This is Zoë’s first extended trip. She’ll be introduced to snow and cold, to new beds, to new people. Fourteen days of unfamiliarity and family. What were we thinking?

When we pull up to Elise’s brother’s house in D.C., I sit in the car for a moment and think, Let’s keep driving. Then the front door of the house opens and the relatives are on us. Actually, they’re on Zoë, hugging and kissing and squeezing her. Zoë’s cousins are sick. They’re little faucets of phlegm. The boy cousin holds Zoë by the ears and sneezes. Then he coughs. Then someone tells him to cover his mouth and he does, and coughs and wipes his hand on her head. Zoë just sits and stares. In fact, she’s in love. I love her cousins, too, though I’d like them better now if they were wrapped in plastic.

Zoë gets loads of gifts. The house is wall-to-wall wrapping paper and family. The family cat has gone into hiding. I’m hiding behind a book. I look over at Zoë and see that her cousin is exploring her nose with his tongue. That can’t be good. We should go for a walk. So I wrap Zoë in a snowsuit that makes her look like a yeti and we head out into the searing cold and come back in ten minutes. She naps with her face buried in a blanket.

After two days we cram with Elise’s parents into a car and drive north. We stop in Brooklyn, and visit Elise’s grandmother. Zoë is fascinated by her great-grandmother’s squeaky voice and amazed when her great-grandmother grabs her ears and drags her in for a mouth-to-mouth kiss. After lunch, after another mouth-to-mouth kiss, we head into Manhattan.

We’re on our own, finally. We spend the day in the Village hopping from café to café, searching for hot chocolate and a comfortable place to breast-feed. The first café has weak hot chocolate and hard wooden seats. The next café has hot chocolate you can stand your spoon in but only stools to sit on. We settle at Doma, a café with cozy seats and wide windows looking out on Seventh Avenue. The woman next to us gushes over Zoë. Elise whispers, “She looks like Hilary Swank’s sister.” It is Hilary Swank. She’s playing chess with her husband, and Zoë spends the afternoon tossing her toy under their table and they keep picking it up and giving it back. We spend the afternoon reading books and ignoring the fact that we recognize Hilary Swank. The only problem with Doma is its coffee, a problem for a café, which combines being bad with being expensive.

We spend the next day in more cafés drinking more hot chocolate. Occasionally we bundle up for a walk in the cold. Once we see Sarah Jessica Parker walking down the other side of the street with her baby in her Baby Björn and she waves at us and we wave at her before diving back into a café.

Night comes. Zoë’s nose was already running but now it’s sprinting. She sleeps fitfully, can’t breathe. We hear her wheezing on the makeshift bed of cushions we’ve set up next to our bed in the apartment where we’re staying.

It sounds as if she’s trying to drag the last bits of a milk shake through a straw. By midnight her nose is completely clogged. We get out The Snot-Suction Thing.

The Snot-Suction Thing looks like an onion with a nose. Its light-blue color could be called Hospital Sick. It is medieval, emphasis on “eval.” But when we shove its nose up Zoë’s nose, and release the onion, The Snot-Suction Thing yanks out a satisfying sinewy strand of goo. Zoë feels better and sleeps, at least for the hour until we de-snot her again. During the night, “de-snot” becomes a verb.

In the morning we take five minutes cleaning up the wadded tissues covering the floor. Then we slog out into the cold to visit friends uptown. Zoë is exhausted. We’re not feeling too great either. We make a bed for Zoë on our friend’s bed and she sleeps, then we head downtown and set up another bed at another friend’s house and she sleeps again. As we talk with our friends in the living room we want nothing more than to lounge around and catch up on gossip. But we have become nervous on-call plumbers, one of our ears always tuned to the gurgling from the other room, which at some point will burst into a full-on pipe malfunction that requires our services, our little baby plunger.

We retreat to New Haven, wads of tissues crammed in every pocket. My parents live outside of town on a farm. We spend New Year’s Eve playing charades and pumping snot out of Zoë and wondering how many pints of snot can be in one baby’s head.

Elise has an interview the next day for her predoctoral internship. While she’s gone I wrap Zoë in a blanket and walk around the farm, kicking snow into the air and onto the backs of my parents’ dogs. It’s odd to show Zoë where I grew up and it moves me in a way I can’t quite describe—she’s in a place where she never existed, but was always part of the future story. She’s nowhere but everywhere.

