When I found out that my mother was dead, I was enraged. Not because she was gone—for that I felt a slight uptick of relief. I was angry because nobody had told me earlier. I hadn’t known she was sick, hadn’t known there was a funeral, hadn’t been able to say good-bye. I had never known how to talk to my mother, but I wanted to say good-bye.

A lawyer had found my brother first to broach the news, and my brother had called me. This lawyer wanted us to sign some papers, but I called him directly to ask why no one in her family—in my family—had reached out to us. The lawyer turned out to be a friend of my mother’s. She had done his bookkeeping for years. He told me that the family didn’t know how to find us, his tone cool and professional. This, I said, was impossible. I am an author and a professor at three universities; a Google search of my name yields plenty of hits. For $1.95, you can see my last seven addresses and get a criminal background check thrown in for free. My brother has a website with an address and phone number on it. After all, the lawyer himself tracked us down.

The lawyer then said that my mother had written us letters to tell us she was dying and we didn’t write her back.

“Oh,” I said, stunned. “She wrote to us?”

I didn’t tell him that the few letters she had sent me over the years had been in direct response to mine, that she’d never mustered the courage to make contact on her own.

“The family didn’t think you cared,” the lawyer continued. “You didn’t write back to her letters, so why would you go to her funeral?”

“But I never got a letter,” I protested, sounding every bit the 5-year-old I felt like inside.

The lawyer knew her husband, Clem, and her sister. “Well, honestly, I think Clem and Phyllis thought you had already caused your mother enough grief in her life, why should you be allowed to cause any more?” he said.

In my mother’s will, I discovered, she had left the house for Clem to maintain his “health and standard of living.” After he passes, half the sale of the house will be distributed to her relatives: Mom’s sister and her sister’s two children are to receive a quarter, and my brother and I will collect an eighth apiece. In 20 years, I may get a hundred bucks out of the deal. The only other things she had to give away were two diamond rings. These she bequeathed to my cousin Kathy.

After I got off the phone with the lawyer, I decided to take the risk and track down Clem. I had never met him. I discovered that he lived in a house he had shared with Mom for 18 years in Benicia, a town 11 miles from where I grew up. I saw a picture of it on Google Maps: It was a one-story clapboard house, painted blue with white trim. Clem was 72, but when he answered the phone he sounded younger. Your mother, he said, was the nicest person he had ever known.

“Your mother loved you,” Clem said. “She cried over you all the time. She never understood why you never came and saw her. Birthdays especially.”

Clem confirmed the letters she supposedly wrote when she was sick, though he never saw them. He said she cried when she didn’t hear back from us. He said he didn’t know how to find us for the funeral. In fact, he said, “I didn’t know if you was even alive."

There must have been 150 people at the funeral, he told me. Everyone loved her. I had done a real bad thing, leaving her like that, he said, but she was never angry—just the rest of the family was, for treating her so bad.

I remembered the way my mother had told her family that I was dead and wondered if they ever believed it. I thought how strange it was to be a ghost: solid enough for everyone’s projections to land and stick but too ephemeral to fight back. I also felt that Clem didn’t like talking to me.

She was the smartest person in town, he said. I sensed he was trying to get off the phone. “You really missed a lot not knowing your mother.”

What about our report cards and stories and drawings and photographs from when we were kids, I asked him. My mother kept all of these things in boxes labeled with dates. There was nothing to prove our childhoods with our mother, only the scattering of pictures of the visits with our dad that marked us growing up.

“No, no, we threw all of that stuff away,” Clem said. His voice was rushed. “She didn’t want it anymore.”

The depth of this loss stopped me cold. “Um, could I have a picture of her, something of hers?”

“The only pictures I got are the pictures of her and me, and they’re up on the wall.”

“Could I get a copy of that picture, just to see what she looks like?”

“No,” Clem answered, his voice firm. “I don’t got nothing.” He hung up the phone.

Cris Beam is an author and professor in New York City. She is the author of the young adult novel I Am J, as well as Transparent, a nonfiction book that covers seven years in the lives of four transgender teenagers, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best transgender book in 2008 and was a Stonewall Honor book. She is currently at work on a book about the foster-care system. You can find the full ebook of Mother, Stranger at The Atavist.

