Dylan Sawyer Howe

Dylan: D for David after Larry's dad, who passed away when he was in college. It's controversial in his family because one of his sisters has major issues with their dad. I think it will mean a lot to his mom, brother, and other sister's though, even though they, as all children and widows, have their own issues with him.

This is what I know about Larry's father. He took cake decorating classes. He was absent minded. He lost his job with the state when he blew the whistle on corrupt managers. He lived his life in the shadow of his father - a grad of the University of Pennsylvania who started his own accounting firm and made lots of money. He loved sports. He had a desk job in the army, which he left with honors. He loved to sing while he did the dishes and would wear an apron. He had six kids, one of whom died as a little boy, one of whom suffered from childhood diabetes, and one of whom was so badly burnt as a little girl that she never really recovered. He was not open about his emotions. He was super-involved with his church and helped to start a vibrant community in their brand new parish. He suffered from depression. His widow never has one bad thing to say about him. He worked two jobs most of his life, including a candy store that never really made it. Larry's favorite memory of him is staying overnight with him in a state barracks on Penn's Landing. They had the whole place to themselves and they played the most amazing, echoing game of catch with a rubber Spalding ball.

I want Dylan to have David's senses of play, of generosity, of honesty, of accepting loss, of community, of pitching in, and of morality. I also want him to have David's legendary sweetness and good looks.

Dylan is also Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, cowboy boot wearing, dust-trudging, poetry reading, quietly singing, a little bit shy with a very sweet smile. A guy who makes all the girls crazy without having to try, who loves rivers and mountains and dogs and fires and mission furniture and wrapping gifts and keeps all his crayons in order by color and intensity.

Sawyer: S is for Sarah, my grandmother, who lived well into a tortured old age and was known as a difficult woman until the end. My grandmother was not a pretty woman, with a big nose and a sallow complexion, but then again, I don't think she ever cared very much for looks. She was known to be slightly off in her hometown, a little shtetl in Poland. The details of her life are fuzzy because she wanted them that way, but the timeline goes something like this:

She came to America, to Chicago, as a teenager on her grandmother's dime in hopes of going to school and making lots of money. Her grandmother, though, wanted her to help keep house, and so Sarah left, went to business school (I would guess an associates degree) and married a man. That's all I know about him, that he was some man somewhere in the mid-west. That didn't last (something about a mother-in-law?) and she left him and went to nursing school (another associates degree? She only ever worked as a nurse's aid). Somehow she ended up in New York and when the Holocaust ended, she found out most of the people in her town had died. My grandfather was on the list of survivors. Thinking he was in fact his older brother, she contacted him in Palestine and said, hey, we're from the same town and we're both alive, let's get married. He agreed and they were married in New York with no pomp and little circumstance. He wanted to live in Israel and she said, as soon as the baby's born, but then my mother was born and she wanted to stay in New York and make money. They owned a nursing home and real estate and she worked as an aid in people's homes. My grandfather never called her anything but Mrs. Strenger and she had several boyfriends on the side. They made a lot of money and moved to New Jersey.

So what could I want my child to inherit from such a cold, calculating woman? Her strength, of course, and her shrewdness, her sense of entitlement and the ethic of hard work she coupled with thriftiness. In her own way, too, she was loving. She never stole or cheated or shortchanged to make her money, but she was exacting, demanding, and stood her ground always. She knew who she was and she made her dreams come true.

This is what I remember of my grandmother. She never gave us presents but put all her money into trust accounts for me, my brother, and sister. She ate directly out of pots kept in the refrigerator. She drank borcht out of jelly glasses. She had the smoothest skin of anyone I've ever touched because she used Nivea cream obsessively. She gave me a jar of anti-wrinkle cream the day I turned 21. She wanted my mother and then me to be a lawyer. Once, when she was very old, I came to her house unannounced. She was wearing a horrible green sweater, a turban, a nightgown wrapped around her neck - as was her custom - and nothing on her lower half. She was dusting something and singing in Polish. She was very happy to see me. When we were kids, my mother used to take us to her house deep in the Pine Barrens - or so it seemed to us then - to swim in our underwear in the kiddie pool and swing on the hammock she kept in her sandy backyard through which deer foraged and which always smelled of pine. Once, we pulled up and she was standing by the side of the house completely naked, bent over a garden hose, which she was using to wash her enormous, hanging breasts. She waved to us, smiling. She used to call us Shenkshicks, Shinebudgela, Shinechuchela and kiss us with her sunken in mouth, staring out at us from beneath her thick, rose-tinted, cat's eye glasses. She loved turqoise. She always watched her weight. She had terrible arthritis. She called things a "dois" when she couldn't remember the right name. She once told me her kindly neighbor, a farmer who raised hounds and cranberries, was rooting through her trash and calling her on the phone to harrass her - sexually. She told my mother that's why she was continually changing her phone number. The phone company told my mother they would cut her off if she tried to change her phone number one more time. Once, on a New York subway in the dangerous early 80's, en route to visit an accountant and carrying a paper bag full of cash, she loudly said to my father, There sure are a lot of Hispaniolas on this train. Another time, apropos of nothing, she asked my mother - who she once accused of being a member of a girl gang in her mid-30's - How 'bout that Gorby? Her favorite store was Clover because they made the softest nightgowns to wrap around her neck. She loved a sitz bath.

Sawyer means woodcutter. I love the idea of my child having a name connected to nature and the outdoors. I want him to be healthy and wild and filled with the language and scent and sound and solitude of the forest. Very zen, no? Strength and gentleness, genrosity and self-reliance, survivalism and drive. He has a very big name to grow into.

And Howe: Howe is Larry's name and I love him for too many reasonson to list. And that is enough.

posted by Fictionchick @ 10:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

Gray morning, bloodshot eyes, mushroom hair. Sometimes the routines of the day seem like such a hassle. Every time I floss my teeth, they bleed - pregnancy. Instead, I dream of Cuba, Brazil, Naples. I have always believed I was meant for a hotter climate, for hot blood, for tiny bathing suits, a life of fresh fruit, salty air, crisply fried fish, lemons all around me. Philadelphia is so even, so calculated, as is my life within in, doled out like the city blocks, each a tenth of a mile, separated by squares. My life is bills, work, exercise, television, dinner, regimented social activity.

I need to dance more, to throw my hips toward the walls, to unscrew all the clenched inside parts of me. Does passion die at 29? Do I live inside my library books? Is it because I read the newspaper and the New Yorker instead of poetry now?

The other day I dreamed I was Vincent D'Onofrio, saving a little girl given the evil eye by a Santaria, who appeared in scratchy black and white (the rest of the dream was in color) covered by a cowl, a henchwoman of Darth Vadar. I can't tell my own life from TV anymore.

The sky is my favorite this morning, a blanket of clouds cut in regular patterns by the sun, small pillows of bluish gray, each surrounded by a mystical gold. I have to go and take the trash out.