Holding my friend’s baby

Catalogue of delights: 13

It’s graduation day, a day that seems more important to everyone else but me, not because I don’t find it significant, but because I get to see O for the first time. He’s sleeping when I arrive at N’s parent’s house, so I make my rounds around the room and indulge myself in some food. There’s an assortment of delicious buns from a local bakery, chips and dip of average quality from Trader Joes, homemade mocktails on tap, and I haven’t eaten yet. The house pup greets me like I’m family despite the contrast of my southeast Asian glow to that of the Vermonters I love.

The last time I was here was right before I officiated N & M’s wedding. I met N five years ago when I moved from California to Vermont for a job in a developmental neuroscience lab. We shared an office where we often goofed off and talked about science, books, astrology, and other kinds of heady deliciousness for hours. It was a sad day when she moved a couple of feet down the hall—it makes a ginormous difference in the ease of conversation!—and even sadder still when she got accepted to med school. I was happy for her too of course, and thankfully she’d be attending the local university with M! But I knew that med school had the tendency to eat people and their friendships alive.

A year or two later, I ran into N at the grocery store. She caught me in one of the darkest moods I’d ever been. We chatted over dinner, and I learned that she was getting married. She was also pregnant and wanted me to officiate her wedding. This put me in one of the best moods I’d ever been. We had made the occasional effort to catch up in town while she was trudging through her first few years of med school, but it wasn’t the same as sharing an office together. So I was ecstatic that she’d chosen me to do the honors.

And what an honor it was. Everyone was situated in a beautiful, open field on a blisteringly hot day. A light breeze was present. Umbrellas were docked throughout the ceremony area. I was nervous, but everything went smoothly. I led her family and friends through a short meditation involving oranges and chocolate, quoted David Whyte’s Friendship, and half-successfully kept my tears in check. N & M sang a cappella together in college. This was central to the formation of their then budding relationship. The night ended on the high note of their individual and duo performances. O was there, steadily growing in the womb, listening to the kind of music that can only be produced by love.

When it came time to choose between N’s graduation party and my own graduation ceremony, it was a no-brainer. There too was always a part of me that felt distant from my program and the work I was doing, which I’m still unpacking a bit. Regardless, I’d choose celebrating and seeing my friends over anything any day.

I’d choose over and over again to bounce O on my leg as he chews and slobbers over a cardboard tag attached to the new plushie his grandmother has just given him. He’s looking at me with innocent eyes, with a gaze free from expectation that puts me ease, scanning the ridges of my face and my acne scars and my darkened skin and my crooked smile like little curiosities, not anomalies that need correction. He has no notion of what it means to size someone up, the way we adults do.

He laughs with and at me regardless of whether or not I have a masters or medical degree, even if I am no comedian. He smiles because I have done something funny, and for no reason at all. His wispy tuft of hair reminds me of clouds and cotton candy, his two bottom teeth of pebbles on a gummy coastline. These baby things are kind of amazing, I tell myself.

I think of what science can tell us about babies, about the variability in the development of certain milestones like the ability to crawl, walk, and talk. How fast these things happen—so fast that they seem like discrete events. One moment they’re here, the next they’re twenty-nine years old pondering the nature of things, hopelessly aware of how transient life is. My attention is fixed on him like a laser, as if I can engrave the moment into marble. He looks back at me, and reminds me to soften.

Graduation

• We look to our future days
• with eager eyes to behold—
• But don’t run so quickly!
• Too soon you’ll be old.
• The worlds that need your saving
• are here with us now.
• Our minds are the soil,
• the heart is our plow.
• Sow the seeds and wait,
• let the stories be told.
• Hold your heart steady
• as our future days unfold.