Walking with the puma, especially when she was very young, I found that the young black men who use the drum space in my building would bless me and greet the baby, and the men working at the Pakistani restaurant around the corner would talk to the baby and talk to me, and the Yemeni man at the deli would never fail to ask after the baby, and in the immigration line when I landed in India, a man escorted me and the baby to the diplomats line, and said, This is how we treat a mother in India, and at a foreign train station an Ethiopian man walked me and the baby five minutes out of his way to the correct platform when I asked for directions, and on the subway, the construction workers whose shoulders the baby would reach out and pat, asking for their attention, would also play with the baby, and pretty much all women, everywhere, would smile at the baby. There was only one group, very demographable, to whom the baby — and myself with the baby — was suddenly invisible, and that was the group with which I am particularly comfortable, the youngish, white, well-employed, culturally literate male. There’s nothing inherently commendable, or deplorable, in liking, or not liking, babies, or women with babies: it is what it is. And I encountered exceptions, in all categories. But when, without a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for years, and then, with a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for months and months, you feel you have slip-slided into another strata or you feel you have gone pre-Cambrian, or, perhaps more accurately, that you are contributing, somehow, to the next geological stratum (or both at once) and you begin to wonder what formed each geological layer, and what really was the geological layer you were in before, and what is the geological layer you are in now, and how was it that each layer seemed, individually, when you were in it, to be everything. Did a meteor crash, or the climate abruptly change, or a series of volcanoes erupt? I decide the baby is like a minor climate catastrophe, or, through dumb luck, redemption, and all the people who might hold out the smallest hope that a shift could result in their life on the earth being ever so slightly better feel one way about the royal catastrophe/redemption of infants, while another group that has, more or less, nowhere to go but down, on however subconscious a level, and even however much they might consciously want to be shifted down, also don’t want to be shifted down, which is why their encounter, therefore, with the royalty of infants unavoidably bears an unwelcome message of the end of their own reign, meager or real as it may be, and so they simply avoid noticing the possibility.