Now, I have another career that I've just
begun in the last two years.
That's as a humorist.
I'm going to read two stories.
Maybe more.
One is very short.
Let's see how long it goes on here.
Well, a couple of them are pretty short.
This is called The Tiny Baby.
Even before the tiny baby was born,
its mother hired a sitter to prepare for the days
when she'd need one.
She told the sitter, it's real small.
So if you don't see it, don't worry.
Then the mother pretended to leave and hid in the bushes
outside the living room window watching the sitter's
every move.
The tiny baby was so tiny that its mother never
looked pregnant.
And when it was born, it took a long time for the doctor
to find it.
If it had wings, it would have been
a goldfinch or a chickadee.
Primitives in the community who heard of the tiny baby
joked that it was small because its father was far away.
Like a dot on the horizon, they would say.
The mother feared for the tiny baby,
feared it would see every carpeted room
as a prairie strewn with monuments,
huge and upholstered, every tree as a green net
of frangible light, every flower as a wound in the air.
So she dressed the baby in a catsuit,
in the soft gray stripes of a tabby,
and sat in the afternoon sun watching it bound
and roll on the lawn.
Soon, she doubted that such a deception
would ensure the baby's safe passage into adulthood.
She worried about the blades of grass, the thorns of bushes,
the tumultuous advances of weather,
to say nothing of those other advances, caterwauling,
indiscreet, brutishly fickle of the neighborhood toms.
The tiny baby's mother shuddered.
She thought of removing the catsuit
but did nothing until the baby killed a mouse.
Then the suit came off.
As everyone knows, a mother's love for her child
lives in that lush conjunction of selfless concern
and undisguised identification.
It rises above chance and its easy and expert acceptance
of duty.
Its destiny extends beyond the mute scrutiny of eros.
Nothing compares with it.
By contrast, the formal shenanigans
that pass between a man and a woman
are the mere stuff of comedy.
The mother of the tiny baby obeyed
the transcendent obligations of her sex
with unalterable devotion.
She tied the baby to the tail of a kite
but never let go of the string.
She kept the baby in her purse, so she wouldn't lose it.
At home, she put the baby in a little chair
on the dining room table surrounded by roses.
Would the tiny baby become a Hollywood star,
spreading its light in every room?
Would it rise to the top of Australian society?
Would it join the Mormon church, sit in the celestial room
and be reproduced by mirrors into eternity?
It is well to consider the fortunes of the loved.
They move through the glitter of hotel lobbies.
They hang around pools and desert resorts.
They read best sellers in subways and trains.
They are never alone.
Now, consider the tiny baby years hence,
a woman with blue, beady eyes watching
the street for a sight of her favorite hairdo.
When she sees it, the long black tresses
forming a castle of hair, she will imagine it on herself.
She sits in a flower print dress,
her thin legs crossed, the tips of her shoes
hardly reaching the ground.
She suddenly, in barely audible tones,
sings a song about rain falling and a man on a bicycle hurrying
home.
The man's wife leans from a window watching him
but is distracted by the noisy appearance of seagulls.
The smallest woman gets up.
The train has left.
The day keeps echoing around her.
It is priceless, she thinks.
Death will not have me.
That is the story of the tiny baby."