Holiday Labors

In the old days, fathers were not allowed in the delivery rooms. Admittance for them beyond a series of swinging doors even in the early stages of a wife’s labor was strictly forbidden.

Go, sit in the waiting room, watch the television high up on the wall, we’ll keep you informed of the ritual secret birth and call you when your life has changed in unimaginable ways, when you and your wife are forever marked as blessed by a tiny life you’ll come to love above all else. So go on, pace the halls and lobby of The Woman’s Hospital if you must but never ever go through those swinging doors because you are germ-filled and are only the father.

Dee woke me early Thanksgiving in the still-dark morning and told me she was in labor. No old Dick Van Dyke routine with a cap on the top of the headboard, ready to sit up in bed and put it on in one quick motion, no fumbling for a suitcase that springs open and dumps all the womanly clothing and items needed after becoming a mother. It was simply excitement and a call to the doctor who said he would meet us at the hospital. So eyes puffy from lack of sleep, excited heartbeats felt in our throats, we met the doctor and he said Dee was barely dilated, to go on home and enjoy Thanksgiving. So we mentally put my baseball cap back on the headboard and had breakfast and waited for the Thanksgiving meal at Dee’s mother’s apartment. Miriam had baked the requisite turkey and her usual delicious fare of dressing and squash and butterbeans and cranberries cooked fresh that morning, a late afternoon feast with Dee’s brothers, David and Ricky, rounding out the family.

Once seated and no prayer, my first forkful of food heading toward my mouth, I swear, the first forkful heading up on an arc toward waiting teeth and tongue, and Dee said quietly, My water just broke. My fork clattered down on the plate and catapulted a piece of turkey to the other side of the white linen tablecloth like some invading eat-or-die mongrel hoard launching the only ammunition they had left.

A quick trip home to retrieve the suitcase and we were back at the hospital, me handling the check-in paperwork, Dee in a wheelchair facing the corridor of swinging doors leading to the Labor Room and, ultimately, the Secret Birth Room and special reclining chairs with here’s-one-for-the-boys-in-the-balcony leg stirrups in a wishbone Y. Hurried kisses and reassuring hugs, finally losing sight of Dee through a small window before being exiled in the waiting room.

Dee attempted Natural Child Birth but it was a long hard labor, stretching on into the night and all the next day, so long, in fact, that when they did finally wheel an exhausted Dee into the hallway and finally allowing me back by her side, she put her hand on my face and told me we had a daughter and wondered if worry made a man’s beard grow.

When she went into labor with Jennifer two years later, two weeks after Christmas in January of 1972, Dee remembered the two long days trying to deliver Laurie. She started holding out her arm for a shot as soon as we hit the hospital parking lot—or at least as soon as we cleared the first doors of the hospital. But Jen’s birth came much easier, not nearly the physical ordeal of Laurie’s first appearance on the Cothern stage.

I posted a sign on the door of The Rainy Day Bookstore that we owned, saying the store would be closed for a day or so and giving proud father details on Jennifer’s birth and weight. A reporter for a newspaper from one of the smaller towns around Baton Rouge took a photograph of the birth notice and we were told it had been published, one of those feel good items smaller newspapers seemed particularly fond of trumpeting.

During the time both daughters were born, their historical holiday birthstones included the still raging Vietnam War and the sometimes violent push for racial equality. While the Beatles’ “Come Together” / “Something” was climbing Billboard’s Hot 100 as a two-sided single (and would peak at Number One on Laurie’s birthday of November 29, 1969), The Plain Dealer published shocking photographs of the massacre of Vietnam villagers at My Lai, and in a more subtle approach John Lennon returned his MBE medal to protest his government’s support of the war in Vietnam. Two days after Laurie was born (and something that concerned her father), the first Draft lottery was held in this country since World War II. Three days before Jennifer’s birth on the 13^th of January, 1972, a local reporter and anchorman, Bob Johnson, and his cameraman, Henry Baptiste, were covering a rally for a group claiming to be Muslims from outside the state who parked cars in the middle of North Boulevard to protest racial discrimination. The crowd grew, 200 or more strong, deputies arrived, and bottles and bricks flew. Two by three they died, two deputies, three Muslims, and the enraged crowd attacked Johnson and Baptiste as they fled, and it was Baptiste, a black man, who dragged from the scene his co-worker and friend, Johnson, a now comatose white man, who would remain in a coma for almost four decades.

