ever-fixed mark

We’ve just returned from my brother’s wedding in Florida. That means that Aitch has been sleeping in a hotel for the better part of two weeks. Aitch, like Eloise, is eminently suited to hotel life. He has an active and social disposition and loves to explore any new environment at full speed. Push all the elevator buttons! Run up and down the hallway! Climb on some strange man’s lap in the restaurant! Dash to the edge of the pool! He occasionally takes a break, but only at the most inopportune times.

Aitch’s parents, on the other hand, are active and social only in measured doses. At virtually all other times, we prefer to read. We read magazines in the bathroom, books before bed, and newspapers at meals. We read e-mail and blogs during conference calls. In the event of an emergency — for example, being stuck on a long plane flight after having exhausted all reading material — we make anagrams out of any visible text:

A CAB DEED UNIFIES CHINESE SNOUTS TO ‘VOLT, CA

When traveling, as you can imagine, Aitch’s need for speed comes into direct conflict with our need to read. Guess who wins? Here’s a hint: We are exhausted.

It’s a bit strange, having a child whose personality is so different from ours. I suppose we knew, intellectually, that our child would not come out of the womb clutching a New York Times and a backup Economist, but we thought there would be lulls. Our hopes of turning Aitch into a nice quiet, indoor, anti-social geek or bookworm are faint. Our aspirations for an occasional quiet interlude are pretty much pinned on child #2 now.

When we returned from our trip, we found a Notice of Favorable Disposition Concerning Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition in our mailbox. This means that the government is finally satisfied that we are not felons. We’re that much closer to having a second child in our family. We’re on the list!

“Honey, after you meet with the social worker about getting the kids back, could you pick up a fifth of vodka?”

We have no idea why the general public is compelled to ascertain potential biological ties between adopted siblings, to the point where they feel justified asking probing questions of their parents. If you’re on the receiving end of such a question, here’s an answer that could serve you well. I’m still laughing.

There’s a lot of down time at a wake, time that begs to be filled with conversation. In fact, standing around talking is pretty much the intended principal occupation of wake-goers, if I’m reading the situation correctly. And during periods of low mourner traffic, family members have no one to talk to but each other, which is probably how most of those I-wanted-the-breakfront family feuds get started.

So, at my father-in-law’s wake, Husband and his brother were reaching for conversational topics and arrived at the subject of parenting tips. Brother-in-law — a former military man who has requested that we address him as “Patriarch” in recognition of his new standing in the family — has an interesting technique that he calls “the chirp.” Basically, he’s trained his children to respond to him instantly when he emits an unobtrusive chirping noise. I’ve seen his college-age son stop dead in his tracks and rush to his dad’s side when chirped at from across a crowded, noisy room, then fetch his dad a beer at his request. Good stuff, this.

To keep the conversation going, Husband offered up the tidbit that we were considering not doing the Santa Claus thing to the hilt at Christmas. We’d still teach Aitch the story — you could hardly avoid it — but we don’t want to go the extra step of insisting that Santa’s real.

I should preface this story by saying that our anti-Claus stance is not motivated by a strong, unshakeable conviction. We don’t think that children will be scarred for life if they believe in Santa Claus for a while, but we don’t think they’ll be scarred if they don’t believe, either. Our main objection to Santa is that is seems kind of unnecessary. Kids have great imaginations — why ruin a pleasurable fictional experience by insisting on its reality, and then tying yourself in knots explaining the obvious contradictions until the child’s reasoning faculties progress to the point where he can prove you wrong with authority?

It’s interesting, though, that encouraging a child’s belief in Santa Claus conflicts with both rationalism and Christianity. Pre-disillusionment, the rationalist can hardly promote the concept of a telepathic elf while simultaneously debunking the supernatural. Post-disillusionment, the Christian can hardly admit the fallacy of Santa Claus while insisting that God is still alive.

Anyway, during the dinner break, Brother-in-Law decided that he would have some fun with this information, and he let the Tribal Council (Husband’s four sisters) in on the Santa veto. At this point all hell broke loose, in a merry kind of way. The Tribal Council ganged up on Husband and peppered him with objections. We’ll deprive Aitch of the magic of Christmas! The other parents will crucify us when Aitch tells their kids that Santa’s a fake! We’ll lose a prime blackmailing opportunity! It was rather entertaining to see Husband trying to cope with being scolded by four sisters at once, not to mention several nieces and a sister-in-law who got in on the act.

