“Okay okay! Quiet! Hey let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!”

“No!”

“Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!”

“NO!”

But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.

Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. “Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk, guy, a walk to the park!”

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other day care to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colorful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. “Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!”

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.