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peer to a three year old
Sunday, November 11 2007
setting: Squirrel Hill neighborhood, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
This morning the happy couple whose engagement had been celebrated last night hosted a brunch at their place, a smallish house in what had once been a working class Pittsburgh neighborhood. The house had been fixed to such perfection that we were asked to take our shoes off at the door for reasons having nothing to do with Buddha. There must have also been some aversion to marring the walls, because the only thing hanging from them was a single flat screen teevee.
There were a dozen people there but I was, I think, the only non-Jew present (although one in our midst was merely a convert, one whose conversion isn't recognized by the orthodox with whom he occasionally hopes to form a minyan). So I was understandably surprised when we were offered mimosas, one of only two semi-legitimate forms of morning alcohol (a kind normally only seen among heavier drinking cultures such as WASPs, Europeans, Australians, and college kids). Strangely, though, no one was talking about or drinking coffee. Though I'd completely kicked it a year ago, I've fully lapsed back into my caffeine addiction, so I was wanting coffee. Though the mimosa in my hand was nice, I was definitely craving coffee a lot more than I was alcohol. But I'm not one to make a fuss and ask for things. I naturally assumed that a pot of coffee was being made. That's just how things are done in the world. If you're hosting a brunch, you're either making coffee or you don't know what the fuck a brunch is.
So then the table was being set with bagels, onions, and (most wonderfully) lox. With the exception of Chefs on Fire, lox are impossible to get in the Hudson Valley, so I was eagerly anticipating the sandwich I would be making with the provisions available. At some point someone asked me if I wanted eggs and before I could give a polite "no" someone else answered for me (with appropriately inappropriate rudeness). My egg aversion is well-known.
The we were all sitting down, and still no one was drinking coffee. Using the available materials I made a delicious bagel sandwich (or "snerchwich," the term Gretchen and I reserve for particularly delicious sandwiches). And as I was messily devouring it, somehow the topic of coffee came up, and reference was made to the as-yet-untapped pop in the coffee maker which was, someone murmured, decaf. I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly and from the other end of table announced "You can't be serious!" Oh but they were. They were hosting a brunch and they'd made a pot of decaf coffee and no one had cared enough about it to have even one cup. For some reason this group, which had been filling the air with painfully conventional conversation, had decided to defy convention on the one thing that I really care about at a brunch: caffeine. I've acclimated to Gretchen's caffeine-abstemious ways, but I found it hard to believe that this group, which included four others in my age group and still others I've known to drink caffeine, had no interest in morning coffee. Later it was revealed that there actually was real coffee in the house, but this hadn't been mentioned while there was still decaf to be drunk. The whole debacle was nothing short of a brunch felony, though I didn't yet know how aggravated it had been.
At some point I learned another nuance that put the situation in an even less forgiveable light. It seems that the host and hostess of this morning's brunch actually do drink real coffee on occasion, but in those cases they always get it by the cup at a fucking Starbucks. Way to find a way to be utterly conventional while throwing a Molotov cocktail at brunch convention, guys!
Somehow, and much later than both Gretchen and I had hoped, we managed to get out of there. A subset of us, one that didn't include bulky strollers and squalling children, drove to Construction Junction so Gretchen's father and mother could tour the Handmade Arcade and Gretchen and I could see it a second time. Gretchen's father didn't stay long; he found the pounding DJ mix oppressive. But Gretchen and the mother of her sister-in-law did a complete tour and bought a number of things. Now it's up to me to find a place to hang that lamp made of cocktail umbrellas.
As a break from the occasionally ear-splitting family-centered wholesomeness of Gretchen's brother's house, Barbara picked us up and drove us to her place, an apartment she rents in slightly-dilapidated neighborhood rich in old Victorian houses. We met her dog mMAH and her cute little cat Bella, which had once lived with both Gretchen and Barbara and had gone to the latter in the custody arrangement that had put Sally the Dog and the late Noah the Cat into my life.
Barbara was definitely in a spunkier mood than she had been in yesterday, occasionally producing little asides and in-jokes that were funny even though I was not in on them.
At some point Barbara produced a few odd instruments including a one-stringed Indian fiddle, an African drum, and a banjo and we all grooved for about a minute until the conversation needed to resume. (That's how one grooves when one isn't smoking pot.)
Eventually Gretchen went off to give her brother a tour of a co-op healthfood store to give him suggestions for what to eat should he decide to become vegan (something he is considering). Meanwhile Barbara took me to a nearby café called Quiet Storm, a sort of hipper, more colorful, more urban, and less hippie version of the Rosendale Café. Adding to its charm, it's in a "high crime area." Over real coffee (various forms of which I'd been drinking all day), Barbara and I discussed such subjects as our childhoods (neither of us were exactly spoiled as children, but Barbara had grown up in real poverty) and our relationships with Gretchen's parents, who (in spite of their liberal bona fides) hadn't been especially enthusiastic about Gretchen's relationship with Barbara.
