The Long National Nightmare Known as Breakfast . . .

. . .  ended in a draw. The decisive battle in the war involved possession of a strategic stool. In the end the carnage included half a slice of toast with jelly, or was it jam?, and many tears. Neither side was satisfied with the terms of cessation, which was basically me grabbing the stool, throwing it the next room, and shutting the door.

Things calmed. As I cleaned up, Archie pretended to be a kitty cat, sitting on the floor singing “Oh, Christmas Tree” in meows. Augie rolled around on the bed and screamed, short high-pitched bursts, insanity in his face, clenching a shaker egg and an toy excavator. Soon they were playing together again, much to my horror, as I scrambled to get our junk together and get us out the door. The timebomb ticked.

“Look, Daddy, your little kitties are playing in a tent. It’s okay, meow, it’s fun any way you do it.”

Then it went off. Archie wailed his monotone, extended-day cry that howls along at a certain pitch straight to a pain receptor in my brain.

“Nooooooooo! Augie’s messing up the tent! Aggghhhhhhhhh! Whhaaaaaaa!

Archie’s low level cry is deadly, insidious. It winds and whines and digs in.

Next Augie’s head hit the ground in an audible thud and he cried. You’re probably thinking, why don’t you stop writing and go see what happened, try to help, do some parenting? Thing was, they had already ebbed back to fun. That is the pattern: a constant ebb and flow between fun and rage. Quite exhausting, and it requires calories.

In the end, just before we made it out the door. Augie ran around with the tent on his head, falling and flailing and crashing into furniture, like Thing 1 and  Thing 2.

On day two of The Summer of the Finger, we got corn dogs. I let Archie pick what he wanted from the frozen case at the grocery store, and he picked corn dogs. Don’t worry, though, they were organic tofu dogs coated in minimally processed whole grain batter made in sustainable and diverse small family factories. Just kidding! They were Winn Dixie-brand “classic”corn dogs. I resisted and ate my leafy vegetables and whole grains, a hard man with complete command, until the next day when I was hungover and crushed a corn dog with yellow mustard in about ten seconds after pulling it out of the oven.  Finger culture took that round.

The next day, The Breakfast Wars fired up again. This time it was me against the both of them, though, instead of them against each other. I stood over Archie and held a half piece of toast with blueberry jam near his face, while he sat with his head down playing with an toy alphabet-saying dachshund and taking nibbles of the toast that left little marks that looked like a gerbil had gotten ahold of it.

Meanwhile Augie smashed his half piece of toast and blueberry jam into his face first chance he had, getting it all over his face and saying, “sticky.” I put Archie’s piece down and went to tear a piece off to try to feed Augie, but Augie got angry that I tore his piece, enraged, and smushed the whole thing up in his hands, balling it up and squeezing it through his fingers. Once he was satisfied and his anger subsided, he held hands up and said “sticky” again.

“a constant ebb and flow between fun and rage.”

 

The Summer of the Finger

Why is okay for adults to eat chicken fingers but not chicken nuggets?

I was around ten when McNuggets came out, and I remember thinking the McNugget was genius in its conceptual obviousness and simplicity. Just the meat off the bone, fried like a french fry, with barbecue or sweet-and-sour sauce for dippin’. Holy smokes! And that was before I even tried one.

Once I got to sinking my teeth into one, it was delicious, and wonderful, and heavenly in its greasy, steaming-hot goodness, and no matter which sauce you tried, you were assured a massive sugar rush to go along with that sodium-chemical blast. Eating them was a high. Even at the time, though, I understood that the McNugget was not exactly what I had thought. It wasn’t just chicken that was batter fried. That much was apparent to a ten-year-old, even though I could have in no way imagined the truth of the vile fake-food-stuff spew of mechanically-separated garbage and chemicals the McNugget is. But the taste and texture were enough to know that it was a McDonalds product and had no comparable equivalent in nature or elsewhere in the food universe.

Thirty-some years later, chicken nuggets are still more or less horrifically produced garbage and chemicals, despite the fact that the nugget industry has exploded to the point that there are thousands of varieties, including “healthy” ones. Also more things than ever are smashed into nugget form and sold to kids. In my freezer right now is something called Dr. Prager’s Broccoli Littles, with the word “kids” in multi-color, along with “gluten free.” According to the pictures on the box, Broccoli Littles are toasty-brown-colored, dinosaur-shaped nuggets with flecks of green, presumably the broccoli. As for what makes up the brown parts, according to the label it’s a combo of potatoes, canola oil, egg whites, and something called arrowroot. To Dr. Prager’s credit, the label is notably free of un-pronounceables, but the point is that these types of foods comprise a huge portion of foods marketed to kids, and presumably fed to kids, because kids love them, and because parents love foods that kids will actually eat.

