Fortunately, It's Just Something Else

When I was writing on this blog every single day for, um, for a very long time, it was inconceivable that there would come a time when I would write perhaps once a month.  Now that this time has arrived, it is inconceivable to me, now, that there was a time-- a very long time-- in my life where I wrote on this blog every single day.

Life; you're a real croquet mallet to the taint, aren't you?

I've been getting a lot of croquet mallets to the taint lately which, of course, doesn't make me special or martyred, it just makes me like everyone else.  I got rejected from a prospective job, my car that I bought three weeks ago started bucking like a horse and needed a repair that, if it hadn't been covered under warranty, would have cost $4,000-$5,000 to fix.  My dog died.  Work sucks.  And I haven't slept in approximately two years.  Yes, I know the twins are only 8 months old, but I count the time my wife was pregnant and thrashed around in bed in discomfort night after night, keeping me awake, and tack on another year of anxiety-ridden nightmares and evenings spent staring at the ceiling fan.

I tell people that I haven't slept since 1984, which was the year I finally understood that my mommy and daddy weren't going to live forever.  They say there's truth in every joke, and, if you look at pictures of me at around that age, there are black rings under my youthful, sparkly little eyes.

I'm emotionally drained and physically exhausted.  The heat around here has barely let up in two months and I struggle to keep my eyes open during the day-- they're all dried out from the excessive dependence on decades old window air conditioning units that struggle and wheeze like a COPD patient huffing and puffing to walk ten feet.  I need oxygen.  I need... something.

My dog needed something, too.  He needed something more than pills, something more than Glucosamine-rich food.  He needed something more than time and care and love.  He needed a miracle, and you can just ask the Catholic Church how short they are on those these days.  We kept him going longer than we should have, longer than was humane.  Did you know your vet can put your dog on the canine equivalent of hospice care?  Well, they can, if you're cowardly enough to go along with it.

We were.  For a couple long, sad weeks at any rate.

I knelt down on the floor of that tiny little room-- no bigger than our twins' nursery-- and I held him and stroked his thick, gray fur and I thought to myself, this is the most I've touched you in months.  And I felt sick.  I just kept rubbing his head and all the way down his back, as clumps of his fur came off in my hand and fluttered to the floor.  I was fine at reception.  I was fine talking to the vet tech.  I was fine when they brought him back in, the catheter inserted in his arm, like a condemned green mile prisoner deposited into the chamber.  When the vet came in and asked if I had any questions, my throat became thick and I shut my eyes and tears sprayed onto my glasses.

"How long will it take?" I asked.  I was surprised he understood the question, because what I heard was utterly unintelligible, but I guess a lot of people must ask that.

"Not very long at all, maybe a minute or two."

"Jesus," I said.

The Propofol went in first.  Goodnight, Finley.  His breathing had become so loud and harsh and raspy, cagey, throaty, labored, awful in the past year-- it was everywhere I walked.  When we would be upstairs and the baby monitor would be on downstairs, all it would pick up was his breathing-- like a lumberjack sawing through a stubborn oak.  I close my eyes and I can still hear it.  His head thunked on the blanket covering the floor in seconds and his tongue fell out lazily.  I stared at it, and I was shocked at how repulsed I was by the sight of it-- undignified, disorganized, vulgar.  I wanted to push it back into his mouth, like the doctor who put the coins over Lincoln's eyes, but I couldn't move.  The phenobarbital came next and fast-- the overdose.  The end.  Dr. Peters put the Littmann on Finley's chest and said,

"His heart's stopped."

His heart.  My heart.  I still could hear the relentless clatter of his breath.  Only I could hear it, I guess.

I'm so tired and run down these days I haven't had time to grieve or process or anything-- I suppose that's what this is.  This blog used to be the place I would come to and sort out life's idiocies and its beauties, where I could make fun of the world and myself, where I could come to identify with that part of me that still clung desperately to the notion that I was a writer in some way.  Now, I don't know what it is, or why it is.

I still can't get over how fast it happened.  He was fourteen-- eighty-eight in people years.  He was my first dog ever and, at 32, I come downstairs in the morning and I don't know what to do.  Make coffee, I suppose.  The English make tea-- the half-Israelis make coffee.  We have hairy arms and hot tempers and we drink coffee and we get on with it.  While taking a walk today with my father's sister who is visiting from Australia, I lost one of the baby's hats.  It's somewhere, on some street in our neighborhood somewhere-- some sidewalk.  I pushed them in the stroller while they slept and my 70-year-old aunt with her squeaky voice and her artsy glasses followed diligently a half-step behind us.  She casually mentioned that, in the early 70s, she fell in love with a cousin of hers and, when he was arranged-married off to someone else, she overdosed on pills to try to kill herself.  I wanted to stop pushing the stroller and turn to her and scream,

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURSELF?!  ALL DAY LONG I WORK WITH ASSHOLES LIKE THAT-- WHAT ARE YOU TELLING ME?"

But I just said, "uh-huh-- wow" and kept pushing the stroller along, petrified that, if I stopped and thought about it, it would become real.  Something to deal with, a thing to confront.  Fortunately, it's just something else to write about.

