Turkey Boy

Last Thursday, a ragtag bunch of career graduate students, professorial misfits, homeless grandparents, and dotty neighbors converged for a Romanesque evening of overindulgence. The turkey weighed in at 17.6 pounds. So did Cosmico. We were happy there was no confusion.

Most of us crapped out at about 11, too booze addled and turkey bludgeoned to care anymore. But Zoogle, still at the top of his game, urged us to stay, his beautiful bug-eyes bulging with excitement. Quiet, attentive, he took in everything: weather-carved faces, strange accents, candles flickering against crystal, glorious cornucopias, a strangely lethargic cat, the smell of cinnamon, Gillian Welch's ripping guitar accompanist. He was neither vocal nor demonstrative, just very interested and extremely focused, observing with what seemed the sustained concentration of a first class mind. He sat high in the purple sling and let himself be carried, from the kitchen to the table to the rocking chair and back, and as he went, he stared, all night, sans cesse, like a little sociologist micro-pasha, issuing no directives, knowing his will would be known, letting the world pass through him. He sat and he soaked it up and when he saw that we were truly beat he said 'wah' and took us home.

The Five Year Plan

Last December Catalina and I made a five year plan. We took as our model the third five year plan of communist China, whose stated objectives were 1) to solve food, clothing and housing problems, 2) to strengthen national defense and make breakthroughs in technology, and 3) to build an economy of self-reliance. Not an unreasonable agenda for a young and crunchy peacenick couple with ambitions of world transformation, it seemed to us.

Suitably inspired, we taped a piece of newsprint to the kitchen wall and drew a black line from left to right, a fat timeskewer on which to fix, order, and slowroast our dreams. And after cracking a bottle of good wine, opening a little fromage tres forte, and setting Mariachi Madness at full blast, we got to work, heaving black and formless hopes from the unexplored recesses of our psyches, shaping them into appetizing forms, and setting them on the clean page for skewering. All sorts of dreams came out, big and small, wild and domestic, dreams about ourselves, about others, about the world; there were trips, deadlines, wendepunkte, nows-or-nevers, crises, resolutions, ripenings, and retractions. Each was written down, circled, and pinned in place by a thin black tether that connected to some particular spot in time. And on the very tip of the skewer, at the far right hand side of the page, surrounded in a big cartoon cloud and marked through with a red question mark, was the picture of a baby. Baby in five years, we decided, exchanging sly winks and a little tender innuendo: what the hell, maybe by then we'll have our lives in order.

Well, that was the plan. But someone tipped the kid off about his place on Life's Shiskabob and he wasn't happy: he called his buddy Bruno over in production and two days later Catalina was pregnant. Back to the drawing board. The Protozoogle had to be moved from the far right to the far left hand side of the picture, and all the other dreams had to be de-skewered, one by torturous one, to let us get the Baby where the Baby wanted to be, right at the beginning of things. And there we were, two bumbling novices, lost and confused in the kitchen, all those dreams just lying around the page, leaking their juices, drying out, unpalatable and disorganized. Start over? We thought about it, but got nervous: what if there were other secret orders that we didn't know about? What if we re-organized the dreams, only to find once again that we'd made some critical omission, or an ordering error, and had to take them all off again? Was this any way to run a dream kitchen?

The answer, curiously, seems to be 'yes'. I don't think it is a coincidence that the relentless failure of Mao's policies did nothing to persuade him to abandon them: his five year plans continued, the state slogged on, he died, things changed. If nation-states have these problems, what can we expect on the level of the benighted hippy couple? Error seems to be a fundamental part of this activity, as if there were a kind of visionary quantum principle that set some lower bound on the product of a dream's importance and its accuracy. Planning, especially radical planning, is a hit and miss sort of affair: unless you limit yourself to purely achievable ambitions (in which case you miss out on the exciting ones) some reshuffling is guaranteed.

So last night, almost precisely a year after the first, abortive five year plan, we sat down to draft a new one. Older, wiser, a little chastened but no less brazen, we chose once again to take our lead from the author of the Little Red Book and ignore the gross failures of the central planning committee, plunging boldly ahead with new ideas, new visions, new timescales. Five years is actually a good timeframe for human planning. It represents about 7% of the average lifespan, a considerable chunk but not so much that everything blends into some hazy contemplation of the The Future. It is a span that permits concrete actions (trip to the Riviera, Spring 2010; first child, Summer 2012), but extends far enough into the future as to allow speculative thought to play a guiding role (indeed, concrete actions typically expire in a year or two, at which point you've either got speculative thought or nothing at all.)

