This is what a napping child looks like:

This is what a "napping" child looks like:

This is just to say

I have licked
the clementines
that were in
your fingers

and which
you were probably
thinking
you were going to eat

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so not breast milk

Above, Addie and Piper sharing some chuckles at dinner last night.

Puzzled, I push a little and then sit back. There's a faint electric tingle in my toes, but other than that, the only unusual thing is this sudden lack of flexibility. I shuck off my biking clothes, change into jeans, and take the train south, down the island.

The radio show on which I work, The Takeaway, is preparing for Thanksgiving by guiltily pre-recording a few segments. Our format, normally entirely live, gets fudged a little on holiday weeks when staff are short and guests are harder to pry out of bed at oh-god-early: none of our listeners ever seem to notice or be upset by this, but there's a vague sense that we're getting away with something a little naughty when we do it. But this Monday, looking down the foreshortened slope of a short week, we're all a little giddy. The show's been on the air for just about seven months at this point, and the coffee-drenched early morning schedule has become routine, if not pleasant.

At my desk, though, I'm looking at the morning's news and considering my back. Some years before, my friend Josh had suffered from a herniated disc in his spine, and the signal that he'd ignored for months before getting diagnosed was an inability to stretch down and touch his toes. In hindsight, he'd said, ignoring it had been a mistake.

So every so often I try stretching, just to see if the tension was transitory, or if my walk to 145th St and my seat on the A train had loosened me up at all. They have not.

I have a vague sense of foreboding, at realizing this. "What if I have a herniated disc," I wonder. Back surgery? At 35 years old? But I'm already jotting myself a note to call Josh at some humane hour, later, and get a more detailed description from him of the onset of his problems.

I don't particularly want his answer. I would like to believe that whatever it is will clear up on its own: that I'd merely slept on my back in some unconventional way the night before, and that it correct itself as I do nothing more rigorous than curling tight that night around my wife, Kate, and drifting off to sleep, anchored surely and floating on the rising tide of the coming winter.

Late November, 2008. President-elect Barack Obama is picking Cabinet members; Citigroup is receiving $20 billion in rescue money. Former New Jersey governor and EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman talks on our show about how the GOP has allowed itself to be pigeonholed as unsympathetic. Other guests talk about economizing and canceling unnecessary luxuries. I sit, type, call, jog to the reception desk, copy, paste. "This will pass," I think to myself. It's easy to ignore.

And why shouldn't it be? My mom has always called me "disgustingly healthy." Rarely sick, always skinny, loving my leafy greens at dinner and my steel-cut oats and yogurt for breakfast. But I've got an inkling, somewhere deep down, that I'm in denial — that a physical problem that doesn't show improvement in 24 hours is not going to be trivial.

Up until this point, my adult life has largely been comprised of the extended adolescence available to a lot of high-tech workers in the late '90s. I graduated from college, rode the internet boom long enough to pay off my student loans, and then kept on riding it, skipping from one technical job to the next more-technical job. I bought luxuries unheard of in my spartan childhood: a brand new car, sushi meals out, faster and faster internet access, sharp knives and motorized kitchen tools and obscure ingredients. Jaggery. Black salt. Wakame. Asafetida.

I taught myself to cook my favorite Indian dishes from my favorite Indian restaurants, and then moved on Ethiopian stews and Italian paeans to ingredients and time. After college, food and the time to cook it became two of my favorite pastimes; my bookshelves groaned under the weight of Paul Prud'homme, Madhur Jaffrey, Christopher Kimball's bowtie and the multiple generatons of cooking joy from the Rombauer family.

The very first meal that I shared with Kate, the woman who would become my wife, was a collaboration on hand-made pasta with her sister and brother-in-law, hosted at my apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. The very first meal I made for her and her alone was spaetzle and a bottle of Riesling, hosted at her apartment in Philadelphia one month later. (The spaetzle maker and the bottle of wine clinked against each other in my bag on the way down to Pennsylvania; by the time I went home the wine was gone and I was already considering what to make for her next.) Cooking for Kate comes as easily to me as looking at her.

Thanksgiving, however, was to be a rush job in 2008. New at her hospital, Kate would be working on Thursday and the day after; new at my job, I would be, too. We had agreed that we'd spend Saturday making a toned-down feast. Kate's yen for turkey and mashed potatoes matched mine. My family would be home in Wisconsin, and Kate's family traveling on Thanksgiving weekend, so it would just be the two of us, thankful.

And thankful we certainly would be, this year. Both of us employed, even me in my newly-minted journalism career; living in New York City, the navel of the world; and after a summer of breathless attempts, we had just two weeks previously hit the jackpot: Kate was six weeks pregnant with our first child. No Riesling this weekend, but nobody else would be at dinner to notice that it was missing.