That's all.

My Salt Mine's Breath Tastes Like Salt

I go back to work tomorrow.

My wife had two babies, so I stayed home for a bit.

It's been nine weeks.

NEIN!

I was supposed to be gone for eight weeks, but I freaked out (NEIN!) and extended my leave by a week. Work didn't care. Hey, what's another week of not paying me to them?

(The answer: not much.)

I'm gold that most husbands/partners/S.O.'s don't take so much time off when their wives/partners/S.O.'s, Baby Mamma, Bitches have children. Of course, most people have single babies. Twins are kind of more complicated. More screaming. More shitting. More... there.

There there, they're there.

And they're definitely there. And, tomorrow, from roughly 5:45am when I leave the house until 3:45pm when I return, I'll be here, and they'll be there. My wife'll be there, too, until April 2nd, and she's got a couple intrepid people coming in sporadically to assist but, for the most part, she's going to be a solo act while I'm deeply entrenched in the psychiatric salt mine.

I was thinking about writing this next paragraph about how I'm preparing myself to go back. But, see, there really is no way to prepare yourself to go back to a job after nine weeks of being away. What am I supposed to do? Zen out? Read up on Clozaril? Do mental push-ups? Please-- it's bull-cock. It's like preparing to have twins in your house every waking and sleeping (HA!) second of every day.

(NEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIN!)

Can't be done.

Stupid.

No.

SO, why try?

I'm just going to wake up tomorrow and pilot the car a little less mindlessly than I've been doing for the last year-and-a-half, and hope I remember how to interact appropriately not only with patients, but with coworkers. I hope I remember which little checkboxes to tic off and which ones to leave alone. I hope I remember to sign my name, stamp my name, and write the time-- specifying a.m. or p.m. I hope the new photocopier likes me. The old one didn't. Antisemitic piece of shit.

Faced with my inevitable return to the working world-- I'm angry more than anything. I thought I would be more hysterical and panicked, but I'm not. I'm just mad. At myself. At me. Mad at my meager earning potential. Mad at my schedule that necessitates my being at work every other weekend. Mad at the fact that we don't have gobs and gobs of money and cocaine stashed away under the floorboards that might facilitate a life of leisure for my wife and my children. Mad at this country that punishes procreatin' mothafuckas by offering them unpaid leave at a time when expenses rise dramatically and unendingly.

I'm one angry little blogger-boo.

Roar.

I suppose it's going to be alright, though. People always say that, usually when they have absolutely no idea if it's true. I suppose my wife will be alright and my kids will be alright and, if I can get through the door without bursting into tears, I'll be alright, too. I know that, in some ways, I've lost my facility-- that breezy ease with which I strolled down the hallways and knocked on patients' doors and knew everybody's name and everybody's story-- who washed their pants yesterday with cigarettes in the pocket and had a meltdown, who assaulted whom, who's on fall precautions, who's being discharged soon-- who isn't.

Well. I suppose it'll all come back. People say that to people, too. After all: working in a psychiatric hospital's just like riding a bicycle.

Isn't it?

Down to Zero

"Oh the feeling
When you're reeling
You step lightly thinking you're number one
Down to zero with a word
Leaving
For another one

Now you walk with your feet
Back on the ground
Down to the ground
Down to the ground."

My wife and I have been spending a lot of time recently watching "Homicide: Life on the Street". It's a police procedural-- well, it's a lot more than that-- that was filmed in Baltimore, and Fells Point, from 1993-1999, and it was one of my favorite shows on television when I was in middle and high school. There's a picture of me, somewhere, standing in front of the building that was used as the headquarters, in Fells Point-- and I'm grinning in that picture about as big as I can.

I can remember well watching Pembleton, who made suspenders look cool, scream a confession out of some moke in The Box, or Bayliss going through some existential crisis, or Munch never doing any actual police work-- just cracking wise, or paranoid. I can remember the brilliant Yaphet Kotto astonishing with his performance as Al Giardello, expertly towing the line between rabid attack dog and sensitive mentor. I can remember watching this show in 1998 when I decided to enter college as a theatre major, but I can remember watching "Homicide" in my parents' basement dreaming not of becoming an actor, but becoming a cop.

Instead, I became a father. I wrote a book about cops. I appear in local theatre plays. And, in 2011, I'm still watching "Homicide", with my best friend beside me on the couch-- and she loves it-- while she breastfeeds our twins, or pumps.

The song lyrics at the beginning of this blog are from the Joan Armatrading song "Down to Zero". The song plays at the end of the Season 5 episode of "Homicide" called "Prison Riot". I love Joan Armatrading's voice. It's a lot like Tracy Chapman's, and it's frequently confused for hers, but there's an earthier quality, a more impassioned fervor to Armatrading's voice. Something. If I knew more about music, or anything, maybe I could tell you what it is, but I don't know.

The older I get, the more I realize that there's a lot I don't know.

