The open ward of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit -- PICU to those in the know -- was unevenly lit, the darkness broken by a bright fluorescence in the back left corner of the room. Aidan was there, settled in a crib with what seemed like 1,000 machines around him; an array of wires and tubes curled up from his face and arms and legs.

The doctors guessed that seizures were firing through his brain, disrupting the message to his lungs to breathe. It was unclear what this meant, whether it was a transitory aberration or a lifelong condition, whether it was just seizures or something else. They told us to sleep; we would need our rest for what might be a long and trying stay. They were right, of course, but sleep was hard to find that night and rest a fleeting luxury ever since.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

In the few years before Aidan was born, I was just beginning to feel like I had gained some control over my circumstances. I had recently changed jobs and had done so on my own terms, moving to a position and place that I preferred. It was a regular faculty post at an elite New England college, the kind of situation I had dreamed of but never really believed I could secure.

After the move, Maureen and I, married now for 10 years, bought our first house. The weight of the mortgage compressed the possibilities of nonconformity, focusing my attention on steady income and steady prospects. I was, in the flash of a banker's eye, a responsible property owner. To top it off, we got our first dog, a reliable Labrador that came when I whistled and stood ready to bring all scurrilous squirrels to the ground.

This was a new and more together me. For years, from adolescence until about 30, I had been skeptical of my ability to shape my own fate. An old hippie suspicion of orderly arrangements suffused my consciousness: Nobody could really control the flux of existence, could he? I had always scoffed at the hyperorganized types who seemed to have every detail of their world neatly fit into a conventional mold, complete with matching accessories. The apparent coherence seemed to me a thin and fragile shell waiting to be shattered by chance.

For the longest time, because of my aversion to planning, I did not know what to do with my life. As I finished high school, my peers at a suburban New York high school poured their energy into doing the right extracurricular activities, taking the hardest tests and writing the best essays to impress Ivy League admissions officers. I hung out with ne'er-do-well friends and wound up at the modest state school in the next town.

When college came to a close, I had no career strategy, no clear plan for the future. Various jobs had taught me the depressing reality of work, and I knew that I did not want someone else owning my time. This ruled out most employment options. So I backed into graduate school to study Chinese politics and language, subjects that had captured my imagination. The language, in particular, was drawing me into a different culture, a different world, something quite unlike the "real world" I was avoiding in school.

Though completely uninformed, I stumbled into a good university, a place that would give me a chance of getting a teaching job when the time came. And when the time did come, I was lucky again: After applying for 30 positions, I got one interview and, miraculously, was offered a job I had to take, whether I wanted it or not.

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