So the various in-laws began plotting Ninja maneuvers to trick Aitch into believing in Santa in spite of us. They conspired to sneak up to our house on Christmas Eve, make sleigh tracks in the snow and reindeer noises on the roof, play Christmas carols while Aitch slept, etc. It was all in good fun until Mother-in-Law got wind of the conversation, and said angrily:

“You can’t deprive that child of the magic of Santa Claus. If you’re going to do that, he would have been better off if you left him where you got him.”

?!

I don’t even know where to begin parsing that. Let’s put aside, for the moment, the veiled insult to Aitch (i.e., a commodity that might be returned if conditions didn’t suit) and the blatant insult to us (i.e., we’re such bad parents that Aitch would be better off without us).

All that aside…the cornerstone of her belief system, the bedrock of Western civilization for her, is Santa Claus? I mean, Santa Claus? This piece of fiction, this invention of retailers, this parental untruth is the litmus test that would fail us as parents?

On Saturday morning, as Husband and I were packing up the car to travel to New York for his father’s funeral, we learned that at my mother-in-law’s direction, the funeral observances were going to be delayed a day and lengthened a day. In other words, our three-day trip with a two-year-old was now a five-day trip with a two-year-old. The wake would now be two full days.

I had never attended a traditional Irish wake before — traditional in the sense of a prolonged public morning period; there was no drinking or singing of “Danny Boy.” The family installed itself a funeral home for two days, along with the open casket, and friends came to visit and condole. Incredibly, to me, many people came to visit on both days and stayed for hours — and then showed up at the funeral home, the Mass, the burial, and the luncheon on the third day. It was touching to witness that commitment to the community and the honor and respect paid to my father-in-law. It might have been more touching had Husband and I not spent so much time chasing after our rambunctious little Aitch, completely unimpressed with the solemnity of the occasion. Luckily, when he charged the casket, jumped up on the kneeler, and yelled “Hi! Hi!” at his grandfather, everyone thought it was cute.

Mercifully, my sister-in-law arranged for babysitting for the evening wake periods. The first night, the babysitter arrived at my sister-in-law’s house during the dinner break between afternoon and evening sessions. I was a bit nervous about leaving Aitch and his allergies with someone who did not have experience with the Epipen, but I coached her carefully on foods to avoid and had her practice with the Epipen trainer. After instilling her with a healthy amount of fear, I left Aitch in her care. He cried for a few minutes, then all was well.

The next night, that girl was not available, so another girl was enlisted. She arrived while I was eating dinner in the back yard. This time, I delegated allergy-training duties to Husband and resumed my dinner. Five minutes later, he came dashing back: “I injected myself!”

“You what?”

“I was showing the babysitter how to use the Epipen, and I injected myself.”

“How on Earth did you do that?”

As it happens, Husband couldn’t be bothered to track down the Epipen trainer in the car, so he used the live pen to demonstrate. In spite of the fact that the illustration on the Epipen directions looks like this,

Husband somehow got the idea that you could take the Epipen out of its container, take off the little gray cap, and jam it into your thigh, but it would not activate unless you actually put your thumb on the cap end. For the record, this is not the case. For the record, removing the gray cap is like the removing the “safety,”and pushing the business end against the flesh is like pulling the trigger.

(Also for the record, I object to the sitcom-stereotype of the bumbling husband/father juxtaposed against the know-it-all wife and mom. It’s sexist and trite. But what can I do? Would you look at the material he gives me to work with? This stuff does not invent itself.)

Silly me — I thought we’d be doing shots of whiskey at an Irish wake.

Over on the Holt board, a young Korean-American woman posted asking for legal advice for her uncle, who proposed that the woman’s parents adopt his young daughter. The girl’s mother had absconded, and her father thought that it would be better for her to grow up with an intact family in the US than with a single parent in Korea. Although she politely asked, “[P]lease no flames about her family sending her to us. Korean culture is a bit different,” she was flamed pretty hard with responses accusing her parents of being deceptive in trying to sneak an illegal immigrant into the country to get that superior American education. The poster noted that this was not the reason, and her father was a pastor who was eager to abide by the law, but responses continued to be critical. Obviously the idea of a competent parent placing an older child for an open adoption, motivated by a complex set of factors, rankled — as if there were “good adoption plans” and “bad adoption plans.”

