Not alone.

Six short years ago (no, not short) we began creating a ritual. And on Calvin's first birthday it was pretty set: decorating the brick outside CPT, visitng his grave at Riverside Cemetery and then a trip to the zoo to see the otters. The home to create "the feast" which consists of spaghetti and meatballs (my favorite) whole artichokes with butter (her favorite) and some kind of dessert.

We did this alone that first year, just us and an otter named Bat. The next year, the day Bush started his war, we had a small child with us, who slept through most of it.

Now we have two, who shape the day's events as much as working around our schedules does.

The more you stay the same, the more they seem to change. Girl, put your records on.


Reading the Brick




We have three.


Riverside Cementery

It was a cold day this year. There is a new stone, on the other side of the tree, for children from UH who do not have their own plot. This troubled me a little, because I assume Calvins plot will now not get as much attention from the groundskeepers. He and his compatriots were cremated, and laid in a communal plot, which I guess is now full.

As if to confirm this potential for neglect, a backhoe which had worked on a nearby grave had pressed the stone into the muddy earth. It was partially obstructed, tokens of affection had been scattered. I wasn't prepared to do a proper cleaning, but managed as best I could with water from a sippy cup and the 900 number pages from a copy of Scene. We collected some of the toys and cars that had been tossed aside and put them back where they belonged.


Six sunflowers


Otter family


Tertia & Orson

My folks joined us at the zoo. I had an all-day rehearsal for TEMPEST, and the plan was to have the feast after 8.30 when I got home. By then the kids were quite squirrelly, and so we had dessert with them and put them to bed. Toni and I enjoyed Calvin's birthday dinner on our own for the first time in years.

By then it was very late. To do things right, we'd need to go through his things, listen to his song, but life just got in the way this year. Better to make time when we can really take our time with them.


Blowing out his candles.

Any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner.

Life intrudes.

Last year we celebrated Calvin's fifth just before leaving for London. In fact, our calendar was arranged around it, that's when my hiatus began and we had a flight on Tuesday as opposed to a nicely rounded Sunday or Monday. The year before we had a wedding to attend in NYC, a wedding on the 20th, and so most of our rituals were performed on the 19th - going to the zoo, preparing and enjoying the feast. On the morning of the 20th we decorated the brick and went to his grave before heading to the airport.

This year it's my schedule that has things out of order. Because I am performing in one-half of a rep, the second half, the last week has been spent in a holding pattern (i.e. no rehearsal) while the other show got on its feet. Now that HAY FEVER has opened, TEMPEST rehearsals resume in earnest - starting tomorrow.

This afternoon I will prepare meatballs and whatever else I can do. Tomorrow we will perform our remembrances in the morning before my noontime call, and have a late-night feast whenever I get back, probably after 8.30. We will shake the kids a little bit to keep them awake.

Every year a ritual ... that changes.

"... and on Tuesday it is brother Calvin's birthday ..."

"Yay!" said Zelda.

Stuck

There are a number of swirling emotions in our home right now, which is normal for the second week of March. "When is it going to stop being wintertime?" Z. asks, again. She had been asking this once a day for a couple of weeks, the past few days representing a freakish respite from snow and whithering cold.

"It will stop being winter next Tuesday," I tell her, "that's the first day of spring." But I also warn her, "it will still be cold."

Seasons hold meaning to all living things, the calendar only belongs to us. And so it is with no amount of real significance to anyone except us (the personal us this time, not the all-inclusive us) that March 20 falls on a Tuesday, for the first time since 2001.

Monday was the routine check-up, Tuesday was his birthday.

Two days ago I spent the afternoon with Number 3. The Boy. The One Who Lived, and continues to do so despite own mutual attempts to smash his head to pieces (not to mention a particularly grisly dream I had the other night which I won't go into here.)

We were in the backyard, he wanted to play with the rakes, so we were scraping up all the leaves from the Magnolia which I missed last fall. We also took up a lot of dead grass.

