Benny in Boston

Zoogle, it seems, is something of a skirt-chaser. At check-in he chats up a trio of flugelmarms, a droopy collection of forty-something gate ladies decked out faux-attractive, per industry standards, headscarves, droopy blouses, lipstick that could double as traffic control. "Leave the kid, drop the bags," they tell us, "we'll take care of everything." We smile our excuses, beat a hasty retreat to security, sigh in relief as we drop into our seats. But halfway to Boston Benny strikes again, weaving his lovenets around a thirty year old flaxen haired stewardess in heavy warpaint. "You are so fortunate" she exclaims, and though we agree, we have a hard time understanding why that luck should translate into one blue-slacked airservice professional imitating a red-tufted warbler everytime she happens to pass our aisle. "Hey, baby, want to come back to the hotel with me tonight?" she laughs. Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah. An hour later we beat another hasty retreat through another security, stuff little Casanova beneath our coats and hightail it for the monastery.

Actually, there are two monasteries in the plans. The first is a condominium owned by our friends Scott and Alison, two of the most brilliant, kind, always-game kind of people we know, who in spite of being knee deep in tenure track jobs at Tufts and MIT, respectively, have agree to put us up for a couple of nights and even babysit Benny, should the occasion arise. The second is a groovy Bohemian dive owned by our friends Kelly and Weston, equally brilliant, kind, and game, and who have not only agreed to put us up for two nights, but have sacrificed their bed in the process. Moving from one place to the other other creates certain logistical difficulties, but Catalina and I agree that it's better to deal with the hassle of moving than risk testing our friendship on four straight nights of wailing baby.

Technically, Catalina made the trip so she could enlighten some congress of literary luminaries on the latest creations of her lurid imagination, while I made the trip to change diapers. Perhaps Scott intuited that Conference Husband was not my favorite role, for he kindly extended an invitation to speak at the Tufts mathematics colloquium once he knew I was going to be in town, a charge that I, with my fragile ego, eagerly accepted, as I would have accepted any task that held forth the promise of disguising my true one. As it turns out, however, our various holdings forth, while satisfying, represented a relatively minor portion of our energies: we reconnected with old friends, ate at Punjabi Daba, broke Chinese lobster, molded modernista action figures, and reminded ourselves how nice it was to live in an ethnically diverse and culturally sophisticated city.

Benny was a hit, of course, ogled and coddled into a farthewell. He was so charming, in fact, that Catalina thinks he may have duped various (unnamed) cronies into believing that having kids is not such a catastrophe after all, and that maybe they should give it a whirl. Which would be perfectly lovely, of course (no one wants to be only couple in the crowd who can't stay out after 8) but which sweeps under the rug some of the thornier aspects of the process (the nuits blanches, the worry, the expense, etc.) Maybe we should warn these guys about Benny the Heart Breaker before they fall for his wiles and do something rash?

Swan Dive

Benjamin's chum Henry flew from his crib this afternoon while both boys were in the care of the nanny. The nanny was with B. in the other room and thus did not see the sequence of events that produced the plunge, so whether it was provoked by boredom, anxiety, or clumsiness is anyone's guess. But whatever the motives, the nanny swears that there was a thud, followed by a shriek (or was it a shriek, followed by a thud?) and that the crib, which not five minutes ago had held sweet baby Henry securely behind padded bars, now lay empty, while the floor, which not five minutes ago had lain empty, now held screeching baby Henry, newly initiated into the ways of the world, unharmed but pissed and anxious to make sure everyone knew it.

Zoogle, meanwhile? Who knows, there are no reports. As fire-engines roared, crowds swelled, and the wail of thwarted animal filled the air, he probably just slipped into his usual low level hysterics, I imagine, though the Amazing Plummeting Henry was too engaging to allow confirmation of this theory. This afternoon he seemed happy. We played Twist the Whisker with Ezekiel the Cat, chewed on a few plastic scoopy things, exchanged a volley of old man style emphysimic howls (Zoogle's latest addition to his ever growing repertoire of odd sounds.) He ate cold green pea mush for dinner, bathed with his usual soddening ardour, soldiered through a dull tale about Pliney the Pig, and dozed off quietly in his crib. I forgot to lift the safety wall. He did not seem to be traumatized.

