A few weeks ago I bought the kid a couple packs of Loteria cards, and she quickly became obsessed with El Corazon ("The Heart"). She asks me to draw hearts when we we're out chalking the sidewalks, and when I draw a nice figurative valentine-style heart she throws down her chalk and stamps her feet until I draw a realistic veiny and ventricled blue-and-red lump with severed aortic arches and pulmonary veins and auricles sticking out of blue atriums and she isn't really happy until I draw some drops of blood squirting out, like the beating heart Mola Ram pulled out of the ribcage of that poor turbaned Thugee in Temple of Doom. I do sometimes suspect my child has the morbid tendencies of an old Aztec priest. "Heart," she finally says---quite satisfied---before asking me to draw a red-nosed drunkard and a topless mermaid.

Truthfully, I think it's that she only gets freaked out by things when we expose her to our own prejudices; this is why I pinch Wood extra hard when we're at the meat counter of the Mexican grocery store and she starts gagging at the piles of spotted cow's tongues and beef hearts. But the other day Juniper asked me to show her a movie about a heart, so I clicked on youtube and searched for "heart," first coming up with only this one, but then finding this one and this one. I watched the first with horror, and the latter two with the creeping sense of doom I get whenever I see someone else's insides. This is what I have been avoiding all these years, since 9th-grade science, this reminder of that weird glistening universe that exists within us all, that pulsating network of wet alien tubes and tanks and tissues. The surgeons were chatting above the gaping chest cavity, the very definition of nonchalance, and Juniper watched, entranced, but not the least bit grossed out or frightened. I tried not to wince or turn away. Why should she be scared of this? I asked myself. What is it that makes us frightened of what's under our skin, if not the grim reality that our souls are tethered to dirt by those crude mechanics? "Does Juney have a heart like that?" she finally asks me, blissfully ignorant of mortality.

"Of course she does," I answer. "But Juney has a very strong heart. It's the size of her hand," I say, and wrap her little fist inside my own, squeezing it over and over against her own chest. "It sounds just like this: pu-dum, pu-dum, pu-dum." I try to picture it inside her, strong and fast and young.

She laughs and puts her ear to my chest and listens. "I can hear your heart, too, dada," she says.
A few weeks earlier I sat in a doctor's office at Henry Ford Hospital for my Wood-mandated 30th-year physical, trying to figure out whether the paper robe left the front or the back open when the doctor walked in. I hadn't seen one in a decade. He showed me how to put the robe on, slipped the stethoscope onto my back, my chest. "Your heart and lungs sound great," he said, and later: "You are in perfect health." I felt relieved, but walked out through the cardiovascular ward looking at the faces of those with less optimistic prognoses. As you are now so once were we, they said. Out on Grand Boulevard, I looked at all those bodies moving around, all those hearts nestled somewhere inside cages of bone among slithering viscera.

We use a "white noise machine" in Juniper's room when she sleeps. It allowed us to sneeze and speak above a whisper in that tiny apartment we shared in San Francisco. She still uses it, and one of the ways I can tell she is up from her nap is when she changes it from "Yosemite Falls" to its "Heartbeat" setting, a muted constant thumping. "This is the sound of when Juney was in Mama's belly," she says when I open the door to her room. She is repeating something I'm sure her mother told her, still it reminds me that the heart's rhythm has a wombish comfort, just as the flickering rhythm on an ultrasound or the pattering of a heart monitor comforts those trying to usher new life into the world. "Does Wendell have a heart?"

"Yes. Everything alive does. Even bugs. I think. Wendell's heart is very fast."

They say pets are useful for teaching children about empathy and death. Someday Wendell's heart will stop and she will wonder why. As will mine.

There was a time or two in our eleven years when Wood and I broke things off. Once when she left for a year in China we tried it, and to say it broke my heart is not quite right. I remember running a lot then. I used to sprint up this long stretch of hill in the Arb trying to get my heart to burst, but I could not run hard or fast enough. At the top of the hill I would double over, sometimes collapse to my knees, picturing my heart at its brink inside my chest, yet somehow stronger now. The other time we broke up I was so despondent I went to see a counselor, a former professor of mine who talked to me about why seventeenth-century ascetic artists painted Jesus with his heart outside his chest. He said that it symbolized not only his great love for humanity, but his immense vulnerability, especially in those depictions of him nailed to the cross with his arms outstretched, his heart completely exposed, lance-pierced, but still burning with love. Vulnerability, he said, has its own sort of power. It allows you to love even when you have every reason not to, to keep your heart on fire even when you have every excuse to let it go cold.

