She touched my face with her hand and said, ‘Ragaboon.’ I thought about that. : Rhythms and Battles

I have a friend named Nicole who is 5 months old, and sometimes we talk about things.

Well, actually, I do most of the talking because, at 5 months, you don’t have a terrific vocabulary.

Nicole’s favorite word, for instance, is “ragaboon,” and while it is a fine word, possibly even the best word ever spoken, it is less than precise in its imagery.

I mention it, I suppose, not because of ragaboon itself but because of the way Nicole says it, touching my face, studying me with large hazel eyes, smiling suddenly with a glow that lights my life.

Ragaboon.

She said it to me the other day in the Woodland Hills Hamburger Hamlet, which is where we dine occasionally.

The Hamlet is a kind of hangout for babies, and I like that. There are almost always infants around during the day and no one seems to mind when one of them begins to yowl.

Also, they make a very nice martini at the Hamlet. That is not their prime purpose, I suppose, else they would be known as the Martini Hamlet and not the Hamburger Hamlet.

However, I don’t eat hamburgers because I am on a Pritikin diet and eat only eggplant cooked in rainwater. But I figure any place that can be kind to babies and still make a decent martini deserves mention here.

Martinis, by the way, are also not on the Pritikin diet, but I’m certain they will be someday as science defines their vast curative powers.

Nicole was crying when we sat down for lunch. Tears gleamed like diamonds on cheeks as soft as a summer whisper.

I hugged her and shook her rattle, which is a rhythm she usually responds to, but not this time. It’s a red rattle with a smiling face.

I even tried baby talk, but I have never been too good at baby talk. I am a little better at it halfway through my first martini, but Nicole needed it right away.

In a matter of minutes, every baby in the restaurant was crying, because that’s what babies do in a crowd. They have a kind of instinctive empathy with others of their kind, which is perhaps something we might think about.

I increased my efforts to calm Nicole, without much success. After several awkward attempts at goo and gah and da-da-boo-boo, I said, “What’s the problem?”

She stopped crying suddenly and touched my face with her hand and said, “Ragaboon.”

I thought about that.

What Nicole was telling me was that she was feeling sad because the year was ending and she hadn’t accomplished everything she had intended.

I kissed her ear, which causes her to smile, and said, “You’re only 5 months old, you can’t expect too much from yourself.”

“Ragaboon.”

“I too have much I did not accomplish in 1986, but I did the best I could, and so did you. Be at peace with that, little one.”

This caused me to think about how much time I had spent during the year doing nothing.

I am one of the world’s two or three great amblers, drifting through life with a degree of aimlessness that is difficult to perceive.

I begin each day with great intentions, to go from here to there, to interview smartly, to write a column of wit and substance and then to go home and fix the broken kitchen drawer and take out the garbage and chat with my wife and still have an hour or so left to work on a movie.

But it’s a fantasy world I create.

Because what really happens is that I begin to drift off my charted course and pretty soon I am on a dirt road somewhere, looking for a tree around the corner, or driving down a street I’ve never seen or staring at people from a coffee shop window.

Mostly it’s the tree around the corner I seek, because I’m a tree freak and I could look at them forever, standing there like a mindless fool staring at the perfect symmetry of their branches and measuring the rhythm of the wind that moves them.

But then I wake up suddenly and say, Damn you, Martinez, you’ve done it again, you’ve daydreamed away another day and you’ve still got a column to write and not an idea in your head and now what, muchacho?

Good question.

I race to the office and work like a man on fire and vow never to do that again, but I will, no matter what I vow.

And then I go home, weary from the explosion of energy, and the kitchen drawer doesn’t get fixed and the garbage doesn’t get taken out and my wife, that poor woman, might as well be married to an aardvark. The movie script? Forget that too.

“The problem,” I said to Nicole, “is that I get sidetracked. I start out striding and then forget about halfway through where I was going in the first place, so I amble off down a path and listen to the crickets.”

“Ragaboon.”

“I’m with you, kid. Next year, I knock their socks off. Next year, I go for the golden kazoo. Next year I fix the kitchen drawer.”

She touched my face and I kissed her ear and we sat there for a very long time, Nicole with her rattle and me with my martini, wondering at the rhythms of the world and the tree around the corner.