Today is one of those bright, cold, beautiful days when it is necessary to put on a large black Laura Ashley hat and a long coat and a pair of excellently patterned stockings and buy a baguette and take it to the park with you. So that is what I did. I ended up eating very little of the baguette, because it was more fun to crumble it into little pieces and feed them to the ducks and geese, some of whom did me the exquisite favor of scraping their little raspy not-teeth against my palms and fingers. (Yes, I know geese can hurt you; once I saw a goose totally bite the crotch of a little boy I knew, and it was pretty awful.)

Since I didn't get to eat my baguette, I was all ready to leap into a waiting car & be sped to a rice-pudding restaurant to eat two different kinds of rice pudding with sour cherries all over them, when the IR called me on her cell phone. "Do you think it's okay to leave your baby with some people at the gas station?" she said.

"No, I don't," I said.

"Well, they're reeeally nice people," she said. "The wife already has her own baby. It's a smart baby. It can play the xylophone."

"You really can't leave the baby with some people at the gas station," I said. "Why do you want to, anyway?"

"Well, it's just that I ran into Melvin, you know Melvin, and, like, they're doing a photo shoot at his space right now, or like, in five minutes or something, and they want me to be in the photo shoot, and there's, like, a tank of water I could go in and stuff, and I think it would be really good, you know, and Melvin says they would give me five hundred dollars, and I could really use a new lens, you know, and they could get it for me for cheap, so I wanna do it."

"Can't you bring the baby?"

"Nonnie! I can't bring the baby! Somebody there would totally eat the baby."

Well, maybe she was right. "Listen, why don't I come take care of the baby?"

"Wow, that's a great idea. Maybe you could take the baby to the zoo or something."

So now I have the baby and we are going to the zoo. But not until after we eat some rice pudding.

I wonder if this baby can play the xylophone.