The first time I met him, I had passed through two checkpoints, shown my badge two times and twice waited for the nurse on duty to wave me through. Babies go missing from the neonatal unit sometimes, it turns out.

I was there for my first-ever shift as a volunteer “baby cuddler.” Baby cuddlers are a rather odd hospital species. Less than a wet nurse, more than a comfort object, our only job is to sit in a rocking chair and cradle a stranger’s infant to the left side of our chest — the heart side — to share with the tiny being the mammalian soundtrack of that beating: I am here. You are here. Just that, nothing more.

When I had heard about the growing need for volunteers, I thought, “I can do that one simple thing.” Yet for weeks I avoided the application I had tossed onto my desk.

Because I do not like hospitals. Because decades ago, in the final three years of my young husband’s life, he was admitted 33 times, and in a way, so was I. Because it’s soul sucking to sit on a chair in an antiseptic waiting room, hoping for a happier ending. Because, finally, all I had to offer him was a sliver of ice,todaybet login a squeeze of his hand.

After his death, I felt wrecked, impotent and cynical about the value of small acts in the face of profound needs. Still, I couldn’t shake the notion of cuddling. My own children were now young adults, and I missed the perfume of infants and their weight in my arms. I was looking for a volunteer job, a way to be of some use in our messy world. And more, a piece of my heart was still battened down; I had lived almost twice as long as my husband by then, and I felt a push to atone — perhaps for my own good fortune next to his crummy fate?

So I completed the hospital background checks. I trained with the head of the special care team. I waited six months for a placement. And finally, the day arrived.

Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.

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