faulty vision

I was going to write about butterflies, but I have decided not to. I have nothing to say about butterflies, except that they are pretty, and I like them, and they’re probably evil. Bound to be. If I have learned nothing in this long life, it is that beautiful things and beautiful people are evil to the core, or else plainly they would not be beautiful. Or rather, because they are beautiful, they are evil — I seem to have lost track of which one is cause and which one is effect, but it doesn’t really matter.

Here’s the point. Have you ever seen a butterfly in a spider’s web? Ever? I haven’t. And does that make any sense? No. Here are these spiders all over the place, predators with an eye to the main chance. There is strategy to the placement of their webs and the design. Years of evolutionary trial and error have made them experts — well, all except for the strangely challenged one that persists on trying to build his in the bottom of our guest bathtub; I can’t figure out what he thinks he’s going to accomplish doing this, but day after day he just sits there, twiddling his little legs. I even took pity one day and dropped an earwig into his web, which stirred him strangely; he dashed all around his web with great excitement, then proceeded to set the earwig free. I swear, he’s the first (and probably the last) of a new species of anorexic vegan spider.

Where was I?

Master hunters, right.

So there you have these spiders, and they’re probably eying these butterflies galumphing around all over the place, the insect world’s answer to the dizzy Malibou Beach blonde, and they’re thinking: “Yum.” Because you and I may know that those plump, perky thoraces owe nothing to nature and everything to Dr. Rutabaga on North Bedford Drive, but spiders are innocent and don’t know any better. So there they are, thinking about their supper and imagining a butterfly would just about hit the spot right about now, and probably taste like chicken to boot, and with all their best efforts, what happens? Nothing, that’s what.

And why is that, do you suppose? I mean, here you have an insect with the looks of a madonna, the coordination of a 2-year old, and the intellectual stamina of the Octomom. Everything is lined up perfectly for it to end up as dinner, and still it escapes.

Obviously, this is because butterflies are evil. Little known fact: butterflies eat spiders. Even littler known fact. After eating the spiders, butterflies GIVE BIRTH TO COCKROACHES.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about butterflies. I want to talk about my sister, and how she ate silkworms.

Although come to think of it, that’s not really much of a story.

Sako came out to visit us a few weeks ago, on her way to Yosemite on one of her random vacations. I took her to a Korean market, where she discovered a stack of cans advertising themselves as Boiled Silkworms.

Personally, that’s where I would have stopped. I would’ve picked up a can, read the label, and then put it back on the display. My sister works in mysterious ways. I didn’t realize she had picked up the can for purchase until she was going through the checkout line. I overheard her asking the cashier if he had ever had the silkworms before.

The cashier, a young Korean-American man, looked at the can with an expression of faint alarm. “I’ve never eaten them,” he said slowly, “but every time I go back to Korea, my cousins eat them.”

“How do you eat them?” Sako persisted. “Do you roast them? Flavor them?”

He shrugged, disavowing both responsibility and knowledge.

These are the kinds of stories you know will have no happy ending. “Are you seriously going to eat that?” I asked Sako, and like the cashier she shrugged, disavowing both responsibility and knowledge. A couple of hours later, she headed off to Yosemite.

Two weeks later, she was back. “And?” I asked. “The silkworms? How were they?”

“Ugh,” she said. “I thought they would be, I don’t know — different. They were — bleh. I offered them to all my friends. Only Chad had some.” She picked absent-mindedly between her teeth with a fingernail. “I got a leg stuck in my teeth.”

“Silkworms have legs? Really? Aren’t they just … worms? Do worms have legs?”

She paused to consider this. “I got something stuck between my teeth.”

“Something leg-like.”

“I could feel it sticking out.”

“Hm,” I said. “The object lesson here being that you probably shouldn’t eat silkworms. Why did you decide to, by the way?”

Again, the shrug. “Protein,” she said vaguely, and picked again at her teeth.

She only stayed for one night this time. “I came to use your internet,” she said simply, when I asked when she would be heading back. “I only get dial-up where I’m staying, and I can only use it for half an hour at the library.” Right before she left, the Guy took her shopping again, while I stayed home to make Hobbes nap.

“ARRRRR,” he said happily, plastering himself to my legs and drooling.