So in all the years down the road, there were celebrations of birthdays while historical events swirled amid the holidays, always making reflections of the season a little deeper, more poignant. The girls grew up so quickly, and in the rush and hassle of living day to day we sometimes blinded ourselves to the simple sentimental facts that no matter the season of discord in the world, loving and sharing and protecting and giving to one another were the best gifts we had to offer.

Foreshadowing

It occurred to me only later that there was a hospital episode when Jennifer was a senior in high school that was a sampling of what was to come for her and us. When she contracted encephalitis and battled for months to stay alive while in a coma and battled for years rebuilding her life from the ground up, the earlier botched tonsillectomy was a foreshadowing of the dark days to come as parents, helpless, worrying about a sick child, worrying that earlier time about the outcome of a second surgery needed to correct the weakness of catgut or silk in the back of the throat, the placement or tightness of the sutures, all done in the operating theatre by a masked man performing badly.

The initial surgery went well, we thought, all according to form, we thought: a sedative to relax Jen, an intravenous line in the arm for fluids and antibiotics and whatever, general anesthesia before the procedure started, a breathing tube through the nose and down the throat, the mouth propped open, and the tongue no doubt pulled to the side like a thirsty hound on a summer day, snip, clip, suture ligation, the recovery room until the anesthesia wore off, and finally the white-sheeted bed.

But all during the day, after Jen was awake and aware, she said she could taste blood and assurances constantly came from us and the nurses about that being normal. She threw up once, twice, three or more times, each episode filling one of those kidney-shaped yellow plastic bedside pans. Aahhh, that will make you feel better, to get all that blood out of your stomach. And it went on and on until early evening. Finally, finally, the man was called back, unmasked now, Dr. Breaux, so obviously put-out by being called and having to come back, doubting until he probed the back of Jen’s throat with long crooked surgical tweezers and mumbled something about the sutures, straightening and telling the nurse to call a surgical team back to the hospital.

Now more assurances to Jen from us that everything would be fine, a stitch needed repair, that was all, and the pan again filling up with blood, her teeth and lips smeared with bright blood. You’ll be okay, here’s the gurney, slide over, that’s it, we’re going with you as far as we can, everything will be fine.

A nurse maneuvered the gurney out of the room, bumping the door facing a couple of times, pushing Jen by the nurses’ station, some of them registering slight surprise, and Jen sat up suddenly, hemorrhaging, gagging, leaning over, and the blood coming out, a projected wide stream like dark rusty water thrown across a yard out of a full bucket, covering half the gurney, Jennifer’s lap and legs, and splashing down to the floor, some of it rolling down the framework of the gurney as if the chrome tubes were being magically transformed to a bright Christmas red.

The speed of the gurney picked up and Dee and I were racing down the hall to keep up, drops and plops of blood marking our trail.

Dee and I waited in an empty pre-op room, the stillness and evening quiet unsettling, the worry now manifest in furrowed brows and tight lips and eyes moist with concern, pacing, arms across our chests, hands squeezing biceps in rhythm with our thoughts, Dee suddenly giving out a quick sob, telling me to please come hug her, asking me why I didn’t know she needed that, me wondering for a moment what was pushing me to stand at a distance in the empty room, apart from her, some solitary grieving ritual denying us both comfort.

The Value of Illness: Love Again

     I wish I could say my daughter’s almost deadly battle with encephalitis brought quick changes, an appreciation of living in the moment, magically the nearness of death immediately forging Dee and me back together as loving husband and wife. But, in fact, Jennifer’s long rehabilitation brought more paranoia—Jen asking in the early months if she was dead—all of us expecting the next foundation brick to loosen and slip out, bringing another crisis of health for Jen, for any of us. The months rolling along were just chaos with familiar faces: Jen’s continuing recovery, how far she could come back, and the fallout from all the expenses the insurance didn’t cover. The simplest decisions took effort, the movement forward weighted down with the feeling that little mattered, that daily concerns were just battles contested with slight gain and little reward.

