Sixteen years ago today I spent several unpleasant hours in the hospital and returned home the following morning with a very small boy who looked like Edward G. Robinson. Shortly thereafter, our well went dry, and the dog got sprayed by a skunk. A few months later we moved across town to our present house, and the boy became attached to a stuffed pig. Before long he learned to talk. Some of his first words were "Birdfinch," "Birdhatch," "Bucket loader," and "Right, Mom?"At age 2 he met his best friend, and they spent many happy hours together riding a wooden giraffe on wheels. (Mine was the bossy blond kid on the left.) Soon he began to construct forts from baling twine, pine boughs, and duct tape; and by second grade he had attempted to glue an annoying kid to a desk chair.

The years passed by, both swiftly and at a turtle's pace. The boy took up canoeing and socializing and became popular with his grandparents. He spent the day before his 16th birthday mowing grass, helping his mother drag two dogs to the vet, eating a large grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich, talking on the phone to his best friend (the very same ex-giraffe rider), prodding the wrapped birthday presents he'd arranged on top of the piano, twisting his mother's arm behind her back in a friendly way, chortling sarcastically about the gophers in Caddyshack, not writing a paper about Fast-Food Nation (his summer-reading assignment), trying on his new soccer cleats and jumping up and down in them on the linoleum until ordered to stop, eating whipped cream and berries with a serving spoon, stuffing the serving spoon into his mouth and bugging out his eyes ironically, proposing that we should let him consume our whipped cream as well as his own, watching stupid YouTube videos, watching an elegant Peter Gunn episode, and going to bed after midnight.

He also requested the following birthday dinner: homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta and chard leaves, chard stems baked with butter and parmesan, homemade French bread, pineapple bavarian cream. This meant that Tom, who is our resident ravioli maker, had to labor all day yesterday on a roof and then come home and spend all evening making pasta. He was cheerful, however. The boy is good at making his parents cheerful. And since the French bread is already in the freezer, all I have to manage today are the chard stems and the pineapple bavarian. I'm a little disappointed that the boy changed his mind about the ice cream and meringue confection known as Mount Vesuvius, but he decided to save that for a graduation party.