I’m no different as a parent. Long having disabused myself of the notion that I’d avoid feeding my kids heavily processed foods, I now am happy to feed them anything they want, whenever they want it, and as much of it as they want. Why? Because I need them to eat! And they won’t eat things they don’t like. It’s a simple equation that every parent figures out sooner if not later. We feed our kids crap because they like it, things we would never eat ourselves, or else seriously try to avoid eating. Hence the concept of kids’ food. The chicken nugget is the embodiment of this concept. Do adults eat nuggets? I see McNuggets advertised with adults eating them in the ads, so presumably they do, but I’m guessing (hoping?)  these people are young adults still clinging to habits of their childhood. At some point, they stop, don’t they? They move on to the chicken finger instead. If nuggets embody kids’ food, then the chicken finger and what I’ll call “finger culture” represent the netherworld between childhood and adulthood where America seems to spend most of its waking life.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t eat or don’t enjoy chicken fingers. Quite the opposite, and that’s the point. I love them and would eat them at every meal if I could, but I can’t, and that’s the other point. I realize, though, that my love for them stems in part from being immersed in inescapable finger culture. Goddamn chicken fingers are on every single menu in every restaurant in the entire freaking country. The reasons for this are many, as are the adverse effects, which are also somewhat boring, and I promise not to get into them too much, but I have to talk some about the crushing effects of finger culture, as my kids and I try to weave our way through it this summer. That in a nutshell is what I’m faced with for the next few months, trying to get food into my kids’ cry-holes, while trying to keep myself from drowning in a vat of fryer grease at the same time. Please join us here at Xuladad as we embark on The Summer of the Finger.

Our Summer Mountain Repeat

This morning I dropped off Archie at school and took Augie to City Park’s Coterie Forest. In a few weeks Archie’s school-year will end and I’ll have both boys during the day, Xuladad version 2.0. But for today it was me and Augie, solo in the backwoods of the park, him at a year and nine months, around six months older than Archie was when we began the adventures of Xuladad, in the summer of 2013. And yes I’ll be employing that New Yorker-style comma for dates in these posts because its use makes sense to me on logical grounds. We didn’t also begin our adventures at another time that wasn’t the summer of 2013, which is how it would read to me without the comma.

The air temperature was remarkably cool for a May 9th morning in New Orleans, unbelievably, really, as I couldn’t recall a year with as long a reprieve from the crushing heat as this. Winds swooshed in the trees above us as we walked across the bridge at the entrance to the forest. Augie proceeded with some trepidation, holding to my hand, where in most situations he’d barrel ahead with confidence. This place was new and strange, and its beauty unfolds beginning there on the bridge, which crosses a shallow marsh of a lake covered with vast swaths of water hyacinths. The canopy darkened the path beyond as we watched a brown dove walk ahead of us, the only animal we’d see on the outing. Augie held fast to my hand as we climbed the forty-three-foot-high Mt. Laborde, the highest point in New Orleans, and he remained cautious at the top, where we encountered the owner of one of the two other vehicles we’d seen in the lot. She was out for some exercise, by her outfit, but had taken a moment to place a row of rocks on the end of the tall, semi-circular bench at the top. The top of Mt. Laborde is leveled flat and on it is a strange fabricated space consisting of a concrete slab topped with like a fiberglass-and-gravel meshed surface and the semicircular bench. I placed Augie on the bench and held his hand from the ground as we walked toward the rocks at the end, which he identified correctly and we played with for a minute. I wasn’t sure if the exerciser had put him there for him or not. They were placed in a row and spaced evenly, not something an adult would normally do for herself. It could have been a message to any other person, not necessarily us, but there was no doubting that it spoke most directly to kids, and Augie understood. The exerciser had disappeared but then reappeared quickly. She was running up and down the hill on the different paths on it and had broken a sweat, one that was a mild version of what a May morning’s heat would normally inflict. She said hello and didn’t seemed displeased that we’d scrambled her rock message.

We then walked down another path, made of broken concrete stepping-stones, toward the small lake, where we saw the other vehicle owner, a man with a fishing pole who was in the middle of switching spots. We moved toward the one he had just left, a short pier, and he said hello as he passed. On the pier Augie finally released his grip and started to explore like his usual self, walking up and down the single pier step and to the railed end and back. I sat and watched him play, and he came and sat next to me and fed me some pretend snacks that he pretend pulled from the post. We had a quiet moment there, as the breeze rippled the water, so much like a moment Archie and I had spent there in 2013 that it felt strange and fortunate to be able to repeat it like that. The boys were similar in the way I guess all kids of that age to be, experimenting with their balance, trying the different surfaces, transitioning from one to another, grabbing the rail and peering over into the water, looking through the boards to the bright green algae below. But they were different, too. Archie wanted to be picked up and held. Augie wanted to walk. Archie never pretended to eat. He would pretend prepare food to serve to others, but he would never taste his preparations himself, real or pretend.

When we got back to the top of the hill, he had a completely different mindset. Now comfortable with the stillness of the forest, and that strange, bastardized natural space at the hilltop, he went to work playing in earnest, running around on the fiber-mesh surface, to the center and back to the bench. The very center of the top is covered by a piece of spray-painted wood, heavy and old, worn-down and smooth, with holes and gaps that gave the spray-painted colors a vintage, almost 1970’s NYC subway-style look. The whole top area, with the mesh surface worn away in places, revealing the industrial fibers of which it was comprised, and the slightly-tall bench, and spray-painted wood, had a look like someone’s good idea from thirty years ago. I put Augie up on the bench again and now he wanted to jump off and have me swing him back by his arms. He laughed and got more aggressive with the game and signaled “more” in his index-finger-to-palm way when I paused.  He got into his full regular mode, exploring down the paths until he disappeared from my sight and I called him back, until finally he got around to doing what he really came to do, throw rocks.

