Noah

Noah turned five on Tuesday. It's impossible to believe that Anna and I have survived parenthood this long; impossible, too, to imagine a world before Noah. Not that I lack for selfishness as a parent or think about him every second of every day but, you know, it's as if he has threaded through every capillary of my sense of the world, stamped every thought with some peculiar cast, expanded to the limits of my (dim) memories of things, even if only as a faint trace, a whisper. It's terrifying to love someone so much and to think what I think of the future, of the world we live in. And, of course, it's that anxiety, that certainty of the limits to present society such as it is constructed, which makes ninety percent of the parents I meet, when they are being parents, so unbearable to be around. . .


[Noah, right, and my nephew Asa, left, in a gold mine turned museum.]