At a wedding long ago I met my wife's second cousin and his wife, both former CIA agents. They weren't analysts or Langley office drones but straight-up field operatives who spoke every Asian language and had spent their thirties in the deep jungles of Indonesia trying to dredge up support for cooperative right-wing military juntas or something. That's what I assumed: they wouldn't say a word about what it was they actually did there. Wood's cousin wore pressed khakis and a bowtie that marked him as unquestionably Republican. His wife was a quiet woman without makeup who was self-effacing to the point of near-invisibility. This was a perfect cover, I thought, for the deadly assassin or provocateur she probably was, with a checkered history of black ops in leftist guerrilla camps or rooftop-fisticuffs with Bakin double agents. Every time one of them picked up a toothpick or looked at their wristwatches I half expected to spot the secret detonators or tranquilizer darts they were ready to wield at a moment's notice.

But these were not spies in the way I had always thought of spies, though they were probably a lot like most actual CIA assets: incredibly smart, unassuming people who know how to keep a secret. When I was a kid, I always thought I wanted to be a spy. I imagined a life spent with an attache full of dossiers and passports representing multiple identities that I could slip in and out of like differently-cut bespoke suits. I checked books out of the library like The Encyclopedia of Espionage and An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets. I read le Carré and Clancy. I was pretty sure I'd be great at reading microdots and intercepting defectors while in deep cover. I kept spy notebooks (in code) detailing neighborhood surveillance: license plate numbers of unrecognized cars; suspicious dogs. I would practice stealth at night by sneaking downstairs to spy on my parents while they watched television. Fortunately my interest in espionage waned before I spied anything too traumatizing.

Lately, though, I've been watching a lot of spy movies again. The new Bond movies are good entertainment, and my wife will watch them with me for the obligatory Daniel-Craig-in-a-swimsuit shots (same with those Matt Damon punching-bag-amnesiac movies). These movies would have you believe all spies are both dreamy and tough, and only spend time in the most tastefully-decorated locations in the beautiful places of the world. The spy is never a tourist. He always belongs wherever he is.

Perhaps because of this, sometimes during the day I find my mind wandering towards dreams of cinematic espionage: I might be at a red light with two whining kids in carseats behind me and I'll close my eyes and picture myself driving up to some beaux-arts hotel on the French Riviera, leaving a clean Aston Martin with the valet and subsisting for weeks on nothing but cocktail olives and the smell of expensive perfume. Do you remember that scene in Election, where Matthew Broderick's character imagines himself driving a convertible along an Italian clifftop?



That is what I see when I close my eyes to shut out the relentless whining from the two pint-sized slobs crammed into the back seat of our economy car. A sophisticated escape. I doubt that any stay-at-home parent hasn't wished, at least for a second, that he or she had a passport for a secret identity and an account number for a bank in Geneva.

When we checked out of the Westin Cincinnati the other day I had baby roadie duty, carrying the bag of clean diapers and the bag of unwashed shit-filled diapers and all the baby blankets, toys, and suitcases down to the car. When I got there, the fucking key BROKE IN THE LOCK and I couldn't open the trunk. I spent twenty minutes trying to remove the key and detach the kids' carseats so that I could crawl through the backseat to get to the trunk. The backseat smelled like week-old cantaloupe. The trunk somehow smelled worse. While messing with the lock, I closed my eyes and imagined myself under pressure to escape from the clutches of a double agent with a mind bent towards torture.

At some point in this struggle I stepped on the cheap Playskool keyboard that my mother-in-law bought Gram that plays instrumental versions of dimly familiar Steve Winwood and Huey Lewis songs from the eighties. The batteries were dying and the stupid toy starts playing a dirge-like version of Europe's "The Final Countdown."

This, I mourned, was the closest I would get to Europe anytime soon.

How is it you never see James Bond with so much as a garment bag, yet he always manages to have a Brioni tuxedo on hand? I closed my eyes again, and instead of descending the steps of the Vienna opera house with a beautiful redhead on one arm, I pictured myself holed up in a Jakarta slum during monsoon season with a mousy former National Merit Scholar eating rice balls and analyzing satellite data. Most true CIA assets, I told myself, spend most of their time in places where you only drink martinis because you can't drink the water.

