I met my first rat in São Paulo, Brazil--not in the sticky summer when you wait for your turn to feel the oscillating fan for a few seconds each minute, all night long, but in the cold, sticky winter. Winter in São Paulo (starting in June and humidly freezing its way through August) is the time when you mix flour with rubbing alcohol in a small cereal bowl to burn and heat your room all night, because central heating in Brazil is more ridiculous than Gonçalvo Braga da Silva's jokes that gently skirt humor without bedding it down. "Why did the Hulk's girlfriend dump him? (Pause for comedic timing.) Because she wanted a more experienced man; he was too green." . . . But the rat.
     He was having a leisurely time in the kitchen late at night, as was his custom, until the guys and I tried to flush him out from behind the butane stove tank with broom handles and other weapons that made us feel safe, as though we were the ones in danger. He made a desperate bid for freedom past our tree-trunk legs (we jumped, I admit, fearful of bubonic plague and teeth honed from a lifetime of gnawing) and jumped, flipped, and hopped his way up the stairs, too cool to die, the James Dean of rodents.
     Whump and clang, and "There he is!" and "I got 'im!" and "Let him pull his tail out from under the lid," and "No way, moron!" and a few hours later we whumped him under an overturned wastebasket, the best we could do for a makeshift cage on such short notice. We tested his mettle by poking at him with chopsticks from leftover Chinese takeout. He fought back and bared his fangs, fiercer than any caged lion. He was about a foot long, not counting the tail. I know this from a picture someone took of a shoe hitting the wall just above him as he scurried toward some distant hope of leaving our apartment alive. He was bigger than my size 10. (Seriously, Gonçalvo, you're killing me. Why'd you have to throw my shoe, man?)
     None of us were brave enough to risk losing a finger by picking him up, so we slid a book underneath the wastebasket and carried him, cage and all, to the outdoor sink where we washed our clothes. "Get a book," and "That one's not big enough," and "But this one has a picture of Jesus on it."
     He must have known what would happen next, there in the sink with the wastebasket still secured on top of him. I wondered for a second what it would be like to know that death is coming, rising, pouring to the very top, one small air bubble trapped inside the wastebasket. I would have been in a state of utter panic. As if he hadn't already deprived me of 5 hours of sleep, he added insult to injury by calmly and regally swimming to the air bubble and breathing what he could from it. In a daze, I took a knife and perforated the basket to allow his last breath to bubble up and escape him. Nobody gave him a last meal or said a prayer for him, so I thought it the least I could to not look away as he twitched and convulsed his last seconds of life. While we buried him under the pimenta plant in the back yard, the sun rising in approval of our dusk-'til-dawn conquest, I wished that I could encounter such dignified tenacity again.

*  *  *

     I met my son in May. It was sunny, but I don't think I paid much attention to the weather. He was 38 weeks. OBs generally consider that a full term, but the on-call pediatrician said there was no way he was full term. He was small enough to be 36 weeks, which makes a lot of difference because the majority of the third trimester is spent gaining weight . . . for the fetus, that is.
     I was surprised at how orange his hair was. My wife's hair is the color of maple leaves in autumn, but we didn't have much hope of our children inheriting that striking trait because my ancestry is mostly Mexican and Japanese, and dark hair is the dominant phenotype. My wife's eyes are brown, another dominant trait, but my son miraculously wound up with my eyes, blue with an uneven ring of brown around the pupil.
     We were allowed to hold him for a couple of minutes before he was spirited off to what passed for a newborn ICU. They said I could go with him, so I did, expecting the worst. I kept waiting for someone to ask me to wash my hands or put on sterile gloves, but they never did. If they were assuming I was smart enough to do that on their own . . . well, they must not know how new fathers get. It was the quiet that was most unnerving, nothing like what ER led me to believe. When they put him on oxygen, they didn't intubate him or even "bag" him--they just held a plastic hose near his face. He didn't cry but for half a minute when they gave him his first bath and for maybe a whole minute when they circumcised him. (I belong to the Hebrew faith in that regard.) He didn't nurse, didn't really do much of anything. There was resignation in his eyes, like he felt he'd already accomplished his purpose in life. "Failure to thrive" is about the most tragic condition a newborn can have.

*  *  *

     My son's second birthday is in a couple weeks. He loves nothing more than to waddle up to me, grab my hand, and force me into his room to close the door and play hide and seek. He's hardwired for an inordinate amount of happiness, so you might never guess that he's mentally and physically delayed--globally, by more than six months. The fine- and gross-motor delays are due to his low muscle tone. No surprises there. What I hadn't realized was how much his mental and cognitive development hinged on his physical growth as well. The mind apparently needs the body like the stars need the night, like a stationery store needs a guy named Clem with twinkly eyes who wears the two-days' scruff on his chin like a medal.
     We teach the baby to use sign language to ask for what he wants. Waddle, waddle, waddle, and squeezes chin, and "Oh, o, OOOHHH-djuh!" and I discard the peel, watching tiny citrus volcanoes erupt from the surface, and give him a section of orange to suck, squish, and rub in his hair.
     "Can you say 'Thank you'?" Pats open palm on mouth. "What a good boy! I love you."
     "Ah la lou," and I can't help but think he'll be doing plenty of thriving when he's ready.