A few weeks ago we were picking up pizza at the Janesville Pizza Factory when a young couple with a baby approached us and said, in effect, "hello, you are a young couple with a baby, let's have dinner together." And so, after some delay to allow the family waters to rise and recede, we did: a mellow meal of split-pea barley soup, tofu-balls and freshbaked pecan sourdough shared on the deck amid the howls of 5-month Zella and the porcine grunts of 11-month Snockelpea, all sharpened and clarified by the clean grassy smell left by an afternoon thunderstorm.
Kindred souls are rare and wonderful things. Strangely, kindred souls in remote locations seem to be no rarer that their counterparts in the heavily populated regions (though they are just as wonderful.) Whether this phenomenon is a reflection on us or on humanity is a question I'm probably not qualified to answer: true, I tend to like the sorts of loners, individualists, do-it-yourselfers, and back-to-the-landers that you find in the dark heart of rural America, but I would hardly say that my friend-circle is limited to this class of people (consider my wife....) Perhaps then there really is some Law of Thermodynamics that governs the distribution of kindred tastes, an aggregate statistics dictating the equidistribution of Like and Dislike.
Whatever it is, these people rocked: they were the kind of people we'd like to be if we had more time to work at it.
It is unfortunate, of course, that we met them the week before we were to leave. Not just because it would have been great to spend more time with them, but also because they could have given us a better sense of what it might be like to try to build a life in these parts. This is a relevant issue, especially now, in the last few days of our sojourn, as we find ourselves spending a little more time each night on the back deck watching the sun go down, trying to soak a little more of the spirit of this place into our bones, our senses, so that when we return to the Burgh, it will still burn within us, and we can think clearly about the Next Step.
A precipitous move to Janesville? On the heels of a summer like this one, the idea does not seem so farfeteched. Still, something holds us back, something that is not about careers or money or networks, but some basic question about how to invest a life, how and when to tie yourself to a chunk of land and a group of people, how to throw down roots and build up homes and etch out identities. None of these questions have easy answers, but seeing other people, about our age and in about our circumstances, seeing them in action struggling to find these these things out: this is a rich and rare discovery, and one I would very much like to have pushed further.
Five more days in the mountains. Then a few days on the coast and we're off, back to the Burgh, 'America's Most Livable City', as Dean Labriola liked to cackle on about before keeling over of that spring-term pneumonia that found such fertile ground on the soot-sodden lungs of a Pittsburgh Lifer. Not a bad place in its way, especially as viewed from far away: it is the city in which Benjamin was conceived, and born, and will turn one in less than a month. It is the city in which, for the first time in my life, I've Professed. It is also the city in which I've discovered my mixed appetite for teaching, and in which my heart hardened to the ugly truths of formal academic productions, and, further afield, in which I finally understood who loses, and how, when the planet gets ripped apart for material and industrial ends, and how economic inequalities degrade a place, and segregation gets so entrenched there's no way to root it out, even when its underlying causes are long dead and the new regime is the sort of mild academic liberalism which one expects to be the total opposite of such a state.
It is important to remember that the world has problems, and those problems need solutions. A part of life is taking care of yourself: thinking about your food sources, your kid's college fund, your retirement. But in the midst of the bosco oscuro, I find it useful to remember that if I can't solve my own problems, perhaps I can solve someone else's. And that to do that, it might be useful to take our new friends' ansatz as paradigm, something along the lines of "hello, you are a humanoid, I am a humanoid, let's have dinner." After all, in less than a month we'll be the prime custodial units of a one year old: if now isn't the time to start thinking about what kind of home, what kind of world we want for that boy, when is?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
The Sound of a Diaper Folding
At the height of the madness there was a regulation size city bus ripping limbs left and right as it blundered toward the hook-up, two freewheeling French girls with flip-flops and several bottles of burgundy, a vatic 14 year old nose-locked to his blackberry and subject to spontaneous chicken-jigs, a silver-bearded Jonah, a hands-laying healer woman, a towering robo-hulk with a good eye for long shots, a storyteller-gunman type, replete with a grey moustache, large regular teeth and narrow eyes, a Chinese tea pusher, a Turkish epicurean, a Colombian poet, a purveyor of fine theorems, and one wild whale of a one-year-old with a penchant for pigscreams. Inexplicably, nothing broke, no one got hurt, and the Gathering ended as inconspicuously as it had begun: a little dust on the chairs, the distant hum of the highway.
