GRATITUDE: I'm remembering from last time that this baby thing opens all kinds of feelings of gratitude, of connection with the universe and its people. There's the gratitude I feel toward my parents, for obvious reasons...but heck, why not list some of them:

• For setting an example of how to parent
• For sacrificing for me and my brothers
• For my brothers
• For taking care of helpless little me
• Etc.

I could go on for days on this one, and if I felt that my parents didn't already know that I've grown up enough to feel these things, this broad sense of gratitude, I'd go on longer. But this post, albeit tossed off as most of mine are, is meant to be broader than this.

There's the gratitude I feel towards Dave and Trisha, for their nice comments, links, etc. Two people who I feel I know pretty well, and yet who are distant from me on an everyday basis. My old, old pal John who just sent me a note about the baby and about the blog. I had no idea he was even reading. My brothers and their spouses -- for taking care of my son, offering steady counsel, etc. C.J. has no idea what a gift his new brother can be for him! My neighbors, who've supported us thus far and whose calls and encouragement are both small and inobtrusive and therefore giant and terribly generous. It seems like the baby inspires people to reach for you, to acknowledge their presence in your life (and yours in theirs), and it's very, very humbling. It makes me jump to this: Have I done enough to deserve this love and support? I'm old enough to just take this feeling and turn it into the positive, the "I can do more for others" feeling rather than the "maybe I suck" feeling.

I think of the awards speeches, where people have endless lists of people to thank, and I understand. Something like this new baby -- and it's not like we even did anything that grand to earn him -- well, it just inspires me to see way far beyond myself, which in and of itself is a good thing. There's this feeling...maybe magnanimous is the right word...where just for a moment, I can see the world through what is a kind of unfocused love, a very comfortable blurriness that I'm in no hurry to clear up.

Warning: I wrote a lot of stuff like this with the first baby. It makes me a little weird, this procreation stuff.