Thirteen years and three hours ago, my second son, Paul, was born. When Tom and I brought him home from the hospital later that day, Robbie the cairn terrier mistook his peeps and wails for kitten meows and spent the next 10 hours or so leaping wildly around the Rubbermaid container we were using as a bassinet. This was merely a taste of the boy-related hijinks to come. Three-year-old James was pleased to have a brother, though disappointed that he lay around so boringly and that we had decided against using the name that James had picked out for him: Mister Penguin.

Nonetheless, like a penguin, Paul fattened rapidly. His menu schedule was as follows: pre-breakfast, breakfast, post-breakfast, midmorning snack, pre-lunch, lunch, post-lunch, midafternoon snack, pre-dinner, dinner, post-dinner, dessert, extra dessert, bedtime snack, middle of the night snacks 1, 2, and 3, repeat. As long as he ate constantly, he was a good-tempered baby; and James enjoyed shoving spoons into his ever-open mouth and caroling the song about peaches that he and I had composed in order to distract Paul from the time lapse between bites. The song went like this:

I kick up my heels when I eat peaches,

When I eat peaches, I always screeches.

I screeches and I yells,

I hoots and I howls,

'Cause somebody fed all my peaches to the owls.

James and I had a number of handy songs in our quiver for various moments of baby care, and sometimes we still sing them. There is a brief yet catchy lullaby about getting tattoos, for instance.

Although Paul refused, for as long as possible, to roll over, crawl, walk, or ride his trike, he eventually broke down and became ambulatory. Simultaneously all his fat vanished and other mothers began to ask if he were anorexic. The answer is no: he merely has his father's scrawny genes. In addition he has his father's hair, eyes, nose, mouth, scowl, and physical grace. (See the attached poem for more on this theme.)

Last night, before he went to bed, he said: "Tomorrow, when I wake up, I get to be a surly teenager!" This morning, he leaped out of bed without being prodded and threw his arms around me, meanwhile growling like a Tasmanian devil. He then explained that this was a symptom of being a surly teenager. After consuming a shocking amount of birthday-breakfast French toast, he donned a few of his birthday gifts--including a Montreal Expos cap and a short-order-cook's jacket that Tom had unearthed at Marden's--and blithely took off for school. Oy.

Tonight's dinner, at Paul's request: melon with prosciutto, boiled lobster, tiny crusty rolls, birthday-boy-made coleslaw with our own carrots, cabbage, and birthday-boy-made mayonnaise, lime meringue pie.

Here a poem from How the Crimes Happened, in honor of my dear second son and his dear father:

There’s no denying him

Dawn Potter

announced the old lady at Bud’s Shop ’n Save,

grabbing your father’s coat sleeve, eyeing you

up and down like post-office criminals.

Flat cheekbones, shock of hair, same aloof,

thin-hipped stride, same touch-me-not scowl:

six years old, already the masked man.

What have I done to deserve lover and son

so beautiful, both remote as trout in green shallows?

I fritter my squirrel antics on the bank, swing

head-first from a cedar bough: Notice me, notice me!

You cock his cool stare and flit into shadow, my slippery fish.

But dangle the lure, the words—

up you flash, sun bronzing your quick scales.

“Away went Alice like the wind!” you cry; “In Lear I love the Fool!”

Feathers sprout from my worldly paws, your gills suckle air.

New born, we flee open-eyed into the east,

bright wingbeats carving cloud, below us the unfolding sea—

white chop, clean spray.

You know the story.