Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head…
Yesterday I sat at my desk chin deep in accounting work reconciling company bank accounts, searching for pennies while entering columns of numbers on a 10-key at a rapid staccato that kept time with U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album playing on my computer. The adding machine was my personal metronome. Numbers and music intertwined in my head riding guitar riffs and the constant sound of the adding machine printing numbers on a never-ending tape. I was looking for $1.84. Somewhere within these pages of columns of numbers I had lost $1.84. I had to re-add every column looking for the logical hiding places. Did I miss add a number, or miss enter a number on the adding machine or had I committed the non pardonable sin of transposition. I continued wading through numbers as adding machine tape puddled around my feet under the desk. And then something happened during my search for $1.84; my eyes and hand still saw and entered numbers, my ears heard and processed music, but my mind left and traveled down roads paved in memories. I didn’t feel well. I hadn’t felt well all day. And at that moment I was desperately reminded of what its like to be a woman. There was my life right in front of me… the organized order of neatly arranged columns, my hearts emotional roller coaster ride on melodic anthem-like music, the knowledge of something missing and my search for the little details. And I was stuck thinking “where had I made a transposition?” If I could just find that one detail, that one mistake, that one moment… I could fix things and balance my life. If only it were that simple to sort out. If only I could find the Miracle Drug that Bono sang about. “If only”, I thought as I continued adding numbers into a machine that would calculate the sum of things.

Later in the afternoon I left the pages of columns on my desk and went to Mercy Southwest Hospital with my boss and co-workers to see my Administrative Assistant’s new baby. There in a room full of flowers with HGTV playing on the TV, I looked into the face of an angel. She was tiny with the most beautiful olive skin, perfect lips and a head full of jet-black hair. Gulianna Renea, the prettiest purest thing my jaded eyes had seen in a long long time. I love babies, but I especially love tiny newborn babies. As I held Gulianna in my arms and looked into her perfect beautiful face I heard Bono singing to a sold out Anaheim Pond stadium “Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head”, and then I sighed, all was right with the world again...

I was entranced by her innocence. She was untouched, unspoiled, not jaded, she had her whole life ahead of her and I wondered what Gulianna would become. Would she like herself when she was 36? Would she look back at her childhood pictures someday and want to apologize to that child for her life not turning out how she had dreamed it would? Just as the character of the Nick Hornby book High Fidelity I had finished reading on my lunch hour had done while trying to sort out his life. I kissed Gulianna on the forehead and wished her happiness and dreams, freedom and passions and then I passed her to one of my co-workers to hold while I congratulated my Administrative Assistant on the birth of her Miracle Drug angel.  posted by Matildakay at 9:25 PM