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.