"Does Juney have a strong heart?" she asks me almost every day. I tell her it is a very strong heart. Sometimes her silly questions send me spinning, thinking not only of that tiny mortal organ inside her chest, El Corazon, but her figurative heart, the heart of pop songs and bad teenage poetry, the one that will lead her through life's greatest joys and disappointments. I felt so helpless knowing that as sure as it has its own separate rhythm, there will come a day that it will suffer, and there will be nothing for me to do but hold her bigger fist in my hand again and squeeze it, and if she'll listen I'll tell her how strong it still is, that it is never really torn or broken, but merely wounded and exposed, and that even in that state of terrible vulnerability, the most important thing to do is not let it grow cold.

I'm still waiting for the day to come when I'll wish she was younger. It's like a refrain with us: she'll smile or say something or scoot along the ground in some woeful imitation of running and Wood and I will look at each other and say I don't want her to grow up---this is the perfect age. Then a couple months later we'll say that same thing again. Often I'll see someone else's baby in some earlier state of infant evolution, and I'll think, God I'm so glad Juniper's not that age anymore. That age is no fun compared to this one. It gives me some hope that we will never see the day where we'll wish she's something she's not.

The last few days were full of such superlatives; for example, we were sure that Monday was her sweetest day ever, watching her cling to Wood's belly at the beach in Santa Cruz, afraid of the water, watching her slurp down a milkshake and shriek along the sidewalk of Pacific Street, parting waves of admiring old ladies with each step. But then we said it again yesterday while she romped around the sculpture garden outside the De Young Museum rushing us with kisses and then hiding from us, giggling behind trees in the Shakespeare Garden. With two days off work I was able to spend four full days with Juniper: four days without her clinging to my shins while I hunt for my keys in the morning, no need for those hard byebyes. She's laughing so much these days; she's showing us that she has a sense of humor and she plays little jokes that she finds absolutely hilarious. She's talking so much more, finding words for the things she wants. Wood remarked that it must feel so powerful to suddenly find yourself able to ask for something and then actually get it, to say "ca-ca" and have two crackers appear out of nowhere to fit snugly in two hands. My favorite thing about this Juniper is the way she responds to your voice when you ask any question: she nods with such baseless certainty. "Juniper, are there monkeys in those trees?" [vigorous nodding] "Juniper, don't you think that Heath Ledger is only marrying Michelle Williams because she got knocked up?" [nod, nod] My favorite thing to do at the end of the day when I come home from work is to sit with her in the tub and ask her about all the things she did that day, and have her look up at me with those big brown eyes and nod in answer to every question.

Despite her overeagerness to affirm, it is clear she does understand so much more than she can say. I love watching her think, watching her "twist the shapes of thoughts into the stony idiom of the brain." I get so absorbed in her words, I whisper and repeat them in her ear on long walks. I am so eager to converse with her, her every correct answer to my mild interrogation feels as powerful to me as it must feel for her to get what she asks for. "What does the bus say, Juniper?" Vroooooooooooooo. "Which way to the ducks?" [she points] While walking down our street and she suddenly says "leafs," I'll lift her high above my head and she reaches her arms up into the boughs and branches of the trees and she shrieks as the fleshy blades and the petioles tickle her palms. "Again," she tells me, as we draw near a gingko at eye level and I stick my nose into her neck and she giggles and the gingko leaves run along both our cheeks.

I remember years ago when I first moved to San Francisco I went out for sushi with a friend and during the entire meal I was distracted to dumb wonder by a father and his teenage daughter eating together at the next table on a late Sunday afternoon. This should say something about what kind of 23-year old I was, to sit there and fantasize about some future meal with some imagined daughter of my own who would want to sit and have sushi and talk with me when she's sixteen, to laugh and talk about important things or things that weren't important at all, but more importantly to sit across from her and hear her voice and hear her shade and knit anew the patch of words we've gifted her, to sit and marvel and gasp at the wonder of this thing that's sprung from me.

During college in 1997 I lived on one side of a pink duplex across the street from a purported crackhouse owned by our local fundamentalist Christian state senator. My roommates were a Korean Dutchman and a guy who drove a VW bus that he'd hitchhiked to Florida to buy from two girls who'd spent the previous six years painting grateful dead lyrics and flowers on its beige exterior. On the day we moved in I found them tapping on the walls and moldings, "gonna hang a picture?" I asked. "People used to hide money in the walls of old houses," they said, leering at echoes like those old guys you see combing beaches with metal detectors.

When we moved in, the other side of the duplex was unoccupied, but soon a woman with five children rented the place. The oldest was ten or eleven, the youngest just a baby. I have no idea how old the rest of them were, just that they fit somewhere on that spectrum between the oldest and the youngest. They had the look of children sired by different fathers but intrinsically bound to each other by the genes of their mother, a straw-headed woman who had given each of them a similar head of scrubby blond hair. The oldest kid, a gangly girl of eleven, attended the same elementary school I once did, where we found crack pipes on the playground and played with them like toys. There was another straw-haired woman with them, the children's grandmother. She took care of the youngest ones while the mother worked.

