The World is Not Just One Thing.

Started the day at 3 am with a vomiting daughter; by midday her vomiting had morphed into a fierce cruel headache and body-aches, "Make it stop!" she said to me as she moaned and sobbed, but she finally had a moment of relief: it came when we were riding to see the pediatrician and the thunderclouds we had seen in the distance paid off, pouring rain in the windows and the sunroof, Jaelyn giggled with delight as we let it pour into the car and she said, "I prayed God would make it rain and it did!"

Margot at the Wedding was the kind of movie that slowed the world down into a kind of literary miracle -- every bouncing moonlit shadow on the bathroom wall, the insomniac desperation in the squeeze of Addison's hand as I coached him through whispered relaxation exercises, the uneven bursts of comfortable air scooped by the fan into our bedroom and even the long-in-coming whines of boys racing their crotch-rockets down our road -- everything became so specific and beautiful that I went to sleep grateful for the world.