A lot of the talk recently, and not just in the Ho-Ward household (I haven’t yet changed my name), revolves around babies.
How much money is needed to raise them? Where should one raise them? How does one raise them? When should one start having them? How many should one have? How does one make them? (We sort of know; for starters, it takes two. Tee-hee!). The natural thing, if after a wedding you find yourselves in your early to mid-thirties, is to start planning for a family. Biological clocks wait for no one, especially not the hearts that run them. The natural thing, at this point, is to take a look at your one bedroom apartment in the gayest part of town and wonder, “Can we do it here?”
Make the baby, sure.
Raise it? You can if you really want to.
But we don’t really want to.
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Tonight Tom and I loafed on the couch before foraging around in the fridge for something we could call dinner. As of late our fridge has been mostly bare, but for english muffins, iced tea (Tom’s elixir), and berries. It’s been too hot to go grocery shopping, too hot for truly robust appetites.
We found some chicken thighs I’d marinated a few days ago, froze, then forgot about. Also, a head of cabbage.
“Shall we eat this?”
We opened a bottle of wine, and over rice, roasted cabbage and bland chicken pepped up with salt and ketchup, pondered our next steps. Outside, clouds that had been threatening the streets for some time finally broke. Though we couldn’t quite see the rain coming down, we saw the streets darken with moisture. No thunder, but plenty of lightning. Curiously, outside, no one seemed to be rushing for cover. It was as though all the pedestrians on 9th Ave. had been watching the clouds, anticipating, and were prepared for whatever came. When it came, they simply walked through it.
In Chinese, that’s what my mother says about adversity, or a tough decision to make or made. Or marriage. Mostly she says this about marriage. You walk through it. Together.
Tough decisions ahead abound. And we haven’t yet made one. Instead, we ate the chicken, doused the rice in soy sauce, and sipped the Woop Woop (not bad, by the way). We felt like drunk children – okay maybe not children, but way, way younger than we are – both close to and far from having kids.
The rain stopped and the sun, saying goodnight, made the clouds glow for a few minutes more. The streets seemed oddly empty for a standard weeknight. Had everyone gone home to towel off?
I raised a glass to Tom. “One day, we’re going to look back on our evenings when it was just you and me, in this apartment and think, ‘Wow, that was so fun. So long ago.'”
But for now it was now, and we were here. And to here, we drank.
VERY HIGHBROW 