What on earth would inspire a dad to name his daughter superfluous?
Odd question as I lay there, well after midnight. It wouldn’t be right to say I couldn’t sleep. I had slept a little, nodding in my office chair while doing school work. All those nods amounted to a power nap and there I was, wide awake. It wasn’t the first time I’d been stuck in this late night cycle. Not even the first time that week.
The last time it happened I remember getting the sudden urge to put in some research into baby names. We’re having another daughter soon, and I’ve got no idea what to call her. Probably wouldn’t be that big a deal if I hadn’t made such a big deal out of the previous five kids.
If I had to sum up the past year in a word, what would it be?
That’s kind of how I came around to choosing the names of the previous kids. For instance, the year we bought our first house I named the son born that year Bezalel after the guy who designed God’s first house. So that he wouldn’t get beat up at school for such a weird name we stuck Christian in front of it, as a reminder to not get too comfortable calling this world our home. That, and I really like John Bunyan. There’s more to it than that, but you get the picture.
What’s a name for overwhelming? Hmm? In the course of the search I’d stumbled onto a guy that appears to have named his daughter superfluous. Weird...
Since I couldn’t sleep I crept back into my office to chase down a baby name. How to describe my office? It isn’t so much a place where work gets done. It’s more a place where work congregates, accumulating in massive, judgmental piles that glower at you. I have so much still to do.
I built a few oak bookshelves years ago, and though overflowing with lots of unread books, their shelves never bow. They fill one wall, while the credenza spans the opposite. I built it out of an old door and two unused tool chests, and it’s covered in stacks and stacks of additional books. They’re like rabbits.
Then there’s the boxes. Cardboard boxes, still with the white shipping labels on them from places like J.C. Whitney, Rock Auto, and Rubicon Express. Three of the four corners of my office are piled high with them, neatly stacked and organized. Three corners containing car parts from the four corners of the globe. World domination bearing down on me in the form of unfinished car projects.
Car projects that I’ve been working on for years. Or in some cases, like that of my Jeep, not working on for years. Kid number four put the brakes on that one. We needed a bigger car, one that would fit a family of six, and that’s why I bought the Mitsubishi. Years later, with an accumulated corner of car parts all its own, I’m seeing the repeating of the same dilemma. With family member number eight on the way we’ll again have more butts than seats. Next time I’m just gonna get a school bus.
Three corners of the office have towering monoliths to the projects I haven’t completed. Behind those are the rows and stacks of books I’ll read someday. There’s a computer buried in there somewhere that’s supposed to have all my school work on it. Much of that is unfinished too. The fourth corner of the office is behind the door, and it’s where I keep my fishing poles. It’s also where I’d like to keep the boxes of free time I wish I had, but that seems to be on backorder.
Jim Gaffigan said that having four kids is like drowning, and then someone hands you a baby. I’m looking for a name for baby number six.
* * *
I’ve never been a good gift giver. Birthdays, anniversaries, and Christmas mornings are not my best. I bought my mother a vacuum cleaner once when I was in college, not as a joke—well, not intended as a joke. I thought I was going big, getting her something practical and expensive. It didn’t go well.
More recently I thought it prudent to hide all my kids’ Christmas presents under the guise of a burglary. We’d go on a Christmas adventure instead, involving squirrels and talking trees. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that it was quickly and tearfully declared by my oldest son to be “the worst Christmas ever.”
Every December I ask my wife, “What do you want for Christmas?”, and every year she dismissively replies with a contented, “Nothing.” She doesn’t even want a vacuum cleaner. I know. I’ve asked. Or maybe she’s been lying to me all this time. Maybe she needs some coal.
Well, this past December, with my wife being pregnant with our sixth, I really wanted to get her the perfect gift. Based on my experience it had to be expensive, practical, and probably not a vacuum.
I thought long about it and decided on a refrigerator. A big, shiny one with one of those little water fountain attachments on the front. One big enough to hold more than a half week’s worth of groceries. Big enough to feed an army of growing boys, and maybe with electric shock handles to keep them out when she’s not looking. One with doors that swing open like a set of French windows to crisp, blue, LED lights so you can actually find stuff. Doors with unbroken plastic shelves in them so the condiments don’t go spinning out onto the floor with every opening.
I found a few online. Then I got my measuring tape out to see if these immense machines of modern convenience could even fit in my wife’s little kitchen. Alas, there’s a reason our current refrigerator is so small. She might first need a bigger kitchen.
It is now the end of May. You can see into my crawlspace through my kitchen floor. From the walls we removed layer after layer of wallpaper, giving up once we reached the Neolithic era. The kitchen cabinets are without counter tops, and the stove has taken up a useless residence in the dining room. Somehow my wife has been sustaining us by way of a coffee machine, an InstaPot, and a waffle maker. Miraculously no kids have starved and I haven’t been murdered for not finishing the kitchen yet.
Christmas was five months ago, meaning my wife is now five months more pregnant. It looks like a bomb went off in the kitchen, and we still have our tiny refrigerator.
* * *
Back at the beginning of 2020 I wish I had known how crazy everything was going to be going forward. I’m not talking about the world going crazy, four horseman of the Apocalypse-like. That stuff was all just background music to tectonic shifts in my own life.
