My Pompei: Reflections on Being a New Adoptive Parent

I know exactly what I was doing when you were born, because it's still unfinished, just as I left it. My private Pompei.

I was cleaning my office. Not cleaning it, actually. On my way to organizing Important Things, I stumbled on the assorted This and That of the last several years, and meaning to spend only a few minutes visiting, looked up just in time to see the last light tiptoe from the room, having whittled the whole day away right from that spot.

Everywhere are piles of ideas. Some that I abandoned, others that abandoned me. Outlines and rough drafts, clever titles, opening lines, unresolved poems, manuscript middles without beginnings or ends. A writer's unborn children.

An old address book. People and places I can neither remember nor forget.

A sympathy card I never sent. Simon & Garfunkel sheet music. A note from your Daddy.

My weights are in the corner with my step bench, half on either side, next to a box of things I keep for Reasons I Can't Explain. A set of bamboo wind chimes, an old sketch pad, a cone of vanilla incense and a mini stapler. A garden stake. Brown shoelaces, still in the wrapper, caught with a pin shaped like a Treble clef.

Now you're here, and you are my Important Thing. You are my This and That. You are my ideas and my address and my Reasons. And since I don't see any prospect of cleaning my office for at least the next eighteen years, I can show you exactly what I was doing while I waited for you.

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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