First

There had been plans. The best-laid plans, in fact. (That's not intended as a pun.) But the fickle gods of rainfall and chill wind looked at our plans and laughed, as gods are wont to do, and so we did not head south to the wilds of Rhode Island to spend this - Father's Day, our first Father's Day in which we had a fatherhood to celebrate - embracing that most traditional of father/son events: an afternoon at the ballpark.

We had known this would happen. All week, we - by which I mean: I - had watched the forecasts with a growing sense of dread and disappointment, my mood growing bleak and grey as the countless miles of cloud that came to spread over southern New England that weekend, a cold front thick with the promise of rain and a sunless Sunday. I took the weather as it was intended to be taken: as an affront to me, on a personal level. The birth of our son in early April had served as a trigger event, one followed with alarming immediacy by my wife's birthday and Mother's Day. In both cases, I scrambled furiously to overcome my own exhaustion and sloth to generate appropriately celebratory events, replete with splendid, rainbowed bouquets of tulips, expertly homecooked dinners, and the unleashing of doves to the heavens.

This was my turn — my moment in the spotlight; my day to be celebrated for my work and effort and procreative (also: recreative) expertise, and to be recognized in terms of the transformation my life had undergone and the new man - father, still such a strange and foreign term - I had apparently become. My expectations were boundless. Here I am now; celebrate me.

We awoke that Sunday morning to the howl of an infant Hurricane, as we did every morning. Hunger, rage, an insatiable demand for love and attention — all rolled together in the piercing, glass-cutting cry of the wee beastie that had infested our lives like a battalion of ants in a rotten tree, consuming it from the inside, reimagining and repurposing whatever it might once have been into the new and forevermore: home. We rose wearily and brought him downstairs, and as my wife muffled his screams beneath an onslaught of milk I flashed the TV to life, hoping for the blessing of a broken front to greet us to this holiday. I remember standing next to the fireplace, one arm resting at my side, holding the remote, the other high upon the mantle, my fingers shuffling the tickets like playing cards, mumbling prayers for sunshine.

They went unanswered. And as I collapsed, crestfallen, into an oversized chair, bemoaning how I had been robbed of what was rightfully mine, lamenting this sad turn of events and beating my breast in outrage and pain at a world that would so carelessly crush my hopes and dreams of an afternoon of AAA baseball... my wife had already moved on.

"I've got an idea," she said. I hadn't even had time to find my hairshirt, and she there she was: glossing over my nascent martyrdom and segueing to something else. Before I could even blurt out an anguished "But..!" she cut me short: "We should go outlet shopping."

Ye gods. What horrors have you unleashed? Are there any words that send a deeper chill - a sharper stake, a colder blade, a more wickedly curved thorn - into the heart of a man with aspirations of baseball and beer and hot dogs and sunshine with his son... than the suggestion that the time might be better spent at an outlet mall? Had I not already been lying Pieta-style across the oversized chair, I cannot doubt that I would have dropped to my knees and pounded my chest, howling with Hurricane-force: "Why hast thou forsaken me? For a mall?" But lying prostrate I was, and so I could respond with little more than a groan of profound despair: the comfy chair-bound groan of the damned.

She took that as a yes.

Which is how, some hours later, I found myself drifting among the other lost souls through the misty, infinite limbo that lies between heaven and hell, life and dreams, Ann Taylor and Williams-Sonoma. This was the place where the aspirations of man came to wither and die, where the gap between who we are and who we should be found worship in the khaki-draped temple of The Gap, and where lives that once seemed limitless with fierce energy and dynamic possibility became trapped, neutered, Limited. Occasionally I caught the eye of one of the other shuffling men, and in their expression saw a reflection of my own surrender. They had dead eyes; like a doll's eyes.

My wife moved happily through the labyrinth, her intensive focus mirrored by that of her partner in crime and shopping KK, while I slowly followed, pushing my Sisyphean boulder stroller in measured, labored steps. At times, they would emerge from one place or another weighed heavily by unknown wares, and I would be dispatched back to the farthest reaches of the space-time continuum to stow the bags safely away in our trunk, before returning to resume my burden as beast of the fields; drawing the plow, silent in acquiescence, domesticated in full.

At some point - we had been there for perhaps 14 hours, as best I could tell - TheHurricane awakened, and from the depths of his hard plastic shell and countless sedimentary layers of blanket erupted a cry of infinite hunger. He was Shiva, and he would consume worlds if not sated by sacrifice. And there I was: the fatted calf, eyes dumb and trusting, offering myself to the knife. "I've got it," I said. My wife and KK vanished into the swirling mists, and I pulled the stroller and occupant next to a bench. From beneath the carriage I drew the diaper bag - one the approximate dimensions and weight of a steamer trunk - and pulled out a bottle of water and another plastic bottle, this one with yellow powder at the bottom. I unscrewed both. Mixed. Shook. Returned the caps to their respective owners, and then withdrew the squealing Hurricane from his perch.

I rested him in the crook of my left arm, and - cradling his head at my elbow, his bottom resting in the palm of my hand - brought the bottle with my right to his lips. They opened, a flower eager for rain, and he drank with a deep and bottomless thirst. Together we sat there on the bench, he taking long, deep draws from the bottle, I taking long, deep draws of breath.

Two women (older; perhaps in their sixties) walked past us, then stopped. "Isn't this a picture for Father's Day," they said. They smiled, warm and complimentary. Admiring my son.

He looked at me. I looked at them. Not knowing what to say for a minute.

Then I smiled. Made a moment of smalltalk. Thanked them for their kindness, and watched them amble away. And then we sat there, together, alone. Waiting for the day to pass.