Early in 2020, with much of the world put on pause, I found myself with a bunch of extra time on my hands. Seemed reasonable to go back to school to fill some of that time. I applied to a writing program and got accepted for that coming Fall. That September I would be going back to school for the first time in a decade.
Something else that I hadn’t done in a decade was change jobs, but I’d unexpectedly be doing that too in September. And then shortly after that someone handed me the news that we were having another baby.
There’s this thing Psychologists use to measure stress called the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, which is basically a way to put a number value to the stressors in a person’s life caused by big changes. According to the SRRS, these three good turns added up to 102 mean stress points, two points more than the stress associated with losing a spouse. And that’s before factoring in the crazy 2020 background music. “Too blessed to be stressed” comes to mind, and I’m sure we’ll be fine.
Regarding life changes, it was sixteen weeks into this latest pregnancy before we made it to the doctor. The nice thing about waiting that long is that when the nurses finally get you hooked up to that sonar machine they can already tell the sex of the baby. We were very happy to find out that baby number six will be another girl.
Our fifth child was a girl after a streak of four boys. Girls are weird. Even my wife agrees. But weird in the way that makes you want another one. Our house has three bedrooms upstairs, one of which is my office. I knew I’d be giving it up to the kids at some point, but am glad it will now be to a pair of girls. It would have been awkward explaining to five brothers why they had to bunk up Navy-style while their sister got her own room. Now I just need to figure out how to fit two girls amid the car parts, book piles, and endless monoliths of unfinished things to do.
* * *
“Hello. I’d like to introduce you to my daughter, Superfluous. We named her after those extra wood dowels you get with your IKEA furniture.” No one would do that. But then comes Asher, one of Jacob’s twelve sons in the book of Genesis, who with the arrival of child number five (only five mind you) has reached the point where this parenting thing has just gotten out of hand. Anything north of four kids is simply superfluous. Thus we got Serah.
At least that is what Dr. James Strong would have you think if you consult the Serah entry in his Hebrew and Greek Dictionary, as I was that late night in my office. I’d dug it out from behind the clutter and blew the dust off in an attempt to figure this weird name out. No offense to Dr. Strong, God rest his soul, but at this point he left the reader to do the leg work.
Serah, from Serach, and that from Cerach, all of which come most primarily from the root Carach. Here are words that don’t necessarily carry definitions as much as they do images. Images of a table cloth stretched out with a remnant overhanging every edge. Images of an unseen boundary that extends to the horizon. Images of a hand, open with all five fingers spread out is every direction. Of a covering that flows down over the shoulders in unnecessary splendor. Of a cloud extended to the point of disappearing. Of a vine greedily grasping for another place to grow. They are words for extension, for stretching, for excess, for extravagance.
Five kids would seem to encompass the idea. I think I see where Asher was coming from at the birth of his first daughter. Or maybe it’s just a misspelling of Sarah, which just means princess. That’s a name every father has called every daughter in every culture and age. That would work too.
* * *
At school I met a ten foot tall lumberjack among my classmates named Ian, who moonlights as an author and could make it as a voice coach for Hollywood cowboy actors. He’s somehow real and actually lives right here in my home state of Virginia. We hit it off pretty naturally, and he invited my family out to his place for a much needed Spring weekend of camping, hiking, and relaxing.
Spring time doesn’t really show up all at once in Virginia. Temperatures tend to vacillate wildly between “Is it still Winter?” and “Is it Summer already?” with a few stretches of perfect mixed in. Perfect is where all the outside comes back to life with chirps, warbles, purples, and honeysuckle breezes. My favorite season until Fall comes back around.
A weather front had moved in the day before we arrived to set up our tent. The sky was to be that deep denim blue all weekend with temps that make you keep a sweater to hand just in case. Perfect.
In addition to being a lumberjack and author, Ian is also something of an Appalachian mountain man, and was planning on leading our two families up his beloved Cove Mountain to the top of something called the Dragon’s Tooth. By two families I mean our two pregnant wives, mine at least seven months at this point, the eight children, two of whom still walk mostly by toddling, and the two aspiring writers, one of whom has knees that rotate on several axis that nature never intended.
It was a proud parade with the Spring’s handiwork on varied display by altitude. The redbuds were all but gone at the bottom of the mountain, but allowed the kids their crisp citrus taste after they’d climbed up to where the world was still a few weeks behind. Trillium blooms filled another strata of hillside as if a plane dumped out a load of wartime leaflets announcing the war with Winter was over. Even the green, overwhelming in attendance, held some odd allure in the shapes it could come up with. Leaves that looked like starbursts, some like dragon wings, and some whose insides held orange ink so familiar in the way it’d stain your kids’ fingers that you’d think it was where Crayola got their idea for washable markers from.
