Sunday, May 31, 2009

New Developments

Benjamin's bride-to-be arrived in Pittsburgh early last week, rosy and pink in her Ethiopian finery and surprisingly sweet, given the length of the journey (her duck, it should be admitted, was a little saggy, but that's a long swim by any measure.) The brunt of the trip seems to haven fallen on her escorts, April and John, but eyebags, slurred speech, and tsi-tsi fever not withstanding, they looked great, shining with the natural radiance of new life and fresh beginnings. Details of the journey can be found here.

The hitching won't take place right away, of course: we intend to give Zoogle and Zora a couple twenty years to get to know one another, to say nothing of putting the finishing touches on our dowry settlements. (Current offer: twenty bushels of fresh injera against twenty cases of Camelscud honeywine, with the caveat that all four guardians split the loot even-steven, slowly, over many rich years of regular reunions and good, celebratory cooking.) Consider yourself invited to the ceremony: 4 p.m., May 28, 2029, somewhere in the great Northwest.

Meanwhile, Benjamin's growth continues apace. Those six, hopeless hours in the car on the way back from Blacksburg seem to have jolted the boy into radical advance: not only has he mastered the art of forward motion while holding himself in a standing position, but he has thrown a third tooth, crawled four steps, fed himself with a spoon, learned how to wave, and mastered the double perididdle. All in the space of about three days.

I think he's a little stressed out by all this motion, actually: as a static, floor-bound blob, the coming and going of a parent was an inscrutable feature of the World-in-Flux, a world essentially beyond his ken and experience, but with his newfound mobility he understands that there is a relation between wanting to be someplace and actually being there, and all these movements assume new and sinister overtones. He is by turns clingy and explosively belligerent. He sobs at the temporary disappearance of a parent into the kitchen. He bellows at the sight of his Nubian bride. And he laughs, huge, convulsive belly laughs, laughs that build like waves on the open ocean, hang at his eyes and crash at his mouth, pure harmonics of the soul that swirl into soft, still, embarrassed pools visible long after the tide has changed.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Matters of Method

Seeing the extended family always reminds me of Granny, the woman at the historical center of our common sense of clan. A while ago I sat down to write about this strong, spiritually emanative woman, and though I never finished the piece, two things occur to me: one, that I probably never will, and two, that this blog is as reasonable a forum as any other to give it air time. It is as fragmentary and inconclusive as any life, and should probably be read as something like an abortive statement of purpose for was ultimately to be a much larger project, namely a psychological and perhaps novelistic history of an odd and talented family. (Think Salinger's Glass family.) It was called Matters of Method, and goes like this:

Sunlight infuses this vision of my grandmother standing akimbo in the clearing. She wears light slacks and running shoes, supports a small dog chain in her right hand, and gazes at a clump of manzanita ten yards off, a thick, tangled briar that bristles and cracks as her two golden retrievers hone in on the target. Her long, brittle frame is erect, her head is slightly back, her eyes are narrow and she is smiling. It is a vision of beatification: my grandmother, Saint Jean of the Dog Trainers.

Jean was a Granny, not a Grandma. Grandma was the short frumpy one who gave away prayer cards and watched TV. But it was Granny who played gin rummy, wrote plays, boogied at the hoe down weekends with gramps and slipped her grandkids thin, decadent slices of homemade apple strudel late nights on the sly. It was Granny, with her laughter, her energy, her myriad interests, who stood at the epicenter of what I eventually understood as family. And it is in Granny’s life that I now comb for clues as, at the age of 37, newly gifted with a son and reconfiguring my own sense of family, I try to understand the grip and pull of wayward genes.

I do not agree with Tolstoy that all unhappy families are unique, while all happy families resemble one another—bliss is misery’s double, and each anguish holds the seeds of a unique and elusive joy. But though every hue of unhappiness find a twin in the spectrum of bliss, the palate of misery is vivid and sharp. There is a reason that we read Inferno with pleasure and sputter mid-Purgatorio, and that Satan is the only character who lingers after a brush with Paradise.

There is a dark thread that runs through my family. Our closets team with skeletons. This in itself does not interest me: dark threads are common as blue jeans, and skeletons dance daily on the airwaves. But I think it is a clue; I want to follow it from its murky socio-biological origins generations hence to its frayed end in the present, wound round the fingers that write these words. This is a sort of operation Ariadne, a guide-threading through the labyrinth of forgotten or excised fact. I am prepared to face my minotaurs.