---

See more posts by Cris Beam

4 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

0 comments

Sometimes the kiddie-Joycean monologue defies untangling. "Musaka musaka iko," he likes to say, or something that sounds like that. Followed by: "No! That's J____'s line!" J____ is one of his day-care classmates. I tried to reproduce his thought processes with Google and got eggplant recipes. None of the day-care teachers could figure out where it had come from.

"Fuck!" was not one of the mysterious ones. He had it perfect. We were heading out to the airport, the two of us, and we'd burned most of our margin of error getting him into his coat and shoes. I'd hurried him through the apartment garage, buckled him into his car seat, and thrown the luggage into the trunk. I jabbed the key into the ignition, letting my eyes fall on the dashboard clock, and just as the numbers lit up: "Fuck!"-like a cue called out from the wings.

It's not that I'd been about to blurt it out myself, right then. We weren't running that late, yet. But I'd slipped up enough times before-missing a Metro train, yes, definitely-and he'd picked up the whole rhythm and logic of it, the moment when Daddy's haste and frustration would crest. He could hear and echo the bad words even if I kept them inside my skull.

"Fuck!" he repeated, with rising merriment, as I put the car in reverse and looked over my shoulder. "Fuck!"

I tried not to meet his eyes. Take provocation in stride, the experts say. Deprive the child of any reaction, positive or negative, as if nothing interesting had happened. This is wonderful advice. If I had that much self-control, he would never have heard me cuss in the first place.

I don't want to have a salty, transgressive mini-adult around. The joke is not that great. My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on "holy crap." It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying "dog-fucking son of a bitch" during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn't try to speed up the process.

So it was guilty and mortified laughter that I was stifling, ineffectively. No one will mimic you more cruelly and accurately than your own child. "Daddy made a mistake!" is his favorite gag line of all. Daddy made a mistake! It's not funny. It's funny. Fuck! I mean, drat.

A friend of mine, when his daughter was two years old, got called in for a parent-teacher conference. The little girl had been bouncing around on one of those big rubber balls, happily saying "Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!" in time with the bouncing. Yeah, he and his wife said, abashedly, she got that from us. The teacher was surprised. No parents had ever pleaded guilty before, she told them. They always said it must have been an uncle or something.

Or something. I do sincerely believe he picked up "It is SO fucking cold!" from somewhere else, for instance. And the "WEEE WILLL, WEEE WILLL..." of "We Will Rock You." Not my fault. Influences are everywhere. The parent has to set an example.

Not long after the ride to the airport, at the end of a party with people we'd only just met, the kid-who'd been quiet all evening-suddenly felt moved to holler. "Oh, MERCY!" he yelled. "Oh, MERCY!" Those words had come out of my mouth only once, maybe a week before, at the sight of some Dutch elm disease damage. The kid had been up on my shoulders at the time, seemingly engrossed in an electronic greeting card he'd discovered, making it play a snippet of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" over and over in my ear.

But now he was stomping around these people's entrance hall. "Oh, MERCY! Oh, MERCY!"

The other people's children were scampering here and there. Who says "Oh, mercy"? someone asked.

I do, I said.

Tom Scocca is finishing up Beijing Welcomes You for Riverhead and is at war with the machines in his spare time.

---

See more posts by Tom Scocca

23 comments

It wasn't that scary for me; I did know where he was, more or less. But this was what I was leaving my wife with, on the other end of the phone:

[Child's screaming.]
Fuck! Shit. Uh, I gotta call you back-
[Screaming continues in background.]
[Call disconnects.]

I was standing by the elevator bank, all by myself. The screaming was coming from the other side of a closed elevator door.

We had been riding the elevators for amusement ever since Halloween. The kid hated wearing his costume, a velcro-fastened dragon-or-dinosaur jacket with spines on the sleeves and a little tail. He wouldn't wear the hood at all, and people guessed at first that he was a turtle. There were a fair number of young couples on the trick-or-treat apartment list, visibly proud to be answering the door together in their shared dwelling, rather than staggering around alone in the night among people dressed as Slutty Runaway Balloon Hoaxes or whatever was funny this year.

He was indifferent to the candy, but he was thrilled about riding up to the top floor, the 17th, and working his way down. That was what he had wanted as soon as he woke up on All Saints' Day-not the Laffy Taffy, but an elevator ride back to 17. So I obliged. Later that day, after a morning on the elevators, he flopped down with a miserable respiratory infection. It tested negative for swine flu, but it could have been swine flu anyway. The test wasn't very good, the pediatrician said.

