more normal than not

Sometimes when a radio wasn’t working right, you could kind of rap it on something and get a signal to come in for a while.

You could rap it, and you might get a snippet of news or some music or someone talking for a little bit.

And then, usually, it was gone again.

Your reception was intermittent and accidental…never enough to get the whole story…just enough to remind you that there was still something “out there”.

That was how it worked with some of the “bad radios” I’ve owned.

Sometimes, I feel like just another one of those radios.

God must be out there “transmitting”…but somewhere along the way, my receiver got messed up.  I don’t pick up everything I should.

Now, if I was alone in that feeling, I’d feel really bad.

It might be like the villagers seeing the Frankenstein monster up on the darkened hill…

“There he is!!! GET HIM!!!”

That would not be good to be the only one.

I’d hate to go through life being the only broken radio in the world.

Sometimes we question why God seems to have left us…the old “footsteps in the sand” poem brings that to mind…but maybe it’s just a question of the receiver being a little out of whack?

I don’t know, really.  What do I know?  I’m a freaking mailman.  Good grief.

Now we have digital radio.

With digital radio, a signal either comes through or it doesn’t come through.

If it comes through, it’s usually crystal clear.  If it doesn’t make it to the receiver, there’s nothing.

No static, no cross fade, no garbled half-listenable broadcast.

No late night, radio under the pillow listening for stations from Chicago…it doesn’t work like that now.

( I don’t do as much “under the pillow listening” since I got older…I don’t think that digital works like that anymore.  You used to be able to pick up faraway stations because of a condition called “skip”…lots of signals floating around up in the atmosphere…when the conditions were right, they’d bounce down in places hundreds of miles from their origin.)

It’s different from analog.

Analog is poetry and surfing, waves of maybe…you might get it, it might not always be crystal clear…but you had a chance. It’s randomness and fallible…just a bunch of moveable waves.

Digital is a robot…designed to work until it doesn’t. It’s the latest and greatest…but it’s not really “human scaled”. It’s 0’s and 1’s…put together in the right order….a picture through a screen door…chopped up and “less” somehow.

I’m analog. My reception fades and then comes back.  I’m listening under my pillow, I’m listening with my cheek to the breeze, face turned toward the clouds. I listen.

I am one of many bad radios out in the world…dials turning, hoping for a signal to bleed through one of these late nights.

It’s faith that keeps the dials turning…knowing that the transmission never stops keeps the faith alive.

Maybe I just need to be rapped on a table…maybe I just need some kind of “bad radio” tuneup?

I stopped running about a month or two ago.

Just stopped. Cold Turkey.

It was something about it getting cold, or having a cold, or having other obligations…

Maybe it was something about getting ready to have another baby…I don’t have a specific excuse.

I have a lot of vague generalities that I can point to as being the reason I quit running.

I have a lot of ground to cover when I compromise…a lot of excuses seem to be a better blanket than just one reason.

I stopped running and that was that…no turning back.

For right now, I just don’t do it.

It’s funny how much easier it was to steel myself to not doing something that can be kind of hard.

It was a lot easier to come up with the resolve I needed to not run than it was to start getting out every morning and covering some miles.

That’s really what most of life is all about.

Unless it’s a habit that you struggle to quit, like smoking or drinking too much, it’s usually easier to “not do” than it is to “do”.

I can “not do it” with the best of them.

“Manana” is my best excuse.  It’s not confrontational.  It doesn’t raise my hackles one bit.  It’s not a defeat…it’s just a postponement.

I can do manana…even if I have to wait a day or two to get started.

I think that children are a pretty good wakeup call, though.

When you have a child, I think that it makes you aware of time passing…even though sometimes you’re too busy to pay attention to what’s going on while the time is moving by.

You know that you better not put too much off for later.

Later only lasts a short while.  Our “later” is a finite thing.  That’s something that hits you when you have a baby…and you still have a lot of work to do.

You better get a move on…prioritize and act on it.

It makes me tired just thinking about action…but just “thinking about action” doesn’t put the bacon in the pan, much less bring it home.

I stopped running because I had a hacking cough and it got really cold outside.

That was a pretty commonsensical reason to not push the envelope physically for a couple of days.

It’s good to take it easy when you’re sick.

The trouble is, a few days turns into a week, then a month…and before you know it, you have a lifetime of new habit laying behind you like a field of dead corn waving in dry winter air.

And you don’t even remember what it felt like to put one foot down in front of the other…over and over and over…each footfall reminding you that “I can, I can, I can, I can”.

It’s easier to back away from something that seems hard at the time than it is to keep going.

It’s surprising, though, how easy a “hard habit” gets as time goes by.  What was hard to begin with becomes easy through time and repetition.

I may get back to running sometime soon.  I may not.

Most of the time, I don’t really know what I’m going to do.

For now, I guess the occasional lack of direction is as good an excuse as any.

Names are funny things.

My names been “Peter” most of my life.  There may have been a short period of namelessness between my birth and when they first officially recorded it, but if there was, I don’t remember it.

It’s my name.  It’s what I’m called.

