Larissa Ives-Shaughnessy has the hiccups. A moment ago, she was resting or at least lying peacefully (which is not, of course, the right word) in her carefully arranged crib in the dining room with the mid-day light streaming through the Frank Lloyd Wright glass panels hung by the window. From another window somewhere, a light breeze seemed to be in evidence through the house.

What Larissa was doing as she lay in her crib has perhaps been studied intensely by child development specialists but for most of us, it seems a mysterious process of attunement to the universe - which in this case is mostly the crib itself, surrounding voices, occasional wanderings about to different places (how strange that must be!), and the self-awareness of one's own body. "Are you spending more time thinking about what's going inside or what's going on outside?" one reporter wanted to ask Larissa before she was quickly bundled away from the news conference. Now, for the moment, for the several thousandth moment, Larissa lay in her crib, no longer the silent sleeping princess, the perfect-featured future Queen we had seen on the previous visit. Now, she was awake, content to be looking around, developing the apparatus, learning, absorbing, being. Her toys were her eyes, her mouth and breath, the slowly emerging interior of the crib and the way the light played on it, the sounds of what are intuited to be other humans. To a visitor, Larissa's blue eyes wandered, straining to understand, seeming to be conditionally delighted, her face vibrant and plastic, the rest of her body seeming to support her mind stretchings. As always, she wore her small wool cap as though it were a condition of existence.

One of the human sounds outside was a visitor who had brought tomatoes. Joann had to run to the hospital for a quick test and Jim wasn't quite back from work yet. Would the visitor watch Larissa for a short time? (The visitor had previously been qualified as a certified baby watcher by dint of having watched two previous babies some years previous.) "Yes," said the visitor, "I'll watch. I'll be right here in the dining room. I don't think I'll pick her up or anything." (She's too tiny and fragile, he thought.) Joann left. The ever-alert Blacky immediately relaxed on the sofa and the visitor picked up the New York Times. I'll read aloud some of the lurid political stories from the front page, thought the visitor. She won't really understand it, but she'll begin to get the general idea about it and someday she'll be a better citizen for it. But before the visitor started with the reading, leaning in to check, he noticed something. Perhaps he heard it first. It was hiccups. Larissa had the hiccups. Big hiccups. Each hiccup shook her body and seemed to bewilder her. The individual hiccup seemed to originate from the foundation of her being and emanate to the outer dining room walls. She lay there, having the hiccups and there was not going to be an end to it.

Well, it wasn't really difficult picking her up. You just have to remember to hold the head so it doesn't wobble too much. Now she was moving around with the hiccups. Each 7.5 earthquake on the Richter scale seemed to amaze her, but she didn't seem to be actually frightened, just amazed. "I can't believe this stuff happens...and it's happening to me again," perhaps she thought. The visitor tried to remember whether hiccups always just stayed hiccups, never anything worse. Was pretty sure not, but just in case, the visitor and Larissa walked around trying to locate all the telephones and tried to remember Jim's phone number at work. Hic! (Latin for "Here...NOW!") Larissa was being walked around to a new rhythm, the visitor having harked back to the earlier children, one in particular and how she liked a certain bump in the carpet and a certain way of walking and being moved around. Did you slap the baby on the back? Rub the baby's back...OK, try that. Keeping walking, too. Joann or Jim will surely return soon. Blacky remains passive, definitely a Joann-and-Jim person, has no opinion in this case, perhaps has been through this before. This baby doesn't complain at all. Just keeps on hiccuping big and looking around and moving her head and eyes. Finally, Larissa stopped hiccupping and she lived happily ever after. But before she stopped, a certain amount of walking about the living room and kitchen was in order, a certain amount of back rubbing, and not once did Larissa shed a tear or make the slightest objection to the conditions of existence (and never once did she lose her stocking cap). Not long after she stopped, Joann returned (she hadn't really been gone long) and the visitor, now visibly proud of his baby-holding and rocking capabilities, returned Larissa to her crib, hoping that some closer bonds had been established.

Back in her crib, no longer distracted by those amazing interior earthquakes, Larissa was back at her special kind of inquisitive wriggling or wiggling, somehow seeming to be taking all in stride, that this was simply part of the day's work. Soon, the stomach would start sending forth its special signals and there would be even more work ahead. It was challenging work but it was fascinating, and anyway, what the heck, it was life.