Life's funny. On December 15th, my twins were born. I didn't get to cut the cords, because the O.R. was way too chaotic, and my son came out white as a hospital wall. I was hurt, bummed-- diminished, I suppose might be a better way to describe it. My daughter had jaundice, my son had to have help to breathe, but we all went home together, and they grew, and we fell into a new routine, of feeding, and pumping, and watching Kay Howard, Meldrick Lewis, Mikey Kellerman, John Munch, Tim Bayliss, Frank Pembleton slug their way through another shift on the dirty streets of Bal'more.

Maybe four days after we got home with the twins, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer. Stage 4. Metastases in his stomach, his liver, his brain. Multiple masses in the brain, including one that was so huge it was growing even while he was hospitalized. A mass that's 9 centimeters in his chest. He's lost thirty pounds in no time at all.

No time at all. Down to zero.

Down to the ground,
Down to the ground.

I was reminded, in thinking of all this, of the story of a young New York City patrolman who, on one particular shift in the early 1970s, shot and killed a suspect who had pulled a gun on him, and, several hours into the same shift, delivered a baby. That's how fucked up life is-- that these things happen like that. That life can come in and go out so soon, so close. My brother-in-law's life has not gone out, but it feels as though it is on its way out, as the lives of my children begin.

And what's to be done? My mother-in-law wants to send them lasagna, and cookies. She wants to festoon my nephew's room and life with an abundance of toys to make up for the fact that his father won't see much of 2012, let alone 2013. People want to clean their house and hold beef-n-beer benefits. People want to pay their bills, and I guess I hope they do. Me? I don't know what I want to do. It sounds cruel, but I have two children to raise and provide for, and I don't know how to do that, and I feel like I've got to start figuring that out. I never figured me out, and I guess that's going to have to wait until, I don't know-- retirement?

Maybe.

In the meantime, I'll be changing diapers, and receiving more bad news texts from my sister, and watching "Homicide" with my wife while our twins snore on our chests.

Since news of my brother-in-law's ill health broke on New Year's Day, I know now what Joan Armatrading is singing about, about being down to zero-- at the beginning, or at the end, it barely makes a difference. Sleep-deprived, half-psychotic, half-dreaming, in love, in mourning, in despair, infatuated, indefinable.

Down to the ground,
Down to the ground.

For the (t)Win

"We depart as two,
Wee-hee, wa-hoo!
And return as four,
No less, no more."

That was the Facebook status update I wrote on Wednesday as my wife and I prepared to leave our home for the hospital to commence our induction. The twins, it seemed, were running out of room in my 5'0" wife's womb, and they weren't going to cook till today-- their scheduled due date.

Returning as four almost didn't happen.

They almost kept our little girl at the hospital due to jaundice. Hyperbilirubinemia, they call it. Thanks to my stupid blood type, our daughter's red blood cells were breaking down and a substance called bilirubin was forming, and she had that tell-tale yellow tint to her skin. So, on our first night together as a family, they took our daughter from us and sent her upstairs to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for phototherapy.

There was talk of sending me, my wife, and our son home, and keeping our little girl.

It's a funny thing. You meet someone for the first time and, instantly, you can't bear to be separated from them. The thought of going home as three, and not as four, ripped me apart inside, and it did that and more to my wife, whose insides were already ripped apart anyway. A very sympathetic nurse pushed our discharge time back hours upon hours so they could test our daughter's bilirubin number to see if it would go down before we absolutely had to be kicked out of the hospital and, finally, it did. And we left as four.

Our tiny house is positively crammed with Fed-EX boxes, cards containing beautiful sentiments, gifts, diapers, burp-cloths, impossibly small socks, and the uncommonly sublime smell of babies (just changed babies, that is).

They say you lose a part of you when you become a parent, and that's true. I'd like to say that I don't mind that loss, because I'm so in love, but that's not true. Well, the I'm in love part is true, but I do mind the loss. I think that's what I was mourning when I broke down and cried hysterically on Sunday-- or Monday night-- I forget which. On my knees in the living room, sobbing hysterically, inconsolably, shaking, clutching at my wife as if I were adrift in the Atlantic and she were a life-raft. And, really, she is. It is her ceaseless love and support that keeps me afloat, that keeps me rising at 3am to stumble blindly about the house and change diapers and feed children and do the dishes and take out the recycling and miraculously find time to get a haircut from the man who gave me my very first non-mommy haircut.

Our son is gaining weight. Our daughter is losing her yellow. My wife is amazing me at every moment. And I am still here, a piece of me lost, and the gains are just beginning.

A Sentimental Man

"I am a sentimental man,
Who always longed to be a father.

That's why I do the best I can,
To treat each citizen of son of Oz
As son or daughter.

So, Elphaba, I'd like to raise you high,
'Cuz I think everyone deserves the fly.

And helping you with your ascent,
Allows me to feel so... parental.

For I am a sentimental man."

That's how my favorite song from "Wicked" goes. Yes. I'm a 31-year-old straight guy, and I have a favorite song from "Wicked". Wanna fight about it?

My favorite song from that show is not in the "Wicked" Easy Piano songbooks that pony-tailed tweens used at creative arts summer camps for a few years so that they could sing "Popular" and "For Good" at low-budget showcases and talent shows the world over.

