October 9, 2011
Some shopping malls can be dangerous places thanks to random outbreaks of violence, including at the one near my house. That doesn’t explain all the clothes for sale featuring patterns once the exclusive purview of battlefields and hunting grounds. Takeoffs on camouflage have infiltrated clothing lines for kids, judging from my recent shopping trips for our six-year-old son. Unless I want to outfit him as a fashionable guerrilla or wild-animal stalker, the choices are greatly reduced at places like the Gap, Old Navy, and others. Do clothing manufacturers want children to to be less easily seen? Of course not — we don’t live in forests. Do they want kids to feel macho and aspire to membership in the NRA? Doubtful. I don’t see the aesthetic appeal, though I’m an outlier given the popularity of so-called camo clothes. The simple and obvious answer: we live in a country where an estimated 200 million guns are in private ownership, where violent military-themed video games are ubiquitous, and where defense spending and a low threshold for going to war help define the national character. Next up I suppose: camo diapers.
Like one of my favorite bloggers, Jason Kottke, I was put off by the idea of parties for parents to learn the sex of their gestating child. Then a video he linked to choked me up. Guess I’m a sucker for such joy. Still, not knowing the sex adds to the mystery and suspense of an event not lacking in either. During a trip to Italy when Suzame was five months pregnant, we didn’t know. That led to two encounters, both in Sorrento. An elderly woman at a shop selling baby things asked us our ages, birth dates, and more. After studying her scribbled computation, she said: “It’s a girl.” Later at a restaurant, the rotund and jolly owner led us to a table. He told us what his staff would cook for us. Then he held his hand near Suzame’s stomach and announced: “I think it is a man.” Maybe the differing findings explained why during an ultrasound we asked about the sex. The news cleared up a sliver of the uncertain future ahead. And without a few months to ponder and debate names, I’m not sure “Atticus” would have surfaced and taken hold. Now maybe we should take Atticus to Sorrento and the restaurant and introduce him to the owner, who no doubt would shout: “Lo sapevo!” — “I knew it!”
We try not to over-indulge our five-year-old son. Still, Atticus has ended up with many more things than any kid can keep track of, much less play with. I could haul away all his toys, and he wouldn’t complain — as long as he was lording over this small creek winding its way to the Pacific Ocean. Each day of our Oregon coast vacation last week, the creek was the center of his universe. At night he wondered whether the dam he built was still there. He wanted to know where the water comes from and ends up. (China seemed an acceptable answer.) He wanted to put a note in a bottle and send it seaward.
Now, back in the humdrum of our routine existence, I could offer to buy him any of the 1,361,605 toys sold on Amazon.com. No doubt he would prefer instead the sand, flowing water, rocks, and freedom to shape them as he wishes. Or do they shape him?
Leave it to a child to ask an existential question that reverberates louder than the Pacific surf:
Will there still be waves if everybody’s dead?
Atticus, in the midst of his first beach vacation, received a truthful answer — and a question. Why did you wonder such a thing? Silence, except the sound of waves arriving and retreating.
Our son Atticus, now 4, watched part of Finding Nemo tonight. The story’s setting was relevant given the roaring surf outside our rented vacation house on the Oregon coast. Judging from his reaction to the dramatic scenes (shielding his eyes with a blanket and whimpering occasionally), we’ve overly sheltered him from TV and other insidious forms of pop culture. Read More
I would have stopped there if I had been a few decades younger and still reckless and easily thrilled by mega-fireworks. It was one of three stores on the Nez Perce Reservation in tiny Lapwai, Idaho, competing to sell the really good stuff for the Fourth of July. I passed it ten times during a research trip in late June.
A fire bug as a kid, I thought of the business tonight as we lit the most demure fireworks for little Atticus, who looked on in wonder, hands clasped over sensitive ears. Maybe one day I’ll take him to Lapwai and we’ll stock up at the place that wins my award for best business name ever: Pyro Paradise.
Seeing the world through the eyes of four year olds must be like looking through a peephole. This narrow, constrained view also bestows them with blissful ignorance. Take as evidence an exchange today involving our little boy and his friend:
NPR, soundtrack of our life, blares in the kitchen. Michael Jackson’s name is mentioned, again. The friend asks how he died. “A heart attack,” my wife says. The friend thinks about this, then states with authority that “a dog attacked him, then a cat.”
Now comes the blissful part. Our son, Atticus, says, “Who’s Michael Jackson?”
I pass the bathroom door. Our soon-to-be four year old, Atticus, is seated naked on the toilet. His mother is next to him. Atticus is holding her iPhone, which is playing a YouTube video of Sesame Street, a technique for scaring off the constipation spirits.
Surely no one forecast such a scene more than a half-century ago when, at the same age, I needed to relax on the toilet. But what if I would have requested similar attention from my mother (or father), two people never inclined to assist in my bodily discharges post-potty training? Read More
I swear it’s true: Dog Boy, aka son Atticus, asked to enter a dog carrier. (Please, no calls to the child abuse hotline.) His mother consented (arrest her, not me). Photographic proof here: Read More
Cracked Window celebrated its one-year anniversary today without fanfare. That’s because I stayed away from the keyboard and enjoyed the outdoors on a beautiful spring day in Portland. It was my first nothing-but-shorts-and-tee-shirt day of 2009.
Random projects, including installing two trellises on the fence two years after I bought them, were too much to resist. My little boy delighted in helping me squeeze the trigger on the power drill and marking holes for screws. Little things go a long way.
I invited Atticus to join me by asking if he “wanted to make some trouble,” an innocent enough expression. But he repeated it throughout the day, at one point telling his grandmother: “Daddy and me made some trouble today.”
And after 294 blog posts, that’s what I plan to do more of on Cracked Window.
A sometimes irrationally exuberant supporter of Barack Obama, I’m puzzled and dismayed at his administration’s failure to address the torture scandal. Repudiating torture isn’t enough. Finding the truth and punishing lawbreakers are only way to right terrible wrongs.
The most lucid assessment of the administration’s failure comes via the always-trenchant Scott Horton. He accuses the CIA and Justice Department of engaging in a de facto cover-up of Bush administration illegalities and warns of the consequences: Read More
I usually wield no club in the intensifying mainstream media bashathon. But Todd Gitlin, whose journalism bona fides make his views worth a read, rightly hammers Big-Time Reporters’ coverage of President Obama’s press conference last night.
Petulance born of arrogance is especially repugnant when it leads to stories focusing on style at the expense of substance. We need hard-nosed reporting combined with clear explanations and analyses of what’s really happening around us. Now more than ever.
Our little boy, Atticus, spots a bright moon at dusk. He’s holding a toy modeled after one that was around when I was a kid, the Dan Dare Planet Gun. Pull the trigger and it launches a spring-powered propeller disk.
I’ve wound it to the max. From our front steps he aims at the moon and fires. The disk whirs an impressive 20 feet into the air and lands a short distance away. I’m thrilled and assume he is too.
“Why didn’t it land on the moon?” Atticus asks, not impressed at all.
