Feliz Cumplemeses

Today for the first time in five weeks Catalina and I woke up to a house without visitors. I feel like a man trying out his mended foot after weeks in a cast: I'm excited to be walking again, dreaming of dancing, a little bit nervous that maybe those feet weren't so good to begin with. (I should add that my in-laws are about as cool as in-laws can be. The cast analogy is a consequence of my own limitations: my addiction to walking around in boxers, my passion for drinking milk from the bottle, my penchant for silence. All of which are hard to indulge with visitors, cool though they be. )

So today is a big day for us. It marks the beginning of independent parenthood. Having served our internship under the watchful (and permissive) eye of the abuela, we are, at long last, hip-shooting Independents, Writer, Director, and Producer in one (or two, as the case may be); or, more soberly, we are autochthenous agents of biological continuance who are free to flub the physical and moral upbringing of this creature as we see fit. It's kind of exciting. It's kind of scary. It kind of makes me want to get that abuela back and ask her to show me one more time how give the kid a bath.

Today is also a big day for Benjamin. It marks one month since he made his debut as a human being, entering the scene stage center as a screaming purple conehead who already had a bagful of tricks, who already knew how to latch and suck, who picked up breathing on the first try, who could say "I'm hungry" in perfect dialect. But these days his skill set is vast beyond imagining. This morning, for example, he seized my index finger with his left hand, eyed it critically, and then thrust it in his mouth. Perhaps not so hygenic, but pretty cool. Another trick: he likes to pluck molecules from the air and set them delicately on his palate, pinching them between his thumb and middle finger and hohlding them in his mouth until he is sure they are disolved and can't escape. His eyes are starting to focus: one of his favorite games is 'watch the spot', and though that spot is still sometimes high on the ceiling or somewhere in the middle of a vast expanse of white wall, more often it's a face, ideally his mother's, but failing that, anything with two eyes, even the ugly mug of his father will do. And he's a grasper. He'll pick up anything from fingers to blankets to synthetic plastic buckey balls, and though he isn't really into holding anything for long (an anti-materialist streak that I hope extends into his adult life) he is hungry for touch and experience. And the clincher: his sleep schedule has almost normalized. For the last week, he has eaten at 11, 2, 5, and 7:30 (why 7:30? Isn't nature suppose to follow patterns? The intervals are 3 hours, 3 hours, and 2.5 hours. There's something perverse in his getting up at 7:30; I think he knows his parents are night-owls.)

This new, improved, extended, craneologically rounded and socially polished Benjamin is asleep in a basket at the foot of my desk as I write this. His lips are working in autochupe, a mode where all processes save the suck turn off, the eyes are closed, the hands unclenched, the breath soft, but the chupo is bobbing up and down in his mouth, which contracts five or six times in quick succession, then relaxes for breathing, pauses and repeats. (The sucking is hilarious, incidentally; his cheeks are so fat that the motion sends ripples running across his face. His face is the surface of a lake.) I decided to waste the morning today, stay at home, graze, write, think, process: I don't teach, and though I've got grants to write and papers to produce and classes to teach, it's more important to me to spend a little time clearing my head. It takes a while to purge five weeks of being polite from the system, to rediscover what a man alone can do with a morning.

What can a man do with a morning? In my days as a young buck, I would hit the office early, firing raging in the belly, tearing tooth and claw into whatever lay between me and a result. This was the primal feeding on which the mathematician lives and grows, the crude, savage hewing of fact and form. How different with a baby on hand! Between bouncings, cooings, comfortings, feedings, and plain old fashioned delightings, I've managed to devote about twenty minutes of the last three hours to writing. Where is the fire? Where is the rage? Where is the long trail of formal truths that comprise the mathematician's sworn conduit to life and beauty?

I don't have an answer to this question, but curiously, I'm not worried (though the great David Hilbert did recommend that this students wait to get married and have children until they had already given their best to science.) For many years I refused to think about babies because of all the things I wanted to do and to be. But for reasons that I cannot explain, life with Zoogle seems more open, not less. Partly this feeling has to do with the natural, unreasonable optimism that is my nature, but partly too it is the renewed sense of mission that a baby brings. I'm not tearing into theorems today, and the world of science will certainly have no memory of my morning's labors. But I do have an acute sense of tearing into life, of grappling with the basic facts of our biological condition, of grappling with something that will sustain me as I contemplate age, death, a life's work. I may not get any math done today, but Zoogle's toothless oldman smile leads me with very little doubt that I am getting something done. Google "Zoogle" twenty five years from now to find out what that was.

