Kids Are People, Too

"I left London one Saturday afternoon in the autumn to make some arrangement about a son going to school."

So begins the last chapter of Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish A Room, the tenth volume of his hypnotic, twelve-volume A Dance To The Music of Time, which I read every night during the twenty minutes when a son's nursing coincides with another son's bath.

Elsewhere Powell refers to his children as "it" or, mostly, not at all. Strange to be a father when so many of my literary role models have no kids, or had kids before kids were considered to be people, too. At the other extreme from Powell, Amy Fusselman writes well about parenting destroying her writing.

Pillow talk

I.
I took a walk with my father and sister tonight. He was telling us about a book he was reading about Confucius, a distant relation of mine. Tangentially, he mentioned that Lao-tze, according to legend, spent 80 years in his mother's womb and emerged a white-haired geezer!

II.
Not long afterward, back at home, I talked to S. about Duncan's sleep habits. Lately he's only content to snooze while in a semi-sitting position, within the compass of a boppy pillow. I joked that pretty soon he'd need to sleep in the circular "body pillow"—ehhh, too hard to explain, but basically it's this huge elongated pillow that you can turn into a circular seating thingy. (S. used it during her pregnancy, and we don't know what to do with it now.)

III.
Annnyway, this amusing dialogue made S. flash back to Jonathan Winters' character on Mork & Mindy—he played Mearth, Mork's child, who was much older-looking, since Morkans age backward.

Which made me bring up the Lao-tze anecdote my father had told me...

IV.
I turned on the radio. Odd sounds issued forth: David Garland's Spinning on Air. DG talks to the Chinese musician...who says her composition is based on a saying by...Lao-tze!

Hymns to the Duncan, Part II

I almost forgot: "And the Feeding Has Begun"

Ollister

Maybe this chart will help me keep my children straight. My wife and I are so sleep-deprived that we've been calling both our sons Ollister. Oliver is three while Alistair was born last month.

Oliver: naps when it's raining or after being asked to spell more than about ten words.

Alistair: naps if you walk around with him in your arms, or turn on the sink.

Oliver: smiles mostly when awake.

Alistair: smiles right after nursing, and a lot when he's asleep.

Oliver: loves Cosmic Collisions, a film at the Franklin Institute, viewable after putting on bulky coats, driving downtown and finding a parking space, and walking through the Human Heart and Space Command, where we first build rover cars.

Alistair: likes it when I spin the blue lampshade by the bed.

Hymns to the Duncan

I have found myself singing to Duncan a lot—sometimes this soothes him, other times he's indifferent, and occasionally it seems to provoke crying.

I suspected I would be singing him a lot of Beatles songs, with their appealing melodies, but for some reason Van Morrison has been on the Dadistan jukebox. The songs are:

"Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)"
"Beautiful Duncan" (after "Beautiful Vision")
"Sweet Thing"
End of "Cyprus Avenue" ("Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby...")

Will Ferrell double-feature

The TV in the delivery room had a movie channel, so during the long wait we/I watched (ratings are based on how engaged I was):

About half of 13 Going on 30 ***
National Treasure ****
The Bourne Supremacy (I drifted...) *1/2[?]
The Break-Up **1/2
Blades of Glory ****
Elf *

I read:
Nearly all of The New Yorker with the Jonathan Lethem story "The King of Sentences"; it also had the Malcolm Gladwell piece on IQ tests. ****
Nearly all of the Harper's with the Ben Marcus story ****
Some of P.G. Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth and Others ****

Conclusion: Literature is better than movies?

Baby Early, Daddy Late

Never go to Harrisburg two days before your wife is due to give birth. I had walked onto the set of the Harrisburg TV show where I would be talking about dangerous toys (like AquaDots, beads coated with a sticky substance that, when licked, turns into the date-rape drug rohypnol), when I got the Call. It was snowing outside and the only sure way to get back to Philadelphia in time was to take a taxi all the way. My driver fish-tailed before we'd left the TV station parking lot, so I decided to take the train and risk arriving late but safe.

Almost being late: my feeble contribution to Alistair's arrival, which happened forty minutes after we got to the hospital.