Because, let’s face it, if you’re a new parent, you don’t really have much idea about how much poop there will be, or what it will be like, and part of your decision about what products to use will be informed by it.

For starters, your baby is going to come out and have this nasty, sticky poop that will stain everything for about two days. It’s called meconium, and it’s made out of all the hair that fell off your baby in-utero, I believe. It’s nasty stuff. During these couple days, use disposable diapers. If the baby is born in a hospital, they’ll provide such- use them. If you use them on a reusable diaper or washcloth, they’ll get stained.

At some point, when the kid starts breastfeeding (you should do this if you can, because it’s healthy, it’s free, and it will make the poop a little less stinky), you’ll start getting this golden smear in the diapers, maybe with little bits of curdled milk in it. It won’t smell bad, and it doesn’t even need to be rinsed off of the diapers before they’re washed. If the kid is eating formula, it will be a little stinkier, and a little more formed.

Every kid’s poop will be different. We had one that had pretty well-formed poop after the first meal of solid food, and we had another whose wasn’t until around two. If you’ve got a kid that has messy poops, invest in a sprayer for the back of the toilet. Took about fifteen minutes to install, and saved us a crapload of mess. Pun intended.

But your kid’s poop might not be that messy. My kids have a cousin whose poop just rolls right off the diaper into the toilet. If you’re using reusable diapers, that’s what you do with the poop: flush it. Imagine that.

You’ll need some accessories. You’ll need some washcloths to wash the kid’s butt when you change a diaper. If you’re already doing wash for the reusable diapers, using a disposable washcloth seemed silly to us. You’ll need a waterproof diaper pail (we use a plastic garbage bin) and some waterproof bags that you can buy anywhere people sell cloth diapers. We use two big ones for home, plus three or four more for when we’re out and about.

Last, but not least, your kid’s butt will be bigger in cloth diapers. Buy clothes that have a little room in the trunk for some junk. Then practice looking smugly superior for when you, a dad, whip out cloth diapers and start changing your kid. All the moms will stand around and marvel, and you’ll feel (justifiably) awesome.

There is a fey princess in Finn Faerie Land named Mary Katroux.  I don’t know if I’m spelling the name right, because it was told to me by a three-year-old and a four-year-old, neither of whom are particularly insistent on the finer points of spelling, though they are Quite Adamant about details.  They’re much more insistent, in fact, about the details of Finn Faerie Land than they are on the particulars of what happened or didn’t happen, which is somewhat different than the kind of stories I’ve grown accustomed to (which is part of why I mentioned before that this is not necessarily a story).

In fact, there are a few things about Finn Faerie Land that are quite different than I’ve grown accustomed to.  For instance, there is a frog from Finn Faerie Land who lives in a magnolia tree with a hollow spot in it.  The frog’s name is Finnbell, and he is no particular color.  He is no particular kind of frog.  And he is not even really a he, because sometimes she is a she, depending upon what she is occupied with, and she is no particular gender of frog.  I’m told this is not a particularly unusual characteristic in frogs, but it still seemed strange to me when I first encountered Finnbell.

Finnbell’s house, it should be noted, is one of the in-between places that the children call Faerie Houses.  Once on our way down to Indian Run, the children saw such a house without a door, and insisted that we make one and bring it back, since in this particular case, it was surely a mistake.  Sometimes when we go by that place now, the door is open.  Other times, it is closed.  It appears the yard is quite well tended, and we found a stag-horn nearby too, which may have been left there by the Piebald Deer.

The Piebald Deer, like Finnbell, is one of the in-betweens, who can be seen quite plainly when sampling delicious plums from our plum tree, if one is patient enough to wait, and lucky enough to be waiting at a time when the Piebald Deer has a sweet tooth.  The Piebald Deer is also friends with Bernie-the-real-dog, who is usually the one that notices that piebald rump hopping into the trees.  Bernie gives chase, but only in good fun- there is no animosity.

Last, but not least, and not really last, are the Kitsune.  At first I thought they were just foxes, but I guess that is part of the magic of the Kitsune, that most people think they are just mangy red dogs who hang around waiting for a chicken to come outside the fence.  Kirby-the-real-dog tolerates the Kitsune, but Bernie-the-real-dog does not like them at all.  Too much hound in that one to be friends with something that looks that much like a fox.

