GRAB SOME CHANGE

Dear Spike:

With just two months to go until you arrive, your mother this week began to exhibit what is commonly described as “nesting” behavior.

I came home from work, the other day, to find our home more neatly cleaned than it has been for months. Your mom, on the way out the door for her music lessons as I walked in, noted that she’d also “done some stuff in the basement.”

I immediately panicked. Over time, our basement had become a pit of endless piles of camping gear, Christmas decorations, seasonal clothing, school supplies and other miscellaneous items we bring out once a year, if that. Littered with power tools, buckets of paint and bags of concrete, it is no place for a pregnant woman to be nesting.

I was relieved to find she’d left most of the heavy lifting for me — but only until I realized that meant that we were going to be spending a very good part of the weekend “in the pit.” In the end, it turned out to be a pretty good time with endless opportunities for self reflection on materialism (it’s absolutely amazing what you think you’ll need but manage to live without for years but then can’t bring yourself to throw away because you still think you need it.)

While we were in the basement, your mother came across an old Zippo-style cigarette lighter I picked up in Japan, when I was in the Navy a number of years ago. The inscription on the side of the lighter indicated it was carried by a soldier who’d fought in the three-day battle for Loc Ninh, in Vietnam. How it wound up in a Tokyo street market, I don’t know, but I felt I had to have it.

For years after I got out of the military I carried the lighter in my pocket, where I could feel it anytime I reached down to grab some change or to warm my hands — a constant reminder to always appreciate how bad I don’t have it.

At some point, I think around the time I met your mother, I stopped carrying it.

With two months to go before you arrive, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about whether we’re ready to bring you home. Several nights this week, those thoughts have kept me awake.

Over the next two months, we’ll clean the house and put the car seats in the cars and wash your crib and check the batteries in your baby monitors. We’ll buy your diapers and wash your clothes and power clean the carpets.

We’ll nest in ways that have nothing to do with you: Cleaning the garage or fixing the rain gutters or organizing the refrigerator.

We’ll worry. About you. About us. About money. About life. About this house and this town and this world.

And for me, there are bound to be some more sleepless nights.

So for the time, I think I’ll keep this lighter by my bedside, perhaps next to an ultrasound picture of you — a small midnight reminder to appreciate how bad I don’t have it.

Love,
dad