     It was much later that Dee and I realized our daughter’s illness did reveal within us strengths and weaknesses and concern and care and love that both of us had forgotten in the other.

    We dated in junior high, high school, the usual breakups, one so bad we went our separate ways to college, and Dee got married, eventually divorcing, and we came back together a few years later, her pregnancy happily bonding us for life.

    The marriage dynamic started like most marriages do: loving, caring, the sense of great adventures to come, and eventually the gift of children, Laurie and Jennifer, and a love for them that brought a welcomed understanding that they were the most important people in the world, suddenly shifting self-interest to a lower rung—at least for a long period of time, until those wizard-hiding curtains began falling for us, revealing a Raymond and Dee neither one of us really knew.

We separated, tried again, separated, me staying away from Dee and the girls for weeks at a time. A year or two of this until Dee finally announced she was tired of ping pong and had rented an apartment. I was an angry man, knowing I hadn’t given her my best but feeling like I had, telling her, fine, go on, get the hell out if that’s what you want.

She went.

The girls stayed.

In her usual quick decision way, oldest daughter Laurie said she was not moving out of the house since her friends were all nearby. Still following our old edict of treating them like an equal member of the family early on, Dee reluctantly swallowed the hurt and allowed Laurie’s decision to become law. Oh, yes, I should have been the one to move out of the house but my anger was hard resolve not to make it any easier for my wife. Jen told Dee privately that she couldn’t move out of the house because someone had to look after me. Nothing said could convince Jen that taking care of her father was not her job. So the positions were fixed.

Dee became the self-imposed outcast, and I saw the pain she attempted to hide every time she came by the house to pick the girls up for shopping or eating out, the pain of simply not being with her daughters on a daily basis. I smothered my pain with anger and alcohol and my sense that everything put together does eventually fall apart.

Routine did settle in, the anger veiled by common courtesy and consideration for the girls, the years rolling along in this city on the river, a time when Laurie viewed me with suspicion, knowing something else might change again and interrupt the delicate balance of her life. Jen was more concerned with everyday issues, school, getting together with friends, even shopping with me at the grocery store and quickly planting herself in front of the cooler with ten pound packs of legs and thighs, throwing her arms wide open and saying, No, Dad, no more chicken, please, no more chicken for a while. Without anything being said about it, Dee and I always attended any function the girls asked us to, showing up as a united front as their parents. Repeated over the next several years, our continuing association and long history together did smooth over those initial reactions when we first separated, the anger that was sometimes directed at each other by deficiencies within ourselves, our lives as a broken family now accommodated somehow.

     So we went through Jennifer’s illness united in battle.

   Starting with fever and terrible headaches, the trip to the emergency room, negative drug test, Jennifer was more and more out of touch, not knowing what was real. The Behavioral Unit, walking around barefooted, talking incoherently to imaginary people, pulling her hair out, coming back suddenly for a moment of clarity.

     Two weeks, no control, and finally a spinal tap.

     Encephalitis.

     An inflammation of the brain due to an infection, a virus.

   After being transferred to the critical care wing, I walked into the room, expecting a calmer Jen, sedated perhaps, but seeing her attempting to sit up, eyes closed, straining violently against the cloth restraints, instinctively fighting what was happening to her, my soul plunged along with my daughter during that long night, Jen descending into a coma, Dee constantly yanking her up to sitting positions, yelling at her, Breath, Jennifer!

    Even those days became routine: carrying on and dealing with the constant monitoring of machines and infections and bodily functions (or lack of them), Dee and I making an effort at small talk, at being interested in matters outside of the hospital, most times the effort of reading a newspaper or book or watching the TV high up on the wall too much to overcome, walking the halls when the need to escape the room was high, peering into other sick rooms when doing so, making eye contact with other vigilant people, the heaviness of waiting etched always in expectant looks, wondering at other stories of illnesses, nodding at the thin young man in his robe wasting away from AIDS, wondering at his thoughts as he stood at the end of the corridor looking out the window, knowing (unlike Jen) just how ill he was, knowing the prognosis was dim, dealing with it the only way any of us could, one moment at a time, one after the other, then again and again, moments rushing together so quickly but strung out so endlessly that the fabric of time finally stretches and slows down.

