8 pounds, 6 ounces

The trajectory is good.  He’s growing, and steady urine flow whenever the female docs take a look.  You need to remember that.  How small he is.  How helpless he is.  How he responds to white noise.  How he slept this morning as we prepped the house for Grandmom’s first visit.  The cutlery sparkling.  The doctor’s appointment tests passed again.  

Old King Cole was a merry old soul… the circle of things.  J. Anderson M. tied these flies in 2000 for J. Anderson M.  If only he knew that 22 years later, and 15 after he slipped the bonds, they would hang in a namesake’s birthing room.  We cannot know the future, we can only guess at it, and do our best in helping usher it forth as best as we may hope.

I keep coming back to Scafell, that conversation in 2017 as the last full consideration of whether this was the type of life to come.  And the answer was no.  And the Bark was meant to solve the Ahab question.  And instead, Daddy Long Legs.

Moments of epiphany.  AA can deal with the flights.  Cape Town has to be the route.  Book it tonight, in faith.  Remember getting tongue-tied at grace with mom, who still seems strangely caught off guard by it.  So let’s bring her to church next week?  So she can see M and what she’s already developed?  Seems most natural.

A good day today.  A nice rest, a Killick for M, and thoughts of magic.  The Old King Cole was bought in 1982.  It is nice when things come around.  Potent.  Recollections of whether it was ok not to have put vasoline on the ass.  Grandmom teaching the swaddling, the accepted advice of putting to sleep on the stomach.  The comforts of this house.

And dreams of how to write it.  Taking shape a bit.  Has to be addressed to him.  A memoir about how he came to be, roundabout, but uniquely told.  Lessons and humility and magic and … I don’t know.  You were going to write in the Domus and they tore it down.  You were going to write and going to write and finally started in the MFA.  Then you took a break because you knew you needed time for the story to run it’s course a bit further.  

Now you’ve paid for this house so you can do it here.  On Garrett’s street, in Penney’s neighborhood.  Make it a good one.  He’s going to be.  I know it, aye.