To A Baby, Everything Is A New Thing

 To A Baby, Everything Is A New Thing

I accepted the delicate object into my hands, cradling it as I had done before with others of its kind. This, though, was nothing like anything else.

He looked up at me. The world was a great confusion to his eyes, which at most had seen a red void before, but I knew he could recognize faces, for the same reason that adults “recognize” faces in wall sockets and cracks in the ceiling.

“Hello. Your name is Walden Kelley Burt. I love you.”

We’d known he was going to be a boy for a couple of months now. I’d sent out an e-mail announcing, “It’s a boy. Well, it’s a fetus, but it’s a boy fetus (The Adventures of Walden Kelley Burt, Boy Fetus).”

“God, look at him,” my wife said at my shoulder.”

“How can I look at anything else?”

“Look at the look on his face. He’s fascinated.”

“Everything has changed for him.”

“I remember when Jake was born, he cried, but he stopped when I said, ‘It’s okay, baby, I’m still here’. He quieted down as soon as he heard my voice.”

“Waldy won’t get that. He didn’t hear Maureen’s voice. He may never hear it again.”

“He’s had a very different trip, being anesthetized along with Maureen for the C-section, and then waking up in a strange place without even her voice to orient him.”

“We’ll have to make his landing as easy as we can.”

I brushed his forehead lightly with my fingertips, and put my finger where his hand could grasp. His tiny fingers closed around it.

“God….”

I held him out for Kathe to take.

“I remember being this helpless. Not much, but I especially remember being laid on a cold pan scale to weigh me. It could have been from my birth, or from a well-baby visit when I was a few months old, but I was definitely very small.”

“Justin said he remembered before he was born, a time when ‘I could see only red, and I was slimy, but I didn’t mind’.”

I laughed.

“You told me about that one. I wonder what Waldy will remember?”

“We’ll have to ask him.”

Kathe handed him back to the impatient nurse, who carried him out of the room.

 

 

https://poems.com/poem/your-new-world/