Eventually I got the lock cleared and the luggage tetrised into the trunk. When I showed my wife the broken key that certainly wouldn't be starting any ignition, she gasped: "What will we do? Are we trapped here in Cincinnati with a bag of poopy diapers?" I lifted my chin and brandished the spare valet key that I always pack when we leave town, just in case something like this happens. "We'll make it," I said, and after snapping the kids into their carseats, I led the beautiful redhead on my arm over to the passenger side of our stinky economy car parked in an underground parking garage and opened the door for her.

In this car, with her and these two kids, and no job. Apparently this is where I belong.

1. His child's best friend fell on the way into preschool yesterday, cutting his little head open against the concrete, requiring him to be shuttled away to a doctor. Since then, if he even mentions the the words "injury" or "blood" around his daughter, she shrieks with an uncontrollable rage of terror. She sits on his lap and draws pictures of herself wondering where her friend is and "hoping he is okay."

2. Her father broke his toe yesterday. He feels stupid and doesn't even want to reveal how it happened, but goddamn it's ugly. If this were a war movie he'd gruffly order some private to sniff it and tell him if it smells like cheese. It hurts like hell whenever he wears shoes. But at least it's only a toe.

3. There are few things more pathetic than a stay-at-home dad with a freshly-broken toe trying to run errands with his kids all around town. You should see him: dragging one foot behind wherever they go with a squirmy 9-month-old under his arm while trying to keep the other one out of the path of fast-moving motorized wheelchairs and cars. Little old ladies open doors for him and offer their assistance. "Can I carry that for you?" they ask. "Yes, thank you." And here he thought this life hadn't left him with a shred of masculinity to lose.

3. He takes his kids into a store that advertises itself as the "Doll Hospital and Toy Soldier Shop" though it contains no recovery wards full of morose infants with third-degree vinyl burns nor enough recruits for a new legion to reinforce the troops reenacting the Second Battle of Capua on his living room floor. But it's still an incredible mom & pop toy store. His daughter is there to select a few things she'd like from the obese, red-clad Nunavutian sweatshop owner who terrifies her so much. He picks up a Santa puppet and uses a ho-ho-ho voice and she screams while clutching his legs as if he were talking about her bloody best friend. His nine-month-old son stares at rows and rows of baby dolls his own size, and then looks at his father with concern and confusion. Who are these silent, unmoving colleagues? Why are they in glass cages, boxes? You're not going to put me in there with them, are you?

5. He picks a crusty yellow booger from under the left nostril of his son and stares at it on his fingertip. What should he do with it? Flick or wipe? Where? It has only been a few years that he's had the good sense to do the right thing with his own boogers, and now he is responsible for the boogers from not just one but two constantly-leaking noses that aren't his own? Sometimes the awkward responsibilities of parenthood threaten to overwhelm him completely.

6. They figure as long as they're up in the tony suburbs, they should stop at the best French bakery in the area to buy some buttery treats. Afterwards, he hands his daughter a fresh croissant that silences her in the backseat. He sees gasoline selling for $1.55 and stops to fill up the tank for less than $20.00. While pumping, he watches his children in the backseat though they cannot see him. She is picking tiny, soft bits from inside the croissant and handing them over to her brother, who fumbles for each morsel in her outstretched hand while she patiently waits for him to get it. He watches their hands together, the baby boy smiling at this small generosity, and when the tank is full he opens his daughter's door just to kiss her on the cheek.

7. His favorite time during the day is when he gets to put his son down for a nap, sing to him and feed the boy his mother's milk from a bottle and watch him ebb from the inquisitive, mobile boy he's become back to the stillness of what he once was and so rarely still is: this baby, this sweet sleeping baby.

The boy fights it more this morning, laughing through the bottle with his hand outstretched, touching his father's mouth, grabbing and twisting the fat on his father's neck, his chin. Laughing. What is this Mummenschanz shit? Sleep baby. Please sleep. Your pops needs to write something for the internet.