“Sleep,” I said.

“AAAAARRRRR.”

My phone buzzed: text message. I inspected it. The Guy and Sako had discovered a new Korean market; Sako, he reported, was in love. The market was huge. It had everything. I returned to my task of parting the Red Sea and making the sun rise in the west.

“AAAAAAAAARRRRR.”

“I saw those silkworms again,” Sako reported when she returned, dumping a dozen different varieties of mushroom on my kitchen table. “They were cheaper, too.”

“Tell me you didn’t buy more.”

“You know what?” she said, ignoring me. “They were labeled dog food. Is that what dogs eat?”

“The hell do I know,” I said. “Dogs lick their own testicles. I don’t think silkworms would bother them much.”

Her eyes unfocused. “Maybe it’s an acquired taste. They weren’t very good. Do you think we ate dog food?” The thought plainly didn’t bother her too much.

“Why? Which would be worse? Eating dog food, or eating silkworms?”

Sako’s forehead crinkled. Was this a trick question? Why would either be a problem?

…

There’s no punchline to this story, so you read through it for nothing. Just pretend it was a silkworm. Protein. Good for you. Builds — uh, bones. And muscle. And stuff.

Also, flossing regularly is an important part of a good dental hygiene program.

My memory is not, let’s say, good. It wouldn’t be too far to say that it has the retentive qualities of your average titanium brick. It takes something on the order of a laser drill or an atomic bomb to make any impact on it. Yes, I manage to remember from day to day that I am married, and that I have a son, and that I live in Silicon Valley and even what my address is– mostly. But when it comes down to names, dates of birth, zip codes and phone numbers, there’s always that half-second of frozen panic while I try to figure out what the answer is. Then there are the times when I start out at home and then magically end up at work, with an entire intervening period I can’t really account for.¹

In case you’re wondering, this really doesn’t have all that much to do with my first crush except as an introduction to explain why I’m a lot better with visuals, and by “a lot better,” I mean that I’m not actively worse. And so when I tell you that I met my first crush in the summer of 1977, and can clearly remember watching him stride through a cloud of smoke, pause long enough for us to register the fact that he was a good 20 feet high and looked fantastic in platform boots — I shit you not, the guy was huge — and knew that he would be the man I would eventually marry, you are welcome to take that with a grain of salt.²

I was 3 years old, and my father had decided that it would be a good idea for me to go with him to one of the first showings of Star Wars.³ Why he thought this would be a brilliant notion is anyone’s guess; sci-fi was never one of his passions, though in later years he really got behind the idea of Knight Rider. I can only imagine that someone told him the movie was a knock-off of a Kurosawa film, or suggested it had some kind of kinship with the Three Stooges, his personal heroes.

3 years old is maybe not the best age to be taken to a movie of this type. My father may have reconsidered after a certain point, and taken us out of the theater. I have no clear memory of seeing the rest of the show. Didn’t matter. I was in love.

Seriously, I think the way Darth Vader won my heart wasn’t his snazzy dress sense — elevator boots or not, he looked outstanding in a cape. What 3 year old doesn’t love a cape? — or even his height. Or even the fact that his head was modeled after a praying mantis on crack. I think it was the first man he strangled that really did it for me. There was something in the way he crushed that guy’s trachea like an empty 7-Up can and tossed him aside that made my little heart go thumpity-thump.

It’s probably just as well I can’t remember watching the rest of the film. It would have been a complete disappointment by comparison.

For days afterwards, I muttered to myself in the hobbit hole of my room, working out little explanations for his costume and the backstory that went into making him Darth Vader. At the age of 4, it occurred to me that in order to be an appropriate Bride of Darth Vader, I would also need to be bad-ass. Also, tall. To the bemusement of my parents and neighbors, I promptly began trying to stretch myself by dangling off of anything I could find. A poorly understood snatch of overheard conversation had led me to believe that gravity had a permanent stretching effect on the human body. My father and mother were 5′6″ and 5′7″, respectively. Nonetheless, I had hopes I would someday grow to a respectable 6′2″.^{4, 5}

“It’s just a phase,” my father told my mother, when she ended up having to untangle me from the bannisters for the umpteenth time. To me, he said, “Noodles will make you taller. You should eat more noodles.”

