“Do you want to push her in the stroller?” my wife asked.

Unhesitatingly, I put down John Irving’s novel, Last Night in Twisted River, that I was reading on the rear patio and hopped up, smiling.

CJ placed Lennon in her new black stroller. Lennon squirmed and cooed, and sucked on her blue pacifier.

It is moments like this when I hear Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” lyrics in my mind’s ear:

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day
‘Til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you

If I could make days last forever
If words could make wishes come true
I’d save every day like a treasure and then
Again, I would spend them with you

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them
I’ve looked around enough to know
That you’re the one I want to go
Through time with

If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never come true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how they were answered by you

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them
I’ve looked around enough to know
That you’re the one I want to go
Through time with

The sun was going down through the pines. Some of the neighborhood dogs barked in the distance at deer down in the branch behind the houses.

I pushed the stroller, Lennon asleep and rocking, as we walked the nighborhood streets. Three kids at the end of the cul-de-sac were playing basketball. A girl skated down the street in what appeared to be new rollerblades. They were a bright pink, matching the ribbons she had in her hair.

I could hear traffic in the distance, the sounds of wheels rolling down I-20. CJ and I found ourselves wordlessly joyful. We just looked at Lennon Ray in her red onesie as she lay in her black stroller, as she nodded to sleep and then would briefly open her eyes as she felt the macadam beneath her stroller’s wheels.

We strolled and strolled. When we came back to our daugher and son-in-law’s home, CJ began cooking fajitas for the adults.

Taylor Ray put Lennon in a bouncing seat on the counter as CJ prepared supper, and I chatted with our son-in-law and played with his dogs.

I sat down again in the wicker chair on the back patio and picked up the Irving novel again, but then put it back down in order to write this. I know what Croce meant in his beautiful song. If I, too, could save time in a bottle, this would be one of those times. Maybe this little writing will preserve it in a small way. Merry Christmas, everyone.