El Chupo

About the only thing I remember from high school chemistry is Mr. Young's explanation of the basic mechanism behind sucking devices. 'To suck', said the old wizened crank, 'is to create a low pressure zone', and with merry eyes and a practiced sense of wonder, he proceeded to share the inside story of particle flow, the Bernouli family, and nature's feelings about vacuums. Like most teens, we were neither dull nor kind: as students filed into laboratory the next day, they were greeted with judgment in large caps on the blackboard: 'CHEMISTRY CREATES A LOW PRESSURE ZONE.'

Benjamin has reached the age where the biological imperative to create low pressure zones in the mouth has assumed such urgency that not slipping him the pacifier seems an act of active cruelty. Still, until yesterday, we had held firm, heeding Dr. Sear's stern warning that putting your child on a pacifier in his first month threatens him with nipple confusion, unproductive feedings, despair at the teta and the subsequent vicious downward cycle that ends with the gimpy life of a bottle baby. Our theologian friends, who beat us to the baby punch by about three months, assured us that their pediatrician had given them the green light when Baby Schleiermacher was just a week, but Catalina and I have our doubts: might not the dividing line between theology and philosophy fall precisely in the place where the humanist impulse muddies the head? Better to hold to the straight and narrow.

But Zoogle's behavioral patterns have been changing. Time was he would eat, shit, sleep, and hit rewind. Recently, however, his meals have been followed by fidgeting, a state of alert, quite consciousness that carries with it some overtone of aggrievement, and that can quickly balloon into a five alarm fire. He moves his hands in sharp, downward gestures, gently at first, then firmer, more violently, until it becomes a gesture of thwarted Baby Power, a Snoop Dogg knockoff that shakes and vibrates the whole stiffened body in a convulsive protest against the System, the Schedule, the contours of his Stomache. His face, sweet and placid after feeding, slowly darkens under the advance of the Sucking Spirit, his brow wrinkling, his eyes narrowing, and suddenly it breaks full upon him and it's Angry Baby, Gangsta' Baby, Baby whose face is a rictus of unspeakable rage racked red around his tortured and toothless Sadclown mouth.

Beatriz has been telling us for some time that we should just give the boy the maldito chupo. Though we have resisted, our will has been breaking, especially in light of recent rumors that she has been treating him all along to secret chupo samples, in those long, stolen hours of the afternoon when Madre would catnap and Fadre would work. (Childrearing seems to be an exercise in relinquishing illusions of control.) So last night we gave Zoogle his first, official taste of chupo, a green-rimmed silicon device with breathing holes for the nose and an ergonomically contoured tip, presumably to keep the tongue and palate in fighting form for their ongoing battles with the breast. Just as Zoogle was gearing up for his nightly concert, Beatriz produced the glombus and with a (suspiciously) practiced hand, popped it in.

Never have I seen fuller fusion between man and technology. Zoogle's massive jaw muscles immediately went to work, plastering the suck-guard against his fat-rimmed baby lips, the chupo bobbing in time to his rhythmic sucking. Simultaneously, his breath slowed, became gentle and even. His evil pigeyes gradually lost their porcine quality, became soft, questioning, as if it to ask 'what's the catch?' Within minutes he was asleep, though the chupo continued to bob and the jaw muscles continued to work. With black ninja stealth, I stole the glombus, kissed him good night, and set to my dinner with relish.

Years later I found out that Mr. Young was a creationist, one of those guys who believes that dinosaur bones were put on the earth by a God anxious to test his flock's faith in the literaral truth of the bible. The force of this revelation was for me on par with the discovery that my best friend and long time roommate was gay, which is to say a trigger to reconsider a whole body of conversation (about girls, about atoms) and wonder how what was said aligned with what was meant. And just as it turns out that most of those grand moments of friendship survive intact, changed and repolished, perhaps, but still meaningful, lovely, explicable against the broad backdrop of human foibles, so, I imagine, does most of Mr. Young's science survive, falling well within the boundaries of the generally accepted and the formally true. Still, Benjamin's response to the chupo makes me suspect that maybe Young got the sucking theory backwards. Could it be that low pressure is the result, rather than the cause, of sucking? That the Suck itself is the prime mover, the first consoler, the basic trick by which nature lowers pressure, dispels tension, banishes ghosts, and sends us off into deep and comfortable dreams about our mother?

RIP DFW

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last week. I read about his death in the NY Times, minutes after the story broke and shortly after posting to this blog. His wife apparently came home and found him strung up in a closet, blue and google-eyed. Later, my brother sent me a one line email, containing only the cryptic acronym that is the title of this post.