* * *

She had a reputation as a woman who could coax magic from her dogs, and seemed to have settled comfortably into her status as someone with a touch, a nuance, a rare canine sensitivity. Years later fate dropped a mannerless pup on my own front step and Granny interceded by sending me a hardbound copy of the Koehler Method.

William Koehler was a famous dog trainer. He had coached such Hollywood Wunderhunds as Lassie, Big Red, and the Shaggy Dog, and marketed a training system that “produces a dog capable of performing … Heel, Come, Sit, Down, Stand, and Stay, both on & off-leash in about 13 weeks.” Koehler was old school, a firm believer in ‘spare the rod, spoil the canine’. He worked in the fifties and sixties, and in my mind’s eye I have always associated him with the austere sensibilities of the westerns of the time, a large, leather-skinned man with a black moustache staring into the eyes of a terrier, saying in a low, gravelly voice “I’ll count three, I suggest you roll.” Memory is tricky, and mine is more devious than most, so I checked the web, just to make sure. There was Koehler, bald as an egg and looking more like Humpty Dumpty than a gunslinger. Zero for one. But koehlerrdogtraining.com did find the proviso “there are those who will find this method offensive...so be it; even Jesus Christ couldn’t please everybody. But there are many more who would bet the life of their dog on it’s result...a reliable off-lead dog.” Maybe I was on to something.

I believe, broadly, in the law of cause and effect. I believe that if you spit in my eye, I will wash my glasses, and that if a pencil-necked stoolie in concrete boots is found bug eyed at the bottom of the Charles, then a man named Mugs sits sipping capuchino somewhere in the North End, his trousers dusted with limestone. It does not surprise me that my grandmother’s ‘secret’ lay hidden among strong arm techniques. Hell, she had been strong armed much of her life—why should she have thought other methods more effective? What interests me is not the fact that my grandmother used the Koehler method; what interests me is to what extent the Koehler method used her, used my father, used my family; to what extent the generational silence, the suicide, the long sequence of fractures and frayed ends struck, tamed, cowed and inspired this witting league into its present shape: a normal, American family.

Perhaps to be continued some day.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Nuptials

At breakfast the day after the ceremony, cousin Erica promised a fivespot to anyone who could successfully predict the next cousin to get hitched. My money's on my dappled bay of a brother, of course, but by the time you factor in all the insidious twists of circumstance, will, ambition, and good old Toews-clan neurosis, it's any one's guess. If you want in, shoot me a name and a Lincoln.

The wedding was a Wedding, of the sort that everyone loves and no one can afford. The whole lumbering tribe appeared in full plumage, and amid the excitement of lavish dinners, open bars, a somber string trio, and a fleet of rambling groomsmen, we exchanged the sort of snippety life summaries that are the staple of large and infrequent family gatherings. Anna and Bill pulled off their roles as Main Attractions with characteristic panache, doing all the flitting and buzzing the occasion demanded, spreading Natural Radiance in smooth, even layers, like fertilizer on a new lawn. Their parents were cool under fire, speaking dexterously, mingling with deft formality, charming and warm and welcoming and composed. I didn't know anyone on Bill's side, though Catalina apparently recognized one of his friends as an old crony from the La Sociedad Latina at UVA. We waxed formally nostalgic about by-gone times and moved on with some relief.

Babies were apparently in season. Big ones, small ones, pretty ones, homely ones. I saw the cook eyeing Benjamin's physique with an appreciative eye, and decided to keep him away from the kitchen, lest he decide to put an apple in his mouth and baste him in butter sauce. So we strolled away, past flower pots and beer bottles to the tables where my seldom seen but endlessly fascinating extended family was swapping verbiage over gin and tonics. I made the interesting but obvious discovery that having a baby has a catalyzing effect on one's role within the Tribe: from Autochtonous Agent with Interesting Agenda, one becomes The Accessory, the means to the next generation. Conversations with the baby in tow were, almost without exception, conversations about the Baby-In-Tow, and it became very clear to me that all those simmering preoccupations I carry around with me, those big, endless questions about Wherefores and Whencetos and other basic matters of Life and Self and Meaning about which the wild and willful Toews clan doubtless has wise and relevant things to say, that those questions would need to wait. Which is probably just as well: knowing that Broodstock trumps Philospher-king in tribal poker doesn't change the game, just the strategy.

