Waiting for FedEx

Somewhere in a factory, someone is packing up my new Mac and getting ready to FedEx it to me. Its tender little circuits are being lovingly sealed away in classy, minimalistic bubble wrap, and its sleek, almost organic-looking shell is closed like a secret, waiting for me. Today, maybe tomorrow, maybe (God!) the next day, the delivery guy who's missing his left hand (but is somehow able to carry human-sized boxes *and* his little beeping signature pad) will pull up in front of my house and glance awkwardly at me when I throw open the front door before he's even pulled to a complete stop, and then meet him at the curb, bouncing back and forth on the balls of my feet. Until then, I'm going to wait in my house like one of those trap door spiders lest I miss his arrival and fail to provide the signature which will release My Mac to me.

I hope I can muster as much excitement when my first child is born. I may have to fake it.

The weekend passed fairly uneventfully. Pants and I and three of his buddies went to a triple A ballgame in Fresno. It was cold and the mascot, a Grizzly, allegedly, gyrated furiously in his dusty costume. One of Pants's friends is a baseball fanatic, but this only meant that he was a much louder heckler than anyone else. When I used to go to Astros games with my dad, a true fanatic, I'd leave knowing the family and medical histories of individual players, their seething personal rivalries, but M.'s contribution stopped at a folksy catalogue of pitching flaws delivered at high volume.

Fresno's Chukchansi Stadium, according to the teenager taking ticket stubs, is named after a casino. Whether that casino takes its name from a Native American tribe whose people once ruled the land with fearsome warriors or peaceful commerce or some combination of the two, we'll never know. Just beyond the right field fence, old downtown buildings, some with the names of bygone banks still sketched out against the skyline in iron letters, peer down. Back behind left field, the train station still has an open line and train whistles blot out the at-bat snippets of Nirvana and Marilyn Manson the players have chosen to introduce themselves. Center field is dominated by a massive electronic scoreboard/television/billboard, a short grass berm, and then a clear path of darkening sky beyond.

After the game (the Grizzlies beat the 51's handily) the stadium had a fireworks display that ended in a breathtaking finale given its small scale. It surprised laughter and yells out of me, and I imagined Fresno's homeless population, many of whom seem to live in the forested city pavilion a block from the stadium, looking up through the shadows of the trees at the exploding lights and wondering, like me, "Why tonight?" Oh well, why not? Maybe Chukchansi is just a casino.

The next day Pants and I took an evening walk to take the head of steam off the dog, who had been stalking around the house wide-eyed and grumbling all afternoon. We took her to a park downtown and made her run huge geometric paths, the greatest possible distance from point A (us) to point B (the ball), that space allowed. Two little boys came over and wanted to throw the ball for her, and she cowered and barked before finally relenting and chasing their short throws only to toss the ball back at them from ten feet away. They quickly lost interest and focused instead on a fallen nest of baby birds.

"This one needs help!" one of them shouted at me. I went over to look. One of the thirty-foot palms had dropped an armful's worth of nest, and five chicks, each as big across as my palm and covered in gray down with the black stubs of beginner feathers sprouting along their backs, lay scattered across the grass. "This one's still alive," one of the boys said, pointing to a chick who wobbled weakly on his side, "We have to help him."

I felt like a mom because I had to disappoint him. "I don't think he's going to make it, buddy. This happens sometimes." I squatted down next to them and held the kid's hand back when he reached out to touch the bird. "Probably shouldn't touch him." "Germs?" "Yeah." We stared and I wondered what to say. I pointed out what beginner feathers looked like, and described what I'd learned from David Attenborough about why baby birds have such pronounced, fleshy sides to their mouths. "It's so their moms can see where to put the food."

After a while the two boys stood up. "I have to go home now," one of them said to me, and then ran off. The other, the one who hadn't said anything at all the whole time, lingered. I started over to join Pants, who was standing over where Abby had finally collapsed in ecstasy, her tongue bright red and scrolling in and out of her mouth with her panting. I thought about telling the boy again not to touch the dying chick, but instead I said, "It'll be OK," and walked off, feeling thoroughly adult, and thoroughly weird in how automatic and obligatory it felt to say something like that.

Trucks keep stopping outside, and they keep not being the FedEx guy.