Family is a wonderful thing. Among its other virtues, it provides a window into a cross section of humanity that otherwise gets winnowed out by our social and professional biases. When was the last time I talked world history with a jittery teenager? Or discussed domestic policy with a retired LAPD officer? There are perspectives and rhythms that I had totally forgotten about, having fallen into the usual trap of assuming that the bulk of the world was like the one in which I spend my days. Newsflash: it is not.
Of course the average mathematician doesn't have to travel very far from his office to realize that mismatched socks and uncombed hair are far from the usual fare. But whenever I revisit my family, I am amazed at just how narrow my circle really is. If the world were nothing more than the gross aggregate of the life I live every day, the people that form my family would be totally uninventable, so far from the mean as to imply some structured skewing of the data: a character fraud, as it were, carried out by some wily painter of people-scapes and set just so to substantiate my pet theory of Natural Diversity. As it is, it can be a challenge to appreciate that these characters were formed in the same slow crucible of experience as I, and that what look like the wild, improbable touches of a journeyman artist are in fact the natural consequences of experiences totally beyond my ken.
We had a great time. We sang, we danced, we drank, we croqueted one another to the rotten log halfway down the mountain in ever widening circles of sporting malice. Wings were flapped, feather preened, crests shaken and bills stretched. It was the Great Family Roost, 2009, and every zany pin-feathered cockastruz who came got exactly what he was looking for: a scent of the flock, a sense of the family pattern. And then, without warning, it was over. Perhaps the Great Cockastruz flapped his wing, or shook his tail. Whatever it was, they all got the signal, and one by one they packed up and pulled out, leaving nothing behind except a few tracks, a couple of white smudges: the usual aftermarks of zootomical scrutiny.
Today, for the first time in two weeks, we are home alone. As the din ebbs and the dust settles, nature slowly pushes in to fill the spaces: the wind is back to its old tricks of making noise in the pines, I see, and that obnoxious Stellar's Jay has decided to come back and pick away at the herbs again. Zoogle and I saw a 10 point buck down the hill this afternoon, and later we spied a spotted fawn asleep on the sand at the side of the road. As we ate dinner in silence on the back porch tonight, we noted that the sun had remembered its old trick of arranging the day's left over color in bright, clean swathes across the twilight sky. And a gray fox came trotting across the lawn just as the first stars came out, a swiftly moving shadow whose passage mopped up what remained of the malice.
Family is a wonderful thing. Among its other virtues, it provides a window into a cross section of humanity that otherwise gets winnowed out by our social and professional biases. When was the last time I talked world history with a jittery teenager? Or discussed domestic policy with a retired LAPD officer? There are perspectives and rhythms that I had totally forgotten about, having fallen into the usual trap of assuming that the bulk of the world was like the one in which I spend my days. Newsflash: it is not.
Of course the average mathematician doesn't have to travel very far from his office to realize that mismatched socks and uncombed hair are far from the usual fare. But whenever I revisit my family, I am amazed at just how narrow my circle really is. If the world were nothing more than the gross aggregate of the life I live every day, the people that form my family would be totally uninventable, so far from the mean as to imply some structured skewing of the data: a character fraud, as it were, carried out by some wily painter of people-scapes and set just so to substantiate my pet theory of Natural Diversity. As it is, it can be a challenge to appreciate that these characters were formed in the same slow crucible of experience as I, and that what look like the wild, improbable touches of a journeyman artist are in fact the natural consequences of experiences totally beyond my ken.
