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The cyclocross season is getting underway, and so we took Bobo to his first race yesterday, in the park around Laarne’s (Belgium) castle, about 500 meters from where we live. In the fore Bobo, in the back former U19/U23/elite world CX champion and current elite Belgian national champion Niels Albert who finished second, behind the legend (and Flemish folk hero) Sven Nys.
To Bodhi’s birth announcement I added a small and simple poem (in Dutch), which evolved out of a conversation I had with a colleague and which touches upon the idea of a child as an anchor (just one aspect of becoming a dad), or conversely, upon the idea of the childless man adrift.
In English it would be:
————–
From the bank into the river,
from the river back onto the bank,
a great man feels forlorn;
a short rapid,
calm open waters,
a little man is born.
I got here (Ghent, Belgium and its perimeter) 20 years ago as an aspiring student in chemistry and I have lived here ever since apart from a sabbatical (with loads of travelling) in 2000, and a 4-year stint in the US of A (NC + OR) between 2001 and 2004. I lived in Ghent when I bought my first mountain bike, I will forever remember my Ph. D. years as some of the best in my life, the lady was in a lab across from mine, I own a house in the green belt around it, and so it was with great joy and pride that in the late afternoon of September-2, let’s say dusk was budding over Ghent’s historic spires otherwise the story doesn’t make sense, after the tough delivery that was Bodhi’s, I proudly pushed the big red button in the maternity ward of Ghent’s University Hospital (UZ), a button that together with other similar buttons in the few more hospitals embedded in the city, links up with the lanterns of the Sint-Veerleplein (a small square downtown Ghent, near the castle), and that makes these lanterns blink softly (when pushed). When the lights blink, the people of Ghent know a new baby is born in their midst, as such the idea behind Ai Nati Oggi (‘To who is born today’), the interactive art installation produced by Alberto Garutti, and bought by the city council.
A tough delivery it was, in that place of derelict buildings but great people which is the UZ, great people whose diligence, warmth, and expertise stole my heart, in the city for the city, I pushed the button and now became a father in Ghent too – full circle.
You gotta have the sticker. (Scenes of domestic bliss.)
His first bike-like contraption, a cool gift from his godmother, i.e. my sister.
Just to let you all know that the lady and I became parents yesterday, to a boy whose name will be Bodhi, as we think it sounds fun and it works across languages. More to come - for now it suffices that the mother and the baby are doing well.
Name: Bodhi Hardeman; date of birth: 02-09-11; length: 51cm; weight: 3230g; nationality: Belgian; favorite bike rider: my daddy
We’re 40 weeks past LNMP today (last normal menstrual period), and I’m beginning to feel a bit like Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, who couldn’t focus on his death penalty because of the fat droning fly in the room. It ain’t that bad of course, but here I am a few hours/days away from what will arguably be the most profound event in my life, the birth of our baby. I have had a very rich life so far, luckily without major losses (no deaths in first degree family for example), and so it shouldn’t be difficult for the baby to dethrone my 8th place in the 1998 Belcanto Classic, and the purchase of my first mountain bike.
There are times when a man should feel, but somehow gets lost in the no man’s land between ratio and emotions, the mind and the heart, and there are times when a man just feels, and I’m presuming there will be a lot of the latter, interspersed with some of the former.
I switched off my cell phone, had my last day of work yesterday, and it’s between the lady, me, and the galaxy now. I won’t understand, nor do I need to, I will feel and sometimes I won’t, but through the act of living I will live, and that’s all there is to it.
I’m going down now for a dry run. Scenario is the baby is coming this very moment and are we ready? (Though there’s a great soccer game tomorrow that I need…)
(My copy (bought it in the Duke University bookstore) of the great Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy says this about existentialism: ‘A philosophical and literary movement that came to prominence in France, immediately after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual as distinguished from abstract human qualities. Some see an existentialist precursor in Pascal, whose aphoristically expressed Catholic fideism questioned the power of rationalist thought and preferred the God of Scripture to the abstract “God of the philosophers.” Many agree that Kierkegaard, whose fundamentally similar but Protestant fideism was based on a profound unwillingness to situate either God or any individual’s relationship with God within a systematic philosophy, as Hegel had done, should be considered the first modern existentialist, though he too lived long before the term emerged. Others find a proto-existentialist in Nietzsche, because of the aphoristic and anti-systematic nature of his writings, and on the literary side, in Dostoevsky.’)
I haven’t touched a smoke in what is getting close to two years now, and I don’t think I have had a beer a month over that same period. I rarely go to bed after 11pm, I’m a stickler for eating healthy (with a vegetarian bias), and I run through my yoga exercises regularly (‘gymnastics,’ the lady would snicker), as well as exercises to strengthen my core. As a result, and of course combined with the miles I have invested (and a total lack of energy spent socially), I have been riding very well lately, also tapping into fifteen years of experience, doing the small things that make the difference, making the miles smart miles. There is no bike rider in the world that doesn’t treasure what George Hincapie calls ‘no chain days’, when as a rider you don’t feel the chain, and the legs brim with strength.
[Listening to Neil Young’s soundtrack for Dead Man, the Jim Jarmusch movie.]
The lady’s at the point where you can just feel the entire baby, with all its extremities, through skin that seems to be getting thinner every day now. He or she has started descending, on the way to into the world. Kids are life’s relay batons. (The handsome young poet, Mo_toothie, a Mountaintop regular, became a father a few days back, father to a boy – George D.) Two more weeks at most…
A nightclub sponsoring a cycling team, only in Belgium, and similarly it so happened that on Friday the 5th of July 1985, the great Ludwig Wynants won a stage in the Tour de France (a 215 kilometer stage from Reims to Nancy), riding for a team sponsored by Belgium’s biggest rock festival, back then Torhout-Werchter, now Rock Werchter, which kicked off the day after, and where Wynants’ victory was announced through the undoubtedly very powerful PA system, only briefly interrupting a line-up that included The Ramones, REM, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, The Style Council, Depeche Mode, Paul Young & The Royal Family, U2, and Joe Cocker, an announcement which was met with the applause and warmth of the Belgian crowd, as so it goes here when you win a stage in the Tour, in this cycling-mad great small country. I was thirteen back then, am a grown man now, and shall be a father soon.
There are quite a few topics I know quite a lot about, but babies isn’t one of them. In fact, I know next to nothing about babies. And so I listen to the lady, who is setting the direction, getting plenty of tips and advice from equally-pregnant colleagues, or colleagues just turned mom. Luckily a pregnancy lasts 9 months, so there’s ample time to prepare in every way, to get ready to be a dad. 6 months down, 3 more to go. I think about my kid a lot now.
I bumped into a colleague the other day that I hadn’t seen in a while and she asked how I was doing. I answered ‘superb’, and felt it too, a pre-baby bliss, further deepened by a lull in the project I’m helping to manage and the great spring weather we’ve had here in Belgium.
My mother’s brother migrated to Canada a few decades ago (he died of cancer in the meantime), but when he got his first son and called my grandmother here in Belgium to tell her (“It’s a boy,” he announced.), my grandmother erroneously thought his name was ‘Itsaboi’. Family lore.
We had a dog for a week and I studied psychology for a day, but there won’t be any turning back the clock on what isn’t even that far away anymore, August to be precise, when if all goes well I will become a father, for the first time. I’m over the moon I must say, an effortless father of 39, after two decades of freedom, one on my own, one with the lady, and fifteen years in the saddle.
