Not that I didn’t have complaints. I did. I had one big one. Names. How was I to remember all the names of all the mothers and babysitters and nannies and the oh-so-many children? It was impossible to differentiate between little Sam Blumenthal and even littler Sammy Plant and chubby Max Steiner and not so chubby Maxwell Silverstein and Ruben and Rhonda and Rebecca and Rory . . .

Right away I had to abandon any fantasies of posterity. This journal wasn’t for historians. It was only for Kate. So I developed a kind of shorthand, starting with a story about What’s-Her-Name, a mother whose name I’d forgotten yet again. She had accosted me on the playground about the boys not wearing warm enough clothes. As I tried to tell Kate about the incident, I was nearly derailed by my inability to conjure up the woman’s name. “You know the mother I mean,” I said in a pre-Alzheimer’s panic.

“No, I don’t,” Kate said. “There are so many mothers.”

“You’re telling me!” I couldn’t snatch the name from the place in my brain where names were stored. Then I remembered the conversation. Not what was said but what happened when What’s-Her-Name turned her head at a particular angle so that the sun, which was setting over the Manhattan skyline, backlit her face, revealing a rather unfortunate field of blond facial hair. When hit by that late-afternoon light in Pierrepont Playground, What’s-Her-Name became known as Mom with a Beard. Oh, sure, she had a name, but for the time being, Mom with a Beard would have to suffice. Even better, Kate knew exactly which mom I meant.

She also knew Milk Mom, who, rumor had it, still breast-fed her five-year-old boy, Jett. I had proof, having watched the boy named Jett pester his mother in the children’s section of Book Court. In fact, he bothered her so much that she led him between History and Biography, lifted up her shirt, exposed her tired and overused nipple (long like a straw), and let the boy take a few quick sucks.

There was Nazi Mom—incidentally, not a German mother but a stern Southern woman who said to her son in a thick Georgia drawl, “Honey, get your little butt over here before I spank it red.”

There were Flicka, National Velvet, and Misty of Chincoteague—a cluster of equine-featured women who seemed inseparable, always moving en masse with their kids in strollers, all with long manes of hair, wearing similar leather boots that clacked like hooves as they walked.

There were Eager-to-Please Mom, Best-Dressed Mom, Grateful Dead Mom, Cindy McCain Mom, Pippi Longstocking Mom, and Mom with a Man’s Voice.

Kate preferred the nice nicknames to the cruel ones. But sometimes I could get her to laugh out loud against her will. Dad Without a Clue, Mom with Beaver Teeth, and Momma-licious.

There was one nickname that I waited to reveal, holding out for a moment when Kate would need to laugh most.

The Weasel.