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Ipods are for sharing...


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IT STARTS

The grandparent’s gonna-miss-that-boy countdown has begun. Today, Mary comes in from a morning with the ducks and says to me: “This was the last time Sam and I fed the ducks.” Then we hold each other tight for a bit. We’re hopeless. I wonder if Sam is starting to notice. Yeah, right.

We’re also becoming more and more convinced that the trip is a good idea, much to my surprise and consternation. Ducks notwithstanding, it will be an extraordinary opportunity for Sam to hear different voices, feel different textures, and grow from a precocious 2.25 yr old boy to a wise-soul 3.25yrs. Wish we could be there to see that happen, but we’ve seen so much in the past two years that our hearts will be full for a long long time.

Or so I like to think.



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But back to the ducks: Sam walked the entire distance (about a mile and a half), clutching his bag of bread. The ducks cluster around the Inwood bays (inpouchings from the Harlem River and the Hudson), and Sam likes to stalk them for a bit before they discover his bread-crumb wealth. The squirrels like to get into the act as well. We are a bit careful these days: it seems that a child was bitten by a squirrel recently. And keeping the pigeons away is a real problem. Rats in the sky, I call them. Today Mary said that a pigeon literally swooped in and grabbed a piece of bread right out of Sam’s hand. Damn. If I’d been there I might have…

Paul and Sonja will protect him. And keep him safe.

Hope there are fewer pigeons in Zagreb.

Probably not.

SAM AND THE CRANBERRIES



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I’ve mentioned this inumerable times, I know, but it’s still so much fun for Sam to have a grandma who is also and early childhood specialist. Because of her background, training, and many years of experience, Mary has Sam doing some remarkable (and visually beautiful) things. Here is an example:

Mary lays out a blue plastic dropcloth, and on it puts a large bowl filled with water and cranberries. Why?

Sam can practice ladling/scooping.

He can hide and reveal to himself various body parts:
Elbow
Arm (And feels the textures of the floating cranberries)
Foot
And he can put cranberries between his toes.

When was the last time you got to put cranberries between your toes?

I thought so.

Finally:
Who’s eyes are bigger, more pentetrating, more beautiful?



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TRAINS AT ALMOST CHRISTMAS



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I don’t know why, but like so many other young boys Sam loves trains. It seems a real gender difference: I don’t remember Sonja being a train junkie, and I’ve seen few girls at the train exhibits Sam and I have visited. Frankly I think it has something to do with power and strength.

If that’s true, power has grabbed this boy. Last year we visited the MTA train 'museum'at Grand Central Station, which has a nice little three tier layout. The museum is really a souvenir store, but Sam spent over an hour watching this train. This year, he spent almost two hours, and didn’t want to leave, even when his grappa was bored out of his skull and wished for a shot of my namesake drink…

Thomas The Tank Engine started it all, I think. He watched the videos, loved the books, could name all the engines, knew their personalities, and liked them all. Even the scary and angry 'Diesel Ten’. Currently that one seems to be his favorite, and he carries it with him frequently on our trips. We visited the giant Toys R Us in Times Square a few Fridays ago (the one with the ferris wheel inside) and pawed through the Thomas stuff. They had a lovely train layout in the store that Sam and other kids could play with. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera that day, so I couldn’t take a photo of something that fascinated me: there were a bunch of kids playing with the trains, and around the edges, sitting in chairs and chatting with each other, were a number of women who were clearly not the mothers of these children. They were the nannies. A real NYC moment- nannies spending the afternoon with other nannies while their little charges played in a consumer playground. I was quite surprised until I stopped to realize that this was exactly what I was doing…

Back in September, Mary discovered a treasure trove of Thomas goodies on Craig’s list (an internet swap sheet), for a remarkably low price. Oh yes. We traveled out to Queens to pick it up. The Dad had a hard time parting with it. His boy had “outgrown” Thomas, but Dad had not. But he reluctantly parted with it all, after lovingly describing each engine, and each type of track. And there were lots of engines, and lots of track. Got home, laid it out, and realized that it consumed our apartment. Oh, what the hell. We weren’t doing anything with those parts of the floor anyway. It decreased the cat’s choice of places to lie down, but she made do. Sam was quite pleased with it all. At the same time, I learned something about kids his age: it was too much for him. He couldn’t take it all in, and quickly focused on very small parts of the layout, and on the individual cars. I love watching that boy find his limits, his interests, and his comfort level with the world around him. Never ceases to amaze me. Needless to say, I made significant changes, made it much smaller, and made him happy.

Wait’ll he gets back from Croatia. He’ll discover the hundreds of feet of Thomas track, and we’ll be happily doomed to having our entire apartment be a train set. I can’t wait (and I don’t even particularly like trains).



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So knowing that we will come back to the train ‘museum’ when he returns, it made the visit last week particularly poignant. I do love seeing the pleasure in his little body when he watches those trains go by.

At night we went to see the windows at Macy's. The window displays attract folks from all over the world, and are pretty nice. We didn’t do the SC thing this year: if you remember my description of last year (it’s in the archives: click on the ‘archives’ link at the upper right hand corner of this screen), it was a freaky experience, and not something I wanted to repeat (actually that’s a bit of a lie- the animatronic animals you see while waiting in the long line, this year Sesame Street characters, are fun. So maybe we’ll do that part, and skip SC. But I digress. The windows along one side of Macy’s are the traditional Night Before Christmas layouts (Sam preferred his pretzel). In the front windows were scenes from The Polar Express. Not sure I like the idea of movie companies stocking the windows with their products, but I know that Macy’s needs the money. For Sam, it was just great. The trains were three dimensional and huge.

