knocked wood

2021-01-27 :: Al Min

Marcelo is 16 lbs. 7 oz. today. I spotted the woodpecker while pushing him home from the pediatrician’s office, mom next to me with an insulated bag of tortas from Doña Maty’s. I’m listening to Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors as a sliver of sleep expands in my soul. Last night I was up until about the same time as now assembling baby’s crib, cutting up its oversized box, and trashing its styrofoam bits. The crib’s color is called lagoon. It’s a mini so it’s a mini lagoon I guess. Marcelo is swimming or floating then. The pediatrician knocked on wood to emphasize the expression, which is something some people do. I briefly thought of William Carlos Williams only because we are with a doctor in Spanish Harlem I guess. People are dying daily for a very specific reason we’re all aware of instead of the usual nebulous ineffable shadow undergirding all our pedestrian sightings of knocked wood.

101 days

2021-01-22 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

The days though arbitrary have number once you pick one to count. There’s disagreement about the first day, but the last is indisputable as we know. The room is warm with sleep, wake, sleep again. Cedarwood sticks in rice send up wisps of farm in summer Korea—sun, frogs, heavy rains tamping dust.

bee sting and nothingness

2021-01-20 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

Now he reaches far away from being and been. He’s at his ends. I live in half sleep liminal. The room swoons, and the void renders me unavoidable. Tomorrow a hundred days, sacral mortal number, cardinal luck for soju and rice cakes’ offering.

later elations

2021-01-19 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

His hands move now with more intention. He holds them centered looking intently for his will in their grasping. He chatters loudly to us and mumbles to himself with a gaze that seems lost in thought. There’s a deep satisfaction in seeing what I’d experienced but of which I’d had no awareness. There’s joy in his joy that can’t be stifled. As the world becomes clearer for him so does our shared experience clarify something for me though I’m not quite sure what it is.

head’s thread

2021-01-18 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

This thread I’m pulling now is pulling me through the hearted now. This is a record of today. We woke in the baby’s slow wake to feed. 404 push-ups / 406 crunches/leg lifts. Mom bought bagels from Bo’s for herself and dad. Baby burbled with new sounds. Roasted the last 8 ounces of Flores Ranaka Robusta while pourover of same brewed, and the smoke alarm stirred around minutes after second crack. Mom and baby done, baby into bouncer, and we bounce sounds while the coffee is clean but dark and slim bitter. Marcelo on the bed for second time with head raised. Out for groceries alone and return to him asleep, mom’s watch waning, wakes to our lunch. Walk east, three of us in mostly shade for a latte and espresso. Marcus Garvey Park is bubbling with muted joy of kids and dogs. I push the stroller, espresso pushing too. Home to dinner of lime butter white wine shrimp pasta, peeling de-veining freezer-burned thirteen in the sink listening to our collective MLK memories.

Something like a low gurgling joy through all of this, thread/river pulling mind alive. Maybe something waking to this baby boy.

familiar familiar

2021-01-17 :: Al Min

#pandemic

There is a bubble of ecstatic joy pressing up above the river beneath the quotidian air of my life. Something says it’s been there. What releases it? It’s surrounded by a fractal web of feelings that map against momentary stations of a lifetime. Each node is a world. How do I see this more clearly? How do I instantiate this state?

enjoy it

2021-01-03 :: Al Min

#hedonism

Here I am following the forgotten feeling, the lost mundane pleasures. There’s still something new to be had, to be taken in, to be possessed by. Flickers of felt memory call, the stream of small, past pleasures mark the way but not the way. There’s a pleasure in the remembering too, the thread of life I’d lost shimmering in the weft.

in between days

2021-01-02 :: Al Min

#meditation

Mom and baby asleep is my time. Pre-babe daily hour’s meditation still ripples its years’ groove, but the static of entropy obscures in grey-matter spaces. Now I write to gather thread, to remember the dowser’s angle and make my way to the river music. To be revealed again and again, ephemeral and vital, the feeling is buried by battered consciousness. Maybe it’s the thing known by the unmediated body’s minding. Here at every moment, I follow, I forget, I follow, I follow.

handedness

2020-12-31 :: Al Min

#Marcelo #firsts

A week or two ago, Marcelo began to notice the first premise of the external world’s proof of his right hand. He’s begun to gurgle and coo with greater variation, to startle with particularity and to gain some control of his reflexes. Our first new year.

unrecorded firsts

2020-12-19 :: Al Min

#Marcelo #parenting #firsts

At 2 months Marcelo begins to follow our faces and smile when he sees us. My vestigial, pre-dad impulses continue to make notes I won’t have time to follow up on. I mark time less and less as it marks me more and more. And as my colitis flares, I wonder how long this body gives me to let him know from his roots that he’s loved and that he’s born of love.

thanksgiving eve

2020-11-25 :: Al Min

#Thanksgiving #pandemic

10:41pm on the eve of Thanksgiving, and the low hum of never sleeping more than 3–4 hours at a clip is a slightly dicey, disembodied feeling. I slough balance as Marcelo rounds 6 weeks—a constant off kilter. The caffeine-frenetic wave’s crest glimmers far off from this drained space of opaque chromatic activity. Something’s going on underneath that I can’t see.

friday the 13th eve

2020-11-12 :: Al Min

#pandemic #friday the 13th #parenting

Marcelo Francisco Min Chavez was born 9:23PM EST on October 13, 2020 at Mount Sinai West in New York City. How to think/feel about the fact that from his grandparents’ generation to his, we’ve gone from almost no photos of early childhood to a sinuous stream whose source is the exact recorded time of his birth? And the C-section—a word often passed so casually in conversation—casts a dull, deep pain, ineradicable from palimpsest memory. The fatigue-addled body’s minding gives less and less to reflection and revision. In fits and starts spirit inertia, like the baby’s own growth. His oddly paced, inchoate breath-rhythms and animal noises guide me through strange terrain.

liminal melons

2020-08-17 :: Al Min

#pandemic #liminality #참외 #Korean melon

There was an almost fall-like coolness to the air last night as we walked through Marcus Garvey Park and circled back to open our windows to cross-winds. This summer I’ve been buying Korean melons from the local H-Mart regularly. I spent some summers of my childhood on my maternal grandparents’ farm and in Seoul. My grandmother had a head of short, permed curly hair, and the crowns in her mouth gleamed when she smiled wide or laughed. I think her voice partly stands out in my mind because hers was an accent you won’t hear too often, and my food memories from those times are visceral. When we tried the baba ganoush one night at an Upper West Side Druze restaurant called Gazala’s, I had a Proustian madeleine moment because something about the eggplant’s smokiness enveloped me in a reverie of that tiny (now mostly empty) village. It’s a strange liminal state because the visceral memories are clearly imprinted, but my actual state of mind and feelings from the time are vague. Add to that my dad’s home movies on VHS tapes, and it’s a disorienting mixture of intimate closeness and decades-distant mirage.

Still, there’s a non-mystical feeling of ancestral presence about me. And I say non-mystical because it doesn’t feel extraordinary in any way but just as it should be. I do sort of feel like I should be lingering in it though—as if there’s something in it that I need to find.