Not yet

This morning I was at my desk, waiting to hear back from L about her trip to the sonogram place to check on the baby's growth. Around 11:30 she called me on my office phone. When I picked up I could hear her laughing to someone else, so I thought everything was fine. "I'm in a cab to the hospital," she said. "The baby's heart rate was low, so they want to hook me up to a fetal heart rate monitor." The doctors had told her that I should meet her at the hospital. A nurse had walked L out of the office to make sure she could catch a cab to St. Vincents downtown.

I had a conference call at 12, and was supposed to attend a hearing at 2. Everything was different now. I emailed a few attorneys and my secretary to tell them I had to go to the hospital. At first I tried to be discreet but I couldn't find the words so I said exactly what was happening. I didn't care who knew. My wonderful secretary came to my doorway and helped me think of things I needed. We decided I should take the subway. I gathered a few work items, grabbed my lunch and the New Yorker, my headphones. "You know, this could be it," I said.

I was so nervous I got out at the wrong subway stop, walking briskly up 7th Avenue in my ill-fitting dress shoes at a clip that made my lower legs ache. St. Patrick's Day revelers were everywhere, laughing and plodding along in their stupid green t-shirts. A lot of green Yankees paraphernalia and orange wigs. In the hospital I remembered how to get to Labor & Delivery, but I had to stop at two different nurse's stations to find L. I thought of the other times I had made similar trips, navigating an unknown hospital to find my wife hidden in some small undistinguished room.

She was lying on her side in a hospital gown, a nest of tubes and wires snaking out from her belly. The room was filled with the constant, reassuring thrum of the baby's heartbeat. She was smiling. Everything seemed to be fine.

We sat there for almost two hours, as doctors and nurses came in and agreed that things seemed perfectly normal. We watched a little bit of TV: some CNN, some TLC, the "Full House" episode where Michelle learns to tie her shoes and Uncle Jesse admits he never graduated high school and decides to go back. It wasn't as poorly written and un-funny as I feared it would be; it wasn't bad at all, except for the unnervingly intimate close-ups. I've never seen a sitcom with such tight close-ups. It was like "60 Minutes" or something.

Ultimately they discharged us; L got dressed and we staggered back out into the day. A part of me had hoped this would be it, that the day would end with a baby. But I suspected we would probably just head on home. The doctors concluded that the low heart rate had been a fluke: maybe L had been sitting in a weird way, maybe the baby had been squeezing the cord or something. Who knows. Nothing to worry about.

We stopped at the bookstore visit with our friends, and ate lunch at Subway. We both returned to work rattled. I had a couple of beers at the office's St. Patrick's Day happy hour, organized my personal emails and eventually went to hip hop. Class was great tonight; we had a sub, and he was doing really intricate, asymmetrical stuff, based on the California style of krumping. Then I came back home to see my pregnant wife and wind down this day.

Now at day's end, I'm glad we were able to go through a dry run of things. L told me she had initially gone to the wrong floor of the hospital. Now she knows which floor to go to, and I know which subway stop to take.

On my subway ride down to the hospital, I had started to get excited. If the baby was going to be born today I could just wear my suit at the hospital for the next few days, my nice starched shirt getting wrinkled and soft after a couple days of broken sleep. This necktie would always remind me of the day my daughter was born. The work I brought would have gone untouched, but I might have read the New Yorker. We didn't have a lot with us, but it would have been enough.

There was that sense, riding the train down to see my wife and my daughter, that this could be it. The question kept rising in my mind, and the realization that there was no wrong or bad answer made me revel in the asking: Why not today? Why not right now?

Eventually, soon, we can answer. But not today.

"Key be to lock"

Last night at hip hop we were doing some hard, intricate stuff, to some new song built around that old Digable Planets couplet, "We be to rap what key be to lock." There were a lot of regulars there and there was a great energy in the room -- the air felt hot, electric. Some of our teacher's cool hip hop friends came in and joined the group, and that amped things up too. I saw them and I thought, hey I can do that. By the end of the night I was sweaty and my knees hurt from jumping and coming down just so, but it was fantastic. On my way out one of the teacher's friends stopped me to give me five (or do that urban handshake thing, you know) and was complimenting me and saying I was the one to watch. He turned to my teacher and then she said, "Oh, him? That's my man, I love him," all matter-of-factly, like it was as obvious as anything. "He goes in."