Eventually Barbara dropped me off at Gullifty's in Squirrel Hill, a large eclectic American restaurant, where most of this weekend's adults (but none of the wee ones) would be dining tonight. I sat near the formerly-goy/formerly-Republican husband of Gretchen's aunt. He's the one whose orthodox friends won't count him towards their minyans until he gets a proper Orthodox conversion to Judaism (to them his Conservative conversion doesn't count). And I can't count him formerly-Republican until he gives up Coors Light, which he was drinking despite being ribbed about it by his wife.
Back at the house, my young nearly-four-year-old nephew decided he wanted to build a racetrack for his collection of toy cars. His material of choice was Kapla Blocks, a kind of wooden block that comes in completely uniform slabs, resembling scaled-down two by twelve framing studs. A patient and motivated child is supposed to be able to stack these to make all sorts of wonders (pictures on the box include a giraffe and the Eiffel Tower), but all we used them for was to lay roadway, as if the floor was the Florida Everglades. My nephew is particularly fond of bridges, so I made a few of these as well as some tunnels. At some point I converted an awkward curve in the highway to an intersection featuring two competing (and rather abstractly-depicted) gas stations.
It's been a long time since I played as a kid, and I was a bit rusty, but I was aiming to do it all on my nephew's terms. At first I thought we'd actually be rolling the cars freely on the roadway and I wondered how it could possibly survive. But a kid doesn't actually need free motion to achieve happy play. He can be happy just moving the cars around with his fingers a little here and there and mostly letting them sit still. Being able to give a car a little push into a tunnel and see it emerge on its own on the other side is just an added bonus.
At my nephew's suggestion, we drove our cars from one end of the track to the other, each of us starting on either end and passing in the middle. Later a series of cars waited at the gas stations while cars ahead of them gassed up. For an added bit of fun, I suggested my nephew could be a helicopter looking down from above, and he ran to grab a toy airplane (which was understandably made of nerf).
There was a surprising amount of conversation and back-and-forth negotiation about what to do with the roadway and how to move the cars around on it. I could see this sort of play being helpful in the development of all sorts of essential interpersonal skills, skills that, up until this point, I hadn't seen my little nephew displaying even in nascent form. It could be that I'd only seen him interacting with other adults who (by necessity or habit) tend to talk to him in the way that God spoke to Adam. I was not doing that. I was behaving as much like a peer as I possibly could, and this meant speaking to my nephew as if he were my age, not speaking to him like I was his. I used my usual vocabulary, sentence structure, and tempo of enunciation. Kids that age have a natural gift for language, so you might as well expose them to the real thing. Meanwhile, though, the way I was playing was based on what my nephew was doing, so in this way I was acting his age.
I'd seen plenty of evidence of my nephew's destructive tendencies, and I honestly didn't think the track would last more than a half hour, but something about it brought out a hitherto-unseen carefulness and even patience. For example, I watched him stepping with a surprising gingerness around and pushing cars through the two gas stations, which were obviously-fragile structures built with sticks standing on their narrow ends. The track would end up surviving the night.
After a certain point I couldn't maintain the hunched-over posture essential to this kind of play, so I kicked back in a chair and interviewed my nephew about the various cars. He proceeded to relate a complex taxonomy based on three categories: speed cars, fire cars, and water cars. His information was based on his watching of the movie Cars (about a group of anthropomorphic cars equipped with human eyes) with additional insights from various books and a hearty dollop of his own flights of fancy. His explanations of the mechanisms that propel the cars were magical and somewhat incoherent, but getting him to talk this way produced a long series of precious video moments for his zeidy, who was operating a digital camera in movie mode. At one point Gretchen exclaimed, "He's so cute right now!"
It bears noting that throughout our play, my nephew repeatedly referred to me as "Uncle Gus," a title I had never before heard spoken by someone to whom I've been an uncle.
It felt great to bask in the glory and accolades that rained down from witnesses who had watched this spectacle, but I don't think I'd been tapping any special mojo. All one has to do when playing with a young child is be willing to relate to him on his own terms without condescension and he'll be a good kid and produce oodles of Kodak moments. He'll also eventually get tired and have to go to bed of his own volition, something that happened tonight but hadn't happened for the preceding two.
Obviously, though, it's important to note that I happened to be in a unique position to bring out such behavior from my nephew. I'm not his parent and it's not my job to discipline him, so I really can relate to him as a peer. Furthermore, I've never felt particularly attached to my adult dignity.
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