Cultures are different. My paternal grandmother was raised in an orphanage, although she was not an orphan. Her father was alive, but her mother was dead, so he placed his daughter with nuns in Philadelphia — 45 miles from his home in Reading, before the days of quick highway travel. He was a businessman, a Greek immigrant who made trips back and forth to the old country, so he may not have been able to care for her consistently.

My grandmother did visit him periodically, though. He must not have been a very observant chaperone because during one of those visits, when she was 15, she met a 30-year-old man and became pregnant with his child. It wasn’t until after she delivered her daughter in the orphanage that she gave up the name of her seducer. State troopers were dispatched to Reading to pick up the man who would become my grandfather and offer him the choice between marriage and jail. They went on to have four more children together. I wonder what would have happened if she never told, though, or if he had fled — would they have raised her child in the orphanage along with her? Arranged for the baby’s adoption?

My other grandmother also experienced the death of her mother at a young age. After the funeral, her father took her and her younger sister to a photographer so their portrait could be sent to some cousins in Canada, who might be interested in adopting them. The cousins could only take one girl, the youngest, but my great-grandfather did not want the sisters to be split up. He remarried quickly, a formidable-looking battle-ax with a daughter of her own whom my great-aunt has characterized as an evil stepmother.

My father-in-law was born on a small island off the western coast of Ireland, near Galway. The island, reachable only by ferry to this day, was isolated, and sheep farming, fishing, and immigration were pretty much the only career paths. My father-in-law’s parents departed for America when he was young, leaving him in the care of an aunt. The aunt eventually emigrated with him to Liverpool, then to New York, where he was finally, at age 14, able to join his long-absent parents.

I’ve wondered whether it was jarring for him, suddenly reunited with strangers he was expected to call Mum and Da. I never had the opportunity to ask him. He died on Saturday, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Even when I first met him seven years ago, he was unable to carry on a conversation of that sort. Husband and his sisters and brother are not aware of any animosity my father-in-law carried for his parents, or even that he thought his situation was in any way unusual or remarkable.

Aitch met his grandfather once, thanks to my sister-in-law, but my father-in-law has never really met Aitch. We’re not sure what my father-in-law, a veteran who spent WWII in the Japanese theater, would have thought about having an Asian grandson. But they do have that odd thing in common — both were relinquished by their birth parents, presumably so all concerned could have a better life.

A few weeks ago, Husband and I saw Batman. I liked the movie a lot but had two quibbles. First, the bat special effects seemed really cheesy. Individual bats flailed around spastically, about as realistic as the Muppets that accompany the Count as he counts down the number of the day. Second, I couldn’t believe that young Bruce Wayne would have been so frightened of the bats. Bats don’t bite; surely you could endure a little flapping about your head without getting all wigged about it.

On Monday night, I was checking e-mail on the machine in the kitchen when I saw something that looked like a cheesy special effects Muppet bat flailing spastically into the kitchen, then back out.

I shrieked and barricaded myself in the den, demanding that Husband remove the bat. Then, since the camera was handy in a kitchen drawer, I grabbed it for documentary purposes. Here is a brief video of Husband trying to subdue the bat and the bat making its escape and flying directly into the camera. I have edited out my screaming:

Very Blair Witch Project, eh? “We found this footage in the kitchen, and she’s never been heard from again.”

You say you missed it? Well, I couldn’t hold the camera steady because I was yelling and running. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the bat, but he seemed so skittish and uncoordinated that I thought he might run right into me, and I didn’t want to feel furry bat wings in my teeth.

I was rather disappointed in my failure to capture the bat on camera and decided to see if my iMovie editing software could tease out the image. I mean, on CSI they would have been able to identify the bat genus and sex, as well as the murderer’s license plate number reflected in Batzilla’s beady little eyes.

And here it is:

Animal activists will be happy to know that Husband managed to capture the bat alive and released him into the relative wilderness of our back yard, where, I’m sure, he promptly rejoined his little bat friends and they had a good laugh over the ugly inherited pseudo-Victorian wallpaper in our living room. Aitch and Dog slept through the whole thing. Holy bat-racket, Batman!

Yesterday, Husband and I shook off the dust of the Yankee Homecoming parade and went a few blocks down the street to hear Richard Thompson in concert. Thompson sandwiched us in between two bigger and better things: The Newport Folk Festival on Saturday, and a gig at Joe’s Pub in New York on Monday. I’m not sure why Thompson keeps coming back to Newburyport, where he’s forced to play venues like the middle school auditorium and — big step up this year — the high school auditorium, but we’re not complaining. Once again, he was brilliant.

