The Farm Report

WHAT TRAVIS AND I SAW AT THE GAZING FIELD.

I awoke with a song from church in my head.

This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad.

I had no expectations and only a couple of things on my agenda – birthday parties with my two youngest sons. A series of fiscal calamities make the usual sorts of entertainment unwise. Movies, dinner at a restaurant, theme parks – all of these things are out of reach, considering our expenses and the fact that anything we do is multiplied by six.

So I lay in bed, contemplating the day. I’m usually the first one awake, but not the first one out of bed. After a while, I hear the scampering of feet upstairs and I know it’s time to get to work.

I brew a pot of coffee and present a cup to my wife in bed. I feed all the critters – horses, dogs, chickens, boys and girls – then start preparing for the first party.

It’s for Zane, a child that cross-examination reveals to be a girl. She is a classmate of Charley’s and she has reserved a spot at O2B Kids, which is something like an amusement park for children.

This is a momentous event for Charley. He has never attended a birthday party before. We’ve had them at the house for his brothers and sisters, but this is a signature moment for him.

We arrive late because of the birthday-party purchases on the way, and for the first half hour, Charley doesn’t know how to behave. As the birthday party moves from room to room at this temple to yuppie spawn, he does not participate. At one point, as the fun cascades around him, he rolls up in a ball in the middle of the room. The other parents joke about him not having enough sleep or being grumpy. I have no idea what’s up, but finally take him aside and tell him that no matter what he is feeling, this party is about his friend Zane and about her happiness – and that he needs to put that first, not whatever drama is going on inside his head.

This is rough stuff to lay on a 3-year-old. I sometimes wonder if I’ve learned anything through seven children. Here I am, talking to the youngest in revolting psychobabble that I can’t believe is emanating from my mouth.

But then we hit the trampoline room. Kids bounce on a trampoline, then launch themselves over a pit filled with foam squares for a soft landing. Oh please, someone, invent such a thing for us grownups.

It’s all downhill from there. Charley becomes himself. Pizza and cake are consumed and on the way home, he says several times, “That was a great party.”

At home, things are not so good. We are caught in the housing crunch, limping along with two mortgages. One is for a magnificent house that’s now been vacant for a year and a half since we’ve moved out to the farm. We are squeezed tight and my beautiful wife, who does the finances, is on the phone, negotiating with our infuriatingly inept mortgage company during my brief break between birthday parties.

I get Travis dressed and wrap the present for the second party of the day and the whole time I’m home, Nicole is trying to explain to some minimum wager why we are having issues with our mortgages. Our mistake was probably doing mortgages with the same company for both houses. Managing such a problem is apparently beyond the ken of this corporate giant.

The second party is some 25 miles away. I nearly used a half a tank in my truck. We arrive in a cookie-cutter community but it’s easy to spot the birthday house – the parents have rented a bounce house for the kids. As I stand around and talk to the other parents, a fully entertaining exercise, I can’t help think of how I left my lovely wife: on the telephone, dealing with our fiscal crisis. She does this because when I handled the money, it caused me physical pain. So she took it over, but now it’s my turn to help out.

So as I enjoy these conversational bouquets at the party, I can’t stop thinking about her and what I can do to help her.

On the way home, we make a brief detour to pick up Savannah, who’s been staying overnight with a friend. I call Nicole on the way home.

“Hello, Husband,” she answers. I love to hear happiness in her voice.

“Can I bring you anything?” I always call her when I’m out, to see if I can be of service.

“Just yourself – and those children.”

At home, she has made her chicken soup. This is probably one of the best things to eat on the face of the earth, with a lot of chicken, carrots, snow peas and spaghetti. Eat enough and it will keep you from getting sick for years.

We talk about the mortgage company, but she says, “Don’t worry. I’m on it.”

After dinner, it’s time to feed again and Travis helps me. I ask him if he wants to help me drive the truck down to the gazing field to see the sunset. Of course he does.

I pull him into my lap and we drive to the end of the road and sit there, to behold again the splendor of God’s work in the sky.

After we go inside, Nicole and I start to watch a movie together, one of her favorites, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” She doesn’t like to watch movies repeatedly, but this is the exception. It’s campy, like all musicals from the 1950s, but I still get the music – even songs such as “Bless Yore Beautiful Hide” – stuck in my head.

But I can tell the stress of the day has worn on her, so I get her settled in bed. Savannah and Jack and Charley go upstairs to the playroom and Travis comes into the family room with me. He wants to watch “that cowboy movie” I was watching. So I turn on John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine.” Travis lays down with his head on my lap and soon is asleep.

I remember watching this film with my father. I think we watched every film John Ford ever made together. I’ve seen the film before, but don’t want to disturb Travis. His head rests on my thigh. I have one eye on the film and the other on William Faulkner’s Snopes. I’ve been meaning to read that omnibus for years and now, here’s my chance.

