Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.