Ussins

Nem-nem for a while has been learning to walk, and has abandoned crawling and walks pretty well by now.

I took her for a walk recently down the same place where Mago used to visit the deer lawn ornaments (we still do sometimes) which I swear I’ve written about but can’t seem to find the entry.. hope it’s still there.. anyway I took her for a walk. On the walk she pointed to a tree and signed “bird”, and when we passed flowers, she scrunched her lips and nose together and exhaled sharply, to imitate sniffing: this is her own sign for “flower”. I set her on the sidewalk to examine some purple daisies in someone’s yard, and she batted them, and when they bounced on their stem she laughed. Then she noticed some ants and stooped down to examine them, and she did this short low sort of raspy grunt. It’s her word for “creature”: she does this for bugs, dogs, animals she sees on TV etc.

The other day she looked at me from her car seat while I was outside the car, and she called: “Dada”. I pointed at her and said “Baby”. She smiled and did the sign for baby: holding one hand on the other elbow and cradling her arms back and forth.

Tia tells me the other day when they went to a playground, Nem-nem said “play”, and the other day she said “doll” when handed a doll. This morning we read a muppet babies book, and seeing baby Kermit she made the sign for frog: hold the back of your hand on your chin and curl three fingers down and up several times.

Mago has amused us with more things he says in his sleep. Tia heard these ones:

In the way a child declares small facts like having visited Denver, importantly:

I’m someone’s brutha!..

Then in a sing-song sort of way going up on the second word, he continued:

Whatch’your name?

Recently I put his blanket back on him at night and he said:

You’re the nice fishy.

Another night I put his blanket back on him and he stirred and urgently whined in alarm:

You’re underwater!

The other night I just went and held him while he was asleep. In his sleep he instinctively tried to put his arm around my neck, but it just kind of flopped up to the side of my neck and he couldn’t get it far around. After I stayed there for a while he whined in his sleep:

I can’t reach you!

So I let his arm drop and I put his plush monkey (Millie) in his arms.

Losing Tia’s grandpa several weeks ago and then more recently my own grandfather, I’ve been in kind of a state of shock and not known what to write or post. My cousin Daniel puts it briefly and well, though, in his post, linking also to another cousin’s (his sister’s) great post.

(There are many cousins’ and relatives’ blogs I don’t have in my blogroll yet, and some I’ve known about for some time but haven’t added. I’ll get them there.)

Grandpa Clark (Riley Garner) has died, in the hospital, of old age (99) and pneumonia; he’s passed on to the next life.

My history with him is mostly withdrawn, sometimes affectionate, and often very cantankerous or even worse. I had a very similar experience with his passing as I did with his daughter, my mother-in-law Joan (with whom I have a similar history): circumstance taught him, exceedingly stubborn as he was, to accept help. For all the following, I would be boasting if the point was only that I helped him. The last day he was home, the morning of the day we later realized his oxygen supply was low (he had a breath mask and cable with oxygen tank) and he needed to go to the hospital, I was called by him to get help to head on his walker to the bathroom, and a while after he let himself into the bathroom he called urgently for me, and I came to see that he’d only just made it, but leaving a terrible mess anyway. In my weak first attempts to help it became obvious I wasn’t doing enough, and he was too winded, weak and agitated (and I didn’t know it at the time, but too short on oxygen) to help himself. “HELP! HELP!” he cried, trying to raise himself up. After cleaning up, after the long slow journey back to the living room he thanked me for the help, and this wasn’t the grandiose, over-the top thank you I’ve received when I finally get around to doing something like mowing the lawn. (As heroic as that actually is for me.) It was just a humble, dignified thank you.

All the time I’ve lived here in his basement, it’s been like there’s a dark cloud upstairs, and only a bearable light downstairs, for my shame that I have to live in his basement, for all my history of unhappiness with him, for how little he’s let me in, and I don’t think he’s even known how to, and for the futility of my largely unknowledgable attempts to connect and repair my damage with him. But the morning that he didn’t know he was saying goodbye to his home for the final time, Grandpa learned that he could trust me with the worst of messes, and that it was no mar on his dignity at all, and that I’m glad and able to help him. But it wasn’t just Grandpa that learned that.

Was it a day or so later? - I visited him in the hospital, after the doctors had said he could only have about a week to live. They didn’t know they were dealing with a Clark. A whole day of mortal battle to a person of average constitution is just breakfast for a Clark - he hung on for several weeks and the sickness cleared despite everyone’s expectations meanwhile. But I thought I wouldn’t see him again - and I only saw him briefly once again after that, while he was only coherent enough to know I was there - but I made a video recording of him holding his great-grandson, my son’s hand in farewell, and then I took his hand and looked at him in farewell. Through the full breath mask latched over his entire face, he looked at me in clear awareness, and the words came easily for him, spoken by him as a revelation to himself as much as to me:

“I love you! I love you!”

