Carpe diem. Be here now. I keep repeating these things to myself, but nothing’s working. Today still feels like the last eighty-eight million mornings on the playground. Boring. I’m glad Leo is having fun going up and down the slide. Up and down the slide. Up and . . . Wait, maybe he’s going to . . . No, there he goes, down the slide. It’s the same cliques as always on the playground. The Euro moms dominate the sandbox, the Santa Monica moms are in the west corner under the oak tree, and the Spanish-speaking nannies in hospital scrubs (which I really hope was their idea and not their employers’) are sitting on the benches. The redheaded dad from Chicago is pointing out to me how one of the ladders on the climbing structure is wood and the other is rope. “That one, do you see it? It’s wood. All wood. The other one, not the wood one but the one next to it, it’s rope. I didn’t realize that until yesterday.”