Then there were all the weirdo hikers. Saturday is like the rush hour of nature trails, and there are no H.O.V. lanes for your busload of kids to hop onto out of the way. Judging by all the looks, sneers, and comments we garnered you’d think we missed the sign at the trail head restricting the mountain to only those vaccinated against the deadly virus of reproduction. In fact, you’d think to all the D.I.N.K.s (dual income, no kids), empty-nester retirees, and college kids we passed along the way that we were some kind of apocalyptic troop of prophets, sustained on Goldfish and Honey Nut Cheerios, the forerunners of judgment on their fruitless lifestyles. I mean, when you’ve given up marriage and kids so you can don the trekking poles and knee high socks of a professional adventurer, and then you’re passed on the trail by a three year old in Crocs, it must really make you wonder who’s the crazy one.
Nobody died, but the beers Ian and I shared around the campfire that night really helped the “I’m getting too old for this” comments to subside. We talked about how much our governor is an idiot, how good our God is by comparison, how overwhelming work has been, and how family is the heaviest blessing in the world. At some point we switched to Bourbon so the conversations could go to the next level. By the time it was an hour past bedtime we talked about all the writing we still had to do for school.
I fell in a pool once as a kid before I officially knew how to swim. I remember my aunt standing there at the side, not to rescue me, but simply trying to help me realize that I hadn’t drowned yet. That’s how I learned to swim. This weekend was kind of like Ian standing on the side of the pool saying something similar. I haven’t drowned yet.
* * *
Eight thousand square feet is a lot of house. You could fit my whole house inside this thing four whole times with room still for a pool. My new job is essentially a facilities manager for several properties. It did not include this historic Confederate home when I signed on, but here I was tasked with the responsibility of renovating it. I’m not a general contractor, nor the son of one. Anyone who has seen the smoldering crater that is my wife’s 116 square foot kitchen would think this was a terrible idea. Yet here we were wrapping up the four month project on a light Friday just ahead of the deadline. Finished.
I don’t have a work truck. I brought this up during the initial job interview. It was going to be an issue. And Friday’s like this prove my point. My twenty year old minivan is an amazing machine, but she has earned far better than to be expected to haul around a metric ton of tools, building materials, and rubbish on a consistent basis. Especially since her first calling is hauling around a metric ton of children.
Getting a work van would be something like getting a raise.
Pay raises come in odd packages when your collar is blue, but I’ll take whatever I can get. I blame it on the poverty genes. Half of what’s going into the back of my minivan this Friday is stuff that most would have chucked right into the roll off, mistaking it for garbage. Half used pieces of plywood, three foot cuts of one-by trim, a five gallon bucket full of old wire, an old painting, etc. Stuff that served a purpose, but still has some use left in it.
The poverty genes are the reason I’m the only guy at work who takes home leftovers after the weekly staff lunch. They were passed down by grandparents that wouldn’t let you leave the table until all was eaten, passed down to them by memories of lean times and tales of potato famines. Share croppers and coal miners that made it through the hardest of times. If you have a junk drawer in your kitchen, you have some of these genes. It’s more advanced stages have turned many an Appalachian front yard into a junkyard after the garage was filled to the brim with Folgers coffee cans full of stuff to sort someday.
It’s not the same thing as being a hoarder. At least not in every case. For some it’s got more in common with somebody that buys more books than they’ll ever be able to actually read. Nobody thinks that guy’s a weirdo who’s gonna bring the neighborhood housing prices down. But then again I’ve never seen a front yard overtaken with dilapidated bookshelves with trees growing up through them.
Author Nassim Taleb says that it’s a good thing to surround yourself with as many books as you can regardless of whether you can read them all or not. The insurmountable keeps you grounded, but also keeps you grinding. I wonder what he would say about my office. I’m surrounded, not just by books I may never read, but by projects I may never complete. Is that good for you?
The poverty genes seem to backfire once you move up out of poverty. They don’t just turn off. When a man’s cup runneth over, as mine is with all of God’s good blessings, I’m the idiot running around looking for empty Folgers cans to catch the overflow. I was raised by heretics. You do not have to finish everything on your plate.
* * *
I’m sitting at my new job as I wrap up these thoughts, on the third floor of one of the buildings I manage. It’s a hundred year old church. The roof directly above me is all of slate, and it is pouring rain. Rain on a slate roof isn’t quite as sonorous as what you get with tin, but with rain poured out to this extent, and with no one else in the building, the sound is everything.
I make my way down a level to a door with no knob, only a slot for an old fashioned skeleton key. Behind this door is a series of staircases that ascends up into the cavernous attic above the church’s sanctuary. A place for changing those impossibly high ceiling bulbs, for housing urban squirrels long deprived of trees to call home, and also for the thirty something five gallon buckets I have spread out all over the place to catch the rain.
I’m up here to check for leaks, or more specifically the absence of them. Unlike the old slate roofing on the backside of the church where the offices are, the roof above the sanctuary was a clapped out asphalt job, patched and repatched to hang on twenty years past its service life. It leaked horribly, like a colander. We have just finished an expensive roofing project on this building, and I’m checking to see if all that work has paid off. Every single bucket, all thirty, are bone dry despite the heavens opened to their fullness above.
I collect the buckets. They’re no longer needed here. The rain may fall in all its extravagance, doing the work it was sent to do, washing the church in its living water. There’s no need to save any for tomorrow. Just let it wash over and run down.
I am not drowning. This year I am learning the meaning of Serah.