It’s Easter weekend, according to the plastic eggs dangling from tree branches in our neighbor’s yard, and I am once again experiencing the odd non-sensation of my own long-lapsed Catholicism. I would like to say it’s something I still struggle with — indeed, struggling with things seemed to be the ur-lesson of most of the scriptural teachings to which I was exposed — but the truth is that I left the church as soon as I was doctrinally allowed to, following my Confirmation, and never looked back. Always suspicious of the soap-smelling classrooms of my Sunday school and grumblingly resistant to any commitment of a weekend morning (I remember complaining to my parents that I only got two mornings a week to sleep in, which made them laugh, and not in a nice way), I hit my breaking point when one of our teachers gently explained to me that no animals, including cats, could make it to the afterlife, since they had no souls. Maybe true and maybe not, but in any case, not a faith that fits or suits me.

Instead, I’ve spent most of my life engaging in the secular ritual of weekends, playing out my small personal drama fifty-two times a year, kicking off with the joyous arrival of Friday, bookended by the grim letdown of Sunday. At heart I will always be wired for weekends and summer vacations, patterns of leisure stamped into me by the school calendar, continued now in my career as a college professor. In the microcosm of the weekend, on Fridays I am young and just getting out of school; on Sundays, old, an adult preparing for the work of the coming week. Death and resurrection, not of the body but of the spirit.

Fridays lately have the added significance of being “family days,” devoted to Zach and Katie. You’d think that my role as a husband and father would mark the apogee of grown-up-ness, but in practice these days are about much more straightforward pleasures: putting aside schoolwork to experience the easy companionship of my wife’s love, the eternal and unflawed presentness of Z’s babyhood. Fridays remind me what my mind and heart used to be like before they got all kinked up and complicated, and I am as grateful for their simplicity as I am awed by their profundity.

Watching Z pull himself eagerly along a shelf of books at our local library — thin tomes, the spine of each marked by a circular sticker whose color indicated the intended reading level — I allowed myself to hope that he will grow up bookish like me, drawn to the quiet hours one finds between a story’s pages, or the murmur of a parent’s voice reading aloud before bed. My mother read to me sometimes, but more consistently it was my oldest brother Paul, himself a highly intellectual, tense, and troubled young man with whom I got along not at all by day, but by night became my guide through lands of fantasy: The Hobbit, the Narnia books, A Wrinkle in Time and its remarkable, disquieting sequels. I would love to read these to Z, and more: Heinlein’s young adult novels, and Harry Potter, and E. Nesbit. But for now, I just whisper in the darkness of the nursery: shh shh shh, and it’s all right: waiting for the grape-flavored infant Advil to kick in and muffle his teething pain, our story a more simple and shared one of comfort in the night.

Sharing one of my exceedingly rare cigarettes with a friend at this weekend’s SCMS conference in Boston, I joked about writing an avant-garde academic text in the form of a giant palindrome: it would be a perfectly cogent argument up to the halfway point, then reverse itself and proceed backwards, until, on the last page, it ended on the same word with which it had started.

Now that my wife, son, and I are back in our house, I see that the act of travel, of being away and coming back, is a lot like that giant palindrome. All of the preparations we so carefully make before depature — packing the suitcase, loading the dishwasher, turning off the lights — reverse themselves on our arrival home, and the first small acts with which I began (always, for some reason, the zipping-up of toothbrush and razor in my toiletries bag) are the last to be performed at the other end of the experience, shuffling disordered cards back into the familiar and dog-eared deck of our everyday life. For me, there is nothing quite like the pleasure and relief of settling back in at home.

All of this has an added resonance and poignancy, because today marks one year since another act of coming home. On March 25, 2011, my wife and I lost a pregnancy at 23 weeks, after medical scans that showed profound defects in the fetus and left us with little hope for a healthy birth or normal life for the child if it survived. “Fetus,” “child,” “it”; all inadequate but protectively distancing approximations for the boy we named Arlo, delivered as the sun rose outside the windows of our room at the hospital. That room continued to brighten and warm thoughout the morning as we sat with our son, saying hello and goodbye to this tiny pound-and-a-quarter person whose motionless face, after all our weeks of fear and dread, turned out to be not so scary after all: a gentle little visage, like a thoughtful gnome’s, with eyes that never opened.

