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By Jonathan Gibbs
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With this column, I seek to combine my old-timey newshound self with my new modernized news self, mix in the blogosphere’s self-indulgent tendencies and spew forth the jumbled thoughts in my head straight onto this page in one furious blast. In this neo-gonzo Frankensteinian journalism, I will wed Al Gore’s Web with Gutenberg’s printed word by dumping my random thoughts once a week no matter how ludicrous, slight or weird. Finally, absurdity will get equal treatment with profundity.
In my endeavors, I promise not to cheat by using any actual book as a reference; I will to rely on SpelCzech and Wikipedia in lieu of a dictionary and encyclopedia. If I need a word – or fact – and can’t find it in my memory or online, I will make one up. As for rules of grammar, syntax or order of events depicted, I will go with the spirit of most blogging: if I have forgotten a rule, I’ll just make up a new one. Self rather than grammar rules will rule.
There are 100 billion nerve cells in the human brain busily passing signals through its synaptic gaps at 100 miles-per-hour, decoding, calculating and interpreting stimuli. This organic computing system, which weighs all of three pounds when lying in a mortician’s tray, relays (before its date with a tray, of course) what the eye sees, and then begins formulating an appropriate response within 1/30th of a second. That’s how we can dodge a piano falling out of a third story window. And when you’re talking about the brain of a three-year-old boy, you can almost hear the electricity hum.
My son turned three on Jan. 29, officially entering post-toddlerhood. And so, given the logistics of extended family and friends, this passage was acknowledged on several different occasions over the past fortnight. Each one was different, and each one offered an opportunity to gauge how far he’s come since he was born as well as hint at how much more we have to prepare him so that he can retain the joy he exhibits almost al the time now without doing so by ending up on the exhibition end of a Michael Phelpsian YouTube episode. And if he can do that while still managing to slip his old man a couple of bucks in the Senior Center game room to spend on Gummi Bears, great. Job, well done.
I mention the term old man because I am 52 years, 10 months and 29 days older than him already, and I know enough Quantum Physics to know that math won’t change. And since our “Diaper Years” will almost overlap, I know I will have to be hyper attentive to his development over the next couple of years if only because I can still hear what he’s saying and remember what he’s said when he’s done saying it. This is not being maudlin, it’s being realistic: I get the AARP Bulletin; he gets Highlights. So I’m just sayin’, uh . . . something.
I realized where I got this frank, emotionally pragmatic view on the state of my Larry Kinghood last weekend at my mother’s house, where we held the second stop on his Birthday Tour. My mom told my wife’s late husband’s parents that Nathan was her favorite grandchild (she has eight others, none mine). When they congratulated her on her candor she coolly remarked that she’s 91 and won’t be around when he has donned the armor of sullen hostility at age 13 and fixes every adult, including her, with a look that could turn milk blue.
So that being said, how do I go about doing something – parenting – right, when it is such an entirely nonlinear endeavor performed within the linear passages of time and rites? Parenthood is an unbelievably tender pairing. There is an unconcealment that goes on between a young child and a parent that I have to reciprocate, or else I’m cheating both of us. When he takes my hand and says, “C’mon, Daddy, let’s play trains,” I feel a little more unbound from this earth when I allow myself to be led to the playroom. The time will come when I miss the goings-on with Thomas and Friends on the Island of Sodor, which until last year I would have guessed was the hobbits’ lost kingdom.
Children form their reality from bits of experience they piece together and reformulate and burn into their memory by means of a running commentary. These real-life segments are often acted out with incongruous objects. “Daddy, you be the daddy,” he’ll say, handing me a plastic Stegosaurus, and “Mommy, you be the Mommy,” handing her a wooden cutout cow. An unlikely pairing perhaps, but not when he produces a cement-mixer and says, “And I’m Nathan. We are going to go to the store.” You don’t want to mess with this reality; it’s my job to not burden his imagination with limitations. After all, how great would it be if a shark really could fly like an eagle and eat raisins?
In the garden of human emotion, I am like the tender little flower that buds along the Alpine trails, proud and pretty but correspondingly brittle once exposed to a harsh emotional cold front. My natural unnatural tendency is to hear the one whispered voice criticizing me in a room full tenors and baritones, all of whom are singing my praises in full voice. And so, when Nathan told me several weeks ago “Go away, Dad, I’m playing with Mommy,” I packed a toothbrush, some mismatched socks and went to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. Then I remembered there might not be a French Foreign Legion anymore and bought some milk we didn’t need to take home as a readmittance ticket. After acting like nothing had happened for a couple of hours, I sat down and told my son, “You know, when you said ‘go away,’ you hurt Daddy’s feelings.” He looked concerned but also a little overwhelmed by being handed such a large tool, much as I would imagine an Argiope spider would look if one handed it a free-standing hand loom to mend its web.
Later, talking the incident over with a friend, he pointed out that I had supplied my then-toddler with an awful lot of power. I had unwittingly supplied the member of an indigenous tribe of pre-Columbian forest footmen with a boosted fission weapon. His advice was to try to react to my son’s actions, thoughts and deeds in ways that will help shape him into the person I want to have come visit me when he’s 30 and I’m 82. Ah-ha! If I do ____ now, then he will do _____ later.
Putting this into practice hasn’t been as difficult as I had thought; I’ve just had to run everything from his tousling the mane of a dog twice his size to his putting stickers all over my keyboard. What I hope for him to be as a person has to evolve one response at a time, and I have learned you can behave yourself into good thinking easier than you can thinking your way into good behavior. Recently we had to practice gritting of teeth when Nathan did something that, had anyone else in the world done, would have filled me with the rage of a thousand suns. Believing in the importance of cleanliness he took it upon himself to wash our iPod. When he brought it back to its dock (maybe the exact term to use in this context) and we saw what he had done, we smiled widely and thanked him for his attention to good hygiene for inanimate objects. He had just deleted 90196 songs spread out over 26 days, 23 hours, 29 minutes and 12 seconds of music - but who’s counting when you kid looks so cute?
Which is all very Wayne Dyer-esque, but what do you do when the behavior is off the charts and his artwork is displayed on his bedroom wall with a media consisting of organic waste material? Last weekend we had the third birthday party in a restaurant ¬– a quiet restaurant. He was polite, he was delightful and he was well behaved. He asked his Godfather if he would protect him from bad guys and tried out one of his new conceptual humor routines:
Nathan: “Knock-knock.”
Me: “Who’s there?”
Nathan: “Is it Penguin soup yet?”
I told you it was conceptual.
Now, the human body operates on stored glucose kept in packets in our tissues until needed to fire electrical currents through our central nervous system to move our joints, muscles and bones. He is coordinated, well balanced on his feet and can operate his machinery quickly yet under control. But introduce cake or ice cream into this extraordinary formula matching great chemistry with efficient physiology, and potential energy becomes explosive energy. When the sugar hit his bloodstream, the room shook; wires flew out of their connections to the wall sockets and beakers overflowed with acrid green mist. He burst into a series of squawks and bolted out of the booth.
“Ahh….the humanity,” an announcer bleated in my head.
The adventure continues next week with more heir-raising stories, blogged old-school.
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