As we left we passed a group of four coming in wearing pastel and khaki, plastic-ish hiking clothes. There was no new car in the parking lot, though, which meant they had walked in, which suggested out-of-towners, possibly European, no doubt wondering why more Americans don’t live in New Orleans, with such glorious May weather. I wasn’t sure how often we’d be back once version 2.0 kicked in in a few weeks, but it was good to get this “repeat” day in for me and young August. And the forest was an option, which I need a few of to get through summer. On the way home we drove by the skatepark at Paris Ave. and I-610 . . . .

Archie’s Freakbeat Wig-Out!

Sometime a few months before he turned four, Archie developed some consistent rhythm and ability to carry a little tune. I don’t know if this was ahead or behind schedule for that sort of thing, but considering he’d been banging on pans and yelling words for several years, it sure felt like a long time coming.

One night just before bedtime he set up a drumset of an upturned tote with a mini-frisbee as the high-hat and sat down to bang out a tune, using a light-up Mardi Gras wand as the sole stick.

“Okay, I want to play one of my favorite songs,” he said. “So tell me what one is.”

He pretended not to know what one was, or maybe he really couldn’t remember. He counted on our knowledge of his favorite songs, and he wasn’t wrong. We’d been cataloging his favorite songs for years. You may recall I scored a victory by introducing him to The Sweet’s “Little Willie” at a very early age. The disc it was on, which also contained The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” went away for a while, and when it came back, on a trip to the beach when he was two, it instantly became his favorite song. He asked for it each time in the car, and I couldn’t have been more excited. We both loved it so, we never tired of it.

The bubble burst of course when he discovered kids’ music soon after and went through several phases, some horrid like this thing called Little People, which was supposed to be Fisher Price toy characters singing nauseatingly “rocked up” versions of “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea” and other nasty ear worms. The singers were clearly adults trying to act like kids, which made it unbearable. Other phases, like Sesame Street and Raffi, were enjoyable in a predictably nostalgic way. But then he started pre-kindergarten in the fall of his fourth go-round, and all bets were off when they sent him home with a very special disc called Music Together. You see, we didn’t know it at the time, but we were already at a huge disadvantage, as his teachers had been using this disc in class exercises, and were in no way prepared for the onslaught that followed in the form of a little ditty called “Ram Sam Sam.”

This song, “Ram Sam Sam,” consisted of exactly one phrase, which comprised both the chorus and the verse, and exactly two chords that just repeated and repeated. The thing started slow and built real slow and deliberately, then got going on what seemed like a really fast tempo. This formula alone is enough to drive any kid wild, but the kicker was the dance that his teacher taught him to go with the song. It starts off with a march and an arm roll, with a little jump, and you move in a circle, faster and faster with the song, doing the dance faster and faster, straight through the soprano sax solo, until you collapse at the end in a heap of overloaded kid frenzy. It’s like a kids’ psychedelic freak-beat wig-out!  It reminds me of what happens with a bunch of freaks at a Klezmer All-Stars show, or the pit at a Reverend Horton Heat show, bands that go up slow to fast and you dance in a circle. In other words, it’s really, really fun.

“Ram Sam Sam” took over his life and mine in a way I might have predicted but didn’t. He requested it nicely but frequently, and oh so cutely. I tried to counter, but it was useless. Even if I could squeeze in one of mine, it was always, “Can we listen to my song after this, daddy? Please, please daddy, can we listen to my song?”

What could I do? We listened to it in the car (where the arm parts of the dance were still executed from the car seat). We danced with him, at home, in his room on the rug, in the front room on “Daddy’s stereo,” on the deck, on the front porch, on trips to Grandma’s house where it went with us, everywhere and all the time and multiple times in a row, over and over again. Like the song itself, building each time, repeating over and over again, collapsing in a heap, starting anew.

The other songs on the disc also caught his fancy, or maybe they moved on to others in school. He listened to the entire Music Together disc so many times that he knew the words and the order. He learned to skip some he liked less. When he discovered “random” play he asked for that, calling it “uh-oh” because the tracks came in unexpected order.

“Can we listen to my CD on uh-oh, daddy?”

“Only after you finish your french fries and ice cream, son. Now pass daddy the Zapp’s Voodoo chips.”

The thing is, the stuff wasn’t bad. It has interesting rhythms and percussion going on, and the instrumentation is varied and nice, with a bunch of strings and horns. I even showed him a youtube video of Music Together Live! and it blew his little mind. The concert was over-the-top, with a hundred or so kids and parents dancing around in circles to a blowout rendition of “Working on the Railroad” like our mini psychedelic freakouts times a thousand. He studied all of it so closely that he began to learn rhythm and melody from it. So that night when he sat down for a totes and frisbee drum concert, Erin and I knew the first song would be one of those. He just needed us to count it off, so to speak. And when she started a soft “So Long, Farewell,” he picked it right up and banged off a respectable version, with a sped-up flourish at the end.

We didn’t get into “Ram Sam Sam” that night. After all, it was bedtime. But his musical skills bode well for the eardrums of our future. One problem is that, well, it’s drums. Plus he can still command us to sing and do the dance from behind the kit.

One other thing, his little brother likes to sing now, too, at one and a half, but he’s nowhere near carrying a tune. His favorite song at the moment.: “Sweet Jane” by The Velvet Underground.

The Babbling Baby meets Derridean Deconstruction.

Augie at 7 months.

