Dear Evan:

Today is 11-11-11. Some people think it’s some sort of magical day; others are writing it off, other than the usual Veterans Day remembrances.

Me, I just think it’s neat. For one thing, it’s one of just a dozen days like it per century. The next is 12-12-12, and then I’m afraid I won’t see another configuration like it before my death. And you? With as long as our family lives, and modern science, I bet you’ll be there for 01-01-2101.

Enough of the future, though. Let’s talk about today. 11-11-11 is fun to think about (however briefly), and I hope you get my love for little riddles or, more appropriately, pattern recognition. When I was a boy, my parents got me books of brain teasers, riddles, rebuses, anagrams, that sort of thing. I loved the word games most of all, and would go around rearranging or reversing words in search of some (usually absent) hidden meaning.

Just don’t go overboard. Some people are doing that with today, insisting that some arbitrary (and oft-changed) configuration of months and days and years has cosmic significance. It has exactly as much significance as you give it. Forget returning messiahs or universal consciousness or whatever else people thing the day will bring. For me, 11-11-11 will mean coming home from work, kissing your mommy, sharing a family hug, holding you cheek-to-cheek, laughing when you stand, and putting you gently into your crib.

That’s more than good enough for any day.

I love you,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

Some mornings it aches to leave you and your mommy.

You’re back to sleepless — or rather, sleep-interrupted — nights, thanks to a perfect storm of teething, a fever last weekend and the “fall back” time change. All three served to throw off your sleep schedule, so while you had been snoozing peacefully between 7:30 p.m. and 5 a.m., now you’re up throughout the night.

Your mommy is bearing the brunt of that, but it’s wearing on her. Neither of us likes the idea, but it’s time to let you cry it out a little more until you’re back on track.

Today, you were up early (or, for you, at the same time as usual), so after I showered and dressed for work, I picked you up and smooched your fat cheeks and let you stare in amazement at a tassle hanging down from our ceiling fan. You stroked it softly, not grabbing, but letting your fingers trail over it. I set you down on the bed for a moment, so you could practice standing.

You’re so proud, every time you lever yourself up on widely spaced feet. You look around, mouth open and grinning. We cheer and praise you and make noises of encouragement. I swear you’ll be walking soon, but your mommy says that’s a ways off, and she knows better.

This morning, she watched in sleepy amusement, and then whispered that I should take you to bed, see whether you (and she) could get a little more sleep.

I was skeptical, but I scooped you up again, my left arm under your bum and my right loosely on your chubby belly. You don’t even need me to hold you upright with that right hand, but I feel better doing when we walk in the dark.

Which we did, through the living room and kitchen and front hallway, then down that hall to your room. You goggled at everything, at the green lit numbers on the microwave and the blueish nightlights in the halls. You’ve seen them so many times before, but your brain is still mapping, still taking them into account and trying to decide what they mean.

You grumbled a bit at your bedroom — no question there for your brain; if we go in and I don’t turn on the light, you know the crib is your next stop. I was surprised, though, that you didn’t cry when I laid you down. You just rolled over, felt for the green-and-brown fabric bear your mommy calls “Woobie.” And then you were quiet.

I slipped out the door as noiselessly as possible. I hope you slept.

Love,

Daddy

[Written yesterday, and published a day late.]

Dear Evan:

Happy birthday! It’s your first ever, and boy did you start it early. You’ve been sleeping through the night lately, so I was surprised to hear you crying at just after 2 a.m. Your mommy brought you into our bed, and fed you for a little bit. I’m afraid I ruined that, though, by popping my head up. That seemed to be the signal for “crawl to Daddy and honk his nose.” After some play time, your mommy took you back to your room, and managed to get you to sleep until 5. She brought you back to our bed, where you slept until I left for work at 6. Not a bad start to the morning! Too bad your fur-brother Lil’ Bit woke you as I was leaving.

As your mommy tells it, you got a nice long nap after a trip with her to the doctor (she has a sinus infection that became bronchitis) and flirted with all the nurses. Oh, and while she was on the phone with your Aunt Kiki, you demonstrated your latest trick, waving bye-bye when someone says, well, “wave bye-bye.” That may not sound like much when you read this, but it’s only recently that you actively started reacting to your name, though you do seem to know what “hug” means, even if your version is more of a head-butt. I’m still trying to get you to understand “come here.”

