the last book I ever read (Blue Nights)

from Blue Nights by Joan Didion:

Before she was born we had been planning a trip to Saigon.

We had assignments from magazines, we had credentials, we had everything we needed.

Including, suddenly, a baby.

That year, 1966, during which the American military presence in Vietnam would reach four hundred thousand and American B-52s had begun bombing the North, was not widely considered an ideal year to take an infant to Southeast Asia, yet it never occurred to me to abandon or even adjust the plan. I even went so far as to shop for what I imagined we would need: Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif.

In the end this trip to Saigon did not take place, although its cancellation was by no means based on what might have seemed the obvious reason--we canceled, it turned out, because John had to finish the book he had contracted to write about César Chavéz and his National Farm Workers Association and the DiGiorgio grape strike in Delano--and I mention Saigon at all only by way of suggesting the extent of my misconceptions about what having a child, let alone adopting one, might actually entail.