Oregon Humanities

New People

Hmm. The moments that most changed the way I think about the world, o dear sweet jesus yes I can tell you those moments, with glee and gaping, still. There were three of them, actually. One was at about three in the afternoon, and the others, I remember vividly, were 1:14 and 1:15 p.m. Those were the moments when people I had never seen before came swimming, literally, their arms milling and their tiny trout mouths gasping for breath, out of the woman who had married me some years before, after thinking long and hard about such a ridiculous proposition. I stood there gawking. The first one to emerge was a girl, although the way the umbilical cord was positioned made that a chancy guess for a while, and she didn’t say anything, and neither did I, and there was a great bustle of glittering tools and nurses, and I saw a spleen and some subcutaneous fat, just a very thin layer of it, a most amazing sight, and then the nurse herded me away from the woman who married me, who was woozy but thrilled, she said, faintly, and another nurse handed me the new person who had been living inside my wife, and we stared at each other, astonished. A most remarkable moment. I don’t think I have ever recovered from that. Soon after this, though, it happened again, and this time two new people emerged from the woman who married me, it was a parade of new people, but this time they turned out to be boys, and the lot of them have been on the run since. We take this whole thing for granted, it seems to me. I mean, I am a student of lust, and zygotes, and cellular division, and the unfurling of the brain stem, but the fact is that we say such things knowledgeably, as if we have the slightest idea what’s really driving the boat here, and when we thrash after words and definitions for what is driving the boat we are just as hapless and amazed and abashed and wordless. Those were the three moments that stunned me most, yes. This happens all the time, and you don’t need a license for it, and you don’t have to get permits or ear-chips for these new roommates, and it appears to be such a normal state of affairs that a lot of those new people get tossed in the trash, or buried because they don’t have peckers, or dumped in orphanages, or used for evil games or as fodder in wars, and some don’t even get names before they are thrown in the street to fend for themselves, and lots of others seem to be lucky, being born in a stable and wealthy country, but they get quietly raped or starved or ignored, which seems like poor resource management to me, inasmuch as they are so fresh and new from the factory where new people get made and mailed to us.

About Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of nine books of essays and poems. His novel Mink River will be published in October by Oregon State University Press. His essay “Irreconcilable Dissonance,” which appeared in the fall/winter 2009 Away issue of Oregon Humanities magazine, has been selected for the Best American Essays 2010, guest edited by Christopher Hitchens.

05 August 2010 | Posted by Brian Doyle in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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