. We didn’t leave New York because she was unhappy at work, far from it. So earlier this year, we started thinking, What if she could get back in there? A new job that’s also an old job would solve a lot of problems, and make any move a lot easier.

So Jen floated the idea, with the manager of the New York office of her old law firm, and also the managing partner of that office, to whom she used to report. They were in.

So we scheduled a trip down to New York, in February and got the ball rolling.

Then the ball came to an abrupt halt. I shouldn’t talk much about what happened between February and the Friday before Memorial Day, except to say that we had a false start on a New York move. And when the ball stopped rolling, we thought it had stopped rolling for, at the very least, months, if not a year.

So we made plans to move to that cute, charming two bedroom on Westminster, across from Fertile Underground.

And then shit got real.

Friday, May 25, right before Memorial Day weekend. We had big plans. Jen’s parents arrived the previous day, Thursday. They were up to help us move. We weren’t going far, just a couple of blocks away. Our lease was up at our apartment on Sycamore St., and we needed to find a new place, which was fine. With Julian, we needed another bedroom and a little more space.

So we found a great two bedroom apartment on Westminster Street. If any of you are Providence-area people, we were going to be living just across the street from Fertile Underground, the charming little food market/co-op where we had already become regulars.

That morning, the 25th, Jen went out to the bank and got a cashier’s check for our security deposit and first month’s rent. We had an appointment scheduled for the following morning to sign a lease on the place. Then …

HAMMER TIME.

20 minutes to 4, just before Jen was to leave the office for the long weekend, her phone rang. Her former boss was calling to offer her a job in New York. “But Janet, we’re signing a lease tomorrow.”

– Don’t sign that lease! I’ll have a former offer letter out to you as soon as I get the approvals.

Within a couple of hours, Jen had the formal offer. Start date? June 18, Midtown Manhattan.

Shit just got real.

Jen got up at her normal time and left us by 7. Kid got a new diaper and back to sleep. I showered, dressed like normal, and got some final-day shit done in the apartment. We’re cavernous now, empty in all rooms and just occupying what’s left.

No AC, 80s, humid. Kid hot, sweaty fussier than normal.

Kid woke up 9:30 and was just up up up. He usually naps until late, but not today. Jen’s parents came by to help with last minute packing and cleaning. Some stuff is going with us to the hotel and then to our new New York home. Some stuff is going into storage. Some stuff is just trash.

Jen home at 6:30, he nursed and fell asleep until 9:30. We have locals that would be great last dinners in PVD: Loie Fuller’s, Nick’s on Broadway. Julian’s might be most appropriate. But when the kid needs the sleep, it’s what you do.

So, we ordered in again. After two nights of pizza, we couldn’t stomach the thought of a third. So our last meal at home in Providence? Kabob and Curry, delivered. Not what we’d have preferred, but when the baby needs sleep, that’s what you do.