The words were easy to return, and true. It had been later in the day after I’d helped with his mess at home, after they took him to the hospital, that I came home to the house after work and the cloud was lifted. It wasn’t just a physical mess I had cleaned, and not just his mess either. It was my mess too. It took a lot of water and soap, many towels and washcloths, and a lot of straining and lifting to clean up thoroughly. I changed him into new undergarments and new clothes, before he was ushered through doors into rooms where he waited to pass the final curtain, reaching to meet his maker, who forgets every mess, who fills the house with light, top to bottom.

Nem-nem took many steps yesterday on different occasions. She’s continuing today.  Video footage (get it? footage, har, har) pending..

Here’s a short test clip from my new camcorder shooting in lower-quality DV (as opposed to higher-quality HD) mode, compressed with Xvid and LAME mp3, then recompressed by YouTube into Flash (.swf) format. I am aware you may not have needed to know any of that, but at least a tiny bit of my geekiness needs to bleed into this blog. I’m looking for an attractive way to host and embed video here - meanwhile, what does some lower quality video of a high quality child hurt?

This morning we drove to a local elementary school to vote for our congressional district. (I voted for this guy - guess why? - I only know enough about him to know I don’t dislike him though).

Mago had been very unhappy deciding whether to come along and ultimately did. (It was very brief - most of the times I’ve gone to the polls nearly everyone there is from my neighborhood. You’d think my neighborhood has the only voting citizens in Utah.) I’d spent the morning doing other things and realized Mago needs some time with me, so I invited him to drive home with me and took him for a drive to see “where mommy used to go to school”. Showing him some of the BYU campus I remembered a site where Tia and I spent time and took him there, an area of apartments off campus.

I took him to a particular corner in residential Provo, explaining to him where I’d go:

Me: I’m going to show you what mom and I called the Magic Tree.

Mago: Does the magic tree disappear?

Me: No, we called it the Magic Tree because we fell in love under it, and love is magic.

After a bit of searching I spotted the corner to realize the large tree wasn’t there any more. All that was left was a dark patch of ground without much grass. I explained this to Mago:

Me: Oh - the tree isn’t there any more. Do you see that dark spot in the grass? That’s what’s left of the tree. They must have torn it down.

Mago: The Magic Tree did disappear.

Mago (a few moments later) … Did Jesus bring it back to life?

At the city carnival just over a week ago, I took Nem-nem on a ferris wheel and held her tight.

I didn’t know it was going to go around fast. She was terrified for her life, screaming, sobbing, squirming, and inconsolable. I felt terrible. I’d have never taken Mago on a ferris wheel when he was an infant - I was too protective. Maybe I’ve swung too far the other way.

(Although usually I’m.. very protective.)

Driving home from dinner at my dad’s this past Sunday (Father’s Day), I played favorites in the CD player that lulled Nemmy off to sleep. One of them was Time After Time as it appears on the album for STRICTLY BALLROOM (probably Tia’s favorite film - or she showed it to everyone in High School). I reached back and held Mago’s hand and sang to him in between treacherously brief glances back to the road (I can’t believe that either considering the last paragraph I wrote) and he lovingly smiled back at me. In a while he asked:

Daddy, does this song teach you to pick me up if I fall down?

That night around 10, about an hour and a half after I finally got him in bed (Tia was off late in another city taking someone’s family photograph), he came to the bathroom as I cleaned out his toilet. He held up a folded paper card he’d colored - I guess from Nursery at church - and said:

Daddy, I forgot to give this to you. This is yours.

It was a line drawing of a father holding up his kid, a boy about Mago’s size/age, the card colored with blue marker scribbles solidly clumped together roughly inside every shape. Inside was a note scrawled with a nursery worker’s help:

Daddy I love you too.

A simple thing like that from any little kid cuts any parent down into a burbling lump much smaller than the kid.

The other day I was holding Nem-nem and making her “jump” on a bed with Mago, and other general riotous fun, including making silly babbling monster sounds for her and chasing Mago around the room, all of which she laughed uproariously at and squealed and giggled. Then Mago said:

Let’s play Sambo-Wan.
Okay, how do you play that?
You go like this.

He stood, bending down to touch his foot with one arm, thrusting the other arm up in the air behind him, making a fist. Another way to play Sambo-Wan apparently is to “Do tricks and stuff”, including jumping off a bed and getting as many little kicks as you can in, midair and crouching before you land.

Photograph by Tia.