One day not long after they moved in, my friend Koby from high school pulled up in his 1984 Datsun Sentra Hatchback. People called him Cold Cuts, because he really loved cold cuts, I guess. One thing I always admired about Koby and his family was that they never paid more than $200 for an automobile. They'd find somebody who needed to get rid of a 1983 Oldsmobile Ninety Eight station wagon and then they'd just drive that sonofabitch until they had to take the tags and the tape deck and leave it on the side of a highway somewhere. Koby told me that he'd heard about this farmer's field down in Indiana with a couple acres of mature marijuana plants and he wanted me to come with him. He had become much more dangerous since high school, and he was even more so when he had a treasure map. "You'll get shot," I said, and he just got pissed and drove off. A few hours later that night he pulled into our driveway and laid on the horn. We went out to see what all the commotion was about and there was Cold Cuts Koby with a shit-eating grin on his face. He popped the hatchback and under some Indian blankets were four or five garbage bags full of marijuana. Stalks of it. There had to be sixty or seventy pounds of dewy-wet plants in there, enough to get him sent to federal prison. He pulled off a few handfuls of buds and brought them inside our apartment. "Aren't you supposed to let those dry or something?" one of my roommates asked him, but he was too excited not to smoke his bountiful harvest immediately. He emptied out a Philly cigar casing (Koby refused to smoke anything but blunts) and I swear to god as he loaded it a cricket jumped out from among the buds. From that day forward my roommates referred to him as "Cricket-Weed Koby."

So Koby enjoyed his yield like a 19th-century shipping magnate with a Bolivar and a glass of Lagavulin Single Malt while clouds of wet brown campfire smoke filled our living room, and about five minutes later we heard a knock on our door.

It wasn't the cops: it was our neighbors. The mom. Or the grandma. Years of heavy smoking and hard living had made it impossible to tell. She had some sleepy-looking old guy behind her with a longneck in his hand and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. "What you guys smoking in there?" she asked coyly. My roommate feigned incomprehension. "Don't play with me boys, we can smell what you're smoking. Can we have some?" Koby was not one to suffer fools. I believe he got up in her face and used some hostile language unbefitting a gentleman of his stature, including, "fuck no"; "skanky-ass bitch"; "dirty-ass hoe"; and "white-trash-piece-of-shit motherfuckers."

We didn't hear from our neighbors for a couple of weeks after that, other than the dull screams and wails of the kids through the walls. One night we did get another knock on our door. This time it was grandma for sure, holding a lit cigarette and a nearly-empty bottle of vodka in one hand. She was holding her other hand up to her head and kind of moaning. "Do you boys have any aspirin?" she asked. "I just got a nail shoved up in my head." She removed her hand from her head, and true to her word, there was a small puncture wound with dried blood streaming down her forehead. One of us rushed to grab some bottles of aspirin and ibuprofin and I said, "You know, you should probably go to the hospital for that."

"Oh, I'll be alright," she said. "I just need some aspirin."

After she thanked us, my roommates and I just kind of sat around dumbstruck. How does one get a nail "shoved up in" one's head? What was going on on the other side of our walls?

Over the next few months of autumn, we really started to get to know the little kids, who were all starved for attention We shared a front porch, and whenever one of us sat out there reading or just watching co-eds walk down the sidewalk, the kids would get us to toss them up into the air or swing them around the front yard. One time a bunch of hippies made a gigantic vat of hummous and ate it on our front porch. The little kids joined in, a bunch of bearded guys breaking pita with a gangly troupe of towheaded porch urchins. They were always after our food. The porch was old and dilapidated and they treated it like a jungle gym (they had no other toys as far as I could tell). They were always getting hurt when wooden planks or beams broke or collapsed. We'd hear them scream and rush to see if they were okay. Nobody would emerge from their side of the duplex. The children were easily calmed as children who never get attention for their screaming often are. I did wonder, then, what it took to get them screaming as loud and as long as they did at night.

One of my roommates was the kind of guy who actually took his studying seriously, and he preferred doing it at our dining room table. With time, the screaming and constant noise of footsteps storming up and down the stairs next door and through the wall became too great a distraction, and he called to complain to the landlord, an ineffectual little twerp named "Dale" who washed his hands of any involvement. Over time the sounds we heard on the other side of the wall only grew more and more disturbing. A man had started living with them and his hoarse yells were more and more often the prologue to long bouts of screaming and more yelling. It all became very My name is Luka. I had long talks about what to do about it with the girl in the next house down who was getting her degree in social work. We thought about calling Child Protective Services.

By November they were gone. Dale had evicted them. They had only paid him $700, one month's rent. We came back from class one day and he was standing there on the porch wearing a dust-mask like an old Chinese lady and a big pair of rubber gloves carrying garbage bags full of clothes out of the house. He was very upset about the damage to his property. "They didn't even have any furniture in there," he said, disgusted. "Those kids were sleeping on piles of dirty old clothes, and everything smells like urine." We looked inside. The house, a mirror image of the one we inhabited on the other side of the wall, could not have been more different: there was no thrift store furniture; no empty bottles of Goldschlager decorating the mantle, no environmental science textbooks or Peruvian wall hangings. There were just piles of clothes, and stains on the carpet, and filth all over the walls.

