Have you been dying to get on the Notify List but couldn’t because I’m an html tard and kept somehow breaking that little handy window down on the bottom of the page? No. Don’t go looking for the little window. It’s gone. I’ve banished it. But if the answer to that question is “Why yes, Weetabix, I have indeed been salivating at the thought of reading those super secret extra details that you sometimes spout on the notify list but were up until this point much like the Holy Grail of all Weetabix knowledge, accessibly only to an elite subset of readers, plus the ecstacy of being alerted the very minute that a new entry is posted… Oh yes, I heartily would! Please please show me how!”. Well, um, ok. You can click here and there’s a little box there that I haven’t managed to break. Yet.
I’m posting from work right now. Yep. That’s right. It’s Saturday, it’s beautiful out and I’m sitting at work, in a mostly dark cubicle farm but for a lucky strike with the correct light switch to illuminate just the section of the farm where my own little stall exists. Yup. Should buy a lottery ticket today. Wait. I guess I did. Someone at work had some kind of lottery pool and I needed change for a ten, so I went over there and bought a lottery ticket so that I could get a five and four ones. I basically paid for change. Tax on stupidity and I just contributed. I suppose I deserve it, but part of me is completely terrified of the idea that I might come into work on Monday morning to the site of all of my coworkers mooning the company because they just won a bazillion gajillion dollars, even after taxes, and now they were all going to Disneyworld or something. Bah.
That sounds really grouchy and believe me, I’m not. I’ve been here for about three hours and have done a great deal of organizing to put my mind at ease. I hauled out my little radio, which I never get to listen to because everyone is on the phone and I don’t want to be a nuisance, and tuned it to Public Radio, where they have Classics by Request on Saturday mornings. And that’s just another sign of fall, people. I know. I know. I’m a broken record, but traditionally, I feel like listening to classical music when the weather gets colder. It’s nesting music. Esteban can’t stand it. “Stop the senseless violins!” he’ll cry out dramatically. Saturday evenings spent cooking dinner while listening to Prairie Home Companion cannot be far behind.
How much of a dork am I? Not only did I call in a request for a specific piece of Mozart’s Requiem to Public Radio, but I also went to their website and put a fake name and city and requested ANOTHER piece of music (Faure’s Pavane, if you must know). Yes. I’m certain you can feel the shame eminating right through your monitor, hovering over your keyboard even now as you read this page. I feel all dirty now.
Mo dropped in because she forgot something on her desk and accompanying her was my niece Abigail and her cousin Bailey, who is the second cutest child in the world. Bailey has recently cut her own bangs, ending up with a fringe of rice-long hair and a forehead the size of North Dakota. Even then, she’s adorable. She’s all blond and has these enormous green eyes. You just know that she’s going to be prom queen but so nice that everyone loves her anyway and all the boys will have enormous crushes on her, even the teachers. Even at a sage five years old, she’s the poster child for babymaking. We giggled a bit, ignoring Mo completely while I talked with the girls. It put a whole new spin on my stress because nothing can be so bad that you can’t giggle about it. And isn’t ‘purple’ a fun word to say? Isn’t it? Then they invited me to lunch with them after they were done shopping and I accepted and then also quickly called Esteban at home and invited him too.
Bailey actually unknowingly allowed Esteban and myself to realize just how much fun a baby can be. Well, it was Esteban’s big eye-opener, actually, as I had already known. At Abby’s baptism, 9-month-old Bailey was delightful and unafraid of these two large scary strangers. She pulled herself up onto my lap and then proceeded to bat her lovely large blue eyes at us and coo.
Esteban was sitting next to me, smiling. I do have a face that babies seem to adore. I think because my face is round and sort of babyish as well. It’s catnip for babies. Esteban, on the other hand, seems to frighten babies, with his black hair and beard. But not Bailey. She immediately crawled onto his lap and began flirting with him. We couldn’t take our eyes off of her. She did not cry. She did not whine. She just effervesced the beauty of all babies everywhere.
And at that moment, we both decided that we would very easily take Bailey home with us. Now, that’s one thing for me to say that but quite another for Esteban to agree to it. Shockingly, he agreed that if we knew that we’d have some wonderful archetype of a baby like Bailey, we would be shagging like bunny rabbits to get the job done. But, he then added, with our luck and DNA, we’d get some cranky little slug-like child whose nose dispensed veritable gallons of slime and whose fingers were perpetually covered in jam. Because those are the kinds of children that we were. There are said to be three types of babies’. Easy babies, like Bailey was, who are wonderful and sweet and lovely, Slow to Warm babies, who start out a bit cranky but then acclimate to a happier yet unpredictable baby, and then there are the little demons who never warm up, whose apparent sole purpose in life is to guarantee that their parents never get a moment of sleep and all of their expensive furniture has been chewed upon, scratched, crayoned, or otherwise maimed. I think those babies might just be God’s little way of telling those parents ‘Hey, you’re a great couple, love ya to death, but maybe not so much with the reproducing, ‘k?’ Those babies are God’s condom.
I’m pretty sure that we’d spawn one of those babies. Especially with Esteban’s surly DNA in the mix. In every fairy tale, he’s the bear who wants to eat Goldilocks, the troll who won’t let the Billy goats over the bridge, the little man who teaches the girl to weave straw into gold in exchange for a lifetime of oral pleasure. I don’t call him a Burgermeister for nothing. And I’m pretty sure that his surly demeanor would mix with my free-floating Grouchious Pantimus and create one surly little carpet monster. But I digress.
After Mo and the girls left, the radio played my Faure request and I felt very pleased with my clever ruse. I continued to kick ass on my work, taking a break to nosh six Oreos. Then I got up to use the potty, but then realized that I needed an access card to get to the bathrooms, so I went back to my desk and it was the very beginning of Requiem’s ‘Lacrimosa’. I sat down and couldn’t help but smile. Requiem is one of those pieces that is so entirely beautiful, so completely perfect, that it just proves to you that the world is an incredible place that such things could exist, forged by a person (or people, in this case, as it was unfinished when Mozart died) and brought forth by mere hands. So despite my complaining bladder, I sat there and stared at the postagestamp-sized piece of window I can see from my new location and just allowed myself to enjoy the Latin words, the bassoons, the luminous tenors and baritones, in a dark catacomb of cubicles, watching the rain on a dreary Saturday.
Then I went to lunch with my family, where we dined upon pizza and giggled and hugged a lot and in general, remembered for a moment how great it is to be alive.
It was a good thing.