Archie’s brother, Augie, was born August 7, 2014, and on his 8-month birthday he began his first syllabic utterances, babbling, as it’s called, strung-together consonant-vowel combos. Ah-bah-bah-bah, or Ah-dah-dah-dah. It’s an amazing moment, really, and not just because these sounds are new coming from his mouth, but also because there seems to be some meaning behind them. You watch his face as he babbles, and it seems clear that there is some thought present, some reason, some purpose for the utterance. It’s joy, or contentment, or happiness, usually, but directed joy, toward some object, or person, or situation. He looks and he babbles and he clearly has an internal moment along with the external one, some confluence of meaning, intent, understanding, and sound. Of course it’s entirely possible that the thought and the sound are separate and random, that the look on his face is coincidental, and that what I read into it is simply a projection. After all there are thoughts present presumably from the beginning, and the babbles certainly aren’t the first sounds he’s made.  There have been occurrences of thought and sound aligned before the 8-month mark, essentially what the first cries and laughter are, sounds with meaning in them. But can we call those meanings thoughts? Is hunger a thought? For that matter, is joy a thought? Can such a feeling be called a thought before it’s verbalized, when it’s just a pang or a tactile sensation?

I pose these questions because my freshmen are currently engaged in their “research” project, a dreaded, required portion of the class in which I attempt to convince them that there are other sources of information besides the top two Google hits. It’s mostly an exercise in futility, as the sources I direct them towards are hopelessly dense. I try to limit the tasks for the students, to make them more manageable, but no amount of limiting can make a database article on feminist literary theory easier to read than a Wikipedia article on the same topic. We’re in the library, and they’re pretending to search databases while sexting on Snapchat or whatever. I’m pretending to care what they’re doing while reading articles on deconstruction, one of which begins with the idea of words being arbitrary signs, disconnected from meaning in any primal, preverbal way. I think about Augie and this incredible moment he’s in, the very beginning of his verbal existence, the formation of his self that some would argue follows this verbalization, the idea that all of the meaning we find in the world, the very way we order and comprehend existence, follows from our ability to use language. When I watch Augie pulling himself up on a coffee-table corner, gnawing on the table, looking around and saying, “Ah-dah-dah-dah,” it’s hard for me to believe that there isn’t some underlying preverbal reality, call it a language, that exists before our knowledge of an entire system of signs and signifiers, if not before, then concurrent with, in a sense always and already.

Like a Republican asked a question about climate change, I’m no scientist. But unlike a Republican, I say this not to posit a ridiculous counter-argument freed from the constraints of logic because, you know, I’m no expert, but rather to admit an actual lack of knowledge. I don’t know if looking at Augie offers any anthropological insight whatsoever into how language developed in humans (around 500 years ago, right?) Of course the cavewoman’s move from utterance to sign to word to language is nothing like Augie’s babbling “Dah-dah” (which I swear is because of me, daddy). His development is entirely conscripted by the context of mine and Erin’s and Archie’s language. There is no direct line from the universe to Augie’s brain, to his mouth, to our ears. The line is always already interrupted, directed, shaped. But is the same true for the cavewoman? Was there a primal existence unencumbered by language, a point in time in which the unanswerable questions of how meaning is created could be answered by simply observing the development happen. I mean, there’ve been a lot of babies and all have first uttered. A lot of smart people have watched them and tried to figure it all out, yet the question remains.

A student asks me to help explain an article she’s found on feminist theory. She’s trying to make an argument that the speaker of “One Perfect Rose” is a feminist. Her understanding of what “feminist” means is very fixed and self-evident, having been formed long ago. Nothing in the article she’s reading will come close to confirming or refuting her understanding. It can only complicate things, which is a fun thing to do for an English teacher, but not for a science major trying to understand an assignment get an A in a required course. I don’t tell her to look at Wikipedia, or not to. She’s probably done it already. So I paraphrase a few of the lines of her unhelpful article, in hopes that she’ll at least notice where Wikipedia differs or confirms. But ultimately she’s better off at this point moving forward with her understanding, believing a fixed meaning that she can grasp.

At home Augie crawls toward the door as I walk in and stops, sits on his knees, raises his arms, and cries out, “Agghhh,” dark eyes beaming, crooked smile and no teeth. He’s the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen. I know it and I think he does, too.  He’s glad to see me, or maybe he’s just hungry.

Jam Versus Jelly

Unlike most Americans, Archie doesn’t like food. It started when he was a baby, refusing to nurse, pushing away the bottle. His sense of humor developed much more quickly than his appetite, as he would laugh when the bottle he knocked away squirted milk on his face. But he wouldn’t eat. We figured that survival instinct would kick in at some point, that he’d feel hunger and want food, but almost three years later, he still doesn’t seem to have made the connection between the pain in his belly and the stuff we’re constantly trying to shove into his mouth. This situation has led to some questionable and embarrassing parenting, certain things my wife swore she would never do, like giving him fries, nuggets, pizza, ice cream, cookies, anything to force some calories into the boy. It’s also led to some things I never thought I’d have to say, to anyone, let alone my offspring, like, “You can’t have any ice cream until you finish those last few French fries.”

He’s always been quite manually dexterous, and independent, so we thought that things might get better when he was able to feed himself. But along with with his love of order and ritual came a peculiar form of OCD-like behavior. For instance, he loved making decisions from the moment he could, so we’d let him choose what he wanted on his toast, jelly, peanut butter, syrup, etc. But one day I must have called the jelly “jam” instead, so then he thought he had another option. Now, I understand that there is in fact a difference, but this isn’t what were talking about here. In our fridge, it’s the same shit. We’ve only got the one jar of stuff. So I’d say, “how about some jelly on your toast?”

