What?

S insisted on calling the baby something sort of cute primarily because her currently pregnant sister did a similar thing. Anyhow the decided upon name was sprout because it met all the requisite qualities of cuteness. Unfortunately for her I don't enjoy being told, well anything. Ergo; I took to calling the unborn little thing after the guy pictured above. I'm unclear on why this isn't a good name to call a baby as I find the little critter to be absolutely adorable.

S: I wish you wouldn’t call it scrat.

M: I just think sprout is kind of girly.

S: What if it's a girl?

M: Who said I wanted her to be girly?

Incidentally I'm hoping for a girl for reasons I've probably already stated.

Here is a poem that I didn't write.

The Conversation
By Jane Hirshfield
A woman moves close:
there is something she wants to say.
The currents take you one direction, her another.
All night you are aware of her presence,
aware of the conversation that did not happen.
Inside it are mountains, birds, a wide river,
a few sparse-leaved trees.
On the river, a wooden boat putters.
On its deck, a spider washes its face.
Years from now, the boat will reach a port by the sea,
and the generations of spider descendants upon it
will look out, from their nearsighted, eightfold eyes,
at something unanswered.

In the meantime we've discovered a brand of food that goes by the name of Sprout and clothes that have sprout emblazoned across them. Curiously we have yet to find a brand name food called Scrat with that strange rodent clutching an acorn. Sometimes capitalism just doesn't make sense.

This story kind of hit the mark for me in the Atlantic fiction issue. Of late, I've been into family sorts of stuff.


Some Random Fiction

We stood on walls smoking cigarettes waiting for the pretty girls to pass us by. The sky was every shade of blue that you could imagine that summer, and when the mood was right, near sundown, I'd often fantasize about painting it. Of course, we didn't have shi- to do because as Ray said, "Ain't no pretty girls in this town."

Instead we brought boxes from home and played cards in the alley, betting the cheap sums we got for sweeping floors for old men that moved like birds, their frail hairs like feathers in the wind, guys who's wives were so long dead or run off that they imagined often that they were still there and had imaginary arguments with piles of bones. Crazy old Irish types with hair growing in their ears and along the mottled skin of their knuckles. Pale faced waxy bastards who nipped off the bottle at lunch out back, keeping watch over the blank cement parking lot lined by tires and pockmarked by trash, a couple of nondescript trees pushing up through cracks in the pavement.

"Get back to work you lazy bastards," they'd yell if they saw us shirking duty to study them like the anthropologists that we'd never be.

Years later we took a road trip out west, on a beach somewhere in CA with Tony and Ray, we stood at the edge of the cement where it met sand and admired all the pretty girls walking dogs or just lying out in that gd beautiful sun, purer than we ever could have imagined. It was then that I first heard the cry of a seagull, and I swear to you, it's the most mournful f-ing sound in the world, it reminded me of those old men in the parking lot at lunch mumbling to their dead wives ghosts. I picked up the football and tossed it to Ray who was running a fly pattern towards that immense green ocean keeping time with his feet on the shore. We were home.