The other side of the duplex sat empty for a month, and Dale came to us, desperate to learn if we knew of anyone who needed a place. "I don't want to rent it out to anyone like that again," he said. At that time Wood and her two friends were looking to move, and he offered us a finder's fee and gave them a huge discount on rent if they agreed to paint the walls and clean the place up themselves. I wanted so badly to live on the other side of the wall from Wood, I helped them paint the walls white. I will never forget what that side of the house looked like, or how it smelled, and how easily it was all cleaned up. When we were done, Wood and I sat on the porch, kicking at a broken plank still nailed to the porch.

I told her how I remembered kids in elementary school who were there one day and gone the next. I remembered the kids who really smelled, the kids whose outrageous behavior problems shocked the class and prevented the teachers from ever really teaching us anything. I had never seen how those kids lived. They had not been my friends. Their parents were not acquainted with my own.

What will happen to those kids who lived on the other side of the wall, we wondered. Where did they go?

I walked her down to the Geary Street bus graveyard on Saturday, and we looked at the hundreds of buses sitting there abandoned for the weekend. The facility takes up a few full blocks and we walked around the entire thing, me repeating the word to her. Bus, Juney: bus.

She looked at all of them with me, solemn and soaking it in, not saying a word. For months I have pointed out every bus we've ridden or seen on the street, but she's never gotten any closer than Bup. It's that pesky voiceless alveolar sibilant again.

I think it was Walker Percy, writing to his old friend Shelby Foote, who once claimed that Shakespeare had it easy. He pointed out that Shakespeare came along at the birth of the modern English language, when all of his brilliant lines and aphorisms sat like low-hanging fruit from the lexical sapling of the modern English tongue. The rest of us, he considered, have it hard: trying to come up with new ways to say the things that people have always felt, new phrases and words in which to wrap our truths.

One of the greatest gifts of becoming a parent, I think, is having the opportunity to observe the moments in your child's life that you cannot remember in your own, from those first bright, cold days, the pummeling of everything being new, through when their own memories hatch. I doubt this ever ends; I doubt kids' lives ever cease to bring perspective to their parents' own pasts. With Juniper these days I am still struck by the overwhelming newness of everything. I try to compare it to things that I can remember: stepping out of a plane into a foreign country, for example, searching desperately for what is familiar yet marveling at everything that is new. Maybe there's a reason you can't remember what it was like to be a baby; memory must be a particularly unsuitable medium to store such intensity of feeling, in the same way one can't remember anything about an afternoon spent with some particularly good psilocybin mushrooms.

There is a certain simplicity in Juniper's perception that I almost envy, a very primitive but beautiful sense of abstraction. Picasso once said that it was a little-known secret that Henri Matisse developed his signature style only after he had children, that it was the influence of his babies and their sensibility that allowed him to paint the way he did, with what Picasso called, "the straightforward simplicity of children's art."

Yesterday I was running with Juniper in the park and I looked down on the ground and saw a carefully folded twenty dollar bill and no one around to claim it. I found this money because I have spent most of my life staring down at my feet, thinking about "the road ahead," the next steps. When I'm riding the bus or grocery shopping nearly all of my thoughts are about what I need to get done and the best way to do it. For Juniper it's not that way at all, I know, as she constantly reminds me. I still carry this tiny child everywhere we go, I keep her head right next to mine when we walk, so we can say her words back and forth to each other. Even with her there my mind will drift towards mundanities and then she will point to an Old Navy advertisement on top of a cab and she tells me about the dog in the ad, or we'll be walking down the milk aisle in Trader Joe's and she'll point to the cow in the elaborate paintings up by the ceiling that I have never noticed even though I've been there five dozen times. Moooo, she says. Up! Up! I admire her for the way she sees the world. She sees shapes and creatures and every idea she can cram into a word everywhere we go. It might be incredibly frustrating, to see so much but to be able to say so little. But I think it must also be beautiful, to be so overwhelmed by the world.

Yesterday, we were walking down Clement Street and from her perch in the crook of my arm she pointed towards the traffic and said, "Bus" clear as anything. I looked and sure enough a bus had stopped in front of Burma Superstar across the street. I couldn't contain myself, overwhelmed with so much love for her right then. I smiled and held her close in a hug and she squirmed and I kissed her head and said, "That's right Juney, it is a bus. You're right! I didn't even see it."

