Me: Yes, onrushing son or daughter whom I love in turn?
My incoming loin-fruit: Has not my tiny brain achieved rectitude in thinking that wolves are simply the most perilous and lovely of creatures?
Me: Tiny? That brain's big enough to suck all the protein out of your poor mother. Also it can somehow pass notes between your transcendent spirit and earthly body, so—you know. Bonus points.
Offspringy McGee: Hey Dad.
Me: What, kid?
The kid: Wolves are cool, huh?
Me: Heck yeah they are.
Kid: How come they howl at the moon?
Me: Huh, that's funny, I was just about to write a blog post about that.
Not a wolf. That's our cat Felix trying to decide if he truly wants to pass through the door that he was just yowling to be let through. Once he gets outside, the most important thing for him to accomplish out there is usually getting back in again. I can't help thinking that if a wolf actually got to the moon, it would spend most of its time howling at the Earth. I mean, obviously it would freeze and suffocate, and possibly explode, but let's assume there's magic involved. How else would a wolf get to the moon in the first place.
I spend a lot of time thinking about, and yearning for, That Which Lies Beyond. C.S. Lewis calls it sehnsucht, the unsatisfied desire. Ever since we got a cat, it's been occurring to me on a daily basis that if They ever let me out into the Beyond, there's an above average chance that I would immediately turn around and start scrambling back toward the quotidian. Doesn't change the fact that everything I write is my way of pushing outwards to something I can't write about. And more importantly, since my wife is very similar to me in this regard (go figure), our kid is probably going to have quite the imagination. I expect to climb a fair number of trees in order to drag him or her inside for supper.
Like several things in this life, there will probably be a difficult balancing act involved here. Sure as hell don't want to squash the kid's imagination. Also, however, don't want the kid spending the kid's whole life gazing at the clouds and wasting the kid's potential. (I promise my syntax will get pithier once we find out the kid's gender and I can start using pronouns.) What I have to find a way to convey to our increasingly imminent infant is that life does in fact contain adventure and magic, except not exactly the way it looks in the storybooks.
Why are wolves so cool? People love cats and dogs and birds, but there aren't any myths about werecats or weredogs or werebirds. I mean there probably are, but none that are awesome. Why is the image of a howling wolf so iconic, so powerful? So ambiguous? We certainly don't want to encounter a hungry wolf alone in the starlit snow. And yet... don't we? Think about all the times that angels appear in the Bible—what's the first thing they always say? "Don't be afraid." Why are the most beautiful things also the most terrifying? I'll tell you one thing: I was afraid of falling in love with Ellie, and I'm afraid of this child we're about to have.
Okay fine, two things. Leave me alone.
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