Author: admin

Beloved son,

Sometimes when I watch you I can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson. It’s time that I introduce you two.

People often get the wrong idea about Emily Dickinson. Morbid, they say. Antisocial, they say. Abstruse, they say.* They’re wrong. Emily Dickinson, I think, was so alive to the world—both earthly and spiritual—that it inspired yet overwhelmed her. She said that true poetry made her feel as if the “top of [her] head were taken off.” I get the sense that just living felt like that to her sometimes, as if she were a raw nerve exposed to the world’s every sensory output.

I see a similar kind of rawness in you, a radical alertness. How else could you be so profoundly fascinated by something as mundane as a whisk? And why else would you need to take a nap every three hours? You must be living with the top off.

But that’s not the main way you remind me of Emily Dickinson. You remind me of her because one day you do not, and the next you do. One day you don’t smile, and the next you do. One day you are all gums, and the next you have two teeth.** One day you’re carpet-bound, and the next you can stand. We can even rewind the tape all the way back and say—miracle of all everyday miracles—that one day you didn’t exist, and the next you did.

That invisible passing between is and was is the kind of magic that Dickinson noticed. I imagine her looking out her window at dusk, wondering about the slice of difference between day and night, light and shadow, when she grabbed her pen to write:

Presentiment — is that long Shadow — on the Lawn —
Indicative that Suns go down —

The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness — is about to pass —

Isn’t that just lovely? I often feel like startled grass watching you grow like a weed yourself. Just as the sun sets and that day is no more, almost every day I see you change into a new little person and the old little person is no more. The newborn that cannot roll over is suddenly the baby that cannot crawl is suddenly the toddler that can walk. What? My child of so many days becomes my child of so many months becomes my child of so many years. In my head I know this to be true, yet somehow I still need more warning.

Of course, it’s not like the lawn goes away when the sun sets or the earth actually disappears in the night: in a real sense, you are still the same you today that you were the moment you let out your first cry, no matter how many milestones you reach. But I understand the feeling of loss, the melancholy—in short, the presentiment—in Dickinson’s poem. There is much joy in watching you discover the world and grow into yourself day by day, but there comes with it, too, a startling sensation that something as irretrievable as time itself has just passed by.

Our poet friend captures that feeling even better in another gem:

The difference between Despair
And Fear — is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck
And when the Wreck has been —

The Mind is smooth — no Motion —
Contented as the Eye
Upon the Forehead of a Bust —
That knows — it cannot see —

Hold on a second, though—don’t think I am saying that I feel despair or fear when I see your incremental steps forward. Don’t think, either, that watching you is ever like witnessing a wreck (except, of course, when you actually do wreck, like by tipping over onto your head or crawling straight into a wall). No, I feel more like the eye on the bust, frozen in time as you accelerate forward. The difference, of course, is that I can see. Mom and I, statuesque compared to you, witness every day your unhindered discovery, marveling as each will becomes is and each is becomes was.

In a few weeks you will turn one year old. One day you are zero, and the next you are one. And when does it happen, really? When the clock strikes midnight? When we again reach December 9 at 6:23 a.m.? Which second did it occur? Which fraction of a moment divides the you that knew the womb from the you that knew the world?

Just as your marvelous little existence raises marvelous big questions, the timing of your birthday—right in the middle of Advent—inevitably turns my mind to even greater mysteries. Not long after your birthday, the world celebrates the birth of the Anointed One, Christ incarnate. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man. One day he is beyond us, and the next he is among us—miracle of all miracles.

So, when we sing “Happy Birthday” in a short while and “Joy the World” a short while after that, I suppose those marble lips of mine should turn up into a smile, for a moment is passing but another, better one follows. For as much as she pondered the fine distinctions of our transient existence, I wonder it ever dawned on Emily Dickinson that presentiment is just a shade darker than hope.

*I was hoping your first word might be “abstruse.” “Mama” won out by a considerable margin.

**Okay, maybe Mom and I could have watched the gradual progress on this one more closely, but we genuinely had no idea that you had any teeth until the pediatrician pointed them out. Sure enough, there were two ridged caps poking through your gums. I’m fairly certain you willed them into existence somewhere between the parking lot and the doctor’s office.

Beloved son,

My dearest moment of the day with you happens early in the morning, before the sun has yet risen. You wake up around 6 o’clock – too early for our taste on the weekends – so I fetch your little body and bring you into bed with me and Mom. Sometimes you are still so sleepy that you end up back in child’s pose, butt in the air, neck craned sideways to nurse. After a few minutes you are sated and dazed, and you sit up to look around our dark bedroom like a mole freshly popped out from his burrow.

