Five AM has always been a very worrisome time for me. For instance, there was a time in my life when I avoided the dentist like the plague, and in the wee hours of the morning I would find myself staring at the ceiling – or into the red of my digital alarm clock – worrying about my teeth falling out of my head. Whenever money was tight, I would worry about losing the house. When I drank and smoked regularly, five AM was a good time to worry about becoming a cancer-ridden cautionary tale to the friends who shared my habits. I would worry about the condition most of my organs, brain, kidneys, liver and stomach. I would worry about my memory and whether or not I had a case of early onset Alzheimer’s. If I had a twitchy muscle I would worry that it was Parkinson’s. In other words, saying I’m a little bit anxious is like saying the Niagara Falls boat ride, The Maid of the Mist, is a little bit moist.

Interesting thing about these pesky worries was that they would always evaporate within half hour of getting out of bed. One minute I would making toast, brooding over the inedible loss of my front teeth, and the next I would be as right as a sunny day. I had spent a more than I decade compartmentalizing my bad habits – drinking and smoking once a week, usually Fridays – and somehow I inadvertently managed to do the same for my anxieties.

But thanks to regular visits to the dentist, better money-management skills, and NOT being allowed near Ava (my nine-month old) after having a cigarette, most of these worries, and their causes have since receded.

Except for one that I can’t seem to shake.

It’s about time, and my inability to control it.

More specifically, it’s about having less and less time to achieve what I need to do.

OK, if you must know, it’s about being ever-closer to middle-age and thinking, every morning at – you guessed it – five AM: I’m thirty-eight and only a poet or I’m thirty-eight only a ESL instructor. If I’m feeling particularly cruel that morning, I think to myself I’m thirty-eight and only a daytime supply ESL instructor with a permanent night-time gig, but that one does take a lot of effort at the crack of dawn.

Of course, I do try to defend my career choice by telling myself that I’ve always needed something to pay the bills while allowing me to write, and as luck would have it, I’ve fallen into a career which I find very fulfilling, take pride in, enjoy thoroughly and – if I may toot my own horn – do very well at.

It then comes back to my writing. More specifically, my poetry. How much am I willing to gamble on even a moderate level of success/recognition? If you have a look at the bios in any anthology, quite a large number contain the phrase discovered posthumously. Now, I just want to stop right here and address the people who routinely say: Who cares about recognition? Just enjoy the act of creation!

To those people I would like propose that they burn all of their finished works right now. After all, if it’s just about the agony and ecstasy of artistic creation, then they should have no trouble putting a match to all of their finished artwork. Most would balk at the suggestion, demonstrating that in even the most idealistic of artists, there’s still a part of them that wants a little recognition for their effort, something that says I was here. I just happen to embrace that part more openly than others.

Of course, one of the drawbacks to embracing a demon is that tends to whisper in your ear at five AM. Which you can’t help but respond to. And in the end you have the equivalent of Gollum’s monologue going on in your head and you haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.

Or maybe that’s just me.

When you right down to it, this last remaining anxiety of mine is simply a matter of me not reaching the level of success I thought I would have reached by this time. I guess one way of looking at my predicament is that it’s a good thing to always expect better of yourself. Or at least that is what my online cognitive therapy avatar would tell me. But you know, I never cared much for those Pollyanna types anyways.

I have no choice. It looks as though, despite this last remaining persistent worry, I’ll just have to keep plugging away until my number comes up, or until 100 years from now, some crusty old critic discovers one of my poems in yellowed magazine, and thinks: meh, not bad, but what’s with all the kvetching?

Breathchrystal

 
I.

YOU MAY confidently
ragale me with snow:
as often as I strode through summer
shoulder to shoulder with the mulberry tree,
its youngest leaf
shrieked

II.

PATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK
of your hand.

From the four-finger-furrow
I root up the
petrified blessing.

 
Paul Celan (1920 – 1970)
 
 

 
Saturday, mid-afternoon at the local park. Young dads like myself are out in full force. Some are here, I’m sure, to spend some time with their kids after a busy workweek. Most, however, are here to ensure that their wives get a much-needed break and don’t end up, as my better half once put it, “going a little cray-cray”.