My mother gave him an exasperated look. My father’s lifelong ambition was to transform the family menu into one based purely on noodles and beer-related fried goods. And beer. He fought a losing battle against my mother, who persisted on buying groceries that didn’t originate in a factory.

“It stands to reason,” he told me. “Noodles are long. So if you eat them, you’ll be long.”

I really was a gullible child.

I eventually put height on the back burner as a project to be tackled later, and concentrated instead on killing people with my mind. There wasn’t, I think, any malice in the project. Certainly the concept of permanence as it related to death never actually occurred to me. I imagined, I suppose, that after I had killed someone, they would stand up, dust themselves off, say something congratulatory like, “Jolly good! That was a real privilege. Really felt those brain waves crushing my throat, hah hah! Aren’t you the precocious one? I must congratulate your parents,” and then shake my hand, end scene.

My parents were at the center of Japanese transplant social life in Seattle at the time, and the Consul-General of the Japanese embassy would occasionally drop by, along with assorted judges, politicians, professors, doctors — and in the middle of the festivities, they would occasionally find me standing rigid as a board in the midst of them, one arm outstretched, with my hand in the claw-like rictus that is de rigueur for inflicting Sith Lord strangulation on the deserving.

They were generally very nice people, and Japanese courtesy prohibits the kind of frank and biting observations that are more customary for Americans. They would regard my bulging eyes, the look of obvious strain on my face, and pat my head kindly. “She’s growing so tall,” they would say. “Doesn’t time fly? How old is she now? Four years old? Such a big girl!”

“Another phase,” my father said a bit worriedly.

“Your daughter,” my mother said, “is getting strange.”

“But the noodles are working,” he said, ever the optimist.

In fact, I was a big girl. Certainly too big to be having the kinds of accidents that straining to strangle someone with my mind tended to cause. When I committed to psychic murder, I committed myself whole-heartedly, body and soul — and the body, led to believe that the brain needed more muscular control than the bowels, would start redistributing energy appropriately.

Or … inappropriately, as it turned out.

My parents never really understood what all that was about. In time, I gave up. The threat of having to return to diapers was not something that sat well with a nascent Sith Lordess’s dignity — not knowing the female form of ‘Lord,’ I satisfied myself with the obvious alternative — though I was pleased to have discovered the reason for one of Darth Vader’s wardrobe choices, at any rate.⁶

Footnotes

1. I mean, I know I must have driven, because I own a car and I drop my son off at daycare on the way in and it’s a 30 minute commute — but you’d think that at least some speck of memory would cling, lint-like, to my mental jacket, wouldn’t you? Instead of which, I come to myself in the middle of a meeting, answering some question posed to me with the sudden realization that I’m not wearing any shoes. (Back)

2.In case you’re wondering, I didn’t actually marry him. He was already pretty old at the time, and by the time I actually got married, he was 71. The man I ended up marrying is very nice, and is actually young enough to remember what his meat and two veg look like, much less where he saw them last. Most of the time. (Back)

3.The standards for good parenting were different back in those days. My father had a sunny conviction that children were durable and could only benefit from exposure to all sorts of experiences. He may be right. I got to watch people being strangled to death on screen, and turned out fine. Meanwhile, my son is carefully sheltered from violence and disasters, and he’s scared of the fish in Little Nemo. (Back)

4. At that age, I was hardly to know that this type of gravitational plastic surgery is only effective on boobs and butts. (Back)

5. Also, while in my mind I am tall enough to straddle entire galaxies with a single step, and crush the planets between my thumb and forefinger — technically, I never did quite make it to 6′2″. Quite. But I’m DAMN CLOSE. (Back)

6. My current husband is not able to strangle grown men with his mind. Sadly, neither am I. However, we are also not required to wear rubber trousers. In the grand scheme of things, I consider this a reasonable tradeoff.

My friends, you make me sad. So many of you started out well with this 30 day meme. You gamboled along all full of excitement and vision; you gurgled words into the internet like merry brooks. You spouted material for me to sip from, like the parched frog at the spout of a beer keg. And then day 6 came around, and you petered out.

No, day 4 came around, and you petered out.

