And that I could not fix it, and I could not help with the column, because she was the one who was good at that and I was the one who drove.

So I picked up a guitar I could barely play and I made up four lines to be annoying until she laughed, and she did laugh, eventually, and then she went back to the column, and we made it through that year.

Beto thought about this for about a mile.

Then he said, “So it’s a mom song.”

And I said, “Yeah.

It’s a mom song.”

He sings it constantly.

In the truck, in the shower, walking to the car, under his breath during homework.

He has never once, to my knowledge, thought of it as a sad thing, and he never should, because it is not one.

I walked past my son on a sidewalk twice that I can prove and probably nine or ten times in all, and I did not look up, and a boy sang four lines I wrote for his mother at a card table in 2011 to a street that had no idea.