Waiting in small leather chairs, Betsy and I sat at the women's imaging center making small talk and fidgeting through magazines without reading any of the words, or for that matter even knowing which title we were holding. She would point out great ideas on how to recycle wine bottles into everyday useful items, and, to her disdain, I would flip through her magazine (while she held it) if I saw a funny picture that caught my eye. My attention span has always suffered from anxiety. Typically ideas land in my mind like planes on a runway, only stopping to fill to capacity and then take off into the great wide open. Today they are buzzing the tower, doing touch and goes, and some are just circling as if there is no space to land. Today, we are finding out if our baby is going to be a boy or girl.
They called for Betsy and we walked down the hallway passed the crazy pastel interpretive art that is probably a mother and child, but looks like two grapefruits square dancing. This is when I think I could be an artist. I'm wrong. She goes to change and I fight the urge to touch all the buttons on the picturemahicky they have left me with unsupervised. This is where my planes all take off at the same time and leave the runaway empty. It seems we should be lying on a hill somewhere with binoculars pressed hard against our eyes staring down at a hole holding our breath. Some time passes before we see a small fury head ease out to check if the coast is clear. Then, out comes the groundhog one wobbling limb at a time while we all watch to see if it has a penis. Hard to tell at this angle. Betsy walked out in a gown and I snapped out of my day dream realizing I had been holding my breath.
She laid down and out came the belly jelly. At this point there are no planes left, no airport even, just a black and white screen and a heart beat. Little hands. Little feet. But no penis. Because we are having a little girl, Harper Elizabeth Collum, and that's all I can think about.
A few months ago a great friend of mine got married. Naturally, all the excitement turned to the Bachelor Party. I remember buying the ticket to Las Vegas, walking through the airport, and then boarding the plane back home while popping Excedrin Migraine and inhaling some Cinnabon minis. It all happened that fast. But sometimes the little details of a trip get lost in the feeling that of all life's ups and downs you just logged one huge UP for the record book. Slowly but surely the memories will come floating in to be labeled, framed, and organized in the library of my mind. 
Coming back from Vegas there is a zip to life all together absent otherwise. Snapping fingers and striding around with Sinatra tunes on repeat in your head makes life pop like velour and white shoes. All one can hope for is to drag both feet in the afterglow, humming all the way back down to reality. I keep pulling up these memories as if someone threw them all in a hat and shook them up. I reach in feeling around for "the good ones" but they are all the same shape and size. Pulling out what looks like a polaroid of a close friend too drunk to walk, sitting indian style riding an escalator upstairs to another casino. That one is " a good one". Good ones don't always surface and that's when I wish I could just dump out the contents of the hat on the floor and walk over them looking for all the squares filled with color, the brighter the better, and then leave all the dim and blurry snapshots lying on the floor where they were most likely taken in the first place. In time those memories will surface less or become altered in story so long that they grow a little color of their own. However, in this moment, our short song and dance with Vegas is still fresh on the mind and each grab in the hat reveals a square filled with color from corner to corner. 
