August 3, 2010 - Lunch

I need to do something about eating vegetables.

Last night I was out with a divorcing friend. I asked after his daughter. A few years ago I went over to their place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and they'd offered to let me hold her. I'd never held a baby that small before: red, a few days old, wobbling.

"Huh," I'd said. "So that's what they're like. A lump."

"Yes," he'd said. "Pretty lumpy."

Last night I asked about her. I said, "she must be getting big."

He said: "She's eight. She's nearly five feet tall."

Of course she is. Took a moment: I'd lost four, maybe six years. Never had that sensation before, where life just empties out of a jug. Slow drip at the end and you're looking at the jug, going, but. You're standing on a bridge over a river. A small bridge, a metal bridge with grating across the span. Emptying this big jug of life into the muddy river. Then the kid is eight. But it's not that the time was lost; it's just that the moment holding the baby was so strange and alive, and I sort of missed everything that came between. I haven't missed it for real, I just missed it right then. Like I entered a localized chronozone; you're suddenly in their timeline instead of your own, and the gap seems enormous, you don't know how to do anything. The sequences are all off. Maybe time is a different language between families, between generations. The way they speak about it, measure it out, count it off, the amount remaining. If I see this kid I have promised myself that I will not say: I remember you when you were just a little. I will not try to find that common language. It's not there. There is no translation; the language you spoke last week, you can never speak it again.