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?
I drilled into our little boy today another of my dead mother’s irrational holiday rules: everything Christmas related must be taken down before the new year begins. Otherwise, the most dire bad luck will ensue.
Atticus accepted the rule as if our very existence hinged upon it, and we did mom proud. As a bonus, he learned another valuable lesson while helping unscrew the Christmas tree holder — lefty loosey, righty tighty.
And he’s been repeating it over and over while setting up a make-believe bookstore and pretending to take phone calls from Santa Claus. All this after his first inauspicious attempt to use his Christmas gift scooter and showing off in this video that his mother, Suzame, made.
What my mother missed.
Assumptions are dangerous. That maxim was drilled into me years ago as a newbie journalist. But I’m not writing a news story. I’m speculating about a man at the school park up the street. He was sitting at a table, alone, surrounded by squealing kids and watchful parents. My son, Atticus, was playing nearby on the slide.
The guy looked wayward, homeless even, but orderly — lush gray beard, weathered face, stocking cap pulled to his brow, clean jeans, stuffed duffel bag, and a few items that I couldn’t make out next to the bag. On the table was a blue hard-cover notebook. Printed on the cover and spine was “Hewlett Packard.” The notebook made me think of the one I had at Intel for personnel documents. Read More
At the Portland Farmers Market, roasting chilies perfume every cool breath. Autumn has thinned the crowds but not the produce. Along with poblanos, I buy what may be the year’s last peaches, several varieties of apples, shiitake mushrooms, and more.
The once-ubiquitous volunteers registering people to vote are nowhere to be seen beneath the canopy of blue sky and elms. A sign perhaps that the presidential race is over, except for the vile death rattle from the McCain-Palin attack machine.
People look happy to be here, more so than usual. And why not? We’re surrounded by nature’s bounty on a classic fall day. But I sense something else, something more uplifting, even with the economy gone to hell. Read More
What will the boy remember of yesterday? Years hence, is Atticus, my son of three, doomed to never recall his first day at the new edge of his known world, the Pacific Coast?
As I watched him run toward and away from tiny advancing and retreating waves, I realized how fleeting the moment probably was. Not just his memory of what he did but the pure delight of not caring about anything else. Neither the event or the feeling might ever return. Read More
Atticus Bales Tong, three days shy of three years old, doesn’t know the meaning of the word gun. Suzame and I didn’t set out to deprive him of this knowledge, though it’s no doubt a dividend of allowing scant TV viewing — and only since he turned two.
I learned this today when I handed him a garden hose. The hose has a squeeze-handle nozzle. I said, “Here’s your gun.” And he didn’t know what I meant. And this is a boy with a remarkable vocabulary, including some Spanish, French, and Cantonese.
Sometimes ignorance is a state of grace. How long can it last?
Unlike past wars, the Iraq war is an abstraction. We rarely glimpse the unspeakable suffering. Most of the media have lost interest. Some stalwarts remain, chronicling events beyond our comprehension. As much as I hate this war, I’ve never let what happens there penetrate my comfortable life here. Until now.
Reality intruded last night when Suzame, my wife, showed me this photograph: Read More
A familiar formula: too little sleep plus a frenetic start to the day equals foul mood.
My black cloud lifted in two stages.
Stage one: spotting one of our little boy’s books in the bathroom, propped against the wall directly across from the toilet. Suzame bought it for Atticus, and this was the first time I’d seen the title: Little Monkey’s BIG Peeing Circus.
Stage two: interviewing David Sill, 68, about his father, Jesse Sill, a legendary Portland newsreel cameraman who was among the first to film the Pendleton Round-Up, starting in 1915. (I’m co-authoring a book about the world-famous rodeo.) Reveling in memories about their life together, David said: “I had a great dad, best as you can get, or close to it. He really spent time with me.”Â
As I drove home shortly before noon, the sun found a crack in the low clouds over the hills of Forest Park. Among the brooding evergreens, hardwoods showed off their newborn leaves, glittering in shades of sage as if proclaiming, “We’ve returned!”
