The thing to understand about this is that Gil has always been petrified of heights and falling. He’s so nervous about it that when we got to one side of the canyon, he insisted that David and I shouldn’t walk to the edge, but rather Army-crawl up to it on our bellies, peer over, and then Army-crawl back. (After we’d spent a few days sightseeing and hiking down into the thing, Gil loosened up a bit about the edge; the three of us eventually held a pissing contest to see who could pee farthest into the canion … but that’s a story for another time.)

The point is, what Gil insisted we initially do with that cliff’s edge, Gil did at death’s Grand Canyon, this week. Army-crawled up to it on his hands and knees, peered over, and slowly backed away, dirty and covered with gravel. It really looked like he wasn’t going to survive last week, but survive he has. It’s no sure thing, but if he continues progressing as he has been, the docs say, it’s possible he could get another year: not exactly what we were expecting last week. Army-crawling back from the brink, indeed.

I’ll tell you,  in the days immediately after we thought he was about to die, his room became the weirdest, most upbeat damn “dying of cancer room” I’ve ever been in. (This will be the fourth one I’ve experienced.) Two Wednesdays ago, we thought he wouldn’t make it through the next 48 hours. Family converged, we all tearfully told him we loved him (and got lots of tears and “I love you” responses); we played him favorite music and treasured the beaming smiles we got from him.

And then he kept on smiling at music the next day. And then his appetite started to come back. His blood remained composed of dirty dishwater and the bags of donated blood the hospital kept pouring into him, but each day he began to regain a little more motion. And then he asked for ribs and corn muffins for dinner, and began to shimmy his shoulders when we played good mambo tunes. Conversations were positive and mostly lucid, though the meds he was on gave him a dreamy, trippy logic that occasionally meant he’d veer off onto tangents about the significance of the hotel-quality art on the hospital wall or the fact that his oncologist knew Zeus personally. Funny, at first, and then upsetting when we thought the effects might be permanent… and then funny again, once they subsided and he more fully rejoined the real world. Kate and I hosted dinners for visiting family, and we all started to talk about both his continued life and death, however eventual or imminent, with a weird mix of humor and confidence.

Once you have what you think will be your final conversation with someone, it turns out that all the next conversations with them can continue to be 100% up front and honest… and if you’re lucky enough that the person isn’t in pain, it turns out conversations involving death can also be very funny. Go figure.

I haven’t seen him in a week, since Piper got a wicked virus and stayed home with me — sick, miserable and virulently contagious — for the last six days, but according to my mom (and her blog about Gil, which updates here) Gil is going to get out of the hospital this afternoon and go to a rehab center for a week or two, to get his strength back … and then, if his cancer numbers continue getting better and if he gets more mobile on his own, and if he tolerates the chemo he’s on, he might be able to go home. There are a lot of conditionals in that statement, but we’ll take’em.

The cliff’s edge still isn’t all that far away, but hopefully by the next time we approach it, we’ll have had enough time near it to piss off it instead of being so scared.

I went to see him today, and got a few good heartfelt interactions. Most of the time he’s hovering just below the surface of consciousness, bobbing up for brief periods when we rub his shoulders or play him some favorite music. He knows where he is and what’s going on, and while he’s uncomfortable, he says he’s not actually in pain. He can’t have many visitors, since his immune system is shot. His obvious pleasure in seeing people and hearing especially familiar CD tracks more than compensates for his being unable to finish sentences longer than 3-4 words. He drifts off mid-phrase, not really asleep, but definitely not awake. Most of what he does talk about are good things: love, family trips, memories and pleasures.

Even in his current state, he’s socializing with the nursing staff, recommending dance albums, and still charming everyone around him. In other words, he’s being exactly who he’s been for as long as I’ve known him.

