Homecoming

It's quarter past five on Friday afternoon. For the first time in two weeks, I've been able to cycle to and from work. Thirty degrees is my cut-off temperature. Today it soared almost all the way to 50. Noah has been with Erica all day. She's probably had no reason to open the dishwasher -- Noah's first head-over-heels, ache-in-the-bottom-of-the-stomach love crush -- but she's almost certainly taken him for his first real outdoor pleasure stroll since December. By that measure alone, today will have given him as much cause for happiness as he's had in a fortnight.

Key in the door, bike wheeled against the hallway wall, shoes off next to the bottom step.

I can hear them murmuring in the living room. If I were Noah, sitting in that impossible position with one foot beneath my belly button and the other behind my tailbone, I would know exactly what the sound of feet clomping up the stairs meant. Dinner, the hassle of another diaper change, and a bedtime routine with less than half the amount of horseplay that I want.

The day is over. It's getting cold and dark again. The fun is about to stop.

But I'm not the one with his fanny pressed against the rug. I'm the one who just hung a coat on the knob at the edge of the landing.

And even before I catch sight of the child gate, I can hear this crazy scampering toward the landing. Noah might as well have been slung from a catapult. The gait of his crawl is all sped up. He's not going quite fast enough to make him fall, but it's enough to break his rhythm with a little recurring hitch. And my god, the smile on this kid's face! There's just no way around it: whatever he's done for the eight hours before I walked through the door, the excitement of these last five seconds is some kind of ecstasy that looks like it might totally unhinge him. His dad just walked around the corner, and there's a level of glee gripping his brain that I don't think any grown person could even imagine.

What a thing to be his dad at this moment! In five, ten, fifteen years, he'll know better. I'll be something else to him. He'll learn to investigate the gap between what I say and what I do, and his energy will go to rubbing my nose in it. That's fine. I hope he does. If your child can't shame you out of hypocrisy, I doubt anyone can. But right now, with this blur of almost furious joy careering toward my pant legs, right now I'm going to savor it and try to put some pale description into words.

And thank Erica for not opening the dishwasher's drawbridge door the moment I arrived.