We return home and Zoë naps, snoring like a phlegmatic old man. The Snot-Suction Thing is clogged. It needs a suction of its own. Should I use a turkey baster on it? A turkey baster on my daughter? This is getting ridiculous. In the morning we bundle Zoë and drive up another slushy highway to visit my brother. He and his wife own the general store in a small Massachusetts town. They live above the store and treat it like a pantry, walking down for pints of Ben & Jerry’s whenever they want. I like visiting. But this year I’m walking downstairs to see if the store kitchen has a turkey baster. Zoë may not need anything, though. She’s getting better. Nursing has literally nursed her back to health. Her face is an ugly record of the ten days she’s been through: raw and red and covered with dried mucus that sticks to her skin like yellow lichen on a slick rock. She sleeps through the night. In the morning her snots are hard and I can shovel them out of her nose with the tip of my pinky. I don’t bother with tissues anymore and am wiping the snots on my socks.

Our last stop is in Boston. When Elise goes to another internship interview I stay with Zoë at a friend’s apartment. Another futon, another temporary bed, another pile of dirty clothes and winter jackets. Being in yet another place that is not ours makes me wish that I could pack an entire warm room in my shoulder bag, with Zoë’s bed and clothes arranged neatly inside. It would fold easily in and out, and if I could pack my child in the bag, too, and ensure that she was never sick, travel would be so easy.

Zoë naps and I sit in the kitchen and nurse a coffee and listen to the radio. A man is talking about how his baby got ill and died in her crib so I go check on Zoë. She is flat on her back, immune to her surroundings, breathing easy after all she’s been through. I guess The Snot-Suction Thing did its job. It expired in the process, though. It’s broken, like us. I return to the kitchen and put my head on the table. Outside, through windows fogged with cold, I hear the crunch of boots in snow, the swish of car wheels through slush, the occasional clatter of falling icicles. Inside I hear the asthmatic rattle of the radiator. I close my eyes and picture the produce section of Berkeley Bowl. I picture the tomatoes. I picture tomatoes that are a certain red that is rich and bursting to the point of being so full of color that you can’t imagine a deeper color in the world, where if you put your hands on them you can sense the soil they came from and the sun they must have grown under. I picture the leeks and the radishes, dripping wet. Each color distinct and sharp. And as I daydream my bag full of produce and walk outside into the sun and look up at the hills and smell that bright clean smell that is distinctly California, I want to go home. I want to go home to our home three thousand miles away.

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The above appears in CRAWLING, copyright 2006 Pantheon Books.

2) I draw the female DKNY model, whose eyes are closer to her ears than to her nose.

3) Girl has me draw her lighting menorah with a blowtorch.

4) Customer, looking at my name on book jacket: "Is your name Ed?"

5) A woman says to her friend: "You have beautiful eyes. I would have noticed them last year but I was medicated."

7) Man walking past me, carrying shopping bags, yelling: "Lisa? Anne? Where are my fucking kids?!"

9) Story told to me by Kate’s worker, unprompted: "My cats are huge, big. They were sitting in our kitchen, in the sun, playing it cool, looking out the window. I was trying to take their picture but they were playing hard to get. My girl cat is in heat, though I don’t know if she and the male cat have consummated the relationship. Now, out in the back yard is this line and the neighbors attached their bird feeder to the middle of the line because of the squirrels, see, and the cats were watching. These are determined squirrels, and this one guy walks out on the line, he falls twice, but keeps going, and he’s out there on the line eating seed with one hand and holding on with the other and the blue jays on the fence are watching and the cats are watching and I would have taken pictures, but, I don’t have time for that."

11) Monica Lewinsky rushes past my table. She’s wearing a black hat, sunglasses, and carrying one of her bags. She’s on a cellphone. She stops, says, "Wait, I’m losing you…" turns, walks out of store. The weird thing is I’d seen her that morning at the café in the village where I was having breakfast. She was reading the Post, with its "BUSH WINS" headline.

12) Customer: "If you don’t work here, then what the hell do you do?"

13) I’ve been counting toupees and nose jobs. The count as of Thursday: toupees, three. Nose jobs, seventeen.

