Wasting Time

I got a calendar for Christmas. It’s not your run-of-the-mill Dilbert or Calvin & Hobbes calendar. My beautiful, loving wife made me a custom calendar with a picture of the baby girl for each month. The January, 2010 picture (above) is from January, 2009. The February picture is from last February, and so on and so forth. The January picture is LMJ asleep with her head on my chest. I don’t know when it was taken, specifically. I imagine we were coming back from somewhere and she fell asleep in the car – this was pre-van, which means we got her out of the Accord without waking her up. I’m standing in front of the kitchen door, and I guess MJ was standing in the foyer and took a picture of our, LMJ’s and my, profiles. I’m wearing the same sweater today that I am in the photo. I wish I had shaved. Staring at it makes me feel good. It makes all the bad go away. I feel a sense of tranquility. I imagine this is what heroin is like but without the AIDS and ridicule. I hung it up on my wall this morning. I would have hung it up earlier but I’m not a carpenter so I don’t carry around a hammer and nails. I pulled out a nail in the wall that the guy here before me must have used to hang something up and banged it into a new spot with the heel of my shoe. I have another picture of the baby girl on my desk but it’s from about nine months earlier than the one on my calendar. It was taken before she could walk. I know this because she’s sitting on the beach and smiling at the camera. She doesn’t do that anymore. She’s a baby in the photo on my desk. She’s the bucket of go in the calendar photo. She changed so much more in the nine months – possibly less – between the two photos than she has in the year since the calendar photo was taken. She’s growing up and settling into the person that she’s going to be, and I’m just sitting here staring at her, anxious for February to get her so I can see what’s next.