I wouldn’t try to argue with my grandfather Eddie from his grave but I am not sure that is what he would have preferred. He might disagree about anything I have to say about him. Eddie was one of those people who derive pleasure out of an intellectual debate and was always hungry for a smart hour with a worthy adversary to discuss a subject shrouded by opinions and complexity. I am a genetic disciple of this stubborn argumentative trait. My sister Lisa can easily confirm this having debated with me in the back seat of a car and then after having me get close to convincing her of my point of view being asked to switch sides to argue the other side of the argument. My friend Robert wanted to create an event called Bringing Down the House where people could get a chance to rise from the audience to debate me.

I don’t know if I received love for debate and being contrarian from frequent interactions with my grandfather or an intellectual gene put into place through years of genetic selection of rabbis and philosophers. Eddie’s family, the Wigdor’s, are descended from the Rabbinovich family, one of the longest lines of rabbis so it is likely that this is the case. Eddie was cynical. It may have been his age and often times it was just from having been a business person for his whole life with the experience to spot crap when he saw it. When I went into business selling products over the web with VirtuMall he was astounded by the value of Netscape and other free Internet services. He kept asking “How can you make money on the Internet if everything is free?” It took the crash of 2002 to see the wisdom in his cynicism. He also challenged me when I was dating Nadia, a rabbinical student. He knew I was an atheist so he would ask “How can you be an atheist and marry a rabbi?” Nadia and I broke-up over this issue a few years later. Like me, Eddie was likely an atheist. He was skeptical of what claims had been made about God. But that didn’t change how he felt about his culture, history, and religion. He lived in a house with two sets of dishes and ate Kosher meals every day of his life.

I don’t remember Eddie as much from his youth other than from what I could gather he might have been like from stories he told or stories told to me about him. I remember him mostly from my own youth. It seems that from the perspective of a child grandparents start out antiquated and are born balding with grey hair. My grandfather liked to say little phrases to me playing with words and numbers and would say them to me even when I was beyond the age to just giggle about them. I can still hear him say “ABC Goldfish. MNO Goldfish. SAR!” or “Why did six eat seven? Because seven ate nine!” He also would ask questions that could confuse a little kid like “What would happen if a snake ate it’s tail?”.

When I came to Toronto he knew that I liked to play baseball but wasn’t a sports fan himself. But he took me to the Toronto Blue Jays game when I came to town and marveled at the new stadium and how much it cost the city. He liked to give me updates on how well the Blue Jays were playing, especially when they were playing well during the Red Sox poorer years in the eighties. More than once I received a blue jays jersey that I wasn’t sure whether to wear or not. He would also, with my grandmother and aunt, take me to the science or art museum in Toronto to look and learn about the world. When I came to town he and my grandmother would look for an event that might entertain me during my stay. He always wanted to know how I was doing in school, what I was studying, and to talk and compare how different things were from the US and Canada.

We didn’t go out to eat very often when I visited Toronto. We would sit at the long table at 260 Heath Street Apt. 1004 and discuss matters of great importance like the origin of life, what the meaning of quantum physics was, the cause of the middle east crisis, the benefits of socialized health care. While at the dinner table he was always very fired-up to talk about something that had just come fresh from the newspaper or radio. It was a contrast to when I would call him on the phone to wish him a happy new years, happy birthday, or to thank him for a gift. On the phone he was a man of few words thanking me for the call and then saying he had to go. He probably never got into the habit of low cost calls to talk long distance on the phone. He likely remembered back to the days when you paid by the letter for a telegraph whenever I called.

We did go out a restaurant a few times. I recall one place that was specially designed for children. The restaurant was decorated like a circus like atmosphere with an organ in the center and fresh popcorn on the tables. While we were sitting there was a man at the table next to us who was smoking. While this was long before the days when smoking was disallowed in bars across America Eddie took offense to the man and challenged him by telling the people next to us to stop smoking. I could see he was protective of us and willing to stand-up to make it known what was and was not acceptable regardless of what was allowed by laws. I am a non-smoker as is everyone in my family and everyone I have ever dated. He was a non-smoker in an earlier era when people smoked in their offices and doctors recommended brands of cigarettes.

