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?
Forests and cliffs along a finger of Puget Sound replace scenes from my city life. I’m driving north, Highway 101, enjoying glimpses of water reflecting gray sky. Then a small roadside cross blares a silent message: Fatal Crash Happened Here. Questions come in bursts, and the mind answers with gory images. Did the car flip? Trapped victims? And so on.
People mark spots like this to memorialize friends and family killed in an awful, pointless way. But why not honor the dead in private? Why does death by traffic accident warrant public displays that pull strangers like me into pasts not their own? Of course I might think differently about these crosses if my family, in the car with me, perishes in a wreck around the curve ahead.
Passing another cross a few miles later, I force myself to picture not bodies in mangled cars but the rented cabin that awaits us near Port Townsend on Discovery Bay. In this envisioned future, tips of snowy Olympic Mountain tops peek down at a deserted tidal flat. I’m walking amid scattered shells, where the incoming tide will wash away my footprints.
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
Too much of my life is spent living vicariously through what I read and watch, through people I think about. This trait hardly sets me apart. But recognizing it as I did today feels notable.
The trigger was a post on one of my favorite blogs, Boing Boing, from guest blogger Gareth Branwyn, who writes about technology, pop, and fringe culture:
“My friend, photographer and filmmaker, Seanie Blue traveled north, to Iceland, to blow his mind on the aurora borealis, in hopes that its incomprehensibility might help him forget a love gone south.” Read More