He’s got both a raging cancer and a whopping big dose of chemo burning through him, nullifying what tatters remain of his immune system and keeping his blood components in the “terrible” range. The palliative care team is talking about hospice and seems clear that he’s winding down. His oncologist, who’s known him longer, is worried, but says there *could* be a very slim chance he’ll survive the chemo (and bacterial infections) long enough to see the cancer slowed down a bit … but it’s a very, very slim shot. His family is converging, and we’re all just enjoying what we can of the hours and days we’ve got with him right now. That’s the attitude I learned from him, after all.

We’ll have a better sense of any future trajectory for him if he survives through the weekend. I find myself reacting much the same way I did when I was at my low point with the GBS, and simply not thinking about the long term. The short term is almost too much to handle as it is.

Piper Tells a Story: 1 (01:57)

Piper Tells a Story: 2 (01:09)

Phrases that I’ll need to ask Piper about more later: “she munched a quarter and it bing-ding-dinged,” “in pajamas like a pea,” “had her juice on her little … painted … um … orangey table.”

I picked P up from her day care late this afternoon, whistling as I walk in the door. Any time I walk into a space in which Kate or Piper can hear me, I give the same little three note whistle I’ve used for years to announce myself — tonic, dominant, major-third. Piper hears this and comes excitedly running out to meet me.  She pauses for a second, looking past me for Kate before I explain that her mom’s at work tonight, and that we’ll be having dinner as a twosome. She’s psyched to head out, though, and so I gather the day’s masterpieces (unfinished raviolis in her lunch bag and a scrawled-on picture of a squirrel, HELLO JACKSON POLLACK) and bundle her into her purple coat.  She says goodbye to Emily, the afternoon caretaker, with a cheery “Shabbat Shalom!” — I’m guessing Piper is likely the only kid being raised by two Quaker parents who knows to say that on Fridays, but when you’re attending a day care named Gan HaYeled, this is perhaps unsurprising, and totally charming — and we run out to the car with a rain squall bearing down on us overhead.

We drive home, Piper pointing out stop signs and busses, and telling me when lights have turned green. We get a brief, blatting shower as we park, and Piper insists that she can hold the umbrella as we walk up to our front door … and she’s right. Holding it upright and going up the steps proves a challenge, though, so I take the umbrella down and we both burst in the door dripping. We marvel at the new couch and chairs, which showed up only this morning, and then I go to transmute several days of base-metal leftovers into one new golden meal for the two of us. Piper leans on the new couch, ransacks her room, rummages through some kitchen cabinets, and finally settles down on the kitchen floor to recite Maurice Sendak’s “Chicken Soup with Rice” to me.

Meanwhile I’m chopping up a shallot; some leftover cooked chicken from the batch we raised, killed and butchered this summer; and a bunch of broccoli. I sautée the shallot with some garlic, and Piper asks to smell the garlic.  Then she wants to smell (and sample) the chicken. Then she wants to watch me stir the rice in.  As I fetch out the usual bottles to jazz up the stir fry, she requests a taste of each and its name: soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, sesame oil.

We sit down at the table and I serve her a big scoop of the fried-rice-and-stuff; on a whim, I put a few drops of each of the four seasonings on her plate, too.  She spends easily the first five minutes of the meal dipping an index finger into each one. “They’re not spicy!”, she reports, before going back for many repeats on all four: especially the puddle of mirin, natch. Then she tries dipping pieces of broccoli into each one in turn and tasting them that way. Having finished her broccoli, she finally hoovers up the chicken and rice. That, I figure, earns her a little dessert, so I get out a frozen peach pop for her and prop the iPad on the table.

As she ate dessert, we video chat with the Massachusetts Hankins, who proudly display their Halloween costumes and play peekaboo with an amused Piper, who keeps proclaiming, “I’ve got a peach pop!”  Then, off for teeth brushing. Piper’s developed some occasional and (thankfully) mild resistance to helping out the tooth brushing process, but after a request from me to help her get to book-reading more quickly, she leans back and says “Ahhh,” all the while signing the ASL word for “help.”