Both boys are fine, then: it was a minor incident, one of many, I'm sure, that will puncture our children's life and slowly pepper our hair with gray. But though on a rational level it is easy to understand that hard knocks are an inevitable part of life, on the level of raw, visceral image, the picture of the Baby Swan Dive continues to haunt me. Accidents happen. But I can't help thinking about D., my colleague many years ago at the American School in Bilbao. He was ten years my senior, a hard drinking, hard working, writer-teacher-hellraiser type who happened to be a single dad to a beautiful 10 year old boy. That boy took a swan dive too. His happened to be from a 4th story window, carelessly left open by some construction workers. And neither the knowledge that accidents happen nor sincere friendship with the father helped me find any words at the wake.

I just finished reading "A River Runs Through It", by Norman MacClean. It's a lean, well-crafted piece that reminds me of how much I love good storytelling. It's a story about the West, about drinking, fishing, and the challenges of family. It's a story about losing something beautiful. Is there nothing else you can tell me? the old preacher keeps asking, years after the body of his boy Paul had been found beaten to death in an alley. Yes, says Norman, most of the bones in his hand were crushed. Which hand? asks the father, as if knowing his son went out fighting could ease the burden of his absence. It's a sad, pathetic question. And that old preacher, that pottering old figure who tends his garden, drifts from his wife, reads and tries to remember, he has rooted himself in my imagination. He was beautiful, the old man would say, helpless, rubbing his hands in his hair, staring at nothing. A sad, ragged canvass with its central image ripped out.

I worry that I worry too much.

21lbs 9oz

By all accounts, our child is a monster. At his six month pediatric appointment this afternoon, Doctor Schneider confirmed that he was off the charts for height and weight, and suggested that he was showing signs of "unusual mental agility" for a child of his age. I have this second hand, unfortunately, our current deadline crunch allowing only one parent at a time the liberty of gallivanting with the pediatricians. "But what does that mean?" I ask my wife, delighted to hear the news but genuinely puzzled by it. After all, talented though he be, his tricks are limited to smiling, clenching, vomiting, howling, and staring with the same bug-eyed open-mouthed vacuous stupor that he probably inherited or acquired from me. Which among these is the mark of genius? The wife couldn't tell me, alas, having apparently agreed so completely with the doctor that refining questions appeared superfluous. We'll see if he still has the signs at nine months, when it's my turn.

The child has definitively made the transition from larval blob to b0nzai humanoid, i.e. from the sort of creature you expect to find under a wet log to one you might reasonably expect to see on a living room floor. As the above photo shows, sitting up is now routine. In peak form, he can hold that position almost indefinitely (the 'almost' part has caused a couple of tears) while systematically passing every toy within reach through the laboratory of the mouth. (I think it's a question of limited tools, the old 'if all you got is a hammer, you see a lot of nails' business. Perhaps when he has other methods of probing material objects, the Tooth Test will seem less compelling, but the moment, everything goes in, from juggling balls to fingers to the tails of the cats.) Still has trouble sleeping through the night ("He absolutely does not need to be eating at four in the morning at this age" admonished Dr. Schneider. Well well. Maybe so, but who wants to listen to him grumble?) and can't crawl yet, but his nap schedule is regularizing and he seems to have made a reluctant peace with the nanny. (Could it be that we have made a reluctant peace with leaving the premises when the nanny is here? Strange how those two phenomena coincided.) He has taken well to solid foods (avocado, mango, pea, banana) and his poo has transformed from delicate light brown milk stains to round oversized rabbit turds. Hurray for clothe diapers.

Under the dual dietary regimes of breast milk and raw fruits, fat is gradually filling in the convex hull of his body. Soon he will physically instantiate the following theorem: let B denote the set of spacial points coinciding with Benjamin's material body. Let x and y be two points in B, and S the straight line segment that passes from x to y. The all points in S are contained in B. (Preliminary proof: see photo above right.)

A few recent quotes:

"That kid don't miss no meals, do he?" (woman working the checkout counter at Home Depot)

"That child looks...healthy!" (random dog-walker in the park who witnessed B.'s cheek jutting from the sling and tried to suppress a smile as she passed.)

"Be nice to Benjamin, he might decide to sit on you." (The mother of the child with whom we share a nanny, speaking to her child.)

The Dean Is Dead

The first email raised no flags. Good morning, it began, crisp, fresh, businesslike. Dean Labriola has been hospitalized in Florida since Thursday night, March 5th. The diagnosis is acute pneumonia. Sad, but in character: who but Dean Labriola comes down with a chest cold in the warmest state in the union on the first day of Spring Break? Poor devil probably out tippling with his literary chums until the wee hours. He will be in the hospital until Wednesday, March 11th. He expects to gain clearance to fly home on Friday, March 13th and plans to be back in the office next Monday, March 16th. That's my dean, baby: I see him now, smiling his sly smile at Nurse Wackelsticks, pressing her pudgy hands as he blusters on about transmigration, no man an island, tolling bells, oh yes, but not for me. And with a yawn he looks at his watch, smiles again, schedule me for checkout Wednesday morning, that's my doll, and how about a little of that boef a la port reduction tonight...?