I rode the subway home, Monday night, planning the weekend's menu and absentmindedly rubbing my fingertips together, feeling the tingling and pricking of my thumbs. Surely a solid night's sleep in a reasonable position would set me right.

Tuesday morning, however, brought no improvement. My hamstrings burned and sang as I tried to stretch them, and the numb spots on my fingers were just as prominent as they had been Monday. I rolled my shoulders around, feeling for any sign that our pillow-top mattress, less than a year old, was to blame. I stretched as much as I could, glanced wistfully at my bicycle, and decided to ride the train to work again.

That morning, the show featured an interview with Dr. Cary Cooper, professor of Psychology and Health at Lancaster University in the UK, on the subject of "cyber-chondria." Learning a little bit about one's medical symptoms online, he says, leads people to conclude that they have the worst potential ailment. A headache becomes an imagined brain tumor, and stomach-aches impacted bowels. I decide not to worry so much about my tendons.

By mid-day, though, my resolve flagged. With my symptoms unchanged, I had figured out what was wrong: clearly my back had gone out of alignment. A simple trip to a (non-quack) chiropractor would certainly set me right. It being Thanksgiving week, I'd probably need to hustle to find an appointment, but it would be worth it. I dug around online for various recommendations, found a chiropractor on whom it'd be easy to stop in, and called for an appointment. "No appointments," the man said on the phone. "Just walk on in: you'll be fine."

Wednesday dawned clear and cold. The Takeaway featured a pre-Thanksgiving story about "Holiday Foods You Won't Touch," which only made me wistful for Thanksgivings past and sad that we couldn't justifiably cook a million dishes for just the two of us. For the last several Thanksgivings I'd made some dish with Brussels sprouts which I was sure would overcome Kate's hatred of them, and every time my hopes were dashed as she gamely sampled them, grimaced, and set her fork down. I'd promised her that there'd be no more attempts to convert her, and this year's lack of family and friends meant I'd have nobody else to justify making them.

On the way down the subway steps that morning, I'd had a strange almost-stumble. My feet felt a little strange, but it had been one of the muscles across the tops of my legs, my quad, that had buckled momentarily. The weakness passed almost immediately, but I'd clutched at the handrail nonetheless. The rest of the trip I looked quizzically at my legs, but they seemed fine.

After work, around 3, I rode the train uptown to the office of a chiropractor I'd found online. This was the first time I'd experienced what's actually pretty common in New York: a doctor practicing medicine out of a residential apartment cum office. The address led me to a brick apartment building full of regular apartments, and I wondered if I were in the right place. When I hit the buzzer on the wall, the door rang open seconds later, with no voice. I walked down the hall, feeling like an interloper.

The living room of the apartment held four people waiting ahead of me, but nobody's session lasted longer than about 10-15 minutes, so I tucked into that month's Atlantic and waited. The walls held bland, inoffensive landscapes, and the lights in the waiting room were dim, making it easy to not meet anyone else's eyes. Nobody was obviously injured or in pain, but the people leaving the back room seemed looser, more fluid in their movements… or maybe that was just my (and their) wishful thinking. I hadn't decided whether I considered chiropractics real or hokum, but with twinges now starting to show up in my shoulders, I figured it wouldn't hurt to try.

When it was my turn, the chiropractor welcomed me into his office. He was a cheerful, bearded man in his early 50's, happy to answer my questions and take notes on my symptoms: tingly arms, tight hamstrings, numb spots. He asked me about our mattress at home ("aHA!", I thought) but discounted it as a potential cause. I lay myself carefully down on an impressive motorized table and let him work his "adjustments."

Doctor friends of mine always wince at discussing "adjustments," but they felt pretty good to me that day as the chiropractor compressed, flexed, and rotated my neck, shoulders, and spine. No immediate sense of relief, but the movement felt good. Surely if there was a pinched nerve or stubbornly spasmed muscle, it would take a little while to relax. I paid the man (in cash, contributing to the vaguely illicit sense of the whole thing, like buying a watch on the street) and left, still walking carefully, into Thanksgiving eve. Wednesday.

You are standing and watching your child sleep – their miniature motions and rustlings – and realizing that one year ago today, the human being in front of you was in all likelihood still an even power-of-two number of cells. Just beginning. A very slow, very small Big Bang, still expanding in front of your eyes and creating an entire universe of new rules and physical constants.

And then, just as this metaphor occurs to you, the child lets out a resounding fart that makes the cat turn his head. It sounds uncannily like a truck hitting the air brakes in your kid's diaper.

