In Memory of Owen Hunt Richel

He was six years old and had been battling lukiemia. He died last night. Daryl and Charlotte, his parents, were an example to us all of love, courage and grace in the face of the hardest choices anyone would ever have to make.

I grieve. Less so for Owen because his time might have been short but he was loved fiercely and often and is now out of pain. I grieve for his parents, lovely people who are now faced with their own battle to heal. You don't bounce back from a thing like this, not quickly anyway.

This has been a strange time for the LUC and I. The following is an email I sent them on Teusday.

>I wanted to add to Claire's thoughts. Monday was a very odd day for
>us. To see Owen in such a state and realize just how great the
>difficulties of being a parent can be was very sobering. I had thought
>that to go from that to the first shadowy glimpse of our child-to-be
>would be hard.
>

> But it wasn't. In fact what I took away from our time with you,
>Charlotte and Owen was entirely positive. It was a realization that
>love begets strength even in the face of such terrible difficulties.
> I'm sure you've had your black moments, moments when you felt
> you couldn't continue, couldn't make one more hard decision.
> And yet the people I saw on Monday were making those decisions
> and contemplating more with a grace and a strength that I
>couldn't imagine having. Couldn't imagine that is until I looked at
>that tiny figure on the ultrasound monitor.
>
> Daryl and Charlotte, by allowing me to share in this difficult time, however
> briefly, you have shown me a glimpse of what it means to truly love a child.
>No matter what happens in the end, your ordeal will have had at least
>that one positive effect in the world, an effect for which I'll be forever
>grateful.

Yes you read that right, I'm about to be a father.* This isn't the way I wanted to announce this but you can see how Owens illness and death and my impending fatherhood are all mixed up in my feelings. Daryl and Charlotte were two of the first people we told about our engagement and about the pregnancy. (Sorry Mum.) Mostly because it was a good way to distract them from their worries.

So now we all go on. Daryl and Charlotte to their grieving and healing and the LUC and I to our wedding and baby prep. I hope that our happiness will help them just as the example they gave me of good parenting will help me. I am going to hold what I learned very close as I take this journey into the deep, dark, mysterious jungle of fatherhood.


*Yes, yes I have details. As of today we're 14 weeks and 1 day in. The ultrasound and blood work showed normal development and reduced the likelihood of having a Downs Syndrome child from 1 in 686 to 1 in 6000 or so. The tyke was 7.5 cm long. We don't know the sex yet and aren't going to find out, kinda seems like cheating. Yes the marriage proposal took place before the conception. We really didn't expect to conceive on the first try (I'm trying very hard not to feel too manly about that). The wedding going to be 2 weeks before the due date. I hope our child is like us in that he or she is never on time for anything. There's a wedding web page in the works for updates, I'll post the link as soon as it's up and running. And finally remember: wedding gifts and baby gifts are two different things.

Can he tell me where my keys are?

We live in an increasingly superstitious world. The rise of religious fundamentalism, the popularity of the new age movement, the increase in psychic and ghost hunting shows on tv all point to this. It scares me.

It scares me far more than the drunk guy who came up to me as I was unlocking my bike and insisted that I was going to die. I have to say he was spooky. An older guy in a nice suit and overcoat with shiny shoes; he wasn't an incoherent homeless ranter. He was however, very insistent that getting on my bike was going to be fatal.

Pah, I say. I know folks, nice, normal, intelligent folks who would have taken him seriously. He was well dressed, he could have been a psychic who earned his living of the lottery, right? This is the danger of letting the para-normal into your life. You decide to believe one thing without insisting on good evidence and that can be the start of a downhill slide. If you're willing to believe X despite a lack of proof, why not Y or Z? Where does it end?

It ends with allowing some drunk who knows nothing about winter cycling project his unsubstantiated fears onto you. There's more than enough to worry about in the world without that sort of nonsense.

Going on

We, all of us, cannot see into the future. We stand in the hall and peer around the corner and are greeted with an imperfect view. The difference is that when I look ahead I see nothing but silent dangers lurking in the shadows. Others see infinite possibilities, a path that can lead anywhere.

I'm so very tired of fear and yet there's so much in this world to be fearful of. I do my level best not to lie to myself, take pride in it in fact. But you have to deceive yourself just a little bit in order to be happy. You have to tell yourself it's all going to be alright even though sometimes it most definitely won't be alright. You have to purposefully ignore the unpleasant realities that you can do nothing about.

I'm learning how to do this, being forced to, truth be told. And like many a child I'm coming to this education unwilling, grumpy and uncooperative. I just hope that by nap time I'll be so entranced by the shiny blocks and rainbow crayons that I'll have forgotten that I was supposed to be throwing a tantrum.

Dang

I've had a very bad week. So now that the new one has started, technically speaking, I'm hoping for an improvement.

Wish me luck.

My morning

I left the LUC asleep in our bed and rode out into the blizzard. It was hard.

She's really ill, wheezing and coughing all night, and cold despite three layers of comforters, touque and scarf. I piled all my clean hankies on the bannister, she's going to need them. She called me a "good man" for going to work despite her plea to stay home and muttered something about "...taking care of your obligations." as I tucked her in and rustled away in my cold weather gear. Yah, it was hard to leave. Was it the right thing to do? How do I decide which obligation is greater?

The blizzard promised by Enviroment Canada wasn't so bad. The wind had died down from the 60km/h gusts of the night before but it was still snowing hard. The snow was 5cm or so on the ground, more where it had drifted but the riding wasn't too hard. There had only been one bike and a couple of peds before me on the bike path and fresh, un-tramped snow only makes it a little harder to pedal.

