Summer Is Ready When You Are

(I don’t think I’m ready for summer, really; but I’ve no choice, and neither do you.)

My mother’s baby gift to us was a pack-and-play – like a playpen/bed you can fold-up/disassemble and take with you wherever you go, for newborns – and last night we moved it from the living room into our bedroom, positioned on Alecia’s side of the bed. We moved the red Ikea chair out of the room and shifted the nightstands, bed, and lamps away from the windows to accommodate this tan-colored furniture (that isn’t the proper word surely but I’m having trouble arriving at a better one) – there are three little bears hanging from an attachment for Malia to bat around or just stare at, whenever she gets here.

And we’ve come to crunch time, these crucial last eight weeks where for all intents and purposes our little bundle of joy could enter our lives at any time; this is the configuration our bedroom will be in until we leave the condo for good in late September. Someday I’ll be mercilessly boring Malia with stories about life prior to her ability to retain memories, and I’ll say something like “We didn’t always live in this house – right after you were born, we resided for a time in this condo in Baltimore County” at which time I will present digital photographs as evidence of this and Malia will marvel, as children will (I know I did when my parents told me we lived in D.C. when I was a toddler) at the fact that anything existed prior to their coming into being. When introducing her to my friends, I’ll become accustomed to saying things like “Uncle Bill” or “Aunt Sanjeevani” or “Miss Pearl” other authoritative variations, just as I call my godmothers “Miss Edith” and “Aunt Ena.” When as a youth I did something I wasn’t supposed to do, I was warned “Qui Dow, Raymond” by both parents – a benign but effective threat whose provenance and meaning I forget now. It will tumble unconsciously from my lips at least once in the next several years, I’m sure. The cycle – of what exactly, I can’t say, of life? Of parenthood? -- continues, and I observe it in quiet awe.

Malia has already shown up in a few of my dreams, tiny and pinch-faced, swaddled and cradled in my arms; the recollection of her face is a blur. Which attributes of ours will she have? Will she inherit our worst qualities, our best ones, or a mixture of both? Who will she become? How will she play well with others? Can we protect her from a world that seems to be more and more morally bankrupt? When she enters this world, screaming, naked, tiny fists clenched, will I be able to hold back tears? For years I never believed that I would be a parent – that fatherhood was something I wasn’t meant to experience; thankfully, I was dead wrong.

(Forgive the awkwardness of all of this – I’ve never been much good at writing well when writing about myself.)

And, in other news: We have a second baby registry now, at Toys’R’Us; Jef (er, Thom) discovers that to make it onto Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, a would-be contestant must know too, too much about Barbie’s extended family; Doug Coupland is still a lucky idiot; John Dwyer echoes DMX circa 2000 or so – “Shut ‘em down/Open up shop” – careerwise, sorta; man, I miss Chuck Eddy being at the Village Voice more now than ever; two of my favorite records of 2006 so far are named after a “body of water” (I believe) and a child’s writing instruments; amazing what Google discovers (I think I had this link years ago but lost it); as Doug Mowbray used to say with a cracked grin: “Be leery of Timothy.” (This article actually filled in a great many blanks (didn’t even know they were blanks) for me as I’d no clue Leary was ever a Harvard professor of psychology before fringing out into the countercultural LSD evangelist/guru the public consciousness remembers him as today – also didn’t know dude got pinched, broken out of jail, or shuttled off to other countries to escape prosecution.)