Look at me. I am a dead frog, all desiccated and sad, my spindly little arms all curled up in fetal position, my mouth gaping wide open in hollow misery. Dehydration is a terrible thing to do to an amphibian.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps you need a little quid pro quo. Maybe I need to give a little to get a lot. Maybe you need some encouragement. So, fine. I, too, will take on a 30 day meme, and do my damnedest at getting at least up to day 4, because I think that’s achievable, or maybe day 6, because sometimes I’m feeling full of irrational optimism and unrealistic expectations of my own capabilities. And maybe as I dawdle after you, my poor, aged mind cracking under the strain, my feeble little webbed fingers scrabbling on the keys, you’ll catch sight of me in your rear view mirrors and feel inspired to race on with your own memes. “Here she comes,” you’ll think. “She’s gibbering again. I don’t like the way she’s eying my ankles. I think she might actually be tall enough to reach them, and — my God, what shark did she kill to make those dentures?”

No need to thank me.

The List
(The management reserves the right to change, cancel, reorder, skip, and redefine, God-like, the number of hours that qualify as a ‘day,’ without notice and at whim.)

1. My first crush wore rubber.
2. A thing about Evil and Butterflies and Sako and things not to eat
3. Why earbuds will make you stupid.
4. Live once, lose twice.
5. If I were writing the goddamn memo about the meaning of life.
6. All the ways in which I am not paranoid.
7. Why I was such a wanker when I was a kid.
8. This is my religion and I’ll make it the way I want.
9. My week in feces (not mine.) (Photo essay?)
10. Proverbs, a la me.
11. Apologies to everyone who deserves one.
12. What the people around me ate today, vs what I thought they should have eaten.
    
13. A frank and open letter to the people who have inconvenienced me today.
    
14. Things I could have said if I had Asian Tact Deficiency Syndrome. (But don’t.)

15. – 30. We (royal) have not yet decided what comes next so we’ll figure it out as we get closer.

“Hobbes, say, ‘Mommy crazy.’”

“Mommy cwazy.”

The Guy started to crack up. “We have the best son,” he declared.

“Hobbes, punch daddy in the balls, please.”

“Bawws,” Hobbes said gravely.

The Guy continued to laugh.

“Sweetie, say, ‘Daddy is a jackass.’”

“Hey, don’t teach him swear words.”

“What’s a swear word?”

“Jackass.”

“That’s not a swear word. That’s a statement of fact.”

“Twuck,” Hobbes said with great severity, and sighed. His parents are a sore trial to him.

Baffling. I might want to write something someday.

(I know, right? Madness.)

I was taking a bath with Hobbes and watching while the boy busily filled a hollow octopus toy with bathwater and guzzled it down. Again. And again.

“Really?” I said. “Really? Bath water?”

He peered up at me and swallowed another little bowl of lukewarm water. Drinking from actual bowls and cups is a new skill for him, and even though he still can’t say his own name and still thinks all food is either, “Ceeee’ral?” or “Ap-pow?” he is damned proud of that accomplishment.

“He’s not ready to get out yet,” I told the Guy. “I haven’t washed him.”

The Guy watched Hobbes drinking down another octopus of water. “Great,” he said. “So he’s drinking ass water.”

Hobbes solemnly poured out his container and then turned around to stare at me. Or rather, my breast. After a thoughtful moment, he carefully poked my nipple in. “Beep beep,” he said.

“God. Mom’s down pillows are literally the beaks, and the claws.” She crunched one demonstratively. “They hurt.”

So she threw it at me.

“Do you want to take your shower now?” I asked the sprog.

“No,” he said. If there is one word he can be said to have mastered, it is that one. No. Also, more, though I don’t give him credit for that one because he skips the latter half of the word and more or less ends up chanting, “Mo’? Mo’? Mo’?” like a drunk trying to get the attention of a hostile bartender at the neighborhood pub.

“C’mon,” I said, coaxingly. He was busy scribbling away on a piece of paper with some crayons, and it was already 8:00 PM. “Shower?”

“No mo’,” he said firmly, his attention still on the paper. Scribble scribble.

“I really think it’s time for your shower,” I told him.

“No mo’, no mo’, no mo’, no mo’,” he said.

