Fortuna in Febraio

In Pittsburgh, February 28 is recognized as a kind of meteorological milestone: the ungainly death-swoon of what is locally recognized as the longest month of the year. February is the Hector of Winter's army: admired for the strength of its resistance, but reviled and spat upon once slain.

Classical mythology may provide a reasonable starting point for describing my sense of this city, with its grim circle of seasons. I'm thinking of the basic structures that form the grammar of Greek drama, the sense of cycle and return. Both the ancients and their modern adherents like to say that Fate moves in a cycle, that birth follows death follows buying a lemon from a shyster named Fergus in one, long, relentless and unalterable sequence that started before the bat flapped its wings over the waters and will continue until the earth erupts in flames. Fate's cycle should not be confused with Fortune's wheel, of course: these two concepts, cycles and wheels, could not be more different, for a cycle is a mathematical abstraction, while a wheel is a mechanical device invented by some lazy and clever Mesopotamian gravedigger. The abstraction is subject to statistical analysis and formal proof, while the concrete image remains just that: a hard, blob-like, unwieldy.

In applications it is difficult to differentiate between true cycles (characterized by repetition) and stochastic ups and downs (characterized by persistent singularity.) A certain level of oscillatory behavior seems to be built into the structure of biological existence, in the sense that if I am dead broke, homeless and hungry today, either my fortunes rise or I quickly die and remove myself from the game. Even on a psychological level, a certain undulatory behavior is inescapable: I prove a theorem, and for five minutes I rejoice; but by minute 6 I'm wondering if there's an obvious corollary, by minute 7 I'm second-guessing a technical detail, and by minute 8 I'm scuffing my heels, wondering if I've wrung dry the Theorem Gods and if I'll ever have a good idea again. This pattern (exultation to despair in under 10 minutes, following by a slow re-pooling of hope, energy, and ambition) seems an almost universal feature not just of the mathematical psyche, but of the creative consciousness in general. But is this a true cycle or just the random bit-flip in the texture of Organism?

As mentioned, February is the dog month in Pittsburgh. The sky's have been gray for four months, and while the temperature still feels bitterly cold, what falls from the sky is not snow but rather some gritty concoction of water, ice-chunks, acid particles and soot. The streets are empty, save for angry drivers and chunks of trash that blow like tumbleweeds through the alleyways and along the riverbanks. All animals have left town, birds to the Gulf of Mexico, fish to the ocean, stray cats to the sewer pipes and dogs to their dumb dreams by the hearth. Trees stand skeletal and resentful again drab hills, flowers are nowhere to be seen, shopkeepers nod stiffly instead of saying hello, and the daily mail turns up wet and crumpled. Pittsburgh is in the dumps just now, and so, by extension, am I. Whence the question: cycle, or random draw?

The implications of the answer may be nil: if it is a cycle, then it will happen every year, and unless I wish to sign up for a lifetime of seasonal depression, I need to get the hell out of this city. If it is a random down patch, on the other hand, I in my infinite mysticism would be inclined to interpret it as Nature's Goad to go do something new, and would probably pull up stakes just in case. Either way, February is a great month to start planning The Next Thing.

There may be more to this than the weather. When I took this job, Benjamin wasn't even a blip on the radar, and the choice boiled down to finding a city with a vibrant cultural scene and ample opportunities for research. Fancying ourselves urbanites, we felt that Pittsburgh would be an excellent option, with its affordable housing, its status as an air hub, its major research universities, and its large population of Starving Artist Types (with whom, of course, we would stay up carousing ‘til the wee hours, swilling absinthe and spouting Shelley.) Pittsburgh loomed in our imaginations as a Down City on the Upswing, a hub of intellectual and artistic activity and a convenient way-station in our relentless and eternal bushwacking through all facets of the American Experience.

