ever-fixed mark

Good morning, ma’am. This is the front desk with your six a.m wake-up call. It is currently 10 degrees outside. Have a wonderful day.

Dear Hyatt management,

You may want to reconsider the wake-up greeting for your Chicago area guests, at least until the weather turns.

Sincerely,

A cold guest

Since I last wrote about Minor’s problems with enunciation, I have noticed that a bunch of sounds I thought were just baby-babble are, in fact, words, words that are so inarticulate Minor has had to repeat them over days before some contextual clue alerted me to the meaning. The “Me know who God is” sentence was kind of an eye-opener; I hadn’t realized he was using sentences of three words or more. Now that I’m listening more closely I’ve been able to identify a lot more sentences, although I can’t always discern the meanings. He hasn’t been making progress on some sounds, like k and t, that most two-year-olds can say, which really inhibits understanding. In other words, his language development seems to be on-target, but his speech production definitely isn’t. At his two-year physical, I asked the nurse practitioner if this might be an artefact of his original hearing loss, prior to the tubes, or if he could some residual loss. She said it might be hearing loss or low muscle tone, and suggested both a hearing test and an evaluation by a speech pathologist.

Last week we went to the audiologist. I was very careful not to use the word “doctor” when we went into the exam room. Minor wasn’t afraid, but he was rather overstimulated by the new environment, and of course he hated having his ears examined. I tried to pay attention to the audiologist while simultaneously wrangling the baby, never an easy feat. Then we were seated in a soundproof booth with a window. Minor sat quietly while he set up the test, and for a brief moment I got to enjoy absolute silence. It was so peaceful. I never realized before how much ambient noise there is. I wondered how much it would cost to install a soundproof booth in our house? Do they make invisible soundproof rooms? Perhaps one with a toilet?

The test is structured very cleverly to capture feedback from an unreliable subject. There are two speakers on either side of the booth. The tester plays tones on each side. If the subject turns his head toward the correct tone, he’s assumed to have heard it. To encourage a small child to stick with the program, the tester activates a light box with a moving toy inside after he does turn his head.

Minor was completely on board with the test, turning his head for most of the sounds and looking eagerly for the moving toys. When the tester played high-pitched tones, though, he never turned his head. I thought he might have just lost interest, but sometimes he was looking in one direction saying, “More, more” when tones were playing in the other side. The audiologist confirmed that Minor has some high-frequency hearing loss, which is not too debilitating in an adult but may affect a child’s ability to speak. He recommended follow-ups with both an ENT and a speech pathologist.

After we got home, I called Early Intervention to make an appointment to have Minor evaluated. They called me back within fifteen minutes and said, “We just had a cancellation. Would today work for you?” So I rearranged my work schedule and called the preschool to tell them I would be picking Minor up just before nap time.

I wanted to walk Dog before the visit, so he wouldn’t be crazily attacking the EI people. I took him to the pond and brought my ice skates with me. Aitch loves to ice skate, although he has a pair of double-bladed skates so dull and rusted that he practically walks. I’m a weak skater, and I have been wanting to practice on my own so I can keep up with him. There is no better place to build confidence than a deserted, glassy pond on a cold, windless, bright winter day.

At 1:00 on the dot the EI people pulled up: a speech pathologist, a motor development expert, a student, and an administrator. I suddenly realized that having four strangers grill Minor in lieu of his nap might not be a recipe for success. He had been up for a few hours the night before, and then I had to wake him up for the eight a.m. audiologist appointment, which was in itself a bit stressful for him. When they arrived I had just given him a cup of yogurt. He spilled it and made a huge mess. I gave him a napkin and asked him to clean it up, and he assiduously wiped it all over the table. The EI people wrote it down: “Cleans up on request.” Already, he was more developmentally advanced than his father.

From that point on, he did wonderfully. He built a tower with blocks on command, put pegs in a pegboard, folded a piece of paper, found a toy that was being moved from one place to another in a baby version of the shell game. (I told the EI people we were training him to be a mountebank, and they just stared at me.) He responded to commands, uttered three-word sentences, tried to repeat words. He jumped up and down, climbed up the stairs without holding the railing, and (with me standing in front of him) climbed down the stairs without holding the railing (my God, when did he learn that?). In fact, the evaluators were so excited about his performance (”We should tape this as a model evaluation!”) that I thought they would pronounce him a genius. In fact, he was just at age level in everything; like many people who work with developmentally delayed children, they were just enthusiastic about the novelty of meeting a “typical.”

