~ a rather long, unrproofed excerpt from my new book: a memoir.

     Well, I’d held the baby, and loved her. But I went back to my apartment and resumed my daily routine. I admit I didn’t think much about the baby at first. I mean, what is there to think about? She was there, I was here. I saw her occasionally, watched her being burped, examined her puking all over MB. That was cheerful. I don’t remember her crying very much. I looked in on her when she was asleep. I’d see her awake, hypnotized by a mobile (who wouldn’t be? I certainly was). She still smiled at me, but I wasn’t at their house often. I just hoped she slept well and had beautiful dreams.
     I am nobody special. You need to know this to understand. I claim no status as a war-ravaged refugee. I’ve done no great deeds, nor reaped any public acclaim. I’m not to be pitied. My life has been violently torn apart from the beginning. This is not privileged information. No one gets an easy life. Sorrow is the one universal constant. It happens to you, at some point, and to the neighbors down the street.
     For myself, I’ve never been right in the head. My brain chemistry is faulty, and has been since birth. No one is to blame. A storm rages in my synaptic junctures, causing them to misfire. Brain cells are like spark plugs: there is that gap in the machinery that requires a spark to work properly, a chemical ocean to be crossed by this incessant fleet of glitter-ships. Mine are shipwrecked, breached on the shoals of the mind’s phantom gelatin. They never make the connection. I’m not alone in this.
     When I see children whip fizzing sparklers on a Summer’s night, I am reminded of the complex turnpike of the nervous system: the traffic is staggering! I think of all the sparklers I whirled as a child with my brothers. The jars of fireflies we kept by our beds. The dancing fire of a candle-driven magic lantern. Whenever a thunderstorm gave us a night’s opera, my parent’s knew to find me outside, staring up at the heaven’s blue-gold cutlery. I didn’t know a thing, but I could feel the pull of it.
     One of my earliest childhood memories is being tugged out of sleep by night terrors. I would have been about two or three years when they began. Two or three times I would “wake,” hyperventilating and cold, pulse racing, face lathered in sweat, screaming. My mother would come rushing to pluck me out of bed, take me to the living room, where she would hold me tight, rocking, whispering soothing words of comfort into my wet and burning ears. She was as frightened as I was, because she knew I hadn’t been dreaming. I was wide awake, and this was no nightmare.  I am in the nightmare now mom at this moment curled in your arms and there’s no place to go.
     The entire room, the world, now telescoped beyond all comprehension, producing horizons that race on into infinity, overlapping in a way no child should know. The room was distorted, fuzzy. I wasn’t able to hold on, I would spin away into the grin of madness, I would fall through the floor and Mom wouldn’t be able to keep me solid, God bless her, I would fade.
     I was outside myself looking at Mom holding this little boy
     I wanted to be especially alive then, in my mother’s arms. I longed to be weary enough to sleep like my older brother. I prayed for a regular nightmare like his.
     The night terrors went away at some point. The rest of my childhood was free from that grotesque phenomena -- or any other. Though I’ve been told I was a difficult infant, I don’t remember, so I can’t vouch for that. I’m certain there was a huge grain of truth to that statement, since both my mother and my paternal grandmother both avidly declared it to be so. My childhood, however, was beyond happy -- it was magical, a sentimental poem of deep play, every day so terribly alive, full of discovery. I was Magellan. I was a happy youth, imaginative but introverted. I loved reading, and climbing trees and, most of all, running. It was a fitting pastime, this refusal to stay in one place for too long (so it would not catch up), and oh how I ran. There was the relentless envy of winged things, the confusion of birds with angels -- a distinction that remains unresolved -- the desire to be mothered by the heartless wind, and still break free.
     I filled my lungs with the retribution of wrens and would have run beyond all known horizons, all day and night, carrying my cargo of brittle bones long past what everyone else was already calling the World, into a glorious yonder where I might know what it finally meant, this flesh:  it is merely borrowed. You can’t outdistance decay, so you run while you can. Whether the wind was at your back, or took the side of belligerence against you, you ran through it all, never looking over your shoulder. All that mattered was what lay ahead -- and even that wasn’t so important, since, in youth, nothing was:  you weren’t running away, or toward, anything. You ran because you could, and your legs didn’t ever get tired; there was no pain, your breath was as full as a ship’s bulging sail, and you ran on through the fields of life, and there was no stopping you. That’s what it is to be so very young and know everything, with life keeping pace like a generous host, a fastidious butler existing only for your whims.
     In my late teens, the panic attacks came. They are like night terrors writ large. You can’t tell if I’m having one. The lightning in the brain strikes rapidly, furtively, rendering all you see and feel…unreal. It’s like you find yourself inside a merciless Dali painting. You think you can’t breathe, that you are probably going to die. It’s frightening. These arduous attacks became more frequent. Then, I’d be rid of them for a year. At the age of 20, they returned with a vengeance, and remain. This was bad. I was an infant again, in the body of an adult. As if this wasn’t enough vengeance for my vanity in running away all those years, depression came to call.
