I have a habit of narrating my life as it happens, in my head, like Randy Newman set up shop in my left hemisphere. I'm describing an experience before it's over, sharpening it, tightening it, giving it a hook, editing life on the fly. I don't know why. No one's asked for this material. I don't owe anyone a report of my goings-on. But if I ever stopped it might seem like reading a book in a language I don't understand—life would go on without making sense.

Pepin doesn't appear to think at all. Eat, burp, fart, poop, eat, burp, fart, poop—she's running on instincts as limited as the tunes on her swing chair and her whole waking life is a struggle to fufill them. Lying in her box, she'll wake up, wriggle her right hand out of the straightjacket of her swaddler, raise it in the air as if in salute, and toot. Then fall back to sleep. Zero reflection. No forthcoming memoir: The Many Toots of Pepin Gihring.

Life for her is a plumbing job, an endless effort of working out the kinks, clearing the bowels, fusing the neurons, making sure everything flows on command—and being surprised by her own handiwork. She's living so thoroughly in the present that it owns her, sweeps her along. She has no past and no concept of the future. There's nothing she can do with life but react to it, nowhere she can go in her head but out.

There's not much I can do around her but react, too. There's no time to think. Hungry, get a bottle; spit up, need a cloth; crying, need to bounce. It's not simply a lot of work, it's work on someone else's behalf—there's nothing to second-guess, no storyline to shape. She calls the shots. I'm here to take them.

It may be impossible for me to think differently. Writers write, as surely as musicians experience life as music. But there's a reward in it. She's in the habit now of staring, and it seems impolite not to stare back. She's waiting for instinct to pull her one way or the other, and so we wait together. It doesn't take long—20 seconds at the most—but in those moments my mind empties and there I am, on the outside, with her.

(Photos: Pepin showing how to be serene even with a full load in your pants, and staying in the moment—it helps if the moment is brightly colored, moving, and stuffed with jingle bells.)