We abruptly foisted Aitch on the babysitter and dashed to the high school to find that the concert was sold out. One of our dog-walking friends, though, was standing at the entrance trying to get rid of an extra ticket. She was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to find a second ticket, and wanted to give us hers without paying, but we finally convinced her to take the cash for it. Then when the promoter heard that we lacked just one ticket, he graciously let us have an extra seat.

We had just settled in among a few hundred beret-wearing Thompson fans a few minutes before the opening act, Syd Straw, started up. Straw is a singer/songwriter in the folkie, Phoebe Buffet mode. She had an interesting voice and some good songs, but her guitar playing was strangely reminiscent of mine — four unvarying strums to a measure, just the chords, thank you very much. She appeared with her dog, a yellow Lab who wandered in and out of the wings, tail wagging.

What a contrast to Thompson, whose solo guitar sounded like a bass, two or three rhythm guitars, and a drum kit all rolled up into one. I don’t know much about guitar technique, even though my father’s a musician, but Thompson sounds like a virtuoso to me. This article gives a good description of the sound. Thompson was in terrific voice and, as always, very entertaining. He has a new album coming out, but any of his earlier work would make a fine addition to your collection if you haven’t yet had the pleasure.

Husband and I first heard of Thompson when Lin Brehmer opined that Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” was one of the two best rock and roll songs of all time. That’s a pretty bold claim for a DJ to make, and we would follow Lin Brehmer off the edge of a cliff if he said there was a good band down there, so we had to check it out. It is a fine song, indeed, and the guitar is especially good. Thompson’s also good at light comic songs — he unveiled one from his new disc, “Hots for Smarts” (in his accent, it rhymes), soon to be the anthem for girls who wear glasses everywhere.

Today, our city’s annual week-long Yankee Homecoming festival culminated in the traditional parade, which runs right past our front door. The celebrations — dozens of food stands, outdoor concerts, two road races, a bed race, and other special events — draws locals, tourists, and former ‘Portions. As the name suggests, it’s a Homecoming for an entire town, and a perfect excuse to stroll around eating ice cream for seven nights running.

The majority of the parade consists of about seventy-five (no exaggeration, just a realistic estimate) fire engines rolling slowly down two miles of street, sirens blaring the whole way. The following clip from last year’s parade should give you a good idea of the din, which persists for about half an hour:

Now here’s a clip showing what Aitch was doing during the entire fire engine serenade:

Unbelievable, eh? I put him down for a nap about a minute and a half before the first truck started wailing. Aitch’s room is at the front of the house, yards from the street. (I did eventually go upstairs and remove the blanket from his face.)

Ironically, minutes after the parade ended and the siren cacophony had finally died down, a fire alarm went off at the house across the street, and two of the seventy-five engines had to circle back to respond–the two, I imagine, that drew the short straws at the post-parade festivities.

Thus ends Yankee Homecoming for another year. Now the Yankees go home, and we have to start cooking our meals rather than eating from food trucks every night. We’ll miss the ice cream.

In June, the House of Representatives approved the proposed Flag Desecration Amendment to the Constitution. Although the title of this amendment suggests that it favors flag-burning, it actually states, “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” The measure now goes to the Senate for approval. The House has passed this amendment five times before, and five times the Senate has failed to obtain the two-thirds majority needed to approve it, but this time there is some legitimate concern that the Senate has grown so conservative that they will pass it.

If you’re a commie pinko Massachusetts liberal, you think the proposed amendment is a disgraceful abridgment of First Amendment rights. If you’re an uptight God-fearing knee-jerk neocon, you think it is a patriotic measure that is absolutely necessary to protect our symbol of freedom.

The question is, what do the robots think?

Husband and I went out to lunch today secure in the knowledge that our Roomba was vacuuming our floors. We came home to find this:

A few possibilities:

1. This is a statement of opposition to the Flag Desecration Amendment. The robots are liberals. (Important clue: Where is iRobot’s headquarters? See?)

2. This is a statement of support for the Flag Desecration Amendment. The robot was trying to wrap itself in the flag, like a good conservative.

3. This is a statement of contempt for the US Constitution. The robots are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.