And he’d say, “no, no jelly. I want jam.” So I’d put the sticky purple stuff on his toast and he’d say, “no, daddy. That’s jelly. I want jam.” Basically anything to avoid having to eat it.

So next time I’d try, “Do you want jelly or jam on your toast?” And whatever he’d say, I’d put the stuff on and say, “Here ya go. Jam on toast, just like you wanted.” It worked okay for a minute, but then he got into this OCD thing of not wanting to get any jelly on his fingers. He’d get a little on his finger, then hold it up and cry like he’d just been stabbed in the hand. I’d cut the toast into strips so that he could pick them up himself, but he can’t quite figure out how to hold them by the edge so as to get a minimal amount of jelly on his fingers. This led to discussions like the following:

“Eat a bite of toast,” I’d say.

“Feed me a bite,” he’d say.

I’d say, “Archie, if you’re old enough to ask me to feed you a bite, then you’re old enough to feed yourself. I already ate my toast. This is your toast. You pick it up and put it in your mouth yourself.”

He’d say, “I don’t want jelly on my fingers. It’s sticky.”

I’d say, “I know it’s sticky, but it’s your goddamn toast. If I pick it up, then I’ve got jelly on my fingers. How is that fair? Me getting your jelly from your toast on my fingers?” But the semantics of my argument were lost on him.

Another thing he’d do was to bite the toast strip in the wrong place, like in front of the spot where it was naturally about to tear, so that he’d have a piece in his mouth and a piece hanging out of his mouth. He wouldn’t know what to do, so he’d freak out and wave his hands in front of his face like he’d been stung on the nose by a wasp or something.

“Just push the rest into your mouth,” I’d say. But then he might get jelly on his fingers, so instead he open his mouth and let the whole thing fall out, at which point the dogs, sitting like hawks watching prey, would scramble for the bit, and I’d have to separate them from from ripping each other’s ears off over a scrap of toast.

Once we got past two-year no-TV moratorium we’d decided on and mostly successfully enforced, we found that, like most Americans, he was able have food mindlessly stuffed into his face while distracted by the glowing rays of the tube. This strategy has proven mildly successful, but we’re somewhat put off by the way his face seems to go blank while staring at Elmo and having bits of toast stuffed into his mouth, sort of like those pig people from that one season of True Blood.

Over this past holiday break at his grandma’s, I got up when he awoke and took him downstairs while the rest of the house slept. We flipped through the 857 channels and found some Elmo, and I toasted half a slice of bread, spread jelly on it, and cut it into three strips. It’s odd that I consider it some kind of his success that I was able to force feed him almost two thirds of one half of one piece of toast, while responding to, “Look, daddy. Elmo!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, shoving in another bite, knowing he was completely tuned out to what I was saying. “There’s that little freak. Now take another bite. By the way, it’s jelly, not jam. It never was. And by the way, Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”

Xuladad 2014: Archie Commandeers the Car Stereo

At almost two and a half Archie is now able to deliver information to me that was previously unknown, a remarkable step. This morning on the changing table I accidentally close his foot into the top drawer as it dangled over the edge. “Mama did that, too,” he said.

“Mama did that, too?” I said, completing this thing of repeating everything he says, in part to make sure I got it right, but more so just because I can’t quite believe he said it.

“Yes,” he affirmed. “Silly mama.”

So now he can report to me things that mama has done when I wasn’t around. Unfortunately the flip is true, too, as I take a quick inventory of the things I’ve done so far today that may or may not be related back to mama later.

Of course the previously unbeknownst information is the exception, as most of his missives are still of the obvious, yet still remarkable, variety.

“Somebody moved the car,” he said. And indeed the car was not in the driveway but on the street. But I already knew that. I was the one who moved it. Still it’s nice to know we’ve got another set of eyes on the car at all times.

“Somebody moved the car?” I say.

“Yes,” he says, as we walk to its new location.

A year ago car trips we’re times when I could plop him in the car seat in the back and then listen to whatever I wanted. He didn’t really have an opinion. Not one he could express clearly anyway. Besides he was facing the other way. I just assumed that he liked listening to sports talk and cranked up Billy Lee Riley: The Complete 60s Sun Outtakes as much as I did. I did have him singing along to “Little Willy” at one point after all. “Uptown downtown, Little Willy Willy Willy.” Everything was great. We had common interests.

Now he wanted to hear his own CD. And he was sitting there looking at me in the mirror asking for it. “Archie listen to ABCs,” he said.

“Huh?” I said, pretending not to understand. It hit me that he’d actually been saying that same thing since the changing table. I hadn’t understood it then, but now in context it was crystal clear.

“Archie listen to ABCs,” he repeated. What could I do? I was stuck. He had the CD case in his hand.

“What number is it?” I asked, hoping to flummox him.

“Track 16,” he said. Just kidding. “Archie listen to ABCs.”

“Ok, hand me the case,” I said. Damn, good thing I asked. The disc had like thirty songs on it, and ABCs was buried deep in the mix.

It wasn’t the worst version I’d ever heard. Not the best either, certainly no Raffi, and not even on par with the original cast of Sesame Street. I’m not sure who the group was. Their instrumentation was decent, standard piano-bass-flute-type arrangement. But the vocals. Blech. Would it have killed them to mix in a harmony. They could have learned a thing or two from Elmo’s duet with India Aire.

“Again,” he said.

