Last month, three days after Americans cast their ballots on a sea of fury, my son was born. Four weeks later, it's late at night. Flames crackle and hiss in my fireplace, flickering against a city sky glowing dull orange, the color thrown off by incandescent street lights. But the evening is still, like a breath being held.
Alexander, all eight pounds of him, listens with me to a radio tribute to jazz composer and pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim on the day of his death. I wonder how this could be. Last I knew, Jobim was young, his Latin hair shiny black, his hands gliding over the keys of his own haunting, smoky, bossa nova tunes. I whisper to my sleeping son, asking him: O, can the world bear the death of the Girl from Ipanema? In these times, this is not an idle question.
Already, magazines are insisting the Apocalypse is at hand as the third Millennium A.D. approaches, though I suspect as we endure story after story of millennium pablum, by the time it comes it will be an old story, and hardly worth bothering about.
I cuddle my baby. He is our third, arriving six years after our daughter, and eight after our first son. Coming from a family with two children, my brother and myself, the existence of this cooing, sleepy boy astonished me. Three children? Me?
My mother, who dabbled in environmentalism, Buddhism and many other isms, drilled into us the philosophy of Paul Erlich's Population Bomb. Responsible humans should only replace themselves. Two babies for two parents. Zero population growth.
This was, in fact, our plan, though less to preserve the ozone or save the whales than because babies take time we thought we didn't have. So after my daughter learned to tie her shoes and pour her own Rice Krispies, we gave away the crib, the snugli, the high chair.
Then one night, near the sea on a vacation far to the south, my wife and I simultaneously blurted out that we wanted another child; another tiny speck of life to wonder about; to hold in awe and anticipation of what he might become.
I try to feel guilty having a third child, for my mother's sake, and for a planet already straining to provide every American with two cars, garbage pick-ups twice a week, and CD Roms. But I have a justification, because I'm convinced this boy will one day save the world.
Besides, Newt Gingrich says I'm not supposed to worry about things like overpopulation anymore. It's unfashionable, what with talk of orphanages for naughty children, the death of the New Deal, and the dawn of the age of Grab What You Can and Bugger Everyone Else.
Rocking Alexander, who coos more like a raccoon or a gerbil than a human, I whisper that it will be up to him to set things right. But I'm not so sure. For as the turn of the millennium approaches, the world seems to be growing colder as lines of conflict and anger are drawn more rigid. The rich, at peace and prosperous, rave about who knows what; Muslim women talking Serbo-Croatian are raped by Serbs also speaking Serbo-Croatian; and the poor seem about to be left to their own devices, as they have been for most of time.
All I ask is that my boy doesn't forget what Wordsworth called "the still, sad music of humanity," that he will approach life with compassion, love and joy, and not with the self-satisfied smirk of a Newt Gingrich, with his grim vision of cities abandoned, lethal injections and maximum-security prisons stretching from sea to sea.
Now the fire is down to a few orange-red embers, Jobim's sad melodies are gone from the radio, and Alexander stirs. His eyelids flutter, and he looks up. He can't really see me, because his dark blue eyes are not yet capable of focusing. But he can hear me hum a lullaby. This calms Alexander as I take him upstairs to my sleeping wife, who will provide our son with all the nourishment he needs right now.
David Ewing Duncan is a free-lance writer.