I’ve noticed this tendency in the child that when he thinks his point isn’t being made, or if we don’t understand what he is saying — because after all, how much can you really convey with a combination of vowel sounds and the word, “Mo’?” unless you’re French, let’s just say for the sake of argument — he’ll simply repeat the same phrase again and again, louder. It seems to be the penultimate toddler reaction to communication barriers. “Just like meeting someone who doesn’t speak your language,” I told the Guy. “You know, how some people just … automatically talk slower and louder, like that’s going to make a difference?”

“So it’s a human instinct?” he asked.

“I think it’s just British,” I said.

Back in the present day, I demonstrated my qualifications as a parent by saying in a firm and decisive tone, “It’s time for your shower, Hobbes. Let’s put your toys away.”

Hobbes stopped scribbling to regard me thoughtfully.

Then he tried to stab me in the face with the crayons. Yellow and indigo, I believe they were.

It’s awful, the things I find hilarious nowadays. I would have told him to use his words, but he already had. I suppose acts of violence are the natural next step in establishing a solid communication line.

Good boy.

Hobbes at 18 months

My little boy is growing up.

(Sniffle.)

Unfortunately, his brain is still the size of a brussel sprout, if recent activities of his are any indication. My coworkers assure me that the things he does are, “Typical for little boys.” After which they add thoughtfully, “Big boys, too.” Which is a nice thought, but I’ve yet to see a grown man run head-first into a bookshelf and give himself a giant lump on the head, just because it was there.

Later…

I take it back. Apparently, my coworkers were absolutely right. Well, thank God for that. I can’t wait to see what intellectual heights my son will rise to — or ram into, as the case may be. (Is ‘heights’ the word? Or do I mean ‘lows’?)

I guess Hobbes is developing right on schedule.

The internet is so comforting.

The Guy has been watching Once Upon a Time in the West for the last 20 minutes now, and so far, the only thing that has happened is that the credits have stopped rolling.

And some guy got off a train.

The interval before that was more or less filled by close-up shots of really bored men sitting around and waiting for the train, alternately sweating, messing with bugs, or … well, there was more sweating. And some stuff dripping. And more sweating. And sitting.

My attention span is not made for this sort of thing. Just kill me now. Or better yet, put something else on.

“If you think about it,” said the Guy, “this is a lot like a samurai movie.”

“No it isn’t. Samurai movies aren’t boring.”

Thing-a-day started yesterday, only I was too ill to remember to register for the event. This doesn’t mean I can’t participate, mind, but it does somewhat limit the number of postings I would otherwise do for it. No worries.

With that in mind, I started the first steps towards a baby quilt yesterday, despite the fact that I was sick as a dog yesterday (thank you, son. One of these days when you are all grown up and have a life of your own, I will hunt you down and snot at you. Just to see how you like it. There’s no point in doing it now; you’re too young to appreciate the horrors. No worries. I can wait.)

Quilting is one of those random hobbies that I take up and drop from time to time, just to see how I like it. It’s something I’m improving at by degrees, which is a lot like the other hobbies I have on my chain. There’s a circular routine to my hobbies; I take them or leave them at intervals, improve a bit on one, then lose interest and move on to another. This explains why I have in my house: 1 pink lace shawl, half-finished; 1 knitted red kimono sleeve; 1 requested digital painting of a really depressed-looking girl in various shades of green and blue with a water retention problem; 12 chapters of 3 different novels.

The Guy puts up with it, as he does most of my aberrations. From time to time he will register that I’m buying more thread or more yarn or more … whatever, sigh, then buy some more hardware in a sort of retaliatory parity. We have incomes that can support this sort of half-assery, and if my attention span isn’t at the level of, say, your average pill bug’s, so be it.

Speaking of which, I can’t remember what the point of this post was.

Right. The quilt.

So, I’m making one.

That is all.

“Wow. You look really … Asian.”

Thank you. That was the look I was going for, after the last haircut made me look too … white?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have had the misfortune to give birth to a morning person, which just seems like added insult to injury when the man I married turned out to be a morning person as well, something that he didn’t reveal until after the knot was tied. How he managed to keep that under wraps when we actually lived together for several years before we got married is a question for the ages, but here we are, the three of us, balancing on the precipice of justifiable homicide and no salvation in sight.

