The Queen sleeps! And now her faithful attendant can write.
 
The Queen of course is the 7-month-old granddaughter Ryan, whom I tend 1 – 2 days a week while her folks are at work. Get this: I offered to do it. In one of those commonplace miracles everybody tells you about but can’t be known until it is experienced I’ve come to savor the gramps gig. I look forward to spending the day with her—feeding her and playing with her and rocking her to sleep. I watch her and marvel at the incarnation of God in her, and at that incarnational alchemy that turns puréed bananas into foul, eye-watering gobs of shit, which she undoubtedly thinks doesn’t stink, grinning toothlessly and kicking her legs flingingly, like the happy sower in Jesus’ parable, a regular Johnny Appleseed of shit, during diaper changing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; perhaps this foul incense is received in the heavens as the perfume of the life they created, cherubim high-fiving behind olfactory tears—”Yo! We did it”—though also recalling Ernest Becker’s comment in The Denial of Death that the fundamental human paradox is that “man [sic] is a god who shits”. It’s even more exciting here on earth because—obviously—I’m out of practice with this, having, for example, forgotten how fast they move when the diaper is released, like some excited pup suddenly unleashed. Then, too, back in the day, I had 2 hands, compared to my current situation thanks to the table saw encounter of 1.55 (no sense of touch). So things get exciting. But even when the moment’s shitty, we have a great time together.
 
Excursus: I thank you God for disposable diapers with tape instead of cloth diapers with ’safety’ pins, which is all we had back then; gotta rinse those bastards out in the toilet, then dump them in the diaper soaker, then try to stop the bleeding. O Lord, you have blessed us with disposable diapers; though were a little slow about it. And this tardiness cost him/her/it a missionary to Africa when the call came back in my senior year of sem with a diapered kid at home and two more on the way. Somebody Big And Important asked me to consider global missions—as I recall, Cameroon—since I had such a ‘natural fluency for foreign languages’. It was both flattering and exciting: study in France for a couple of years, head off to the Dark Continent for Jesus. I was ready to go. ‘Course the call of God ain’t just inner and personal; there’s also the outer, confirming one, not only by the church but most particularly the beloved life mate given to me by God him/her/itself, the mother (and mother-to-be) of our children. It was a brief conversation, beginning, as I recall, with an incredulous ‘are you serious?’ by She Who Only Ever Wanted A Regular Life and ending after some heat with ‘well go ahead and enjoy playing Albert Schweitzer. I ain’t spending my days beating no diapers against no rocks’. I knew instantly that it was, as they say, a game-ender. We were caught in the classic Beckerian human paradox between God and shit. Shit won.
 
The Queen and I have a great time together. And then hoorah she goes away. I love seeing her happiness when Mom and/or Dad show up, jerking in excitement. Me, too; I’m excited, too, clapping with her, ‘Yahoo, Mommy n Daddy’re here! Yahoo! Yahoo!’ eagerly handing her over.
 
We’re starting to develop our own unique way of being together, special games, special rules. Gramps lets her gum the neck of his beer bottle, to the scorn of her mother. Her mother makes her keep her hands still while being fed; gramps lets her grab the spoon and Johnny Appleseed all that puréed shit on its way to her mouth; ‘though really, it’s not so much that I allow her,’ as I explained to her mother when she demanded to know just how the food got on the back of her head, ‘it’s that I have 1.55 hands and she has eight. Now hand me that sponge so I can get this stuff off the wall.’
 
When Doc Boner was somewhere around 18 months—walking, but still an only child—the darling and I hoofed it non-stop from St. Louis to the Grand Canyon, spent twenty minutes there oohing and aahing, then took off to find a campsite, discovering one about halfway to Flagstaff around 3:00 in the afternoon. We were relieved to be there because we’d spent something like 42 hours in the car. We set up the campsite, I kicked back, and she decided to give the kid a bath. Then she told him he had to stay in the tent. She became increasingly irritated and the warnings become more dire as he kept trying to get out. The whole thing was disturbing my communion with nature. So I asked her gently ‘are you insane? do you really expect him to stay in the tent?’ Like flint to tinder it was, sparking with ‘well you don’t have to wash the clothes’ glowing into a full flame of my utter failure as mate and father in the midst of which the boy and I thought it would be good to go for a walk through God’s peaceful forest, and look there, there’s a little pond, oh boy. The darling had calmed considerably by the time we got back, even acknowledging that she might have had a bit of a brain fart there. Then she looked at me with a knowing and superior smirk as I cleaned the mud off his shoes and she threw his clothes in the dirty bag and gave him another, necessary bath. Moms care about cleanliness; gramps cares about fun.
 
Uh oh. The Queen has announced herself.
 
Being an attendant to the Queen means that any other life is lived between naps; the day revolves around her. So I don’t plan much on getting anything done other than being with her. I can do this gig because I have the time; I’m not exactly in demand on a daily basis. Matter of fact, when the depressive energies are running I have to ward off the emotional assaults of mockery ‘you’re only good for baby-sitting,’ with the intellectual insistence that this moment with this child is of intrinsic worth. Beyond everything else, here is where love is lived and learned. What’s more important than that? What’s more valuable? That’s rhetorically obvious, of course, that’s what we all claim; but it’s an existential dialectic in my experience: reason (and the reasoning of theology) have to trump the emotional surges; just ’cause you feel useless doesn’t mean you are. (Nor does it mean that you have to rush out and get all crazy committed to relieve the angst, either.)
 
In one of the few decisions we didn’t argue about, darling Sue and I agreed from the get-go that she would postpone her teaching career in order to raise the kids at home, Ozzie-n-Harriet style. We’re glad we did it that way, but it was a bitch, both financially and psychically. Nowadays she can talk about how isolated and worthless she felt then, ’cause, you know, she was ‘only’ a mom. Other women who followed a similar trail have told me how they felt infantilized in social settings, as if being ‘only’ a mom they had nothing to offer conversationally. After I’ve chased her and played with her and read to her and babbled with her and watched her and fed her and changed her diapers and am rocking the Queen toward a squirmy sleep I ponder how it must have been for the darling day in and day out nursing two kids with a third one hauling ass all over the parsonage and continuing to do this day after day after day and I can’t get my head around it. It’s amazing to me. No wonder she responded to my amorous desperation in those days with a less than enthusiastic ‘go ahead if you have to.’ There’s that Beckerian paradox again: it’s impossible to be a sex goddess when you’ve spent the day in shit.
 
Ah. The Queen beckons.
 
The gramps gig has its dark side: gramps was the old guy who died when I was a kid. My own dad didn’t get past his grandkids’ first years in school. Nor, in fact, did my brother in his grampshood. I wonder what this moment might mean when I am but a dim memory. I hold her and rock her and watch the Queen slowly relax to the embrace and let herself slide into the nap and I remember that the dark mystery of life from which she has been born and in which she now dreams is the same dark mystery of life to which I shall return. In the Land of Naps we are formed and grown, and to the land of Naps we shall return and meet each other again for the first time.
 
Our lives are lived between the naps.