I don’t sleep well, most nights.  I could fall asleep standing, most days.  It is an irony that is lost on me.  An irony that has exhausted all its charm.  I toss and think about things of little consequence.  A year or so ago, I learned about this guy and I often think about making something similar.  Or whether I need to mow the lawn in the morning.  These are the type of things that occupy my restlessness.  I guess fatigue that doesn’t lessen regardless of sleep, ultimately, pays no mind to sleep.  My tired and my wake exist along parallel lines.  Long, long lines.

Waylon hasn’t been sleeping well, most nights.  He’s spending a lot of time up and about, and in our bed.  Someday, when he’s older, I’m sure I’ll love to hang out at midnight while the rest of the neighborhood sleeps.  But these days it’s just a bad habit.  One more habit of mine he doesn’t need to inherit.  He’s just a kid.  Though, if he sneaks into our room tonight, he’ll do it as a five year old.  He turns five in a few minutes.  The clock ticks as we speak.  I will wake up the father of a five year old.  I know it’s cliche as hell, but where’d the years go?

I’ve told myself for a while now that I need to clean up my act before my kids are old enough to remember.  Too late.  Waylon’s five, and I’m not the father he deserves.  I’m impatient, I’m moody, I’m quick to argue with him.  I’m preoccupied, I’m busy, I’m tired.  I forget sometimes that my every move shapes him.  I’m going to get better because I’m running out of time.  I’m always saying things like that.  I’m saying a lot of things about myself on his birthday.  I’m selfish and an egoist.

But he is fantastic.  He is smart (way advanced!) and adorable.  He has always been the sweetest and funniest one in the room.  He has a gentle soul with a wild outer shell.  His imagination is amazing, and when he sings it sounds like cake.  He is unabashedly loud and apologetically messy.  He devours books and remembers entire sections weeks later.  He is a horrible eater and a pretty good joke teller.  He’s way cooler than I give him credit for, and polite and respectful. He likes superheroes and cars and movies and running back and forth across the room.  He likes his cats and loves his family.  He’s an amazing little boy.

Once, in a prenatal class, I told a room full of strangers that I hoped Waylon would be born with my wife’s joy.  And I meant it, and he was.  He’s going to wake up in a few hours (minutes?) excited to be five, and who am I to take that joy away?  In fact, it’s my job to do my damnedest to make sure he never loses it.  And that starts tomorrow, before he’s too old to remember.

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One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own
A broken off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.”
And I say this to Kai
“Look: We’ll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with–“
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It’s in Lu Ji’s Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. “Essay on Literature” — in the
Preface: “In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.”
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see Pound was an axe
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

-Axe Handles
Gary Snyder