Dear Diary: Season
The dishwasher’s non-working status has grown Really Old. And very distracting: I’m worn down by the anxiety of wondering if it will ever work again. (Actually, it’s not broken. The water intake filter is clogged, so saith the super.) That’s why I haven’t got much to report this evening.
That and Will. Will’s day care was closed for Easter Monday, so Megan brought him up to our place for a change. The blue room was transformed into the slumber chamber — the draperies can actually be drawn in here. The coffee table was cleared and set on edge; the Pack and Play took its place. Will got the idea, all right: he actually napped for a total of seventy minutes during the course of the day, a record so far as my being around is concerned. Megan and I agreed that Will ought to spend an hour or more in the blue room, at regular intervals, whether he’s asleep or not, whether we’re holding him or he’s stretched out in the crib. The two of us understand his reluctance to fall asleep from the inside.
At thirteen weeks, Will has come a long way from Day One. The impression of unimaginable development is paradoxically enhanced by his unchanging character—he has always been the one and only Will O’Neill. Every time he picks up a new trick, I respond as though he were now all grown up, finished with this childhood thing. And yet he is months away from eating solid food, much less crawling across the floor. He is, in a word, an infant. But when he gazes about the blue room in the draped dusk, it is obvious that he is at some level registering all of the stuff in here. When I whispered in his ear the question that I always get — “Have you really read all of those books?” — he smiled to one side, as if I didn’t know the half of it.
He likes to be held, and he likes to play. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose, but the boy could use a few lessons in decent dissumulation. He brakes from sixty to zero— from squalling infant to fun-seeking jokester — with shameless brevity. This reminds me of the more naive portion of my own childhood. I would convince my mother that I was too sick for school — no problem. Then I would give the game away by rearranging all the furniture in my bedroom. It does not yet seem to have dawned on Will that we are not out-of-towners.Â
I wish that there were a way to describe the exhaustion that Will leaves behind him (or that I carry away in my taxi uptown, if I’ve been at his house) without appearing to complain. Or even to seem to be excusing the trickle of my contributions to Portico. (I’m now I don’t know how many New Yorker stories in arrears, and I’ve got two movies to put up.) It’s not physical fatigue, but more a matter of wary remoteness, as if I were carefully avoiding the job of carrying a thought across the room. I certainly don’t mind. I’d much rather carry Will.