I have read only a few bit and pieces of Wallace's obra, and hated everything I read. (My review of Wallace's short story collection Oblivion can still be found on Cocodrilo's Review of Books, and is excoriating.) Still, the news hit me hard. As Benjamin's self-appointed moral touch stone and eventually worldly guide (ambitious, aren't we?), I have an obligation to confront the world in all its grisle and horror. How else can I hope to answer the hard questions when the boy is three, questions like what is death, who is god, and what's a sin? And here we have a genuine horror! True, it ranks rather low on the Novelty scale: the death of a young and prominent writer in full grip of his powers is hardly a new story. But this particular incident struck nerves on several accounts. In the first place, Wallace was the guy I thought about when I thought about the latest generation of great fiction writers. He was the iconic post-modern literary soul, erudite, reclusive, shabby, brilliant, and his demise leaves me feeling vaguely unmoored, as if suddenly my tenuous links to the world of letters had broken and I was drifting free, buffeted by an acute ignorance of both who is writing and what is being written. For the fact is I don't know who occupies the second or third ranks these days, and can make no surmises as to Wallace's successor. Who now is worrying about the great Problems of our Time? Not only do I not know the answer to this question, I suddenly realize that I wouldn't know the answer even if Wallace were alive, for I had never entered into his work with that exultant complicity on which dreams are sustained and lives are changed. Wallace's death exposes the shallowness of my reading, the spiritually eroding effects of placing a matter of supreme importance in the margins of one's life.

More than just marking the end of an era, however, Wallace's death jars because it comes so quickly on the heels of my Benjamin's birth. It wafts the odor of personal death through thoughts that were otherwise fully consumed with the scent of vibrant life, stewing in its rank and glorious peak in that stainless steel diaper pail tucked in the darkest corner of the bedroom. For hearing about Wallace's death is quite different from reading about Ten Killed in a Bomb Attack, or Thousands Missing After Tropical Storm: Wallace was a name, a face. Like all great writers, he was great because he made himself known, because he put on paper recesses of the psyche most of us have neither time nor courage nor talent to access. To see ourselves truly, we need tools, a whole host of tools, books, art, music, friends, conversation. When a great writer dies, we lose a trusted source for those tools, and we wince as much for our potentially stunted narcissism as for the face in the casket. And when it happens that the death was a suicide, we wince triply, once for the writer, once for ourselves, and once for the whole blasted affair that is mortal existence.

When I hold Benjamin, I see a shimmering surface under which I can just make out all the great Identities of the world. Soft under the skin of his pellucid brow, I see a faint but vast school of Professions, all nibbling at the surface, all hoping to be snatched up and made his own. I see the great poet, the incorruptible judge, the independent scientist, I see the austere painter, the committed environmentalist, the wild droop-eyed sax player. And when I glimpse these future rolls, I assume that when one or the other finally comes to the surface, when it impregnates itself unmistakeably on the life of the Man, that it will be as I know it to be, as it has been in the past, perhaps only as I have thought it to be in the past. I recognize the fallacy, of course, for when Benjamin the Boy becomes Benjamin the Man, the world will have shifted, and the real or imagined problems of today may have no relation to the real or imagined problems of tomorrow. But as imagination feeds on experience, so I can only project the present, even as these professional pockets of the world evolve. Wallace's death marks a sudden leap in this evolution. It rankles because it threatens to impede on that favored paternal pastime, the investiture of dreams.

I have long felt the suicide of a spouse to be one of the worst experiences possible within the purview of human relations. I think of Henry Adams, that obscure American statesmen whose one great contribution to American letters, his autobiography, somehow gets included in the literary canon in spite of the fact that neither he nor his story have anything to do with literary narrative. His book covers his youth and his old age, but abruptly skips, with only skeletal explanation, twenty years in between, during which he is reported (by extra-textual sources) to have married a beautiful woman, and then lost her to suicide. The Autobiography of Henry Adams is a brilliant book, full of fascinating historical tidbits, technical asides, and literary panache, but I can't read it without obsessing about that huge hole in its center, the specter of the Self-Annihilating Spouse. In Adam's case, I ask how did that Act shape the man at the center of text? Or, conversely, how did the man at the center of the text produce the Act? In Wallace case, I assume the Act is implicit somewhere in the work, as is his marriage, his sense of moral obligation, his weakness, his minor cruelties. News of his suicide made me want to go scour Wallace's work for clues, to find those telltale bits of Prologue in the fictionalized Past, to stretch the idealized relation between Art and Life in all its morbid finality. How perfectly sordid.