A few years ago I saw a painting above a grand staircase at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue that drew my mind completely away from where it had been. I was in the library looking for a place to piss in Manhattan that didn't require me buying something, and seeing this painting I was stunned enough to forget the search for a few minutes to enjoy it. It was called "Blind Milton dictating 'Paradise Lost' to his daughters." It showed the old poet in his Puritan's blouse, sullen and grumpy, slouched in an armchair, his whole face bent inward, his daughters at a table, hunched in anticipation of the next word to leave his lips. Most people know that Milton went blind, but not that he used his three daughters as amanuenses, forcing them to do all his reading and writing for him. I have read that Milton's daughters hated him for it, forcing them to read Latin and Greek and Hebrew aloud without being allowed to understand what any of it meant. Paradise Lost was written down entirely by surly teenage girls. I imagine them making faces at him through all his Hebrew and Latin. Why did he use his own greekless daughters for such a monumental task, rather than some Cambridge-bred republican lackey? Perhaps because he could completely control them. Or maybe it's even simpler than that: they were always there. After he died, one of Milton's daughters recounted that when they woke in the morning, he would be downstairs, pacing "like a cow waiting to be milked." He could hardly wait for them to gather their papers or dip their quills in the ink, he was so pregnant with poetry.

Greg's recent post made me think about my own experiences with the kid and museums. I have been taking the kid to art museums and galleries ever since she was old enough to sit forward in a bjorn. For the most part I think it's a load of horseshit to say she really got anything out of it during the first year of her life, but for the past year we both have enjoyed these trips, each in our own way. Since the Detroit Institute of Arts closed for renovations, and Cranbrook is so far away, we have spent a lot of time at MOCAD, Detroit's museum of contemporary art. Their opening exhibition last year included Roxy Paine's computer-driven sculpture machine that extruded huge piles of a crimson wax-like polymer (in Juniper-speak, "the red goo machine"), Jon Pylypchuk's little shanty-town full of morose and drunken stuffed creatures pissing in alleys and fishing for carp (J-s: "babies peepeeing!"), and a giant Nari Ward sculpture that involved hundreds of ceiling panels and tea pots with used styrofoam cups placed amid the piece by previous museum goers ("the cups.") Juney enjoyed these exhibits so much that we spent quite a few dull winter afternoons just sitting there, leaving me as familiar with each work as a security guard at MOMA must get watching that same room full of Rothkos all day.

That exhibition is long over, so every time we go now she gets upset that the goo machine and the pissing babies are no longer there, but inevitably there's another piece of pretentious conceptual art that she learns to love in a way that would certainly make the artist cringe. Right now it's Jennifer West's two films projected on the museum's northwest corner walls. The kid could really care less about the content (rapid sequences of scratched negatives); what she's really into is standing in front of the floor-mounted projectors watching her shadow dance and jump on the wall. This could go on for hours. Usually we are the only people in the museum, so it's not a big deal. I spend some time walking around looking at the other exhibits while she entertains herself, holding her hand as she points at a picture of a bunny while I try to consume the deeper meanings of the art around me.

This is, I think, a defining aspect of my experience as a father who doesn't "work" but spends all day with his daughter. Every morning we select a mutually-agreeable destination, and I try to find something to do there that will interest her on one level and still engage me on another. It is as though all day I am of two minds, one on par with hers, aware of what she understands and enjoys and appreciates, and another ready to capitalize on every distraction, every second of silence, a second mind ready to wrestle with ideas and thoughts that may have nothing to do with my daughter but do engage my own curiosity. I usually don't like calling myself a stay-at-home dad (that connotes a sort of militancy I don't have the energy for). Instead I have become something of a professional daydreamer.