Three decently long books, as Piper fitsherself under my arm: “How to be a Baby,” “Lots of Dots,” and the last story in “Owl at Home”: “Owl and the Moon.” I turn out the light and do the bedtime ritual, which begins with “What a fun day!” and a recounting of everything (that I know) she’s done that day, with especial attention paid to friends and meals. We talk about what we’ll do tomorrow, and then I ask her for a few of her animal sound renditions. Tonight she happily neighs as a horse and chatters as a dolphin; she laughs knowingly but won’t perform when I ask her about crows, and she giggles when I ask about whales, because that’s my cue to make the lowest rumbles and the highest squeaks I can. Then it’s serious business: what does Mama say?  ”I love you.”  What does Abba say? “I love you.” What does Piper say?  ”Dawa.” And with that, I ASL-sign I-love-you-all-time, wish her a good night, and leave the room.

And then go back to her door 30 seconds later to tell her that no, she doesn’t need any orange medicine. (the kid ibuprofen we use apparently tastes really good, but it’s only for actual tooth issues.)

And then I’m back 30 seconds later with a sippy cup of water, at which point I say firmly that we’re done and good night: I’ll see you in the morning, kid, and don’t call unless there’s blood, flames or flashing lights.

It’s not that any of this evening is particularly remarkable. It is, in fact, that this is a thoroughly typical evening that makes me want to record it, lest it be lost in a generally pleasant blur. It’d be way too easy to only jot down the screaming fits or the Calgon-take-me-away moments… but man, these kinds of gently curved few hours together make me astoundingly satisfied to be a father.

CODA

I wonder whether we’ll have these quiet periods of awesome when the second one comes along?

Almost precisely halfway to a second / Due March 12, 2012 Gender: unknown

Context: I frequently ask Piper, “So, what’s your diaper situation?” To which she always invariably replies, “Good!” The verbal response is not the one I’m watching; if she sidles away while saying “Good!” than she’s trying to get out of smelling range, which indicates un petit falsehood as to her pants’ status. If she stays put, she’s most likely telling the truth.

However, this is not actually a diaper story. This morning, I took the bag out of our kitchen trashcan. While knotting the damn eco-friendly trash bag, I noticed a dead fly down in the bottom of the can, and figured I would swab out the whole thing when I came back from taking the bag out.  As I walked towards the back door, though, Piper walked over and peered down into the bottom of the can, and then quizzically looked at me. “What’s the bug situation?”

Late update: tonight we got asked about “the music situation,” during dinner.  So I think we officially have a catchphrase of the week.

We’ve moved since last I updated here, one and a half times. The one time took us from our apartment in upstate Manhattan to my mom’s farm near Barneveld, Wisconsin. Along the way, we moved through the traditional Seven Stages of Moving: Packing the Books, Acquiring Liquor Boxes, Sorting the Crap, Dumping Drawers Into Boxes, Running Out of Tape, Eating Take-Out, and Sweeping. We had a tearful good-bye with Dawn, the sparky actress who had been taking care of Piper for most of the past year, and then Kate and P got on an airplane while I packed the cats, catboxes, wine, computers and other breakables into our blue car and hit the road, heading for Wisconsin.

Flashback 16 years: my orange cat, Carlos, and I drove the same route in my mom’s pickup truck, heading east. Carlos yowled for five minutes and then found car travel acceptable; I snuck him and a shoebox full of cat litter into a motel, after driving 15 hours straight.

Present day: Carlos and Lucy both eventually accepted being contained in their catboxes for the trip west. After a mere eight hours on the road, I consulted my phone and made for a motel. This time I didn’t need to sneak them into the Motel 6 in eastern Ohio, as the place explicitly allowed pets. The heavens opened up overnight, and the car was covered in dew and leftover rain when we came back out to it the next morning.

