River’s first.

River’s first concert was at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX.  We went to see Balmorhea. I think that by then you had your ears, so I like to imagine that you could hear the whole thing.  It was so beautiful.  Your mom said she had tears in her eyes three times, and I can hardly remember a scene that I didn’t see through water.  I imagined what the world must look like to the musicians, with all that beauty in their minds.  They heard all those notes and rhythms rustling above their heads like springing leaves, and they plucked them down from the green and heavy branches like apples from orchard trees.  I watched them in throes and the wilds of their imaginations.  They took those notes and rhythms and made something so perfect.  I was watching them through water.  Your mom and I both.

After the show, I spoke with one of the musicians.  I told him that I was sorry if I sounded cloying.  Tawdry.  I apologized, but I told him I needed to say it anyway.  I told him that I was tired of spending so much time thinking about how destructive we are, as a people.  Or as a species, however you want to look at it.   I take these quick glances at what the human tide is up to, what it’s careening up against now.  Check the news, work a shift in the emergency room.  Instead of seeing the glowing moon’s pull and tug in our ebbing and rising, flowing and waning, I see heavy cliffs crumbling slowly, rocks and sturdy shores moaning.  I see wars and murders and rapes and horrible coping mechanisms that lead people to do awful things to themselves and to each other.  I see  terrible illness and disease, and I see us ripping our precious Garden to shreds and tatters for what amounts to absolutely nothing.  We shatter the mountains and pick through the shards for shiny slivers and wet ore, and then we burn their black bones, violently sweeping their gnarled and rivered faces from the dirt of the quiet earth.  We rearrange the rivers, children at play.  We turn the air grey.  And all this for nothing.  Without any discernible way to stop it.  And I wonder if we are capable only of pain and destruction.

But as we listened to Balmorhea’s music, the musicians dancing through those orchards and picking apples and picking apples and picking apples, I kept thinking that this is the truth.  This is what is true and good about our nature.  This is how we were made, and what we were made for.  We are so beautifully, wonderfully made.  We are capable of such unimaginable beauty and creativity.  Genesis says that we were created “in God’s own image,” and we’re told that right after He finishes creating the heaven and the stars and the seas and the trees.  That’s the source and the proof of all that exploding life in you, all that surging, rushing beauty that defines you already.  I want you to know how much we love you.  And I want you to know how much beauty you have in your soul.  It is your true nature, your true design, your true ability.  To create beauty.

So I told him all that, and he seemed really surprised.  I told him I was so thankful that he had reminded me of how much beauty we have inside us, and that we’re capable of creation, not just destruction.

I hope you enjoyed the show.  Like I said, I think you had just gotten your ears, so I would love it if that music was one of the first things you ever heard.  And by the way, your middle name was almost Balmorhea.  I think you can see why.

River’s first camping trip was to the bluffs on Lake Travis, west of Austin, TX.  Your mom and I know this spot so well that we can find it and build camp in the dark.  Let the night itself blindfold us!  In fact, I think we’ve set up the tent more often in the dark than we have in the day.  When we were at Baylor, we went to Austin about once a month.  Sometimes we’d go for a concert, or sometimes just coffee and fresh air, and then we’d always camp at that spot on the bluffs at Lake Travis.  We’d listen to owls, let the birds wake us up, the sun wash our hair.  We used to jump off the cliffs, and take new friends to jump with us, about forty feet down.  I jumped every time until one day I just decided to stop.  Some Goodness must have reminded me that you were in my future, and that I’d rather not ruin my chances at hiking the John Muir Trail with you one day.

In the mornings we’d go to Mozart’s coffee, a beautiful little cabin on the water that roasts beans and bakes breads.  Your mom loves their bagels, and I love their cinnamon buns without icing.  They have sprawling, yawning decks and docks that stretch into the lake like fingers.  I can’t tell you how many hours we’ve spent on that deck drinking coffee.

Other traditions are to go to Waterloo Records, Whole Foods, and REI, where we spend a fair amount of time trying to feel out just how serious the other one is about setting up a yurt and living quietly in the mountains, drinking from clear streams and gardening food.  Something I suppose you’ll come to understand about us is that we’re mountain walkers, forest people, maybe even hippies at heart, and that we go to Whole Foods with the same glassy, gaping look in our eyes as a tween in the mall.  It is our wonderland.

This particular trip to the bluffs was your mom’s idea.  In all the swarming, smothering chaos of medical school, we had only made it to the bluffs a handful of times.  As soon as medical school ended, we made a mad dash for those bluffs with the owls and the morning birds.  I love your mom so much.  She knew exactly what I needed.

River’s first argument with mama was a few days after we found out that you had appeared.  I cooked some quinoa with a lot of veggies and seitan, one of our favorite meals.  Your mom wanted to eat it, but you kept telling her you weren’t so sure about it.  Mama looked down at her belly (at you) and said “Baby, we eat lots of veggies in this family.  They’re good for you!”  You said you didn’t care and that you would prefer some limes.  You know, mom didn’t put up much of a fight.  She loves you a lot.