So the second email, when it arrived three days later, blew me out of the water: I regret to inform you that Dr. Al Labriola, Interim Dean of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, has died. Has what? We are indebted to him for his leadership in the College and his dedication to our students.

Thus was the life of one Albert Labriola, scholar, teacher, administrator, and all around nutcase, summarized by President Dougherty. Has died. Not even a passed away, never mind winged his deanly way into the bosom of that good night. Labriola, for all his common sense and steelbelt pragmatism, would have been outraged.

This has been a bad year for literary deaths. First there was Foster Wallace, then Updike, now Labriola. There is a difference, of course, between the first two and the last one. The fiction writers were iconic figures, and their deaths hit me hard because they represented a material shift in something that I had implicitly begun to view as immutable: just as there are good writers and bad writers, so there are live writers and dead writers, and when I pick up a book, I like to know who is who. Like most dilettante gathers of loose ends, I use these facile taxonomies as a sort of crude topographical map of the World, and resist any bursting of categories with dutchboy ardor, eyes closed and thumb in the hole. Labriola's death, on the other hand, represented an assault on a taxonomic line drawn not just through life, but through my life: it was the barrier between people that were sick and people that were well, between people I knew and people who were dead, between people I had joked with last week and people I would never speak to again.

What can I say about Dean Labriola? He belonged to a category of one, had a touch of the old sui generisitis, he would say, his fleshy lips concealing a smile, crows feet forming at the corners of his eyes, his whole carriage an invitation to revel in the double meanings, ribald implications, and arcane references rife in his every utterance. He greeted me at the beginning of the semester, asked about my child, flashed me a smile. Three weeks ago he signed my reimbursement forms for expenses incurred in the line of departmental duties. And in a not unrelated matter, two weeks ago he interview my good friend D. about a faculty position with the math department, and gave her a glowing report, D. and K evince an infectious good energy, and would be valuable additions to the college; the other two candidates are acceptable. D. and I had a long good laugh about this man (is he unwell? she asked, he seemed a touch ashen. No, no, just a touch of prostate cancer, nothing to worry about. He's much too jovial to succumb.)

Really, what do I know about his guy? He wore elbow patches. He kept his meetings short. He dropped lines from Donne and Shakespeare, he touched his thumbs to his middle fingers when he spoke, and spoke very slowly, with perfect Oxfordian timing (though he would lose it upon occasion and start cackling like hyena when he found his wit too pregnant to bear.) He embodied the basic ridiculousness that is being an academic in a minor American university, and carried that charge with pride and dignity. He was ,in a way, our standard bearer, and we loved him because he reminded us that the line between being and play-acting is one of perspective. He was the most vital man in the college, 69 years old, sly and wiry and decadent and polished. He made me laugh. He was kind. I still haven't thanked him for remembering that we had a child.

Hombres de Estufa

I hear them long before I see them, and see them long before I speak to them. Their arrival is heralded by the flat staccato of a big diesel engine, followed by the hiss of hydraulic breaks and the pulsed shriek of a company truck in reverse. From across the room we can just make out the beast's dull white dorsum, a long slab rimmed above with a thin steal truss that glides above level of the sill. Easing towards the window we see the monster itself, a 24 foot stub-nosed box van grazing at the barren branches on the far side of the road. It is a generic member of the species, dingy and unmarked except for the phrase 'Reliable Movers' stencilled with wind-blurred spray paint on the runners. It moves forward and backward in small steps, like a pig rooting for a place to lie down. When it advances, it roars, when it retreats, it shrieks, over and over until it finally finds a suitable spot on the sidewalk, far enough up that cars can pass but no so far as to crush the Japanese plum trees extending over the neighbors fence. Pop, hiss. The beast vomits up three men and lays still.

