You know it's true.
Grey, in his 22-month-old wisdom, has decided that the bath is the perfect place to go number two. He did it a few days ago when Alisa was bathing him, and this morning he did it yet again, this time under my supervision.
Happy Squat
I’ve seen Caddy Shack and knew exactly what to do — I sounded the alarm, evacuated and drained the tub in a mild frenzy, and then meticulously sanitized it, gingerly removing the little larval confections, each lovingly wrapped in a wipe. In transit to the john, I was careful to support them evenly and avoid squeezing to maintain structural integrity. This, I thought, is fatherly devotion. We resumed the bath and not five minutes later, he delivered an encore, loudly announcing, “look, Daddy, look! All done. Out please.”
This is clearly no longer accident. Maybe Grey enjoys watching me clean. Or perhaps he thinks the tub offers all the advantages of a water birth — zero gravity, smoother delivery, greater comfort. I will ask him after his nap.
Posted in Grey, funny, home life, parenting, personal | 1 Comment »
“Let’s jump on the bed” was, as a child, an un-turn-down-able invitation. My brother and I LOVED jumping on beds — as we got older our favorite version was slaloming back and forth between two twin beds in my grandmother’s guest room, gleefully destroying bedspreads and mattress springs. Watching Declan and Grey jump on the bed (or try to in Grey’s case), with all the exuberance of first time sky divers, you see the magic of the play instinct at work — they are developing motor skills, getting a vigorous aerobic workout, and having the time of their lives, all without a monthly membership fee, from the comfort of home. I think this fits squarely in the “things that we can learn from kids” category.
Posted in Declan, Grey, home life, parenting | Leave a Comment »
Dear Declan –
On Sunday i took you to the Intrepid aircraft carrier off the west side highway in the 30s, a floating museum showcasing fighter jets, supersonic surveillance aircraft, a cruise missile bearing submarine, and other child-friendly chattels of the world’s reigning superpower. You were transfixed — you pulled at my arm and dragged me from exhibit to exhibit for a period of several hours and protested with all your four year old might (which is considerable) when we had to leave.
It was clear to me watching you (and myself, for that matter) that military equipment appeals to even kind, gentle boys like yourself on a deep, reptilian level. First there are what you call the “buttons and levers and controls” which fascinate you, whether it’s on a trash compactor or 1970s Soviet Mig. Then there is the physics-defying wonder of airplanes — the absurdity of the idea that massive steel objects weighing thousands of tons float through the air like birds. And finally there is the allure of pyrotechnics, and the idea that we can punish bad guys in a severe and precise manner, at a time of our choosing, as pentagon officials love to say. It’s like the boxing glove at the end of the long accordion-like scissors contraption that enables you to mete out punishment to the mean kids from a safe remove.
You asked me recently if there are any “bad guys” in New York. I told you there were only a few million, if you include the perpetrators of the recent worldwide economic implosion. You are very interested in bad guys lately — in identifying who they are and what we can do to them, but of course it’s all in a Bugs Bunny-like context right now, in which characters that get blown up end up with black faces, singed, smoking hair, and a desperate need for a good bath.
You nurturing side is also apparent in your recent obsession with “rescue helicopters” — you have a toy one at home, complete with a winch and a cot for injured people, and we had a lot of fun pretend-flying this one:
I have a hunch you and i will be seeing the Intrepid again soon.
xo, Dad
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August 24, 2008
Dear Declan –
This morning in the middle of brunch at the Whitney (Museum of Art, Sarah Beth’s downstairs, highly recommended), you pronounced, “Kids don’t like mushrooms.” You said it patiently, over-enunciating, slowly shaking your head, as if you were talking with your three year old son.
This is something you have starting doing lately — making grand proclamations about the habits of your tribe (kids), usually in an effort to negotiate something. This morning it was your desire not to eat to the mushrooms in your mother’s fritatta.