Finally, before Sam leaves, I am bound and determined to get him to the most famous train layout in NYC. It’s an annual fixture at the Botanical Gardens, and has a number of Manhattan buildings, all made of pine cones, sticks and leaves... I want him to remember this city in just that way...

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ILLUMINATION


I saw a play last night. Illumination Rounds. It was written primarily by Josh Liveright, and it features he and Sonja Rzespki, and is Directed by Paul Smithyman. That fact that Josh’s son, Bodhi, is Sam’s best friend suggests to me the inspiration both kids will get from these illustrious parents. Instead of Jackson Pollack and Jasper Johns sitting around the Cedar Bar plotting the destruction of Art as we know it (and, not incidentally, the creation of something transcendent), we have Josh and Sonja and Paul playing with their two-year-olds and negotiating playground rituals(and, not incidentally, creating something transcendent). Seems appropriate somehow.

The photo above was taken on the set of Illumination Rounds (click it to see it better). It is a dangerous play, on a lot of levels. The most obvious is that it takes place during the upcoming American Civil War, during a pitched battle outside of Independence Hall, and it concerns a suicide bomber (my daughter), and a journalist (Josh), trapped in a hell made possible by our current terrorist-loving President. I think it’s an important play, and speaks to the increasingly critical need for all of us to begin to understand despair.

We need to know what’s happening out there, and to know what brings people to use suicide as a weapon. It’s not a popular subject; except in its ideological aspects (by both sides). But I do feel it’s something we need to come to grips with. In our current climate of political trepidation, I actually had friends who were nervous even about me sending the postcard announcement to them in the mail: the card shows a picture of Independence Hall with an assault weapon trained on it…

I left the theatre deeply moved. And thinking of Sam, and his upcoming departure.

My heart aches for those who have lost their children to war; I have attached a photo of lost children in Iraq that I can't get out of my head (so please avoid it if you don't wanna get crazy as me). It is a despair too great to bear. To hell with ideologies and all that crap, I’d want simple revenge. I would want to kill.

But Sam is still very much alive, and about to spend a year in a beautiful part of the world with parents who dearly love him, and who will be able to devote all their time to him. It’s extraordinarily wonderful. I do not mean to suggest that the perspective of Illumination Rounds should belittle my sadness of Sam leaving, nor does it make me feel guilty (“See?? You’re lucky he’s still alive!!”). What it does say to me is that all life is a desire to understand. Whether it is for survival, or for enlightenment, our need to understand seems to me the basis for just about everything. What Sam’s leaving does for me, and what I re-learned from my night at the theatre, is that the gift he brings to me by his leaving is to help me understand. I’m now a little bit closer to that Polish old man standing on the docks at the turn of the century waving goodbye to his emigrating children knowing he will never see them again. The old man's pain is exponentially greater than mine, but my small pain helps me understand what he gave up. I now have a very very very tiny understanding of the emptiness that comes from a child’s loss, and if that loss is from war, from violence…. No, I’m not there yet.

[I should note here that we humans are incredibly selfish beasts, and as such we see everything through our own needs; at least that’s what I do. So it’s important for the sake of critical accuracy, at the very least, that I tell you that their little play is about a lot more than what I’ve hinted at above. Its primary appeal to me is that it directly tackles the most important question of our time: why do we love war so much? Is it true that we need war to define us? Must that always be the case? I hope the play continues to live, and be seen. It has something to say.]

Where was I? Oh yeah, ruminating. Well, in our attempts to figure out how best to help Sam with the transition, we’ve been consulting with various child experts, and have come up with a few thoughts. The first is that we’ve been charged with making picture books for him. Each should focus on a particular set of activities, something like I’ve done here (Sam Goes to The Zoo with Grandpa), and make sure to include daily routines with both Grandma and Grandpa. Nice idea. Looking back on John’s childhood, I wish we had more photos of him on ‘non-special’ occasions.

Like blowing bubbles. Sam was absolutely insistent that he could do this completely on his own, and mostly succeeded. I did not get the best picture: him pouring the soap solution bemusedly onto his pants…. Luckily, he didn’t lose all of it. He still found a good few bubbles left in that bottle.

Or helping with the laundry. I get so used to taking Sam away on adventures that I sometimes forget how much of an adventure it is to just have him help with the chores. During one laundry run, Sam insisted on bringing his own basket of laundry.




And folding clothes with Sam frolicking in them can be very difficult. And fun.

During the past few weeks as Sonja and Paul became increasingly more involved in Illumination Rounds and Mary and I found ourselves putting him to bed on a relatively frequent basis, Sam has had some interesting ways of dealing with this. There were times when it was clearly hard for him, and he would whimper, or keep repeating that “Sam lost Mommy.” But it never lasted long, and he was always happy when his parents returned home (even if to Sam it was the next morning). But on two occasions he insisted that he be wrapped in a towel, and fell asleeep like that. Now, it makes for great swaddling-like messianic photos, but I was hard-pressed to understand why he felt it so comforting and necessary. Then Mary reminded me of this photo, from a year ago.

He just wanted to be reminded of his happiest moments with his Mom; after the bath, cuddling.


And finally, speaking of nostalgia (the kid is only two years old! And I’m already using words like nostalgia!!!??? I gotta get me a life), remember this one from back in June of 2003? Well, Sam still loves
popsicles, even in the winter.