Over the course of the day of driving, I remembered just how big and flat the midwest can be. In the Northeast, I grew accustomed to relatively short distances between exits on the highways: in Ohio and Indiana, the spaces between the truck stops grew longer and longer. The clouds meandered higher, eventually resolving to become laughably storybook puffs against a bright blue sky. The shoebox of cat litter in the back of the car made a faint maraca-rattle every time I hit a bump, but for the most part the freeways were smooth.

Driving through Gary smelled, of course, like sulfur, eggs and metal, and Chicago’s traffic, while bad, was characteristically not as bad as New York’s. Sometimes it’s not so bad to be the Second City.

I pulled into my mom’s farm around seven that night. Piper seemed unsurprised to see me, but utterly delighted to see her cats riding in boxes. “Carlos and Lucy are here!”, she trilled as I trudged in the door. Parents, apparently, are simply a fact of life: cats are an occasion to celebrate.

There followed nearly six weeks of settling into my mom’s library. K had a long break before her job began, and the weeds around the strawberries and raspberries managed to tickle her periodic need to Clean Things Up. Piper, still with a deep affection for noisy subway trains, found the chickens terrifying for several days. The movers delivered our boxes of stuff, stacking them into a 10x20x8 foot cube with which we’d periodically play Jenga, extracting swimming trunks and bike shorts and a few cords and cables.

With no regular work to do, we spent most days gardening or catching up with friends. We didn’t feel like setting up Piper’s crib, and gambled that she’d sleep in a regular bed: success! (After only two midnight tumbles in a week.) We made sure that the farm felt like home, gambling that Piper would be okay when Kate and I went to Italy for a week around July 4th: success! (We spoke with her via videochat at least once a day, whether she wanted to or not. After the first two days, our visual images began to hold little appeal for her. “All done,” she told us on day five. “All done what?”, we asked her. “All done talking with Mama and Abba,” she said, squirming off my mom’s lap and running off to play with her trains.

Once home, we looked at a series of houses on the market in Madison — lots and lots of things for sale, most of which spend months reluctantly dropping their prices lower and lower. Despite this, we saw nothing that made both of us equally happy, and around September 1st, made the half-move into the house on Adams St in which I’d done a lot of my adolescent growing up.

We’re simultaneously renting it from the family LLC in which I am a third-part owner, so I get to be the landlord and the tenant, both. Piper took this move harder than the one to the farm; we think it’s because Kate’s back at work and P is having to adjust to three days a week of (awesome!) daycare, as well as two days with various grandparents. Plus, we’re still unpacking our ungodly pile of boxes.

My timer just went off, so I’m back to my consulting gig. I feel rusty, writing, and so clearly it’s time to dust off the blog and get back into it.

Please do not confuse the two Mason jars in our refrigerator. They contain similar-looking thick, rich, viscous brown fluids: one of them is home-made chocolate syrup, to satisfy a recent spate of cravings for chocolate egg creams; and the other is two cups of roux, for a several-days-late gumbo in honor of Mardi Gras.

An egg-cream made with roux would probably be terrible. I don’t even think I’ll try it for science.

• Tasting notes on the egg cream: a quarter-inch of chocolate syrup, a half-inch of milk or your milk-analogue of choice [hemp milk, in my case, and QUIT SNIGGERING] and seltzer the rest of the way up the glass. Stir. Watch out for foam.
• Cooking notes on the roux: takes a long freakin’ time to get it dark enough to have good flavor. Has to be stirred every 15 picoseconds, or it’ll taste burnt. Is probably horrible for you, but man: gumbo is awesome.

It’s just shy of 8 a.m., and our apartment is uncharacteristically quiet. Kate was supposed to be working today, but felt so wretched overnight that she called out (at 0530, I believe) and is sawing wood in the next room. Piper, just a day over the same illness, is having one of her rare lie-ins as well.

I’m in a liminal state, and it’s not entirely comfortable.

