Hot pink baby

Freeze-dried strawberries left in a baggie in your backpack and thereby mushed into a powder + exactly one-half second of inattention to Mr. OhmygoshILOVEstrawberries=hot pink baby

The Man With the Golden Palate

You guys! Yogurt is awesome!

You guys! Mulberries are awesome!

You guys! Sugar snap peas are awesome!

You guys! Cherries are awesome!

 You guys! Baguettes are awesome!

You guys! Chilled English pea soup topped with dungeoness crab, lemon verbena and crème fraîche is awesome! 

You guys! Homemade yogurt-and-berry popsicles are awesome!

You guys! Figs are awesome!

You guys! Watermelon is awesome!

You guys! Apples are awesome!

You guys! Pears are awesome!  

You guys! Chicken long rice is awesome! 

You guys! Chicken liver pâté and pepper jelly sandwiches are awesome!

A year and a month

Somehow, he's thirteen months old tonight. He's walking, responding to questions ("What does a fishy say?" results in a puckered mouth and kissy noises; "Where are your ears?" is answered with his hands clapped over them), babbling, laughing, and starting to lose his baby chubbiness. It's beautiful and bittersweet to watch my baby turn into a little boy. 

I'm taking all the snuggles I can get while time races us along.

Morning nap

Is there anything sweeter than napping with your baby? Than laying down next to the person you love more than anyone in the world, who is warm and impossibly soft, and nearly the exact size and shape as a teddy bear, who smells sweetly of milk and chamomile and rained-on lambswool? 

Grandma and Small Kamal: kindred spirits.

Adam's mom, Leslie, came for a visit this past weekend, and I don't know who had more fun: Grandma or Kamal. 

They're truly kindred spirits. Kamal, who does say "Dada!" when he sees Adam and sometimes "Mama!" when he sees me--although both of those words mean lots of other things too--started hollering "Aya!" when he saw Leslie. He would reach for her to hold him just like he reaches to Adam and me, beam when she entered the room, babble at her eagerly and unshyly. His typical reserve with people was all out the window; you can just tell he knows she's family. 

I am so happy that these two have each other. 

The Prayer of St. Francis

Today I went on a house call to see a man who is dying; his family told me he hadn't slept for a week, and they hoped I could help him get some rest.

This patient is a lovely man, both gracious and graceful, who welcomed me with a kindly formality into his home in spite of being obviously exhausted and in several different kinds of distress. I helped him lie down, explained what I was going to do and what he would feel, rolled down his socks and rolled us the legs of his pajamas, and went to work. I swabbed his translucent skin; I slipped acupuncture needles into intricate labyrinths of capillaries the color of bruised fruit; I pressed my thumbs into the soles of his cold, edematous feet. I sat next to his bed, working hard to stay focused and relaxed, trying to hold the mood of the room in a quiet, peaceful place. After a while, I motioned for his daughter, who was sitting on a couch at the edge of the room with her mother, to switch seats with me; I whispered to her to think about sending her father calm energy.  I watched as she took her place next to him, closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Every time she heard her father fretfully stir she'd open her eyes, tilt her head and smile at him, sending him gently back to sleep.

I am neither a professional singer nor a religious person, but once I was both. I haven't been either for a long time, which I am most of the time okay with. The thing is, through every breath of my visit with this patient I kept hearing the first line of this hymn I sang when I was a fervently devout teenager: "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace."  That's the first line of the Prayer of St. Francis, but I didn't remember the whole hymn--my prayer today, my involuntary prayer, was just that one line, a short, silent, constant prayer. I don't know exactly who I pray to when I pray, but I knew what I wanted to be able to do for this man. I called on the Judeo-Christian God my mother raised me with to bring this patient peace. I called on the new-agey concept of the universe. I called on the pragmatic and academic theological ideals in which my father believed. I called on my mother, hoping with a wobbly mixture of self-conscious conviction and educated doubt that she could hear me. And I called, most strongly, on my love for Kamal.

Because my love for Kamal is the most effective tool in my work, and it's one I didn't even have till a little over a year ago. It blows my mind how much it's changed my practice for the better. Of course I always knew that every patient I see was once a baby, and I would remind myself of this whenever I felt unusually challenged in finding empathy for a patient--but I know it in a deeper part of my body now that I know Kamal. I don't have to remind myself; the knowing is in my cells, in my nerve endings; childbirth ground it into the base of my spine and from there it anchors me and I can't drift. I know that every body I touch was once small and fat and dimpled, dearer to one mother than anything else could possibly be. I know when I part white wisps of hair to swab acupuncture points on the scalp that that hair was once downy as a new chick's; that every fraction of an inch of it was beloved; that that one mother shed a few tears the first time it was cut; that she might have saved a curl of it between the pages of a book, lost now to time but no less precious for that. I know that the veiny old-man feet I held today, tried to warm with my inadequate hands, carefully pulled socks back over were once kissed and tickled with as much plain and straightforward joy as I kiss and tickle Kamal's little paws.

Loving humankind is what made me an acupuncturist, but loving this one tiny little human is what makes me know I am supposed to be one. Loving him! Holy moly. It is an unending education, a rubato unspooling, a moment-by-moment redemption. Thank God, thank the universe, thank goodness for my child. Thank you, Mom, for your grandson's wide, bright eyes and ready smile. Thank you, Kamal, my sweet baby, my saving grace, for letting me be your mama.

One year ago tonight, the remarkable Colette Mercier took this photograph, and I will always be grateful that she did. I thought I couldn't remember the first moment holding Kamal until I saw this, and then it rushes back: how every single thing disappeared except this tiny body, this familiar stranger, in my arms; how nothing leading up to that moment mattered anymore, at all; how he looked right at me with his darkly boundless eyes, like he had absolute faith that I could make everything safe and logical, like I wasn't just as flabbergasted as he by everything that had just happened to us. In the picture, there are doctors and nurses rushing around in the background, blurry with speed. I know Adam was next to us, I know Colette was next to us, I know there must have been beeping machines and flashing monitors and fluorescent hospital lights, but for these few seconds Kamal and I were one another's single real thing in the whole world.

Happy birthday, baby. You are far and away the coolest thing that has ever happened to your father and me. You have rendered us dorkier, tireder, and gladder than we thought possible. Thank you for being ours.