I scoop you up and put your pacifier back in. Pacifier – it’s become one of my favorite words. It’s not its utility that I love (although the tool certainly does its job well); it’s what the word embodies. It pacifies, brings peace. The word makes it that much cooler that you are a Pacific Northwest baby.

In our pacified moment, the curtains turning deep-ocean blue from the faraway sun starting to shake off its sleep, you tuck your head into my shoulder, almost pressing into that shallow recess above my collarbone. I walk slowly – deliberately so – for I know it is only a few feet from our bedroom to yours. Your arm wraps around my neck. Sometimes you paw at a tuft of my hair. I cannot see your face, and you cannot see mine, but we don’t need to. We know what it means to be together, still, and at peace.

Your room, the warmest in the whole house, feels like stepping inside a giant sweater. I stand in front of your crib, rubbing your back as we sway to a looping harp rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or “Hush Little Baby.” I think maybe we could stand there in our embrace forever, but I know that you should get more sleep, so I lay you down. Though you are nearly a year old now, in this moment you act as still as a newborn, flat on your back looking up at me. I know that as soon as I leave you will turn over and fall fast asleep.

As I walk back to bed, I am at once as calm and as energized as I am in any other part of the day – like I could just as easily sleep or stay awake for 24 hours straight. It’s the closest I come to feeling like I could do anything.

I wonder how you came to know the significance of cuddling – not just being held but holding back. I wonder how the most tired nighttime moments I’ve had with you these past months have settled in my mind as the ones I’d last trade. And I wonder when, in the partitioning of my day and the busyness of my heart, I ever grow still or sated enough for our heavenly Father to have his dearest moment of the day with me. He does instruct through parable, doesn’t he?

Beloved son,

You should know how this website came to be, and why I have called it “Garland and Chain.” Actually, as with many things in life, you have Mom to thank for both.

For my first Father’s Day with you in the world, Mom gave me a gift that I hope you can give to someone else one day: She challenged me to pursue a dream of mine. For years I have wanted to do more writing—I used to do quite a bit when I was younger—but have lacked the time, platform, and motivation. Another way to say that, of course, is that I did not make the time, create the platform, or search for the motivation. Mom didn’t parse words, though; she just wanted to help me do more of what I love, so she bought me this domain for a year and told me I could do with it whatever I pleased. If you want to know about your hand in this scheme of hers, by the way, you should read the letter you wrote me for Father’s Day, which was this website’s very first page.

For some months, in fact, your letter was the website’s only page. The same writerly problems that I had faced for years still plagued me: Though I now had a platform, I still didn’t have much time, and with everything else going on in my life (you know, like hanging out with you), I didn’t have the motivation. But I had new problems, too, questions that kept my mind tied up. What kind of website should it be? What should I call it? How should it look? What types of content should I write? What tone should I strike? And the biggest head-scratcher of all: Why and for whom was I going to be writing, anyway?

So I sat with those questions—or underneath them, rather. I let their weight stop me from writing hardly anything at all. It was a classic case of overthinking. For how little people think about some things, it is amazing how far they get carried away thinking about others. Sadly, your papa is not immune to this common human ailment. I was fixated by my imaginary audience, frozen by thoughts of how my published self would be perceived.

You and Mom brought me back to reality. I knew early on that I wanted to write about fatherhood, but I didn’t know much more than that. I had brainstormed a list of possible domain names, most of which revolved around me and my experience as a dad, like “Pondering Papa,” “Daddy Diaries,” and “Raggedy Dad” (I’ll have to explain that last one another time). Then one night when Mom and I were searching for available domains, she came across a passage in Proverbs (1.8-9) that instantly clicked:

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction

and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.

They are a garland to grace your head

and a chain to adorn your neck.

Garland and chain—the blessings of knowing your parents’ hearts. I knew right away that I wanted to borrow the poetry of that verse for my writing project, and I knew just as soon that there would be no better audience to write for than you, my precious son.

I must confess that the words “instruction” and “teaching” seemed a bit stiff to me, less affectionate than what I’d like to impart to you through my words. Truth be told, I don’t know if I have too many lessons with which to instruct you; I probably won’t have my lectures polished until you have a younger sibling or two. Still, I think that the sages of Israel were onto something profound and timeless in urging children first and foremost to listen—so urgent, in fact, that these words make it into the very beginning of Proverbs, just one verse after “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”

I can’t say exactly what wisdom you will find in these love letters, my dear boy. I can say, however, that I write them for you, empowered by your mother and inspired by the scriptures. Listen, my son, to these words of mine.