“Huh?” I said hoping to stall till the next track started. It worked. He forgot about hearing the last one again and was content with the next one. But it didn’t save me much grief. Billy Lee Riley make have been a second-tier artist on the Sun roster, struggling for a hit by the mid-sixties, but so what if his “Working on a River” is an obvious attempt to ride the coat tails of “Proud Mary.” It still rocked, damn it! Now I was stuck in a squeaky-voice, glockenspiel, la-la nightmare. Everything sounded like the tail end of a bad acid trip. At least we were almost at our destination.

“Up down elevator,” he said, as we approached downtown and he saw the buildings. If there was one thing he loved more than listening to the same insane-making track on repeat, it was riding up-down elevators. Unfortunately he also liked to do that on repeat, as I’d soon find out.

The Aquarium, Part Two–Eggs in My Head

We made it! After an incredibly long walk up the promenade, which took over a month (sorry!), Archie and I arrived at the ticket window of the Aquarium of the Americas. This beautiful aquarium is quite cleverly named: One would think that this aquarium is somehow the official aquarium of all of the Americas, North, South, and Costa Rica and whatever else is in the middle, sort of like the WWII museum is the official, national museum of that event. How did New Orleans pull this off? Some incredible NAFTA maneuver? Sister city program? Our prestigious location as the northernmost city in the Caribbean? But it seemed odd, and unlikely, that a citizen of, say, Brazil, would need to travel to New Orleans to visit his or her official, hemispheric aquarium. A quick study of the exhibit names, though, revealed that the aquarium is so named because it presents species and habitats of the various Americas, with a focus, of course, on the northern Gulf and lower Mississippi areas. You didn’t think they were miss an opportunity to put an alligator on it, did you!

It had been great having the Audubon pass over the summer. We were able to visit the zoo and the aquarium unlimited times and not have to worry about staying all day to get our money’s worth. But the membership plans were actually numerous and complicated, a fact that became apparent as the two moms in line in front of me, managing like ten kids between them, engaged in a lengthy and confusing discussion with the young clerk behind the window about just how many and who of their brood their particular plan allowed them to bring in. When they finally got that sorted out, I rolled Archie forward and handed her my card.

“Just us,” I said, hoping to cheer her up with the simplicity of our request.

“How old is he?” she asked.

Oh, no, I thought. I wasn’t sure what our plan entitled us to. And I wasn’t sure if I should lie and say that he’s one or not. He was so small, he could’ve passed for under one, that is unless they saw him doing his pull-ups.

“Um, one,” I said.

“Enjoy the aquarium,” she said and handed me my card and ID, some tickets, and some other receipt or something. Why did we need so many papers to go from that window into the aquarium, the entrance to which was like five feet away? As I was pondering this, I should’ve been paying attention to where I put the tickets because when I got to the ticket-taker, I had to rummage through every pocket I had before finding them stuffed into the diaper bag. Why the heck did I do that? Because I was too busy wondering why we needed tickets at all to pay attention to where I was putting them.

Once inside, we rolled through an aquarium tunnel, where schools of fish and stingrays swim above your head through shimmering light. It was a wonderful sight that we paused to behold, but we were standing between a group and their camera-person. So we moved down a few feet to get out of their way, but then another group came through moving the opposite direction. We crossed to the other side to get out of their way, but a group was standing at the glass there. To get out of the aisle, we moved a few feet down from them, but by that point, we had exited the tunnel. It was a site to behold, just don’t stop to behold it.

Next up was another giant tank, this one featuring large fish, turtles, even sharks swimming laps around what looked like the undersea portion of an offshore oil rig. Some people might find it strange that the pilings of an oil rig are presented as the fish’s natural habitat, and that the exhibit is sponsored by Shell, when public perception is that oil production has degraded and damaged the natural environs of these magnificent creatures. But I saw the exhibit more symbolically: the oil rig is a prison, like Alcatraz, in which we are all trapped, the circling sharks a reminder of the unseen dangers of oil production. Or perhaps, the sharks serve as agents of Shell, preventing us from jumping ship. More literally, though, the rig is a terrifying place, continually surrounded by swarms of hungry sharks, and it’s the workers of south Louisiana who are literally trapped there, unable to escape.

More prescient to my current situation was my own little shark, trapped in his stroller. I rolled him up to the glass, imagining many minutes of calm wonder. Instead he strained against his stroller straps, squirming and torquing. He had been in the stroller since we got off the streetcar, and he was done. What the heck? I popped the straps and let him out. Uninterested in the giant, awe-inspiring tank, he immediately ran toward a seated area, where patrons could observe the theater-like tank from cubed, carpeted bleachers in the dark. He flung his belly against the seat, between two people, and began his belly climb onto it. Soon he was onto that seat level and attempting to climb onto the next level, through, over, and between the legs of more seated patrons. He could fit between them, but I couldn’t. I had to halt his progress. I grabbed him by the waist and lifted him off the bleachers. His legs kicked and arms flailed like a stunned octopus, or maybe a quadrapus. He threw is head back and let out a scream. The patrons thrilled to the up-close and personal wildlife show.

He wasn’t going back into the stroller. I needed to find an area with more space, and less climb-y things. We took an elevator to the second floor. Then we took it back to the first floor. Then to the second again, and back to the first. Each time, he reached to touch the button and cried, “buh-n, buh-n.” I’d lift him and he’d press it. Then when the silver doors opened, he said, “oooh.” He’d made it happen. He’d walk through the doors like he was entering Oz, then turn and watch the silver doors close behind him. When we reached the first floor for the third time, other people waited to get on, so I had to put a stop to the elevator game. Instead we took the stairs. Then we took the stairs back down.  Then back up again.