     After a year of rehabilitation in Texas, the lowest moment of the entire ordeal came a couple of days after Christmas

     It was also the moment, looking into Dee’s eyes, I realized how much I still loved her.

   When Jennifer was between her junior and senior years in high school, she was one of 19 girls chosen to attend the Women in Science Program at Harvard University. Math, science, it all came easily for her, rarely cracking books in high school where she ended up as Salutatorian, the girl as a fearless child with a fistful of earthworms approaching the house and dumping them on the steps for study.

     Jen was home from rehab in Texas until after the first of the New Year. Dee and I were standing in the kitchen when Jen came back from checking the mail. She opened a questionnaire from the Summer Science Program at Harvard, flipping to the information about the girls she was there with in 1989. Her eyes rounded slightly as she read about their accomplishments, those doing scientific research, those working as doctors in major hospitals, and Jen broke down, crying, trying to talk while sobbing.

      I am never going to be a doctor.

     Dee and I encircled her in our arms, the three of us standing there, hugging and trying to comfort each other.

     Jen wailed and said, It is so hard when dreams die.

    My heart literally changed at that moment, the ache unlike anything I have ever felt in that one moment I had dreaded for all of the last year, watching her confronting the realization that her life had spun out of her control, hearing her admit that her dreams were no longer valid, seeing the pain of the last year made visible on her face, looking into Dee’s eyes and seeing her pain also, all driving home the random injustice of serious illness, the dark chaos always circling that will someday claim us all, realizing in that moment we have but one weapon.

     Months later, coming up out of sleep because of the rolling thunder and the constant lightning, alone since Jennifer was spending the night at a friend’s house, I was in the dining area off the kitchen, looking out of the rain-smeared bank of floor-to-ceiling windows when a huge tree came crashing down across the roof, almost slicing the house in half, exploding into the book-lined den with limbs as big around as my waist and legs, and it felt like a tank at full speed had run into the house, the impact of it surely like the first huge shock of a California earthquake, the floor shifting suddenly once, equilibrium suddenly suspect. Waterfalls with leaves and twigs and pieces of wooden roof and tar paper and bits of insulation and black shingles poured down to the parquet floors, splashing walls and running into other rooms torqued out of plumb.

     I called Dee and plugged the coffee pot in, knowing the electricity would be turned off for safety reasons when the firemen arrived. Surprisingly, a miracle to me, the books in the den, some ruined, yes, but I found the tightly shelved ones with only wet spines on the dust jackets.

A reluctant but accommodating Dee welcomed me, providing the last puzzle piece, reshaping our relational landscape.

     Refusing to leave the neighborhood after the destruction, her illness now dictating the notion that she had to be close to the destroyed house, to her actual possessions, Jen stayed for weeks with a good friend across the street, and from the front yard Jen watched the tree being removed, so large it had to be cut in desk-sized segments in order to be lifted by the crane, watching and wondering in her post traumatic stress phase what use the tree could now serve, knowing—with the help of her therapist—and laughing softly after she realized the tree was a symbol of herself: a once strong entity felled, the usefulness of it changed in a moment in another direction, lasting forever.

     Slowly, that morning storm brought Dee and me together again, me lacking resources to rent another place, back to living under one roof, an effort of graciousness on her part, me the grateful guest. Discovering the comfort of company while sitting across the table from each other, good food on the table between us, conversation was a forgotten joy revealed again in the talk of everyday news and the shared history of raising children, seeing one through a terrible illness along the way. Never mind that certain subjects were skirted and some events were off the radar for now, never mind the wariness flashing for a moment in the eyes, in the bodily shift on the kitchen chair, never mind all that. For the talk was a courtship again, the good parts history between us a starting point to begin again, to see if eventual openness came and the bad parts version could be discussed and accommodations made to lay it all to rest.

Daughter

My answer to the good and bad shocks of life has always been to write about them, maybe years down the road as an experience shaded to fit some character I am writing about. Recently my daughter Jennifer, who battled encephalitis and coma for her very life, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an insidious and incurable systemic disease I have battled for 35 years, more than half my life. Occasionally poetical with words, not at all a poet, this is what emerged about passing things on.