There was a certain undeniable grace to that morning, a gift of release, but by nightfall much of the spell had worn off, and by the time we got home, the first real waves of pain had started to throb through the cushion of our shock. K’s mother was here to take care of us, and our dog (now deceased) here to need us in turn, and there was mail on the kitchen table waiting to be sorted, shows on the DVR to watch.

I don’t really remember how we got through the next several weeks (though I did have a moment of startled realization not too many mornings later, sitting at the kitchen table with my wife and mother in law, that the world had not in fact ended). We did the things we normally do: cooked meals, went for walks, paid bills. Early in April some robins built a nest outside our kitchen window and filled it with perfect blue eggs from which emerged a gaggle of adorably wrinkled and disgusting beasts that soon enough turned cute, sprouted feathers, opened their eyes, and flew away. In June we submitted our adoption profile. Six weeks later, we received a call from our agency. Two days after that, we found ourselves in another hospital room, meeting the newborn baby who would become our son.

We got home after that experience, too, and I guess the lesson here is that if luck is with you, you get to come home, put the pieces of your life back together, and move on. Sometimes leaving the safety zone is voluntary and sometimes it’s forced upon you, but either way it’s usually something you have to do in order to keep on growing.

Now that spring is here, robins are starting to show up in the trees and on our lawn. Irrational as it is, I hold out hope that one or more of them are the babies we watched through our kitchen window, grown up now and coming home themselves. The nest is still there, waiting for them to settle in and unpack their suitcases.

Z’s cough turns out to be just that — a cough — but while daylight, a trip to the pediatrician, and the purchase of a cool-mist humidifier have brought calm to our roiling first-time-parent worries, the strange noise that started it all continues to echo in my mental hearing: in the amber nightlit nursery, as my hands moved as deftly as a surgeon’s, tucking Z into a new diaper like a pickpocket in reverse, he emitted a rising squawk that registered as a more primal distress — not just discomfort but existential dread.

Of course I’m reading too much into it. (That seems to be what first-time parenting is all about.) Z’s weird noise, I see now, reactivated some part of my brain that’s been dormant for decades, a nerve cable buried deep in my cerebellum stretching back to my own childhood, when I lay awake many nights gripped in fears that were the residue of too much scary TV, too many horror movies, and one too many skims through the best — which is to say, the most extreme and upsetting — parts of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.

These materials were my prepubescent pornography, an irresistible lure of the forbidden and transgressive that was fun enough to consume by day, but with sundown turned toxic, a kind of slow acid bath for my imagination. Probably because I was raised as a Catholic, it was the devil stories that got to me the worst: The Omen, The Devil’s Rain, Beyond the Door. I envisioned myself being possessed by a demon, and would play out in my head dialogues between God and Satan about whether my nine-year-old soul was worth the trouble of fighting over.

These fears may be in Z’s future, though I expect my wife and I will be more careful about leaving copies of The Exorcist lying around. (The youngest of five, I inherited all manner of cultural detritus, including the Batman comics with which I learned to read.) For now, I’m relieved to know the tickle is in his throat, and not in his mind.

Z wakes with a strange cry, followed by a new cough. More as the situation develops.

1. I have a cold.

2. I want to watch Bob’s Burgers instead.

3. I have a seven-month-old son. Zach came into our lives last July, putting an end to my theatrical moviegoing for a long time. The last film I saw, the day before we got the call about the adoption, was Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, and in retrospect I’m glad it was this and not something good that marked the close of this particular chapter in my life — like getting food poisoning the day before going on a diet. Since then, my media tastes have confined themselves to brief engagements of casual gaming on the iPad and half-hour television series like Arrested Development. I simply haven’t seen most of the nominated films, and after sitting through Billy Crystal’s opening monologue/medley and missing most of the jokes, I realized what a festival of intertextuality the Oscars are. When I’m properly prepared for it, as in most years past, the ceremony is a fusillade of allusions and inside jokes (though the oxymoronic nature of an “inside joke” told to a mass audience is not lost on me). This year, though, the horizon of my attention has contracted, the protocols of Hollywood pageantry becoming nearly illegible, a broadcast from an alien world. Maybe next year.