     To understand true depression -- the clinical variety -- you just have to experience it. No words can adequately express the bleak weight of it crushing you to pulp. Yes, it’s heavy, it has substance -- shadowy, but sincere. It is not the same thing as being unhappy, or blue, which is universal. In fact, depression and happiness can co-exist. We should really find another term for it. One that does it justice, and doesn’t confuse the general public, so that everybody who feels a bit “down in the dumps” isn’t handed a prescription for Prozac, sent home with an empty wallet -- and the false promise of a bright future.
     Depression is an ember in the brain: it smolders and burns, but leaves you a shred of your substance as a reminder, so you can still feel the agony. It isn’t always constant, either. It’s an unannounced, and unexpected, visitor. When it’s in you, like a worm eating its fill, you want nothing more than to be normal, even boring, but you will take death as a palliative elixir, if no other treatment is available. You don’t know the reasons why the dark linen is trying suffocate you, because there aren’t any reasons -- other than in that mysterious electro-chemical soup factory we call the brain. This is not an illusion; it’s not my imagination, nor can it be tempered by meditation. I’ve been through every treatment you can name, and have thirty-six years of experience and research on you. There’s nothing you can say that I haven’t already heard. And dismissed. I know this much about myself, at least. Don’t try to tell me what you might have done, or write to me about cures. Been there. Done that. I’m just trying to save you some time and effort. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me -- I need no pity -- but neither do I want you to judge me. You haven’t earned the right. Finish this book, then we’ll talk.
      This is what my life has been like, until I met the baby. But it’s all still there: the sizzling wasp, the tiger ready to pounce from its makeshift chemical zoo. The Black Lake still sends out its siren song. It will never be far away. It looms. I visit. It wants the whole loaf of my soul; I toss it scraps. The Black Lake was the only home I’d known for most of my life in the this world. I’ve tried to build new homes, places that have nothing to do with houses. Houses burn, get sold, you move. I think it’s working. I’m no penitent, not for the past or the present. I might have owned an unlived-in life, for the most part, but the rent is still expected and -- one way or another, it gets collected. You pay to be a Bedouin. You pay dearly.
     Falling in love with Molly was easy:  she was a baby, a newborn, a foreign object, exotic like a seahorse. What an odd, charming ornament to have in the house! My entire knowledge of babies would fit have fit on a post-it note. I didn’t have any babies. I could admit that I’d been one myself at some point, as my mother insisted, but -- beyond that -- there was little to add to my personal repertoire. That was little help, I realize, but what else was there? I couldn’t have given a very accurate definition of “pediatrics” without picking up the hefty Oxford and, though baby and book weighed about the same, I was more comfortable with the former.
     When Molly was about six months old, I became her babysitter for one day each week. I don’t know how I got talked into this. I suppose it wasn’t that difficult a decision for me, since I was curious, and still had that edge to learn something. And I adored her. It also helped out MB and Mort, and gave her regular sitter a day off. What I lacked in childcare qualifications, I made up in self-doubt. Well, not completely. I mean, how hard could it be? It wasn’t like she could leave the house without my permission, or elope. She spent most of her time either asleep, eating, or pooping. Big deal. I could handle this. I was forty-one years old, past middle-age, and I could take care of a such a simple thing as a baby, for heaven’s sake. Besides, there was my pride to consider. I had to stand pat and parade the race of the male. I harbored no resentment toward the other species -- I was quite amazed by them, in point of fact, and admired them greatly. But whatever they could do, etc. I’d show them! And, at the end of the day, I’d smile when MB returned, nod, stretch, say “piece of cake, kid.” Then I’d get to go home again. Win/win. YES! Hurrah for my side!
     To my great surprise, it wasn’t as horrific as I thought it would be, this eccentric new job. It was more responsibility than I’d bargained for -- after all, this is a helpless new life we’re talking about. It can’t do anything for itself. But it satisfied a curious emptiness in my soul, some estival acre of desire I thought I’d left behind in one of my other lives. At first, I was hesitant around Molly Rae. It was true that she was my niece, and thus part of my family -- but she was also, unmistakably, a baby. I couldn’t ignore that one crucial fact. Well, I tried, but it didn’t work. So there she was. And there was I.
     Babies. What strange animals! Personally, at that time I was on better terms with dogs. I understood dogs. Babies were alien. For one thing, they are always smaller than you remember, inexplicably tiny. They should come with tags that say “handle with care,” or “hand wash only.” I imagined that these truths were self-evident, that parents inherently possess them by some primordial instinct. But others did as well. Even my own self, I shamelessly admit. It was either that or I fell for the prank the universe decided to play on my middle-aged life, and I refused to give it that satisfaction. Let it wonder about that, I thought. Grinned.
     I immediately discovered that babies make funny wet noises that sometimes soften to murmured sonnets. They also make fanatical wet messes that aren’t particularly joyful, but they have to be tended to nonetheless. Here is a truth to all parent’s of newborns: yes, you can put the Pampers on backwards. Trust me on this. But, all in all, I was inclined to enjoy having something to tend. It wasn’t that much different from gardening, I thought at first.