Now we had made it to Saturday, at the tail end of Sick Week. Whatever the disease had been, it was contagious and it lingered. Day care was impossible. We stayed home, through all the low points: the day he made it till dinnertime consuming nothing but Motrin, Tamiflu, and M&Ms; the day I was sicker than he was; the day he happily ate two bowls of oatmeal and then threw it all up on the living-room carpet.

The elevator, when we could manage it, had been our main diversion. Up to 17, to look down at the empty swimming pool and out westward, over the darkening orange-gold treetops, toward the distant lump of downtown Bethesda. Down to 16, for an imperceptibly lower angle on the same thing. Then 15, then 14. Every floor after the top one had the same carpet, the same dark-wood console table, glass-topped, below a round mirror. Our building omits the 13th floor. Mature trees here, in my native mid-Atlantic landscape, top out around 10 or 11 stories. We live down on 3, on the other side of the building, facing a FedEx Office, a Rite-Aid, the metro platform, and the freight tracks. Around 8 or 9 the kid would at last get bored and ask to go to 2, where he would punch buttons on the candy machine to make letters and numbers come up. The big finish.

We were on our way for another ride, then maybe out to do some errands, when my phone rang. I stopped to dig it out of my pocket. It was my wife, calling to say she was coming home. Somewhere in there, while I wasn't looking, the elevator must have arrived. And the kid, focused on his new hobby, charged aboard. He didn't realize something was wrong till the doors closed without Daddy. I didn't realize it till he realized it and started yelling.

When the kid wanders out of view in the produce department or something, you get a quick pang of gut-clenching alarm: the child is unaccounted for. This was something else. He wasn't lost, exactly, nor in any immediate danger. But the problem was getting worse every second-I could hear the elevator going into motion now, and the screams getting fainter. Fainter upwards or fainter downwards? There were four elevators and 17 (no, 16) floors, and the complications were multiplying like some terrible logic puzzle.

I hit both buttons, up and down, hoping to pull his elevator back to the third floor. There are a lot of units in the building, and the elevators seem to be programmed for efficiency-there's always another one coming; you never have to wait. At the moment, this was the opposite of what I wanted. One elevator arrived. Not his. I leaned in, smacked the button for the lobby, and sent it on its way. Another came, also the wrong one, going up. Then another. I couldn't hear the yelling anymore, and I couldn't hit the call button till these two were gone. A man was getting off on 3, and a woman was getting on-she was trying to hold the door for me. No, please, I tried to explain, sending her on without me. My son is-and I need to-and-

Oh, said the man who had just arrived. That's your kid? He's down on the first floor. He looked relieved, a troubling mystery solved.

I got on a down elevator. The only damage, it seemed, would be emotional. We had taken a perfectly fun activity-yes, we, he was old enough to take a kids'-menu share of the blame here, charging off unaccompanied like that, even if Daddy was being wantonly careless-and we had turned it into something terrifying for him. Who knows, this young, what lessons they take away? Maybe he would swear off elevators for the next ten years. One can't even guess.

I found him in the inner lobby, in the arms of the female half of a youngish couple. I did a bad job of registering what they looked like. He was done screaming, but there were visible tear tracks down his face. I wrapped him up in my arms and told him I was sorry, and we sat down on a lobby couch while I called his poor mother back. She had been picturing carnage-a bookcase pulled over on him, or a boiling kettle. He was fine, I told her, we were fine, we'd just gotten him lost on the elevator. She took it well. We would go back upstairs and wait for her to get home. I rang off. Let's go upstairs, I told the kid. He looked at me, his dark eyes still glistening.

"Seventeen!" he said.

Previously: No H1N1 Vaccine for You, Kiddo

Tom Scocca writes here and there and maybe for where you work! Only one way to find out.

---

See more posts by Tom Scocca

20 comments

Apparently, many New Yorkers aren't going for the vaccine either. Though probably not because they've read Corgan's thoughts on the subject.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

43 comments

I would rather not keep calling. That was my third or fourth or fifth inquiry about the swine-flu vaccine, by phone or in person at the office while getting other shots for the kid. This is not because I am a hysterical parent, unable to bear the thought of my child going without medical intervention. I do not snap awake at three in the morning with flu panic, worrying that some filthy stranger may cough around my precious offspring before he has been properly immunized, cursing the government for not coming up with vaccine fast enough, scheming to intercept the life-saving product before it goes to someone else's child. (Let the other child die.)