For all its value as an exercise in fusing hard practicalities with free meditation, however, the five year plan forces some hard questions. In five years you can make your fortune, get a doctorate, write a novel, drink yourself to ruin, become fluent in Russian, take holy orders. In five years my child will be talking, dancing, throwing baseballs, fluent in two languages, conscious of how bad my guitar playing is, clamoring for a brother. Certain parts of the world (both internal and external) will be fundamentally different in five years time, other parts (both internal and external) essentially the same. Do I wish to control that change? Respond to it? Be it? Ignore it? Time moves at different rates in different places; the difficulty of the five year plan is in choosing which temporal stream to commit to.

But by God we were committed to something. We took out the usual paraphernalia, the wine, the snacks, the music. The paper went up on the wall. This time we put a child on the left, a pudgy bear of a boy with a sweet but concerned look, from whose karmic center a number of lines emerged and headed right. Each line was to represent a possible future, a set of independent sequences of contingent events. Ha ha, we said. Let Fate try to thwart us now. And crossing our arms, smug in our cleverness and invulnerable to turns of destiny, we sat, still and smug, sipping our wine, beating time to the mariachi's, chewing our brie. We sat, and we stared, and we thought, and we stared some more, now with hope, now with sinking heart, stared into the vast expanse of empty newsprint that was to hold and nourish our dreams, and wondered what color we should make the links.

Language

Unless you spend a lot of time reading academic criticism, it is easy to forget that language originates in the torrent of undifferentiated cries, grunts, and howls that Man the Animal produces in his quest for survival. Why these grunts eventually evolve into expressions like Hamlet, jive, the Declaration of Independence, and the Tractatus seems to me a source of rich speculation: if we could find a scientific justification for the claim that the Australian tree sloth achieves its highest literary expression in the gutteral snarl-screech of the ovulating female, Harold Bloom’s next text on subtextual intertextualism might actually have something to say.

Zoogle is learning to talk. He’s not quite at the level of Elizebethan revenge tragedies, but he has acquired a range of sounds that can be strung together in different ways to express a small but growing suite of complex ideas. (The semantic range of the word ‘idea’ may need some light stretching to accommodate what Zoogle has to say.) Although a thorough classification of Zoogelian morphemes would require more time, energy, and expertise than I can muster for this blog, the following list contains a few of the more recognizable language units, along with hyperlinks to audio field samples:

* the glooble
* the schnorfelwail
* the Marvin Gay wah
* the short sigh of complicity
* the triple squak of indignation

He ocassionally puts these sounds together into complete sentences:

* an example sentence, where he asks us to turn down the volume on the canticuentos.

And, very rarely, he produces a complete narrative:

* the wacky misadventures of the dog Wagglepox and his sidekick George the Chicken.

Again, this list represents a short sub-sample of the Zoogelian lexicon; anyone interested in a more comprehensive reference would do well to consult the forthchoming Definitive Field Guide to Calls of the Wild Zoogle, currently under contract with American Fauna Press, issue date TBA.

Of course it is one thing to play the scientist, observing and taking notes on a set of phenomena that are designed and presented by nature, quite another to play the creator, guiding and transforming those phenomena into shapes of your own devising. Our ambition is to produce a bi-lingual child, a creature who can formulate complete, syntactically correct sentences in both Spanish and English. However, in light of the fact that a typical sentence in our household sounds something like ‘buenas mañanas, chicalica, come va mi furry round pepino?’, there is a very real chance that Bensoosco will end up being totally unintelligible in five languages, a pentatonic illiterate at equal odds with all his tongues.