Writing about David Foster Wallace, dead or alive, in a forum dedicated to Benjamin Cosme Toews may seem odd, perhaps even perverse. But it should be remembered that BCT is the trigger, not the target of this forum. The boy has blazed Apollo-style into my life, and like the wiseman I am not, I have packed my bags and followed. I have watched him all the way down, growing in my imagination from a stationary speck on the horizon to a low, crawling glow that picked up pace and size and sense, and gradually become this shrieking body, this spark-vomiting presence, that cut through the air of my old life and landed smack dead in the center of the new. So there it is, a direct hit from the divine: a new life. But while BCT may change my life, he neither eliminates nor reduces the problems that define it, and in no way absolves me from the basic human task of creating meaning. The death of David Foster Wallace was a significant event for me. It interferes with that gleeful, highway robber nihilism that sustains me in the works of Pynchon and DeLillo, that has so consistently and powerfully opened the world for me in their great, rollicking tales of modern doom, clever, desperate tellings of nothings. Wallace belonged to that crowd. And while his death might never be important for Benjamin Cosme, who, well adjusted, will probably go into finance and never read a book, I suspect he will feel it some day, perhaps not as I felt it, but bit by bit, swept up in occassional, rambling conversations that integrate to something solid over the course of a lifetime.

Cumplesemanas

Our baby has a breathing problem. On the inhale, he sounds like a large-bore two stroke motor with a leaky piston. On the exhale, he sounds like a galley of pit-vipers hissing disapproval. He'll go on like this for a minute, then switch modes, passing through phases of low moans and plaintive yelps, long groans and spastic gagging, then clucks, a few sighs, a high, piercing shriek, followed by six seconds of total silence: listen, it's terrifying. Perhaps these patterns are normal. The Dr. Sears Baby Book says that 'newborns don't breath like adults.' Maybe true. Still, how do I know? Since he only makes these sounds when he's sleeping, and he'll never sleep for the pediatrician, medical science can't reassure me. And in the absence of a medical opinion, how can I sleep through the night? Watching this boy breath is like observing a drunken high-wire artist lunge and sway wildly at 100 feet with no nets. Only my constant, waking vigilance keeps him up there, keeps the balance pole swinging, the diaphragm contracting, the air coursing through those tiny, overlabored lungs. The minute I doze off, he's a goner.

Benjamin turns three weeks today. Already, he is vastly different from the comic assemblage of cheek that emerged from the womb. His skin is bad. He has had low grade infant acne on his left cheek for over a week, and a pretty red ring around the part of his leg where Dappy Pants touch flesh. During his second week he had some sort of horrible white flakiness on both his hands and his feet, but this seems to have passed with time and worry (no, the pediatric triage nurse assures us, he does not have childhood leprosy.) He also has the look of an old man, with a wrinkled forehead, evil pig eyes, and receding temples. And he is fat in ways I can only dream of being, huge sumo-wrestler legs from which great bags of skin hang flaccid and lifeless, bulging breasts, a distended belly, a bulldog neck, thick robo-killer arms that flail madly when he's hungry or sleepy or wants to be held. At his two week checkup he weighed 11.5 pounds, apparently a gain of such Goliath dimensions that our lactation consultant basically said she had nothing more to tell us, Benjamin seemed to know what to do quiet well enough without her input. Yesterday he weighed in at 12.6 pounds. What a monster. We are thinking about hiring the boy off to a traveling freak show to help pay the rent.

But he is more than just monstrously large. He is also becoming monstrously loud. At three weeks, Benjamusco shows an undeniable upsurge in his tendency to wail, at any provocation: wet diaper, tight sling, touchy tummy, or wrong radio station, it doesn't seem to matter, his response is always the same, a violent, wall-crumbling, lung-rending wail. Even his silences are raked with a low-grade snuffling sound, a kind of pilot-gripe that burns low and steady. And while every book we've read or parent we've talked to assures us this is par for the course, it provides us with almost limitless opportunity to worry.

Suddenly, Benjamin's entire career as a human being, from his fourth grade achievement tests to his performance on the high school track team to his SAT scores to his first job as CEO of a restructured mortgage securities firm, all this depends critically on whether we give him a pacifier this week or next. Why? Well, apparently, some babies take such a shine to these chupos that they renounce the breast for ever, meaning they need to be fed formula, with it's attendant expense and IQ drop and sordid implications for long term loveability, and though the incidence of this might be rare, the American Pediatrics Association recommends waiting until the child is at least a month before introducing any artificial sucking device. "Suelta los chupos!" shouts the mother-in-law, waving a pacifier at Benjamin with manic, diabolical laughter, "a las quatro semanas!," we respond, barricading the boy with our bodies.