Another first today: your first cottage cheese, mixed with applesauce. You’re still unhappy with textured food, especially chunks, but your mommy says that after some initial hesitation, you wolfed down an entire bowl of the mixture.

By the time I got home, you were already in your pajamas. Your mommy had already feed you a birthday dinner of pumpkin, squash and other assorted blended vegetables. (She makes most of it herself; only Daddy is lazy enough to feed you pre-packaged food.) We played for an hour — you danced, you babbled to yourself as you paged through books, you stood and fell down, and I tried (and failed) to take pictures of it all. Then you and I sat on the thick brown shag rug in your room, your back against my chest, and we read your favorite bedtime book, Goodnight Moon.

Sometimes when we read you’ll concentrate, touch the pages, babble under your breath. This was one of the other times. You looked up at me a few times, a wide semi-toothed grin on your face, and toward “Goodnight mush” began climbing my legs and shoulders to see what else might be happening.

Then it was mommy’s turn to cuddle you. Without protest, you slipped into sleep.

That was your first birthday. No cake yet, and the presents were mostly in the form of cards (including one from my late friend Doug’s parents, who sent you Goodnight Moon a year ago) and contributions to your college fund. I meant to sing Happy Birthday to you, and forgot, but we have many years ahead for that.

I love you,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

It’s almost your first birthday! Tomorrow, you’ll be one year old. I am unable to compare you now with pictures of the tiny, thin almost alien boy I saw that scary day last October.

You may be walking by your birthday. Already you stand, feet spread cartoonishly wide, toes pointed outward, balancing on your upper legs and hips. You push up, look around with a huge grin, accept the adulation (“Good job, Evan! Good standing!”) we heap on you, then lower yourself, push back up, repeat. After two or three stands, you slowly fall backward onto your diaper-cushioned bum.

Have I mentioned how much you love to dance? Any snatch of music from the television or the radio, and you’ll be bopping along, bouncing from your knees up whether you’re sitting or standing or being held. And the grin on your face! I’ll be honest, I hate to dance, but only because we didn’t have much rhythm in our house growing up. (I remember hearing lots of easy-listening, but that’s it. Hard to learn to keep a beat to that.) I’m so glad you love to dance.

You have rhythm, too. You’ll stand with one hand on the ottoman for our couch or the footrest to your old glider and with the other hand smack perfectly in time: smack-smack-smack-smack. Sometimes you dance along to your own beat, and definitely you dance along when your mommy or I join in.

Yesterday, you and I had bonding time while your Mommy napped. (She’s got a nasty sinus infection, but you seem not to have caught it, and I don’t often get sick.) I was worried about taking you into a Halloween store, but instead of being frightened, you just goggled open-mouthed at the life-size zombies and skeletons. Not even the spooky noises got to you. I know, you’re probably too young to even think about being scared, but I hope you inherit my love of haunted houses and ghost stories. When I say Halloween is my favorite holiday, it’s not Goth or anything; I just like the otherwordliness that goes along with it. The sense that there’s something still left to discover. Something beyond what we know. Maybe I’m putting too much on a night that’s more about candy than anything else. And maybe I can explain better when you’re older.

One more bit of news: Last week, I started your college fund. As bad as the economy is, I hope it grows alongside you, as tall and as broad as I think you’ll be. I hope that by the time you’re ready to use it, that money has given you the freedom to choose where you go and what you study. But I also hope you won’t stop working even with the cushion there. You may fall on your bum a few times, but if you push back up and keep at it, you’ll get where you need to go.

I love you,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

A quick, heartwarming story to begin: We were playing this past weekend, you sitting with me cross-legged behind you on the thick brown shag rug in your room. You reached for a block, and overcorrected or something, and landed gently headfirst on the rug. Not enough to hurt you, but enough to surprise you. You squeaked indignantly and then — my heart hurts to type this — turned and laid your head gently on my knee. That was it; a quick hug, and you were ready to play again.

I don’t see you enough, so those little moments that remind me I’m your daddy are moments I cherish.

I’ve written it before, and will again, but I hope that someday, reading these letters, you have a sense of how difficult that can be. Especially now, when you’re mobile and interested in everything and learning every day, I wish we had more time together. But the more I work now, the better your life — all of our lives — will be down the road.

Over the past week or so, you’ve learned to dance. You already laughed and snorted when we danced together, me holding you, bouncing up and down while your mommy waved her arms and shook her head. Now you join in, bouncing while you sit or stand, shaking your own head, grinning from ear to ear.

