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5:05 p.m. Tuesday, June 16, 2009. Yesterday I felt sad, just a little sad, a wide, silent, shallow, lukewarm sea of sad that lay all day like a subliminal pool of mood in the background of my activity.

When I paused to look in my heart, to feel, there it was, just as it had been the previous time I stopped briefly to check.

I knew its origin—the death of a family friend the day before, the three times I watched my mother shed silent tears, memories of love long past, my long distance relationship with several of my children and grandchildren, the hours I had spent on the road, a word that hurt.

To express it I posted "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Tithonus," two gorgeous poems by Tennyson on death and decay.

But Leo would have none of it.

He'd snooze, stir, wake, grunt, stretch, and smile, look up at me from his changing table with still more smiles of gratitude, love, and amusement as I wiped and diapered his bottom, and then, his head lying in the crook of my elbow, he'd chug three or four ounces of his mother's milk, burp, smile, babble, coo, and then on his back on a blanket he'd babble and play before he fell asleep to begin all over again his infant routine.

"Hi, Leo!"

In the morning he sat for an hour in his basket chair and wrestled with his bib and with his hanging toys. With his left hand he got the red plastic ring in his grip and he tugged and grunted and squirmed and pulled for many minutes to try to get it to his mouth and in for a taste.

"Oh my!"

His objective was not possible but Leo wrestled and squirmed and pulled so hard for so long that before he gave up not only his feet but his ankles, too, were well out over the bottom edge of his gently bouncing chair.

"Look at you!"

Today, too, he slept and drank and played and smiled and slept and drank and played and smiled, but today at the end of his naps both in the morning and in the afternoon he woke with a start and a loud, sudden, unhappy cry.

On each occasion I jumped up from my easy chair to see.

"What?"

Leo squirmed and yelled and cried.

"Leo."

He was hungry.

"Waaa!"

I got a bottle of his mother's milk and warmed it in the kitchen sink and for the first time in nine days I saw Leo really cry.

"Waaa!"

He made a terrible frown, an angry grimace.

"Waaa aa!"

Two tears fell from the corner of his left eye and rolled down his cheek toward his perfect, pale pink ear.

"Leo."

He wouldn't wait.

"Waaa!"

In the ugly mask of tragedy he made of his mouth and lips I recognized an ancient and familiar look of fear and pain.

For the fraction of an instant an image flashed in my head, the sad, wide eyes of a starving, nameless, brown mother sitting on the barren earth of a refugee camp, her flattened, empty, hanging breasts exposed, her baby boy beyond hunger, his empty belly bulging, his eyes open, too, wide and empty, silent, too sick to cry, dying in her arms. They'd given up. They stared at the camera. Now for one moment in my mind they stared at me.

"Leo!"

The image dissolved.

In my left arm and lap Leo lay and leaned forward and lunged toward his bottle. I helped him hold it in his two pink little hands.

He drank.