Tag: parenthood
-
Looking for the Green Comet
It’s 10pm in Silicon Valley. This winter night is oddly cold and clear, good timing for a drive into the hills. My old sedan climbs up La Honda Road, nimble on the switchbacks, clutch adjusting the gears easily to changes in grade. Redwoods on both sides loom large in the dark. A sharp left onto…
-
Blood Moon
At 4am, the flower moon is pale and brilliant in loam-dark sky. A cloud passes in front of it but does not alter how it shines through the dining room window into our darkened apartment. The glass vase on our wood table holds a bouquet of white roses eerily aglow in its light. Each blossom’s…
-
After Thanksgiving
The Day After Thanksgiving, 2019 It is still dark when I get out of bed and go downstairs to begin my morning. Dawn starts to brightens the kitchen window. The metal pot in the coffee maker sings a merry tune as hot water drips into it. My wife and son still asleep, I have a…
-
Elephant Family
The matriarch is named Gaia. She has led them hundreds of miles from the savanna through salt flat to a river where they can drink. Thirst slaked, the herd continues south to the Okavango delta, passing through veldt rife with lions. One night, the parents must scramble to shield their young from the big cats.…
-
Speech Delay
Twenty-seven months, with a speech delay, my son has not started calling me dad. But he acknowledges me anyhow. For instance, lately, when he wakes upset at 3am, I am often the one he reaches out to in the pre-dawn dark. Most of the time, a soft pat on the back and some reassuring words…
-
Bison
The framed photograph of a bull bison hangs above a roll-top desk where our son in his high chair can see it while he eats: tonight, hamburger mixed with puréed pears. He waves at it, chewing a spoonful of meat, this image captured with a hunter’s eye. The beast in profile stands on a dirt…
-
Seeing at Night
Some things are best observed with peripheral sight – a star at dusk whose light has just emerged; sidelong we can perceive in a darkened bedroom that a child asleep in their crib still breathes.
-
Over the Fence
My three-year-old drop-kicks his ball over the tall vertical slats of the fence surrounding our yard. To him, it simply disappears. He saddens, tantrum imminent. We hurry through a gate to where it landed in the neighbors’ driveway. “You kicked your ball over the fence!” I say, not anticipating this will be a revelation. Boundaries…
-
Vaseline
Which puzzle piece was she putting away, which plastic ball and rattle, which toy car – each one tidily returned to its home, books back on the shelf, clothes in the dresser, getting ready to head out the door – when her baby in his play pen somehow found a jar of Vaseline, removed its…
-
Stored Milk
Stored Milk for Our Son Breast milk keeps in the freezer for six months. That is about half his lifetime ago. October now, what he had at bedtime my wife pumped and stored in the middle of spring. They say an infant’s saliva contains instructions for the mother’s body, a recipe to make the nutrients…
From the Firefly Galaxy 