I am looking forward to further teachings, this week, on the ways of your people.
xo, Dad
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Shortly after Declan turned one, I set up a gmail account for him and began sending him emails, documenting little moments in his life. I recommend this approach — it’s a quick and easy way to store memories, given the ease of forwarding photos and thoughts from a cell phone. I have been going through the old files and am posting a few here for posterity:
August 19, 2008
Dear Declan –
Sometime in the summer of 2008 you began squinting and drawing your upper lip up like a retractable curtain when someone says “Smile!” This is a fascinating thing for a parent to watch — the incremental process of a little human (that would be you) becoming socially aware. Which is to say, becoming less sincere. Developing an intent, however clumsy and well intentioned, to deceive.
I think your lousy half smile is adorable. It’s the perfect response to an unreasonable request — that you smile on command. Smiling, is after all, a spontaneous expression of joy. It’s like someone, with a large camera lense for a nose, saying, “on your mark, get set, experience joy.” You may be correctly inferring right now that I am not very good at it either. I don’t blame you.
As a comrade in lousy fake smiling, i chose to interpret it as a sign of sincerity — it’s failed insincerity, after all. I like to think that a certain amount of social ineptitude — in your case, anyway, Declan — is a sign of good character. Here’s a real one:
love, Dad
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Amanda Little
My not-so-little sister Amanda has a new book the came out from Harper Collins today called POWER TRIP: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.
POWER TRIP is unlike any other book that I have read — it combines fearless, sometimes amusing Michael-Moore-style investigation with level-headed, deeply researched analysis of the history and future of energy. Amanda choppers out to a Gulf of Mexico oil rig to explore the latest drilling technology; crawls down a manhole to examine New York’s electricity grid; joins T. Boone Picken’s on his private jet for a tour of the world’s biggest wind farm; talks renewable energy with top brass in the catacombs of the Pentagon; and shares a play-by-play of a silicon breast implant (it is petroleum derived, after all). The result is sugar-coated spinach — an important book on a critical subject that you’ll love even if you don’t give a flying tahooty about the likelihood that we will all be wearing Water Wings in 50 years.
Though it may be reasonable to assume that my vision is blurred by my affection and admiration for my sister, the same cannot be said of Robert Redford, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Pulitzer Prize winning Daniel Yergin, all of whom rave about the book (see below), not to mention Kirkus, who called it in a starred review “one of the best books on the energy crisis to emerge in recent years.”
You can the book here http://bit.ly/IaeZP and visit Amanda’s website here http://www.amandalittle.com/.
“Power Trip offers a panoramic view of our energy crisis, exploring past, present, and future with hope, passion and humor. Whether you are liberal or conservative, expert or novice, young or old, you’ll find adventure and insight in this book.”
—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. President, Waterkeeper Alliance
“Amanda Little takes a crucial and complicated issue and weaves a fast, fun, gripping story. She represents the best of a new young perspective, a new voice of green.”
—Robert Redford
“A wonderfully illuminating voyage. Little charts a fresh path outside the usual doctrinaire accounts on energy. Her intelligence and enthusiasm will change the way you think about the future.”
—Steven Johnson, bestselling author of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air
“Lively, engaging and most thought-provoking, Power Trip takes us on a journey through the very wide world of energy, from its colorful past to its high-tech future. Little answers the questions that perplex many — and, so importantly, identifies the key questions that only the future will answer.”
—Daniel Yergin, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
“Energy is the most important story in the world bar none, and no one has ever told it with more verve than Amanda Little. If you want to know how the world works, and why it may not work much longer, this is the book you need.”
—Bill McKibben, bestselling author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy
“It’s hard to imagine a book about energy that would appeal as much to a business executive as it would to an eco-activist–or, for that matter, to a soccer mom, a farmer, a politician or a student. Here it is. This provocative story about America’s love affair with energy is a must-read for everyone.”
