what can i say?
One year ago: I have a ton of reading to do.
Two years ago: Rob and I run the Bay to Breakers.
Three years ago: I have a hangover and learn secrets about my class at USC.
Today's news question:New York Democrats have now nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton as their candidate for Senate. Who is she going to run against?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
She has silvery-grey eyes. I have never known anyone who had grey eyes. I didn't think grey eyes really existed. But they do. Several people have said they are his eyes, but I don't think so. I think they are her eyes, uniquely her own. Big eyes, always looking around, searching this big new interesting scary fascinating world. She likes to look at trees. She likes to look at the red, black, and white designs on the mobile over her crib. She likes to look at me.
I like to look at her too.
When I pick her up she puts an arm around my neck. She doesn't know she is doing it. It is the only place for her arm to go. The skin of her arm is soft against my neck. All of her skin is soft. I like to lie with her against me, her skin as soft as a warm wind against my body.
I love holding her.
She smells like milk. The archetypal baby smell: milk. Milk on a soft warm wind. She gets milk all over her face when she nurses, which makes me laugh. She would wear the milk happily if I didn't wipe it off. I am secretly proud that she smells like me, like something I've made especially for her. When she gets sick and throws up all over herself and me, the smell of the milk is tainted. The smell tells me how unhappy she is as much as her trembling expression does. I want to wash her off and cover her with the clean smell of the milk she loves so much.
I press my nose against her neck and inhale.
She squeaks. She trills. She squawks. When she screams, my heart is squeezed by the grip of a icy black hand, and I will do anything to make her feel better, to make everything okay, to reassure her that she is safe. When she squeals, she's excited, she's smiling with her whole mouth, she's enjoying the moment of now with a force I wish I could match. She grunts to say she is uncomfortable, and I ignore the world in order to make her comfortable. Then she looks at me and chirps in a wide smile, and my world is made right again.
Already she talks to me.
When I kiss her, I get as close as I can to her, my soft lips pressing against her milky skin. I imagine that when she suckles me she is kissing me back. She gets the all-important magic elixir that allows her to grow at a prodigious rate. She is comforted by being so close to me, secure in my arms. And we find pleasure in one another's company, the only sound for miles around the wet noisy slurps she makes. We have a relationship unlike any I have ever had before.
She likes to taste me as much as I like to kiss her.
When we first brought her home, I said, "I don't know if I love her." I felt protective of her. I felt responsible for her. But did I love her? It was all too strange and too difficult. In the mornings when I woke up and saw her there, I asked, Who is this stranger? Who is this brand-new person?
And she'd see me, and she'd shake with the need for me to hold her, to feel me surround her with my body.
Day by day, as I learned her ways of telling me what she needs, as I felt her small hands learn to pull my hair, as I watched her learn to hit the rattle on her chair, I discovered I am not sure the word "love" is right. It is such a small word.
I have never felt this way about anyone.
If she feels for me a tenth of what I feel for her, I am a blessed woman indeed.
The answer to Monday's question: Yes, the Justice Department is thisclose to filing suit against the Police Department of...Los Angeles! According to the New York Times,
In a sharp letter to city officials, the Justice Department said that it had found systemic abuses of power by the police here, including improper shootings, improper arrests and searches with insufficient cause. The Justice Department said it was still investigating accusations of racial discrimination by officers in the course of their duties. The federal investigation has happened to coincide with a separate local inquiry into evidence tampering, brutality and false testimony that amounts to the city's worst police corruption scandal in decades.
Yeah...well...we still got pretty good weather.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com