Whenever I call people of late, the first thing they ask me is if the baby is born yet. No, there has been no birth yet. We are ten days shy of the due date, but the baby is in a good, non-breach position and could go at any time. It’s exciting, isn’t it!

I am teaching Sonny’s Blues right now, by James Baldwin; it’s a story about how the darkness of tragedy creeps into every life and yet you can still see innocent children peering out of weathered adults. The narrator is a math teacher trying to understand his younger brother’s heroin addiction and at one point he reminisces about attending his brother’s birth, catching him after his first steps, and watching him grow. I think about what tragedies will weather my son, and I hope that the first of them is a long time in coming.

Boy, do I have a melancholy disposition. Still, the world is the world and human nature hasn’t changed much – as the ecclesiastical psalmist notes, there is nothing new under the sun. Tyler and I were talking the other day about the personal tragedies and difficult times in our lives, we were comparing them to how good things are for us now and how those dark patches of loss were blips amid long positive stretches of friendship, family, and personal growth. He named his daughter Grace for good reason.