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.