He was peevish and restless, drooling, a first tooth far away under this bone trying to make its way out. I sat him on top of the couch back and together we looked out the living room window. There is a red and purple myrtle tree there, the limbs leave enough light to see through them. We watched the rain fall over and over again onto the leaves and then the branches, against the windowpane, onto the earth, dank and redolent with all that is already warm and damp.
I was holding his foot, his cheek against mine and I told him a story about the leaves and the rain. I said there was a tiny little leprechaun the size of…no, not the baby toe, that is too small even for an imaginary leprechaun, but instead the size of the toe right next to it, exactly. His name was…er…Liam and he was very happy standing just where he was under that clump of leaves, darker now that they were wet but yellow tipped and those few branches which crossed there, making a sort of awning. He was warm and dry there, Liam, and he could smell the sweet, rich scent of the duff and hear the earthworms.
Why did I tell him? He is 16 weeks old, he cannot know anything of what I said, and, let’s face it, it wasn’t my best story. But I told him because….I wanted to tell him that this story, and all its sister stories, can get you through any number of rainy days when you are waiting for teeth or mourning a loss or losing at love or at war or at your job. And that without these stories, from the silly to the grand, there just isn’t going to be enough pizza and prosecco to get you through, not even with a warm shoulder to cry or spit up on, the long happy life that I hope he will lead. I wanted to tell him that even the stupidest ones, Mary’s Little Lamb or Little House on the made-up Capitalist Prairie (they can’t all be winners) are a great thing to read on a day like today. That every story, no matter how well or poorly told, how often or how rare, is a conversation across time and space that really only exists, at least for you, when you finally hear or read it.
It is an essential conversation one of very few that I cannot live without and one that I wanted to share with him, as soon as I possibly could.