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?