Well, turns out a couple of estimates were wrong. Firstly, housing, while cheap, is still too expensive to afford easily on a single professorial salary, especially if you add things like child-care to the mix. Moreover, air quality is among the worst in the nation, something I never thought to check before moving here but which, it turns out, I care rather deeply about. Add to this the fact that local drivers have no sense of how to deal with cyclists, that the rivers are both polluted and inaccessible, that city remains deeply segregated, and sports and drinking are the preferred local pastimes, and suddenly the reasons for my rocky relationship to this City seem absolutely transparent.

These days I'm dreaming of mountains, clean air, sandy coastlines. I'm dreaming of wide spaces and laughing children and abuelos and music and warmth and sunshine. I am possessed by the spirit of The Great American West: mid-lecture, chalk in hand, a roomful of eyes staring with mild interest at my scrawling on the board, I suddenly smell the sweet scent of wild lowland hillgrass after a rainfall, feel the sharp, dusty leaves of the California oak, let waves wash over my body and watch the sun set over tide pools crawling with crustaceans and red algea. What am I doing in Pittsburgh?

The weird thing is, Benjamin seems to be dealing with this place just fine. He is he happiest baby in town. He gets up in the morning with a chuckle, he smiles through breakfast, and he pounces with pleasure in the jumperoo until his legs can't take it anymore and he retires to the ruana for another half hour of naked rooting and grinning. He tells jokes to himself and laughs out loud at his punchlines, he thinks Follow the Finger is a great strategy game, and he loves all food except for applesauce, which he tolerates with horrible gestures but stoic goodwill. Is that kid operating in a different micro-climate? Does he know something that I don't? Perhaps he is a prophet, Tiresias, miraculously transformed from a shrivelled old blind man to a bouncy baby boy with flush cheeks and a smile, who instead of prognosticating death, war, and incest, babbles his wonderous insights in a language only the pure of heart can hope to understand.

How far I am from that state! Perhaps a few Herculean labors would help: find Fergus the golden fleecer and return the lemon; clean the stable which I call my desk; lop a few dog heads and liberate the mango eater from her mid-eastern hell. Ah but for strength and cunning! Still, now that February's out of the way....

Growing pains

So the nanny is a bit of a bust, it turns out. Last week, we paid for 8 hours of share-care, which in addition to costing us $50 also stressed out B. to such an extent that we had to spend about 7 of those hours calming him down, rocking his hysterically sobbing body in undulatory figure-eights as we cooed nursery rhymes and tried to edge him back from the brink of total systemic collapse. The experience also stressed out the nanny, who responded by not showing up for work yesterday. Oh, yeah, the babies, sorry guys, I guess it slipped my mind. Unfathomably, she's back on the job today, with Catalina running shotgun and I minding the gati and the bread at the homestead. I have a hunch, however, that at some point we will tire of paying upwards of $250 a month for the pleasure of waking up on someone else's schedule and watching our child explode.

Galloping separation anxiety aside, Bensoosco's latest developments have been uniformly wonderful. He happily nibbles his way through the entire spectrum of Allowable Baby Foods, which at this juncture consist of only two items, bananas and rice-goop. At first he thought that the approaching green spoon was being offered as a toy, and he would reach up with both hands to grab the mush-covered tip as soon as it got within lunging distance. Since he shoves everything in his mouth (which is where we wanted the spoon to go anyway) this independence streak should have been fine, but it ended up producing some curious psychological dynamics on our part: we seem to have wanted the spoon in his mouth exactly as long as he didn't want it, and as soon as he started grabbing for it, we started pulling it away. That was the cycle, then: spoon goes forward, chubby arms go up, spoon goes back, chubby arms go down, repeat ad-impatience, da capo. Feeding became something of a basketball game, Parents vs. The Blob, and our goal was to send the spoon racing past the waving hands of the defense into the gaping hole before the blob got wise and closed the basket. Fun, but tedious. Just as we were on the brink of letting Benjamin feed himself, however, he learned that it was actually easier to cease resisting and have us do all the work. So these days he keeps his arms conspicuously pressed to his sides and plays the Obedient Baby, happily opening his mouth on queue and smacking his lips when he's done.