Technically, Minor did not qualify for services in any area. As the speech pathologist explained to me, though, for the purposes of the assessment, speech and language were assessed as a single category. The fact that Minor was able to ask a spontaneous question (”Balloon pop, Mommy?”) offset his lack of t’s and k’s. But the speech pathologist confirmed that he was not as intelligible as he should be at his age, and said that with a history of hearing loss she would recommend therapy. The therapist will come once a week, and at the end of six months he will be re-evaluated to see if he still qualifies for services. The therapist will come to the house. We will pay about $40 a month. The idea is that by providing services early, before he enters the school system, the state will not have to provide them later, when it is more expensive and harder to integrate with his curriculum. What a wonderful program! Hooray for big government that’s willing to apply a small number of resources now to forestall a bigger societal cost down the road.

By the time they left, Minor was completely baked. I didn’t want to put him down for a nap, so I decided to put him in the stroller and take him and Dog for a long walk. This used to be part of our regular routine when he was a baby, but since he stopped napping twice a day, he has not had the patience for aimless strolling. This time he fell asleep within five minutes, as I had anticipated, and Dog and I enjoyed a quiet walk in his somnolent company. It had turned cold and a bit overcast, but with sunlight still filtering through the clouds, and the streets were deserted. It gave me some time to process the words “hearing impairment” and think how odd it was that this label should be attached to Minor, who seemed, with the exception of a few consonants, to be functioning so well.

Warning: Mansfield Park spoilers ahead.

I hope they get it right.

Mansfield Park is a novel that has intrigued and infuriated me for years. When I first read it, I despised Fanny. When the Crawfords arrived on the scene roughly a quarter of the way through the novel, I thought, “Here is our heroine at last!” and I admired Austen for departing from convention. Mary was beautiful, worldly, witty, intelligent, and looking for love. In fact, she seemed to be the character (apart from her beauty) most like Jane Austen herself. When Henry started making love to Fanny, my suspicions were confirmed: the pairing would certainly be Henry/Fanny and Mary/Edmund.

When Henry fell from grace by running off with Maria, and Mary followed suit by making a crass remark about it to Edmund, I felt royally cheated. Surely Austen could not mean to pair milquetoast Fanny off with her milquetoast foster-brother? In the least romantic denouement in the Austen canon, that’s exactly what happens. Pthhhhhhbbbbbbbbbt.

I came back to Mansfield when I was a bit older, thinking I might have some more sympathy for Fanny as a heroine. Except…not so much. I still hated her and Edmund and their prissy morality. But I really came to admire the structure and wit of the novel. The scene at Rushworth’s house, with the young people playing wedding in the church, is masterful. (Best come-on to an engaged woman: “I do not like seeing Miss Bertram so near the altar.”) Lady Bertram with her pugs (and drugs?) is a terrific character. Somehow I had missed Mary’s extreme snarkiness the first time around (”Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”)

One thing, however, eluded me. What made Austen elevate Fanny to heroine status — Fanny, who seemed more like one of the minor characters in her earlier novels, an uptight foil to the heroine like Jane Fairfax was to Emma or Charlotte Lucas to Elizabeth Bennett? And what made her condemn Mary (or, at least, not redeem her) when she resembled no one so much as Emma or even Elizabeth? Was there something going on in Austen’s life that made her more circumspect, more pious, less tolerant of carelessness and levity? Or was she just trying something different?

Since I first read Mansfield I’ve been looking for a film adaptation that would illuminate this for me, one that would make me care about Fanny, one that would supply what I’m missing in my heart when I read the novel. The 1983 version is dull and plodding, and has the production values of a film shot a decade earlier. Sylvestra Le Touzel looks like a deer in the headlights, and she still makes me want to kick Fanny. (Le Touzel was much more relaxed as Mrs. Allen in last week’s Northanger Abbey.) The 1999 Patricia Rozema version is widely panned. It is not that bad, but it’s not really Austen either. In it, Fanny is changed into a spitfire who spouts some of Anne Eliot’s best dialogue.

