I’m so fascinated by my new niece. I’ve visited her a couple of times so far, and I’ve sat there and held this new, warm baby in my arms and just stared at her. It’s weird to think that she’s a real human being. She will lie there completely still with her eyes closed, and then her mouth will move around like she’s making facial expressions and her eyelids will flutter and she’ll make a soft gurgling noise and I’ll think, This creature looks so lifelike! The special effects guys did an amazing job! It’s weird to think that my little brother helped create this tiny human being, and that he and his wife are now responsible for taking care of her and raising her and instilling her with values. My little brother made this.

And everything that she experiences is new to her. Two days ago she just saw people for the first time. She breathed air for the first time. Today, when she goes home from the hospital, she will go outside for the very, very first time.

She does not know what it means to read or to talk. She has never heard of numbers, or shapes, or history, or science, or the United States of America, or George Washington, or other planets, or dogs, or Coca-Cola. She has never heard of a McDonald’s hamburger. She is a blank slate. She knows less about the world than human beings who existed 20,000 years ago, who thought that the sun was a god that traveled through the sky and that other gods made the wind and rain. If she were somehow sent back in time to be raised by them, she would learn their ideas. Instead she will grow up in the 21st century and learn our ideas.

On Thursday, when she was born, I suddenly felt like I was living in the past. I was walking around Manhattan on a drizzly evening and I thought, All of this is happening in the past. I’m living in a flashback of a story I’m telling to my niece about the day she was born. You have no memories of the beginnings of your own life; it feels half-formed, murky, irretrievable. All you know about the day you were born and the days and weeks surrounding it is what older relatives have told you. You hear stories over and over, and even though we live in a continual present and each moment happens only once before disappearing, the events become stamped with permanence. Walking through Manhattan on Thursday night I felt like I was trapped in the yellowed pages of an old book or inside an old sepia photograph that someone else was looking at years from now. It’s hard to explain.

And I have been seeing myself through her eyes. My god, how amazingly old will I seem to her? I had a childhood, and I went through elementary school, middle school and high school, and then college and law school and several years of adulthood, and I’ve done so much and seen so much. Wow, I am an old hand at this human being business! I am one of those mysterious adults! And forget about me and her parents; what will she think of my parents? Her grandparents?

We all take on new roles. There is a silent *click* as this new baby is born and we all shift back a step in the family tree.

The camera has moved.