We had a great time. We sang, we danced, we drank, we croqueted one another to the rotten log halfway down the mountain in ever widening circles of sporting malice. Wings were flapped, feather preened, crests shaken and bills stretched. It was the Great Family Roost, 2009, and every zany pin-feathered cockastruz who came got exactly what he was looking for: a scent of the flock, a sense of the family pattern. And then, without warning, it was over. Perhaps the Great Cockastruz flapped his wing, or shook his tail. Whatever it was, they all got the signal, and one by one they packed up and pulled out, leaving nothing behind except a few tracks, a couple of white smudges: the usual aftermarks of zootomical scrutiny.
Today, for the first time in two weeks, we are home alone. As the din ebbs and the dust settles, nature slowly pushes in to fill the spaces: the wind is back to its old tricks of making noise in the pines, I see, and that obnoxious Stellar's Jay has decided to come back and pick away at the herbs again. Zoogle and I saw a 10 point buck down the hill this afternoon, and later we spied a spotted fawn asleep on the sand at the side of the road. As we ate dinner in silence on the back porch tonight, we noted that the sun had remembered its old trick of arranging the day's left over color in bright, clean swathes across the twilight sky. And a gray fox came trotting across the lawn just as the first stars came out, a swiftly moving shadow whose passage mopped up what remained of the malice.
Monday, July 20, 2009
2 am Monday morning
A lot of people ask if Benjamin sleeps through the night. I never know what to say. Yes, he is capable of sleeping through the night: he has done it more than one occasion, and both his parents have risen like sunflowers the morning after, beaming and radiant as they sing the glories of the Regular Boy. And then there are nights like tonight, where it's 2 am and Zoogle has been thrashing around like a downer cow for three hours. Does Z. sleep through the night? Perhaps we can say: yes, as long as the night is deemed to have started at the hour of his choosing. And as long as sleep crawling, fitful dreams, random cries, and the occasional foot to the thorax are included within the general category of somnolent behavior.
A few months ago Catalina read a book called Sleep Training: The No-Cry Sleep Solution, thinking to nip this little Turandottino in the bud. "All right, what's the skinny?" I ask her, thinking to save myself the trouble of reading yet another two hundred page technical text based on an idea so flimsy that all of its essential features would fit on a stickynote. But it turned out that the wily autheress had been cheap even by the standards of advice-books: the ruling idea was so slender it slipped through the cracks entirely, and my professional reader of a wife, this trained parser of texts, was wholly incapable of giving me anything more than the roughest of vague ideas. "You need to be prepared to suffer for ten days", she managed to report. "Ten days, and then you're in the clear: consider it an investment." But the rational for the suffering, and its details, and the way all this pain was supposed to transform our child into a rat-tailed liron: all these things were forgotten, or never absorbed, or so obscured by the Attachment Parenting mumbo jumbo that they never crystalized into hard, concrete plans of action. Anyway, the punchline is that we never took the plunge, and thus continue with the nuits blanches long after most babies are sleeping like turtle doves.
And so it is that at 2 on the night before the day on which my wonderful wife freely volunteered for an extra Redeye shift to give me a little more time to work on my paper, I am up writing in my blog instead of nourishing my soon-to-be-taxed brain with a full night's sleep. Meanwhile, four guests snooze like trolls in trailers ten yards away, and two more, in the upstair's bed, have the presence of mind to mumble something about a cursed blighter as they smile drowsily and burrow deeper beneath the sheets.
Woe to the first person to show signs of repose tomorrow.
A few months ago Catalina read a book called Sleep Training: The No-Cry Sleep Solution, thinking to nip this little Turandottino in the bud. "All right, what's the skinny?" I ask her, thinking to save myself the trouble of reading yet another two hundred page technical text based on an idea so flimsy that all of its essential features would fit on a stickynote. But it turned out that the wily autheress had been cheap even by the standards of advice-books: the ruling idea was so slender it slipped through the cracks entirely, and my professional reader of a wife, this trained parser of texts, was wholly incapable of giving me anything more than the roughest of vague ideas. "You need to be prepared to suffer for ten days", she managed to report. "Ten days, and then you're in the clear: consider it an investment." But the rational for the suffering, and its details, and the way all this pain was supposed to transform our child into a rat-tailed liron: all these things were forgotten, or never absorbed, or so obscured by the Attachment Parenting mumbo jumbo that they never crystalized into hard, concrete plans of action. Anyway, the punchline is that we never took the plunge, and thus continue with the nuits blanches long after most babies are sleeping like turtle doves.