The drive home was long but uneventful. The last half hour was torture for Benjamin, who formally registered his indignation by taking his first guided steps forward the moment we set him on his feet in the kitchen.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Second Hand

For the last several months Benjamin has been able to support himself in a standing position with the aid of his hands, bouncing up and down on his mastodon legs while hanging for dear life from anything he can get his hands on (stacks of ceramic plates seem to be ideal.) Recently this behavior has evolved to include a one handed version of the stunt. Like a man on a bull, Zoogle fastens one hand to the wily and bucking beast that is the World and extends the other to the heavens, lets it ride high and loose, one finger extended and the thumb curled back under the palm, howling and puckering and heaving until the center gives way and he spirals nose first into the floor.

There is a second variant to this behavior which is rapidly becoming the norm. In this newer version, the second hand no longer points heavenward, but flashes instinctively towards another object. If there is a block or a ball or a cat on the floor, Zoogle will squat and try to pick it up. Strangely, it is the collection of these other objects that now seems to be the real object of his standing: the second hand is usually busy exploring the world within seconds of achieving his feet, and he will strain to reach objects that he patently ignored while sitting or lying in their immediate vicinity.

There is doubtless some deep insight into the workings of the human mind behind all this. Uncle Eric suggests that the behavior may reflect some basic acquisitiveness. I agree, though I suspect that there is more to the story than mere acretion. As a mathematician, and thus a man whose waking hours are devoted to ruminations on sets and functions, I'm inclined to view Zoogle's Second Hand phenomenon as a reflection of the way in which the brain understands objects as relations, rather than mere chunks of red, chewable plastic. It seems that for Zoogle, there are Objects, and there are Objects While Standing, and that the twain don't have a whole lot in common. Having worked through the one, he now needs to work through the other, scoopy cup by squeezy doll by long wooden spoon, until he understands exactly what it means to hold this particular thing in this particular moment.

From a parental perspective, this is good news: it means all our toys will hold their interest value for twice as long. Still, there is something troubling about this behavior. One hopes he's worked it out by the time the scoopy cup gets replaced by the girl next door.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Apple

New York, 10 a.m. Wednesday morning. At first blush the Cafe Fabiane looks closed, but through the window I can make out what seems to be a long haired rat in a shopping bag looking snooty and bored while its owner explores the pastry display. Later Andrew will claim that only pig-savagers, glue-sniffers, and tourists come here, given that the Verve is right across the street, but on this particular morning I am without the benefit of my brother's contempt, and the Fabiane looks like an oasis of Sittingroom in a Standingroom city. I take a seat by the window, my lips on a mug and my eyes on the street.

In just about any other city in America, Wednesday morning foot traffic is pretty much limited to delivery men, grandmothers, and a few homeless guys. Maybe some scurrilous and dissolute college professors. But as I look around, I note that all I'm seeing are 20-30 somethings, a restless trickle of Young Hopefuls whose collective streaming etches small grooves in the face of the neighborhood. A river of distinct, luminous points, whose movement is the result of a physical law rather than will or need: the expected downward flow of an urban watershed. And as I sit and watch these young men and women shuffle by in ones and twos, each one so carefully crafted, each sartorial signifier so obviously considered, their faces begin to blend, and soon all I see is the macroscopic flux, the general move from Dream to Life, punctuated with a parade of rich particulars: leather satchels, dark jeans, small glasses, business-casual, tattooed forearms, fishnets, heals, hats, scruff. The flotsam of the flow towards identity.

I have only spent twelve hours in this city, eight of them sleeping, and already the spirit of the place has sunk its claws into me. On the way over, I got lost (of course) and ended up driving around docks and warehouses in Newark as night was falling and the wolves began to howl, but every guard, station attendant, businesswoman and beatnik from whom I sought directions responded with warmth, detail, and a smile. As if they were delighted for a chance to show off their city, proud of the fact that they had secured a bit-part in this ongoing production of urban identity; genuinely concerned for the Visiting classes. And the conceit (that New York is special, that it lies in the center, that its history and destiny subsume the individual) is strongly infectious: who can visit this city and not feel the pulse of something huge and central and great? The rough contractions of hope and abandon on a national and historic scale.

