IMOGENE’S NOTEBOOK
Baby Talk
A poem
Tear-filled fear at the start
and then the excitement
of buying a high-end stroller we pushed around the mall
filled with doll clothes and music boxes
in preparation for our still imaginary fare.
That night, I caught you round bellied,
surveying my construction of the crib.
Your expression frozen in the half light of evening
in our novel Rockwellian room.
A picture that looked new to new eyes,
is now grainy, aged in pixel yellowing.
Not nearly as enduring as some snapshot
taped and corner caught
on the brittle paper sheets
of some embellished memory book.
Our portraits are filed and timestamped,
nested in a hierarchy of abstracted folders.
Dimmed in grayscale,
at the mercy of wifi and passwords.
A lifetime of hopes and expectations
bound to the ether,
floating in a void of keywords and tax filings.
We closed the shared accounts
and replaced passwords.
The secret phrases of our new family lost,
and the baby talk code
we will never hear again,
forgotten without an app.
Our grandchildren will never hold
the scrapbook paper of our existence.
They will never see
the scissor cut shaping of our story,
or the hole punched confetti
and crepe paper joys
of our little family.
We created the story together,
and brought it to life with tender narration,
but the codec lost support,
and silence our only succession.
