I am looking at an entire baby department of baby clothes. Swear to god. This is no joke. Three big boxes from Florida were just now dropped off by the mailman. Shirts, shorts, bibs, towels, socks, blankets, pajamas with the feet in ‘em. The whole shebang. Musta cost my mom a small fortune.

“Why does your number never show up on caller ID?”

- How’d you know it was me?

“You’re the only one who ever calls and it says Restricted Number.”

- Well, that’s a form of Caller ID, if you think about it.

“Huh?”

- If you think about it.

“Why can’t it just say your name?”

- I prefer the element of surprise.

“I still know it’s you.”

- You’re not the only one I call.

“Do you surprise anyone else?”

- Only Alan. Hey, so. This is too much, Mom. These are enough clothes to get him through grade school.

“Oooh, you got the boxes!”

- Thank you but wow. You went a little nutso.

“It’s my first grandchild.”

- He’s not even here yet and there’s all this stuff.

“Well, Huey will need it.”

- Who?

“Huey.”

- And who might this ‘Huey’ be?

“Well, I’m not saying Pokey or Hef so you can just forget it.”

- Well, when you say Huey, I won’t know who you’re talking bout so …

“I’m not saying PokeyHef either.”

(Try as I might, I can’t get her to call the kid Pokey, Hef, or PokeyHef. She refers to him only as Huey, as in Baby Huey. It wouldn’t be so bad, her calling him something other than what I want her to call him, if she didn’t also convince Glen and his wife to use Huey as well. It’s a sad state of affairs when a dad can’t even nickname his own kid and the rest of the family dutifully follows suit.)

“I hope (Wife-asaurus) likes it.”

- How come all the stripes always go horizontal. You never see vertical stripes on baby clothing.

“No one wants to see a skinny baby.”

- Guess not.

“We want fat babies.”

- Wait.

“What.”

- Is this what I think it is?

“I can’t see what you’re looking at.”

- It is. Right on, it’s the Fleegle picture.

“Oh, yes. I dug it out one morning when I was bored.”

- You have no idea how happy you’ve made me.

“It’s the simpler things, sometimes.”

- I haven’t seen this picture in … I can’t believe you finally found it.

“It was in the storage unit.”

- No it wasn’t.

“That’s what I was searching through when I found it, so.”

- But I looked there.

“It was in a box right at the front. Hard to miss.”

(This is my favorite picture of Fleegle. And trust me, it’s not even close. All others are tied for very distant second.

This was taken only a few seconds after Fleegle peed on this humane society Santa guy’s shoes and pant leg. Dad later wondered if maybe Fleegle didn’t confuse the red pant leg with a fire hydrant, since it was the one and only time Fleegle ever peed on an actual person. The Santa took it in stride. No big shakes. You gotta hand it to him. He doesn’t look like a Santa who’s much bothered by a little dog pee. Though Dad said it wasn’t a little, it was a lot. But Santa looks pretty unflapped, doesn’t he? We should all look so composed with a foot and calf soaked in dog pee. Oh, but the main thing I love bout this picture, other than Santa doesn’t seem to mind and has an incredibly hairy forearm, is that I swear to god, Fleegle’s smiling. It’s either the smile of bladder relief or the smile of knowing it’s for the camera.)

- What’s this other one. This other picture here.

“You.”

- Me?

“I’m not holding someone else’s child.”

- I’ve never seen it before.

“It’s in the album. It’s always been there. You just never notice because it’s on the same page as the one you stop everything to tell everyone about.”

- Christ would you look at this forehead. Christ.

(The one I like is the one where I clearly am too young to know what’s going on and everything’s scary as hell. I’m the disoriented and alarmed love child of Mr. Potato Head and the Great Gazoo. That’s my favorite. This one here’d be better if I was more hideous and alien and terrified, like I was when I was first born.

I look a little goofy in the hat with the pompon on it, but … and it looks like I’m getting used to the whole being a baby thing, but … and so it doesn’t hold a candle to the other one, but … )

- Shit, how'd they make the hat bigger than my head.

 “A lot of yarn was involved.”

- Is this the outfit from the picture?

“At the bottom of the box?”

- Yeah, in the freezer bag.

“Your great grandmother made that for you.”

- Does PokeyHef hafta wear it?

“Who?”

- PokeyHef.

“You mean Huey.”

-PokeyHef.

“Huey.”

- We’ll be here all day doing this, mom.

“It’d be nice if you took a picture of him in it, at least.”

- Even the hat?

“The hat is half the outfit. Without the hat, it’s just a sweater.”

- Hey, member when I fell down that slide and I was freaking out and dad came over and asked me where I hit myself? So I pointed to my forehead and he said ‘Eh, you’ll be fine then’?

“You’ve also been hit in the forehead with a baseball bat and a tennis racket. You plowed into that tree when I was skiing. It’s a long list, the list of bumps you’ve had to the head.”

- Don’t I know it.

“What’re you doing for the fourth.”

- Going to Michigan. What bout you.

“Charlie is having a barbecue.”

- Who’s Charlie.

“I don’t think you know him.”

- Oh.

(Either her land line or my cell doesn’t have a very good connection. Our every phone call has, at some point, this dead air silence where I’m not sure if she’s still on the line or I’ll need to call her back. It’s happening now.)

- You there?

“Hello? I’m here.”

- You okay?

“Sure. Why.”

- You’ve gone quiet.

“No reason.”

- Okay.

“Do you remember Niles?”

- Niles?

“The parade.”

- Hah. Who could forget.

(Niles is a town just outside Chicago. When we were kids, Glen and I entered some mini-float competition in the Niles Fourth of July parade. We stayed up half the night before with the old man, turning our wagon into this chicken wire and tissue paper liberty bell with red and white streamers that were sposed to be the stripes part of the flag, but we got tired and didn’t feel like making the stars, so we just called ‘em streamers.

We came in second place. Glen saw that our ribbon was smaller and simpler than the first place one. He thought what kept us from winning was the lack of a whole flag, and that the reason we lacked a whole flag is cause I got too tired. I remembered it differently and still do. Cause I wasn’t the one who got too tired. He was. I coulda gone all night, if needed, cause that’s how tough I was. Even then I was tough. Glen, on the other hand, needed his beauty sleep. He still does. He’s delicate and dainty.

So we stood there, arguing, arguing, arguing as dad came to pick us up. We argued as we loaded the float into the trunk. There was this guy idling, waiting for our parking space. Dad waved the guy around but the guy started laying on the horn. Dad waved some more. The guy just kept honking, until another spot opened up a few spaces ahead. He drove past, still honking, and gave Dad the finger. Dad returned the favor, the finger right back at him, and did the guy one better by yelling “Happy Fourth, asshole!”)