Instead, I keep forgetting about the whole thing. Then, after a couple of days, I remember, and I make myself call the pediatrician's office, and the pediatrician's office puts me on hold. And when I get off hold, they say they don't have it. Or one time they did have a batch, but they were only giving it out to kids between 3 and 5, or to kids who had heart conditions requiring surgery. The kid is only 2, and as far as we know his heart is fine. Keep calling back.

It would be much less work if I really were crazy. I try to be reasonable about health care for the kid: get him the normal shots, give him medicine when the doctor says to, and don't go looking for other stuff to get worried about. Now, though, through the wonders of the United States public-health system, the sensible thing turns out to be impractical. I really should get him a swine-flu shot; I really can't get him a swine-flu shot.

Either I force myself to act like an obsessed person or I ignore the whole swine-flu threat. I would love to ignore it. My inclination is to ignore it. At least I think that's my inclination, but it's hard to be sure. The kid was born nine weeks early, and that kind of skews my perspective. Among the routine, non-serious complications that came with it was that in the first few weeks in the hospital, he would sometimes forget to breathe, till an intensive-care nurse would tickle him and he would start up again. Very normal. His last week in the hospital, we slept in a room with him while he was hooked up to a blood-oxygen monitor. Eventually, after maybe the 20th time the machinery had beeped us out of sleep with a false or dubious warning-the baby rosy and oxygenated all the while-our annoyance became stronger than our fear, and we were ready to take him home.

And he was fine, and that would have been that, except he also developed asthma. Big deal, a lot of kids get asthma. Then just as we were moving back to the United States, last winter, he got a bad cold. I had learned not to worry about colds. Children are pretty tough. We took him to the pediatrician to be safe, so she could maybe prescribe him something if he really needed it. She checked his vital signs, blasted his lungs with an emergency dose of albuterol, and called an ambulance: respiratory distress and pneumonia.

So it's also possible, in this over-anxious world, to worry too little. I'm not the only person I know who has overlooked toddler pneumonia. I missed an ear infection for three days, too. The kid is in day care, where disease does flourish. The asthma really would make a flu infection more hazardous. I accept that he needs the vaccine.

But where is the vaccine? Weren't there supposed to be jackbooted public-heath officials ordering everyone to line up for shots? I am all in favor of forcible vaccination; anti-vaccine activists are degenerate idiots who deserve to get polio and live out their days in iron lungs while Child Protective Services takes away their children to be properly raised. Or tetanus. Get lockjaw and shut up and die. What's the point of living in 21st-century America if not to avoid dying of stupid, easily preventable disease? You just like listening to Miley Cyrus?

When I try to be a responsible member of the immunological herd, I get nowhere. While I was writing this, it occurred to me that the kid still also needs to get a shot for the regular, non-swine, non-sensational influenza. That gave me an extra excuse-no, an extra reason-to be calling the doctor, again. The H1N1 was still unavailable, still with no known delivery date. The regular flu shot? Also out of stock. Call back in a week.

Previously: Stroller-Bullying on the Red Line

Tom Scocca prefers to write for money, should you have some. Ask him yourself!

---

See more posts by Tom Scocca

24 comments

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

3 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

10 comments

Genuinely, genuinely sorry, if you were on that train. I need to pause and emphasize this. It should not even need saying how much I-like you-despise the stroller-bullies who go banging through public spaces, using their precious cargo as a snowplow, then give a pained look of fake sympathy to the people who have been unlucky enough to get in the way of their baby-pushing. They are sorry, but they know that God knows that they are in the right, because babies are worth more than other people.

Not me. I made a bad call and it led to me getting on your train with a poorly secured child-and-stroller combo, and the fact that I then allowed the stroller to roll amok does not mean that your comfort and safety are less important than my child's, except in the narrow sense that my choice (a choice, again, created by my idiocy) was either to let the stroller bump into you or to drop the child from a height of six feet. If, through some presently unimaginable set of circumstances, I instead had to choose between bumping my child with a stroller or letting a stranger plunge six feet headfirst to the floor of a subway car-I promise you, I would bang the stroller right into the kid. At that point, it's basic ethics.