That's parenthood for you, alright.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and throw myself out and onto them as confidently as any trapeze artist, wincing only a little as my weight lands with a thud on my feet and ankles. They ache, especially in the mornings, and the few steps as I cross the bedroom and quietly mostly-close the door behind me are rough, some days. Carlos, always interested in being on the other side of the bedroom door, paws it open and steps through. I mostly-close it again. Closed would be worse: There would be scratching.

It is what passes for "dark" in New York City, but that only means that I might have to stand right by the window if I wanted to read some fine print. The accumulated sodium vapor lights and the spotlights on the angel across from our windows give me enough light to see the kitchen island, and on it, my laptop. I close my eyes and open the cover, wincing for the second time in the morning as the screen lights my eyelids a fluorescent orange, at least until I reach out and turn the brightness down as low as it'll go, by feel. Crack one eye open to look at the news. Crack the other open to check the overnight mail, at work. If there's big news already or some on the way, it's best if I know about it soon, so as to be brainstorming how to get at it.

There's usually nothing. Or rather, there's nothing worth diverting us from the news plan set late last evening. I pull the arm on the slot machine once called the World Wide Web and blearily look at a few more places. Nothing of note. A sports event; an international conference; a fire; a press conference. America's Unfunniest Domestic Happenings.

If I am not careful, however, I will spend my remaining 15 minutes pulling the slot machine's arm and not putting my pants on, so I close the laptop lid. My eyes, now adjusted to the LED backlighting, go blind. I stumble into the bathroom, do what needs to be done, and climb into the shower. On days when there are new headlines to consider, here is where I consider them. I am alone in the world, climbing through an endless sluicing of warm water. I am Sham-Pu, the hermit with the clean hair. I am lathering my shaving brush and scraping my face, glancing down at the clock/nightlight in the bathroom.

The night before, I set my clothes out on a chair to foreshadow the next day: Here it is, tomorrow, and I'm ready. Rather than open the bedroom door and waft light, noise and the humid scent of Trader Joe's Mango Shaving Cream across my sleeping wife and child, I politely leave my underwear just outside, crumpled as only Sham-Pu can appreciate. My belt clinks as I put it on, and Carlos opens the bedroom door again. I mostly-close it.

If there are leftovers, I gather a lunch of them; if not, it's sandwich-time. Why don't I assemble my lunch the evening before? If you find out, let me know. By now it is 5:17 a.m., and the car service is undoubtedly waiting for me, since I ask them to arrive at 5:15. My pace quickens. I do not have time to re-sync my phone. I do not have time to feed the cats or put the knife I just used in the dishwasher. I am convinced that I will someday forget some member of the trifecta — keys, wallet, cellphone — and so I cross myself, multiple times, before I grab my backpack and head out, closing the apartment door as quietly as I can.

And then it's straight down the elevator shaft from the 15th floor, plunging south down the strangely deserted island of Manhattan, the few people alert and awake at 5:25 as strange to my eyes as the tubeworms that live under the sea near volcanic vents, though I'm sure I'm just as strange to them. Who needs to be awake at this hour? The particular injustices of my life and work require me to be, of course, but why these people? 24-hour diners and prostitutes and garbage collectors and business people and nannies and me, all of us moving through the same streets that will, in only an hour or two, be filled with the morning cattle drive. All dust clouds and whooping cowboys, but not just yet. The guy driving the car I'm in can hit 50 mph down Columbus, if he times the stoplights just right. I close my eyes and bite my tongue, or, with those who drive slower, I practice my Spanish. I have lost nearly every tense but present and the odd gerund, but we get by.

At work, I badge my way in through the turnstiles, guarding the building from … we're not sure what, exactly, but the building security people are as officious as can be about them. I have my backpack, my lunch, and the trifecta. I use the same hand I used to swat the alarm clock to summon the elevator. It is 5:35. I have been awake for 50 minutes.

Note that while she's found that she likes to put her hand on the texture of the cosleeper's mesh wall, she has not yet figured out how to use that hand to pop her pacifier back into her mouth. That's occasionally a source of some frustration to her.

Of course, once she can put her pacifier back in her mouth, that'll mean that she can put her socks in her mouth, the cats in her mouth, bottles of wine, leftover green beans … the sky will be the limit. So maybe the idle scratching is okay for now.

Here's the next installment of our Piper Notes. Included in today's installment:

• A failed attempt to get a laugh out of her using bathroom humor, and our lamentations that she is not our trained monkey
• A review of her accomplishments in the last six weeks, interspersed with
• random coos, cries, and snorts, painstakingly hand-collected by Kate and me
• Some overly sentimental ramblings about the virtues of single-tasking and multi-tasking
• and a post script, recorded on the ferry coming back from Governors' Island some weeks ago.

There's less crying in this one, anyhow.

We refer to this process as "hitting the snooze button."