Symbolism has a way of fading under the onslaught of Time Logged, of course. I dimly recall that when I moved to Pittsburgh, I did so in part because it too was a symbol, of working class America, of blue-collar struggle, of democratic advance. The power of that symbol lasted about a week. For the middle-aged woman in the toll booth who told me to take U-turn and get another ticket, the City-as-Symbol may take second place to City-as-Crushing-Economic-Reality. What does this place mean for that bearded bum in the gutter, or the trash-talking adolescents, or the Chinese delivery guy? For these, the city may be less the heart-and-soul of America than the everyday, crushing background reality from which it is the duty of every thinking, feeling soul to cut his bonds and find his distance.

But here, in this cafĂ©, in the heart of this bougie, expensive Brooklyn neighborhood whose streets are crawling with mopey young men in tight jeans and artfully uncombed hair, women with short skirts, bare shoulders, and leather writing pads, here New York is about proximity, not distance: it is about being in the epicenter. This is the young person’s New York, the New York to which every thirsty and questing soul must make ritual pilgrimage early in life. Some of these kids are making six figures on wallstreet, others live hand to mouth, some furnish elegant single residence apartments with high end furniture while others pay what in any other city would be a fortune to occupy a small chink in a crawling rat’s nest. They walk the streets, they watch each other, they wonder who is who and where they’re going and who will succeed and who might be interesting or powerful or seducible. They are Pynchon’s Crew, Sick and colorful and sad and endlessly entertaining.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Summer

The Spring term has officially gasped its last. High time, too: it had been languishing in the IC ward for over a month, but nobody, neither the students nor the professors nor the college president, had the discipline to pull the plug. Time, fortunately, keeps a clear head about these things: it announced the end with clipped indifference. As it switched on the summer sun, students and professors scattered like roaches, turning what had been a horrible tangle of legs and mandibles into a hermetic expanse of green lawns, shaded walkways, and distant mowers. A ghostcampus.

Open summers are a gift. Waiting for them to arrive is a process that every kid in America recognizes as a test of patience, without quite knowing why, or by whom, the test is administered. And although the experiential content of Summer changes as we get older, evolving from days at the lake with Granny, to drinking beer and getting laid, to frenetic attempts to produce new and viable research, the basic, psychological implication remains the same: summer is a temple of refuge, the one place we can arrest our Orestian flight and not worry, at least for a moment, about the furies of the Everyday.

Perhaps no one is as conscious of this sense of reprieve as university professors. After all, who else has such long-standing experience? As the student scurry off, to their backpacking tours, their internships, their jobs in the family bakery, the professors scurry too, each to his own booky burrow. The first week is spent taking stock, forming projects, gathering energy: recovering from the soul-searing work of sitting-in-judgment. Soon thoughts turn to the judgment that will be passed on their own work, both by posterity (the real judge) and the tenure committee (sham court). Even in this first flush of reprieve, the Professor is forced to remember that the three months of unstructured time ahead come with a ticking clock.

I rail against this life, but I also love it. Its rhythms are semi-circadian, with cycles a touch too long and patterns a touch too irregular: it is an amplitude damping within a phase modulation, an oscillation that ebbs into some great flat continuum lying at the level of the Species. The annual summer twitters are an important (and lovely) part of the job, but they are shadowed by the multi-year chunks that always threaten Catastrophe (the Degree, the Position, the Product, the Promotion.) Like most professions, it can be both ennobling and eviscerating, luminous and petty. It taps wonderfully into cycles of seasonal growth, but hamstrings them with long term forecasts and the burden of an integrated life. Even now, at the beginning of what is shaping up to be a beautiful summer of family reunions in the mountains, countless research ambitions, wild schemes of going camping with Benjamin, and a raging social calendar at the dome, I am acutely conscious that those wonderful, boyish days spent pissing away time by the bucketful are a thing of the unrecoverable past.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Babble

For reasons ominous but unknown, over the last five days the Mothership has systematically reprogrammed the Babybot's firmware. As a consequence, the alien presence in our midst has transitioned from crude animal squeals into what Zoogelologists call Babble, a gurgling brook of sound that apparently carries meaning somewhere on planet Zog. Click here for a sample. Click here for a sample with a slightly higher signal to anger ratio. 50 ducats to the first Champollion to crack the code.