                 Daughter

  

She comes to visit limping across the yard

along uneven areas of grass and gravel,

favoring her stiff knees, twisting left hip

to swing her leg out to avoid bending it,

every ginger step at the corners of her eyes

as wrinkles appearing and smoothing quickly,

stamped like the beating of her heart.

Smiling, raising wrapped hand, greeting

her mother near the small plum tree snowy

in first bloom, hugging, bound hand on

her mother’s back, another hard-earned smile

and allowing her face to be touched, studied.

Turning body with stiff neck, flashing eyes,

quickly a gritty smile, nodding to her father

on the deck, he lifting a beer, remembering.

The porch steps, the onset, tears in big eyes,

pain-rendered with questions, greeting

dying in his throat, his own swollen hands

little help, useless joints, fingertip sparks

transmitting traits and quirks and bumps,

eye and hair color and skin tone to kin,

the family body made manifest, her spirit

fired at times mixing spirits, locked cells

behind brave new faces, love and fear

constant companions, the gravity of living.

Journal / December 18

Baton Rouge General Hospital

Saturday December 18, 1993

   Back on duty after being sick.

   Jen’s mucus and discharge from her lungs is liquid and abundant when she coughs it up, requiring almost constant suction to get it out of her trach tube. Dee suctions the tube for two days, on her feet, by herself most of those long hours when I am home sick.

   Jen has a small seizure in the middle of the night. The nurses on duty, Maddie and Geoff, chart it and Dee and I become even more watchful.

   Early in the morning, Bill Scott is doing respiration therapy. Still a tremendous amount of mucus. Even after suctioning, Jen is clogged, unable to take much air in, but keeps trying. Jen stiffens, shakes, goes into a grand mal seizure. Full-blown. Her oxygen saturation drops, the machine alarming, pulse rate slowing, her entire body convulsing for four long minutes. Bill uses the hand oxygen pump to keep air going regularly into her lungs. One of the scariest moments of my life. Watching Jen’s face lose color is like my life draining away. Again, like the 6^th, when the trach dislodged, Dee and I leave the room for a moment. It’s either that or start screaming to the heavens. The first seizure subsides and then another starts, just as long and violent and scary. Dee’s got her hand. I hold Jen’s leg and keep telling her it is going to be all right, between please God prayers telling her that I know it is scary but just hold on.

   Finally, finally, she quiets.

   Calls to Dr. Baker take hours to be returned. Medication takes hours to get charted, ordered, and finally administered. Like swimming underwater.

   Very emotional, teary day. The doctors have no answers. One suggests maybe Jen has a connective tissue disease, the blood vessels in the brain contracting. What happened to the diagnosis of encephalitis? Do they know? Why a week on BHU before the first spinal tap?

   Anne, a good nurse from Canada, comes in and changes Jen’s position in the bed. Always hard, watching Jen being moved, like a rag doll with no ability to control how her body is shaped.

  A nurse comes in and says Dr. Baker called. The CAT scan is “unremarkable" for brain damage.

  Something good to end this long day. But sitting in the room with the view of the old neighborhood, staring at the photographs Dawn brought days earlier, studying those still vibrant images of Jen smiling, healthy, unselfconsciously laughing, looking for any clue to the ailment, I wonder if these images on the hospital wall will ever join those in the old suitcase, mixing with those captured moments of relatives and friends.

Journal / December 10th / 11th

Baton Rouge General Hospital

Friday December 10, 1993

   Long night.

   Back on the Critical Care floor.

   Dee sleeps a couple of hours. I watch the oxygen and heart monitors. Heart rate 130+ at the highest. Oxygen saturation good throughout. Jen is having facial seizures and they give her 2mg of Valium in case it is the brain seizuring. Dr. Rogers is called to let him know what is going on. EEG scheduled. 12:30 PM and Debbie who is doing the EEG chases me out of the room for an hour. Eat gumbo and a small salad in the hospital cafeteria. Sitting down the hall from Jen's room, reading Social Security, a play we are considering doing at the theatre, I see Debbie leaving the room and follow her as she wheels the machine along the corridor.

   What did the EEG show, Debbie?

   Can't say until it's evaluated by the doctor.

   I'm her father, give me a hint.

   I'm really not allowed to do that.

   Make an exception.

   I'm sorry. Not allowed.