As I wait for my turn at the swings, I overhear some fathers talking tech. There seems to be rapport among the members of my community that I have missed out on for the last six years. Part of me wants to introduce myself to these guys, being a proud new father just like them, but I simply don’t like people enough. Sometimes I wish I were more like my father, who would start conversations in elevators. Ava seems to share my father’s appreciation of people, as she stares intently at the little people running between the swings and the slides. Speaking of swings, or more specifically, the baby-bucket swings, the children using them at the moment look suspiciously over-age. I feel like I should say something, but then I remember I am a strange man in a park filled with youngsters, so I decide keep my mouth shut.

You think I’m being paranoid? I kid you not. These parents look relaxed, comparing their Galaxies and iPhones, but each one of them is vigilant as a East-German border guard. Once in my pre-child days, when my sister visited from overseas, and we took her kids to the playground. We were sitting on a park bench, and I was just about to take the first sip from my cappuccino when she leaned over and whispered, “keep your eyes peeled, there’s a strange guy over there.” I looked, but I couldn’t single him out, but nevertheless I ventured the question, “how do you know he’s strange?” to which my sister answered, “he’s got a beard”.

You have no idea how precarious my situation is. I am one baby away from having my description read out on the local police radio frequencies. It doesn’t help that Ava’s primary interest right now is the other children. This coupled with my rather anti-social demeanour probably makes for a rather confusing mix for the other parents, much like a pit-fighter who uses luxury foot cream.

A very small part of me worries they’ll think that Ava is not mine. This is not a bizarre thought for me. Often on long walks I daydream about being questioned by the police over the matter, my imagined reaction varying from a polite and cooperative Ned Flanders to Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield.

Now, it may sound like I’m trying to portray myself as some kind of misfit, but that’s not true. Looking at myself then at the other fathers, it is impossible to distinguish me from them. All of us are a little doughy and worse for wear, wearing casual-fit jeans and sporting a little Saturday stubble under our chins.

All in all, I guess I haven’t yet embraced the social aspect of fatherhood, or at least mastered its vernacular. In other words, I am not yet comfortable with speaking “parent”. Not to worry, though. Ava, whose presence in my life has reacquainted me with public swimming pools and petting zoos, hasn’t quite mastered the Queen’s English yet, so I still have some time to prepare.

 
 

 
Ava has become fascinated by her reflection. Because of this, lately, I’ve been spending more time looking in the mirrors around the house. It could be that I haven’t been getting much sleep lately (my fault: gaming on the weekends; during the workweek, pre-dawn anxieties about not fulfilling my mother’s prophecy of becoming Prime Minister of Canada) but I think my own reflection is finding it more difficult to hold the pretence that I am still young and beautiful. This is something that photographs of me had given up doing long before I turned 35. In regards to photos, I’ve come to expect that no matter how much effort I put into posing, I’ll always end up looking like the victim of a kidnapping. I’m surprised I haven’t taken to holding the front page of newspaper in front of my chest whenever anyone reaches for a camera.

Until lately though, I could always blame my god-awful appearance in photos on simply being unphotogenic, like a recessive gene. But now that my daughter has me looking at my haggard appearance in the mirror twenty times a day, my reflection is unable to keep up. It just doesn’t have the energy to lie to me anymore. Sure, there are still a number of ways I can position my head which make me look 25, though all of them are simply variations on something I like to call the “jaw-jut”, which tightens the skin around the lower half of my face and temporarily smoothes out my ever-growing set of truckers’ jowls.

My mother says she is always surprised that when she looks in the mirror, she expects to see an eighteen-year-old looking back at her. While some my say this is one of life’s small tragedies, I am going to go out on a limb and say that my situation is slightly crueller. For years now, my mirror has been hiding the truth that my photographs have been trying to show me. For years, I’ve essentially been acting as though I look like a twenty-year-old. At best, this could mean that I’ve been acting like the energetic jokester who never fails to brighten every workplace he inhabits. At worst, it means I’ve been behaving like the pudgy guy in the office with the pleated pants and ponytail who believes all the women there think he’s cute.

Perhaps I should view this as an opportunity. Maybe by accepting the newfound wrinkles and face-girth my reflection has been working so hard to conceal, can I finally accept – at least partially – my own mortality. Maybe that’s what fresh-faced, button-nosed daughters are for: to encourage you to look and accept how quickly time moves.