And so it is that at 2 on the night before the day on which my wonderful wife freely volunteered for an extra Redeye shift to give me a little more time to work on my paper, I am up writing in my blog instead of nourishing my soon-to-be-taxed brain with a full night's sleep. Meanwhile, four guests snooze like trolls in trailers ten yards away, and two more, in the upstair's bed, have the presence of mind to mumble something about a cursed blighter as they smile drowsily and burrow deeper beneath the sheets.
Woe to the first person to show signs of repose tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Done
1. Picked up a kilo and a half of unpasteurized goat blow from my dealer on Hick's Road. Assurances were given that this is truly the good shit. Doubts niggle.
2. Baked two whole-wheat sourdough almond loaves as part of Operación Conquistaklaus. One was snatched from the cooling rack by a low flying Steller's Jay, the other picked to the bones by the Dome's long-whiskered resident rodent. Operación postponed.
3. Found: one bug in modeling code. Seeking exterminator.
4. Managed to slash a trench in Zoogle's leg with a piece of plywood spinning free in a power drill. The wound blends with his eczema, sunburn, diaper rash, carpetsores, and babypox, luckily.
5. Have played Stan's guitars. One is a certifiable piece of shit, the other a sort of blackmarket dung. No word on the accordian.
6. Have performed final rites for the tomatoes, one of the peppers, all the garlic, and a number of flowers. Have tentatively subcontracted keeners for the onions and the broccoli.
7. The idea of a triple bin composter received a very lukewarm response from the mother-in-law. Possible explanations: one, she knows that they don't work, two, she doubts our ability to generate that much compost, three, she doesn't want to have to look at the thing, four, she thinks they generate bad karma, five, she doubts my ability to make one, six, had a bad experience with triple-bin composters in the past and doesn't want to dredge up memories. All cards very close to the vest, as usual. Work proceeds without drive, wily-nily and at a sluggish pace.
8. Zoogle is back to his old tricks of running laps between the hours of 2 and 4 in the morning. It is not a matter of waking before or after he does: it is a matter of finding some five minute slice of time in the day when Dad-blear clears and I can remember whom to curse.
9. Rodents still duped by bird wire: cages on the raised beds continue sans chicken wire.
10. I am stiff as a German lip, bloated with pie crust, drowning in Walden, invisible to my wife, and a teething ring to my boy. No complaints.
2. Baked two whole-wheat sourdough almond loaves as part of Operación Conquistaklaus. One was snatched from the cooling rack by a low flying Steller's Jay, the other picked to the bones by the Dome's long-whiskered resident rodent. Operación postponed.
3. Found: one bug in modeling code. Seeking exterminator.
4. Managed to slash a trench in Zoogle's leg with a piece of plywood spinning free in a power drill. The wound blends with his eczema, sunburn, diaper rash, carpetsores, and babypox, luckily.
5. Have played Stan's guitars. One is a certifiable piece of shit, the other a sort of blackmarket dung. No word on the accordian.
6. Have performed final rites for the tomatoes, one of the peppers, all the garlic, and a number of flowers. Have tentatively subcontracted keeners for the onions and the broccoli.
7. The idea of a triple bin composter received a very lukewarm response from the mother-in-law. Possible explanations: one, she knows that they don't work, two, she doubts our ability to generate that much compost, three, she doesn't want to have to look at the thing, four, she thinks they generate bad karma, five, she doubts my ability to make one, six, had a bad experience with triple-bin composters in the past and doesn't want to dredge up memories. All cards very close to the vest, as usual. Work proceeds without drive, wily-nily and at a sluggish pace.