In doing this, I am never all that distant. But let's be honest: it doesn't take that much to keep a constantly-babbling 2-year old engaged. It's pretty much the same amount of engagement my law school professors expected (eye contact, head nods, and the occasional astute follow-up question). And toddlers, like law professors, are easily fooled. Sometimes you can just phone in this whole parenting thing, and man, they don't even know. I can have a full-on conversation about fairies or owls or fairies riding on owls, and at the same time I am trying to imagine what life is like for the fucked-up-looking guy we just passed walking down the street, or what that street looked like in 1926, or what an artist is trying to say with a particular work in front of me. And Juniper still believes I'm like this total expert on owls and fairies and shit. In her mind, I have a PhDs in Ornithology and Folklore Studies, specializing in Wee Folk/Owl relations.

At MOCAD, after you see the exhibits, you end up in a room with all these Eames chairs and tables set out with art supplies, openly inviting visitors to create their own art before they leave. Juniper loves this, and the other day she sat there drawing with me for over an hour. When a friend came through and we started talking, the kid looked at me and said, "Dada, I want you all to myself. Can the lady please go away?" I apologized for this polite discourtesy, but still loved how much fun she was having. We were just sitting there together, talking about who we were drawing. I've done a lot of drawing this past year, not just people pooping. I used to have so much fun drawing and painting things as a kid, and now, I do again. I sing a lot more since the kid came around, too. I never drew anything in my mid-twenties except a paycheck. I didn't even sing in the shower. Becoming a parent is kind of like getting a permission slip to again do all the things that seem too silly for a grown man to do.

I will admit that hanging out with a kid all day does make it hard to "get things done" in the old "office" sense, but the truth is I never really got anything done in an office where I had unlimited internet access. I "work" much harder now that I don't just sit there open-mouthed in front of a monitor all day. But I still find the time I spend with Juniper to be valuable beyond seeing her so much and listening to all the crazy junk she says: I have all this time during the day to just gather my thoughts, plot out daydreams, and still pursue interests and projects that have nothing to do with being a parent or taking care of a kid.

These days, I may not be cracking $300 million cases or composing iambs about the fall of man, but by the time nap time arrives or the wife gets home from work, I usually have a torrent of backlogged thoughts I want to get down on paper or some project I've been plotting all day to get underway in the basement. I love the idea of Milton in the morning, his brain a burdened udder. What benefit did his blank verse get from all that midnight plotting, from the bulwark of sleeping daughters?

I know a lot of people would be (or are) unhappy staying home with a kid, but as I've said before, it suits me. I feel unleashed. I feel free. When I was a lawyer, I sometimes had my best thoughts about a case and even some breakthroughs while riding the bus or staring at a lunch menu. Now I have some of my best thoughts pushing a swing.

Today is my last day of work, and I am feeling really guilty.

I have an easy job that pays well. I don't stand on the highway in the hot sun with a jackhammer tucked under my gut all day. I don't work with my hands plunged into the disarray of dead fish guts. I don't even sit in a cubicle forced to listen to my co-workers discussing the latest additions to their pez dispenser displays on top of their monitors. I have my own office. With a view of San Francisco Bay. And a door. That closes. I once worked with a guy whose previous job had been to walk up and down a line of cows that had entered a slaughterhouse, holding a captive bolt gun up to the head of each, and then pulling the trigger to drive a metal rod into their brains, killing them instantly, one after another, all day long. This, he said, was way better than what they used before: a sledgehammer. Sometimes, with a sledgehammer, the cows didn't die right away, but collapsed to the ground, twitching. Ah, beef. Now there's a job I wouldn't have any guilt walking away from.

As a lawyer, my job was to look for cases that have been already decided that bear some relevance to the predicament your company has gotten itself into. With the internetization of legal research, this is nothing more than fancy googling. What a privileged motherfucker I am to walk away from this job, there's no doubt about it. How many millions of people would trade places with me, to get paid what I paid, to dick around on the internet all day? I just punched myself on my right cheekbone on your behalf. Goddamnit, that hurt.

