Mid-July we lost our passenger side mirror. Not lost, broke. Well, we didn’t break it. It broke. Something broke it. I don’t really know what happened. I wasn’t there. My wife was. She also doesn’t know what happened. She looked over and it was broken. She pulled over and got out and looked, no sign of what happened.

She pulled over near the home of my old-man-walking-to-work-friend Bill. I see him on his back deck when I go to or from the bus stop most days. A few days before the mirror incident he told me his wife was probably dying soon. I frowned and nodded and said “I’m sorry” and he pointed to the sky and said “it’s in his hands now.” I’ve brought him - Bill, I mean - some home-made sauerkraut twice, and we’ve talked home repairs and he’s compliment my kids.

My wife was worried she’d somehow whacked the mirror on a parked car. Bill didn’t see that happen. He said ‘what you...

The baby and I stepped onto the porch and a startled pair of goldfinches lit out of our front flower garden, yellow flashes tracing a sine wave across the street, arcing upward then swooping back down then up again to land in the tall pine in the yard of the across-the-street neighbors’ house, the pine where the owl lives. We saw it once when the across-the-street neighbors’ house was being renovated, back before it was the across-the-street neighbors’ house, when it was Denny’s house; Denny was the boyfriend of the daughter of the old man who’d lived there sixty years. Denny was fixing it for the family to sell. We made small talk most of one summer while I weeded the flower patch. He’d give me tips on tuck-pointing and I’d give him basil from out of my garden, little nothings to pass the time and create a bond but not too much. Denny scared up the owl one day while working on the...

She often calls herself “baba!” She says it two or three times while pointing at her chest and nodding her head. We often follow suit, calling her that as well. With the bigger two we tended to use fewer of their words, usually respondimg to their tiny-talk with grown up words. I don’t know why.
Baba’s not so much a baba anymore. What baba can identify itself as such? She’s 19 months old, more toddler now really. Mostly. Sometimes she become more baba. Like when she’s tired. Sometimes she gets older, like when she sits next to her sisters and leafs through a book,“mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm” as she nods and points at the words.

I think age is like an average over the course of the day. I am generally 40. I wake up feeling 50, caffeinated my way to 30 for a little while, then descend back to 40, and it averages out.

Baba’s gone younger, asleep in the carrier, her head nestled against my...

I saw the first of the season but my oldest kid says it doesn’t count because it wasn’t lit up on account of the daytime, and the one she saw lit up that night is the first. I suddenly can’t remember as I type this if she calls them fireflies or, as I do, lightning bugs. I worry in these moments of drawing a blank that I am not living my life attentive to what actually matters, too caught up in work and bills and Trump tweets and unlistenable music. I worry as well that I will end up with my mind mostly gone - was it dementia? Alzheimer’s? I can’t remember - like my grandmother.

She did a lot of my raising. My mom was quite young, 20. My grandma was 26 years older than that. My own advancing age scrambles the distances I remember, makes my memories inaccurate, makes them read differently now. Here, try this. Plot the following points: my mother on the day of my birth; my grandmother on...

A friend is out of town and I am taking care of her cat. It’s an easy kind of care. Today it took about 25 minutes of driving, round trip, and about 20 minutes out of the car. The cat’s old, more like an antique pillow than a companion it seems to me, so it’s low maintenance. This is the perfect dose of caregiving, I think. A short, easy bit of time, and it got me out of the house as a bonus.

My oldest daughter came along. I felt grateful for her company - I love her of course and like to spend time with her - and just for any company at all. I asked her about the book she’s reading. It’s something I’ve not read, some kind of magic library or something. I listened but didn’t retain. Her voice turned down the volume on my internal monologue - internal chorus, really - which is especially welcome in the dark and when few other people are around, as it can get pretty… well, not pretty.

...

We punctuate the gapers’ block of our adult life with food. Our anniversary came: take out, from the new greasy spoon soul food place near the strip mall. Our pool passes required a trip downtown to the Park District office: dine-in, from the local-food restaurant inside the botanical gardens. Our oldest kid’s wednesday karate class recurs: cakes from the bakery with the homey domestic name. Food costs money, though, and money’s been extra in demand this spring - some medical bills, a suddenly dead car, a leak in the roof - so we flirted with not getting the cakes this time. Like most flirting at this life stage there was no follow-through; we opted to stay the course. Cakes again.

They are something like the person pan pizza of cake. Each is about as big around as a softball. My wife wanted a change of pace (who doesn’t, really?), said “no cake for me this time.” I got her a whoopee...

Interruptions compounded! Defeat ensued! Same as it ever was.

I wanted to read something in an E.B White collection. In looking for it I discovered instead cat puke (I spare you, reader, the comparison I wrote between this feline effluent and a certain foodstuff; here as so often I know you will be ungrateful and yet I still serve your best interests, unthanked and unadorned). I cleaned that up then discovered that I have completely misplaced the White.

Ah well, I know some of his work is online, I think as I open the laptop, but no the battery is too low! The plug is in the case which is… where did I leave it? It’s not under the kitchen table where the speakers are plugged in, I often leave it there. It’s not in my backpack by the front door, I often leave it there. It’s not on the dining room table, I often leave it there. I hope it’s not at work, I often leave it there.

...

I read something the other day that said that it’s common for this to happen, where a marriage as people age the sex declines. That’s a real negative term though, ‘declines’. I prefer to call an efficiency increase. You can think of this as not doing the sex as often, or you can think of this as saving times and effort. I see it as retirement. I’m the sexual equivalent of a guy who goes fishing all the time - I lay around and nothing happens and nothing happening is the whole the point.

Now, I know, a guy looking like me, and I am at least as ugly on the inside too, people are not surprised to learn I don’t do the sex with great frequency. I’m not particularly insecure about this, but what I am is pedantic. I care about factual accuracy. That’s why I’m telling you I got three kids. That is proof, definitive proof that I have done the sex three times with the wife. I’ve done the sex...

The baby’s asleep in the carrier. The middle kid is watching TV. The big kid is out at a class with my wife. I got music on to keep the baby asleep. She didn’t nap today so needs to sleep or the evening will be all tears all the time, mostly mine, but if she naps too long it’s gonna mean a late bedtime and then more tears tomorrow, again mine, which let’s be honest are the only ones I care about. I got a timer set for when I gotta start getting set up to make dinner. Spaghetti and whatnot, it’s what I can do right now.
I saw some headline about changes in student loan repayment plans, am feeling real worried about that. I can’t meet my monthly payments right now, just been deferring that problem until some later time when I have older kids and more brain to think with. It’s like hearing a knocking in the car and just turning up the radio. How I live. Well, get through the day anyway...

She bellows as she runs. Objectively it’s a pint-size bellow because she’s only nine, so it’s easy to see it as cute - she’s a LITTLE person and it can be funny to see littles acting big - but for her size it’s a full body roar, and the urge to call it cute is dismissive. She’s a little PERSON and this is her taking on a real challenge. She bellows, runs, eyebrows scrunched, lips pulled back and teeth bared in a snarl, fists clenched and she runs toward the ramp and wall, and misses.

We’re at the kids ninja gym. She’s trying the warped wall. They have six walls in ascending height. She can do the smallest two, and is now working on three. She runs at it easily a dozen times, maybe fifteen or twenty or twenty five, in sets of three to six until she’s panting at the end of each set. She gets closes in the middle. “Daddy I touched the top this time!” I honestly admire the determination...