Then, no credit to me, a nice lady in a loose-weave beige something reached out a hand for the stroller and restrained it. The Red Line is a crowded, creeping, lurching hell-tube these days, and we were riding in the Death Car, at the back of the train, where the next train would slam into us if the system failed. Sometimes people have to help one another, even when the other has done something stupid.

Getting a kid from here to there always involves some new complication. When he was tiny, we lugged him around in an infant car seat or put him in one of those fabric slings. He was only four or five pounds and always seemed to be about to sink out of sight in the sling. Then we forgot the sling at some friends' house while we were busy buckling him into the car seat. Then he got big enough for a Baby Bjorn, which was better, as long as I didn't think about the moist spot that would form when the baby's diaper pressed against my chest for a while. I can't say for sure that it wasn't sweat.

People on the subway would give up their seats at the first sight of the Bjorn, at least on the 7 train. (On the Beijing subway, they did not.) It's nice but confusing, if you're an able-bodied and not-yet-old man, to receive that particular courtesy. Is having a baby strapped to your chest a disability? Or is the baby the disabled person? Or is it just a cumbersome piece of luggage? I wasn't sure about my own answers to these questions, but it was good to be able to sit, even though it meant that the never-properly-positioned straps of the Bjorn would ride up into some new, even less ergonomically correct, position.

Possibly someone would have given up a seat on the Red Line if I'd rolled the child onto the train in the stroller. They do do that sometimes, even though now I'm definitely only incapacitated by association. Maybe it's still the unwieldy-luggage thing, or maybe they sense (correctly) that a kid is less likely to freak out and start howling if the parent is sitting down at his or her level.

But I had marched on with my head held high and the kid's head held higher. We'd come all the way from preschool that way. Outside, on a decent day, there's no better way of carrying a two-year-old. He and I agree on that. A few short months ago, he went through a phase where he was eager to walk everywhere, so eager that I could get fooled into taking him out without a stroller. Then he would run out of gas and want to be carried, but would be so wriggly and intent on throwing his weight outward that the only way to get anywhere was by slinging him over one shoulder, like a 20-pound sack of rice, only 5 pounds heavier, and squirming. Great fun, especially in the rain and with paper bags of groceries dissolving in the other hand.

Then we advanced to the shoulder-top piggyback ride, and everything got better. "Up, please!" he says, and I hoist him, as he kicks out his legs to make it easier. The physics is surprisingly good-the kid's center of mass is lined up with your own, rather than cantilevered at some back-breaking angle. The kid grabs at my ears, chortles at the sight of passing tree branches, wraps himself around the back of my skull and jams his little face up against mine and gives a little whoop. His daddy is tall and strong. "OOH, LA!" he yells, every time we reach a particular corner by the preschool. "OOH, LA!" I have no idea why.

This time, though, I had pushed the good thing too far. The change in the weather had caught us with low inventory of clean long pants, so I'd put in him a pair of track pants, and the satiny athletic fabric was sliding around, shifting his whole body toward the left. The train swayed, and I felt a thump-his head clonking into the handrail. Glancing blow. He was still happy; the game had changed from piggyback to clambering around. There were two handrails, meeting in an X, with his head swinging around inside one of the angles, waiting to clonk into one of the metal bars again. Till the train got to the next stop, we were stuck. I bent my knees a little and writhed in place, trying to swing him around toward the other shoulder. Fun! His jacket-or was it his blanket?-was covering my eyes. Down below to the right, I could see the patient lady's hand still steadying the stroller.

And... Union Station. The standing crowd squeezed for the exits. I dropped the handrail and rolled the kid off my shoulder, sliding him down toward the floor, trying to keep him out of the way. The woman let go of the stroller and headed for the other end of the car. Behind me, another woman got up. Would I like to sit down? she asked. I thanked her, kicked the stroller brake on for sure, and took the seat.

Previously: The "Family Bed"

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

---

See more posts by Tom Scocca

10 comments

Oh.

The kid. I had given him a small clock, last month, for his birthday. A clock that did happen to have an alarm in it. Didn't it. Beep-beep-beep-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP across the apartment, around the corner, and there the clock was, just inside the doorway, beeping until I squinted and fumbled my way to the off switch. 5:20 a.m. The kid was sprawled out in bed, immobile and unmoved.

