Familyhood by Paul Reiser Page B

we’re done peeing. It makes no sense, it’s counterproductive, yet we continue to do it.
    As I say, I’m simple. My wife, on the other hand, is a much deeper person. She demands clarity.
    A few months ago, we were enjoying a lovely walk along a lovely beach on a lovely day, when we came upon a dead goat. Not a whale, mind you, or a baby seal—something you could reasonably expect to see washed ashore. A goat. Dead. On the sand.
    â€œOh my God!” my wife says, grabbing my arm, pulling me with her as she inched closer to investigate. “Why is there a goat on a beach?!” She was transfixed by this anomaly.
    â€œI don’t know,” I shrugged. “Maybe it washed up.”
    â€œFrom where?”
    â€œA boat? Maybe it fell off a boat?”
    â€œIn Malibu ? You see any boats going by with goats on them?”
    I was defending a thesis I not only just made up, but for which I had no conviction whatsoever.
    â€œOkay, well, maybe he got separated from a herd of goats or from his goat-herder and wandered off the road,” I offered.
    â€œFrom where? There are no other goats around here.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, now pulling possible scenarios out of thin air. “How about this: some people, from a culture perhaps more goat-centric than our own, were planning to barbecue it, and then . . . got distracted and went back to the car. And by the time they realized they forgot the goat, it was too late. So they left him here.”
    â€œNo,” my CSI-expert wife concluded. “Because there’s no fire pit, and no evidence of human activity.”
    â€œHmm,” I concede, having run out of possibilities. “Weird. C’mon—let’s keep walking.”
    So we walk, but my wife is now very disturbed. Not by the goat, mind you. By me .
    â€œHow does that not bother you?” she asks, in a joltingly accusatory tone. That I didn’t share the intensity of her perturbed-ness was more irksome to her than the perturbing offense itself. “Don’t you find it weird that a goat is laying there, in a place where goats should not be?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBut it doesn’t bother you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBut . . . Why?!”
    I shrugged. “I just accept it.”
    I DIDN’T SAY IT to be flip, or dismissive. I meant it. There is great liberation in being a simpleton. I was genuinely okay with a dead goat on a beach being “just one of those things” that will likely never be explained to our satisfaction. So why not embrace it as a “miracle” and move on? Miracles don’t always have to be big and flashy, you know.
    I once had a half-eaten cookie appear on my desk from nowhere that had no conceivable explanation. I hadn’t brought that cookie into the house. I lived alone at the time and no one had a key, so nobody else could have put it there. (The idea that a burglar still struggling with the concept of burgling might have broken in and brought it to me as a housewarming gift did cross my mind, but was ultimately rejected.)
    And it was a very specific cookie too. Not readily available, or even store-bought. It was a homemade, dry, chalky mandel-bread kind of cookie that is edible only if you dip it in really strong coffee for a really long time. Like my grandmother used to do. In fact, this was the very kind of cookie my grandmother used to make. I hadn’t had one since she passed away some twenty years earlier, but I was certain this was a grandmother cookie. Then, with a chilling shiver, it hit me: Maybe this was from her . Maybe my grandmother “visited” from . . . wherever grandmothers go when they die, and left me a cookie. With a bite taken out of it. (That’s how sweet she is; she even tasted it to make sure it was good.) Yes! I was certain. There was no other explanation. (How she found my apartment, or even knew I had moved to L.A., I hadn’t figured out yet. But,