And so it goes. Is his horrible breathing a sign of cat allergies? Is his diaper rash going to respond to A&D ointment? Why is he crying, anyway? Maybe he's got gas. But that means mom is producing too much milk, leaving him saturated on the watery front stuff and letting the good, rich, fatty hind product languish at the bottom of the mammary. Oh my God, what do we do? Quick, let's pump it off into bottles, we can freeze it and give it to our friends as a Christmas gift. But hang on, if we do that, Catalina's body will produce even more, and then it's a long, sordid cycle of overproduction, under consumption, and the doomed attempt to get supply in step with demand, which, under the circumstances, can only lead to shrivelled paps, scrawny spawn, bottle feeding, death and ruin.

My mom warned me about this. "Welcome to worry," she told us when she heard about the birth, "it will dog your tracks for the rest of your life." How could she have known?

Move over, Mr. Kent

There is a new superhero in town. She is the Patron Potentate of newborns, and her name is La Teta. Against the tyrannies of lung based life, she is in constant, aggressive vigilance. Her mission is to comfort, to ease and to nourish; her target audience is the rash flayed diaper denizen with testy tummy and chronic spit-up.

Like many a superhero, the Appendage is shy and reclusive in her public life. Cloaked and hidden, she seems an ordinary attachment, a serene and passive auxiliary. But if ever an infant scream should pierce the air, there she is, ready, pointed, glistening. Her Superlife is a never ending sequence of miraculous appearances, flashings forth in glorious lactescent splendor at first signs of distress. When black spirits sweep the cradle, and foul winds ruffle the newborn soul, there you will find her, resplendent, rotund, leaking and dripping white liquid comfort direct to the vein of the child, delivering relief in ways that no father, be he ever so soft-stepping, deep-purring, and smooth-stroking, could ever, possibly, under any circumstances, hope to match.

Do I sound envious?

Twice Bathed

Yesterday Cosmico (='cosmic monkey' in Spanish) completed his first two-week tour of life. No more squint-eyed innocent: he's a veteran now, a hard-pooping, strong-sucking machine of a baby, versed in every dirty attention grabbing trick in the book. Gone the days of baffled parental wonder, the nervous questioning about what this boy might want: Cosmico lets us know, quickly, crudely, loudly. Like a young Obelix, his life is a poem to the limits of his world (drink, sleep, repose), and he takes his pleasures where he finds them, with all the careless indifference of a young legonaire. It seems inevitable: the rest of his life will be a series of scattered escapades in vague homage to the glories of his Youth, a handful of minor missions punctuated by long, lusterless evenings in VFW halls, swapping war stores with his brothers in arms.

But perhaps I am being alarmist. True, 'Mico has changed. If you don't believe me, take a look at Zoogle 1 , our first on-line gallery of baby shots. The album contains some 50 photos ranging from his first primal scream under the hospital heat lamp to the all important Fall of the Umbilical Chord, that symbolic scab that marks the beginning of legitimate ex-utero existence, and thus authentic entrance into a life of suffering and pain. And while it's true that he isn't exactly a shell-shocked, doobie-smoking shell of a man with a five o'clock shadow and a thousand yard stare, he is, well, different: his eyes open more, his cheeks have slimmed down, his cone-head has lost its point, and his legs are a lot fatter. It may be premature at this point to speak of his career as a prowler of drab community functions, a lurker in the Veterans of Fertile Wombs halls, but I'm nervous anyway.

The theory that you can't bathe twice in the same river was introduced by Heraclitus of Ephesus, a pre-Socratic Greek whose philosophy probably sprang from his attempt to justify his own hygenic predilections (one could ask why bathe at all then, if each bathe involves a different river, and by extension, unknown pirranah levels?) Ernesto Sabato, Argentine physicist-turned-writer who is one of my personal literary heros of the twentieth century, had this to say about Heraclitus' worldview:

"The problem is doubly irritating because not only does no one bathe twice in the same river, but the river itself bathes no one twice. Proof: the Amazon can't bathe Peter twice for the simple reason that there is nothing that can be designated with the proper name "Peter". In the best of cases this word refers to whatever has a few "peterish" features.... In truth, it’s strange that we consider a human being to be something inalterable and identical with himself through time, in spite of the fact that he grows, gets sick, learns philosophy, goes mad or loses an arm in the war."