My job and I parted company in early January. Keeping the lessons of Dooce and the constantly-circling search engines in mind, I’ll simply refer to the exact nature of the parting as “firm, but amicable.” Journalism is in a state of flux just now, as you may have heard; unlike my years working as a sysadmin, my next job was not breathlessly waiting in the wings. That’s been a little depressing, despite my knowing the reasons for it.

Seven Days of the Week (I Never Go to Work) – They Might Be Giants from They Might Be Giants on Vimeo.

When I applied to journalism schools back in 2006, Kate had told me that of the cities on my list, New York was the least interesting to her in which to live, but that she’d accompany me to wherever the school search led. Coming up on four years later, we’re both feeling like we’re about Done With New York City… so I haven’t been pounding on the doors of media outlets here in town. Instead, Kate and I are looking at options in other cities. Should they come to fruition, we wouldn’t move until our lease runs out… and so even if another full-time journalism job surfaced here in town right now, I’m not sure I’d take it. I know there will be another stretch of 9-5 career in my life, but having nothing definite on the horizon contributes to feeling rootless. It’s a little like watching the status board in an airport, waiting for a long-delayed flight to arrive. Once it comes, I know there’ll be a flurry of activity and motion, but until then…

Piper’s growing and talking and picking out letters: on the subways, on my t-shirts, from her floating letters in the bath. Every day she calls out more and more of the details around her. She’s a funny, easy kid, and we’re having an absolute ball with her. One of the big upsides to not working evenings any more has been getting to see the arc of her days that much more clearly. She’s in a phase where she wants to hear the same books and stories again and again; after a week of reading the same books (this week: “On Noah’s Ark,” “Everywhere Babies”) three and four (hundred) times a day, we’ve taken to “losing” particular books for a while, just to provide an opportunity for something fresher to take hold.

My brother’s in a bit of a rough spot, and my only connection to him is via paper mail. The last serious paper correspondence I had was probably 20 years ago (Hi, Nicole!), and that was all longhand and doodles. This time I’m cheating a little and printing out typed letters.

My stepfather’s cancer numbers have ticked up again, though with the sheer number of cancers and treatments he’s had over the last decade, it’s gotten much easier to remain in a wait-and-see mode with it. The first time you hear “cancer,” it really sounds like “CANCER!”; by the six or seventh time you find out someone’s own cells have gone rogue and are trying to slowly take over the world, it sounds like something you can talk about briefly over lunch and then ignore it while you go do something else.

Recipes made recently:

• Rosemary-Olive-Oil Cake
• Leek-Potato Dill-Oil soup
• Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip cookies
• for watching the Super Bowl, with a partial-orlop contingent in Connecticut: Pierce St. Vegetarian Chili

I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing daily, and will be taking it up again, whether here or privately. It’s funny, the things I now feel like I can’t mention on my own private/public journal, thanks to technology and the increased attention it brings.

[jwplayer config="Moieus" file="http://web.baz.org/~adam/dailies/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/03/Piper-Eye-View.flv" width="640" height="390" ]

The truth is that exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they need to fight back. The TSA should continue to screen checked luggage. They should start screening airport workers. And then they should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and let the rest of their budget be used for better purposes. Investigation and intelligence is how we’re going to prevent terrorism, on airplanes and elsewhere. It’s how we caught the liquid bombers. It’s how we found the Yemeni printer-cartridge bombs. And its our best chance at stopping the next serious plot.

Because if a group of well-planned and well-funded terrorist plotters makes it to the airport, the chance is pretty low that those blue-shirted crotch-groping water-bottle-confiscating TSA agents are going to catch them. The agents are trying to do a good job, but the deck is so stacked against them that their job is impossible. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one.

We have a job here, too, and it’s to be indomitable in the face of terrorism. The goal of terrorism is to terrorize us: to make us afraid, and make our government do exactly what the TSA is doing. When we react out of fear, the terrorists succeed even when their plots fail. But if we carry on as before, the terrorists fail — even when their plots succeed.

via Schneier on Security: Full Body Scanners: Whats Next?.