   Bill from Respiration is suctioning Jen when I get back to the room. Jen's face is still contorting. I ask Suzie to have a look and ask her if Debbie said anything about the EEG. She looks at me, says Debbie told her the test showed no seizure. Have to cry, the feelings of helplessness so overwhelming.

   Visitors today: Mom arrives with food; an old theatre friend, Daryl Wedwick, comes by; my brother, Bill, and sister-in-law, Marie; nephew Dennis and his wife, Christy, other sister-in-law, Peggy; Jen's friend, Dawn; friend Nathan and his daughter, Melissa.

   Dr. Rogers comes by during rounds, says there were no seizures and that Jen seems lighter in affect. We take any small gain.

Saturday December 11, 1993

   At the elevator, bump into Campo, the Internal Medicine doctor on BHU. Says he is disappointed Jen is not responsive. Like everyone, shakes his head, says there is no way to tell what will happen.

   Too many visitors yesterday. Even in a coma too much talk becomes chaos and upsets Jen.

   Dr. Campanella does rounds instead of Stewart. Says the same as all the others: no one knows . . . wait, time will tell. All recommend trying to loosen the junk in Jen's lungs, especially on the right side where there is pneumonia.

   Dee dry-shampoos Jen's hair. Jen keeps making faces.

   Dee and I have yet to talk about what the future may be for Jen, for all of us.

   Rita, a nurse from some agency, has to get the Charge Nurse to show her how to use the feeding tube. Doesn't inspire much confidence. The care is alternately very good--Maddie, Suzette, Karen, Suzie--and then spotty on weekends when nurses come in from agencies and other hospitals.

   Dr. Haas, doing rounds for Stewart, comes in and says, "I hear she had a seizure."

  8 PM. Jen has fever. Her face continues to contort, grimacing strangely. Stroke her forehead and talk softly to her. Dawn Knight, one of Jen's best friends who grew up three houses down the street, comes back and brings photographs for the wall, of her and Jen, Jen and Ashleigh and Molly. Great shots of Jen, so pretty and vibrant, and I can't look at them for long.

  May be coming down with something: sinus, upper respiratory infection, something. If so, I won't be able to stay with Jen.

   Please God. Just one minor Christmas miracle.

Scientist

Baton Rouge General Hospital
Sunday December 6th, 1993


  Jen descends, not really responsive, having more and more trouble breathing. Everything is labored: breath, the response of the system, decisions, answers. The order for a medicinal patch behind Jen's ear to dry up her saliva is charted at 6 AM but by noon the patch is yet to arrive. Orders are written early, it takes hours to get the medicine, hours to get any response from the patient on that particular course of treatment. Push, push, bitch until the Charge Nurse says she will go track down the doctor's order, the patch riding on the gurney-like Drug Cart, moving slowly along hospital corridors like an old style delivery vehicle.
  Suctioning Jen's airways free of saliva is not enough now. Nurses Geoffery and Maddie come in more and more often, go through Jen's nose to suction her throat, worried glances between them. Because they are bringing up more and more blood they install a nose trumpet, a device shoved into Jen's nose that ends as described, in a bell-shaped flange. Jen's saliva bubbles out of it, drowning her, virus invader within her racing along dark corridors, companions. 


         *                                   *                                            *                                            *                                

  When Jennifer is between her junior and senior years in high school, she is one of 19 girls chosen to attend the Women in Science Program at Harvard University. Math, science, it all comes easily for her, rarely cracking books at Tara High School where she will end up as Salutatorian, always waiting until the last minute to do assignments, the girl as a fearless child with a fistful of earthworms approaching the house and dumping them on the steps for study. And her reasoning and insight extend naturally into discerning the true nature of things. Once, while watching a movie together, a particular scene where actors are so totally emotionally exposed as humans, I remark how much confidence it takes to act that scene out. Jen says, Everyone is insecure, Dad, they just overcome it more than most.

  So it becomes a desperate scramble to raise the $3500.00 for tuition. Don’t have it, nothing of value to quickly sell, salary at the LSU Bookstore laughable, it might as well be millions. Every organization and company in Baton Rouge that might sponsor Jennifer is contacted, the spiel about the opportunity for Jennifer and the opportunity for publicity becomes huckster-smooth, words spilling off my tongue like honey. Truly amazing how much interest there is but days roll on, the departure for Boston ever closer with every polite rejection.