I have lived in the same house since 1993. I only met the backyard in 2001. We cancelled the lawn service, primarily as a cost-cutting measure, but it put me back there, with a new, manual lawn-mower. Toni worked in the garden, we got a bench, I pulled weeds, it was part of the plan, whatever it took to take control of something, anything.

And though I had this hot little toddler in my hands, helping him put the ball in the basket (over and over and over again) the rich smell of rotten grass, the dust from the garage, the sun on my head, the breeze, it was all 2001, all over again.

Songs for an Anxious Pregnancy

Okay, I need your help - and by "your" I am hoping for some lurkers, and not just my brother. For years (really? years?) I have been meddling with a fertility playlist in my head. A list of songs relating to pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, and so on.

Not about parenting. And not "I love my baby" songs.

And after jotting a few of these down, this is all I got:

Hit - The Sugarcubes
Eat For Two - 10,000 Maniacs
Happy Families - XTC
Apron Strings - Everything but the Girl
Sally's Pigeons - Cyndi Lauper
Birth-Day (Love Made Real) - Suzanne Vega
This Woman's Work - Kate Bush

Okay, that's without doing a lot of head-scratching. Would anyone care to contribute? I will not judge nor mock your taste in music, at least not here.

A Place to Turn When a Newborn Is Fated to Die
by Neela Banerjee, The New York Times 3/13/2007

"Most couples choose to have an abortion when they learn that the fetus has a fatal condition. But experts say about 20 to 40 percent of families given such diagnoses opt to carry the pregnancy to term, and an increasing number of them, like the Kilibardas, have turned to programs called perinatal hospice for help with the practical and spiritual questions that arise ..." (more)

Soon, we are six.

Just another fabulous night at home. The Spring Rep opens Saturday. I am not in the first show of the Spring Rep, HAY FEVER, which means the next week is going to be a little easy. No rehearsal until at least Thursday. Evenings at home. Z. asked last week," When are you going to stop doing shows?" I almost answered, "When I'm dead, honey." But that's a little dark, even for us.

But there were martinis for mom and dad, and a lot of play with the children. I had the ROCK MUSIC mix playing on iTunes, which includes light rock, and when Andrew Gold's Lonely Boy came on, there were two slightly tipsy thirtysomethings (if I may use that term) dancing with their progeny, and with not a little joyful irony in their steps.

Later we were taking in a video of Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day on video with the two little tadgers before putting them to bed. "How old is Peter, do you think?" I asked.

"Six," Toni said.

"Yes," I agreed. "Calvin is almost six."

"Why is Calvin almost six?" Z. asked. Everything is why right now.

"He was born almost six years ago," I said.

Yes. Sitting in what is now "the tee vee room." It's where the t.v. is, overlooking the backyard. It was Calvin's room. With the ceiling painted a metallic blue. Where we came to cry, as a ritual, day after day, one million years ago.

I was in my early-early thirties then. I am in my late thirties now. Sometimes I am so overwhelmed with everything that has happened between then and now, it feels as though nothing has happened between then and now.

UK Itinerary

This June we return to the British Isles for the legendary SANDS IHT-UK Tour. Maybe we should make T-shirts.

This is the (partially) itinerary, there may be at least one more scheduled:

Carlisle - Sat 9th
London - Tues 12th
Lincoln - Thurs 14th
Birmingham - Sat 16th
Belfast - Mon 18th
Exeter - Weds 20th

I have only ever been to one of these cities. Carlisle is almost, but not quite Scotland. Lincoln is, I believe, to the east of the Midlands, Birmingham is West Midlands. Exeter is south of Wales, and Belfast is, well, Belfast.

If you are clocking this from over there, forgive my ignorance, I just got this and have only begun my research.

Anne Francis Stars In "Forbidden Planet"

This spring I am part of the repertory company for Great Lakes Theater Festival's production of THE TEMPEST, directed by Andrew May. In preparation for the performance I went to Netflix and queued up a copy of Forbidden Planet.

I think in this version, my character is the alcoholic cook, but I'm not sure.