8. Zoogle is back to his old tricks of running laps between the hours of 2 and 4 in the morning. It is not a matter of waking before or after he does: it is a matter of finding some five minute slice of time in the day when Dad-blear clears and I can remember whom to curse.
9. Rodents still duped by bird wire: cages on the raised beds continue sans chicken wire.
10. I am stiff as a German lip, bloated with pie crust, drowning in Walden, invisible to my wife, and a teething ring to my boy. No complaints.
Friday, July 10, 2009
To Do
1. Read up on how goat's milk affects babies before accepting the 2 gallons/day that Eric's neighbors currently use to water the shrubs. (Note to self: find out if all goats are such boom-or-bust creations before buying one for your wife.)
2. Work on baking an authentic loaf of thick, crusty European Roggenbrot mit Sauerteig with which to dazzle and addict Klaus the Steiflippender Neighbor. Ulterior motive: loosen Klaus's Teuton tongue and start Z. on his third Muttersprache before he gets too old to hold it all in his head.
3. Finish at least one academic paper before I leave the mountains, that I might start on an essay when I reach the coast, that I might apply for grants and jobs when I reach the Burgh, that I might leave the rain-addled East forever for the glories of this open West.
4. Check in the morning to see if Zoogle still has blood seeping from his inner ear. If so, easy on tomorrow's variants of Cosme Cohete Hits Turbulence on Re-entry.
5. Do an internet search to see if Stan's $6000 vintage blood-tinged gaucho accordion with knife-scuffs might be had for somewhat less.
6. Water the flowers. Bury the tomatoes.
7. Buy two 10 foot pine two by fours, one 12 foot two by six, as many as six 8 foot one by sixes, though fewer if I can find suitable portions of one inch plywood lying around the house, six galvanized steel hinges and a sheet and a half of thick exterior plywood. Convert all this into a compost pile.
8. Wake up before Zoogle and get to work. Failing this, wake up after Zoogle and give thanks that you weren't on Redeye.
9. Add chicken wire to the rodent cages on the raised beds.
10. Do yoga, bake a pie, go to the lake, read Walden, love my wife, dandle my boy. Contemplate why I never get anything done during my summer vacation.
2. Work on baking an authentic loaf of thick, crusty European Roggenbrot mit Sauerteig with which to dazzle and addict Klaus the Steiflippender Neighbor. Ulterior motive: loosen Klaus's Teuton tongue and start Z. on his third Muttersprache before he gets too old to hold it all in his head.
3. Finish at least one academic paper before I leave the mountains, that I might start on an essay when I reach the coast, that I might apply for grants and jobs when I reach the Burgh, that I might leave the rain-addled East forever for the glories of this open West.
4. Check in the morning to see if Zoogle still has blood seeping from his inner ear. If so, easy on tomorrow's variants of Cosme Cohete Hits Turbulence on Re-entry.
5. Do an internet search to see if Stan's $6000 vintage blood-tinged gaucho accordion with knife-scuffs might be had for somewhat less.
6. Water the flowers. Bury the tomatoes.
7. Buy two 10 foot pine two by fours, one 12 foot two by six, as many as six 8 foot one by sixes, though fewer if I can find suitable portions of one inch plywood lying around the house, six galvanized steel hinges and a sheet and a half of thick exterior plywood. Convert all this into a compost pile.
8. Wake up before Zoogle and get to work. Failing this, wake up after Zoogle and give thanks that you weren't on Redeye.
9. Add chicken wire to the rodent cages on the raised beds.
10. Do yoga, bake a pie, go to the lake, read Walden, love my wife, dandle my boy. Contemplate why I never get anything done during my summer vacation.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Crank
Benny seems to be developing a troubled side. Setting him on his back for a diaper change is like setting him in boiling oil: the horrified shrieks and violent thrashing last for hours. When you offer him food in which he has no interest, he will hurl it contemptuously to the ground with one backhand sweep and stare with bored, irritated intensity at a spot on the far wall. He has also started to produce low, throaty growls, often for no reason. Though for the most part these growls are subdued affairs, somewhat unnerving but easy to write off as Tuvan warm up exercise, occasionally they snowball into spasms of white rage, eye popping, vein snapping contractions of anger whose raw emotional force lifts nape hairs throughout the room.
