Mic Check

Does anyone else want eighty-seven babies right now? No? Just me? Let's keep calm about the fact that I get a little homesick for my future when I see those women in their late thirties pushing souped-up prams on bike wheels carrying however many children the last round of fertility treatment gave them as they run along the Charles at ten in the misty mornin', oh!, but.

But. In a stunning display of imaginative departure from the realm of the real, I found myself far from Cambridge this morning, somewhere in the future with the morning off and a chocolate lab at my side pushing the world's most intelligent, well-formed children along unfamiliar terrain as my trophy husband was off in the distance gathering baby raddicchio he'd grown himself and simultaneously shooting a wild boar threatening the villagers (there are always villagers) with a bow and arrow he'd fashioned from the willow in our backyard which, now that I think of it, could only have been in the south of France. I'm pretty sure both the raddicchio and boar end up on our dinner table that night, which -- you guessed it -- was hewn with care from the giant oak under which we met during a Quaker meeting and was blown down in a fell wind the spring after he left to practice emergency medicine in the heart of the Congo. Questions abound: have I converted? how, if I am in my late thirties, am I in such incredibly good shape for a mother of two? why do our children speak Farsi? is his accent real or affected? does he love bacon?

Well, shoot. In the interest of quitting what Pastor Um calls "the business of imaginative hedonism," I'll admit that the boar was a bit over the top. Also, I'd settle for either a.) a handful of toddlers to babysit (Karly, get on that) or b.) a digital camera; but in the meantime, here are some public service announcements:

Peter Choi, I have your CD's and am holding them hostage until the fall. And Krishnan, stop telling people I have crushes on them. And don't argue; I know it's you. I am much too balanced, if somewhat emotionally remote, to engage in such foolish chicanery with the kind of impervious, hopeless optimism which you ascribe to me. See above.