I find it telling that Heraclitus, for whom the ox-cart was the Bullet Train and the diviner's stick the modern MRI, shares with Sabato, a man who understands physical processes at the level of the quanta, a common concern for the metaphysics of change. Science has not simplified their problem, nor has it provided answers. Of course the problem is really a pseudo-problem: unlike a real problem, it doesn't call for a solution. It seems, rather, to be just a nagging disquiet which Man the Organizer, Man as Cosme, would like to soothe. At stake is the issue of how to understand Identity when both we and our surroundings are constantly changing.

The modern intellectual landscape offers no shortage of technically prescriptive remedies. "Change is an illusion" was the basic platform of Paremenides, another pre-Socratic. He claimed that existence was static, uniform, and fixed, and that anyone who didn't understand this failed to grasp something essential about the nature of Being. Paremenides has his modern counterparts, of course, Leibnitz with his Monads, the principle of Conservation of Energy, many others. But these are ways to think, not ways to feel. These problem with such 'remedies' is that they soothe only the mind: they provide us with a logical structure within which to interpret our world, but not an emotional one.

As a parent what I want is to understand how to feel about the fact that the pictures of Cosmico taken two short weeks ago no longer correspond to the child I dandle in my arms today. And as an independent agent with my own set of intellectual and psychological demands, what I seek is a way to capture and celebrate my own changing sense of self within the setting of the more obvious changes in the body of my son. Perhaps, ultimately, that is the purpose of this blog: it is a way to reconcile engagement in my child's present with an archival honoring of his physical and emotional past. My hope is that even at one bath per river I can keep the acaros at bay.

"Today, I settle all Family business."

Michael Corleone knew how to make the most of a baptism. Six stiffs in the space of an hour, eliminated in quick and bloody succession by a disciplined troop of henchmen while the Padrino himself stood dressed to the nines at the font, swearing his services as moral guide. And a seventh corpse for dessert: the father himself, his sister's husband, the very man whose death would usher in Michael's own reign of moral responsibility.

Compared to Mr. Corleone, I made rather shabby use of my time at the Baptism. Before the service, about the only arrangement I made was for my shirt to be ironed. Didn't have time to talk to Clemenza, couldn't figure out who to kill to nullify my $140 library fees, couldn't find anyone to kneecap Charles Peterson of C.P. Developments who still has my $800. Nary a corpse. During the ceremony itself, the only thing I managed to do was snap a few backlit photos of hairy priest hands on white baby flesh. I don't mean to undermine the magnitude of this accomplishment (how many baby-handling father-types in enemy territory would summon the nerve?), but it lacked style: I really should have been looking pious and concerned, hands clasped meekly by the johnson, hedging a half-smile and beveling my gaze to the ground (Michael was very good at that.) Afterwards, I partially redeemed myself by thanking the officiant with exceptional sincerity, eyes wide, a firm double hand shake, a few deft phrases. My last act (my seventh corpse, so to speak) was to offer my body as a wall while my wife sat in the car and breatfed Benjamin through a tight purple dress which ceded cleavage access only through total removal. Passing frat boys intuited with beastly accuracy the nature of the transaction; they walked on, cultivating just the sort of deliberate, downcast smirk I had sought to bring to the baptism.

So I am no Michael Corleone, no avenger of secular wrongs at times of high moral seriousness, no tough minded mixer of the profane and the secular. One might ask what I was doing in the church in the first place, given that I haven't stepped into a House of God with Intent to Pray for many a year, and have no intention of raising a Papist. But family works in mysterious ways. It was one thing to insist on a secular marriage. That, at least in principle, was mostly about us, and though we ceded to the suegra's request that we talk it through with a priest, ultimately even he agreed that secular would be best. (Though in retrospect, the argument that 'marriage is about us' is a weak one. If that were true, why would every broke-ass relative in four continents converge on Bogota to wish us well?) But baptism didn't really seem to be about us at all. Though it still isn't totally clear to me what it is about, I do know that the fervor with which Beatriz hedged the Baptismal Dream, replete with white christening gown, the cathedral, la familia entera, a cooked goose afterwards and fine champagne, was such that I had no will to resist, that to resist would have represented unimaginable cruelty, would have broken something both in me and in her.