The Kitsune, interestingly enough, also live in faerie houses, usually down at the bottom of a tree.  You can tell a faerie house with Kitsune living in it, because they dig out the door a little bit.  We found one yesterday that had dug down so much that the tree fell over, but it looked like the Kitsune decided to stay anyhow.  We planted a cherry tree only to learn that it is one of the favorite foods of the Kitsune, at least according to Basho, according to Tim Myers.

One difficulty about this not really being a story is that it becomes difficult to know where to stop.  One stops a story at the end, or when the story has a natural pause, but from what I can tell one only stops telling about Finn Faerie Land when something else grabs one’s attention.  Which has happened to me now.

My parents, I guess, knew the eruption was pending, but it was a great surprise to Dan and Doug and I.  I remember vividly that it didn’t get light that morning like it should have, and that ash began falling from the sky.  I remember I was afraid to go outside- to the outhouse.  I remember animals hiding.

Eventually, years later, I remember climbing to the rim of the St. Helens crater, and seeing the magnitude of the blast that sent pieces of a mountain falling out of the sky, three hundred miles away.

It is also passing strange that we bring with us memories from other places.  Standing deep in right field, I remember hundreds of baseball games, thousands of pitches, and the never-ending hope of a ball being hit my way that would magically, somehow, land in my glove, and we would win the game.  I remember Fenway and Yankee Stadium and Camden Yards.  I remember playing catch with my dad, and getting hit by a thrown bat in T-Ball.

The place I find myself tells this story: of drinking beer and telling lies.  I bring with me my own stories, also of drinking beer and telling lies.  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a ball land in the deep grass, and I wonder where the center fielder is.  I hear the crack of a bat on a ball, and I look toward the backstop, but there’s nobody standing at home plate, nobody on the pitcher’s mound, but it is passing strange that the backstop, the pitcher’s mound, and home plate are all there.

I think “ghost” is just our word for what happens when our memories and the memories of a place combine with such potency that we can call to mind fine details.  Of people, of place, of childhood, and old age.  Of joy and sorrow.  Perhaps most of all, of hope.

I think Dale was still trying to get rid of me, and maybe Jimmy too.  I doubt he’d have admitted it, even at the time, but I basically showed up at the house, met him and his son Mike and the hired hands, and then Mike took Jimmy and me over to the Hassing place with five-gallon buckets and instructions to take rocks out of the field and dump them in the ditch. I looked up the Hassing place on Google maps, and it looks about the same as it did then, except Dale and Mike must have put one of those new pivot irrigation systems in. Had wheel lines when I was working for them, and most of my job was keeping thirty or so wheel lines running for the summer.

Anyway, that’s all just a long lead up to say something that people don’t know about rocks: they grow. Rocks start deep down in the ground, and as time goes on they just work their way up to the top. I never would have believed it, except Mike and Pork (he was one of the hired hands) told me so, and then I saw it for myself. For the three summers I worked for Dale, whenever I saw a rock in that field I picked it up and carried it to the edge, and they never did stop coming up. I’m not exactly clear on the mechanics of it, and when Mike first told me I thought he was just trying to make me sound like a complainer, but rocks grow up like anything else- a plant or a weed or a thorn or a bad feeling. Maybe just a little slower.

Anyway, Mike showed up just before noon, and gave us a hard time for not bringing any water with us (as if we needed him to drive the point home), and took us back to the house. Jimmy and I sat out on the lawn and ate our bag lunches, and everyone else ate dinner in the house. I wasn’t clear on it all at that point, but later on I’d eat dinner with Dale and Mike and the hired hands, and Bernice’s cooking was a sight better than anything I could put in a brown bag. Plus there was more of it, and it was always exactly at noon. Bernice ran a tight ship.

After a few more days of picking rocks, I think Dale and Mike decided they couldn’t get rid of me, or Jimmy either for that matter, so the work started to get a little more interesting, even if it wasn’t any easier. While I was still picking rocks, I thought about the Parable of the Sower, how I always imagined the rocks in that story to be the things in life that you just couldn’t change, but I was wrong about that. Rocks are just weeds that grow a little slower. And like weeds, if they weren’t growing in the wrong place, I suppose I’d get along with them just fine.

Interesting thing about Ralph is that nobody knew where he came from.  One day, I guess he just showed up, with a foot all mangled, that someone said he got stuck in a coyote trap, and the story stuck.  Roger Falter was the one found him, I think.  He farmed Spring Creek Farm, and had a softness for animals.  Later on he took home a Cocker Spaniel that had been run over and nursed it back to health.  We always talked like his girls Angie and Lisa were the animal lovers, but I think it was Roger.