I remember how, when I was washing dishes at Russ', there was one of those big industrial clocks above the sink, and I would sit there at watch the minute hand on the clock drag itself around to all the numbers. I would figure out how much I was earning per second, before and after taxes. I would sit there and see how long it would take me to earn a penny. A nickel. Sometimes I used to go and hide in the bathroom or the walk-in refrigerator for fifteen minutes, only to emerge triumphant fifteen minutes later thinking, "Ha ha, bitches. I just earned $1.28 (before taxes) to take a shit or eat raw cold colds." Near the end of my tenure, I was so rabidly bitter I was ready and willing to perform both tasks in either hiding spot. Time had, as Poor Richard once warned, become money. Just not very much of it.

In my four years as a lawyer I have felt a brief kinship with that former self, in that lawyers are accountable for their time in "billable hours." That means that over the course of a year, a lawyer is required to "bill" a certain number of hours, in my case slightly less than two thousand. A billable hour is divided into tenths, so if you open up a letter from opposing counsel, that is a tenth of an hour even if it only takes 4 seconds. Spending all day in a warehouse in Santa Rosa looking through boxes of documents, however, is only 8.0 hours, though it feels like 12. Usually tasks fall somewhere in between. Writing an e-mail is 0.3 hours. Researching an issue 1.2. In their evenings, mornings, and afternoons, lawyers measure out their lives with coffee spoons. Time, again, means money. Just a hell of a lot more of it.

One hour of my time was charged to the client as $355.00. Remember, that's for fancy googling. I saw only a small fraction of that, but it was still way more than I deserved.

I have joked on our about page of my new career as a "Gentleman of Elegant Leisure." One of the earliest and most successful lawyers in Gold Rush San Francisco was a man named Ben Moors, who knew absolutely nothing about the law. He had memorized three speeches by the orator John Randolph and one by Daniel Webster, and delivered one of those three speeches in court with "magnificent gestures and impressive oratorical effects" no matter what the subject matter of the case was. He once slapped Senator David Broderick in public, and while on trial for that offense he described himself to the court not as a lawyer but as "a gentleman of elegant leisure." I knew the second I read those words exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Unfortunately, my Calvinist Dutch ancestors bequeathed to me more than just a core-rotting frugality, but also the Protestant work ethic in its most concentrated form and a liberal dose of Protestant guilt (and that's the only liberal thing they gifted me). So here I sit, wondering why I feel so guilty because I have but a few more hours to sit well-paid in this chair, abandoning a job others would kill for because the most precious time in my life is that I spend with my kid, and that's how I want to spend all my time.

When I graduated from college, no one was willing to pay me to translate the Annales of Tacitus, nor was I willing to stick my entire head up my own ass and scream until someone gave me a PhD. So I went to law school. My Calvinist ancestors, looking down in their sensible black smocks from their preordained spot in heaven, approved. I worked hard to get to where I am. I'm not afraid to admit that. But today, those ancestors shake their heads in shame. And despite all my anger at those long-dead envious windfuckers, they have succeeded in making me feel guilty.

You might suggest that my guilt is really fear of the unknown that lies ahead. Or, if you are an academic (and being nice to me), you might suggest that it is shame, really: shame that results from the societal anger felt by all those "condemned to wage slavery," the cogs in a laboring society. They feel anger towards those who choose a different path because they themselves once "knew better" about what they wanted from life and dreamed about doing it before they accepted their place in what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of labor that no longer merely enables human activity, but traps and envelops it entirely. If you are a real Marxist, you might suggest that my guilt is showing an inclination to be an unwitting agent of ideology, the guilt an embodiment of mainstream cultural values.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All I know for sure is that this guilt is real, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels some form of it.

I am interested in a theory of elegant leisure. I know it may initially seem ludicrous or insulting to insinuate that taking care of my kid will be "leisure," but I hope you'll hear me out. I had plenty of traditional "leisure" in my lawyer job (passive web surfing, blogging, drinking) but it still wasn't fun. I expect a lot of hard work as a stay-at-home dad, but I'm hoping it will also be fun. I want to reexamine what the word "leisure" means, more along the lines of what Cicero called otium cum dignitate ("leisure with dignity"). I am eager to start living a life that I don't have to measure out in coffee spoons, a new life that is deeply meaningful and satisfying in ways that this old life was not.