Sometimes, you dance when we dance. Sometimes, you dance to music from the television. And sometimes, as your mommy witnessed two days ago, you dance to some internal music, when there’s nothing else around to hear.

That’s even more impressive when compared to the way you came into this world. La brought home copies of some older pictures yesterday, one of which was taken right after your birth. There’s almost no resemblance between that long, thin, jaundiced almost alien creature, wrapped as it is in wires but otherwise naked, and the tall, big-bellied, smiling boy you are now.

When I sat next to your incubator crib in the hospital, I whispered to you about the healthy Grieser genes, about how infrequently we get sick and how long we live. I told you, willed into your sleeping ears, how strong you were and would be. And here you are, just three weeks from being one year old, strong and healthy and happy and smart.

I love you,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

Oh, how you smiled at me this morning! You were in a good mood, which makes me hope that the five (five!) teeth coming in at once have surfaced, or breached, or whatever it is baby teeth do. Broken through? That sounds right. As I finished dressing, you watched and grinned and giggled. It’s going to be a shame when you turn 13, dye your hair black and decide you hate your mother and me.

It took me longer to dress because for the second day this week, I suited up. Once upon a time, I hated wearing suits. Now I like it, but don’t need to do it often. It’s to the point where I may buy more suits and wear them just for the heck of it. But I digress: I dressed well today because I was one of a handful of us who gave tours to the management company owned by H. Ross Perot. (Google him, or Wikipedia, or whatever they have when you’re grown — Wikioogle presented by NFL-Coke?)

I wore a black suit with charcoal pinstripes, a pink button-down and my steel square-lens glasses. In other words, more New York than Texas. And yet the tour group I led was made up of the guys who worked the land before we build here. Real cowboys, the kind who had scuffed boots and pristine hats. You know what? We had a great old time. We talked about the land, and the animals, and environmental consciousness, and… Well, whatever came to mind.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, don’t assume you don’t have anything in common with anyone. There’s always something in common, and every conversation is a chance to learn. And never talk down to anyone. I could’ve written off the group as good ol’ boys (a younger me would have), but those men taught me an amazing amount about the land around us in a short period of time. Plus, they reminded me without saying anything that real gentlemen held doors for women, talked to them with respect and courtesy. I like to think I’ve done the same, but maybe I haven’t. And I’m worse off for it.

Be like that. Be modern and streetwise and tech-savvy, as I like to be, but be gentlemanly and courteous and knowledgeable. Think, and then speak. Be a cowboy.

I love you,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

This morning, I saw you crying, and I saw you laughing, and I saw you asleep, all before I left for work. Our hopes of you sleeping through the night have been almost entirely dashed. The closest you came was Sunday night, when you gave us a solid seven hours of uninterrupted slumber. Otherwise, you wake at midnight, and near 3, and again right around 5 or 6. I don’t want to say we could set a watch by your waking, but it’s close.

Your Mimi Jean is in town this week, and now that the weather’s consistently below 100 degrees during the day, you and she sit outside under our tree. You have never stopped loving being outside; I wonder whether that’s you, whether it’s the 40 days you spent seeing almost nothing but the inside of a NICU bubble, whether it’s just a baby thing. No matter your mood, as soon as we step outdoors you get quiet and pay close attention to the wind and the birds and the children on bikes pedaling past.

You won’t be sneaking up on anyone indoors. Your crawl is accompanied by a smack-smack-smack as you slap the hardwoods with each little hand, squirming forward at an astonishing rate of speed. Only weeks ago, we could set you down and manage to do something — change the laundry, maybe — before you got too far. Nowadays, you’re at the laundry-room door almost as quickly as the dogs.

I love that little smacking noise, and the huge grin on your face when you realize you’ve been caught motoring around the house. You’re already standing almost entirely on your own, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you walked before the end of the year. I thought about that this morning, as I lay in the dark of our bedroom, with you sleeping between me and your mother. I thought about what a huge change that will be in a year — less! it’s still a month until your birthday! — of huge changes. It made me smile, but it made me a little afraid as well.

Love,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

My descent into being a total sap continues. This week, we’ve had news of a woman who flung her infant — a boy not much older than you — from a hospital parking garage, and I read an item about another child who passed away at 16 months. I just wanted to hold you, rub my nose into your chubby cheeks, smell the sweet residue of pureed fruit on your breath.