Actually, this lip smacking seems to be morphing into lip blowing, though we only noticed this behavior yesterday and it may be too soon to add it to his permanent repertoire. Here's a video clip of the Lip Blower in action. Observe the social and gastronomic commentary implicit in the gesture, the ho-hum, another meal of mushed grains and vapid conversation forcibly expressed with the spittle and airplane sounds. The child has a gift for communication; I expect him to be a great artist some day.

Other developments: Catalina assures me he is 'babbling', which is apparently a very particular phonetic exercise children do to loosen the palate and prepare for speech. If I didn't know any better, I would say he's been babbling for about six months now, but I'm willing to follow C.'s lead on this and pronounce this a milestone. (There is something of the Emperor's New Sound in all of this.) He can sit up by himself quite well, when he puts his mind to it, but he often forgets himself and goes toppling over, his great pumpkin head bearing him down and no bracing impulse to shield his landing. The art of inserting his own chupo is old hat: we hand him the device, and he can find a way to get it in his mouth, sometimes even even with the right orientation. His enormity has not ebbed: recently graduated from the 6-9 month clothing size, he now clads himself exclusively in 1 year +'s. He likes to read with the family. He wiggles his legs when he's happy. He chuckles like a hyena in his sleep.

Topology

Topology is the branch of mathematics that deals with surfaces. It attempts to describe whether or not an ant at point A could crawl to point B without crossing any boundaries, sidestepping any holes, or getting totally lost in a sea of white space. (Full disclosure: not every topologist would recognize this as a description of his day job.) From the root concepts of "Near" and "Far", the topologist builds dazzling theories of geodesics, fundamental groups, genus numbers, and cohomology, but the casual reader should take these theories with a grain of salt: for all their splendor, they are all just comments on the nature of distance and proximity.

Although it would be a mistake to take Topology as a paradigm of the soul, the field (like most fields in mathematics or the physical sciences) is packed with metaphoric potential, and has been much on my mind lately as I contemplate why exactly Pittsburgh feels Far Away, au sense moins mathematique du terme. From what, precisely? The mathematician in me cringes as I admit I don't know (define your problem! rages a vision of my old advisor.) Sunlight, perhaps? Family? The smell of the sea? Some core vision loosely coalesces, but comes apart when I turn to look it in the face: a serious voice droning on, the ghost of my old dog, ten screaming piglets, the ball-shrivelling cold of the Sierra lake water, a particular sadness to the afternoon sun as it sets across low hills of wild barley and dusty oaks. Like everything that penetrates the threshold of our perception, these images entered my imagination alone and without fanfare, but, unlike all the other one-night insights that streak into our lives and high-tail it out by dawn, these images stayed. They threw down roots, cross-pollinated, and now form a Landscape, never known and perhaps never to be known except as a gnawing discontent with the present.

There are many measures of distance. In mathematics, you can consider distances imposed by an arbitrary topologies, but in life, distances are imposed by experience: memories, relations, hopes, ambitions. In spiritual terms, we might say that each consciousness endows the earth with its own topology, its own set of geodesics and distances and genii and components, and from these concepts it derives others: Here, There, Close, Far, Native, Natural, Us--all the basic units with which we define Home. Perhaps this Landscape I'm dreaming of seems far away not because I'm in Pittsburgh, but because the suite of daily impressions to which, e.g. my job, social circle, and general lifestyle expose me are so far removed from those that first gave structure to my psychological world. In this conception, my Heimweh is not so much a response to this particular place and time, but a yearning for one in which opportunities dropped like ripe mangoes, and were gathered by the hatful into the structure of our daydreams.

Make no mistake: topologists are a weird lot, and in general I don't trust them. They avoid eye contact and spend a lot of time looking at the ceiling out of the corner of their eyes (seriously: their heads are usually pointed to the back of the room, their eyes are pointed to the left. I have never seen a right-looking topologist.) They ruminate on matters like how many intrinsic dimensions characterize a given material object, or what p-forms such and such a manifold might support; their shirt fronts tend to sport crumbs. But let us take the charitable view: perhaps the reason that topologists are so messed up is that the nature of their subject parallels the great movements of the human heart. Perhaps it is the attempt to formalize something that lies so close to the essence of Life that thwarts the usual mathematicians' game of Stonecold Technoblizzard, and leads to gimpy, quivering men and woman, spinning half-baked theories about impossible worlds. In a formal Gimp-off, it's not clear to me who would win, the topologist or the sociologist.