Tomorrow L and I are going to Miami for three days of sun-splashed leisure. It is a rare vacation in which none of our relatives are participating (except Little Man, of course). We're staying at a fabulous Donald Trump resort property just a little bit north of Miami, with a beach and several pools and plenty of restaurants. I don't know if we'll ever venture out of Mr. Trump's comforting, opulent arms to actually check out the city, but I think some beach-side R&R will be enough. We will read books, L will get tan, I will get tipsy. And I love the fact that we're staying at the Trump International. If there's not a solid gold bidet in our room, the concierge is going to hear about it.

Inside the fortress of solitude

I haven't said very much this weekend. L went down to Florida to see her grandma, so I've been on my own since yesterday afternoon. I have taken this time to briefly withdraw -- from the world, into myself. I feel like I needed time to regroup. Today I only left the house to go to the farmers market, and then again to eat lunch and read "The Power Broker," and finally I went on a walk around the block a couple of hours ago. I have spent a lot of time reading and watching television. I watched "Sophie's Choice" and "The Contender." I thought a lot about writing, which I've put on the backburner after a couple of daunting weeks at work. I've been listening to a lot of music, too, and when John Mayer's song "Home Life" came on, I felt that strange feeling of nostalgia that music can provoke. It is almost palpable, like drunkenness, like feeling something rolling over your shoulders and consuming you. Hearing that song made me think of how much my life has changed in three years, made me think about how I live and what I have now. It was one of those nights where I was just shuffling through all the music on my ipod, rediscovering old stuff and cobbling together a strange and rich medley of stuff, enough to put me in a reflective mood.

Throughout the day I wondered if I should call somebody up or try to meet anyone for a meal or a drink, but I decided not to. Not to mention that the list of potential invitees now seems pathetically small. It was a beautiful day and I felt bad for not running or spending more time outside, but it was enough to run my errands and feel the breeze coming inside, through the plants and the herb garden perched on the fire escape. I didn't even shower today. But that was my choice, and I figure tomorrow when L comes back I can get all spruced up and be sociable. Today it felt good to dig in.

Also, last night I went to an intermediate hip hop class and really got my ass handed to me. It was pretty tough, intricate stuff and I realized I was out of my league about twenty minutes in. There were only a handful of us in there. Two of the other people had clothing with dance studios' names on them, which was a bad sign. Somebody else was some high school prodigy who had learned choreography from our teacher's DVDs. And there I was in my running t-shirt and sneaks, knowing this may have been a mistake. The teacher, who is a pretty accomplished dude, taught really quickly and didn't break things into eight counts. Instead everything tracked the lyrics of the song, so it was tough to place it within the music. Once I realized that he was really hitting the bass notes, things made more sense. By the end of the class I was about 70% there, I would say. It was fun but also very trying. He was calling me out at times during the class, telling me to not think too much and get stuck in my head. There were moments when I would feel those first hot pangs of stress and panic and embarrassment, and I tried to push it as far away as I could. Beneath the immediate knowledge that you alone are very conspicuously not doing something correctly is a deeper and more gnawing realization that you are not as good as you think you are, Mr. Hot Stuff. It was not fun in those moments. And frankly, if I want to feel bad about myself and get yelled at, I just show up at work. No need to extend that into my...hip hop life, as it were.

Maybe that class is what set me on this course for the last twenty-four hours. Quietness, minimal talking, books and the tv, a few strangled verses of old nostalgic songs. Yet for one day it's enough.