So Benji got dunked. Andrew played Il Padrino, swanked out in pin-stripe pants, a classy burgandy button down, and red-striped Adidas. We were lucky: he had gotten smeared by a van about two days earlier, dislocated a shoulder, and couldn't work, so he was free to hop the oh-so-secret Pit-NY Chinatown deathbus and be present for the cleansing. Madrina was played by Juana, impeccable, radiant, unflappable. Catalina appeared in the aforementioned frumpy purple dress, I sported indigo indian twill, Beatriz and Francisco looked the grandparently part and our friends Dan and Anna showed up in their Sunday best.

The actual ceremony was as wacky as it was improbable. Really, it never should have happened: apparently, if you want to get your kid baptized in the US, you need to take some sort of Moral Bearings class and then go through the ceremony en groupe (a lot like confirmation, I imagine.) But it seems Beatriz's Personal Priest (PP) in Bogota pulls some weight around here, for he arranged a private ceremony in the main cathedral on what must have been one of the busiest Saturday's of the season. Not only did we manage to skip the 'obligatory' baptismal class, but we managed to avoid the factory-line group soaking indignities that most new parents are subject to, being ushered into the heart of the baptismal font all by ourselves, with no one but a young, Spanish speaking Italian priest to perform the rights, and a few worshipers in the pews to make sure it got done right. The ceremony itself was a comedy of errors: the priest (Daniel was his name) was in a hurry, as he had to attend a wedding directly afterwards. So after hasty presentations he led us to the alter and we got busy with the questions, the first one, 'What do you seek from the church?", leaving us totally floored until he muttered under his breath "baptism", and we smiled and knew that he knew and that it didn't matter and that what we were doing was good anyway. The rest of the questions were standard protocol, I imagine, things along the lines of 'do you renounce the devil', 'do you promise to educate this boy in the ways of God', and 'you won't forget to tithe, will you?" About half way through the ceremony it became clear that he thought Andrew was the father and I was the padrino (did I mention that our introductions were hasty?) and we made no move to disabuse him of this notion. At the dunking, Cosmico wailed like a fire engine, the parishioners looked nervous, the priest smiled, and Beatriz cried.

The remainder of the day was devoted to the Fete. Roast turkey, cranberries, potatoes, copious good wine, lots of friends, story telling, pictures, laughter, cheer. I went to bed fully conscious of, and totally at ease with, the fact that I had yet again participated in a holy ritual whose meaning totally escaped me. Viva la iglesia, say I.

A baby by any other name....

"I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought."
-- Shakespeare, Henry IV

My college roommate swears he went to high school with a boy named Bobby Buttsavage. I don't really believe him, as he tends to the literary, and is not beyond embellishment when a laugh is at stake. Still, Bobby Buttsavage lies so far to the outrageous that I wonder what the catalyzing truth might have been. Was he a Robert Arschwild who fell in with the wrong group of boys? A Bob Bummel whose surname withered under the twin onslaught of 'bum' and 'pummel'? Whatever the truth, the story continues to stand as a stern warning to choose names with caution.

Historically, I have ignored this warning. For years I maintained a mental list of outrageous potential names for my (ever so unlikely) firstborn. Actually, calling it a 'list' is an exaggeration: what I maintained was a ritual wherein whenever I would stumble across a name that was sufficiently rare, difficult, ridiculous, or exotic, I would gleefully swear on all that was holy to bestow it on my firstborn male child. I accrued a fluid register of great Russian patriarchs, 18th century sybarites, eastern European poets, gunsmen, taxistas, hillbillies, flower children, Benedictine monks, Finish sportsmen, celebrity hitmen, and ruined cult leaders. In retrospect, the pleasure of this ritual sprang as much from delight in raw phonetics as from a perverse affinity for what was marginal, improbable, and unexpected. The rush in letting a name like Jakeldroski Fetiomerkiovitch roll glibly off the tongue was not just the thrill of glottal control but also the host of associations it ushered in, the Dostievskian heros, the blackclad revolutionaries, the besotted holy loner poets groaning under the injuries of the state. The roots of my penchant for impossible names lay deep in an unconscious and perhaps unsustainable exoticism.

