blue streak

We live next to a hospital, so the sights and sounds of ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars are a daily part of the background of our lives (may I also point out that the view from my bedroom window frames a lovely copse of trees on the hospital grounds – if it weren’t for the sirens, you could believe you were in the suburbs. Really.). In the same way, living in a house with me provides another auditory backdrop – swearing, particularly if I’m driving, or there’s too much stuff piled at the front of the refrigerator that falls out when you open it, or someone accidentally hits me in the head with a matchbox car turned projectile. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to hold my tongue since G started not just talking but actively annexing everything he hears into the live Petri dish of his vocabulary – but everyone has to have one vice, don’t they?

Baby B, on his trip to North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, picked up his own first word, “uh-oh,” which he generally uses in its appropriate context, but sometimes just drops into thin air all on its own, like a mild interjection. He’s probably right, given any set of circumstances at any given time around here.

I thought I had escaped with time for good behavior the day that G, playing with a few of his cars in the back of the living room, exclaimed “Oh, CRACK!” loudly but firmly several times when his cars had an unfortunate collision.

But then, last week, we were driving to the babysitter, along a main city artery which had shut down to one very slow-moving lane of downtown traffic because of a giant Lincoln, with its right blinker on, trying to parallel park in a space that was clearly too small for it. Of course this caused the left lane of traffic, annoyed by the stupidity of trying to park in rush hour traffic, and buoyed by the sheer good luck of being in the other lane, to increase its collective speed precipitously, and for each car to pull up just close enough to the car in front to obviate the possibility of letting in any stranded cars in the right lane. In response, the right lane cars also turned on their blinkers and started honking madly, except when the traffic light changed, leaving enough room for one car to accelerate, rev its engine, and zoom out into the flow of traffic. This was almost always the car directly behind the Lincoln trying to park, which then would have – in theory -- left enough space for the car to attempt to pull into the parking place, realize the error of its ways, and drive on. But instead, the next car would pull up immediately into the space vacuum and block the Lincoln, again. It’s like Sisyphus on Georgia Avenue.

We were not running late, so my own annoyance meter was running pretty low – when the fifth or sixth car pulled right up behind the Lincoln, I think I said something like, ‘oh, come on.’

At which point G, from the backseat: “Well, dammit.”

(S pointed out later that, considering my mouth when I’m driving, it could have been a lot worse).

I stifled a giggle, and said, “What do you mean by that word, honey?”

In the new, instructive tone he’s using for everything these days, he said, “That’s the word you use when somebody gets in your way and it’s really annoying.”

It’s hard to fault him for his logic.

“Hmm,” I said. I don’t really like that word. “Do you think we could use another one instead, like kaplooey?”

He thought about it for a second. “No, mommy,” he said. “Dammit’s better.”

Again, logic.

Eventually we settled on a word of G’s own invention that sounds vaguely French, which seemed appropriate. It was really more for the sake of the conversation than anything I’ll bring up again all that often, under the assumption that either the dammits will go their own way, or they won’t, without my highlighting.

Later that day, I noticed a funny thing about our bedroom door. Our house had a marbled history before we bought it, and while the renovations (none of them to our personal credit) are wonderful, bringing the house back to its original modest shine, occasionally a little message from the difficult years will wend its way to the surface. Even under several fresh coats of expertly-applied paint, it turns out that in the late afternoon light you can still see that someone, years ago, carved the words A_ _ and B_ _ _ _ with some kind of sharp object across the front of our bedroom door. It’s a loopy, heavy scrawl, and seems meant rather personally, whether the two words are connected or not. I think it’s weirdly charming – like our own archeological nameplate – if I am the B_ _ _ _, does that make S the A _ _?

But it’s clearly something we’ll have to deal with before G starts to read.

at home

It’s a gorgeous day after several weeks of weather that have really put the “bleak” in midwinter. We took the boys to the park wearing nothing but fleece sweatshirts over their clothes, instead of the heavy, bulky jackets which recently caused G. to wail “It makes my arms too fat and I can’t twirl my hair!” (he has a permanent tangle at the back from this self-soothing activity). It was such a pleasure to watch them run around (or in B’s case, toddle around) unburdened, like little champagne corks followed by endless showers of bubbles.

Now everyone is sleeping, and I am alone in the sunshine, in my living room, looking out across the bare trees and the hospital grounds and the patches of melting snow. And today, for the first time since we got back, I feel deeply, exactly at home. Somehow the passing-through-ness has lifted with the weather (hopefully less briefly, since we’re getting more snow this week). I can imagine remembering this afternoon years from now, in some other place, and being glad. It’s been a long time coming.

Last night we were looking at our two boys, the almost-toilet-trained and the almost-ambulatory, and trying to remember what it was like when G was at B’s stage. We don’t really believe that he ever was, G having skipped entirely the solemn, wry and contemplative baby stage and emerging fully formed, like Athena, except naked and rolling in a barrel. With sparklers attached. I am constantly resisting what feels like an unfair urge to cast B as the yin to G’s yang, the calm beside the storm. He has every opportunity to prove us wrong. But we do start to wonder if we’ve been exaggerating, a bit, just how lively things have been since G joined the party.

So I went upstairs and unearthed a CD with some old videos of G from the first winter we lived in Paris. We slid it into the laptop and clicked on the first video we saw – G in his first pair of rubber-soled shoes, walking across the dining room floor in our apartment. There it was, the 1000-watt smile, barely containing the canary. And underneath our encouraging voices, a strange, persistent noise. After a second, it came to me. It was the thumping of G’s shoes, like timpani, as, at fourteen months, he made his way across the floor. It’s G’s world, and we really do just live in it.

B, on the other hand, is silent as a sylph. He has shown no interest in walking more than a few steps, but he can get to the top of the stairs without making a sound. If he wants attention, he raises one finger in the air, as if he is politely making a point at a meeting. He bursts into absolute highbeams every time G enters the room, and his second favorite game is throwing cereal to Lucy.

In a couple of weeks our babysitter is moving both boys to a bigger site that, thankfully, also exists in her kingdom (more, someday, about working, commuting, the morning oatmeal ritual, and the pleasures of sitting by myself at a desk). I worried, with that peculiar combination of protectiveness and embarrassment, if there were discipline problems around the edges that we weren’t hearing about. “Oh, no,” said M, when I ventured a question on the phone. “I was just watching him all day the other day, and how frustrated he gets that he can’t just move through the other children. He can’t help running into them – he just wants to get across the room, and they happen to be in the way. It just doesn’t seem fair for him to spend the day in time-out just for being a three-year-old boy.” I was flooded with relief. Having always been the child who sat in the corner with a book, being the mother of the one ricocheting around the room is strange and uncharted territory. It requires adjustment, like finding out you are related to Herbert Hoover.

But we let G stay up late to watch Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl, and he curled up next to me on the sofa, leaning into the crook of my arm. After a few minutes of football, to which neither his father nor I could give too much illumination, he said, “Too much pushing in football. It makes me nervous.”

I said, “Me, too.”