But I could look in the mirror right this minute and wonder, “Well, there I am…and my name is Peter.  Where’d that come from?”

It’s, like I said, a funny thing to have a name.  It’s funny to have a name that someone else picked out.

You’ve got to have a name, though.  It would be too confusing, otherwise.

We’d have to operate off of a “description only” basis if we all didn’t have names…it would be like, “no….the dark-haired one…no…I won’t say fat, but it’s kind of bigger than that other dark haired one.  Just bigger…I don’t know…around the middle, I guess…the middle part…right….the belly part…right, that one…the one with the shoes…right.”

It makes it easier to have a name.  It was a smart decision to give us an identifier like a name.

It saved us a lot of time.

Now, some names work against us.  It’s not our fault…it’s something about connotations and sometimes even just the way a name sounds.

If you name your child “Adolph” it really doesn’t fly.  It’s kind of like an “anti-Cher” kind of name…you can identify with just the first name…but it’s a bad identification.  It’s bad especially if you have a premature little mustache.  It doesn’t work to be named Adolph anymore.  It’s not at the top of the list for baby names in any of the books I read.

Charles is a good name. Charles, Chuck…it’s good. Unless, of course, you choose “Manson” for a middle name.  You really have to think about the current events of the last 100 years or so…and maybe that’s way past the statute of limitations for “current events”, I really don’t know…but you have to be careful about what connections people are going to make.

“Charles Manson…” isn’t a good name for a child.

“Schleroderma” would be a bad name.  I don’t know what it means…but it doesn’t sound good.  It’s unpleasant.  You should name your child something pleasant.

“Satan” is a really bad name for any baby.

Those are some bad baby names.  They would be a curse for a baby to be saddled with a name like that.

But any name you give a new baby requires a period of adjustment.

You have to work your way into being able to say your new child’s name.

Saying your new child’s name is just one small part of getting used to having another human being in your life. It’s a really small and important part of getting used to the whole situation.

It might take a couple of days before the name really starts rolling off your tongue.

Our new baby’s name is Sparrow.

You don’t hear that one very often.

It’s not hard to say, really.  I know that’s her name.  But it’s new.

I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone else “Sparrow”.

So it doesn’t roll off my tongue yet.

Our 4-year-old calls her “little guy”.

That’s easy enough to say, but not really accurate.

She really is more of a “little gal” than a “little guy”.

I guess it’s really like that old “frog on the log in the middle of the pond on a bump on the log with a knot on the bump…there’s a hole, there’s a hole, there’s a hole in the middle of the ground” song.

You remember that one?

We have a name…to make it easier to identify the shell that we walk around in…that carries our spirit  while we’re on this big ball floating through space.

We aren’t our name…but it sure helps to describe who we are.  It makes us easier to pick out of a crowd.

Sparrow, Sparrow, Sparrow….it’s starting to roll off my tongue as I speak.

Early Thanksgiving day, Jenny delivered our baby.

That evening and on into the morning, the maternity ward was so busy.  I think the nurses and our midwife told us later that something like 11 babies were born that night.

That’s a lot of babies.

When it was almost time for our baby to be born, the nurse that was helping Jenny told her that the baby was almost here…and not to push any more until our midwife could come back into our room.

The midwife was in the room next door delivering another woman’s baby.

After 9 months of waiting, Jenny waited a little longer.

When the midwife came back into our room, she told Jenny to push…and a short while later…a very short while…our baby was born.

I can’t describe what happened any more simply.

There were a lot of babies born that night on that maternity ward.  It was a busy night for everyone.

There wasn’t anything all that uncommon about babies that night.  There were a lot of new babies.  We’d come to the right place to be around a bunch of new babies.

But every single one of those new babies was someone’s miracle.

I’m not sure how any of the other people really felt about their baby.  I hope they all saw the miracle.  I suspect that they did. It’s hard to say about anyone else, really.

This little girl that we held in our arms was our miracle.  There wasn’t any doubt of that.

One moment she wasn’t…and then, suddenly, she is.  She wasn’t in the world…and now she is.

I don’t know what could be more miraculous.

Trying to describe how it felt and what it all means is kind of like trying to take a picture of a sunrise.  You can’t really do it.  No words are going to be enough to share what that felt like to see our baby for the first time.

So I’ll stop trying to say what can’t really be said.

Our baby was one of many…one of many born on Thanksgiving day on a small maternity ward in a relatively small hospital in a small city on the western side of North Carolina.

She was “just another”.  She was just another baby.

So why does it feel like the whole Universe has opened up again?

All the diamonds in this world
That mean anything to me
Are conjured up by wind and sunlight
Sparkling on the sea

I ran aground in a harbour town
Lost the taste for being free
Thank God He sent some gull-chased ship
To carry me to sea

Two thousand years and half a world away
Dying trees still grow greener when you pray

Silver scales flash bright and fade
In reeds along the shore
Like a pearl in sea of liquid jade
His ship comes shining
Like a crystal swan in a sky of suns
His ship comes shining

-Bruce Cockburn