He liked fresh air like the kind he breathed while traveling through the National parks in California with a travel companion he met on the way. While looking through some old photographs I found a carefully annotated journal of this trip with photographs next to descriptions of the journey. I don’t picture him as a young man needing a large social circle so much as someone with an urge to explore and to do so predominantly alone.

I can’t remember my grandfather without my grandmother. They were only apart after she died and he was crying, lonesome, upset, and worried about what would become of him. He looked different than I had ever seen him before, vulnerable. Part of him, something that propped him up every day was his relationship with Evelyn, his wife and companion. I had traveled to visit my grandparents while looking to make a movie called “Manufacturing Attraction”, a documentary on the shift to more mechanized forms of people meeting, dating, and connecting. I wish I had taken a video tape of him telling the story of how he met my grandmother. He loved to tell it. He had met a girl in New York and been interested in going out with her on a date. When he went to find her she wasn’t there but Evelyn, her roommate was available and he fell in love with her. He had found a soul mate and they stayed married for the rest of their lives, taking many trips together in their seventies and eighties and then propping each other up and caring for each other as they aged once they could no longer travel.

Eddie was a lover of the world who posted an Atlas in his bathroom and would buy detailed coffee table sized Atlases to look at. He had during the course of a lifetime traveled to the many places he had seen on the maps. I remember as a young child getting presents from these travels like a small wooden boat he had bought in Fiji. Among the books he raved about was John Irving’s Son of the Circus, set in a foreign modern landscape of India.

He was an early traveler doing business in Japan and China as an importer looking for electronics lines to represent in Canada. Because he was an individualist he had set out to build his own small business, as a lone salesman pitching a unique bag of goods. I know of two product lines that he sold that were very successful. One was the take a number systems available in supermarkets, bakeries, and deli counters where you take a number and go to the front of the line when your number is called. He also sold the type of intercom systems that were installed in high schools to announce to everyone that homeroom would be five minutes longer, or at the airport that a flight had been delayed.

He had later in his business life gotten interested in some more esoteric lines like a camera that took 3-D stereoscopic pictures, and a pencil with a series of discardable plastic tips with short sharpened pieces of lead in them. Like many other men, he was a gadget fan, the remnants that I could see in the Toronto apartment when he was so fragile were multiple reading machines for the blind. He was trained as an electrical engineer and even went to work for the army to help fit fighter planes to work properly in World War II. Apparently planes built to American standards wouldn’t always work for the Brittish so they needed to make sure certain parts, like the part where they drop bombs through, was aligned properly so that the bombs would drop on their targets rather than explode in the plane. On one of his missions they were testing the bomb release areas using explosive flares and the problem did occur that the bomb wouldn’t release. So he was flying in a plane above a flare he had just dropped into the chute that was capable of blowing-up a large chunk of the plane where he was sitting to do the experiment. Luckily the flare was a dud and didn’t explode even after landing, but it was a close call for him and myself (born two generations later). When he told stories of his work I could tell that work and engineering was a real love for him.

He was an athletic man who enjoyed swimming throughout his life. I recall one story that he had gone swimming one morning in the Fjords in Norway in water so cold that the locals didn’t dare to swim in it. He was a good structured lap swimmer who, even as his health was beginning to fail, continued to go daily to the JCC for a swim. I heard that he also was a tennis player. When he turned 65 he made some new friends who were 40 at the time and gave them a run for their money when he played tennis against them. It was only a broken hip that slowed him down and even then he continued to walk in the halls of his building despite failing joints.