The streets were worse. The uneven packing left by the cars is a bit tricky. It can push you around as you move from one density to another. My glasses were fogged over pretty bad, I hit the surface streets after sweating my way out of the valley. I could see big shapes fine but the subtle differences in snow conditions? No way.

The trick is to trust your skills. Hold the bars gently, ride it out as the bike slips and turns and above all: relax. Being tense leads to overcorrecting which leads to bruising.

Not being able to see perfectly actually helps. Instead of anticipating how hard that next streach is going to be and thus getting tense, you simply ride through it and react only to what actually occurs.

Using the right bike helps too. My fixed gear has very narrow nobby tires. They cut through the snow to the hard surface underneath much better than fat mountain bike tires.

As I move into this new phase of my life, marrriage and some other big changes, I'd do well to remember all this. You learn the skills you need and practise them as best you can. You put on approriate clothes and make sure your tools are in good working order. Then you relax and ride through it and if you make a mistake? Well, bruises heal.

An Hour and a Half

So, do you want to hear about how I proposed to the LUC? Sure you do, the spam I get implies that the internet is full of romantics, well, er, something like romantics anyway.

This is a perfect story for my new expanded content blog. It features two things I'm passionate about in the same way I'm passionate about music: the LUC and bicycles. Sure, I haven't made a secret about my bike fetish on this blog, but I don't think it's clear just how important they are to my life.

You see, the LUC and I met through a shared love of bikes. She does a bike traffic report on the local campus and community radio station. It's an antidote to the ususal "There's a stall on Whitemud Drive." and "Watch out for radar northbound on 109th Street." sort of report you get on commercial radio.

I used to listen every Wednesday morning to this lovely Australian voice enthusing about all things bi-wheeled and human powered and wonder just what she was like in real life. At this point I'd been commuting by bike year-round for about a decade but I wasn't really part of the bike community. Indeed, I didn't really know anyone in any of the sub groups that can be labeled "Bike Nuts". If had been part one of those groups I'd have met the LUC much sooner.

To speed up a long story, she held a contest and I won. All I had to do was guess the email address she'd been given by the radio station and drop her a line. I was the only one who entered and she presented my prize (a bell) on-air. That was the beginning of our story together, and the end? Well, it's nowhere in sight.

Let me make something clear: the nature of marriage should be entirely up to the individuals involved. So long as they're consenting adults anything goes. Religion, government and families should only be involved to the extent that the participants wish them to be involved and my feeling is that institutional intervention in affairs of the heart should be minimal if not completely absent.

So why get married?

The LUC has made it clear that she's willing to make a long term commitment to our relationship without the rigmarole of marriage. I mean, she's said she's willing to have a child with me, and if that isn't a long term commitment? Well, I'll buy a Hummer and start voting Conservative.

The problem of course with children as sign of commitment is that that is a commitment through a third party. I'm not the sort of person who'd walk away from any child I had any part in creating. This means of course, that even if the LUC and I can't sustain a relationship I will always be a part of her life. Pretty obvious. So before we have that external tie I'd like to make a commitment to her and her alone. It just seems like the right thing to do.

On to the story.

This summer we'd discussed getting married and agreed that is was a good idea. This discussion took place at a fine restaurant, the kind where the wait staff not only take the time to know your name, but also treat cyclists who change into their fancies in the washroom exactly the same as they treat those who debark for SUV's in tailored suits and designer frocks.

Our conversation was overheard by our server and she made a joke that involved asking if we were married. I replied that I had in fact just proposed, mostly joking. The LUC looked me in the eye and said "No. No you didn't. And you better do it right buddy." Ah, it's good to have unambiguous instructions: a fuss had to be made.

Over the years I've made a habit of tying little gifts to the LUC's bike when its been locked up outside. I've left chocolates, flowers, bicycle Haikus even a couple of chemical hand warmers taped to the saddle on a particularly cold winter's day. This seemed like a good place to start.

My original plan was to put some kind of clue on her bike directing her to the opera, where we had our first date. Waiting at the opera house would be one of our friends who would have the next clue directing her to where we first kissed where another friend would be waiting ect.

The problem was, I couldn't decide which friends to include and she wasn't attending her dance class (the scene of many a gifting) regularly enough to set a date to swing into action. The encroaching winter was also a factor; if I wanted a "Yes" making her ride all over the city in the cold and snow was poor idea. I had to scale it back a bit.

I ended up making a crossword puzzle in which the answers were Meet, Me, Where, We, First, Met. I tied this to her bike with a bunch of red and white balloons. I then rode along the route she'd most likely take tying balloons to lamp posts, guard rails and street signs. The point of the balloons was to make sure she find me and to give myself something to do to keep the nerves at bay while I waited.

It turned out that she knew where to go (she's got her some smarts, that woman o' mine) and I wasn't really nervous at all. Excited yes, but not scared. That was the most surprising part of the whole thing, my lack of nerves.

I'm a doubting person. On a good day this makes me curious and eager to learn, on a bad day it paralyzes. I doubt myself, my emotions and my motivations more than I doubt faith healers, astrologers and economists. But from the time I tied the crossword to her bike to when she said "Yes" I had no doubt at all.

I spent an hour and a half waiting the LUC to arrive. It was a time were I wasn't just convinced I was doing the right thing, because conviction is a conscious act and I wasn't really thinking about it at all. For that hour and a half I simply existed in a state were spending the rest of my life with the LUC was right. It wasn't a decision or any other kind of thought, it simply was. I'm hard pressed to remember another time when I felt that good.

So the next time she and I are having trouble (And we will, this isn't a perfect world, nor are we perfect people) I'll be able to look back on that hour and a half of peace and certainty. I might not be able to feel it in our moment of conflict, but I'll remember that I once did. I'll remember that I can feel that way and will again in the future.

And that my friends makes all the legal nonsense and chaos of getting married worthwhile.