It's a bouncing baby monk

Friar and Palfrey had their baby yesterday evening. He's a boy, and he was about half a month premature. Yes, my best friend, the man whom I have known for twenty years as a smoker, drunk, reveler, music aficionado and impresario, a man who is rather child-like and yet fiercely independent, immature and precocious, lazy and accomplished, self-deprecating and expansive, is now a father.

The mind boggles.

After work (we opened at ten because of "the ice storm," a chill in the air which only Texans would consider unsafe), I tooled up to the hospital and saw young Crafty for the first time. As when I visited 74 and Zaftig's baby girl in the hospital the November before last, the child was barely 24 hours old. This time, however, because of the premature delivery (C-section), and the fact that he doesn't seem to have caught onto the concept of taking nourishment quite yet, I couldn't hold him.

By sheer coincidence, I ran into Flax's mother in the lobby. I assumed she was coming to see Crafty as well, but it turned out she was ignorant of the birth, and was only there for her own appointment. (She stopped by after her visit.) Weird how the branches of the past sometime converge. Seeing Flax's mother reminded me of just how young we all were fully two decades ago, back when we'd hang out in Flax's kitchen, enraging his father and acting like idiots. Now it's 2007 (and I honestly, sincerely never thought I'd live long enough to see that) and here we are, most of us parents and respectable people to boot.

How morbidly depressing, come to think of it.