To avoid this sad eventuality, we have tried to tighten the ship of our daily discourse: father-son conversations are to be in English, mother-son conversations are to be in Spanish, and mother-father conversations are to be in Spanish unless non-Spanish speakers are present or we are speaking about art, love, or finances, in which case we can use whichever language seems appropriate (preferably sign language in the latter case; all we need is the sign for death by strangulation.) The idea behind formalizing the language-setting rules is to provide a clear division of context so that the baby can sort out the various idioms. It’s not totally clear to me how the system is supposed to work, unfortunately. Apparently, consistency is key, and if you are consistent, your child can learn an arbitrary number of languages. But is there no upper bound on the complexity of the system to which one is supposed to be consistent? Could we stipulate that terms of affection will be in Italian, cream-based sauces will be in French, cries of despair will be in Pig-latin, and still entertain any hope of producing a child who can talk?

Like every other specimen of biological life, our evolutionary success depends on how well we can leverage the stimulus-response circuit to our own advantage. A baby who creates the ruckus of a five alarm fire when it is hungry has a better chance of being fed than one who merely whimpers his displeasure (noise abatement may not be love, but it works in a pinch.) The evolutionary advantages of emitting squeals of delight upon experiencing pleasure are not so clear-cut, however: one could conceive of biologically closed systems designed under purely negative principles. Though ill-qualified to judge the merits of this argument, I do know that nothing lightens the load of parenting more than hearing a happy coo, perhaps with a side of bright eyes and one of those twisted, toothless baby smiles. At which point I don’t care what the program is, all bets are off and formal language is dropped as the parents descend into an imitative chorus of coos and giggles, each outdoing the other to produce the Word, the Sound, that will strike the tocsin of the Childsoul and send a signal of Love peeling across the courtyard of the psyche. These parents are like pet lovers who say 'miao' when they see a cat: both undone by the mimetic fallacy, the doomed attempt to use low-level phenomes to capture high-level language structures. The cat stares dumbly; the baby laughs at our ineptitude; my wife laughs at my basic, instinctual ridiculousness; and the alien psychologists in the sky once again just scratch their heads and write it all down in their notebooks.

Tuesday is my long day

Today I left for work just as Cosmico was opening his eyes, and returned long after he had closed them, already off in the world of dreams and snuffling in his sleep like some truffle pig in hot pursuit of a fungus. Let us hear it for the absentee father. Let us hear it for a work schedule that keeps a man at the office from 8:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night. While we're at it, let's hear it for that crustaceous krankelweib who greets me in the kitchen upon my return, and that rich sense of venial omission that rumbles in my gut an hour after getting up from the table, and that creeping dread at the prospect of getting out of bed tomorrow. Let us hear it for long hours in the company of truth and beauty, or at least in the life-consumptive pursuit of peer reviewed journal articles with an impact factor of 3, and for that noble committment to the training of a new generation, a generation that doesn't do their homework and doesn't ask questions but pays their yearly forty thou with clock-like regularity and expects in return to get B's for having stood the course, shown up day after pointless day, a pulse in a room of pulses, all keeping meticuluous track of Time Served, ticking it off, watching it go, like that bank of cessium clocks at the NSH, only more consistent and better polished.

Bonding

Pittsburgh is covered in its signature November slush this evening, a half inch of dirty snow that makes the roads slick as hell but does nothing to disguise the relentless industrial gray of the city. This is not a town that takes a snowfall gracefully. But the flakes, while they were still flakes, still bright and radiant and unique, still riding the soft currents that pass between the houses, still heading down in those slow, stately spirals, these were beautiful to behold, and I decided that Zoogle should behold them, he being a lad of strong body and restless curiosity. So I and Young Goodman Z., both in our skivvies, stepped onto the steps of the front porch, where we stood and gazed in all our billowing manliness at the sky, and I, with great gaiety, caught flakes on my tongue, and he, with great seriousness, caught flakes in his eyes, and his cheeks, and his ears, and his mouth was open with wonder and his hands were clenched in delight, and we were having a great time until the neighbor lady screamed 'get a coat on that kid!' and that pretty much wrapped up our adventure.

Three Bears

Chris and Mimi arrived last Thursday on a late night flight out of Las Vegas. I would like to imagine that they let their hair down on the layover, maybe dropping a few C notes in a high ante game of roulette and smoking doobies in the VIP lounge, but knowing what I know of those two, it's more likely that they did the old leche-vitrine in Smokey Pete's Old Thyme gift shop, or read books quietly by their assigned gate. (They refused to divulge details.) I had volunteered to pick them up once they hit the City of Pitts, but at the last minute they decided to rent a car and find the hotel under their own steam, so I stayed home and practiced pentatonics on my steel string. A quick call at 11:30 p.m. confirmed that they had arrived without incident and would meet us at some leisurely hour the next day. So much for biting their nails to see the baby.