—Jim Rogers, Chairman and CEO of Duke Energy
“Combine the historical intrigue of Jared Diamond, the journalistic flare of Tom Wolfe, and the passionate advocacy of Rachel Carson — and you get Power Trip. Amanda Little’s multifaceted approach makes this the one book about our energy past and future that everyone should read and all will enjoy.”
—Andrew Shapiro, founder and president of Green Order
“In her ambitious and highly readable first book, environmental journalist Little explains how the United States became addicted to fossil fuel–based energy and how we can break this addiction. . . . Jargon-free and written with a fine eye for detail— [POWER TRIP is] one of the best books on America’s energy crisis to emerge in recent years.”
—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged amanda little sister family | Leave a Comment »
Dear Declan –
Yesterday, sitting on my lap as I took off my shoes after a long day of work, you said to me, “Daddy, sometimes during the day I miss you, and then I look at your shoes and I don’t miss you any more.”
What was extraordinary about this is that you said it as a statement of fact, reporting on your experience, without sentimentality. You had found a solution to a problem. This of course caused me, a grown up already on the sappy side before having kids, to be that much more overcome by the sweetness of your comment.
Posted in Declan, home life, parenting, sappy | Tagged Dear Declan fatherhood sappy | 3 Comments »
On Thursday I learned that the contents of unit 3099 of American Self Storage on Clinton Street in Brooklyn — including a file cabinet stuffed with papers and computer disks containing everything I wrote between about 1983 and 2003 – was sold to the highest bidder in an auction. Also in the unit: all of my wife Alisa’s photographs, for which she has no duplicates, from her childhood, teens, and twenties; her birth certificate; a turn-of-the-century, twenty volume encyclopedia of literature and philosophy, illustrated with beautiful etchings, that we bought from a library in the Berkshires and never would have read but loved the idea of reading during a sabbatical; four well-used beach chairs, an antique dining table that my father gave us as a wedding gift, beautiful but not quite right for our apartment which caused us guilt; and roughly 8 feet cubed of other furniture, junk and memorabilia we couldn’t bring ourselves to properly archive or throw away, the detritus of the first half of our lives.
The auctioneer, a nice man in his 60s named Don Bader, told me he has “no beef with us” and says that we sound “very nice.” He put in a call to the man who bought our belongings – “a family man who doesn’t a speak good English,” he tells me — but we should assume that he has already thrown out all of our photographs and papers.
This misfortune was caused by a combination of my lackluster bill paying skills, and the ineptitude, and quite possibly criminal neglect, of American self-storage. Long story short: my credit card number changed a couple months ago, and I entirely forgot that this would cause my storage auto-pay to fail. In mid-July, while we were in vacation in Maine, American Self-Storage – hereafter ASS – left two rather cryptic messages on my cell phone asking me to “call them.” I figured it was about the credit card and called them last Thursday to update it. I was told that our belongings were sold on August 3.
What I feel, more than anything else, is the sense of loss that a prosecuting attorney must feel when critical evidence is destroyed. Evidence of my younger self – how I thought, felt, came at the world. I remember plenty, of course, but I have become much more aware in the last few years of what a small subset of the whole we recall. I used to think memory was a colander that catches experiences of outsized significance to us, for one reason or another; now I think it’s more like a pair of tongs, and life, a conveyer belt of events. It’s not that we forget some things or a portion of our experiences; it’s that we forget most things.
The experiencing of having two kids has driven this home – during Declan’s first year I was amazed by how much my parents and friends had forgotten about the details of early parenthood; during Grey’s first year I was amazed by how much I had forgotten about Declan’s first year.
This may seem like a rather grim way to start a blog – my first blog, at the tender age of 41 – but it feels appropriate to begin with a great loss of memory, because the loss has motivated me to pull the trigger on this project. The purpose of this blog is to harvest memory – if the present is a combine mowing down moments (thanks for indulging me here), this blog is a bin in which to catch them. My storage unit may be empty due to late bill payment, but my kids’ are empty because they have just begun to live.
Posted in home life, resolutions | 2 Comments »
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