"A Sentimental Man" didn't turn into a smash hit, and it isn't very memorable, or complicated, or vocally or musically interesting either, I suppose. It isn't particularly long, so it's easy to forget. One minute and seventeen seconds, the way Broadway legend Joel Grey does it anyway. Back when I worked in the creative arts, I tried to find the sheet music to the song so I could sing it at an outdoor cabaret, but I couldn't locate the music. So I sang Eric Idle's "The Galaxy Song" from "The Meaning of Life" instead.

That's life sometimes.

It's funny, because "The Galaxy Song" is a funny song, about the dimensions of the universe and the insignificance of our mortal toils and foibles, and it's sort of a modern interpretation of a patter song, the type I love to sing in G&S operettas, and, to many folks who know me, that's the sort of song they might use to identify me. But I think, to those who really know me best, "A Sentimental Man" says more about who I am, what I feel inside, how I operate, what I value and what I long for most.

Tomorrow night, at 7:00pm, my wife and I are to arrive at the hospital so that she can be induced. If all goes as it should, the twins should be making their appearance on Thursday the 15th. And my life will change forever. Because, of course, it will no longer be my life.

Well, that changed some time ago, I suppose. On October 22nd, 2006, under a chuppah covered in radiant sunflowers, I married my best buddy. A girl whom I turn towards in the car or on the couch or in the bed and sometimes just look at, because I like the way it feels. I like to look in her eyes, or at her cheeks, or her lips, or her chin. She's shorter than me, by a decent margin, and, when we hug, I like to hold her head against my chest. I love the shape of her head-- I know that sounds goofy, but sometimes I'm like that. Her head feels great against my chest and in my hand.

From that day forward, it was no longer my life. It was ours. And now ours is getting a wee bit bigger.

I had a terrifying moment of insecurity last night. As my wife and I dined in the restaurant where we had our first date, as we ate our meal alongside her father, an intelligent though disheveled psychiatrist, I suddenly felt very small in his shadow. The shadow of his expectations and his value system, and his romance with formal educational success, of which I had not very much to speak of. I'm a reasonably talented writer, but I couldn't tell you what a gerund is. To me, it sounds like a weapon used against Jews in the Holocaust.

Speaking of Jews, I felt excluded-- muted-- as my father-in-law and my wife discussed Torah portions as if they'd both just read them yesterday. I can tell you what a Torah looks like, and I know how heavy one is to carry, but that's about it. And I shared my feelings of intellectual insecurity with my wife as we lay on the couch together after the meal was over and her father meandered his way back to his hotel.

"What am I going to be able to teach them?" I asked her, "What am I going to be able to help them with?"

"You're going to teach them about how to be good people," my wife said, which, I have to say, didn't make me feel much better.

There's an insidious air of intellectual superiority about my wife's side of the family. Conversations always seem to revolve around mocking or critiquing "simpler" people in their neighborhoods or schools or workplaces when they lived in upstate New York. My father-in-law is keen to present himself as the one who's always correcting other psychiatrists medical errors, or mis-diagnoses, or over-prescribing tendencies where he works, and my mother-in-law is always one to express judgement over how other people live, but she'll be the first one to correct you if you try to do it. And maybe they do it to cover up their own flaws, or maybe they don't know they're doing it. Or maybe it's just my perception but, as many a psych patient has told me at work, "My perception is my reality".

I wish I could tell you that my terrifying moment of insecurity passed after a good night's sleep, but it hasn't. And I can't lie to you. When I first married my wife, I was petrified that I wouldn't be good enough-- not for her, for she had affirmed, by slipping that orange blossom-engraved ring onto my finger, that I was her beloved, and she was mine-- but that I wouldn't be good enough for her parents. Now I'm scared that I won't be good enough for my children.

"I guess what I am is going to have to be enough for them," was the shaky conclusion I came to last night, as my wife rubbed Hydrocortisone cream over her impossibly huge belly and its accompanying itchy stretch marks, "because I'm all they've got."

And, in the end, maybe being a sentimental man will prove to be of infinite and inestimable value to the life and heart and values and experience of a child.

Children.

Me-ness

Mrs. Apron and I went to the King of Prussia mall together on Saturday. It was the first time I had been back at the mall in years. When I was a child, when my family was bereft of things to do, we all inevitably piled into my family's Oldsmobile, or Buick, or Toyota, or Pontiac or, finally, Saab, and went to the mall. It was the Saab that my father was driving when he ran my foot over in the parking lot in front of Bloomingdales when I was fifteen. That traumatic event marked our last family trip to the mall.

Those treks were getting a bit long in the tooth by 1995 anyway.

As Mrs. Apron and I parked the car at Bloomingdales, I stared at the facade of the immense retail space and said, "That's where he ran my foot over with the car," pointing to the curb cut by the entrance, "right there." I shook my head and laughed to myself because, really, it's funny. And I instinctively reached for my wife's hand, and she took it.

