Wednesday

In the evening she'll be five months old. In the morning she bunches the blankets in her hands and chews on it vigorously turning her head from side to side, rooting, but appearing to be some confused lion cub on the Serengeti.

We sit on the front porch and I point the people passing by. "That's a car," I say, as she watches it roll by. I don't bother explaining to her the complex relationship we have with vehicles, fossil fuels, green house gases, wars overseas, that can wait for another day. Today I am trying to teach her what a car is.

I arrive home after midnight and spend five minutes trying to figure out what type of flowering shrub we have in our side yard. AS it nears one I concluded that it probably doesn't matter, the flowers won't be any whiter.

Yesterday I walked outside to say hello to our neighbor. She said, "I saw you planting flowers. I called my family to come help out. I told them that you probably didn't want to live next to the ugly house." I say something in response but wish I'd said that we put up a fence to hide how lazy we were in our own yard. Self-deprecation is a fine art.

After her nap I bring her downstairs, so I can finish my workout. I talk to her while doing push ups. I giver her a large fuzzy polar bear that she starts to gobble up only to realize that the hairs from its back are unpleasant. I say, "This is the sort of thing that is going to help you get the President's gold medal in fitness," not knowing if they still make kids do that and remembering my own flexed arm hang of fifteen seconds. She starts to cry.

I had the impression this morning that the sun was shining, that Sadie had a dimple on her left cheek, and that today was the first day that things were going to change. I eat cereal in the morning, pears in the afternoon, this all feels so familiar. At noon she goes to sleep, I boil pacifiers, stuff diapers and refrigerate milk. I wear a shirt that says I am modern man, hear me help facilitate.

As we stand outside I say to her, "Perhaps I should have bought a rhododendron that was already in bloom." And as I'm about to ask her if she thinks the white blossoms with the pink borders will look okay she reminds me that all things will die in their time. And how in the morning, when the sun was streaming through the blinds and making shapes on the tile, I was making her bottles and thinking that I had met the first person who would almost certainly be at my funeral. And I wanted to tell her that they should plant something that day but to make sure that it was already in bloom. "You see," I'd tell her, pedantically, "you don't always have time to wait for the flowers."

And I screwed on the cap and went to feed her.