So I am nervously awaiting tonight’s adaptation. Billie Piper, the actor who plays Fanny, looks like she was cast in the “spitfire” mold. At least, the bleached-blonde-with-dark-roots ‘do she’s sporting looks kind of punk.

“I haven’t talked to you in a few days. What’s going on?”

“Well, you know I’m going to Asia for five weeks, right?”

“No, I didn’t know that. That’s big!”

“Well, it works out okay, because I kind of have a stalker.”

Ah, yes. When God closes a door, He opens a window.

“Minor, who’s this?”

“Daddy.”

“Who am I?”

“Mommy.”

“What’s his name?”

“Yaitch.”

“And what’s YOUR name?”

“Baby.”

“It’s not ‘baby,’ it’s ‘Minor.’ Say ‘Minor.’”

“No.”

How strange. I have one kid who who, until three and a half, referred to himself exclusively in the third person, and another who at two years old has never uttered his own name.

…and Minor’s first complete sentence was…?

“Me know who God is.”

He was mostly parroting back a question I had asked Aitch, but !!!

After landing in Chicago on Sunday night I struck up a conversation with my cab driver, hoping to practice my Arabic. He was Palestinian and told me that he wouldn’t be able to understand the Tunisian dialect, but his English was excellent and he held forth on a number of topics in that tongue.

“I don’t blame the Israelis for our problems,” he said. “Israelis, Palestinians — we’re all just trying to live our lives. We’re all being manipulated by our governments.”

Okay, I can buy that.

“Our governments lie to us. Like, there’s no such thing as 9/11, the Holocaust — these are stories the governments tell us to get us to act in a certain way.”

Wow…we’re not even on the tollway and already we have conspiracy theories on not one but two major historical events. If he denies the moon landing I may be able to complete my Taxi Driver Bingo Card.

I did not attempt to set him straight. In the first place, people who subscribe to totally irrational conspiracy theories do not listen to reason; but also, a guiding principle that has served me well is Don’t Piss Off a Strange Man with Whom You are Alone in a Car at Night.

Anyway, I find I have more tolerance for these kinds of arguments since living in Tunisia and suffering La Presse as the sole source of my daily news. The governments in Arab countries control news in a way that we Americans can’t even imagine. For example, on 9/12 I accessed the on-line version of La Presse to see how they were reporting the tragedy. The fall of the twin towers was front-page news, but there was no mention of the hijackers or Al Qaeda. It was reported like a particularly unfortunate air traffic control accident. It’s no wonder that the Tunisians or Palestinians don’t trust what the media dishes out.

Of course, we recognize that the American media are biased and, in many cases, influenced by the government, but at least the different media outlets present us with an array of different biases. If you triangulate between Fox News, CNN, and Jon Stewart you might arrive at some approximation of the truth. And we’re free to move around the country, ask questions, do research, post crazy conspiracy theories on the web, etc. without the government opening up a file on us.

Uh, right?

Anyway, we’re reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for my book club, and I had to laugh at this description of How the News is Made, Western style, where government control is less of a danger than the journalist’s desire to create a story:

Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He oveslept his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming chuches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the roadway below his window — you know.

Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.

The Jane-o-sphere is all atwitter over last night’s premiere of the first new adaptation on “Masterpiece Theatre,” so I might as well put my two cents in.

It didn’t suck.

The problem with the third film version of Persuasion is that the second film version of Persuasion was such a brilliant effort that any remake is likely to be a disappointment. The 1995 film with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds was cleverly adapted, beautifully shot, and very well acted. It was also groundbreaking in its use of realism, at least for a story set in Regency times, which is usually all ball gowns and country meadows. This Persuasion had grit. Even the leads were jolie-laide; when it came out on video, the cover image featured two conventionally pretty people, neither of whom had a role in the film. The cover has since been replaced with a picture of the real actors, the marketers having realized that the American public won’t run away screaming if they catch a glimpse of wrinkled skin or imperfect orthodontia.

Like the 1995 Persuasion and also like last year’s Pride and Prejudice remake, last night’s adaptation did not shy away from realistic portrayals, although there was rather less pig slop than in P&P. Anne Eliot was decidedly plain. Anne’s relations were positively ugly in manner, and the perambulations in the Pump Room showed how horrible it must have been to be enslaved by society’s strictures. All of these things worked for the film in the same way they worked for the precursor. One great departure was the choice of Rupert Penry-Jones for Wentworth, but although I appreciated the eye candy, I don’t think he generated the same heat and magnetism as Hinds.

