I got up late this morning and walked into the family room. Benjamin was sitting at the corner of our big round couch eating a toaster waffle. He looked, newly de-mulleted (first haircut yesterday), wearing a red zip-up sweater. Tricia was taking a cup of lukewarm coffee off of the table next to him. “I gave him the waffle and he just came in here and sat down where I was studying. Then he picked up my pen and used it to stir my coffee.” There was an informal handoff: Tricia went off to the bathroom, and I watched Benjie, poured him some milk, and started a kettle of water for myself.
“Good morning. Hey, do you want to watch some Sesame Street?”
Clear as anything, Benjie sang out the first three notes of the Sesame Street song. “Dooo doo-doo.” Not quite enough that royalties would have to be paid if it had been broadcast, but enough that the music could be recognized, and enough to impress me.
A week ago, I picked him up from daycare a couple of hours early. I walked into the classroom, navigated the childproof gate, and found him and another boy huddled over a xylophone. When Benjie heard my voice, he turned and started to run toward me. Halfway across the room, he hesitated. He turned around and walked back over to the other boy. He bent down onto his knees, put his hand on the boys shoulder, and looked him straight in the eye before turning around again and walking calmly back toward me.
A coworker just pointed out two red-headed conures squawking away on the power lines outside our office.
The title for the job ad says, “This is not a job.” I think that this is a coded reference to the Rene Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images.” So I follow the link, and the first line says “…it is a career!!” Two exclamation points.
Yesterday on the bike path that we walk on to get to the park and the plaza in our new suburban neighborhood, I noticed a sprinkling of orange flowers (this kind), all wound tightly into little buds. In Seattle these flowers are already open, I told Tricia. This morning I walked up the same path. The flowers had all opened up and flattened out wider than I ever see them in Seattle.
If you see interview footage of me on the local news saying something intelligent about security cameras in parks, then I assure you that my words were taken completely out of context. My answers were actually inarticulate and internally inconsistent.
If there’s footage of me playing with my son in that news story (captured perhaps by security cameras), and if it looks like I knocked a three year old girl in the head with the back of a swing, that’s exactly what happened, and I regret it.
When cell phone miniaturization advances to the point that Bluetooth earpieces are tiny beads that fit into a user’s ear canal, it will be more difficult to tell assholes from everyone else.
A passing remark by Dan helped me find the appropriate home for Benjamin’s web presence.
When I clicked on the link to badspock.blogspot.com (via Tom), I had the fully formed image of a blog about current events written from the point of view of the parallel universe Spock from the episode Mirror, Mirror — the one who had a goatee and who wasn’t bad himself, so much as he was from a bad universe.
The site is instead a collection of bad drawings of Spock, an infinitely better idea than mine.
Somewhere in a box at my parents house (or possibly in a landfill) there’s a bad drawing of Spock’s father, Sarek, along with the characters known only as Romulan Commander from Balance of Terror and Klingon Commander from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, drawn by me twenty years ago and signed by Mark Leonard, the actor who played all three characters. (Oh, my long suffering parents! They put hundreds of miles on their cars taking me to Star Trek conventions. Benjamin, spare me.)
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Benjamin and I spent the afternoon walking around Berkeley while Tricia went to interviews. Our stroll stretched longer than expected as Tricia’s interviews ran late. I was armed with enough diapers and formula to keep Benjamin dry and fed. He had a bottle and flirted with girls at the Peet’s by the BART station, and he napped in the Baby Bjorn while I browsed bookstores. We had a good time. Tricia finally found us after six, finishing our dinners at a cafe on Telegraph Avenue. We were happy to see her, Benjamin to the point of bliss. We shared a brief reunion. Then, business-like, Tricia and I loaded Benjamin into his back-facing car seat, strapped it into the rental car, and headed back across the Bay. Tricia took the wheel: “I’ll drive. I’m already sort of in that mode.”
Benjie reached the end of his patience in the car. He started to fuss. I pulled faces and made funny noises, cheap laughs that got us through the toll booth and onto the Bridge. Tricia sang to him from the drivers seat. But by the time we’d crossed Treasure Island, Benjie had broken down, crying and babbling, “Ba-ba-bababa”, inconsolable. The “baba”-babbling has been a familiar sound in the last three weeks. Today it was more insistent than we’d heard it before; and somewhere over the Bay, we realized that Benjamin’s “Bababba” was starting to sound a lot like “Mamama.” Benjamin taught us his first word today.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Benjamin has started to favor his thumb over his foot. Progress.