Whale-Baby: Day 12 at home with my three-month-old son
Attainable felicity
This morning we take our time. We loaf. Lauren and I snooze our alarms. Snooze them again. We sit on the couch, drinking our coffee, making faces at Hagen, trying to make him smile back at us, which he does — over and over again. Which is why we stay on the couch. “When’s the absolute latest we could leave,” I ask, “and still have you to work on time?”
That’s when we leave.
Today is my last day off. After this weekend, I’m back at work and Hagen starts daycare.
On our drive back from dropping Lauren off this morning, Hagen and I decide that we will not do any laundry today; we will not do any dishes. We will only snuggle and read. We will loaf all day.
I realize that I might not have time to finish Moby-Dick by Sunday as I’d hoped, but I knew this was a possibility. When we take Levon for a walk around the block, I listen to a few chapters. How strange it is to be listening to this British man read Moby-Dick — “Avast! Man the boat!” — while people speed past us.
Later, we pick Lauren up for a lunch date, and then hang out with her at her office. On the way back home, Hagen and I swing by his doctor’s office to pick up some paperwork for his first day at daycare.
Once we’re home again, Hagen and I return to snuggling and reading. Things are picking up in the book. The Pequod encounters another ship whose captain had a run-in with Moby-Dick. This captain, as it turns out, is missing an arm. He could be Ahab’s amputee bud, but Ahab, single-minded as he is, does not stay and shoot the White Whale breeze. He one-leg hops back into his boat and is on his way after it.
Earlier, I said that the White Whale I was pursuing during my paternity leave was something like time itself. How could I chase it down, wrestle the most out of it, conquer it? Could I, by writing these essays — which have been getting longer and longer — get more out of it than I normally would? Would a more thorough examination of my days with Hagen make them somehow last longer, two weeks into two months, two years? How could I apply the right amount of intellectual rigor to this project and in doing so reach some higher, transcendent level of happiness?
I have cherished this time. And I have enjoyed this process. There’s quite a lot I’ve gotten out of the regular, focused writing that’s been at the center of the Whale-Baby tales. But beyond that, I’m not sure what else I expected to achieve.
What I do know is that I had a lot of notes for a much longer post than this — the roots of the curse of time, the futile attempts to seize the most from it. I had quotes and passages all picked out.
But instead of working on it at my desk in the basement, I am again loafing on the couch with Lauren and Hagen and Levon. We are singing “Stinkerbutt,” an original tune inspired by Hagen: “Stinkerbutt, stinkerbutt / everybody’s got the stinkerbutt”
Hagen’s next to me on the couch, babbling and smiling. He does, in fact, have a stinker butt. After a few moments of calm alertness, he gets fidgety and starts kicking. He throws himself on his side.
He’s trying to roll over. He squirms and moans, red-faced, but he doesn’t quite have the strength yet to do it. It will not be long before he does, though, and the time between now and then is really the only time that I care about tonight.
I have just one quote to share from today’s reading:
“…in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side…” In other words, get out of your head and live in this world. The time in which we find ourselves — day in, day out — is all, and it is enough.
I’m on paternity leave for two weeks with our son, and I’m going to write about it. During this time, I’m also reading Moby-Dick.