Perhaps the clock was not such a good idea. I was proud of it when I got it. He had locked in on it during an earlier trip to the hardware store, parking himself on the aisle in front of it and not moving. So I went back and bought it later. I like it when he plays with regular stuff, like poker chips or calculators or rocks. It's thrifty and educational. One week, he's stuffing playing cards in the cracks in the hall-closet door, then, the next thing you know, he's telling you "jack beats seven!"

Most of the found playthings are also quieter than the toys made for children. Not the clock, it turns out. But he loves clocks, and this one was little and pretty good-looking. It wasn't till we unwrapped and opened it that I noticed it was a plug-in model, rather than a battery-powered one. That was what I thought the mistake was, that it wasn't portable enough.

He must have set the alarm while playing with the clock after bedtime. The sleep thing has been worse lately. We farmed him out to his grandparents for a few weeks, while my wife was abroad and I was rewriting the book manuscript. They made great strides in civilizing him in many respects, but when he got back, he was not interested in returning to his old compliant bedtime routine.

The more fully human the child becomes, the more you remember that human beings are ornery things. I had always thought that "testing limits" was silly jargon, but by the eighth or tenth time he'd busted out of his room in one night, it was clear that he was doing exactly that: experimenting to see what would happen if he resisted the arbitrary concept of "bedtime."

It was a tough test, too, on our end. It is hard to calmly and firmly reassert your authority, keeping things very dull so as to avoid the dread Positive Reinforcement, when you are choking back giggles. Three or four times, in a single bout of trying to brush my teeth, I would sense movement over my shoulder and see him standing serious-faced in the doorway, trailing his blanket behind. Put down the toothbrush, pick him up, carry him back across the apartment, put him in bed–and no sooner would I get back and raise the toothbrush than he would be staring from behind me again, Banquo's Ghost by way of Linus Van Pelt. And again.

This is where someone might want to cave in, because he is so cute and so irritating, and let him sleep in the big bed with his parents. The breastfeed-till-age-five crowd maintains that the kid should be in that bed in the first place. A whole muddy, gory front in the baby culture wars has been dug in around the question of the "family bed," and woe betide the researcher who suggests for instance that infants can get crushed or smothered that way. To say nothing of the insane, child-hating sadists who raise the possibility that piling all the family into one bed could interfere with marital relations among the senior members of the family unit.

In my own experience, the times we've put the kid in our bed for the night-when traveling, or when he's sick-have been trauma. When he was little, these family-bed episodes would leave me in a state of actual post-traumatic stress disorder: for weeks afterward, I would lunge in my sleep to grab what I was certain was the baby, who was about to plunge to the floor. As he's gotten older, the hypervigilance has been redirected toward protecting myself from being head-butted or kicked in the face.

I'm not all cruel wire-monkey-mother about it. If he shows up and wants to crawl into bed an hour before wake-up time, sure, snuggle down, little man. But the last time I was on solo-parent duty, he stiff-armed me in the jaw in my sleep, then burst into laughter when I involuntarily groaned something like, "Blaagh." "Baah!" he yelled, bouncing up and down and socking me in the face some more. "Baah! Baah!"

So the kid sleeps in the kid's room. Even if he doesn't want to. Out he came, back he went. Eventually, I ended up sitting on guard in the living room, losing count of how many times we'd repeated the drill. Eleven? Fourteen? The intervals got longer. Finally, after 20 or 25 minutes without a disturbance, I peeked in on him. He was asleep, his slumbering innocence belied only by the headlights shining from his toy tractor-trailer cab where he'd been playing with it on the floor, not far from where I would eventually discover he had also been playing with the alarm clock. But for now he was sleeping. He would stay that way, peaceful and cooperative, through the next seven or eight hours, despite the beeping alarm and the shuffling feet of his father.

Then, about an hour after I'd crept back to bed, he would finally rouse himself, look around the room, and start banging the toy cymbals together.

Tom Scocca's first book, Beijing Welcomes You, is in the hands of his editor at Riverhead Books. He also writes intermittently at Tom Scocca dot com and for newspapers and magazines. He would likely write for you, for money, if you have some. Ask him!

Previously: The Birthday Party and its Preparations

---

See more posts by Tom Scocca

14 comments