How to get the sacred dousing

This morning, I decided to have some coffee with Bernadette, a retired secretary of the Mayor's office and one of the volunteers for our exhibit.  She was already boiling some water on a kettle while we're discussing about her last visit to Marthe Robin's place when suddenly my cellphone rang.  Annie called me up to remind me of my meeting with a family at ten o'clock... and it's already ten fifteen and I'm about a mile away from the parish.
I've been terribly out of shape for a year now and running back to the parish office to catch my appointment wasn't easy.  Kipling spoke about filling an unforgiving minute with a 60 seconds of distant run.  I did that, multiplied by ten.
Waiting for me is a family.  The husband is from a known family here in the parish, whose parents live in a village two kilometres away. The wife is a very beautiful Polish woman, with a charming accent.  They have their kids with them, Emilie, who was baptised on 2012 and Leon, the one I will baptise next week.  The family is very nice and they seem to be practising Catholics, a rarity in France these days.
We talked about how the baptism will go about.  Emilie started crying.  Her dad opened an app on his iPad and gave it to her.  The wife started breast-feeding Leon.  Polish names were spelled and written and a bit of an explanation about conjugating names was made.
I lent them a CD of tasteful music and songs for baptism and hoped that they'll choose something sensible. We wrapped thing up with exchanges of emails and numbers, and then I showed them the door.


Broken car wheels and doll heads
scattered on the floor,
stained with milk, spit and mud.
Of course, we looked away
to keep the legends of parenthood
as magical as it sounded before.
Blood-shot sleeplessness floats
like empty feeding bottles on
sterilizers, while it carried
a blissful image of joy and pride
that's only theirs to keep.