When I came home from work, you were all smiles, as always when you see me. First you open your mouth wide in a grin, exposing your two little teeth. Then you turn quickly back to your mommy, who’s usually feeding you dinner at that point. Then back to me, a huge grin, back to mommy, a huge grin. You’re just so happy.

Some nights — most nights — I’ll hide behind the column that our pantry forms between the kitchen and the dining-room table area. You’re onto me, though, and watch patiently for me to pop out on the other side, our own game of peek-a-boo. Whether I manage to surprise you, my appearance brings waves of giggles.

Two nights ago, a rare wind blew through Denton. I say rare because we’re in the midst of record-setting heat, and a drought, so even a breeze is cause for celebration. A windy evening? Unthinkable, but there it was. You and I stood on the front walk, and your fine blond hair whipped with every gust. You goggled at leaves scratching along the driveway, turned to watch birds struggling across the sky, closed your eyes and let the wind blow through your parted lips and over your tongue. When we came inside, you almost smelled like fall.

But not yet. It’s hot. The air-conditioner is struggling; I thought it would die last night, and hurriedly turned it off. The thing survived, but I’m not sure for how long. All we need from it are a few more good weeks, and then the weather will, I hope, turn cool. Then you’ll really smell like fall.

Love,

Daddy

Dear Evan:

Last Friday, I spent eight hours putting together a new entertainment center, complete with bookshelves, for the living room. Your mommy and I, during this first year of your life, thought of furniture as luxuries best left for another day. And then you began trying to crawl.

Our living-room setup was what could generously be called shabby chic: The television (admittedly, a large flat-screen, so not as shabby as the rest) rested atop a century-old dinner table whose rounded ends could fold down, leaving only a rectangular surface. The table, I should mention, was painted lime green at some point in the 1970s. I’ve always wanted to strip the paint and restore it, but that will have to wait. A fairly unsteady nightstand was pressed into surface as a pedestal for a tower of cable box and VCR. (Yes, we still own a VCR.) My XBox, which gets more use as a DVD player, stood between the two pieces of dubious furniture. Our books lived on a sort of dingy green and highly unstable set of cheap folding bookshelves.

Obviously, with you days away from being mobile, the tangle of cords and potential avalanche of books would have to go.

And so it was your mommy and I looked for something… well, adult. We splurged (more’s the pity for your college fund), and a few days later the deliveryman very nicely stowed six huge boxes in our garage.

I’ll spare you the gory details, though I will say that for once on a construction (ha) project, my injuries were limited to sore muscles and a shard of metal in one thumb that your mommy ably and quickly plucked out. The bookshelves are standing in the garage, ready to go out with next Monday’s garbage, and the table was relocated to our front room-turned-office. The nightstand still lives in the living room, albeit as a table to one side of my battered leather couch.

As for you, you’re trying so very hard to crawl. When I got home from work today, I stood at the door to your bedroom, and you looked up from the thick brown rug and smiled and smiled and smiled. You pulled yourself forward a bit, but after a few moments I broke down and picked you up.

You’re doing much better at standing. I wonder whether you’ll walk before you crawl. Either way, you’ll be off and running soon.

Love,

Daddy

Dear Evan –

It’s been months since I wrote last, and I apologize for that as always. I took a new job, as you might remember, and while I love what I do, the hours are long. Once a 10-hour day was unthinkable. Now it feels like I’m leaving early. Eleven or 12 is normal. I think about writing to you, though. Daily. Hourly sometimes.

You grow more every day. Most startling, most lovable, is your laugh. You smile when you see your mommy or me. Not just smile. You flat-out grin. You cackle when I get home and envelope you and your mommy in a family hug. You can go from tentative giggles to flat-out belly laughs when I swoop our faces near to each other, or when your mommy speaks Spanish or when I whistle.

You can’t crawl yet, but you’re close. You roll — always in motion — and prop up on your elbows and stare around open-mouthed. You reach for what you want.

You’re eating solid food. You loved whipped prunes and bananas and peas and carrots and squash. You aren’t fond of spinach yet, which makes me sad (though you love when I whistle the Popeye theme) and you aren’t fond of avocado, which makes your mommy sad. You’ll get there though.

I miss my time away from you and your mommy. I know the job lets me stop worrying about your future. It lets me have peace of mind that your mommy can devote time to her doctorate and to you. But it takes away from my time with you. I’ll do better.

I love you,

Daddy