Be that as it may, somewhere on a Klein bottle sits an Ant, stewing in his own juices. He is sitting at the point of self-intersection, a place called A. A, for Another rusting city, A, for a town Ass-savaged by industrialism, A, for can Anyone remind me of why I took this job. He grinds his mandibles, wrinkles his antennae, takes stock: curvature, slope, texture, temperature. It all pisses him off. Somewhere, he suspects, maybe West of the Ohio river, there is an imaginary, impossible, chimeric Landscape in the Sky, a place of surpassing beauty, where cottontails dance in chorus-lines and cats smoke hookahs. In his dreamvision that place is called B, but he couldn't swear to that, he's never been there. He growls (as much as an ant can growl.) Discontent is his metric, his probe: he uses it like a riverman uses a leadline, heaving it here and there, plotting a course according to the rags and weeds that get dredged from the bottom. Somewhere in Fine Hall a group of ceiling-starers has proved beyond all reasonable doubt that if he just follows the right geodesic, he'll get there, but it remains to pick one, the right one, and to follow it bravely: to trust that he won't get snared in the boundaries, and that he won't disappear down a hole, and that the churning sea of white space will leave him as it found him, heading West under full steam.

Two-Tooth Baby

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse....

One-Tooth Baby

One of the cool things about newborns is that they are practically self-sustaining: biology has sent them off into the School of the World with a six month supply of free lunches. Whether this provisioning represents one of manifold ways in which the species might have evolved, or is simply good business sense on the part of nature (psst, you there, parent-to-be: how about a brand new semi-you, no money down for six months? One condition: no throttling...) is a question for scientists and/or theologians. But it is a fact that kids come with most accessories included. Sure, you might throw a few bucks at clothes, or buy a stuffed bear, and it's probably inevitable that at some point you'll crack and splurge for something that is cute, expensive, and totally useless, like pair of baby driving gloves, or a mini zoot-suite, or a shaving set. But in the grand scheme of things, these expenses are incidental: the basic paradigm is that kids come along for the ride. Mom eats, milk materializes, and the children go about their business of thriving. Sounds supremely easy. Why not have two?

Well, the free lunches are about to end: Benny has sprouted a tooth. And he is thus, if traditional tribal wisdom is to be believed, ready for solid food. Non-tribal sources (i.e. pediatricians) have told us that technically we should wait until the six month mark before attempting anything other than breast milk, but the fact that Benjamin physically wrestled a ripe red Anjou pear from Catalina's hands the other day in a desperate attempt to get it into his mouth suggests that, as usual, he occupies an unusual place on the statistical curve.

Childcare Complexity has suddenly shot up by an order of magnitude. There used to be a single alimentary decision variable. It was called t, for time, and the optimization routine boiled down to deciding if the the Creature should eat now or later. The consequences for guessing wrong were nil, of course, since if we flubbed the estimate, Moosco would let us know, with his usual ear shattering tact. But overnight, it seems, the number of variables has skyrocketed. Suddenly we need to calculate not just when, but what, and how much, and in what ratios. We need to worry that if he eats too much X, perhaps he won't get enough Y, with all the associated unknowable but uniformly terrible consequences for the long term development of his pineal gland or his mordant wit.