Michael Jackson

I always felt a connection with MJ. As a kid, I found the fact that he had the same name as me confusing, but vaguely positive. Whenever my parents played "Beat It," I would start dancing furiously in a move that came to be known as the "Boot-head Shuffle." Even now, when I hear those first few strains of the song -- those guitar chords pulsing relentlessly, the drum kicking in -- I still feel the ghostly echoes of whatever that old feeling was. Whatever the feeling is that makes a three year old plaster on a scowl and then dance like his ass is on fire for the next four minutes. When I heard "Beat It," I didn't even know the force that was driving me, but lord knows that same thing still pushes me forward every day. I must have heard "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" around that time -- I remember thinking how cool it was that Michael Jackson had a tiger on his album cover -- but nothing shook me up like "Beat It."

Only later did I go backwards to his earlier work -- the disco perfection of "Rock With You," "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough." (Hell, only a couple months ago did I hear "P.Y.T." and think to myself, wow, this song is great.) The kid who did those songs, the kid dancing with his big smile in a '70s spacesuit amid the green laser lights, is the one we've all been mourning. He seems so fresh and talented and new, even now, even knowing everything we do. As an obnoxious seventh grader I wrote a paper about MJ and how weird he was, and why that might be. His decline was such a horrible spectacle. Our shameless pleasure in watching him destroy himself was only tempered by the knowledge that real kids actually seemed to be getting hurt. Had he died tragically in, say, 1992, can you imagine the sterling legacy he would have left? Nothing worse than a few weird habits, a chimp, strange but harmless.

But then again, if he departed in 1992 we might not have had "Remember the Time," and that was my song. Also his later stuff -- "Break of Dawn" and "Butterflies" breathed some life into his music on the contemporary R&B charts.

He was a tragic figure, but there was a time, a time of "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" and the Boot-head Shuffle, when he seemed to capture everything that was great about music and let everybody else experience it, too. He was the genesis. At hip hop on Wednesday night we did "Thriller" as a tribute, and coming up this week is "Remember the Time," but our teacher took a few minutes to talk about her own experience of MJ -- the fact that she had auditioned for his last volley of shows in London, that the energy in the audition room was palpable and unlike anything she had seen before, that the people dancing there were giving everything they had, sweating through their shoes, even though Michael wasn't even in the room until the final round, when he was merely a soft presence in the back row of an auditorium. She said she was telling us about that experience because it didn't solely belong to her, but it belonged to all of us, to everyone, and that we should share it too, because it carries on. And so it does.

Inspiration

Two things:

At hip hop tonight, as people were getting tired and frustrated with not getting it right, not being as smooth and sharp as we all wanted to be, our teacher watched us from the front, sitting on her haunches against the mirror. "Think of when people tell you, 'no, you can't,'" she said quietly. "This is when you say, 'oh yes, I can.'" There was a murmur of assent, and then we did it, tight and razor-sharp. Turning over her words in my mind, thinking about how the last few weeks have been, I almost got a little emotional, somehow.

Later I was at Chipotle picking up some dinner on my way home. I was sweaty but jubilant. As I stood in line one of the girls behind the counter was talking about me casually to a coworker. "I like him," she said to her colleague as she cut lettuce or something. She saw me looking at her and smiled. "You look like you're on a talk show!" This was perplexing. "Like, 'General Hospital'!" Apparently my devastating combination of bland good looks and big teeth adds up to a possible career in daytime television. That's cool, though -- I'll take it where I can get it.

Oh yes, I can.

Champion of the world

Seven pm found me at hip hop class, at Alvin. I've realized that if I change into my gym clothes at work, and quickly dart from my office to the elevators without being spotted by anyone wearing business attire, then I can nimbly walk over to 55th and 9th in about fifteen minutes.

This was my third time at this class, and the teacher, who is awesome and pretty funny about the whole thing, was playing some straight-up Usher: "Take You There," great beat, catchy tune, exactly what I was hoping for. There were some moves where I could really get into it, add a little swag or aggression, make it look sharp or loose or fluid, however it needs to be done. About halfway through the class I realized the teacher was watching me, with a half smile on her face. After the combo, she stopped and said to me (in front of the other 20 or 30 people in the room): "I am so glad you are taking my class. I've been watching you since day one, you don't know it but I have, and you're all" -- and here she started rocking my dance face, thrusting her hips and swatting away at some imaginary partner -- "I love it! So masculine! I love your attitude, I am so glad you're here."

