Isabela has always been early.

At our favorite Italian restaurant, on the main road between Menino Deus and Cidade Baixo — the former, a lower-middle-class neighborhood where we had first lived when we arrived in the city; the latter, an area of town which was like urban foothills to the buzzing downtown peaks — Júlia and I had conspired to have a Last Dinner, a little planned celebration before the next morning’s planned arrival, via c-section, of our daughter.

The delivery of her brother, four years earlier, had been an unexpectedly adventurous lesson in the minutiae of natural childbirth: those minutiae being moment after moment after moment, tick, tick, tick of excruciating pain: an endless horizon of pain which, rather than the desired gradual approach from afar, seemed instead only to expand with time… while time itself took a holiday, and marched slower and slower, dawdled slower still, oblivious, apparently, to the state of urgency it should have been witnessing, until finally… wait, did it stop…? What time is it? Breathe? Breathe! Oh, I do wish I could breathe for you; unfortunately, I am not longer breathing, so you’ll have to get by on your own…

Well. As we were discussing how to avoid learning the same lesson twice, the doctors had been strenuously pushing c-section as the Delivery of Choice. It was flavor-of-the-year at the Hospital Moinhos de Vento. We think it was mostly a matter of convenience and an attempt to manage what were limited medical resources, not necessarily in the best interest of mother and baby-to-be, but certainly a big plus for insurers and doctors and doctors’ spouses and doctors’ assistants.

Perhaps I could even have told you whether or not the experience was worth the effort, and worth recovery from abdominal surgery, had Isabela actually hung around for the show. Instead, however, somewhere after the main course of pasta and sausage and capers was completed, and moments before we could have taken the first bite of dessert, Júlia became very still. With an expression that left the world behind and gazed… inside… she said: “I think my water just broke.”

And it had, and that was that. This delivery, graced by an “epidural”, was rather more tolerable for actor and audience than the first. Bela was born, wrinkled, slightly displeased, and apparently rather aware that Something Had Shifted. She didn’t cry right away: instead, with furrowed brow and eyes that looked left to right, up and down, she seemed to be naming things. “Oh. Here again, are we…? Hm.”

The doctor decided sight-seeing was over, that it was time to get on with living, and gave Bela a very gentle tap on the bottom (what is that? our first punishment, already? just for having shown up?) and Bela cried — probably angry at the First Injustice — and her mother’s arms enfolded her, and the nurses scurried about here and there, and her father began breathing again, and everything was just as it is with every other baby, fingers to toes, mouth to breast, short to long, horizontal to vertical, slow to fast, noises to sounds, sounds to words, words to sleep.

~

It was in 2005, a year or two after I had written The Future of the Rose for my son Nicolas (music and words about fatherhood, about being connected to a wonderful growing boy, now man) that I thought, listening to his song: there are words for my daughter, as well. Thoughts are seeds, and the imagination, planted, pursues sun and water with a living hunger. With a hunger for light and for life. Sometimes what flowers first are words, and the words are musical, and beg an instrument.

This time, though, all of those leafy words were just below the surface, waiting, apparently, for a sound. For me to have guitar in hand, and for a 10- or 12-note phrase to simply… happen… and that waiting poem to be called out, like a child to play. I have performed this song now and then, usually in private, or when Bela asks “Could you play my song for me again?” A few days ago she asked for the lyrics to this and to Nicolas’ song… I could send her the lyrics, but no recording, until tonight.

With a new, open-source recording program (“open-source” means free, communally-built — just how it should be, or could be), I decided to put both technology and voice through their paces, and spent a couple of hours figuring out the software and hardware, then a couple more repeating track after track until the song was close enough to “right”. Close enough for a gift for my daughter, certainly? Even if other harmonies may have been sweeter, or more skilled instrumentalists offered tastier licks, or some percussion might have underscored the story more eloquently.

That’s all right. We’re not here to achieve perfection nor amass fortune (not all would agree with me) but to touch the earth in passing, to find compassion for those who are stumbling and harmful in their lives, and to find as many loved ones as we can, so that we might embrace them.

And that’s what this is for.

~

Isabela is still flying on ahead, now at a magnificent boarding High School in Putney, Vermont, where she is far more college student than little girl. Her teachers, true to form and consistent with every charge at life my daughter undertakes, find delight in her curiosity and marvel at her depth. Whisper air under her wings:

Line of the Tide – Mark Schultz

THE LINE OF THE TIDE

You arrived with a cry and a question in your eyes
as though awakened from sleep
having taken flight through unlit skies
where am I? where am I?

So you ask me, I will tell you
so you ask me, I will tell you
no lies

Here the land and the sea will write the song for you
here the line of the tide is all divides
what you dream from what you’ll do
simple as it’s true, one step and you choose

Now you ask me, I will tell you
now you ask me, I will tell you
no lies

When is the hour you’ll lose my hand
your flower left to bloom in sand?
How can you stand in that radiant light
where the shadows run and hide
when all we see is day, all we dream is night?

So you ask me, I will tell you
so you ask me, I will tell you

Here a tear is the flower thrown in the grave of love
here a flower wears the crown of beauty’s thorns
once you’ve touched the stem you’re torn
ah, has the fragrance gone? I wish I’d never known…

Now you ask me, I can tell you
now you ask me, I will tell you
it’s all right

For the earth is a womb returns what has been sown
the seed cracks and it cries as the light arrives
to fill the leaves and swell the bud
is heaven in the blood?
Is heaven in the blood?

Feb 2005, Byfield, Massachusetts

“Tide Line” by Wayne Watkins, on DeviantArt.com

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