Perhaps we worry too much. Do I really need to devote several days to writing an object oriented linear program that taps every NIH nutritional database to devise an optimal fruit-to-starch ratio for Chupo's first three months on food? Probably not. Especially as, for the moment, he is really still eating only breastmilk. (Mashing a half inch of ripe banana into a gooey paste and inserting pea-sized portions on the tip of our pinkies is what we're calling the Supplemental Feeding these days.) But let us give the paranoid imagination its due: soon, he will be onto things that are bad for him, like ice-cream and animal crackers, at which point suddenly we're playing the discipline game. And at his rate, I imagine it won't be too long before he'll be vying with me for my own favorite things, like tenderloin and hefeweizen, at which point I'll need to remind myself of what it means to be a team player who shares limited resources (getting married was the first time I was introduced to this painful exercise.) So it seems that starting on solids is rife with consequences. We lose peace of mind, we gain messier diapers: we start down the path toward Parenting Proper, au sense plus noir du term, where the talk will soon be of limits, sharing, balance and principles. Did I sign up for this?

I feel a bit like Faust on the day the Devil returned to claim his soul. Oh. So this is what you meant by "coming due." Or like Bob Bigelow the Aging Sloshball Champ, who bought himself a Truck over there at Fast Freddy's Whee(d)ls, no-money down, but that was August, and now it's February, and those once fat $400 bi-weekly checks from nights at the Fry Guy are looking leaner and leaner. Hmph. So that was the fine print, eh? Oh, cruel fate. Let the days of Sticky Pooh begin.

The Great Nanny Hunt

At the ripe age of five months, Benjamin has already traveled to two continents, four countries, at least seven states, and countless cities (some of these, admittedly, in-utero.) What is obscured by his status as International Baby of Mystery, however, is that he has almost never spent any time away from his mother. From a care-and-nurture perspective, this sort of proximity is doubtless a wonderful thing, but it's not so wonderful from a finish-the-thesis or a get-tenure perspective. The neighboring Scheid Tribe, whose community holdings include one doctorate, one doctorate-pending, and one rambunctious 9 month old, apparently agree, for they met us last week with wampam and warpaint to plan The Great Nanny Hunt.

As the smell of slow-simmered Chili worked its maddening way across the commons, and the elkskin drums sounded their boom-boom bahs in the background, the Elders congregated in the living room to discuss Snaring Stratagems. As the pipe passed from lip to lip, each elder held forth, each according to his dignity, vision, and interest, each with a different plan for bagging the elusive western Pennsylvania nanny. Some advocated posting or responding to ads on craigslist; others objected that this opened up the search to Any Old Body and that we should make some effort to run a first-filter, either by seeking recommendations, plumbing the local church bulletins, contacting the university, or advertising in organic food stores. Others felt that the best approach would be to save ourselves the hunt (and the money) altogether by turning ourselves into a kind of nanny collective, with each of the four adults taking both children one of four weekday mornings, and maybe hiring some bespectacled and earnest theology student to help out on the fifth. Still others felt that the idea of a nanny-share really only worked with older kids, and that the only real solution for two infants would be two nannies, independent and unconnected, each at full local rates.

The Snaring Stratagems Subcommittee dissolved without a resolution. The chili had worked its insidious magic, and instead of focusing on solutions, the Elders were eyeing the 4 gallon pot with the cracked lid and the cloud of steam, from which visions of tomato-stewed pig flesh rose like peyote dreams and drew them to the stove. Baby, what baby? Pass the onions, and if you could sprinkle a little cheese....

The failure of the Snaring Stratagems Subcommittee cast a shadow over the Hunt. The old warriors chewed anxiously at their gums; the young warriors sharpened their spears and looked glum; the chili lay heavy in their guts, and no one moved much. Days passed. Consensus began to build that this would never happen. But one day the village idiot tripped over an email and lo! what should he see but the four toed track of the Nanny. Ring, buzz, hello, anyone? Suddenly, the village was alive with Nanny hunters, touching up their war paint, reworking the sinews on their arrowheads, smiling and working as the drumbeats came faster and heavier, and dreams of the fatted Domestic hummed lightly in the soul of the village. Emails were sent, ads were answered, responses parsed, phone calls made. Soon we had an interview.