When my family would go to the mall together, my sisters, my mother and father and I, we would invariably split up. My sisters would shop for girl things with my mother, and my father and I would pal around together. I would drag him all over the place, to the K. B. Toys, where my dilated pupils would hungrily gaze at all the enormous die-cast cars in 1/18th scale. It was at K. B. Toys where my father first noticed me, as a nine-year-old, standing in the aisle, bent over, rubbing my hand against the small of my back like an octogenarian with spinal stenosis.

"Mummy," he asked, his brow furrowed, "what is the matter with your back?"

"It hurts," I said simply, my brow furrowed, too.

Scoliosis. Thanks, gene pool.

I would also take my father to the Electronics Boutique, where I would show him the backs of all the computer games I wanted. I invariably chose ones that our computer did not have sufficient memory of graphics capability, (remember VGA vs SVGA, 256 color requirements?) to run correctly, or at all. And these wastes of money that would not perform on our home P.C. were invariably not returnable because, in my excitement to use them, I had torn the box to shreds till it resembled hamster bedding.

That man wasted a lot of money on me.

Looking back on our time at the mall, I can't remember one time-- not one single time that he and I were together that he made me go to Macy's with him to look at sweaters for him, or... anything for him. Those trips were all about me, to fuel my interests and my desires and my wants and my perceived needs, and I had no idea.

On Saturday, I accompanied my wife to the mall for no other reason than for her to purchase new bras at Bloomingdales, because our impending twinnage has caused her to appreciably outgrow her current bustenhalters. Okay, we also got Auntie Ann's pretzels, too, but the bra shopping was the main event. And it took an hour. And all the while I stood out among all that lacy and frill and cups and straps looking like part husband and part pervert-- which I am both-- and I texted a friend to ameliorate my feelings of awkwardness by giving voice to them in those text messages.

And it helped.

I suppose I could have gone somewhere in the mall for myself that Saturday, but I had no desire to do so, and it wasn't just my counterculture distaste for the mall.

As we exited, we passed through the men's department (or "menswear" as they used to call it on "Are You Being Served?") and I saw a handsome cardigan, stylish and conservative at the same time. Ralph Lauren. My wife and I both went to it at the same time and investigated it. I didn't look at the price tag, but I didn't have to.

"I can't have anything for myself anymore," I said, half-jokingly, "because we're having twins and my life is over."

Mrs. Apron smiled at me.

"Or, you could say that it's important for you to still have things that you like so that you don't lose your me-ness," she said.

"Right," I said, "the me-ness of penis."

I don't know what that means, I just said it because it rhymed and it's sophomoric.

My me-ness.

Antique typewriters
Old telephones
Eyeglasses
Short-sleeve dress shirts
Skinny ties
Wing-tip shoes
Monty Python
Gilbert & Sullivan
Thrift shopping
Amateur theatre
Writing
Bacon
Coffee
Chocolate
Brash humor
Sensitivity
Introspection
Brooding
Crappy TV
Cuddle time
Worrying

I don't know what parts of my me-ness I'm going to lose once these twins come-- I suppose every parent loses some, as my parents did. Some of it is willing, some of it gets lost with a fight, and I guess what ends up after being funneled and distilled and wrung out by time and diapers and sleep deprivation and sacrifice will be the essence of my me-ness.

Whether I like it, or whether I don't.

It's Not Amazing, It's Genderiffic

I know something you don't know.

I know something you don't know.

I know something you don't know.

(!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Seriously, I know something you don't know.

On Tuesday, August 16th, the gender of our twinners was revealed to me and to my wife. The ultrasound tech obviously knows, but she's been sworn to secrecy by the HIPAA monster. She did mention the genders to our OB/GYN out in the hallway while my wife and I were cooing over the ultrasound picture print-outs, but I guess HIPAA doesn't cover release of medical information from ultrasound techs to OB/GYNs.

Of course, if I find out one day that it does, I'm totally suing that bitch.

See, here's the thing about this whole gender issue: Mrs. Apron decided, when we both said that we wanted to find out what the genders of the twins are, that she wanted to keep the information secret from the rest of the world. Well, the rest of the world that gives a sparrow shit. Her reasoning is that she doesn't want us, and, consequently, the twins inundated with a bunch of gender-assigned gacky shit in traditional boy/girl/lemur colors.

And I can understand that, and I can respect that. And so I am understanding that and respecting that by going along with Mrs. Apron and not revealing the genders of our twins until such time as they see fit to enter the glaring spotlights of all those papparazzi camera flashbulbs as they exit my wife's vagina, or stomach, whichever way this thing plays out.

I've got to say, though, watching those two goofballs rolling around inside her womb on that ultrasound screen was pretty amazing. And I don't use that word lightly, or even often, because it has the propensity for being annoying.

"Oh, that Bee-Gee's coverband was UH-MAZE-ING!"

"Whoa, trans-gender Thai prostitute, watching a streaming video of you having sex with that semi-retarded donkey was UH-MAZE-ING!"

"This two-for-one deal on Chobani yogurt at Genuardi's is uh. maze. ing."

That Ron Popeil Flavor-Injector you're always threatening to violate me with?

