The man at the counter at Panera’s wears the same badge that I see on all Panera’s clerks.  It announces his passion:  My children.  I ask how many he has, and his smile broadens.  “Two,” he tells me.  “A boy, five; a girl, two.”

A couple stands waiting for their food.  The woman moves a double-stroller back and forth with one foot, steadying herself with the other.   Her husband bends to put one tiny shoe back on a foot just visible around the stroller’s frame.  The babies sleep.

I take a seat near the window, settling my computer on its case in front of me.   On the other side of the glass, a big man passes holding a child’s hand in each of his.  Their round clear faces lift towards him; his eyes crinkle.  The little girl shakes a head of tight brown curls.  The boy stares at me with wide green eyes.  I smile and he laughs.  The man raises the girl to his shoulder as they disappear around the corner.

I gaze across the street to where I’ve parked the sweet little Prius that I’ve begun to drive, the car which once belonged to my favorite curmudgeon.  It occupies the precise space where I once parked a blue Buick Century, 1993, program model.  From its interior, I lifted my two-year old and without either of us noticing, he dropped his favorite bunny.  His cries that night kept both of us awake.  I bought a new bunny the next day; but he knew the difference.  Evening found me searching the street on my hands and knees, with my child in his car seat watching anxiously.

I found the old bunny caught on the edge of a storm sewer.

With the wand of a nail polish, I labeled the two stuffed animals with an “O” and an “N”, so that I would never make the mistake of tucking him into his toddler bed with the substitute.  Twenty-two years later, they both lie in the cedar chest, waiting for grandchildren, still marked, so that we will always be able to tell them apart.

A few tables away, a man in a green shirt with a mild blue tie reaches across his companion to lift a child into his lap.  “Let her sit with me,” I hear him say.  She settles, grasps a piece of apple in her chubby hand, and begins to eat as the suns sets over Brookside, this fine April evening.

Ah! They still make the Goodnight Moon bunny! I highly recommend them, for sleeping babies and happy little boys.