River’s first names included – but were not limited to – Lee, Annalise Rae, Finn, Jonas, River, Jayden, Muir, Zoe, Corrigan, Eddie, Jack, Forrest, Levi, Sam, Samuel, and Jackson.

River’s first… well, exposition was on Tuesday morning, April 5, 2011.  We had an appointment to have an ultrasound done so we could make sure that you were growing and moving like you should.  But your mom wanted you to dance.  She read that drinking grapefruit juice incites dancing in babies, so she drank a whole jar of it that had just been hand-squeezed by her friend Sandy.  It worked.  The first thing I saw you do was chop both your arms up and down across the front of your body.  You waved, crawled, somersaulted, and danced.  Even the technician said you were quite an active little boy.  You also were not shy.  At all.  Either that or you were sick and tired of hearing us yammer monologues about how we “knew” you would be a girl with absolutely no evidence to back it up.  At twelve weeks and six days, earlier than I’ve ever heard of such a pronouncement being delivered, we found out you were a boy.  That you would be our son.

To try and summarize the waves and cascades of happiness and surprise and every other emotion that swept through me at that moment would be a feat of introspection that I fear I am not capable of.  All I can say is that I was absolutely bombarded, pummeled, swept up and deposited somewhere else, in some other place than I had been standing before.  The earth tilted.

I can fairly say that I was absolutely ecstatic when I thought we would be having a girl, and that I was equally ecstatic upon the realization that we would actually be having a boy.  But I was happy in an entirely new way.  The closest thing I have for comparison is my love for mountains, both the Rockies and the Appalachians.  The Rockies are enormous, rugged, and spectacular.  They are all rock and ice, canyon and carving river, pine forest and glacier meadow.  They demand a fierceness from you that the Appalachians do not.  They are like boulder words to a wild poet.  But the quiet green waves that ripple through the Appalachians and Blue Ridge offer a sonant peacefulness that is rhythmic in a way the Rockies are not, defined by seasonal washings of orange and red, grey and white, and then the most green of greens, the most yellow of yellows, the most blue of blues.

I love both, but they are different.  And when I found out you were a boy, I felt the earth tilt, leaning its eastern shoulder eastward, and I was in a different place.  I found myself out of the soft forests of the Blue Ridge and in some high alpine meadow, the towering eruptions of the Continental Divide and the rioting sea of Rocky Mountains stretching to every horizon I knew to look for.  I felt wild.  I felt long bearded and glacier eyed.  I felt strong shoulders and calloused hands.

I am ready for you.  I cannot wait to meet you.

River’s first dance was Thursday, April 28, 2011.  Your mom felt a little flutter in her belly, and as soon as she placed a hand over the spot to see if you were moving, she felt two tiny little kicks right under her fingers.  You only moved for a moment, and she didn’t feel anything again for about a week.  I missed the whole thing, but I loved hearing the rivering excitement in your mom’s voice when she told me about it.  I can’t even imagine the connection you two already have.

River’s first trip to the mountains was in the middle of April, 2011.  Your mom and I took a last-minute road trip to Breckenridge, Colorado.  April is the time of year in Colorado when no one who has a grain of honesty in their bones can tell you what the weather will be like.  We thought we might be hiking in fresh green meadows, or even snowshoeing on higher hills, but we were wildly wrong.  It snowed nearly the entire time we were there.

Unfortunately, I failed to anticipate what 10,000 feet of elevation gain could do to a pregnant woman.  Your mom’s morning sickness joined forces with what may have been a little touch of altitude sickness, and together they slammed her whole body into the couch for the first day or two we were there.  But your mom is a rugged Mountain Mama, and she began to climb out of the fog with amazing energy, grace, and beauty.  Before I even had time to crack the covers on a few books I’d brought with us, she was ready to start exploring.  And skiing.

Her eyes looked like the sun and the moon through wet forest trees in fresh morning, and she insisted we go skiing.  We got twenty inches of snow, all soft and gleaming powder, and there was no way she’d let us go home without getting on the mountain.

The day was as beautiful as a mountain day can get.  It snowed all night, leaving us an empty white mountain canvas in the morning.  The clouds had wandered east, and the sky was 10,000 feet closer than we see it in Texas.  I saw blues that you cannot see unless you’re that close, fingertips waving at the earth’s soft roof.  And your pregnant mama carved the sweetest mountain songs to you with her wild white cursive in the snow, skis chiseling verse after verse on the first blank paper runs of the day.

I can’t tell you how proud of her I was.  She was sick all day, but kept riding lifts and skiing back down.  I think she imagined that white slope glide settling into your bones.  Mountain air in your blood.  I think she imagined teaching you what the side of a mountain feels like, the angle and rumble of it, the sturdy heaviness and the pine forest skin.

And I like to think you loved it.