We had known it was coming. Our landlady had called us ten minutes earlier to tip us off and make sure we'd be around, and I had told Benjamin to keep a sharp eye out for these hombres de estufa, I not knowing how to say 'Mover' in what we have decided is the official language of the house. Actually, we had hoped to see these guys six months ago, but six months ago we had played our tenant favors to the hilt and didn't have the heart to request a new stove on top of the $300 refund we got for moving into an uncleaned apartment. Never mind that a new stove option was included in our lease, never mind that the old stove, a 1950's vintage Kalamzoo with narrow oven space, a rusty cabinet for pots, exposed steel tubes going every which way and a tendency to turn off with a bang, had been vaguely stressing us out since the beginning. "Ah, a little bit of gas" my damn-the-toxins-full-speed-ahead wife had responded to my comment that the device emitted an evil odor, "what harm can it do?" After all, we had installed a carbon monoxide alarm in the kitchen, and as far as we knew, it had never made a peep. But we recently realized two things: one, that carbon monoxide alarms only go off if the CO levels are high enough to fell a mastodon, and two, that the device keeps a record of peak CO levels, and the one stored in memory was off the charts. Maybe not mastodon-slaying off the charts, but definitely I-don't-want-my-child-breathing-that-shit off the charts. So from Bohemian delight in this match-ignited antique my wife passed to total raging protective-mother paranoia.

Everyone talks about the protective instinct of new parents as if it were some supremely powerful human impulse, a force capable of converting a wispy young mother into a towering pillar of lion-slaying rage, all within the span of a careless gesture. This may be true, but there is another instinct that is just as powerful: namely, the tenant's instinct to have nothing whatsoever to do with the goddamn landlord. I can offer no biological or evolutionary motivation for this impulse, only my assurance that it is true: ask any long term renter, and they will confirm. I have had good landlords and I have had bad landlords, but I have never had a landlord I trusted, and never have I called a landlord with anything less than sticky black dread in my heart. "Yeah, we should really call the landlords" has become a joke in our house, a codephrase that we use to acknowledge the Fall of Man, the inevitable and ubiquitous presence of evil in the world and our basic inability to do anything about it.

Which perhaps partially explains why, with the CO threat level Flaming Red, a new child, and a provision for a new stove written into our lease, we make the outrageous decision that maybe we should just cook a little less. And for a few days, this is exactly what we do, eating cereal, Chinese takeout, pasta in the toaster oven: a true adventure in dormroom survival. But I am a man who likes his bread. I like it fresh, warm, and sour, and the only way to get that is to have either a very good relation with the neighborhood baker (there is none) or bake your own. Thus, at last, the question: "Do you want to make this call, or should I?"

It is not a neutral question. It is a question rife with insinuation and consequence. Every trick of marital diplomacy goes into asking this question with just the right mixture of intention, indifference, threat and goad, and to answering it in a way that blends self-pity with the illusion of gameness in a way that is neither committal nor noticeably evasive. The who-should-call-the-landlord question is a question on which relationships founder, converge, fuse and explode.

My gaze fixes on something well outside the room as I heave a long, sputtering sigh, a sigh that dispels the accumulated bad gasses of 32 landlords over 18 years of renting life, landlords who have failed to present lead-paint disclosures and failed to fix leaky faucets and for whom, nonetheless, my monthly checks have been building slow equity. (Full disclosure: both my parents are landlords, and I like them. It is not the Landlord as an ontological entity that is the problem, but rather MyLandlord, as a syntactic structure and economic implication.) "Well, if you don't mind...?" Silence. Yes, rather disingenuous, I will need to do better. "All right, how about this: you call, and I'll give you a beer next time we go out?" A slight smile, a shake of the head: nice try, but we've got joint finances and we never go out. Touche. I think for a moment. "OK, how about the following: you call, and I'll wash dishes for a week?" Ring, chat, schedule, done: 3 minutes work on her part for a week of menial labor on mine. And the interesting thing is, I feel that I have never made a better deal in my life, and I continue to believe this, even one week and what seems a thousand dishes later, as I stand in the window watching the great white boxwhale sputter to a halt and three hombres de estufa stagger from its mouth.

The first to emerge is The Driver, a tall middle-aged man of medium build, shoulder length black hair, and a shuffling gate. He wears a baseball cap with the initials YH. "Up?" he asks when I open the door. A man of few but well-chosen words. He tells me he is from Boston, up in the Salem area, and doesn't do any of the heavy work. YH stands for Yankee Hater. He asks questions whose origins and intent lie far from the surface, like "you like living here?", and "what street is this?". The second man is a Popeye knockoff, 45 years old, ripped arms, a barrel chest, his chin covered in a manly shag. Like his cartoon Doppelganger, he directs all speech through a small teardrop-shaped hole in the side of his mouth: he talks quickly, constantly, endlesslessly, yet not once does his jaw show vertical motion. He wears a redsocks baseball cap, but denies that he hails from Beantown. "Naw, that's the Driver. He's real proud about that." Popeye take a shine to little B. "Hey buddy, you gunna help? Har har. Stay in school, buddy, you don't want to become one of us." The third man is an aspiring guitarist in his 20's, short cropped hair, clean shaven, delicate, almost feminine earrings. He probably thinks of himself more as a starving artist than a stove guy, but he and Popeye have a nice schtick, take turns with the dolly, curse the size and ridiculous antiquity of our stove, express grave doubts about the geometric possibilities of getting it out the front door.