L. was the first specimen, a middle aged California girl with a low key vibe and reasonable rates. Lots of experience, a degree in childhood development, flexible schedule: spears bristled from every bush. Problem was, the woman didn't really seem to be that into kids. She held Benjamin for a thirty seconds and gave him back; she made no moves on little Henry, poor devil, who feeling himself slighted began to speak in tongues and cover the floor in large pools of sulphurous saliva. L. had never heard of a cloth diaper, nor could she conceive of babysitting without a TV, nor was she experienced in children of this age, nor, it turns out, was she really interested in the job, for long after we had decided not to take her, but before communicating this decision, she called back to say she had reconsidered the amount of work and would be obliged to charge much more than she had suggested. The arrows went back in the pouches, the spears were lowered, and somewhat glumly, the warriors marched on through the Listings.

Without warning, M. broke from a shrub and made a run on our confidence. As she streaked across the landing, every warrior caught his breath, for here she was, as fine a nanny specimen as roamed the foothills, friendly, affectionate, equipped with every soothing bounce under the sun, intelligent, eco-conscious, engaged, and motivated. In a trice, every spear flew heavenward, each trailing a fine silk web, and as the spears crossed paths, the webs wove through one another to form a complex and extended net, of solidarity, of decent pay, of youth, of forward thinking, of convenience, and as all these threads caught together, the net plunged from the sky, wrapped the nanny around the heart, and held her to the spot.

The Great Nanny Hunt is over, at least for this season. The warriors returned spent and happy to their houses, and the Nanny has agreed to join the Tribe, at least for nine months out of the year, at five hours a day, two days a week. A wage has been set that may or may not prevent her from breaking that promise immediately. All is ready. It only remains to see if our two children, neither of whom has even spent a night away from his mother, are even remotely amenable to being cared for by a Stranger. To say nothing of sharing their toys. I have a sneaking hunch that we haven't seen the last of that Chili pot this year.

Dile a tu papá...

Early in our marriage Catalina and I were visited by a Vision of our old conjugal selves. The senescent Catalina is a happily carping fishwife, thick of ankle and sharp of tongue, tenderly wagging on about my indolence, my idiocy, my thick waist and my bad cooking, while I, a jaunty old crank with a shock of electric white hair, shoot it right back, blow for blow, an unvarnished and unrepentant old coot who sings his passion in an endless stream of petty slander. Our dream house is filled with flying frying pans, the sounds of shrieking and tinkling glass, ritual Arabian curses that touch on the other's mother's strange passion for camels, fierce looks that brim with love. A couple whose intimacy has been codified and preserved within the grammar of insult.

The household shtick has a ways to go, of course, before it reaches these levels: we still slip into straight talk, still dig for sense and intention within the semantic (rather than the gestural or intonational) nuances of speech. But for reasons that I don't fully fathom, Benjamin has brought us one step closer to the Carping Old Couple In The Sky. Not as an object of contention (quite the contrary) but as a Third Voice, an Objective Other, a cool and neutral consciousness capable of relaying messages of protest, indignation, and instruction in ways that mimic the affectionate detachment of the Old Couple in the dream, but without actually committing us to the flying frying pans.

That a child who cannot talk should be considered a Third Voice may strike some as odd. But Benjamin's silences are very different from the empty silences of something inanimate or insentient; they are long, spiralform spaces that absorb echos of the future, and buzz with the promise of projected dreams. When Catalina discovers one of my mud-speckled stockings on the kitchen table and cackles, not at me but at her beaming baby boy, "dile a tu papá que no deje sus medias sucias en la mesa", laughing and pulling faces as she hurls this horrible, caked black monster from the table, she is placing a seed-signal in the spiral, one that will be amplified and transformed with the passage of years. She is communicating a message whose true meaning has nothing to do with socks or hygiene or order, but rather with the joy of language itself, the pleasures of telling, and telling to tell, and the transformative human potential that lies at the heart of these iterations. She is speaking to Benjamin, but really she is speaking to me; she is speaking to me, but really she is speaking to the future Benjamin. It is in the tension between the me-through-Benjamin and the Benjamin-through-the-excuse-of-me that abstraction is born, and with it, the cultural traditions to which, for better or worse, we seem to have pledged our lives.