(Amazing.)

But, really, I suppose any expectant father (of TWINS! GAAHH!!!) is permitted to use the "amazing" word when staring at grainy, blue-tinged representations of his children bumming around inside of their expectant mother.

What are they going to be like?

What are they going to talk like?

What are they going to be into?

What are they going to want on their birthday cakes?

What are they going to think of their Christian friends who go on about Santa Claus?

What are they going to think of... me?

(Not to be a fucking amazing narcissist or anything, but...)

(Oh, God...)

(Sorry.)

I'm already in love, and you know how I know that? I think about them all the time. Sure, sometimes it's more worrying and less thinking, but, one way or the other, they're always on my mind. Always. Constantly.

It's kind of perseverative.

Kind of Aspergian.

I'm sort of like that.

I'm listening to "Comfort" by Deb Talan right now, and that plays frequently enough on my computer to make me wonder if I have Aspergers. I'll bet Pandora does that to lots of people.

Stupid bitch and her fucking hot box.

I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that, yeah, I don't want this to become a Daddy Blog, and I'm pretty sure I said that they day I announced that we were knocked up, but I do want this to be a place to celebrate those two nutter-butters doing somersaults and tumblebumps inside of the woman I adore.

'Cuz, let's face it, this is all pretty fucking amazing.

I Hope They're Not Boys

So, I promised that this wasn't going to turn into a Daddy Blog, but, as those little buggers are kind of on my mind (and on my wife's bladder) a lot, I'm allowed to nattle on on about it a little bit, aren't I?

When you announce that you're having twins, people say stupid shit to you. They can't help it, though-- they're sort of like dogs who impetuously slam their muzzles into your balls. You can't really yell at or blame the dog, it's just something it does. People who have heard that you're having twins are no different. Except for the fact that they're not (usually) placing their faces in your crotch.

I won't go through the litany of annoying and repetitive questions people ask you, but there is a pre-determined formula or script, believe me, and, somehow everybody knows it, because everybody recites it with very little variation and, at work, I go through this kind of annoying Q&A session with people regularly.

My wife brought home this book called "Twinsense" from the library, and it was written by some chick whose name is "Dagmara", which is funny to me because, obviously, if you're reading a book about twins, you're thinking about baby names. And there is no way in hell you're going to be thinking about "Dagmara".

You know, unless you're an idiot. But you're reading this blog, so, clearly, you're not. Unless you're one of those idiots who got here by Googling the phrase "donkey porn". Do me a favor? Stop Googling my site looking for donkey porn.

Anyway, this book, "Twinsense" features the exhaustive list of things people say to you/ask you a.) When you tell them you're having twins and b.) Once you've had and are parading around with your twins. It's funny, because people really do say this shit. What's even funnier than that is that she goes on for quite a while about how politeness is the way to deal with people who ask inane/inappropriate/annoying questions about twinnage. And I was reading that thinking, "Mm, that's mature." Except that, on the next page, she creates an intensive list of fresh/snappy/snarky retorts that you can use to answer every single question/comment listed on the previous page. And I was thinking, "Mm, that's mature."

Mrs. Apron and I are going to find out the gender, in approximately six weeks. We're not going to tell you, though, or anybody, really. It's not going to be a secret, because we'll know, but it'll be our secret, because we'll know. If it were just one, we'd leave it alone until birth but, with two, we feel like we need to know.

Mostly, in my opinion, to cut down on the amount of names we need to come up with. Seriously, it's no fucking joke. Girl names we're good on. In fact, the more baby name books I read, and the more websites I look at, I end up adding more. Boy names are, um...

Well, let's be blunt: boy names blow. They suck. They're for shit. They're fucking awful. And most of the good ones end in the letter "n", and my last name begins and ends with the letter "n", so those "n"-ending names are pretty much out, because, with my last name, those names sound ridiculous.

Let me tell you something, if these kids both turn out to be boys, we're really fucked. Not only is there going to be pee ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE, and I'm including our walls/ceilings/hair/food as part of "ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE", but these kids are most likely going to end up with some terrible-ass names.

She likes Jewish names.

I am trying to convince her that our children will have the map of Israel tattooed on their faces and their airplane hangar-sized noses such that they will not necessitate being branded with Hebjew names that scream out "JEW, JEW, JEW!"

I like names descended from the U.K.

Surprised?

Regardless of the ethno-friction between us delicious little marrieds, the simple fact remains that, even if we agreed on which nation/people the boy names ought to be descended from, they're all basically awful.

I mean, sure, there's "Hrothgar". But what if they're both boys? What boy name goes well with "Hrothgar"?

Happy Brainniversary

It's quite possible, for you, that June 22nd, 2004 was just like any other day.

Then again, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. Maybe your nephew was getting Bar Mitzvahed. Maybe you scratched-and-won. Maybe you twisted your ankle in a pothole while walking to a bar for a blind date with the woman who ended up becoming your wife. Maybe it was the night you saw your first Broadway play or the day you first tried venison or the afternoon you stood in line behind Gene Hackman at Starbucks.