Cosmopolitan cool aside, Old Man Higgins is clearly very conscious of Zoogle's dual status as lovable alien and generational symbol. Not only is he Higgin's first biological grandson, but his arrival breaks what had begun to seem a generational decision to forgo family ties. With most of the brood in their mid to late thirties, it had started to appear as if baby-creation had been permanently and suggestively struck from the agenda, with everyone in such hot pursuit of a glorious future (or panic flight from a dark past) that the present had become permanently unavailable for long-term, responsibility-infusing projects. Not that Baby Z. represents an intentional departure from this policy: as an unplanned love child, Z. has been an agent, not a consequence of change. But change is to stodgy old academics as mountains are to Mohammads: the basic reciprocity of motion defies reason, expectation, hope. Oppressed by a present he viewed as a weak copy of a vibrant past, Rilke tells us that "there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." But the you that reconfigures itself in the gaze of history is not the same you who falls into the hands of a restless creation, the you to whom Life concedes the the vain illusion of being Captain and Master. There is no place that does not seize you. You will be changed by Life.

So life struck, our position changed, and the older generation came calling. The paranoia of being a nuisance runs strong in those two, unfortunately: it was hard to drag them from the hotel and get them to hang with us. (Yes, I agree, a hotel is odd. Who stays in a hotel when the sole object of the trip is to spend time with the new grandchild? There was some mention of cat allergies, of an aversion to hard futons, etc. I think the real reason is that they didn't want to be a pain in the ass. Hah. They have no idea. What they need are some good Colombian in-laws who move in for weeks or months at a time, swilling beer 'til the wee hours of the morning, carousing and talking politics and cooking all manner of unmentionable delights from the time the sun rises is the morning to that dark dawn moment when the last screech owl circles to a silent stop.) One day they decided to take a field trip to Falling Waters, a Frank Lloyd Wright house about an hour out of Pittsburgh. We couldn't accompany them because the house refuses to admit children under 6 (a policy that must be in violation of some equal access law.) They left in the morning, spent all day on the road, and called in the evening to let us know that they would be returning to their hotel at 5pm or so and would see us the following day. I had to call them back and sell them on the manifold pleasures of Time With Zoogle, tempting them back with promises of good food and copious drink. (Thereby blowing my Baby-ace, which I should have reserved for sitting favors.)

Teeth pulling aside, the visit was wonderful. In honor of Catalina's birthday, Mimi produced a batch of her world-famous fish stew, a murky vehicle for everything under the waves, including scallops, the flesh of seven kinds of white fish, shrimp heads, shark ears, manta tails and monster fins. We gobbled it down late on a Friday night, after a thwarted attempt to attend the Gist street poetry reading and before an impromptu birthday party that included a handful of good friends, a few glasses of vino, and the traditional Toews family cake (with the conventional whipcream replaced by a suspicious caramel-pecan spread that ended up being surprisingly popular.) We took walks in the park; we ate at the Piccolo Forno; we took pictures; we shot the shit; we cooked, we sang, we sat on our asses and we twiddled our fat thumbs. Must say, this is a life style I could get into.

With a Baby in Tow

A few weeks ago a couple of friends proposed heading out for a night of latin dance. Manfredo's magic congas start pounding late Wednesday night, but in spite of driving work schedules and imminent deadlines, resolve was strong. The most enthusiastic voice came from my wife, whose genius for for social dance stems from a rare combination of impeccable rhythm and profound patience. Unfortunately, her principal partner is stuck with a raging self-consciousness, a dogged perfectionism, and a terminal goofiness, with the predictable result that they rarely hit the dance floor. "We can play pass the baby" she laughed, and we excitedly wove a picture of Benny on the sidelines, slumbering in a succession of arms, snoring like a borracho de tres dias and totally impervious to the pepper shot from the bongos, the driving martillo of the congas, the piercing tenor, the rusty clave. I suggested that maybe we could even incorporate the baby into our dance routine, some exotic pastiche of LA-style twirls with names like Bebé Around the Back, Chico Por las Piernas, perhaps even a little Triple Baby Flying Flip if we needed something special for the finale.