I have childless friends who ask me how things have changed since she was born. I tend to turn on the self-deprecation, talk about how I don't get to go out to bars anymore or how our lives are scheduled around her naps and bedtime. I tell them that because I know it's what they want to hear; many of them are still convinced, as Ken says on Freaks & Geeks, that, "everything fun in life happens in bars." I don't see any point to getting this precious or sentimental with them. They don't care that the biggest way my life has changed since Juniper was born is that I smile a lot more. That I laugh a lot more now. And it's not laughter at someone because they said or did something stupid and it's not ironic laughter at some shitty movie or television show or laughter at the expense of someone else because I think I'm better than them. I just find myself smiling and laughing because she has somehow fulfilled me in such an unexpected way. She makes me see the world as simple and pure, and it feels so good to have her sitting in the crook of my arm. She is teaching me to look up with her, and remember things I've never known

I have a friend from college, a former roommate, whose young wife has been undergoing chemotherapy for treatment of a malignant tumor in her breast for the past year. This guy's father died of cancer at the age of 50-something while we were roommates, and although we don't keep in touch so well anymore (and we've had our share of disagreements), I can say that I have seen this guy go through more than anyone's share of hard times, and that I respect his courage and tenacity in life. He's a good guy, and my heart goes out to him every time I look in my inbox and see an e-mail from him giving the details of his wife's battle against cancer.

Today was just such a day. His love for his wife, and his pain and concern for what she's going through are palpable in these e-mails. She's now finished with chemotherapy, and the doctors gave her a photo with the following quote from Camus in caption: "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." My friend has never written about the change in his wife's body, in her loss of hair or weight, in the inevitable pain and weakness that chemotherapy brings as the radiation kills both the good and the bad inside her. He has only written about the resolve of her spirit, and how the strength of their love is carrying them through these trying times. The chemo hasn't killed that.

In the past week, I have watched with a heavy heart as our friend MIM's post about "false advertising" has been batted about the blogosphere's echo chamber, analyzed and eviscerated by bloggers who have never visited her site before, her own personality and lifestyle judged and attacked by bloggers and individuals who have no concept of who she really is or the 200 other posts she's written. If there is a lesson here, it is "do not blog about such issues lightly." A blog that has a couple hundred loving, regular readers can easily find itself besieged by thousands of angry strangers whose histrionics over the post in question have been colored by the voices that led them there.

I have let MIM know how I feel about the "false advertising" post, both in an e-mail and in a comment where I tried to identify the three things that made people most upset. The bottom line is that the whole debate has made me feel incredibly sad. It is sad to see a friend judged so ruthlessly for having an opinion, and it is sad to me how much collective neurosis there is out there about this issue. I disagreed wholeheartedly with MIM's post. But what I appreciate about the post and all the hulabaloo that has followed it is how much it has made me think about an issue that seethes below the surface of so many of us, and what it has made me appreciate about marriage and love.

As many of you know, my wife and I have been together for a long time. We're coming up on ten years since the first day we kissed (April 19) and we've been together ever since. She is really the first and only girl I've ever loved. When we met, she thought I was mildly retarded, a "special" kid that the university just kind of let hang out on campus. I was socially inept (preferring to spend time wandering through the woods at night muttering at the moon rather than drink beer), I wore pleated khakis and deck shoes, and I was obssessed with rap music. In other words, I was a real catch. But Wood saw something in me. I don't give these details idly; I can't discuss how I feel about love and physical attraction without putting our life in that context. For us there was no "advertising." We grew up together. At some point you could almost stop drawing a line between us as individuals, and consider every step that we took and choice that we made as done together. In that way, we were married before we were married. We were one.

I realize that kind of experience before marriage might put us in a minority, but I hope that most successful marriages go through that once the knot is tied. Individuality and individual interests sort of become secondary to what works as a unit. Passion doesn't recede, but grows as you find completion in another person. All of that horrible pain of loneliness disappears. What happens on the surface means nothing compared to the inward attraction and bond. One partner can't "let themselves go" because that partner is inextricably bound to the other, particularly when so many decisions are implicitely made together: every meal, every dessert, every walk around the block, every night in front of the television.

In some ways, I can't even see the changes in my wife over ten years. I am generally blind to her changes. I wrote more about that here. But when I stop to think about it, my wife has changed. She has grown so much more fucking awesome. Growth doesn't stop on the day you're married. Time doesn't stand still. Change does not suddenly stop happening. The fact that so much of this insecurity and neurosis comes from the experience of gaining postpartum pounds is so tragic. Our children are tangible proof of the strength of our marital bonds. In our children our physical selves are merged the way our individual lives and individual identities are merged in marriage. They are proof of love.