So great was my fame for horrible names that when Piro materialized the pressue to produce an appropriate lollywhopper of a moniker was almost overwhelming. For months, Catalina and I kept a Google spreadsheet of candidates, divided into three columns, from left to right in order of 'serviceability'. Oh nest of horrors! Which readers of Genesis rember Uz the patriarch, progenitor of Buz? Uz Buz Toews was high on the list. And then there was the impeccable Indalecio, a lullaby of a name, simultaneously suggesting indolence and lo necio, or 'the bad' (not to mention the fact that in practice we would probably cut of the head and tale to leave just 'Dale', whose meaning in Spanish is 'go ahead', 'your turn', or 'give them hell', depending on how liberally you choose to translate.) I was very partial to names with strong cultural resonance, names like Schlomo, Gunther, and Mustafa, while Catalina tended to the resonant, like Facundo, Sinforoso, and Celedonio. (Sinforoso was from Francisco, who also suggested Cosme and Aparicio as 'nombres de la familia'.) If anyone is interested in the complete list, they can find it at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg3bm7vx_16hd89msg7, though be warned that these names are a siren song: the more you look at them, the more you begin to ask yourself 'why couldn't I give that name to my kid?' Trust yourself. Don't do it.

Curiously, we both ended up being rather conservative, I more so than my wife. I originally plumped for Walter; she vetoed that for Balthazar; Benjamin was a compromise that we both loved and felt appropriate for this big, beautiful, beloved boy. Last name was originally open to debate, but after a tearful conversation with her mother, who implored her, in mild histerics, not to do that 'to her' (implication: bastard child!) Catalina decided the battle wasn't worth fighting and settled for Toews. The middle name was a battle ground: I plumped for Emil, Catalina wanted Cosme. We hemmed and hawed. The family began rattling the cage, demanding a handle for the boy, tired, they said, of calling him Baby Zoogle, outraged, they claimed, that a week had passed, nervous, they affirmed, that he might not be named before the Baptism. Finally I cracked. Cosme, same root as cosmos, the Greek principle of order that is the core task of the both the artist and the philosopher. Cosme, the star gazer, the child who needed to be dragged from the womb with forceps because his head was tilted back in wonderous awe as he gazed at the stars in my woman's interior. Cosme, the baby who insisted on making an appearance, in spite of seven forms of birth control and a five year plan that pencilled him in at the very end. This improbable being is my son, this 10 pound puchero king from out of nowhere, this monster who came facing the sun, this purple conehead who in ten days has had a swollen nipple, infant acne, diaper rash, gained a pound and a half, run through 73 diapers, cooed, snuffled, and begun to smile: this amazing creature is Benjamin Cosme Toews.

La Familia

As a bloated corpse is to the buzzard, so a newborn is to the in-laws. Baby came home on a Friday, and by Sunday, the relatives had occupied both spare beds, spilled out into a hotel, and were spending all day every day drifting in slow, expectant circles around the papasan . Shoes fill the vestibule, suitcases liter the guest room, and the pantry is full of items that I don't recognize and won't eat.

In principle, having a few extra hands around for the first few days after birth seemed a great idea, partly in the spirit of 'it takes a village to raise a child', and partly because Catalina and I are so wretchedly ignorant about the most elementary aspects of child rearing. In fact, it is proving something of a headache, in spite of the fact that I enjoy my inlaws' company and, in normal circumstances, would be pleased to have them around. What ends up happening is that we lose sleep on two counts, one because of the baby, and two because of the weird, unspoken social pressure to 'hang out' with the family. Add to this sleep deprivation low-level but surprisingly intense struggles of will about how Zoogle ought to be dressed, bathed, fed, and put to sleep (it's curious how our total ignorance in no way stops us from harboring strong opinions) and what emerges is an exhausting blend of physical, social, and emotional stresses.

On the other hand: Francisco has done dishes almost every night. He has also proved a champion baby-quieter, even going so far as to share his secret Paseo de Camello with me, a proprietary step whose placative properties undo even the fussiest of babies. Juana has worked magic in the kitchen, treating us to a spectacular brunch that included homemade cinnemon rolls, hollandaise sauce, and poached eggs. And Beatriz has cleaned the house: aggessively, relentlessly, repeatedly.

Parenthood is reputed to serve as a catalyst for wisdom: something about how assuming total responsibility for a new lifeform puts all that youthful, obsessive concern for our own lives in telling evolutionary perspective. But I am beginning to see that even beyond basic biological continuity, even beyond the notion of 'link' and the telling implications for individuation, lies the notion of the organic power in small social networks. The relatives will come. And not only am I powerless to structure the form and magnitude of their presence, I find, in the end, that I welcome it, that in spite of the chaos and tears and lost sleep, the strained silence between two divorced parents out-cooing one another over that strange, Gallapagoid creature in the crib, the periodic surging impatience on Catalina's face, the exhaustion of needing to talk, that somehow, in the center of this strain beats the Heart of the Species. I resist the family, I accept the family, I am the family.

If only I could now find out who made off with the measuring cups....