Anyway, when we were getting ready to move into the house on the farm (we didn’t farm it, we just rented the house), he told us there’s a dog that sometimes comes, and he’s got a hurt foot, but that he’d been feeding him.  Didn’t have a name as far as any of us knew.  Long story short, we wound up taking Ralph to see Carl Conroy, the vet, and Carl patched up his foot, and told us he could amputate, but didn’t really see the need, but that foot would never work again.  He was right, mostly.  Eventually, Ralph took to the name we called him, and took to us boys, too.  Never took to riding in a car or coming in a house, but that’s just as well for a farm dog.

There are stories about Ralph.  Stuff I remember, and stuff I imagine he did when he would be gone for a few days, but I figured I’d introduce him first, since some people don’t know him already.  If you read comments or hear tales that don’t jive with Ralph being the fastest, bravest, strongest dog in Klickitat County, must mean they’re talking about some other Ralph than the one I knew.

An initial useful abstraction beyond this concrete reality is that some of the switches are controlled indirectly.  They are electrical circuits that can only be opened or closed by the computer itself- they cannot be manipulated directly.  We call these circuits the computer’s memory.

A second useful abstraction of our switch-machine is that we can store the process for using it.  Humans have been doing this with machines for at least several hundred years, but beginning around sixty years ago, we began to use the machine itself to store this information.

If you are Ed, and you are reading this post: no it isn’t the post I promised (yet).  But it is a precursor, and you should read it before you read the subsequent one in the series.  Not that you have any choice, since I haven’t actually written the next post yet.

I had a nice conversation with a coworker yesterday, in which she asked me a question I hear a lot in library-land: “Is it an identifier for the abstract thing, or just for this manifestation of the thing?”  I reminded her that I don’t understand what “abstract thing” means in that context.

Contingent on the acceptance of “thing” as a valid concept, an identifier either identifies that thing or does not.  We can (and at libraries, often do) argue about whether a particular identifier goes with a particular thing, but this is a specific argument rather than an abstract one.  It is an argument about language design for some particular identifier.

If I substitute “word” for “identifier” it brings the problem with my way of thinking into stark relief.  A word either identifies a thing, or it does not.  If my coworker and I agree about the association between the word and the thing, there’s no problem.  But if we disagree, we are not using the same word (even though it is spelled the same and pronounced the same).  We are faced with a multiple dispatch scenario: if she understands what I mean by my word and I understand what she means by her word, we need some way to disambiguate which one we are using when we speak.  We sometimes do that by adding other words: pen-in-the-sense-I-mean-it versus pen-in-the-sense-she-means-it.  If we often need to perform this kind of disambiguation, we probably develop a lingo or some jargon that people outside our small subgroup might not immediately grok.

In this way, we are pragmatic language designers.  We are using words to communicate about things, and a word is an identifier for all the things it identifies.  This is a definition, in the words of my brother Daniel, that probably “dissolves into mush” if examined too closely.

But I’m convinced it’s right, despite its fragility.  I think it’s even more right in library-land.  When we use identifiers, we need clear criteria for what they do-and-do-not identify.  When we get close to the edge of the definition, we should discuss whether a particular thing is in or out rather than trying to speak in abstracts.  And when it becomes evident we need to disambiguate the-thing-that-I-mean from the-thing-that-you-mean, we should carefully consider adding some words (identifiers) to help us with that task.  If we do it repeatedly, we should design them into our language.

And every once in a great while, we should go over the whole language and see if it could benefit from a little refactoring.  See if there are similarities in the places where jargon and lingo are cropping up, see if we can’t make it into something that’s easy for us all to remember.

Over time, the hypothesis becomes habit.  Memory, like a stream, carves out a groove, and the hypothesis itself is no longer needed.  Habit alone suffices to Separate the Light From the Darkness, and to call the light “on” and the darkness “off.”  Habit outlives memory.  It persists even beyond life.  It is passed from person to person, from animal to animal, it is written on the world around us as paths and canyons and places, and even into our very genes.

Eventually, like Eve in the Garden, we ask why.  Memory persists to habit, now habit gives way to reason.  Patterns emerge.  We notice there is a pattern to the patterns.  These we call law.