Sledders.

There were always stretches along the steep forever hill where people had already shoveled and salted, even as trillions of flakes kept falling; powder sugaring the street where the plows had passed a half hour ago, dusting the windshields of freshly parked cars.

In the last colorless moments of visible day, me and my brother would yank our sleds off of silent unshoveled glides of sidewalk, and the blades would erupt: the red metal scraping down into the concrete tundra, one of our sleds hitting it just a millisecond before the other's did; the screech of two blades cutting across rows of snowy lawns, the unmistakable sound smashing through other kids' suppertime windows just as the next set of blades spilled down on to the cement and piled into the same warm kitchens on the heels of the first. Eyes lifted fast from the plop of mashed potatoes in front of them/ spoons got set back down on the half acre pillow of steaming meatloaf/ milk spilling out of tipped-back Grimace and Hamburgler glasses is suddenly dammed, mid-flow, by shortstops and bullies and flute players: their eyes widening through the mac-n-cheese mist; snow-tired kids drawn out of their exhausted evening lulls by the distant scrapings of other sledders/ later sledders, passing by outside. 

Back at the house, me and my brother flung off our soaked gloves, our crusted Kmart scarves. We unzipped and tugged and used our one boot to get our other boot off; one boot clamping down on the other one as we leaned up against the coffe table or the door jam, tilting with fading balances as we pressed down upon our own arches to egg the tight mildew-y clamps off a couple inches at a time.

Just getting out of our shit was torture.We were already beaten, whipped.

But we managed somehow: eventually stepping out of our fallen suits to stand there in the living room in our hot wool sweaters and corduroys; our over-stretched tube socks collapsing red and blue rings around our ankles. In the kitchen we washed our hands with bar soap and talked to Mom about the day as she clanked spoons on pot edges. Every few seconds, I would look up at the small window above the sink, past the supermarket fern, and in the outskirts of weak glow from the backdoor light, I'd see the fresh flakes still falling.

I never wanted them to stop. Even a single snowflake meant there was hope. More could come. School could be canceled again. Another day on the hill could be ours.

At the table, we cut soft meat with the sides of our forks. We sopped white bread in small lakes of mud and took bites of bright corn mid-sentence. Mom poured milk into my Bill Bergey glass for me and into my brother's Wilbert Montgomery glass for him and I drank the cool milk with one hand while I steadied a forkfull of potatoes au gratin with the other; my eyeballs bending in my face to see the latest flakes falling down along the side of our house.

Then: the sound.

The blades of another slamming into the concrete out there in the night and I freeze my gulps, the glass pressing a cool smooth line into the bridge of my nose.

I shift my eyes and watch my brother freeze his gulps, our eyes meeting out above the paralyzed rims; the electrifying slide of a night sledder's metal richocheting off two young fresh hearts pumping double-time blood down in their pink bony chests; down by their Salisbury Steaks.

Pancake Papa's Crowbar Memory Blues.

Pretty much the first thing I can remember, my very first memory in this world, was digging my wooden cage, where they kept me. I was in the hospital for a hernia operation: I think I was three, maybe four years old. There's nothing etched in the concrete, mind you, just some impressionist sketches that somehow got splattered on my empty memory card. In the one, I'm standing up in a big wooden crib; I wrap my hands around some slats/feeling the smooth round of the slats. I feel the slats even now, even half a life later. In the other one: I am looking up at a TV on the wall, hospital-mounted. I don't remember what was on. I wish I did though. I just have this fuzzy vision of standing there in my cell/crib, looking up at that televison on the wall. And there were other kids around too. Other sick kids, I guess.

I revisit those moments a lot these days as I try and guess when my daughter's first real memory will burn itself into her mind. Will she be three or four, or older? Will I be in it? I wanna be in it bad. I want her first memory to be her father, standing mid-stream, his fly rod arc'd, a silvery trout the size of a hanging provolone dancing across the shimmering ripples.

Or I want her to remember a Christmas morning where Dad and Mom come into her room just as she's beginning to stir. We lift her out of bed and set her down and take her hand and lead her out into the living room where we've already cut the lamps so that only the lights on the tree illuminate the world. Magic reds and blues and yellows and greens glinting off the garland, sparking off the tinsel. I want her breath to flip over on itself as effervesence shoots through her heart like a jar of lightning.