A sci-fi classic from 1956, starring a 30 year-old Leslie Nielsen as the captain, it's exactly the kind of movie MST3K used to send up, only with a plot, interesting characters and fabulous (even by today's standards) special effects.

Yeah, it's a little like TEMPEST, if you count a creepy philologist for the sorcerer Prospero and his slutty late-twenties daughter for the 14 year-old Miranda. Robby, the Robot (check the correct punctuation!) is either Ariel or Caliban, I can't tell.

What is most thrilling is that after a long day of supervising and rehearsing, and joining my family for library time, and then Harriett's 40th birthday party, everyone came home and promptly fell asleep, leaving me to make a Manhattan, pop some popcorn, and watch this chestnut with all the lights out, on my lonesome.

Be the people we want our children to become.

I spend far too much time "surfing" the Internet (i.e. watching porn) and not enough time either reading or writing. I should be doing both, and so - just today - I pledged to read a half-hour every night. Some people already do this. Most don't. But, funny, there's a lot of books here, and for some reason I havn't read as many as I have desired to.

Right now I am reading Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire by Rafe Esquith. It's an inspirational tome Toni picked out because she knows I am going to be leading a theater camp this summer, and thought I might need some ... inspiration.

Rafe Esquith, for those who do not know, is the famous fifth grade teacher from Los Angeles who teaches ESL students (presumably at-risk) to - among other things - perform an entire Shakespearean play by the end of the school year. He teaches a lot of other things, too, but that's the bit that gets him so much attention.

While she was at it, Toni got me the documentary about his work, The Hobart Shakespeareans, from the loal library. I like the book better. While it is exciting to see these children actually performing scenes from Hamlet, the filmmakes chose to forgo an narrator, and so left Rafe to explain everything he does to the camera. I can see why his fellow teachers at Hobart find him insufferable, no teacher should be opened up to such scrutiny. He comes off as very pleased with himself, which I don't believe is accurate nor fair. But there it is.

Also ... were the children really that exciting that Micahel York visited their class? I mean ... were they really? Also, I wanted to be introduced to Ian McKellen's lover, but as movie this produced in part by PBS, they just let him sit there anonymously and smile. Damn you, Buster Baxter, you coward, you.

The book (not his first) is much more enjoyable as not a memoir, but as a how-to manual for teaching kids - any kids. Or for that matter, raising them. I'm enjoying it a great deal.

Secret Club

Hey, weird, I'm in someone else's book.

You'll have to forgive me, I really have tried to keep a comprehensive database on everyone I've spoken with about this show, but I don't remember speaking to Ms. Seftel for her book, Grief Unseen: Healing Pregnancy Loss Through the Arts. Not that she needed to speak with me, what she has gleaned from the production, she could have learned anywhere online, or through the radio drama. Still, an email would have been appreciated.

This link will take you directly to a preview page (p. 89). Notice the reference to Infertility:The Musical right below it. Both shows were at the 2004 NY Fringe.

I can use the Internet, too, however. And it wasn't long before I realized I have heard of Laura Seftel before, once, on NPR. Coping with her own miscarriage in the early 90s, she has created The Secret Club Project, "an international project featuring more than 40 artists exploring miscarriage and other pregnancy-related losses, including infertility, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, and stillbirth."

I think I'm going to get a copy of the book. I encourage you to check out their website. It's amazing the things you can discover on a boring Friday evening when you are Googling your own name.


(Pesky copyright violations ...)

"Emotional practice"

Sudden Death
What Bridge to Terabithia still teaches us.
By Emily Bazelon
SLATE Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007, at 6:38 PM ET

Spoiler alert: This piece gives away the ending of Bridge to Terabithia.

Thanks, Henrik.

Smaller world

"I've been a huge Chicago Public Radio junkie lately. They're playing a lot of radio plays and new music shows. Today I woke up for my ritualistic noon dose of This American Life. Afterwards, they played a radio play called "I Hate This (a play without the baby)," a one-man show by David Hansen which chronicles his and his wife's experience of having a stillborn child ... "(more)

Sibling Rivalry

Zelda has a subscription to NWF's Your Big Backyard magazine. Today the March issue arrived, the featured animal was (you guessed?) an otter. Big ol' otter photo on the front. "You OTTER love this issue!" it says.

