His right leg bounces when he is nervous and stops the second he is not, and it is the single most reliable instrument I have ever had access to.

He is good at math and thinks he is bad at it, because he is slow and careful and there is a boy in his class who is fast.

He sings constantly.

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

Not performing.

The way some people hum.

In the March of the first year he had a fever of a hundred and three on a Saturday and I sat in an urgent care waiting room for two hours and forty minutes with him asleep against my arm, and it was an ear infection, and he was fine by Tuesday.

Nothing happened.

That is why I am putting it in.

It was two hours and forty minutes of magazines and a plastic chair and a slightly heavy seven-year-old, and it was the first ordinary bad thing I had ever been present for, and I would not trade it for the day at the lab.