MIM is adamant that her post was not about love; she says it was about self-respect and physical attraction. She claims none of her opinion applies when changes are medical in nature, applying a individualistic sense of "control" to the philosophy of "false advertising," showing that even in her adamance MIM is capable of recognizing how un-PC it would be to remind someone who is paralyzed from the waist down or burned or stricken with cancer that their spouse may no longer be physically attracted to them. But how can one separate love from the cinderblock of terror and insecurity that she drops on our heads when she asks us to imagine whether after any change in our physical appearance within our control that our partners, the loves of our lives, could stop being attracted to us? Ultimately, despite her protestations it is a post about love. Because after all of the outrage and the pain what MIM's post reminds us is that love is more powerful than superficial attraction.

Love has a way of eclipsing superficial concerns.

Look at your spouse or your lover tonight, hold them tight, and think about your future together. Remember that death is inevitable, and that you are going to lose that person one day, or he or she will lose you. You cannot change that. Remember that if you are lucky, you will live to see your spouse put on a few pounds, grow wrinkles, grow bald and liverspotted and grumpy. If you are lucky you will see your children find love in someone else, and then see you and your spouse and a whole host of strangers live on in the children that grow physically from that love. You will see youth again in them, you will remember all the good times you had in yours. If you are lucky you will grow old and change in a million different ways with the person you've chosen to live your life with. Not everyone reading this will be so lucky. Among you there will be car accidents, lives snatched away without a moment to say goodbye. There will be hands to hold in hospital beds. There will be chemotherapy. There will be pain.

But again, if you are lucky it will come in the depth of the winter of your lives, though an invincible summer will burn inside you still, a love that a few extra pounds could never kill.

For the last three days we've been sitting in my parents' living room in Kalamazoo, Michigan, watching Juniper realize that she loves carpeting. At one point she turned to me while climbing their plush-carpeted stairs, and I swear the look she gave me said, "Jeez, Dutch, what is this stuff? It's fucking great!"

This has been coupled with her sudden realization that walking around is way better than crawling, particularly when falling merely involves her butt landing on a full inch of tightly-woven eighties' shag. I presume that when we return to our hardwood floors in San Francisco, she will once again find her way around our apartment like a Californian on ice skates clutching the boards of a rink.

It has been a strange juxtaposition, going from the bustle of Manhattan to sitting in this living room with the same pictures on the wall that were here when I was a kid, listening to my grandmother tell stories about my dad as a kid fastening a "frank-en-fur-ter" to a string and using it to get the family dog to pull him around in a wagon. Frank-en-fur-ter? Such a grandma word, like afghan. Or davenport. Or calling a creek a crick.

Every time I come home I am shocked by the way things change. Stores and restaurants that I once loved have closed, while the outer rings of town are filled with big box superstores and new neighborhoods where all the homes look exactly the same. My grandmother had Christmas presents waiting; I unwrapped a box of Little Debbie "Banana Twins." She described recently visiting a friend in the nursing home, how as she walked down the hall all these arms reached out for her from each room she passed, hoping for someone to touch. She described going in to touch the hand of one woman who reached out for her, and how the woman simply would not let go, keeping a steely grip on my frail grandmother's wrist, forcing her to pry the fingers away one by one. I looked at my last grandmother and saw an even older lady living in the skin of the old lady I had grown up loving as grandma, and turned my eyes away and let that old mental picture win out as I spoke to her softly about small things. I sometimes catch myself staring at my parents on visits like this, wondering who the old people are inhabiting this home that itself has not changed, my father's hair falling out and graying, the stress of my mother's terrible job written across her face. I see Juniper staring at them and smiling, these are the grandparents she'll know.

When you live so far away these things do not creep up slowly like they do in your own mirror. They hit you hard, almost as hard as it is for them to see the baby they last saw four months ago suddenly talking and feeding herself and walking gleefully across the room that their own son learned to walk across twenty-eight years ago.

Every day it seems like we watch the world form itself anew in her eyes. Synapses crackle, patterns emerge. Cresting Lone Mountain the other night on our way home from the Haight, the fullish moon emerges from its spot low on the eastern horizon and she is in the crook of my arm, pointing at the moon between some blunt apartments and St. Ignatius, and she says "ball" in a voice that is startlingly sure of itself.

That's right Juniper, it is a ball. So is the circle I draw in the condensation obscuring our favorite window every morning when we look out onto the quiet street. Just like the globe on the shelf at the coffee shop, and the stemless cherries in the last book we read before I let you turn off the light at night. Sometimes you see a ball when we're out walking somewhere, and I can't tell what you're talking about, your eyes filled with whole worlds I cannot see, though you still find words to define patterns; describe memories; create metaphors.

The barbaric yawps of your infancy have given way to words. No longer content to passively howl, begging for warmth and attention, you are finally able to control your world a little by naming the things you know. You coyly grin when you say something that makes sense, seeking acknowledgement and hugs.