A second installment, fourteen notes, from my last week at Kate’s Paperie in Soho.

1) I sign a book for architect who designed the moldings for the garbage room of John Bon Jovi’s house in the Hamptons. She says, "He really put a lot of effort into the garbage room."

2) Kate’s saleswoman: "You’ve been shopping so hard!" Customer: "Yeah." Saleswoman: "And you’ve come so close to getting what you want." Customer: "Yeah." [pause] Saleswoman: "Men are hard to shop for. They¹re so simple."

3) A man has me draw him in black two-piece bikini on Venice Beach surrounded by weightlifters from Gold¹s Gym.

4) I sign a book for a man and his alter ego "Mr Vanity."

5) A pug – wearing a green wool sweater with orange and green polka dots and a gold collar covered in shiny silver bones ­ snorts on my leg. Even though the dog is named Henry I can’t sell the owner a book.

6) Girl gives me a porcelain duck.

7) Pregnant woman takes my chair.

Dental student draws me a sketch of a "pterygopalatine fossa," which I think is part of the mouth.

9) Girl has me draw a "smelly cabdriver" in her book.

10) Announcement on Kate¹s address system: "Attention customers. Jennifer, return to the ribbon department. Please. Return to the ribbon department."

11) A man with a mass of curly blond hair, a dark beard, and a strong handshake: "I bring people together. I’m a writer, a motivational speaker. This book is for Barbara. She works for me. She’s my organist. Music, draw music, yeah. I’m a minister. I try to inspire the meeting of business and the spirit. I get people together. Random House, Bertelsmann. I have people realize their inner-consciousness. Elijah. He was up on Mt. Carmel, wrestling the priests of Baal. Now he thought he was too big so God says, "I’m the big guy" and he takes him home. That’s where you get "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." But Elisha. He’s out in the field and he doesn¹t do much and that’s you. He calms things down. See? This is what I do."

12) By my estimate I have heard the music system play "Have yourself a merry little Christmas" fifty-six times. I’m starting to lose it.

13) My friend Josh comes and takes over for the last fifteen minutes one day. He’s better at being me than I am. Sometimes he¹s creative. Example: "Thanks, I appreciate your comments. Yes, I love making children’s books. I’m working on a book on ice cream [true] and after that one one on nuclear Trident attack submarines [not true]." The customer leaves. Also: "Thank you very much for asking. In my spare time I’ve been developing a line of boutique cheeses. Rochefort. Camembert"

We’re walking through the Village, it’s freezing, and we’re trying to find a place that has both good hot chocolate and is a good place to breast-feed. It’s not easy.

I have nothing to do with the breast-feeding (having no breasts), but I feel responsible for finding the location to do it in. The place should be warm, with comfortable chairs. Somewhere you can hang out awhile, watch people come and go, read. And it should serve thick hot chocolate (which Elise likes).

First we duck into the Grey Dog (which no longer allows dogs – maybe it should be called the Grey Lost Dog or something). The hot chocolate is fine, but the benches are hard. Elise has to throw her legs over the table, then over the table next to us, then on my lap. The baby is agitated. We’re agitated. It’s loud, and everybody’s checking everybody else out. We head back into the cold.

We walk north and on 8th Avenue find Chocolate Bar. It has great hot chocolate; the brownies are unreal. But there’s no place to sit (unless Elise wanted to breast-feed on a stool). Out into the cold.

Doubling back, we stop at Doma on Perry Street. A corner café with wide windows, comfortable seats, a soft atmosphere. But their hot chocolate sucks. We ask for another (feeling bad about it). It still sucks. So we deal. One of us nurses. Two of us sit and read. We stay a few hours. The baby plays with her toys, tossing her rattle at the couple next to us trying to play chess. All is good, almost.

The next day we hit on the perfect solution. After buying a hot chocolate at Chocolate Bar, we walk over to Doma, get a coffee, then nurse and read and throw toys for the afternoon.

Now we’re back home, in California. We’re sitting outside at a café (I’m a bit chilly in my t-shirt, but not it’s not bad). The moon just started rising over the Berkeley hills. I’m writing this. Elise is across from me, reading her book. She’s drinking hot chocolate, the baby’s drinking warm milk.

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