A Boy of Our Own

Zoogle's first birthday may have been a symbolic milestone, but it came and went with amazingly little fanfare. Catalina bought a metallic helium-filled balloon with "Happy Birthday!" stenciled in red letters on both sides, and Benjamin spent most of the day staring at the ceiling, pondering the perversities of a Law of Gravity that worked one way for unwanted peas and another way for shiny oblongs. Whenever the problem became too complicated, he would grab the balloon by its ribbon and attack it with his teeth. Later in the day there were a couple of gifts, packages left by Chinabuela during our rendezvous in the dome. Though I thought about occupying my red-eye shift by letting Zoogle tear into the pretty wrapping paper, it occurred to me that this was a ceremony my wife might not wish to miss, and that I should probably wait until evening. Alas: she apparently assumed me too much the Grinch to care, because by the time I got home from the office, the wrapping was in shreds and Zoogle had long since read, drooled on, bent, and forgotten its contents. (My wife did have the delicacy to capture this moment on film, however. Here is a link, if you're interested.) In the evening we ate birthday pie, some low-sugar local organic peach concoction with an all butter crust, garnished with the green wax of the single candle that no amount of coaching could induce Zoogle to blow out. He went to bed late, and after a postprandial tea we followed suit, dropping like old fruit on spent soil.

And thus the First Year came to a close. Discussing the mind-blowing fact that we'd been playing the Parent Game for a full twelve months, Catalina and I agreed that Time in the presence of a child is like space in the presence of worm-hole: strongly distorted, obliteratingly intense. Interestingly, neither of us can describe this "Zoogle Effect" with any accuracy: on the one hand, we feel that time essentially hasn't moved since the boy came off production, and the other that it flies along at breakneck speed. Perhaps our inability to describe the New Time has to do with the fact that it has bifurcated, and now there are two Times, one local, one global. Locally, i.e. on the level of the Everyday, Time is this wild, whooshing thing; I think of a drunken 19th century London cabbie careening along rough cobblestones on a dark night with a mad mare and willing wench, though doubtless other metaphors would work. Globally, however, it is completely static: on the level of personal memory, Time is a large stone in a windless dessert, immovable, unchanging, empty and fixed. I ask ourselves what I did this year, and though I massage my temples and pull at my graying hairs, racking my tired memory for a clue, I keep coming back to the single fact that we took care of Benjamin. There were a few trips to the park, and I do seem to recall a little travel here and there, but the fact of the Child is so vivid and pressing and inescapable that it obliterates almost everything else.

The fact that Parenting looms so large in my memory doubtless has something to do with the sheer number of waking (and no so waking) hours it has occupied. Tom Beem was telling me about a book called "This Is Your Brain on Music", in which there was a theory that professionalism is really a function of 'hours logged', and that after 10,000 hours of doing anything, anyone with even a modicum of talent can rightly call themselves a professional. I find the theory suspicious, but I do feel that the obliterating intensity of the Child provides an interesting context in which to subject it to interpretation. Could it be that after so many long night of cooing, so many diapers changed, so many fingers wackled and lips puckered and faces pulled, that after all this my brain has actually custom molded itself to the task of child-rearing? That the mental resources siphoned into fatherhood uprooted vast dendrite fields and pruned my neural trees? The thought gives me the jeebies. Still, I know that Time is a powerful shaper, and it is an indisputable fact that a disproportionate percentage of my consciousness last year was devoted to thinking about my kid. Painful thought it be, perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that when I think about this year, all I see is the monochrome tundra of Baby.

Of course even Baby admits outside influence, and we have tried to keep at least a tenuous hand on the arts. Last night, for example, Catalina and I saw a film. It was the first film we'd seen for almost a year, and as we snuggled beneath into the couch with our tea and our blankets, I was reminded of a similar night shortly after Benjamin was born, a time when we were so exhausted that to actually stay up and enjoy ourselves seemed an outrageous gesture of defiance. But though I was delighted to be visited by this nostalgic vision of the New Parent, I realized that there were critical details about that viewing that I couldn't reconstruct. Were we holding him? Was he sleeping? I remember Zoogle sitting in his papasan, facing away from the T.V., but I find it unfathomable that there was ever a time when this rambunctious and restless child could have slept so deeply that the noise from the television wouldn't have woken him.

And suddenly the sheer magnitude of the experience I have forgotten comes crashing in on me. In a flash I remembered that initial two or three months when we would bring him tucked in a ring-sling to the cafŽ, and we would order our coffee with cool urban Žlan and sit down and get to work. Work? With Benjamin? These days the idea is so foreign as to be laughable. I don't remember how he used to look or how he used to sleep or when he used to smile or what noises he used to make. And I realize that at some point there was a definitive transition, a point when he moved from Baby to Boy, and I'm stunned that I never noticed it, that I never fixed in my mind that critical tipping point when our child made the irreversible passage from some ridiculous Carry-On to this willful and wonderful Person that we have on our hands today.

Children are reputed to have a focusing effect: once you've got a child, it's impossible not to start thinking in terms of the rest of your life. Predictably, Benjamin has had this effect on us. I've just finished reading a book entitled "A Place of My Own", a thoughtful meditation on architecture, space, America, fashion, and society by the same guy who told us about Maize Walking in the "Omnivores Dilemma." Michael Pollan wrote the book when he was expecting his first child, and though it chronicles his attempts to design and build a "writing house" in response to the shifting winds of his professional calling, there is a strong sense that this foray into nestcraft is motivated as much to have something to show his son as to have space in which to work.

Both themes, new fatherhood and drifting interests, are dear to me, and already I've got the bug, already I want to be off building something, laying foundations and raising roofs. In some ways a lot of the negative energy surrounding my relation with Pittsburgh last year had more to do with this constructivist impulse than the city itself: now that I've returned after a long, clarifying hiatus in the mountains, I see that the real problem with this city is merely that it's not a place I wish to build in, and that at this particular juncture in my life, building (au sense plus grand du terme) is exactly what I want to be doing.

The realization is healthy. It has normalized my relation with the city: we're friends again. And though I wish dearly that I had some better sense of the future, of either what I wanted to be doing or where I wanted to be doing it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the continuing tug of this new, rambunctious lifeform that seems to have found its way into our household is going to act as a clarifying agent. To be unmoored in the world when time drifts at the slow pace of the Self is one thing, quite another is to be unmoored when time is a raging bundle of curiosity careening at breakneck speed around the corners of the Collective. For better or for worse, Benjamin is now our Secret Sharer, an embedded perceptive intelligence who someday will produce questions that require brave and unapologetic responses. It is my fervent hope that under his tutelage, we will learn to live in such a way that we'll have those answers when we need them.