     Molly’s father was an avid gardener. Mort worked such long, tiring hours at his two law offices that I rarely saw him -- and yet his big brick house was surrounded by a majestic panoply of green stuff: geysers of orange Asiatic Lilies, his favorites; rows of redbud trees, rock gardens garnished with marigolds, roses, celosia, tulips, daffodils, crocuses, alyssum; blackberry and raspberry bushes, from which he makes freezer jam. In the past few years, he’s developed a fondness for ornamental grasses, bearding the lawn with them. Mort was born in the Spring, and Spring is his passion. I envy him; he finds the time for all of this, even when there isn’t any.
     Tending a baby wouldn’t be so different, I thought. It would simply be one more extravagance to find time for. Time: a shiny fish caught by hand, evanescent, slippery -- whoops! and it’s gone, scissored away. Time was the one thing I was buried up to my neck in.
    Six days out of each week I led a small, unopened life. I baked bread, wrote letters, read, even cut pictures out of old magazines with the intention of taking up art again. Collage. It’s a wonder I never got around to cutting out paper dolls. I took long walks in town, and out, into the woods. I wanted to learn clock repair, but couldn’t afford the mail-order lessons. I didn’t own a car, a television, or radio. I had no telephone. I was a solitary man, a nowhere man, a man very alone in a small and isolated town in rural West Virginia. That’s the way I wanted it. I puttered about, in a dreamy state, mostly doing nothing, and so the days just happened without a lot of bother. I didn’t want a lot of bother. I just wanted to be left alone. I slept poorly, arose late. On Mondays, I had to get up early and go take care of Molly. It took me just a few minutes to realize that the gardening analogy was absurd. You couldn’t just water a baby, hope for sun and rain, go inside, wash your hands, lay back and watch Jeopardy. Jesus, you couldn’t let the baby out of your sight for one.single.second. I mean, even in the crib, sleeping. I’d watch her sleep, to make sure she was breathing. No hellish elf was going to steal this baby. Not while I still breathed. She’d already wormed her way into my heart. I had to protect and serve. Truth is, she got to the point that she expected me to be standing there when she woke up. I liked that. She needed me, perhaps. Nobody else did. Not really. I considered myself an afterthought in the minds of most people I knew. Trouble is, I didn’t really know anybody now. At this point, I didn’t even know myself. I had a few assumptions, but none that would carry me very far.
     Mort usually picked me up to ferry me to duties, before he headed to work. Sometimes, MB showed up instead -- always late -- before she went off to her own office. I’d stay with Molly until six or seven o’clock, or whatever late hour her parents came home. In the beginning, I dreaded this ordeal. It disturbed my carefully orchestrated routine. Then, much to my consternation, I began to look forward to what I thought of as Holiday with Baby. I was becoming an expert at this. Caring for Molly was the one thing of consequence I could claim. It mattered, these Mondays. Nothing else had, for many years. It became important to me, this one beatific day -- something to call my own. My day! “I did it…myyy day!” I sang on Monday mornings, sipping coffee and waiting for my ride. I was alone all day with a baby and I was doing fine. Well, at least nothing bad ever happened. The worst was getting puked on, but I got used to that. I mean, at least you had warning: you knew it was coming. Not every day. There were times I escaped. But babies slobber, drool, puke, pee, poop. If you can’t wrap your head around those facts, then you should consider contraceptives.
     There were times when I thought this must be a dream, one of the good ones -- and they were rare enough to note. Still, I sighed with an odd sort of sad relief when I was returned to my own three small rooms, and six days of recovery -- that included a busy schedule of mostly doing nothing. I took my medication, cleaned my apartment, baked, wrote, walked, tried to teach Petey, my parakeet, to talk. I was a creature of established habit and my Lilliputian existence was the sweet-and-sour sauce of a life no longer deeply realized. I loved to sleep. I marked my Monday’s on the calendar.
     One Monday morning, when Molly was nine months old, MB stopped by to pick me up. On the short drive to her house, I noticed that a tear fell from her eye. I asked her what was wrong. Was Molly okay? MB explained that Molly’s regular sitter had been let go, since she turned out to be unreliable. She and Mort had no alternatives in mind. “We’re caught between a rock and a hard place,” she lamented. “We’re in trouble here, and we just don’t know what to do.”
     And thus began an odd and harrowing journey into my deepest self, an epic migration that still resonates within the marrow of my spirit. Within a few precious moments, ignoring a severe and doubtful warning from that little reasonable voice in the back of my mind -- the one that tends to mention things like “If you keep holding your finger over that candle flame, you are going to get burnt” -- I blurted out “Well, I’ll do it. I’ll take over full-time. I mean, if you want me to.”
     What had I just uttered? Had I left my mind at home? MB looked so relieved I was sure she was going to shed more tears. Shit and damn, I thought to myself. You just said something you can’t take back. Nice going, idiot.