Home for Christmas: the birth of a family.

It's my turn to write a "Notebook." I don't want to; too much is happening in my life and what's happening is too utterly primal, many-sided, unplumbable. For the very same reasons, I do want to write the column. The way out of this impasse, I hope, is to borrow from two light-hearted communications distributed by my wife, Mig Boyle, and me, having to do with the Big Happenings, and then to touch ever so lightly on matters of moment, depth, and meaning. For the most part, you the reader will have to read between the lines to penetrate the persiflage.

The first of our two messages was a memorandum addressed to the "Liturgy and Liquefaction Coalition," my nickname for a group that has been gathering in its members' homes once a month or so for lo, these several decades, to worship, talk, dine, and hoist a few. The memo asked the other members to accept a new body into the group - even though "she has not yet been shriven" and "does not yet have a full name."

This was a way of leading into an improbable announcement: Mig and I were (gulp! wow!) adopting a baby girl. Pause for exultation.

At that point we hadn't even seen our soon-to-be daughter, but we could give some standard data: Born four-and-a-half weeks early; 5.03 pounds; 18 3/4 inches; doing well. Birth mother twenty-two, Irish-Catholic background, already a mother but unable to provide for a second child. So much for origins. About the baby's future, we predicted that, having already worked a couple of miracles (on us, in absentia), she will be "the first pope to be canonized in her own lifetime, along with her husband."

One vexing issue was resolved when the adoption agency told us (at the last possible moment) that we couldn't walk away with our daughter - she might not even be our daughter - unless and until we gave her a name. Without that pressure, she might have reached college age sort of anonymously. Mig said we had to see her first. When the baby was placed in Mig's arms we looked at her, wept a bit, then at each other and agreed that she wasn't Elizabeth or Maureen or Ermegilda. It was perfectly obvious that she was "Sarah."

Or, in full, "Sarah Boyle Hoyt," a name first put to formal use at the heading of a Fed X message accepting another new arrival, one Andrew Michael Boyle, into her cousinship. Andrew is the newly minted son of Susan and Michael Boyle; he entered history the day after Sarah had enjoyed a baby shower in her honor attended by numerous Boyles and Hoyts. With the benefit of this experience, and with the help of several amanuenses, Sarah was able to inform Andrew of things to come: "I've had occasion to observe at VERY close range that you have a wonderful wide family who will google and coo at you and hand you around from lap to lap and tickle your toes and pat your head and feed your face and wipe your bottom and make funny faces till you'll wish you were back in the womb."

So much for cuteness and kitsch. I've just interrupted this writing to go and hold Sarah. She was placid and solemn. I was able' with effort, to outstare her; but she warmed me more than I warmed her. She doesn't yet know she has cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and - most significantly (to me) - a set of siblings: my six children by a previous marriage, some of whom have offspring of their own who are, astonishingly, Sarah's nephews and nieces. Think about it, as did my youngest grandchild, Timmy, four years old; on first meeting Sarah he said, "She's my aunt? She hasn't even seen a dog yet!"

Again, cute. It doesn't adequately clarify the subtext. Sarah's siblings have cause to worry about her. I'm seventy-one-going-on-seventy-two. On the record, I am not now and have never been a model father. Mig and I have some interactive neuroses that may be interesting to counselors but won't be to Sarah. There is ample reason for some angst. But there are countervailing factors as well. Sarah enters not one but two wide and wonderful families and a

circle of friends beyond compare. For the nonce, at least, we have incredibly deft and gentle live-in help. And Sarah is beautiful. It was correct that she arrived in time for Thanksgiving. Even more appropriately, she'll be on hand for Christmas, when all babies are seen anew, and rightly, as blessings, gifts, miracles. Welcome, Sarah. Thanks for coming.