Column 2 – What happens in Vegas… Can change your life.
Originally published by reimagine.me
Photography: Shannon Cottrell

WHEN WE LAST got together, I was telling you about how the recent birth of my daughter Olivia not only launched me into the growing ranks of AARP-eligible, first-time daddies, but also had the effect of turning the somewhat abstract notion of my own life into something very real, very fast.

How did that happen? Well, like a lot of good stories, this one begins in Las Vegas.

That’s where I was having dinner one fateful evening with my then-wife, a beautiful dancer. Yes, I was once married to a dancer. In Las Vegas.

It wasn’t like that.

She was a classically trained ballerina who left home when she was 17 after winning scholarships to fancy dance companies in New York. She joined the New Jersey Ballet and then toured with Phantom of the Opera. In her mid-20s, she landed in the apartment building in West Hollywood where we met, the only residents who weren’t transvestites named Mistress Ramona, or lesbian hairdressers who liked to watch Xena: Warrior Princess all day long.

I proposed on her birthday, October 1, 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks and weeks before my father would die too young of cancer. Getting married felt almost defiant, like an “up yours” to the messed up state of the world. Let love rule, right?

We got married in a magical ceremony on Father’s Day weekend. Then, I got my dream job as the number-two editor at my favorite publication, the Los Angeles Weekly. The magic continued. I bought a fixer-upper in the last affordable, cool neighborhood in Los Angeles right before real estate went ballistic. For a while, life was like a movie starring our dogs, our friends, and our big backyard where there was always a barbecue or a good conversation going on.

But, back to that dinner in Vegas.

Six years after I asked her to marry me, she and I are out for our anniversary at one of those fancy Las Vegas steak joints that look more like nightclubs than restaurants. At this point, we are splitting time between LA and Vegas. Or at least she was. Soon after we got married, she was hired for Celine Dion’s long-running residency at Caesars Palace called A New Day. Then, she went on a couple national Broadway musical tours and finally back to Vegas for Monty Python’s Spamalot.

She was a dancing gypsy, who’d always dreamed of running off with the circus. I was a curmudgeonly, homebody neurotic who didn’t travel enough to see her on tour or developed feel flu-like symptoms every time I drove to Vegas. Resentments were building. I wanted her to live my version of our life. She wanted me to live hers.

So, there we sat at dinner, wondering if that husky guy at the bar was really Kenan Thompson from SNL. We decided it was. Then, we decided to get divorced.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. And certainly not that easy. But, just like asking her to get married seemed to be a catalyst for building up a lot of things, things to which I’d firmly attached my sense of identity—husband, homeowner, breadwinner, dog guy—deciding on divorce seemed to trigger a series of events that would painstakingly tear away any illusions I had about who I was and what it meant to be a man.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my long journey to my new life as an old dad.

That new life was ushered in by my daughter spending her first five days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. With all those monitoring wires and IVs sticking out of her, she came into the world a flesh-and-blood marionette. Camping around the clock in the NICU listening to ominous sounds coming from the machines monitoring your baby’s vitals is not the stuff birth-story dreams are made of. But even so, I was struck by how Olivia was already teaching me things.

Sweet, tough, stoic, she never complained and took all the love and mother’s milk we could bring her with a preternatural graciousness. In return, we made sure we were there every time Olivia woke up so she’d learn that she could trust her parents. Our bond was forged under challenging circumstances and maybe it’s stronger because of it.

Finally, we left the hospital with a healthy baby. At the time, we were living in Summerland, a sleepy beach town just south of Santa Barbara. We took turns sleeping in a rocking chair wearing her like a new favorite t-shirt, listening for every heartbeat and breath while staring out into the endless ocean.

Maybe Olivia’s rough introduction to the world shouldn’t have surprised us.

Cooking her up, almost literally, was no easy task—one that took us deep into the often trying, sometimes hilarious, and very expensive maw of contemporary baby-making medicine.

We’ll get into that story later, but first let me offer this. The fact that just minutes before sitting down to write, I was holding my beautiful daughter to my cheek while her beautiful mother danced and clowned around for our amusement is something of a miracle.

Not that I think that every new life is a miracle—there’s no such thing as seven billion miracles. But I do think living can be full of them. Or, at least a first bike ride, a first kiss, a first novel, or, some days, just putting shoes on and going out the door can often seem like one. These “miracles” come in all sizes. One of the biggest for me was that I got my shit together enough to meet Olivia’s mother.

But first, I had to die…