Hobbes spends nights in his crib, but when he wakes up at around 5 or 6 AM (as he is too prone to do) and if I choose to pretend I didn’t hear anything, the Guy will bring him to our bed and drop him somewhere on the mattress between us, whereupon the child will ooze like a tentacled brick across our bodies and fall asleep for another hour or so. Occasionally, out of some perversely peppy sadism, he will simply stay awake, and demand our attention until one of us is driven bodily out of bed and forced to take him downstairs to play.

On days when the Guy takes him for a while in the mornings to let me sleep, I am usually awakened by the heavy creak of what he fondly imagines to be his tip-toed entrance into the bedroom. This is two-second advance warning before he holds the baby over my head. When I open my eyes, it’s usually to discover Hobbes spread-eagled in the air over me, his mouth wide open in a delighted grin. Normally I have just enough time to think the word, “Crap,” before the Guy drops him on my face and then walks away.

The Guy and Hobbes think this is hugely funny. Insofar as jolts to the system go, caffeine has nothing on it.

Yesterday, I woke up to the sound of clapping. I lifted my head to peer down the bed and discovered him upside-down in a fold of the comforter, his head resting on my leg and his face mostly covered by blanket. Who knows what he saw on the ceiling to give him such joy, but he was happily applauding — I can only assume the accomplishment of surviving another day and night despite his parents.

The day before that, I fell asleep on the sofa while watching him play, only to wake up unpleasantly when he gave my nose an open-mouthed kiss and sneezed into it.

The day before that, he was absolutely unable to sleep, and cried miserably until 1 AM, at which point I took him downstairs to the living room sofa. There he continued to cry until 4 AM, at which point he fell asleep half-on and half-off the sofa, his head balanced on a little stepstool. The only reason he didn’t fall off was because I held it in place for the next half-hour, at which point I got tired of being (1) awake; and (2) a bookend. Apparently, I fell asleep.

He fell off.

In the grand scheme of things, this was not as serious as it might have been. He was limp and floppy, and the floor wasn’t that far away. He grunted, complained sleepily for all of half a minute, then fell asleep as soon as I’d lifted him to the sofa. Stupidly, I hadn’t made allowances for the fact that I needed room on it to sleep as well, and after the night we’d had, I wasn’t in any mood to potentially wake him by moving him.

I piled a few throw pillows on the floor and fell asleep next to the sofa.

An hour later, he rolled off of it and landed on my head.

He was too sound asleep to care. I was too tired to object. I woke up again half an hour later with him still folded belly-down across my face.

I peeled him off and trundled upstairs to the bedroom, ready to murder the first person I saw. Fortunately, marriage had supplied me with a ready-made target. It was 7 o’clock. The Guy was sound asleep, looking perfectly comfortable in our bed. I stood over him with the saggy body of our son and glared at him with red-rimmed eyes until the beam of homicidal rage I was directing at him peeled his smoking eyelids apart.

“I’m so tired,” the Guy groaned, when he saw me.

“I hate you,” I said.

My morning boys

“Oh, yesterday the milk in his bottle was spoiled,” said the lady at the daycare when she saw me, “so I threw it out.”

I stared at her. Hobbes teetered around the breakfast room and tried to pat a classmate on the face. “What?” I said.

“I hope it was okay,” she said. She didn’t mean the milk. “I heated it up and it smelled funny, so I threw it out. I used our school milk.”

I stared blearily at the bottle in my hand. Well, crap. “That was a new container,” I said, a little accusingly. “We just opened it–” When had we opened it? Was it possibly the day before Hobbes stopped sleeping nights and started screaming his head off all night long instead? We were on night 2 of that, so I wasn’t thinking very clearly. The last part of his bedtime routine was a warm bottle of milk. My shoulders sagged. And here I had thought my son was just being a dipshit.

We threw out the milk.

Weirdly, he slept perfectly soundly that night.

Our day care, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the great joys of my life, landing on the scale right above medical insurance and right below air. It is, in other words, cataloged as a ‘necessity’ as far as I’m concerned. To imagine a world where I don’t have childcare is terrifying as best, and the fact that we’ve managed to find one that’s beyond fantastic is something I’m daily grateful for. True, it costs somewhere between an “ouch,” and a “#*%&,” even taking into account the fact we pay the monthly fee that was in effect before the owner raised the price another $500. Frankly, it’s worth it, and neither the Guy nor I regret it in any way, shape or form. We may wish that it was cheaper, but in the same way that we wish we didn’t have such a big mortgage, or that Hobbes would eat food that was any color but white. It is what it is. We deal with it and move on.