Alas, 'twas not to be: once the preparatory emails started flying, and we began the transition from fantasy to logistics, I realized that the noise level in any salsa bar would deafen most adults, and were definitely inappropriate for baby ears. Not that solutions were impossible (baby earmuffs?), but they seemed so convoluted and involved that we quickly cut our losses and abandoned ship.

So I can't take my baby clubbing. What was strange about this revelation is not that it came so late (though this fact does suggest some basic, utopian woolly-headedness on my part), but rather that it represents the first time we have had to materially modify our social agenda in order to accommodate the Zoogle. Which is interesting, because it suggests that the subset of activities to which new parents traditionally limit themselves is far more restrictive than it need be. Conventional wisdom (among 30-something young professionals) is that once you commit to propagation, you can kiss the rest of your life goodbye. What I find amazing about the small slice of parenthood I've experienced thus far is how patently untrue this idea has turned out to be. When he came home from the hospital, Zoogle partied with the Ocampos for a solid month. He has subsequently attended at least half dozen social gatherings, not that kind in which adults seek refuge from screaming children in small huddled groups in the kitchen, but hipshooting professional young urban ones, with nary a child in sight, only Zoogle, in all his glorious chub, snoring in his sling, head thrown back at that crazy, horrifying angle, tossing out smiles like Jack Nicholson, his eyelids sagging under the weight of exhaustion, those thin, glauco crescents slowly sink under the weight of dreams. At the election party last Tuesday, he hung with the democrats, wincing at the blast of red from the midwest, cooing at the blue counter-blast from the West, fascinated by McCain's concession speech, erupting in tears during the last five minutes of Obama's address. And tonight he celebrated Catalina's birthday in his usual style, falling unconscious five minutes before the first guest arrived and slumbering through soup and toasts and cake until at last, at 2 in the morning, just as the last guest was leaving, he woke up, hoisted a smile, ordered milk, and returned to land the Nod.

We've got a sweet kid. And there's only one of him. And he can't yet crawl off and get into trouble. So I admit that the equation may change if we ever find ourselves in a custodial relation to multiple little monsters all howling like banchies and gnawing holes in the carpet and playing 'Bean the Goldfish' with the host's remote control. Under these circumstances, it is possible that our social agenda will look somewhat different. But for the moment, Benjamin is a social accessory, not a liability. And he's a social accessory that has the marvelous property of doing great things for my ego. I walk into a restaurant and every woman present turns and stammers "My God, he's gorgeous." Is it my fault that English is graced with those lovely, ambiguous pronouns?

All Hallow's Eve

If we had chosen to go as zombies, our work would have been easy (two months with Zoogle=no makeup necessary.) But it's one thing for two haggard, sleep starved parents to pose as undead, quite another for a cherub cheeked infant in the bloom of perfect health. Who would believe that blood and worms could produce fat rolls like that? (N.B.: if you do hope to catch sight of the elusive Buddha zombie, Pittsburgh, as the home of the cult classic "Night of the Living Dead", is a very reasonable place to start looking. That film, incidentally, featured a cameo by the father of Annie Dillard, whose "An American Childhood" is a beautiful portrait both of this city and of a sensitive soul in the flush of self-discovery.)

So we scrapped Plan Z and decided to go existential instead. Behold: one Cosmico Z. Toews, as The Reader, a Sartre-like figure with beady spectacles and a perpetual pipe; one Piccola C. Ocampo, as The Armchair, an ambulatory seat for The Reader's repose; and one Gargantua C. Toews, as The Lamp and Table, a shaky repository for The Reader's texts and pens. We sat on the porch and passed out candy until the kid stream ebbed to a trickle, then blew out the pumpkin, crawled into bed, and passed into weird collective dreams of childhood, nausea, radical freedom and death in the soul.

The prize for best costume goes to my brother, who apparently tore around NYC all day dressed as a sunflower, delivering neatly packed boxes to burly men named Mugs and Bruno, who threatened to grind him into wormpaste if he and his kind ever came around that way again. God that kid rocks.