But, I know. That isn't how shit goes. With my luck, her first memory, that first tiny Polaroid magneted to the fridge door in her sweet little head, will more than likely be something weird. Or gross. She'll pop out of bed some night and open her door all by her big girl self and wander around some, looking for Mommy and Daddy. She'll pitter patter across the carpet, into the kitchen, across the cheap plastic floor. She'll poke her tiny nose in the small opening leading into our bedroom: and see two pink Orcas wrestling while the dogs lay at the foot of the bed, damaged beyond comprehension by years of witness, years of lying there, inches from the deed getting done. Christ, I hope not. For everyone's sake, but especially my daughter's.

No, it can't go that wrong.

Chances are Violet's first memories will rise up out of some common afternoon. When nothing seems remarkable or exciting, when raindrops are pinging off the front window glass and there is the slight waft of burning toast rolling down the hall, something, some abstract moment in time, will speed down out of the Heavens and suction cup itself to my little girl's history. And then it will have begun, for her. The long winding train of days hooting its whistle at the bottom of the mountain and rolling out for the long journey to come.

Maybe it'll happen some Saturday morning, when I'm microwaving frozen pancakes.

I don't know why I wonder this shit. It could be because I'm constantly staring at her from across the couch or in the rearview. I'm always looking at her in strange wonder. It fascinates me more than anything that has ever happened: what is she seeing right now as she is gawking at that tree while we're stopped at a red light. What does she feel when she catches her first glimpse of me or Monica in the early morning kitchen. What the hell is she thinking when she's all pensive in the tub each night, the warm bath water floating her plastic boats around The Cape of Her Toes as she just sits there and  stares hard into the eyes of a Wal-Mart Brontosaurus.

Life is always going off all around her. Around us. Like paparazzi flashbulbs. A hundred times a day, I see her registering stuff/ plugging in facts/ smiling at her own homemade notions as they skip out across the backs of her eyes. It thrills me. And not just because it's my own kid, though I know that's a huge part of it. It just makes me damn giddy to think that somewhere, at some random second down the line, I might just happen to saunter into someone's very first memory. Little old me, the star of Act One.

That floors me.

And so, I keep barging into her fields. Outta the corners of her eyes, I come wandering out, standing in front of The Wonder Pets or whatever she's trying to clock on the tube; the lumbering oaf who knows where the food is/how to make the room dark/when to come in in the morning. That guy with the Pancake Power, hanging around like a playa on the corner, trying to crowbar his way into something real real good.

The dude who swipes the diapers: finagling to be in the shot when the mighty shot gets taken.

The Diaper Champs.

Sometimes I try and just eat the pain. I waltz up to Life's Buffet and take a few chilled shrimp, a couple dipping carrots, some onion rings. I pile on fried mushrooms if they have them. I take soup ladles full of olives, dump them down on my dish. Then I come up to the Hurt. The Pain. Big salad bowls full of coppery bullets for shooting yourself in the foot. I scoop some out. M-80's with nipped fuses for blowing up in your face. A couple of those. Then I move on, I guess. Over to the taco bar or wherever.

Still, its the self-inflicted explosions where I tend to make my mark.

Sitting on the couch the other night, I'm sipping on a glass of wine, letting the buzz roll uphill into my head, when I decide that now is a good time to let Monica know that I went ahead and created one of those baby registries on Amazon. You know: for free shit in the name of the unborn. I pop open the computer all smooth and cool and find the little list I made and then ease it on over to her lap. I'm feeling good about what I've done. I'm feeling confident that this is somehow a charming piece of husbandry I've accomplished, planning ahead for the birth of our boy by sitting on my ass and selecting material goods that we don't really need or even want. Still, I get dazzled by my own notions sometimes. I get to thinking that, Hey...this is what people do...and so here I am doing it...so we must be just regular people afterall, huh?

That's when I fuck things up, it seems.

