Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, though not noticeably

Water: a tiny little pond in the laurel preserve

18 June 2002: Leaving

When Nisou asked if I could drive them to Boston Tuesday morning, not leaving as early as I had rigidly planned was a fine trade-off to having two more hours of her and SPG and our baby. We had a leisurely start and drive, stopping for Emlet to nurse in the mountain laurel preserve in Union and in Framingham to give CLH her new sweatshirt and see her restaurant, and then finding the friend's house was easy, considering it was Somerville. Plus it was about two inches from Jessie's. How much of a Worlds Collide moment would it have been to mix Nisou and Jessie? How bizarre that Jessie would then have met CLH, Haitch, and Nisou, while Nisou and Haitch have not met?

(I mentioned Haitch's collection of vintage self-help books to explain why I had 1967's The Normal Woman in my suitcase and a reprint of a 1938 chapbook About Kissing. Nisou said, "I want to meet HAO!" which shows her excellent taste.)

I wanted to be shut of the hideous car and the sooner I got to Boston the quicker that would happen. I left Nisou &c chez their friend. For the last few minutes of the drive, Emlet had wanted to nurse, so as I said goodbye I leaned over the suckling baby to kiss her mother's forehead. Then I stroked the baby's cheek with my finger. She actually unlatched from the breast, the better to turn her head and smile at me.

If I hadn't already been smitten, that would have been the end of any resistance.

I dragged myself to the door, reluctant, and returned to my goddaughter to give her another kiss and cheek-pet. For a second time, she unlatched, turned her head, and smiled.

Oh my goodness, I believe my goddaughter loves me.

---

I found Jessie's house without a problem and parked in the two inches she had left me in the driveway. The difference between last June and this is impressive. The dentist office's suspended ceiling is gone. Many layers of really unbelievably ugly wallpaper are gone. The floors, after all Jessie's worrying, are wonderful. She showed me their scars, which I declared to be character. She showed me her dining room (I think) and I noticed that a white wall is actually palest blue. The lead-painted, claustrophobic-with-a-hanging-cupboard staircase is clean and pretty. Her computer's desktop shows the cover of Blueberries for Sal.

Then I noticed the box of paper cranes under and a sheaf of square colored paper on her desk. Although I'm not a regular reader of Jessamyn's, I knew of the thousand cranes campaign through Melissa. "Oo, can I try one?" I asked. "Take a brown one," said Jessie.

I have given her shit about that since then, but now that I've written it I can stop. She says she didn't know I wanted to make a crane, that she thought I might want just to mangle a piece of paper. Whatever.

So we began. She also asked me how much origami I've made--I stopped in Brownies in second grade--to gauge how pedantic to be. The first step is to fold the paper in half, and from the Goodnight Moon game and the magnetic Tinker Toys and from, believe me, countless other nonphysical incidents, I know I'm a linear thinker. I would have folded the paper along its vertical or horizontal axis to make a rectangle, but I wouldn't've thought to make a right triangle. Eventually I called it done, and I tossed it into the box with the others. How remarkably unsentimental of me. In my keepsake box I have a paper crane HEBD made for me in college sometime.

Eventually I told her to tell me when it was one o'clock, because then I would have to leave. It was 12:59. She came to Boston with me, steering me across the river onto Mass Ave, after which I would have been fine if Boylston or Dartmouth or St. James had not been ripped to shreds. I circled in, and Jessie pointed out that this was not the Marriott, which I had told her was our destination, but I did want the Westin, and I didn't crash the car into a ball of flames even once.

I don't travel well. Especially when my passenger calls me a freak when I bleat "Puppy, puppy, puppy!" about a yellow lab on the opposite corner. Me a freak, and her the one with the marmoset song. I ask you.

We walked up Newbury and through the Commons and separated at Park Street Station. Remarkably opposite to one time before.

It was 2:30 and my flight was at 4:35, and I got there by 3:00 and waited and waited and waited and saw a year-old, four-toothed human who did end up sitting immediately behind me on the plane on its mother's lap there more conveniently to pummel the back of my seat with its demon hooves. After the seatbelt light went off, the mother released it to menace the cabin, to dump a magazine over the seatback onto my head (I handed it back to her and did not receive an apology), and generally to get in the way such that when eventually it met with a mishap and cut its mouth, I was neither surprised nor (terrible person) sympathetic. She shushed it with a breast and it went to sleep, in which state it neither grizzled nor kicked, an improvement.

Nisou had asked me if it was difficult for me to be or to watch my three best friends with their children, and I was touched at her concern but no, it wasn't, I was only happy to see them with fulfilled wishes. My sister again expressed doubt about my own happiness in nonbreedinghood, but my usual if-I-like-the-parents-I-might-like-the-kid approach continues. If suddenly I get babyitis and coo at the sight of an infant instead of calling it "it," then I shall question myself.

And then Haitch picked me up and then I was home, Blake screaming himself hoarse at my approach. Who thinks I don't have a child?