June 22nd, 2004 wasn't just like any other day for me. And it certainly wasn't just like any other day for Mrs. Apron. June 22nd, 2004 was the day she got wheeled into an operating room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where she was put to sleep while surgeons shaved an inch-or-so line on her head, like a headband, sliced, pulled the skin down, sawed through her skull, drilled holes in her head, dug around in there, snipped, clipped, and drained, for approximately 9 hours before they finished up. And put Humpty Dumpty back together again-- just like she was before.

Almost.

I tell her that she's funnier now, and maybe that's true. I don't know. I don't remember quite as many zingers before she underwent brain surgery-- but maybe I just didn't know her well enough at that point for her sense-of-humor to really come out. After all, mine tends to dwarf most people's.

And that's what she said.

To think that Mrs. Apron's surgery was seven years ago is pretty amazing to me. There are certain things I remember about that day that will never be erased. I remember the way she smelled-- and it wasn't good. Her smell scared me. It was a mixture of sweat and blood and gore and unclean hair and antiseptic and burned bone.

I kissed her and cuddled her anyway. In her hospital bed. And the young resident, whose name was Hunan, walked in and saw us spooning in the Stryker bed and he smiled. "You guys have got the right idea," he said.

There are things I've forgotten, but I remember most of it. Between the two of us, we remember most of it. Her mother playing harp in her hospital room, me unable to eat salad in the cafeteria with my parents, sleeping on the floor in the waiting room, her falling against a trashcan while trying to prove that she was ready to be discharged.

Which she was. Against medical advice, of course.

I know when my wife is about to start crying now, because the left side of her mouth curls down before the first tear makes its appearance. It's the only thing about my beautiful bride that's ugly. It's ugly not even because the fact of her lip curling down is physically ugly, it's ugly because it's like a slap in the face for me, a memory of the most truly awful day and weeks and months I ever experienced-- the time where my love was broken and healing-- slowly.

There are bumps on her head, too, where the skull is imperfectly mended. If you move her hair around, you can see the fleshy, pink spots where no hair grows. I kiss the top of her head a lot, and I feel those bumpy little ridges all the time on my lips.

It could have been much worse. I know.

I don't cry anymore, when I think about it-- at least, I haven't in a while. We were sitting together on the couch in our old place watching TV or something and, out of the corner of my eye, I spied her cane, long since forgotten about, just leaning innocuously against the wall, and I cried. She had tied a pink grosgrain ribbon all along the cane, and it looked like a maypole. When Mrs. Apron, her sister, and I went to see the fourth of July fireworks that year, Mrs. Apron said she would keep people away from our blanket by hitting them with her "whompin' stick". And we laughed. But, much later, seeing her whompin' stick made me cry.

As we prepare to embark on the journey of becoming parents of twins, I am actually relieved that we have already been through something like neurosurgey side-by-side. It showed me that the world may be big and bad, but so are we. My mother wrote Mrs. Apron and I a card while Mrs. Apron was recovering and she wrote, "Together, You Can Do Anything."

Thank you, Mom.

Happy Brainniversary, Mrs. Apron.

I love you.

I'm Not Herbert Lom

But, these days, I look like him.

Of course, I don't look like him, really. I look more like Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfuss, the character he made famous in the "Pink Panther" films, being tortured into madness by the ineptitude of Peter Sellers' Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Clouseau's rampant and limitless bumbling, paired with his inexplicable and accidental good luck at solving the most complex heist cases, grated on Lom's character, who developed a tell-tale eye twitch whenever in the presence of Clouseau, or even just when his name was mentioned.

"CLOUSEAU!" a psychiatrist yells at the supposedly-healed Dreyfuss during a session at a mental hospital-- to assess Dreyfuss's response. The patient reacts with perfect calm and ease. Until, less than 10 minutes later, he has several unfortunate encounters with a pond because of his nemesis, the moustachioed and impossible to understand Clouseau.

It would seem that Lom's character Dreyfuss and I are kindred spirits, as I have developed a twitch under my left eye. It first appeared perhaps a year ago, stuck around for a few days, and went away-- whatever little muscle it was, I guess, no longer felt the need to assert itself and make its presence known so insistently. This time, though, it has come back with a passion. The twitch re-emerged early in June and it's been hanging around pretty consistently. Sometimes it's a quick pulsation, going up and down with great energy and verve, other times it's slow and faint. No matter the rate or force, I've got to tell you, it's fucking annoying.

And I feel kind of silly writing about it, because it seems like it's the kind of thing one might choose to write about if one were grasping at straws for something to write about, and if that's what it seems like to you, that's because that's true. I was rather stuck, actually, for a topic today, and I felt like asking someone for advice-- a friend or a wife or whatever-- but then I usually end up not using that person's suggested topic, and that probably makes them feel like monkey vom, and it makes me feel guilty for soliciting an idea that I'm most likely just going to shitcan anyway.

But I suppose you're supposed to write about what's on your mind, and what's on my mind most frequently is breasts, but I wasn't really in the mood to write about breasts, although I did recently have an illuminating conversation about breasts a couple days ago-- maybe that's why I don't feel the need to write about them-- and so I thought I would go to a topic that really can't help but be on my radar, and that's this ceaseless twitching below my left eye.