Once firmly on the second floor, we found a sea horse exhibit– several tall, round sea horse tanks that extended almost to the floor, a perfect height for him to pound on the glass and scream at the sea horses. “Gentle,” I said, trying to at least get him to touch instead of bang. But he could see them, swimming inside amongst the reedy grasses, which made him shriek with delight and point at them and look at me, making sure I saw them too. I did see them, and I’m pretty sure they saw him as well, a giant, screaming, curly-headed baby, pounding on their world.

I tried to lead him gently away from the glass, but the sea horses had sent him into a frenzy. He jerked my hand away, and when I re-took his hand, he went limp and collapsed to the floor in passive resistance. He understood my options instinctively: I could drag my one-year-old across the floor by one arm, or I could let go. When I let go, he got up and ran, a stumbling, head-forward fast-walk, hands up and bouncing in the air, between patrons, into the dark, toward . . . what . . . I didn’t know . . . penguins maybe . . . or frogs. I moved to catch him, but not before hearing a clip from a sea horse movie that played on a nearby screen. “The female sea horse implants the fertilized egg into an area near the head of the male,” it said. “And it is the male sea horse that gives birth.” Across the long, dark, aquarium corridor, I could see Archie, banging on the glass where a frenzied penguin pecked at his hand.

The Aquarium, Part Two–Eggs in My Head

We made it! After an incredibly long walk up the promenade, which took over a month (sorry!), Archie and I arrived at the ticket window of the Aquarium of the Americas. This beautiful aquarium is quite cleverly named: One would think that this aquarium is somehow the official aquarium of all of the Americas, North, South, and Costa Rica and whatever else is in the middle, sort of like the WWII museum is the official, national museum of that event. How did New Orleans pull this off? Some incredible NAFTA maneuver? Sister city program? Our prestigious location as the northernmost city in the Caribbean? But it seemed odd, and unlikely, that a citizen of, say, Brazil, would need to travel to New Orleans to visit his or her official, hemispheric aquarium. A quick study of the exhibit names, though, revealed that the aquarium is so named because it presents species and habitats of the various Americas, with a focus, of course, on the northern Gulf and lower Mississippi areas. You didn’t think they were miss an opportunity to put an alligator on it, did you!

It had been great having the Audubon pass over the summer. We were able to visit the zoo and the aquarium unlimited times and not have to worry about staying all day to get our money’s worth. But the membership plans were actually numerous and complicated, a fact that became apparent as the two moms in line in front of me, managing like ten kids between them, engaged in a lengthy and confusing discussion with the young clerk behind the window about just how many and who of their brood their particular plan allowed them to bring in. When they finally got that sorted out, I rolled Archie forward and handed her my card.

“Just us,” I said, hoping to cheer her up with the simplicity of our request.

“How old is he?” she asked.

Oh, no, I thought. I wasn’t sure what our plan entitled us to. And I wasn’t sure if I should lie and say that he’s one or not. He was so small, he could’ve passed for under one, that is unless they saw him doing his pull-ups.

“Um, one,” I said.

“Enjoy the aquarium,” she said and handed me my card and ID, some tickets, and some other receipt or something. Why did we need so many papers to go from that window into the aquarium, the entrance to which was like five feet away? As I was pondering this, I should’ve been paying attention to where I put the tickets because when I got to the ticket-taker, I had to rummage through every pocket I had before finding them stuffed into the diaper bag. Why the heck did I do that? Because I was too busy wondering why we needed tickets at all to pay attention to where I was putting them.

Once inside, we rolled through an aquarium tunnel, where schools of fish and stingrays swim above your head through shimmering light. It was a wonderful sight that we paused to behold, but we were standing between a group and their camera-person. So we moved down a few feet to get out of their way, but then another group came through moving the opposite direction. We crossed to the other side to get out of their way, but a group was standing at the glass there. To get out of the aisle, we moved a few feet down from them, but by that point, we had exited the tunnel. It was a site to behold, just don’t stop to behold it.

Next up was another giant tank, this one featuring large fish, turtles, even sharks swimming laps around what looked like the undersea portion of an offshore oil rig. Some people might find it strange that the pilings of an oil rig are presented as the fish’s natural habitat, and that the exhibit is sponsored by Shell, when public perception is that oil production has degraded and damaged the natural environs of these magnificent creatures. But I saw the exhibit more symbolically: the oil rig is a prison, like Alcatraz, in which we are all trapped, the circling sharks a reminder of the unseen dangers of oil production. Or perhaps, the sharks serve as agents of Shell, preventing us from jumping ship. More literally, though, the rig is a terrifying place, continually surrounded by swarms of hungry sharks, and it’s the workers of south Louisiana who are literally trapped there, unable to escape.

More prescient to my current situation was my own little shark, trapped in his stroller. I rolled him up to the glass, imagining many minutes of calm wonder. Instead he strained against his stroller straps, squirming and torquing. He had been in the stroller since we got off the streetcar, and he was done. What the heck? I popped the straps and let him out. Uninterested in the giant, awe-inspiring tank, he immediately ran toward a seated area, where patrons could observe the theater-like tank from cubed, carpeted bleachers in the dark. He flung his belly against the seat, between two people, and began his belly climb onto it. Soon he was onto that seat level and attempting to climb onto the next level, through, over, and between the legs of more seated patrons. He could fit between them, but I couldn’t. I had to halt his progress. I grabbed him by the waist and lifted him off the bleachers. His legs kicked and arms flailed like a stunned octopus, or maybe a quadrapus. He threw is head back and let out a scream. The patrons thrilled to the up-close and personal wildlife show.

