My friends had a son.

It's the first of my friends who've had a baby while I've lived in the same town.

I held him. He is like a handful of clothes, but he squirms, reaching out his arms, and squints and sleeps instantly and peacefully.

They called him Leif. A good name for a child. I had dibs on this name, I thought, after my 2003 post, but now I have given it up, with pleasure.

It is impossible to even dream of. But this squirmy infant will one day be a learner of math and will read stories, and will have his own way of making friends and will begin to leave the house after we are all gone to bed and will do dangerous things we wish he wouldn't. But he will also say something clever at times and surprise us: he has been absorbing life from elsewhere than us! Enthusiasms we have never dreamed of will probably be his, and yet we'll hear echoes of our own voices in him. He will bite the hand that feeds him, and we will probably forgive him. This curve bends outward without limitation and we cannot know where it ends.