The fact that our child is developing a temper is perhaps not totally unexpected: he is, after all, the ill-begotten offspring of a fiery Latina and her grumbelpocks Toews of a husband. But expectations aside, he has been such a sweet child thus far that this shift to the cranky makes me wonder if something is happening to the boy. Could those three new teeth be torturing his gums? Has licking all the lead-infused construction dust littering the dome floor gone to his brain? Sunburn? Dehydration? Brown house spiders....?
We tend to think that watching a child pass through developmental milestones is a moving and uplifting process. What I have come to realize that it can also be somewhat demoralizing. The Zoogle that came out of the box was a wonderful creature, healthy, happy, perfect. At the One Month mark, the object of parenting seemed to consist of nothing more than holding steady at the helm: acting in such a way that this natural wonderfulness would just continue, in degree if not in form. What this naive vision overlooks, however, is that sweetness is no more intrinsic to our animal nature than frightful rage and violent displays of temper. Sweetness may be useful for convincing your mother not to throw you out with the compost, but rage is good back-up system, a terrifying efficient way of ensuring that she doesn't take you for granted and continues to feed you on schedule.
Benjamin is still a sweet child. His smile illuminates the room, and when he laughs that high, ridiculous giggle, there is not a heart in the world that can resist him. But slowly, a more complex creature is oozing into being. He is 'own little man', as my uncle recently said, willful, independent, conscious of what he likes and doesn't like and ruthless in letting you know it. And while this particular Crank may be short lived (he won't be in diapers forever), I strongly suspect that what we are seeing reflects some permanent stamp of character, a temperament that is at once fiery and stubborn and will last long into his adult life. Which is a sobering thought: if nape hair rises at the antics of a 25 pound cherub gone berserk, imagine the effect when he's a hairy chested six foot six 250 pound raging guerrilla of an adult. Which he will be in about two years, at the rate he's going.
The fact that our child is developing a temper is perhaps not totally unexpected: he is, after all, the ill-begotten offspring of a fiery Latina and her grumbelpocks Toews of a husband. But expectations aside, he has been such a sweet child thus far that this shift to the cranky makes me wonder if something is happening to the boy. Could those three new teeth be torturing his gums? Has licking all the lead-infused construction dust littering the dome floor gone to his brain? Sunburn? Dehydration? Brown house spiders....?
We tend to think that watching a child pass through developmental milestones is a moving and uplifting process. What I have come to realize that it can also be somewhat demoralizing. The Zoogle that came out of the box was a wonderful creature, healthy, happy, perfect. At the One Month mark, the object of parenting seemed to consist of nothing more than holding steady at the helm: acting in such a way that this natural wonderfulness would just continue, in degree if not in form. What this naive vision overlooks, however, is that sweetness is no more intrinsic to our animal nature than frightful rage and violent displays of temper. Sweetness may be useful for convincing your mother not to throw you out with the compost, but rage is good back-up system, a terrifying efficient way of ensuring that she doesn't take you for granted and continues to feed you on schedule.
Benjamin is still a sweet child. His smile illuminates the room, and when he laughs that high, ridiculous giggle, there is not a heart in the world that can resist him. But slowly, a more complex creature is oozing into being. He is 'own little man', as my uncle recently said, willful, independent, conscious of what he likes and doesn't like and ruthless in letting you know it. And while this particular Crank may be short lived (he won't be in diapers forever), I strongly suspect that what we are seeing reflects some permanent stamp of character, a temperament that is at once fiery and stubborn and will last long into his adult life. Which is a sobering thought: if nape hair rises at the antics of a 25 pound cherub gone berserk, imagine the effect when he's a hairy chested six foot six 250 pound raging guerrilla of an adult. Which he will be in about two years, at the rate he's going.
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