In his final years he still loved to work and was looking for products for people handicapped like himself with limited eyesight or progressing deafness. I wonder what he would have been involved with had he been an fresh entrepreneur in the internet age. For me, having followed a similar path as an Internet entrepreneur his first question to me whenever we would meet would be the familiar inquisitive version of hello to a business person “How is business?”

He died of shock in the hospital after asking for his daughter Nancy to bring him his transistor radio so that he could listen to the news. He wanted her to make sure there were batteries in it.

I am very much his grandson.

Posted by Melody at 02:15 PM | Permalink

My grandfather died on Saturday night. He was the last of my grandparents to die. Like his wife, my grandmother Evelyn, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. When Madeline was born Sarah and I intended to make our first trip with Madeline to visit him in Toronto so that he would get a chance to see his first great grand daughter before he died. Just last weekend Lisa, Dave, Mom, and Robert made a trip to Toronto with large size prints that Sarah had scrambled to print so that Eddie could see a picture of Madeline large enough to be visible through the haze of his macular degeneration. Had we heard about the visit to Toronto sooner we likely would have traveled along with everyone else. But we put off our trip for a week too long and so without knowing that death was coming so soon we missed the narrow window of opportunity for the generations to briefly meet.

Saturday, the day that he died, was also Sarah’s 30th birthday, a major milestone of itself. For my 30th birthday I gathered together a large group of friends, including Sarah, for a wild trip to Vegas. For Sarah’s 30th birthday we went out on Friday night to celebrate with her friends from college and my parents had gotten their first taste of babysitting Madeline. Then on Saturday Sarah and I were sick all day with the flu and/or hangovers and debated going out for a birthday celebration at the Falks’ house where Lisa had procured an ice cream birthday cake to commemorate the occasion. When we finally decided we couldn’t go out the group celebrating at the Falks gathered around the phone to sing Sarah a Happy Birthday. About an hour later my mother called to let me know that Eddie had died.

On Sunday Sarah and I walked through Brookline to Matt and Kate’s to watch the Patriots get trounced by the Chief’s. Tom Brady had a career high stat, 4 interceptions. On the way we bumped into Gadi from ImprovBoston and we stopped to chat about the baby, Thanksgiving, Arizona, Boston, whatever. It took about an hour and a half to walk down Harvard Avenue to Allston. We always seem to meet people in Coolidge Corner. It’s one of the reasons that Sarah and I don’t ever really want to leave the city to move to the suburbs. We love bumping into random people we know.

At night we watched Layer Cake, an ok movie along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The movie was mildly entertaining but what I was more than amazed by was that Madeline fell asleep on my chest with her face down. Her arms were wide around me holding me like she was trying to hug me but with such a small body I felt like underneath her I was her whole world and that she knew enough instinctively to enjoy embracing me. Although I should have moved her to the bassinet I preferred having her there on my chest because it was such a great feeling. Instead I asked Sarah to get some photographs of the event. I am not sure yet since it happened so recently but it will probably remain a major highlight in my memory.

I flew to Toronto on Monday morning on a small plane that made me a bit dizzy from the turbulence. Because we had been to Toronto less than a year ago for my grandmother’s funeral the chain of places and events were familiar this time. We were going to the same funeral home, the same grave site, and then see the same relatives and friends who were there to comfort us. It feels odd when a funeral becomes something familiar since death is such a singular event.

At the funeral I was the person with the six week old baby, the new hope and generation to contrast a sudden end of an older generation. People were congratulatory and interested in looking through the short stack of pictures of Madeline that I had quickly cut out from a printout on the ink jet printer at 4 am on my way to the flight. People had all heard that there was a great grand daughter that had just been born before his death. It made things at least a little more fair and mirrored the standard messages in the prayers for a funeral – Adonai giveth and Adonai taketh away or life is a journey and the journey itself is eternal even if the traveler is not.