I packed Orson in the car to pick Z. up from school, and brought the magazine to share with her. "Want see otter!" Orson shouts, and so I hand him the magazine ... and he promptly tears the cover neatly in half.

Transcending Pain, a Friendship Fed on Imagination
- NY Times review of "Bridge to Terabthia" 02/16/07
"Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, “Bridge to Terabithia” is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential ... (more)

Okay, so maybe I spoke too soon. Not that the kids are old enough to see this ... but maybe I am. Whew.

It's hard to share why this book was so important to me when I first read it in 5th grade without giving away the ending. What I will say (SPOILER WARNING) is that it was my first truly emotional connection with death. Which makes me feel awful, because my grandmother had died a year or two earlier, and I had little or no connection to that.

Echoes of '78

It's going to have to continue much longer for there to be any comparison, but I have to tell you getting home last night from TEMPEST rehearsals was just stupid. For me it was a test of my East Side geography, and I passed the test. Every time I encoutnered some kind of log-jam, I would take a detour, each one more successful than the last.

Carnegie was backed up to East 55th, so I ducked onto Euclid. I could see that my normal routes, up MLK to Cedar Hill, or up Little Italy, were entirely backed up, and would remain so. I wasn't going home until a little after seven (they called rehearsal early because of the stuff) and yet I imagined poor homegoers, locked in on Mayfield at the top of the hill, sitting there for hours.

I kept heading down Euclid into East Cleveland (it all opened up once I got past Case) and took Forest Hills. Meanwhile, my wife had gotten rear-ended after pulling off the road to scrape accumulating ice off the windshield. The force knocked her down, and she took the wiper with her. Luckily she was unharmed - and so were the kids, inside the car. I got all this news from my cellphone, inside my car, trying to get home.

Everyone is trying to take it easy today. Schools are closed, my office is closed, I was told not to attend afternoon rehearsal, but I will be going out in it tonight. Hope the roads are clear.

whimper.

Uhm ... was it just me, or didn't some kind of big report come out last week announcing that the world was going to end in fifty years?

I mean, the world won't end, but our place in it. Those cities not underwater will be in the same state as New Orleans - rich people with guns rebuilding and everyone else s.o.l.? I mean, wasn't that this gist of the announcement?

And since then, I have to admit, I have done nothing. Yes, yes, I have been replacing every burned out bulb with a nifty new flourescent, but I haven't started taking the bus yet. Neither, from what I can see, has anyone else.

Is someone going to take care of this for us?

"Just another victim ..."

Shame on me. Thoughtless. I try not to post without editing but that was dumb. Obviously it has been sticking with me for months.

We're all victims of something, and I guess it's what you do with your personal hell that defines you. For some actions are very personal, they work on the family-level, the spiritual level. I have a tendency to broadcast and I can't help that. I have been doing it since before I could remember, since I could type or learned to use the cassette recorder.

I recently re-read I, Trissyby Norma Fox Mazer (a startling, eye-opening book from my fifth grade year, just behind Bridge to Terabithiawhich it seems Disney is geared to entirely f*ck up) which exposed me not only to the horrors of divorce, about which I was ignorant. Of course, my two best friends' parents had split a few years earlier, but it took a book to know what they were going through.

It also had the effect of making me feel I had the right to type anything I felt like, any way I felt like, the right to say whatever I felt about anyone, even people I care about. I should have used Harriet the Spyas my bible, I may have learned a tip or two about discretion.

All these books are about intelligent, independent girls. Hmn.

Lately I have fallen in to a sizeable malaise. Blame the weather, everyone's health (but mine) the fact that I am "between projects," what have you. It has gotten me running again, at any rate. Rehearsals for THE TEMPEST begin on Tuesday, we'll see where that takes me.