At the moment, the ritual intercession of our pre-babbling son is mostly for laughs. "Dile a tu mamá", I tell this bug-eyed blob on returning home and finding plates strewn like freeform floral arrangments in every nook and cranny of the house, "que el agua no hace ningun daño a los platos." And with fire-rimmed eyes the wife shoots back "dile a tu papá que á los matematicos tampoco", wrinkling her nose as she blows me a welcome-back smooch. Benjamin, meanwhile, does his job perfectly: every message is relayed with neither alterations nor omissions, bounced directly from fat cheeks to chuckling spouse. They come crashing into the ear canal, this succession of tender jibes, spurious outrage, and mock indignation, and as they rattle the tympanic membrane, some small fraction of the signal power gets redirected into those spiral spaces in the soul, strange, secret cavities in which the integrated self slowly echoes into being. And there, with any luck, they will continue their slow, ripening resonance, building and reinforcing one another so that the signal that emerges in 30 years is a perfect pan wave, a harmonic skillet that we can hurl with amorous rage from one end of a marriage to the other.

Sports Fans

Pittsburgh is a city of sports fans. When we moved here we were warned, in clear and prophetic terms, that to live in Pittsburgh was to align one's karmic energy with the fortunes of the Steelers, and although we had our doubts, the facts soon spoke for themselves: the ubiquitous bumper stickers declaring that "Pittsburgh is a drinking town with a football problem;" the Terrible Towel (a $5 dish rag with the team's logo) placed conspicuously in every sitting room; the plague of black-and-gold jerseys that flood the streets on game days, names like Roethlisberger, Holmes, Ward blazoned on the shoulders of everyone, but everyone, young, grimy, professional, dishevelled, rabbinical, diminutive, monstrous, shrunken, and old. Predictably, we have taken a while to adapt: "how many points for that goal?" we continue to ask, not understanding why the point values vary between 1 and 6, nor that the term "goal" (without a "field" prefix) really refers to soccer and that maybe we should just shut up and drink our beer.

Cultural incompetence aside, we found ourselves invited to a Steeler's bash at the residence of two Pitt biology professors. Always game to sneak a peak at the indigenous tribes, we accepted. With Ben, a six pack, a loaf of fresh bread, the carseat, the diaperbag, the pack-n-play, a handful of chupos and a half-dozen toys, we descended on what we assumed would be a gathering of 25 low-key, mild-mannered professional adults. Turns out we caught them them in their Hyde phase: one of the professors was wearing a miner's hat with a Steelers logo, snuffling around the house like a shrub bear, emitting occasional hoots and snarls long before the game even started, as if to find his form, or complete his transformation, in time to be the Beast Itself when the chips were down. And he was on the tame end of things: our good friend J.P. had enormous black and gold bulbs dangling from his ears which were so barbarous that upon seeing them Benjamin burst into tears and had to be taken upstairs for half an hour to calm down. There was a chocolate cake with 'Steelers' spelled out in sprinkles; the au-pair girl from Austria who had arrived two days earlier was sporting a team jersey, eye-paint, two beers, and a fiery look; the cat was nestled in the bedroom on a Terrible Towel, watching the game with studious detachment.

In general, Benjamin is a trooper when it comes to parties, but Superbowl Sunday chez the biologists proved to be a little more than he was ready for. After recovering from that vision of J.P. the Zulu Warrior, Ben maintained a spotty cool, but every five minutes or so, something would happen (a fumble? a first down? a three-pointer? damned if I know), the crowd would erupt, Benjamin would freak, and we'd be back upstairs in the quiet room, singing lullabies and playing Follow the Finger in desperate attempts to regain some composure. The upshot of all this is that I actually only saw about three minutes of the game, which was, by all accounts, one of the finest in Superbowl history. In some ways, this is fitting: after all, am I not the very man who, while living in Boston, was woken up from slumber on the night the Red Sox broke the Curse, crushed the Yankees, and headed for the World Series? At the very least I'm getting myself to a TV these days.