He wasn’t going back into the stroller. I needed to find an area with more space, and less climb-y things. We took an elevator to the second floor. Then we took it back to the first floor. Then to the second again, and back to the first. Each time, he reached to touch the button and cried, “buh-n, buh-n.” I’d lift him and he’d press it. Then when the silver doors opened, he said, “oooh.” He’d made it happen. He’d walk through the doors like he was entering Oz, then turn and watch the silver doors close behind him. When we reached the first floor for the third time, other people waited to get on, so I had to put a stop to the elevator game. Instead we took the stairs. Then we took the stairs back down.  Then back up again.

Once firmly on the second floor, we found a sea horse exhibit– several tall, round sea horse tanks that extended almost to the floor, a perfect height for him to pound on the glass and scream at the sea horses. “Gentle,” I said, trying to at least get him to touch instead of bang. But he could see them, swimming inside amongst the reedy grasses, which made him shriek with delight and point at them and look at me, making sure I saw them too. I did see them, and I’m pretty sure they saw him as well, a giant, screaming, curly-headed baby, pounding on their world.

I tried to lead him gently away from the glass, but the sea horses had sent him into a frenzy. He jerked my hand away, and when I re-took his hand, he went limp and collapsed to the floor in passive resistance. He understood my options instinctively: I could drag my one-year-old across the floor by one arm, or I could let go. When I let go, he got up and ran, a stumbling, head-forward fast-walk, hands up and bouncing in the air, between patrons, into the dark, toward . . . what . . . I didn’t know . . . penguins maybe . . . or frogs. I moved to catch him, but not before hearing a clip from a sea horse movie that played on a nearby screen. “The female sea horse implants the fertilized egg into an area near the head of the male,” it said. “And it is the male sea horse that gives birth.” Across the long, dark, aquarium corridor, I could see Archie, banging on the glass where a frenzied penguin pecked at his hand.

Xuladad goes . . . Downtown! Part One: The Streetcar.

I had the romantic notion to take Archie on the streetcar downtown to visit the Aquarium of the Americas. It would be a real city experience, a first New Orleans streetcar ride! We’d get lots of looks and smiles, and everyone would be friendly and help us out. I knew it would be tough: I’d have the umbrella stroller, and the carrier, and the bag (the cursed bag!), and it would be hot. But the cars are air conditioned and I didn’t expect a big crowd traveling downtown midweek past rush hour. I thought we’d get back before rush hour the other way. It’s hard to believe people actually use the streetcar to commute, it’s so slow, but they do. But I thought Archie and I would be up for the challenge. I was wrong about one of us.

I prepared the bag–a highly illogical and spastic procedure that involves pacing through the house, talking to oneself, going back and forth to the bag, trying to think of everything that must go in it, knowing something will be forgotten. We said goodbye to Xulamom and ambled down the street to the stop on Canal St. to stand under the hot blanket morning sun and peer toward the cemeteries for a southbound train to appear through the haze. I thought that holding the baby and the stroller while boarding the train would be too difficult. I needed hands to put the money in. The only solution I could think of was the front carrier, the one that goes over your shoulders with the baby dangling in front of you. This turned out to be a mistake, one of Xuladad’s worst of the summer. In the future I will leave the stroller and the carrier behind for trips on the streetcar, and simply carry the child.

Boarding was a bumbling affair, with him attached to my chest, his head coming up to my chin, my arms having to reach around his arms and forward as he tries to grab the money out of my hands. An old soul took pity and let us have a seat at the front of the surprisingly-full train. The train lurched forward and I held fast for balance as we settled in and I tucked the stroller out of the way as best I could. The bag was draped around my neck and shoulder for security, and looped under the carrier. The best I could hope for was to slide it to the side to avoid sitting directly on it, which I couldn’t. So it sat jam-packed and lodged between my back and the seat, with me on the edge of the seat and him dangling in front. The weight I carried was significant, and my face dripped sweat as I sat and looked at the faces for whom we were a show.

I knew that the streetcar travels relatively swiftly along Canal until it passes Claiborne Ave., beyond which it stops frequently and for lengths of time. My plan was to get out and walk but I was finally beginning to get some air on my face and cool down. Getting out would be an effort–better to wait. We rode to Decatur, only a few blocks from the Aquarium. I popped the stroller open and set him in, threw the carrier off and under the stroller, and clipped the bag to the handles, shedding much sweaty weight. We hit the sidewalk rolling and I immediately cut into the closest convenience store. During the streetcar ride, all I could think about was a cold drink–an ice-cold fructose bomb from a reach-in cooler. Zydeco music blared as I gladly paid three dollars for a drink with $.99 printed on the bottle and guzzled half of it at the register. I gave the little man a sip, as the salesclerk peered down from her register tower.

“Ahh,” he said, and signed “more.”

“Drink up, little man,” I said. We had some large chunks of hot concrete to traverse, and at the end, the uphill-because-you’re-going-up-toward-the-river brick promenade leading to . . . the Aquarium!