A great deal of effluvia has been seeping through my brain over actions of the past seven years. A seven-year stink? How odd. But seriously, a rush of images and songs have been coming at me from Year 2000 to the present. And part of that (though not all) tie in to the boy, and where his existence has taken me, has taken us.

I could not sit still and just feel these things, I had to write about them, and having written about them, I had to share them, and having shared them, I needed to broadcast them as far as possible. This used to mean the ends of the living room. Now they go a bit farther.

I have three gigs coming up in the next few months. This spring will take us to a performance here in town, and a week or so later we should be traveling to Louisville, KY. And then ten days in Britain - the schuled is embryonic, but this time in June I may be performing I HATE THIS in London, Cornwall, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Never been to most of those places.

But again, this reflection on the past seven years. It all made me sad. Made me feel old. I have always said I enjoy perfomring this play because it keeps me close to Calvin.

I am beginning to worry that it is keeping me trapped in 2001.

As the present conflicts so harshly with that past, I have begun to rethink the show, and whether or not I should continue presenting it. The mission is still important, and so, frankly, is the money. But I've never really thought of what it has done to me, and whether or not I need to take a break, and permanently.

I had thought all of these things through last week, when I got this email:

Hello David,
(Our mutual friend) mentioned your play to me in our playwrights' group and I listened to the (radio) version. I think it would be great for med students at Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx University or the general support group. I am in the Dept of Bioethics and Humanities at XXU. What would it take to bring you here?
Xxxx Xxxxxx MD

And so I told him what it would take. Because I can't let go.

"The I Hate This Show"

So for a few months now Dave at WCPN and I have been going back and forth about having I HATE THIS (the radio drama, of course) aired on WBEZ In Chicago, home to such noteworthy NPR programs like This American Life and Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me ... WCPN had submitted it to the Third Coast International Audio Festival at WBEZ, for which it did not win, but it attracted the attention of the folks at Re: sound a program which, if I am to understand it correctly, rebroadcasts programs from other NPR stations.

We were negotiating the fine points of the contract, and looking forward to finding out the broadcast date - which I was going to post here and send via email to my friends in Chicago so they could hear it.

It aired last Saturday. So, as Dave put it, oops.

You can listen to the online version of the Re: sound broadcast here.

I wonder if Ira despised it.

Howard Katz

Thursday, June 14, 2001

You won't believe this one - we saw the world premiere of a new play at the National Theatre by this hot, British playwright. It's about this complete, showbiz ***hole who has this mid-life crisis and loses everything he owns or cares about in a desperate attempt to find some kind of meaning in life. It was part King Lear, part story of Job, and the climax, the very end of the play, this broken, destitute, shell of a man, he finally grasps his reason for living as he recounts, in glorious, passionate detail (I sh*t you not) every beautiful, exciting moment of the day that his first son was born.

We had a fun train ride home that night, let me tell you. Thank you, Patrick Marber.

Well, it only took six years, but the Roundabout Theatre Company is finally bringing Howard Katz to Off-B'way. Starring Alfred Molina, this is the American premiere of the show that ruined an otherwise nice day for Toni and I.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

We checked out Children of Men the other night. I recommend it to anyone, though it is terribly violent and will bring about feelings of grief and helplessness in those already bereaved, or perhaps people in general. Hard to say. A film whose premise is the inability of the entire human race to conceive any more children would be disturbing to someone who'd never thought of it before, let alone those who think about it every day.

Having said that, it's excellent.

Even though I was not sobbing uncontrollably at the end, not the way my date was, images from the film have been haunting me for two days, and I just had to break my silence to mention it. One particular comment I wanted to share; the story of a child dying in his youth is being told, lovingly told by none other than Michael Caine (I thought he was channeling John Lennon - I just read that was actually his goal) and this other character, a (former) midwife says, "Everything happens for a reason."

I found it touching that that turn of phrase was included - I find it hard to believe that it was included by accident - and found it poignant that it was the midwife who said it.

Because we despise that sentence, don't we?