  Nights are the hardest, the time after everyone is in bed, the feeling of inadequacy, of artistic paths taken when younger that yield nothing but a slight look of interest when telling people about going to New York to be an actor but coming home to finish college and write, to fulfill that stronger creative urge. So nights it is not self-pity but anger at some path not chosen, one that would have lessened the arguments about the lack of money and the strain on the marriage, anger at the inability to solve the tuition problem.

  Jen packs, scared of the adventure to come, of flying, but despite the look on her face we push her down the boarding tunnel to the plane, a worthless check for the tuition in her purse. Back at the Bookstore, a long day of waiting, of hearing nothing from Jen—whether she got there safely, found her way to her dorm, anything. I am telling the ladies in the Bookstore office about her departure, about calling everyone I could think of about helping out with the tuition, about sending her off with a worthless check, that I might be spending my vacation in jail, when Betty Swain turns and looks at me and tells me her husband knows Senator John Breaux.

  Unexpected, the wheels turning quickly, Senator Breaux contacting Jacobs Engineering, bless their corporate heart, that company coming through and sponsoring Jennifer at Harvard for the summer. But even with the relief and happiness about Jen getting 8 hours of college credit at Harvard while still in high school, those summer nights are still tempered with anger for depending on someone else, on blind luck, anger for the feelings of again skating by, feelings of failing as a father.

Daughters

   The first time Laurie visits Jen in the hospital she moves slowly around the bed, her back pressed against walls and furniture, keeping as much distance between her and her little sister as possible. It is that first time shock of seeing someone you love, the unexpectedness of serious illness no one is prepared for, of viewing something hard to understand, accept, something creating changes in the everydayness like the wake of a boat long after it passes.

   Still standing away from the bed, still acclimating herself, Laurie calls Jen's name. Visibly, Jen fights her way to the surface, is able to open her eyes for a brief moment, tries to find her sister in the dim room, is able for the last time before descending, to speak with sense, to mouth the words, Hi, Laurie.

   Two years apart, always different in most ways, the girls grow up with our idea that they are coming into our lives, that we are not going to center everything around them. We walk around the house normally when they are sleeping babies, play music, loudly sometimes, have friends over and laugh and argue, Dee and I make all the right moves, disciplining them with a swat on the butt when they are learning right from wrong, no means no, never letting them interrupt adults when they are talking, never letting adults interrupt them, loving them and caring for them, treating them like we wish we could have been treated as children, always aware of everything we are doing is molding them, especially the first two years; during all those days in the late 1960's, early 1970's, referring to Dr. Spock occasionally about ailments, aware we are doing it differently from our parents, we make all the right moves and still fuck our children up.

   Two weeks old and Laurie is sleeping all through the night. (Nothing to this child-raising gig.) Always independent and head-strong about food and clothes and opinions, even as a child, she is looked at by others with a touch of envy because decisions come easily, no debating like most folks over choices and consequences. Choose and move on. Just like her mother. On the other hand, there's a photograph of Jennifer on the front porch on Bernardo Street, in her windup swing, arm on the front of the seat, chin resting on arm, dark eyes staring straight into the lens, questioning, reserved, a weary resignation like she's had enough of this childhood thing.

Swimming Underwater / The Memoir

   Instead of posting snippets and fairly self-contained narratives, what follows from this point on is more of the same but from the beginning on of a memoir entitled Swimming Underwater, about growing up in south Louisiana, being able to stand at my daughter's hospital window and look over the old neighborhood, aware of what went on down there and aware of what is being played out in the room behind me, my daughter, Jennifer, critically ill and in a coma from viral encephalitis.

   Keeping a journal during all those dark days gave me an outlet, a foundation, something to grab and weather the everyday changes that shaped everything in daily life. So it was a time of life folding back in on itself, the view from the window of the old neighborhood, the history there, where even Jennifer lived as a child, and the history of the hospital, where I was born, where family members had died. Life repeating familiar patterns and doing the best to make memory make some sense of it all--and both memory and events co-existing in the now, both alive and in a dance as one.