I wonder what people think when they talk to me for any length of time. If they're making any reasonable attempt at eye-contact, they've got to notice it. It must be very unsettling to look at. Most people are probably too polite to say anything about it. Anyway, what would they say?

"Jesus, how about that nasty-ass twitch you've got there, fella! What's the matter-- your eye have Parkinsons?"

I'm not terribly polite, at least, not with people I know well. A friend of mine is pregnant and I haven't seen her in a few months. She's going to pop next week. Anyway, I saw her for the first time in months last weekend and she is so fucking pregnant it's not even funny. And she's growing out-- straight out. It looks like her baby is wearing a hoop-skirt, for Christ's sake. She was wearing a size 2-XL t-shirt. And she was trying to talk to me and my eyes kept going, quite unabashedly, I might add, to her belly.

"I'm sorry, Amy," I said, "I'm just not even listening to you-- I can't stop staring at your fucking belly!"

Which, in a way, was probably a good thing, because she probably didn't notice my eye-twitch that way.

I'm thinking of naming my twitch "Herbert" after Herbert Lom. Since we found out that we're having twins, we've been talking a lot about names. Everything's a name thing now. We were watching Michael Palin's "The Missionary" last night, and one of the actor's names is Denholm Elliott.

"What about 'Denholm'?" I said to my wife.

"That's funny," she said to me. And I presume it wasn't about the movie. In reading up about Denholm Elliott for this post (yeah, I do research. Sort of.) I learned that he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and died of AIDS-related tuberculosis in 1992. That made me sad. Herbert Lom, however, who was born five years before Denholm Elliott, is still living, apparently. Lom is ninety-four, if you can believe that. I don't think Mrs. Apron will let me name the kid "Herbert" either.

Lom, originally from Prague, was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru.

Now that's something to twitch about.

Herbie. Rides. Again. (!!!!!!!!)

The sequel's rarely better than the original. That said, everybody likes a triumphal return.

"Herbie Rides Again" isn't a very good movie, in spite of some admirable performances by Ken Berry and dame of stage and film, Helen Hayes. The sparkle and charm of the original movie, though, is gone. The A-list celebs are nowhere to be seen: Dean Jones, Michelle Lee, Buddy Hackett, and David Tomlinson all said, "Thanks, but no thanks," to once again co-starring beside a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. As sequels go, it's about average, but, much unlike the original, it's nothing special. But there's something about the title that indicates that the film, or at least its namesake, aspires to greatness. There is something valorous that we all like about an underdog getting up to fight again, to shake off dirt and failure that threatens to be permanent, but is really momentary to emerge hopefully victorious.

In 2009, Mrs. Apron and I miscarried, and we were heartbroken. We had told people we were pregnant, and we had told them far too early, and then we had to untell. Fortunately, with most people we knew, we only had to untell them with our eyes. One look at us and they knew. My director of "Pirates of Penzance" knew. We were staging "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" and, when the piano tinkled, I doddered and fuddled appropriately, but, during the downtime, while choreography was hammered out, or choral notes were finessed with the assistant music director, the director, a close friend of mine, watched me. During a break, she took me out in the hall and held me for what seemed like a very long time.

"I love you," Julie said as she ran her hands along my back and I stifled sobs in the hallway. Years ago, she'd lost her son-- all but 19-- in a car accident while he was on his way back to college after winter break. She knew all about loss. It doesn't go away.

"Sometimes," she said to me, "I get in the shower, run the water at full blast, and I just scream and scream and scream."

I never screamed about our miscarriage, not in the shower or anywhere else. That's not to say that I didn't grieve-- it's just not how I grieve, I suppose. I wanted to scream, and rage, and throw things, but I didn't. What I think I might have done, looking back on it, was displace a fair amount of my grief and I probably morphed a significant portion of it into worry and despondency for my wife. In that respect, one might say I didn't exactly "own" the loss, and one could definitely make that argument. And I wouldn't argue.

I think one of my greatest fears is dying before I get a chance to do the things in life at which I will excel. Fortunately, I've acted in a fair number of plays, musicals, and operettas, and I've been appreciated by audience members. I've written a lot that has been seen, and I've written a lot that has never been seen. I've been an efficient friend and confidant to probably enough people, and I've been a loving son and brother. Not gonna lie: as a husband, I think I'm pretty much the shit. The only thing, really, that I haven't had the chance to do that I think I'd be good at is being a father, and so, when the miscarriage happened to us, I think I focused on the fact that I might not get the chance to, well, do that.

Well, this is my sequel.

We're twelve weeks pregnant. And, yeah-- there's two of them in there.


And that's scary, and that's amazing, and that's actually maybe a little dramatic for my taste, which is an admittedly funny thing for a former theatre major to say, but it's overwhelming, almost like I'm pushing the shock-factor a little too hard.

But it's true. There's two.

1

and

2

Come to me, my little love bugs. Let's dim the lights and start the sequel.