But soon I’m tired and so I wrap up Travis and carry him upstairs to bed. Then I take the other boys from the playroom and take them to bed. Savannah is already sleep in her room.

Downstairs, my wife sleeps in our bed. I hear her breathing when I come in and put on my pajamas in the dark.

I remember one of those song lyrics I liked so much: The times that we were happy were the times we never tried.

This is the way we make a day. We have no expectations, no plans or any big promises. But when I get under the covers at night and feel her next to me, I know that we have somehow taken nothing and turned it into an irreplaceable gift.

Seems the older we get, the more we fuck up. We stop doing the stuff that got us here.

For one thing, we stop asking questions because we fear people will think we’re stupid or that we will come off as uncool. But the result is that we grow dumber because by not asking questions, we’ve atrophied as learners.

Same goes  with reading. Remember when you were a kid and you used to read at the table after dinner each night? OK, so maybe you didn’t do that. My son Jack, a well-read boy of 6, entertains us with a book a night aloud.

Once a year, we go off to a remote cabin in a state park, freed from the bonds of television and video games. All of us – husband, wife, four small spawn – amuse ourselves with murmuring radio and reading aloud. We’ve done a couple of Harry Potter books that way and those sorts of memories will never fade.

But in your everyday life – do you ever read aloud? Are you worried about that “uncool” stuff? You’ve got to get over that. The best part about aging is no longer giving a shit about trying to be cool.

I used to keep English Romantic Poets by Marius Bewley (Modern Library, out of print) in my bedside table. I’d occasionally serenade a guest with one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems or even Leigh Hunt’s “Jenny Kissed Me” (I’m such a sentimental swine).

It’s fun to read aloud and real men do read poetry. No leotard required. Reading Lord Byron aloud always worked for me. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Some books demand to be read aloud and I’m not just talking about children’s books.  (Though the whole family is working through Robb White’s The Lion’s Paw now.)  One of my favorite novelists was the late John Gardner, who wrote The Sunlight Dialogues, October Light and several other fine modern fables. Yet he was also a scholar of medieval literature and even wrote an epic poem calledJason and Medeia (Knopf, 1974). Jason and Medeia was meant to be read aloud.  It’s just not the same otherwise.

Maybe you’re afraid of how totally uncool it would be for someone to walk in on you when you’re … you know … reading aloud.

Get over it. I’ve got an idea for you.

Get this new translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’sThe Canterbury Tales (Modern Library, $36). Don’t be selfish. Share it with friends or loved ones. Read it out loud.

In fact, not to get too effete on you, but think about this: A Canterbury Tales dinner party. Seriously. A book of verse, a jug of wine. Have a fine medieval meal, but use utensils and better hygiene. (It’s OK to call each other “wench” and “knave” for the course of the dinner.) Afterward, get comfortable. You, Your Beloved and the Other Couples take turns reading. Play a loop of  ”A Whiter Shade of Pale” as background music. You’ll thank me.

The language of The Canterbury Tales is magnificent.  It has to be in order to have survived six centuries. In this new translation by poet Burton Raffel, the humor, the bawdiness, the joy are all luminescent.

No, you won’t finish it in your post-dinner reading party, but you’ll have a good start. Finishing it’ll be your homework.

Few things are more enjoyable than reading aloud together. Trust me on this.

(This is yet another posting cannibalized from Bill McKeen’s Book Blog, which I write for Tampa’s Creative Loafing. I hate myself for doing this, but I can’t stop.)

We have embraced chickens. Luckily, we live on a small farm. This wouldn’t work in an apartment.

Last spring, we bought six chicks. One got iced by the dog down the road, but we still have five. We allowed our six-year-old son to name them. He dubbed them Jeff, Steve, Spot, Will and Grace. He doesn’t get the whole hen-is-female thing yet.

After months of our patient feeding, the chickens began producing eggs. We now get so many eggs daily that we are packaging them for friends in octagonal containers adorned with a quote from Thomas Paine (”What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly”).  

We’ve come to realize that all of those chicken-related cliches are true. That ain’t chicken feed . . . the pecking order . . .  ruler of the roost. 

We’re going to triple our number of chickens next month. We’re considering selling eggs at the farmers’ market and perhaps creating a new revenue stream.

The egg thing — our first true venture into farmhood other than five acres full of critters — has worked out well. It worked out so well that we spent last week tilling one of our horse paddocks and planting corn, potatoes, carrots, onions and other vegetables. Luckily we live in Florida and are blessed with a long growing season.

Neither my wife nor I are country folk, but we are re-inventing ourselves in this new fiscal era.

Our three boys, all 6 and under, are helping with the planting and so we are teaching them true sustainability. If we have a bounty, we might get to teach the boys about marketing. 

And, in another cost-cutting move, we have switched to Busch Light, the beer of the new economy.

(This post is borrowed from www.thresheronline.com, a subsidiary of www.earningserendipity.com. I’m supposed to be a regular participant in this online forum. Wish me luck.)