This year has been a very major year for me. I lost my last grandparents, started a new job/company, got married, and had a baby. Those weren’t the exact list I had put down at New Years when one of the items that made my top ten list for annual to dos was to become a male exotic dancer and another was to appreciate Sarah more often. I didn’t actually go anywhere exotic like in prior years. This year all of the events occurred around me, some of which I could control and others where I was mainly a spectator. So I feel like an alien life tourist, inhabiting a human body for the period of one life, on a trip I bought in a sci-fi mall, to experience what it is like to be a human.

We looked through a number of pictures from older days. Some had the amazing look of being perfectly set in another era. One had the 1930s with young campers dressed in clothing from the Great Depression looking vaguely like the Little Rascals gang. Another picture showed great uncle Jack with a military uniform on and a rifle in his hand for World War II. He had been 26 but drafted for war anyways. The century has been a big one where at my grandfather’s birth the horse and carriage was commonplace and beginning to be replaced by the automobile. Now at his death I could take breaks from the relatives and friends to review my life by flying like Superman, through the satellite imagery of Google Earth first by looking from above at every address that I had ever lived and then to escapes to Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Grand Canyon, and Venice.

Posted by Melody at 10:17 AM | Permalink

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because it is so simple. The basic structure of the holiday is that you get a day off from work so that you can eat dinner with your family. The funny thing about this is that because the structure is so simple people get very stressed out about the holiday. You should be able to eat dinner with your family once a year, right? My philosophy about Thanksgiving, having experienced the odd phenomenon of people having near nervous breakdowns on this simple holiday is as follows:

“Don’t take Thanksgiving too seriously.”

The basic challenge as I see it is that Thanksgiving makes each person answer a number of major questions in a social situation that tend to linger unanswered for a long period of time and once opened lead to a number of painful discoveries.

Tough question number 1: Who is in my family?

While this may seem to be a simple question there are a number of situations in everyone’s life that tend to make figuring out this question a sticky proposition. The first category of these is whether estranged people should be considered part of the family. Some families I know have to split Thanksgiving into the two estranged halves of a pair of sisters or a child and parent who no longer get along. When a father doesn’t approve of the lifestyle of their gay, drug addled, or politically contrary child Thanksgiving is the perfect time for the child or parent to express their distaste for the other’s lifestyle by not inviting them or refusing to come to Thanksgiving. If the invitation does get extended in a hope to patch differences then it is a good way to create some fun fireworks at dinner once the source of conflict is raised.

Single people in a relationship face the tough decision of evaluating their current boyfriend or girlfriend to determine whether they are ready or appropriate for provisional inclusion in the family. I have seen Thanksgiving break-up relationships because suddenly two people realize that their significant other is not really significant enough to make the transition from a cool friend to a family insider. One friend of Sarah’s made a realization about her relationship when neither she nor her boyfriend even discussed whether they would go to each other’s Thanksgiving meals.

For those people orphaned from home or orphaned from their whole family they need to figure out within their circle of friends which family they can latch onto in a pinch. At the same time families, who know who the orphaned roamers are can get competitive for the roamer to commit that their extended family is theirs. In general these orphaned roamers are the easiest component of Thanksgiving but they present an interesting wild card just in case everything looks like it is going to work out.

People also face the challenge that they are often in a relationship where they have more than one family to tend to. So if each person has a significant other with their own family to define then a family of 8 people can quickly balloon into expanding this question into 16 different families causing a massive web of conflicts when it comes to including all of the families in one place at one time.

Tough question number 2: What is an acceptable family dinner?

Every family that I know has a group of people who don’t agree on the ideal food. Vegetarians generally don’t like turkey and can be disturbed by the focus on killing animals either in general or in non-humane anti free-range fashion. So there is always the added stress of whether the whole family, once it has been determined, can sit in the same place and eat the same meal. Meat eating people like myself don’t want to be downtrodden by the vegetarians and vice-versa leading to some fun food related tensions around things like segregation of stuffing, gravy, and seating. Ethnic differences can often come into play. The movie “The Feast” shows some of the variability of conflict in action. People also make mistakes with the food. At one Thanksgiving, an Asian one, they accidentally purchased a smoked turkey instead of a plain one and it tasted awful to everyone there.