Day care allows us to work. To pay the mortgage. To do those things that would be impossible with a small child, and still know that Hobbes is happy and in the best of hands — not excluding ours, because frankly, neither of us should be trusted with houseplants, much less children, and the fact that we are just goes to show how poorly regulated this world of ours is.

So the fact that the day care shut its doors for a vacation just before Christmas, to open again the Monday after New Year’s, was sort of a disaster.

Normally it wouldn’t have mattered much to us, because we would have taken the entire two week timeframe off. Our yearly visit to Seattle, of course — but as I mentioned before, there was a small hitch in the fact that we were actually spending the two weeks here. We took off some time for my mom’s visit, but that was only a matter of a few days. The rest of the time, the Guy and I worked.

Without daycare.

Most of the time, we managed to find some suitable compromise that basically translated to both of us staying home, taking turns working or taking care of Hobbes. It would be fair to say that not a lot of work got done. Hobbes, who regarded this change in routine with deep suspicion, was eventualy reconciled to the fact that he couldn’t get rid of us, and accepted the inevitability of it with resignation and, I’m tempted to say, a slightly morbid satisfaction.

Toddlers do not have the ability to hide their thoughts the way grown-ups do; they haven’t yet learned the duplicity that allows human beings to function in groups. There were times when Hobbes would stop what he was doing and go eye-to-eye with me. Clearly, he would think, you are not a professional in the field. If I were at daycare, I wouldn’t do this because they would know exactly what to do about it, and the consequences would be both immediate and fair, neither of which would work in my favor. While I may be personally ambivalent to the notion of causing destruction and chaos without any immediate incentive, there is something to be said for experimenting just to see what you will do. Besides which, I observe that you are a placid and overweight individual, plainly requiring some excitement in your life. I consider what I am about to do a service, meant for your greater good.

Then he would beam at me.

“Good boy,” I’d say weakly, and a few seconds later, I would be given striking evidence to the contrary.

On one day that lingers painfully in my memory, both the Guy and I had to head into our respective workplaces. I had a 5 and a half hour meeting. Hobbes went with me, the idea being that it would be less dangerous for him to be playing in my work area.

Our meeting room was a small conference room; about halfway through the first hour, he put his hand on an attendee’s knee, stared at him very seriously, and then started yelling at the top of his lungs.

“This,” said the poor guy, “is going to be a really long meeting.”

I spent perhaps an hour trying to keep him contained, and then gave up. Instead, I left the conference door halfway open, and he spent the next four hours happily charging around the office, returning to my room from time to time with new toys or friends as he suckered coworkers into playing with him. He was a big hit, apparently.

I got a lot of work done. I’m not sure I could say the same for my colleagues. One of them sent me this photograph, which he took in the middle of his meeting. Apparently, he heard banging behind him and found my inquisitive son plastered to the window, staring at them. Strange goldfish they have here, I suppose he was thinking.

Let me in! I can help!

“Can I get a nametag?” I asked the receptionist.

She handed me a standard nametag sticker, and I worked over it with a pen. Behind me in the lobby, a group of three or four women had already flocked around Hobbes. As might be expected, he was flirting shamelessly with them.

“He’s so cute!” one of them exclaimed.

I’m never quite sure what to say in response to this. Thank you? It was a genetic roll of the dice; do I get to take credit for a pleasing arrangement of features, or a personality that hasn’t met a woman it doesn’t like?

Hobbes chuckled.

I slapped the nametag on his back, and steered him by the shoulders towards the elevators. He dug in his heels — elevators weren’t as entertaining as girls — and my (gentle, I swear!) shove combined with his resistance overset him. He faceplanted and stared at the floor for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Aww,” said the women in a chorus. “He fell down.”

He chuckled again.

“What did you put on his back?” one of them asked, and leaned over to look.

MY NAME IS: Hobbes. I belong to Yuhri. Please feed me.

“Might as well resign myself to the inevitable,” I said.