I watch these guys at work, and marvel at the genius of the guy who assembled this team. Larry Moe and Curly don't hold a candle to these three. Their bonhommie casts stove schlepping in a whole new light, and makes me wonder if perhaps I acted hastily when I made that youthful decision to pursue a career among the non-hauling professions. I watch these guys appreciatively, and try to enter the Spirit of the Great Mover. I offer water, a few self-effacing jibes, sailor curses: they smile, but stiffly. For the most part I remain an outsider.

At the very end of the episode I sense a slight opening, however. The Kalamazoo Death Machine gets stuck in the stairwell. Popeye and the guitarist stand around wiping the sweat off their arms, throwing ugly looks and pacing the kinks out of their backs, prophesizing failure in loud and repetitive terms. To lift or not to lift, they ask. Lift, say I, and let me help (I'll be damned if we don't this stove out of the house today.) So I grab a corner, hoist on three, and oh miracle of miracles, the stove rises like a roc, flaps up over the obstructing ledge, and lands thudding on the second flight. From here its a mere question of coaxing this monster down a couple more steps, wheeling it to the street and letting it be absorbed back into what can only be its mother, that white leviathan snoring beneath the Japanese plumbs.

They slap me on the back, these stove men, smile their rough smiles, thank me profusely: for a brief moment, I bask in the glory of a job well done, in the triumph of muscle over mind, in the enduring power of the Grunt as both as a philosophy and an agent of change. I become, briefly, a member of the Team. They never go quite so far as to call me a regular hombre de estufa, of course, but then again, who would?

8 Seconds

Hemingway famously said that "there are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are games." I would like to add a fourth to the list: child rearing.

I have come to see the raising of a child as a kind of rodeo sport, a surrealist and prolonged sort of bull riding which starts with the breaking of the waters and ends with the breaking of the mind. Aside from the length of the ride (8 seconds vs. a lifetime) the differences are mostly cosmetic: bull riders start their charge ringed by chiseled men in identical Stetsons, baby rearers start theirs ringed by frumpy women in identical blue scrubs; bulls go charging and snorting into the ring, babies go kicking and wailing into the night, every night, starting at 3 a.m. and ending at 6:30, when they are finally awake for good, and the parents, bleary-eyed and exhausted, are free to glare at their merrily chirping little calf with some groggy mixture of mirth and resentment; bulls are judged by their surliness, babies by their sweetness. The structures of these games are identical: in both case, it is the raw power of the beast that makes for the sport, and in both case, the sportsman hangs on by a thin chord, contorts himself reflexively, leaves one hand grasping for clouds. How odd that Hemingway, with his three children, failed to see the sportsmanlike dimensions of this activity! Is it possible that we have divergent notions of child rearing?

Benjamin has reached a problem stage. In practical terms, all this means is that his parent suddenly find themselves chin deep in deadlines, and Bensoosco, for all his seemingly cheery demeanor and bonhommie and who-could-ask-for-a-better-baby veneer, doesn't give a shit. He gets up at 3 a.m., and 4 a.m., and 5 a.m., on the hour, every hour, sometimes to grumble, sometimes to eat, sometimes just to say hello and drift happily back to sleep. His nap schedule is a disaster: some days its down at 9:30, others it's 11, sometimes for an hour and a half, sometimes for half an hour. Nothing throws a thesis-driven, deadline racing parent like hearing the telltale wail ten minutes after settling into her writing desk. Often he'll take a bottle, but just as often he refuses, point blank, no, absolutely not, get that thing out of my mouth you horrible creature you. The latter usually happens with the nanny, of course, and the result is total meltdown, a chorus of wails, stress, distraction: all productivity is syphoned off into Operation Save the Baby.

So we go flailing on into the ring, our one hand thrown to the heavens, our other clutching for life, our bodies writhing, our muscles clenched. We the baby riders rise and dodge, buckle, recover, struggle to lock with the rhythms of our beast, while off in another world, the bull rearers, their eight measly seconds elapsed, lie exhausted and triumphant on the ground, their work done, their ride over. We look at them, surpress a slight sportsmanly sneer: what are doing on the ground there, buddy? Look at us. 15552000 seconds down, 1261440000 to go. You call that a sport?