Many of the minor characters were well-played. It must be hard to take a comic character or a villain and make it equally funny/frightening but somehow significantly different from the previous incarnation. I thought both of the Eliot sisters pulled this off quite well. The characterization of Mary Musgrove seems to be universally hated by the Internets, but I thought she was a scream. Anthony Head also brought something new to his role. He wasn’t just ridiculous; you really got a sense of a man coasting on his looks his whole life, and how that formed his character.

My main complaint, I suppose, is that it mostly felt rather flat. The good parts were too derivative but didn’t hang together well enough to make much of an impression. Anne’s “marathon” at the end was just silly. It wasn’t only that a young woman in her position wouldn’t run through the streets. You might break a rule like that to make an emotional point. But who decided that the last five key conversations in the book could all be relocated to the promenade, with Anne rushing to and fro to encounter whosoever might conveniently supply the next piece of information to further the plot? And why did she have to run in such an ugly dress? By the time she hit her mark for her love scene, the poor girl could barely breathe.

And the ending? Why on Earth would Wentworth have bought or even leased Kellynch for Anne? She seemed to prefer a quiet life, and from the looks her family gave him you’d think he would have put as much distance between himself and them as possible.

The previews for Northanger Abbey looked more promising, and that story isn’t plagued by the anxiety of influence, at least on the filmic front. Come to think of it, the novel wasn’t that great, either. No where to go but up!

I spent some time in Portsmouth, New Hampshire this weekend. Portsmouth is a quaint little town with some great shops. I was very tempted to buy one of these beauties.

I thought it would look swell in my darkroom. Then I could type my blog posts on it! Hey, does anyone know where I can buy a mimeograph machine?

I expected Portsmouth to be inundated with candidates, but there was only one Edwards rally in the morning, which I missed. They did leave behind their detritus.

The coffee shop across the street from these signs was so crowded on Saturday evening that I was forced to share a table. As soon as I sat down, my seatmate asked, “So, are you a Hillary fan?”

“Hmm, why didn’t you ask if I were a Mitt fan? Or a Mike fan?”

He looked alarmed for a minute, and then I saw him take inventory: female, unveiled, alone in a public place without benefit of male escort: probably a Democrat, Independent, or call girl. (And with that coat, definitely not a call girl.) “Well, what do I know?” he said. “I’m from Massachusetts.”

“Me, too,” I said, and then drank to the freedom to cross state lines without written permission from my husband, at least until President Huckabee or President Romney takes office. What, you think it can’t happen here? Let me introduce you to a woman who was wearing a mini-skirt and smoking a cigarette on the streets of Tunis in 1974:

(No, I don’t know what the underwear’s all about, but I can tell you she’s not shopping at Victoria’s Secret.)

I caught a significant chunk of the Republican debates on ABC later that evening. I see that Romney has affected Dear Leader’s smirk, and I thought he could not have looked more condescending if he tried. Even his wife seemed to be slumped in her chair as though thinking, “Honey, wipe that look off your face!” The only one who came off worse than Romney was his attacker-in-chief, McCain. What was with that maniacal laugh every time he cracked a joke at Romney’s expense? I thought McCain definitely appeared deranged. His cackle is going to be the Dean-like “rebel yell” of 2008.

Minor, like many near-two-year-olds and the Old Testament God, smites people when angered. We have been working with him (Minor, not the Lord) on more appropriate expressions of anger, like using his words. Lately he has figured out another alternative on his own for showing displeasure: he spits. It’s not an offensive maneuver (in the military sense), but rather, a commentary.

For example, we are in the car and Minor spots the ubiquitous Dunkin’ Donuts logo.

Minor: Donuts!

Me: We are not stopping for donuts today.

Minor: [spitting noise] Thpit!

I especially love the explicit performative “Spit!” calling my attention to what he is doing, as if to say, “I spit on your refusal!”

We should probably coach him out of the spitting, but as a two-year-old he has so few socially acceptable options for showing anger that I’m reluctant to extinguish a non-violent one. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we just have to endure a little saliva. The Almighty made it rain for forty days and forty nights when He got mad.