Well. I think for me, and perhaps many other men, having a woman like that compliment your masculinity basically opens the floodgates. After that I was trying to do good, but not too good, and just rolling with the beat.

A little while later she was watching me again, and I saw her, so I was trying hard to not screw up (since overconfidence and overthinking is the end of me every time) and afterward she came up to me for a pound: "Yeeesssssss! You do it!" A couple minutes later she had everybody change directions, away from the mirrors, and she told me and a few others to go up front, where we were basically leading everybody else. Then she made us go up front again, once it was time to face the mirror.

As the class drew to a close, after a few more rounds of our eight-counts, when my heart was pounding and I was good and sweaty, after she gave me a few more tips ("push your arms out -- it looks cool the way you're doing it, but for tonight just push your arms out"), she spoke to the whole group: "Don't think too hard, because when you think too hard you lose it. Find the nuances in this song -- this dude [pointing to me] is rocking it out [here she started working my dance face again, people kind of laughed], he's doing him and grooving out...He's feeling the nuances of the beat and not worried about the counts." She went on to highlight somebody else too, but I was not listening that hard. I felt that weird mixture of pride and embarrassment -- pride that you are doing good and doing it with passion, tempered by a little embarrassment that you're in the room to to begin with.

I have really been missing the hip hop element of my life, and tonight was spectacular. I didn't think I would be able to go to class because of work, but I'm so thankful I made it over. In some ways I feel like such a fish out of water at Alvin: too male, too old, too lawyerly, too married, too white. But to lose those preoccupations and just revel in the moment -- and then to have some outside validation that yes, I get it and yes, I belong here -- it makes everything else feel real and true and authentic.

Old white married lawyers doing eight-counts, what?

Swagger

Monday night found me at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, where I was summoning all the courage and swag I could find to walk through the doors and into my first hip hop class in months. I've been thinking about it a lot, and after months of no eight counts, no energy, no hip hop, I was really missing it. It's good for my mental health. I spent a few weeks poking around the internet and decided to just go ahead and try it out. I'm a grown-ass man with a life and excessive graduate degrees, and I will take hip hop if I want to.

I arrived insanely early to the class and just stood there and fretted, leaning against one of those ballet bars and wondering how I had got there. "Hey," I thought. "I'm a lawyer trying to dance, not a dancer trying to...do the law." For some reason this made me feel better, even though at this point, I might be a better dancer than I am a lawyer. I don't know if that's a good thing or what.

Eventually everyone arrived and there were thirty or forty people in the studio, a lot of women of varying types and sizes and a fair number of guys too. I didn't feel as uncomfortable as I feared. As we got started, we did some familiar stretches and then learned a pretty simple combo of four eight-counts. The song was "Pop Champagne," which is deceptively simple but has some deeper stuff you can really get into. I got looser and was really into it, riding the beat a little bit, putting my own touches in it and letting the music determine everything. I forgot how much I loved the positioning of hip hop, the confidence, the swagger. In a strange way I feel like I forgot about that attitude and how much I gain from it, even if I am about as un-hip hop as it comes, based on the exterior.

Anyways, it was a really fun time. I will definitely go back. Near the end of the class, the teacher shut some of the lights and raised the curtains that blocked the studio from the sidewalk outside. Suddenly one side of the room was all glass and the street was right there, with pedestrians walking by and some people already peering inside at us. The teacher split us in half and we took turns dancing on the floor, spread out, with nowhere to hide and plenty of room to move. I was hesitant for a moment, kind of embarrassed and second-guessing my presence there, but the beat was undeniable, and soon I was up there with everybody else, getting lost in the music, rocking the dance face, and oblivious to the world outside the glass, because for those fleeting eight counts none of it mattered.