The Greeks had a word for those who could not speak Greek: βαρβαρος (barbaros). It is often said the ancients listened to the languages of other tribes dragging their wares for trade from beyond the Caucuses and could discern little but the sound "bar bar." It came to mean "foreigner" to the Greeks, and came to us later as barbarian. But it all boils down to the Proto-Indo-European root "ba ba," a word "imitative of unarticulated speech," and also the root of our word baby. And babble. The Greeks were snobs. They believed anyone who didn't use their alphabet spoke like an infant. A word itself that comes down to us from the Latin infans, which means "incapable of speech."

Roman Jakobson once wrote that the sounds all babies first make to form words across all cultures arise from nursing, which is often "accompanied by a slight nasal murmur, the only phonation which can be produced when the lips are pressed to mother's breast or to feeding bottle and the mouth is full." With time, that phonation is repeated and expanded as a manifestation of any desire. I think that makes sense considering the frustrating early declarations and demands that Juniper articulated as mmm-mmm-mmmms and nnn-nnn-nns. But now we are in new territory; Juniper has officially moved even beyond the bilabial plosive. Desire does not fully explain the tangible pride she gets from expressive speech, which seems to me less driven by desire than by self realization. Juniper has recently learned the word, "eye" and I can't help but wonder about its homonyms, both for affirmation and identity.

New words fall neatly into place in her burgeoning lexicon almost every day. Light. Hi. Bubble. Nouns make way for prepositions (up) which she also manages to use as an adverb, an adjective, and an imperative verb. "Up!" she barks at 6:40 a.m., seated between Wood and I in bed, banging her tiny fists against our bellies. "Up!" she orders, with her hands reaching into the air. "Up!" she exclaims when we climb stairs. Before we bring her to our bed, we hear her in her crib talking to herself, running through the list of words she knows like a college sophomore before a French quiz. She wakes to muted daylight and the desire to speak.

It is so exciting to watch Juniper brush aside the confusion and chaos of infancy. What a responsibility we have, in teaching her to communicate, in helping her to overcome frustration and express her desires, emotions, fears, and hopes. After so many months of speculating, I can't explain the joy that speech provides as a window into her untapped little mind.

But it is terribly frightening also. It is easy to gauge the progress of her expressive speech, but her receptive comprehension is more elusive. What does she understand about what we say? When Wood and I argue and she watches us, how much of the timbre and strange levity in my voice does she pick up as anger? Sometimes we'll say a word that sounds like frog and she'll dart her tongue out rapidly like we have taught her to do. If we say horse she bucks her body like a redneck on a mechanical bull. What an awesome responsibility it is, suddenly, to speak.

She is still very young, and there is so far to go. And yet the limits of her speech also show just how much she knows. The moon is a ball. The sun is a light. She sometimes calls our window dada because it is through that glass we wave goodbye each morning, over and over until I've crossed the street and disappeared, and it is through that glass that she watches, waiting for me to walk home from work in the evening, waving to her as I approach.

Juniper is pointing at things now, too. She sees the wedding photo of Wood and I on the wall and she points to it and says, dad. In my arms, her face and eyes close to mine, she points to my painting of Charlie Chaplin and says, dad. She points to Wood's autographed photo of Harry Truman and says dad. Her world is full of father figures, it seems. Either that or she has no problem confusing me with guys who have hitlerstaches or no hair.

One of the female providers at Juniper's daycare told me that yesterday the guy who takes care of her asked her where her daddy was and she looked towards the door, but then the woman also told me in her pidgen English that Juniper calls him dada and he says, No, I'm not your dada. No, not me. The guy himself has enough sense not to tell me this, but he can't keep this Chinese broad he works with from breaking my heart.

When I get home from work Wood sets her down by the door to the hallway where I come in soaked from the rain, where I slip off my wet shoes and drop the mail and hold out my arms for her as she crawls down the hallway to me, stopping at my holey socks and pulling herself up by my pantlegs, pushing against my shins before wobbling backwards with her arms in the air, begging to be picked up. Her mother says, daddy's home and she looks at me and mumbles dada before burying her face in my wet shoulder, a shy girl suddenly. I hug her and put my lips against her neck and bounce around the apartment while she laughs and giggles in a voice that hints at what she will talk like when she is a big girl, when's she's too big to hold like this or toss in the air and swing upside-down. I try to squeeze as much of that voice out as I can on nights like tonight with such little time before she has to go to bed, before the nightly battle over sleep challenges me to remember the sweetness in her eyes when she first saw me home, the crinkle in her nose as she crawled across the floor to greet me.

She hasn't said mama yet, but she can say ma when she puts her lips against the back of her hand and kisses it, MMMaaa! She kisses the porcelain of the bathtub and says, MMMaaa! She kisses my hairy belly and says, MMMaaa! She imitates you when you do it on her cheek, on her forehead. She has learned to wave goodbye. She sings when you take her socks off.

