Ah, to be bjorn again

Sunday 9:35 a.m. I’ve taken Gus out by myself for the first time. I’m carrying him in a bjorn, which I call a “Bjork.” This is a dad joke that, as a dad, I’m entitled to make. (Though wearing one is a very Bjorklike thing to do, like wearing a swan to the Oscars.)

The baby bjorn makes me feel burly, barrel chested – empowered by the thing that renders me most vulnerable. That’s life in a nutshell.

10:05 a.m. “That’s a a tree,” I say to Gus as we walk through the Botanical Garden. Plants. Flowers. Branches. Leaves. I don’t have much of a horticultural vocabulary, but Gus won’t remember any of this, anyway. Not only do I not remember my own early weeks, I hardly recall much of my early forties. A couple good meals. That one movie with Ryan Gosling. The time I found $5 in a mall parking lot. That’s about it.

10:30 a.m. That the only way he acknowledges my existence is by yanking my beard to the point of making my eyes water, makes my love for him more pure. It isn’t contingent on anything one might call “personality.” Maybe the real you is the you that first emerges into the world, unconcerned about pleasing anyone. Though I can’t imagine a version of myself that was ever immune to the expectations of others.

“I’m so sorry,” I’d have said to my mother if I could speak as I was being born. “I don’t mean to be hurting you, but what choice do I have?”

10:45 a.m. We’ve only a 2-hour window before Gus has to eat again. In this way he takes after his old man. We head back for a second breakfast.

“Sometimes I look forward to eating breakfast while I’m still eating dinner,” I tell Gus. That all my words will be forgotten is liberating. “Sometimes I look forward to it while eating lunch. Sometimes even while eating breakfast. You’d think that doesn’t make sense, but I like looking forward to breakfast so much, more than perhaps even eating it.”

The best breakfast is the one that’s not on your plate but in your mind, pure and unsullied by the world. In this way, the imagined breakfast is like the perfect person. They are both like snow never trampled on by human feet.

The bjorn places Gus and I face-to-face and so, with surprising force, his hungry cries wrench me out of my reverie. They seem to wrench a few nearby people out of theirs, too. But Gus doesn’t care what anyone thinks. In this way, at least for the next few years, he is pure.