Monica looked down at my creation for a second. This was during a commercial for one of her true crime murder shows, mind ya. I don't try and just introduce my notions when she's in the middle of watching some story about someone's swollen bloated grey body being discovered in the upstairs bedroom after the neighbors called the cops to complain of something ripe drifting down the damn street from the house with nine rubber-banded morning newspapers stacking up on the porch. No sir. I time this stuff, or at least I fancy myself timing this stuff, with impeccable precision. The truth is, though, that I don't know what the hell I'm even up to.

Anyway the detectives spewing all their bullshit gves way to a commercial and Monica is looking intently at the items I've decide we need in order to properly welcome a boy to Earth.

"Why do you have another Diaper Champ on here?" she asks me, without looking up.

We already have one of these things, where you can hoard dirty diapers until you can't even lift the damn thing anymore it's so weighted down with your laziness. I figure, hey: Two Kids=Two Outhouses.

"Well, I thought we probably want one in each room, right?," I tell her. See, there I am thinking ahead again. What a guy. What a beautiful thoughtful guy.

"No," she announces bluntly. "We have one already. Why would we get another one? One is enough for both kids."

This throws me off a little. I mean, yeah, of course one is enough. But I had the notion, you see, that two would be better than one. Three would be overkill, naturally, but two, in my mind, seemed perfectly rationale. A nice seventy dollar item someone could buy us so we could store up twice as many kid shits inside of our house.

"And why are you getting the pink model for a boy?", she says.

Ugh.

"They didn't have any other colors. I figured we give the pink one to Violet and the old one to the new kid."

"We don't need two," she says again, putting the kibosh on it.

I let her comments slide off me. I'm a little bruised, but we're hiking down into the list now. And there's other stuff.

That's just when she comes at me with :" We don't need another changing table, Serge. We HAVE one already. That's ridiculous to get another one!"

That's it.

Now, I'm bleeding all over the place, all over the fucking Micro-Fibre. Wounded. Rattled. Cornered.

I scramble for words.

"Yeah, well don't you think we should have one for each of their rooms, you know, in case one of 'em's napping and we have to change the other one?"

I throw this out there, feebly, I guess. Everything in our house is loud. Taking a coffe mug out of the cabinet sounds like carpet bombing going down. Sneaking into the room with the changing table probably wouldn't be any real disaster/any louder than anything else, but I don't need to fess up to that this minute. I'm insulted. She's questioning my whimsical list.

"No," she gurgles. "That's completely dumb."

Inside of my head: I rise from the couch in slo-mo and rip my flannel open/buttons flying and make an Incredible Hulk noise as she notices the thirty pounds of explosives I have taped to my torso on a wintery Saturday night; her eyes bug out of her face and KA-BOOYA! I jihad the rest of the night due to her sound reasoning (aka in my world: Bad Rudeness).

I bite my tongue but I'm warm from the wine and my simple-minded attempts at great things have proven my downfall. I'm embarrassed and ashamed; although, in truth, each of those emotions seems a bit of a stretch for this particular situation. But that's me. When cool and dapper might bring me the world, I get out the Flame Throwers.  In the ephemeral moments, when a man made of strong stuff would assess these offhanded comments from his wife and maybe parlay them into some sort of reckless animal sex with her, on the coffee table or up against the front door, I instead invite all of my demons down from the Heavens, to come and hang out with us, The Bielankos.

I don't remember what I say. I'm a grenade launcher. I'm launching grenades.

Monica's trying to make amends as her murder show comes back on. I hear her through the lapping flames, through the collapsing timbers and beams.

"This crib bumper is cute, we could use that," she offers, her voice barely cutting through the roaring inferno.

And she's right. It is fucking cute.

It's way fucking cute: airplanes and ships and trucks and cars. But it's too late for me. I leave a trail of oathes. I march over the burning carpets. Gobs of smoke get in my eyes. And bursts of fire too. I storm off into the nether regions of the house, into small caves up in the hills: a broken man.

No, actually, a broken fat sack of cheap wine, but whatever.

Dear Son, you are going to have to share a Diaper Champ with your big sister. Deal with it.

I love you and so does Mommy.

Hurry up.