People also never can collaborate to pick an appropriate time for dinner. The party people want to go out in the early evening to see their high school friends who are in town to see their family for a few days. The general variability of eating schedules for a large number of people makes it tricky to schedule the whole family. Some people won’t eat before dinner time out of fear that they will throw off a carefully constructed diet conscious eating schedule.

The schedule challenge often gets complicated by question number one challenge of people being included into multiple families. In my case the basic issue is that you can’t be in two places at once so I need to go to two different Thanksgivings that by logic should be at two different times. This is doable if both families are in the Boston area but never worked too well when my girlfriend's family was in upstate New York. One solution to this is to move the holiday a full day or week away for one family which is often my preference.

I can imagine that a gigolo lifestyle or a couple of family divorces could lead to the split problem on a far larger scale. It isn’t just a logistical challenge because not appearing is an admission that one family half is more important than the other which also can lead to flying cranberry sauce.

Tough question number 3: Can we pull off the logistics?

The logistics of the Thanksgiving meal are already handicapped by the complexity of the planning process around the holistic questions of defining families and meals. But the meal itself involves a lot of timing on many people’s parts. The advent of cell phones may help to co-ordinate people who are late but it also has led to people trying to time dinners more precisely to come and go near meal times. I would like to see the cell phone usage chart on Thanksgiving. I used mine about twenty times this year because it always takes more time than expected to get the baby out the door and we had a little problem walking a Husky. I can only imagine, having seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, how complicated traveling during peak travel dates from a foreign city to see my family would be. Someone also thought it would be a good idea to have people cook things that take over seven hours to prepare like turkey in order to complicate the logistics so that while people are already stressed out about their complex web of interpersonal relationships they also get further stressed when the expected food to calm them down is still raw because it wasn’t placed in the oven soon enough.

So Thanksgiving is an anthropologists dream to study the American human getting stressed out over the simple task of eating dinner with the family. I have enjoyed it more than ever the past few years not just looking for trouble but seeing people together and having fun chatting with people in my family who I don’t get a chance to see every day. I also love complex logistics and enjoy watching a good fight every now and then.

Posted by Melody at 02:19 PM | Permalink

So far this week I have been suffering from the wrath of drinking too much wine. I think I have some form of flu that has kept me hankering for liquids more than solids to ease the pain of swallowing. Maybe it was the airplane, but I think that the people at The Wine Gallery are to blame. On Saturday night I went to grab a couple of bottles of wine to drink with Sarah and Matt B. and discovered the new automated wine tasting jukebox. They give you a smart card with 12 credits on it to select the wines you would like to taste. The card unlocks sets of eight wines and when you select a wine it deducts credits depending on the quality of the selection. The bottles are all attached to sippers that look like the type of stuff used to make complex automated chemical synthesis like DNA oligos for PCR. The sipper sucks down an ounce or so of wine and releases it into your glass with a bubble at the end. I have gotten better at estimating an ounce from feeding Madeline from the bottle, NOT a wine bottle though.

So I used 11 out of the 12 credits on my card by not deigning to drink the 1 credit wine. I then proceeded to purchase four bottles of wine, two of which I had tasted, and the other two in an attempt to meet Sarah’s request for a Castlerock Chianti. When I arrived home it was time to make dinner with Matt and Sarah. He had brought asparagus and porterhouse steaks. This is when I discovered that we don’t have our own supply of tin foil. Every time someone comes over they look at us cross-eyed because we don’t have our own tin foil. Matt actually brought his own tin foil. I also discovered once again how crappy our oven is. When we turned on the broiler the burners at the top were mainly useful for putting out flames. Since the pilot lights and the electric clicker built into the stove don’t work I was using the bic long tailgating lighter. The lighter kept going out whenever it approached the burner and then after letting the burner build some gas the burner formed what looked something like a blue version of the horsehead nebulae and then died out. Later once the steaks and asparagus had been cooked the broiler decided that it would make it nearly impossible for me to turn the knob so I spent five minutes wondering whether I would have to shut the gas off on the stove.

