All these things I am doing, this stuff I’m using, are things I’ve done and stuff I’ve used before.
    Like these underpants. And this coffee mug. And my digital piano squattin’ over yonder looking all innocent-like*.
    But this bassinet, swing, bouncy-chair, crib, breast-pump**, etc, all seem oddly out of place and time as I begin to use them again. This five year old Samantha was tiny when we used these things. She’s five…a child of the new century.
    Consider this: I was reading Samantha a storybook yesterday. At the end of the story, Sam said,
    ”Put this in so we can pause it.”
    She was handing me a bookmark. Whatever.

    Anyway, back to the five-year-old baby things: I’d assumed all this time that I hadn’t really changed much, but as I wound the spring of this swing, I remember where I was, who I was, and what I felt like when last I wound it… and I am different… in more ways than hairlines, crows feet, and alarming flatulence can delineate.
    Perhaps it was a newness of purpose. I had it then, I don’t now. I don’t know. I don’t know now.

    Times up; leave your money on the dresser.

* Its up to something. Sneaky atonal bastard. When I was its age I had some respect for my elders.
** Not of the “Swedish Enlarger” variety, this is more of a human milking machine. My wife’s breasts are somewhat less erotic when a wee yellow motor sucks foodstuffs from them while humming the theme song from “Jaws”