I had lunch last week with a woman who is two months away from motherhood and it was sweet to watch her caressing the basketball under her blouse, patting it, lifting it slightly, mindful of this modest freight that will, she knows, change her life, though thankfully she can’t know how much. She and her man were married on my terrace in New York five years ago and when my wife and I sit out there, we sometimes think of them. A Korean man, a Portuguese woman, who met in Paris, married by our friend Judge Ira Globerman who grew up Jewish in an Italian neighbourhood in Brooklyn, so there was some diversity going on. He presided as a favour since they’d arrived from France and needed to be a legal couple before the visa ran out. They lived in Brooklyn and then wended up to a town in Connecticut. Her parents will come from Portugal for the birth.

It’s easy for me to romanticize pregnancy since I’ve never gone through it personally except from the inside when I was an embryo. I never walked around with a tenant inside me. So, I look at her and am awestruck to think that we all come into the world exactly this way, our thoughtful mother patting her abdomen as she eats like a farmhand. Family is family: when my grandma lay dying in 1964, she was faithfully tended by her daughters, not hospital staff. I came down the chute in 1942 in a big house on Ferry Street in Anoka, Minnesota, not long before my dad went into the Army. As a toddler, I was proud of him in his uniform, and I guarded his chair at the dinner table and wouldn’t let anyone sit in it. “Daddy’s chair,” I said.