To cope with this gas problem and because we were hanging out with a more professional drinker than myself we drank three bottles of wine between the three of us in less than four hours. This wouldn’t be too impressive, or the cause of this awful sore throat if Sarah wasn’t breast-feeding and only drinking a glass of wine. So I may have drank somewhere between one and two bottles of wine on my own and I was plenty lucid as we were chatting about whether Dick had ever posted a blog about his travels. Apparently he did but I still don’t have the URL for it.

So I was just getting over my Saturday night hangover and Madeline care taking activities on Sunday morning when I went to Foxboro to watch the Patriots try to trounce the Saints. I do feel empathy for the folks who were made homeless by the hurricane but I didn’t feel any pity or empathy for the Saints. I just wanted to see the Patriots get a clear and decisive win. That didn’t happen although the Pats were winning and in control until they worked hard to let the Saints nearly tie the game on the last play after having been up by three scores (two touchdowns and a field goal). We had a beer at the game and then a burger at the Funway. I couldn’t really drink my beer at the Funway as we watched the Bengals and the Colts play. The Colts look very difficult to beat this year. Hopefully we can meet them again in the playoffs and ruin their hopes for a Superbowl again. The Superbowl is nice but beating the Colts is like beating the Yankees. It means more than the Superbowl itself to me because I know them so well as the enemy.

So when I got home we had another little meat and drinking party. This time it was to crack open the 1996 champagne that we had gotten for our wedding from Jeff and Meredith and were waiting to drink all summer. Jeff and M had brought a thick stack of filets from Whole Foods that once again were cooked in the broiler from hell along with the leftover asparagus that we hadn’t cooked on Saturday night. We drank the champagne, two bottles of white wine, and two bottles of red wine. The steak was a great cut and I ate mine about as close to raw as you can before risking death.

So I awoke on Monday morning feeling like crap and still feel like crap despite drinking lots of fluids, OJ, earl grey tea, hot chocolate, coconut milk soup from the Thai place, whatever. I just feel like someone took some sandpaper to my throat. I did manage to buy Earl Grey tea, which Ami noted we never have, and tin foil at the Stop and Shop last night!

Posted by Melody at 02:20 PM | Permalink

Last night was a quiet night out at with Yuval, Molly, and the star of the show, baby Gabriel. I was interested, more than usual, in what future may lie ahead of me with a baby when Madeline turns 18 months old. Gabriel looked like a very solid human being in comparison to Madeline, who is still a helpless little rag doll that can barely hold her head-up. She is doing her tummy time according to Sarah and held her head so high that she went off balance and rolled over to scare herself. Gabriel likes to grab everything. When he was getting changed he prefers to grab the telephone and try to talk into it or call the operator. I read Gabriel a story this morning and we pointed to the words like duck or squirrel and he could say words that would be hard to understand without the picture like squiel for squirrel or buk for book. He apparently believes that all fruits and vegetables are an apple.

Yuval and Molly are teaching Gabriel to be bilingual in Hebrew so the apartment is filled with books that would look familiar children’s classics like the hungry caterpillar but the words are in Hebrew. Looking at them I was thinking about how I couldn’t even read or speak enough Hebrew to read those short children’s books. They made me feel the fear of being illiterate or as a late stage Alzheimer’s patient as I imagined what it would be like if every language were to be foreign to me. I also wished that I could speak another language with Madeline and had some vague dreams of filling our apartment with French children’s books and calling a phone pal via Skype to teach myself French as Madeline ages.

