His words grow. He begins to know letters. He’s excited to see buses and bikes and emergency vehicles. His favorite pond in Morningside Park has a resident egret and occasionally some ducks and two geese with their suddenly adolescent goslings and red-winged blackbirds and stray cats and turtles, always turtles all the way down and through. And he identifies them all. He kicks a ball. He points at everything and demands attention and identification. Let me write the memories before they’re absorbed by the body’s opaque, vestigial palimpsest. I chatter and chatter to lull him into patience, to tide him to the next impossible wave of childhood.