In the mornings, after Wood brings her to our bed for the first feeding of the day, and after she wakes from it and stares at us in astonishment that we would sleep like such shrews hiding from the cusp of the morning, she reaches out for my face and I feel her fingers on my nose, across my eyes and into my mouth, and dadadadadadadadada is the first sound I remember hearing every day. Sometimes we wake to find her making raspberries with her lips. It is getting dark earlier and earlier in San Francisco these days, but still, each evening I call Wood when I get off the bus and when I turn the corner, across the avenue, I see Junebug's face in our window, peering for me in the darkness. By the time I am halfway across the avenue she has found me, and I see her fists banging up and down on the couch and her mother's natural smile above her tells me all I need to know about what Junebug's moving lips are saying. I stand down there, below her face in the window, and I smile and wave and mouth words to her. I would stand there in any kind of rain.



These are just little things, I know, like the curious look of mistrust she gives me when I run a comb through her hair (it's getting longer), or the way she holds on to her mother like a little naked koala when she is fresh from the bath. But they are the little things that all together overcome you with the sensation that this is all so worth it, that this is the best thing in the world you could be doing, that the love you feel for this little person is more powerful than any words you could possibly use in a fruitless effort to contain it.

I determined today while walking under tall buildings that I am a man who prefers ruins.

I looked up at the building where I work every day, where I spend all of the hours that I am away from you, and I imagined someday in the distant future when all the glass will be broken and the wind will blow through my office and only the unstoppable steel frame will hold what's left of the cement up against the sky. That is who I am, a man comfortable with that idea. A man who sometimes prefers the idea of ruins to the vibrancy of everyday life. I majored in classics at college because it was the study of what remained of the birth of the world as we know it. It was about not letting it die. I felt I owed such things my understanding. I spent a month without you in 1997 wandering through the ruins at Delphi, at Olympia, Mikenes and Athens, my hands touching rocks carved with words thousands of years ago. I do this still, in places of ruin, because I feel such places are owed our respect. They were built and used by men and women whose lives meant something but now have no story beyond what the stones tell, beyond their blood diluted in us all. Driving with you in Detroit brought out those old feelings in me again, seeing the city that San Francisco will one day be, the great city tattered through eight decades of decline, brought down by a shift in the global economies rather than a shift of the earth. Living here in all the bustle and activity is too much for me. There is too much noise. I am ready to move on to some place that is a little more dead. If anything, moving to such a place will allow me to remember the vibrancy of these years we had together here, the vibrancy of the years we brought an amazing little person into the world and lived with her in a tiny apartment and all we had was each other and everything seemed so perfect, nobody we knew died or got sick and we never struggled with anything. I will remember these years, as I do all of them in their own way, with a particularly intense fondness.

You will complain that I don't live enough in the present. That I romanticize the past or concern myself too much about futures that might never come to pass. I will tell you that I am scared of death, but only because its inevitable nature means that one day I will have to part from you. That our story will be over. But I am not afraid to grow old. The funny thing about romaticizing the past is that you keep getting more and more of it to work with. It is something I have learned from the old people who talk about the past; it is a sign that someone has had a good life, I think, that they are so filled with fine memories that can't match up to the present. Having grown up in love with you I see no sense in viewing the past with bitterness or regret. I cannot imagine what would have happened to me if it weren't for you.

It's funny, I know we're growing older, but I don't see anything in you that has changed from the way you looked when I was falling madly in love with you ten years ago. So radiant then and now. The only changes I see are for the better, the grooves we have in each other, the steady comfort of knowing that we have a reprieve from being denied each others's presence for the time being. I don't have to fly to Dublin in two weeks. We don't have to wait another six days before you can call me from Phnom Phen. We can sit right here in the living room with each other in the afternoon and not have that anguish. We can sleep together every night. Without all those other commitments constantly tearing us apart, we are only growing closer and closer together. And then there's our baby, who in her very existence seems to represent that closeness, that melding of the two of us into something perfect, growing now so quickly on her own.

This life we're living now may not be glamorous but it's all I could possibly want for the present. Yeah we're getting older and some of our friends are entering their third decade and spending thousands of dollars on snake oils to keep their faces looking young. I have some sense that people start to think these things are a big deal. You still don't even need makeup in the morning. You're 28 today and you look even better than you did at eighteen. If there are changes I just can't see them.

We're still young and I'm so goddamned lucky to have you. I don't see the years that pass as a bad thing, I see them as only giving me more history with you, more perspective on our past and future together. I'm looking forward to moving with you to a new place and starting a life there. I'm looking forward to growing old with you, to watching my hair fall out and yours turn gray and for our skin to grow cavernous and loose. I'll take half a century more with you. I'll take more than that if we're lucky. I'll take dementia. I'll take stubbornness. I'll take all the kooky old lady clothes I know you're going to wear. The thing about loving ruins is the perspective it gives, the shifting, sympathetic sense of beauty. And you married a man who loves ruins. We're not there yet, kid, but I'll be with you when we are, smiling at how beautiful you are just like I am today, ten years since I first saw you and still in love with you as I ever was.