On the car ride out to the airport I listened to an interview with Joan Didion. I remember her as an essayist from my AP English class in high school. She wrote an essay or a book of essays called Slouching Towards Bethlehem that I remember were used to show us young incompetent writers how to write properly. Unfortunately it didn’t stick with me so I still write like a seventh grader, but I also never declared myself to be a premiere essayist. I would love to reread the High School books again. I’ll get my chance in fourteen years when Madeline is reading the modern equivalents. But I’ll have to get her to and through Goodnight Moon in a couple of languages before I can graduate back to the good stuff. Joan Didion won some major book prize this year for her latest book about coping with the death of her husband while she was nursing her daughter back to health from a coma. The book sounded a bit morbid but one line of the interview stuck out in my memory.

My rough recollection of her statement was “Most people who have gone through grief go through this - You keep thinking of things that the other person needs to know about and you can’t tell them.” People persist in memory as real. You can’t help it that when you find something that would interest them you want to talk to them and enjoy sharing a thought with them. But it hits a wall of reality that they are dead when you proceed to the next step to tell them and they aren’t there anymore.

But people appear and disappear mysteriously. While I was boarding the plane back to Boston I bumped into Wilson, Ron’s best man/woman, who is coming to Boston to spend the week of Thanksgiving with her family. Wilson and I collaborated to acquire the poor man’s first class seats in the exit row, shared pictures of Madeline, and synchronized our Pay Per View TVs to watch Wedding Crashers again. Now we are just cruising over Nebraska and I can’t wait to see my beautiful wife Sarah and my darling baby Madeline when I get home.

Posted by Melody at 02:21 PM | Permalink

I heard about this bird that got shot for knocking over dominoes while the folks were trying to break some domino run.

"The bird was shot by an exterminator with an air rifle while cowering in a corner."

Maybe I am a bit of an odd duck but it's hard not to empathize with the bird. I find myself imagining what it would be like to be a bird happily flying through a window into a giant hall and then suddenly finding that I had pissed off some obsessive compulsize dutch domino fanatics that would normally not hunt down a happy sparrow but due to circumstances beyond the normal expectations they needed someone to pay. It at least would make a great scene in a novel to highlight the futility of life at all levels.

Posted by Melody at 02:25 PM | Permalink

On Friday and Saturday night Madeline wasn't interested in sleeping. She preferred to cry inconsolably. Madeline can be consoled by presenting her with some breast milk but Sarah was getting to the end of her rope and mentioning that she was not enjoying the experience of slowly becoming cowlike in her purpose in life. So last night at 2 AM after Madeline had drunk from one breast it was my turn to try to get her to sleep with nothing but my sleep deprived addled wits. I tried to get her to stop crying with the typical rocking motions but that didn't work for the first few minutes. I tried changing her because I figured as long as she was awake I couldn't wake her by changing her. She finally reached a silent awake state and I took her back into the bedroom. When I put her down next to Sarah she began wailing again. So I took her back into the living room. I rocked her in my arms until she got back into the silent alert state. This time I figured it would be best to get her all the way to sleep. So I put her into the Papasan rocking seat from Fisher Price that when everyone sees it they ask whether they make one for adults. I watched her for twenty minutes and she watched me as she rocked. I turned the rocking motion off since Sarah mentioned that 20 minutes was the limit for rocking and it slowly leveled back to rest. I moved to the couch to watch her at this point and then fell asleep on the couch. An hour later when I awoke she was asleep in the swing papasan with her head tucked into her shoulder. I carried her back into the bedroom.

It is difficult when she doesn't sleep but nothing is as bad as when she sleeps so deep that she appears to be potentially dead. Babies don't sleep like adults. If they are very asleep they don't just wake-up when you nudge them and ask them to awaken. We went to Stop and Shop on Friday night and placed her into the baby Bjorn for the first time. By the time we had reached the counter she was so fast asleep that both Sarah and I were wondering if I had suffocated her accidentally as we walked around. I have never been as terrified of something as the total terror of possibly suffocating my own child. We dismantled the Bjorn as we were exiting the parking lot and found after a few minutes that we didn't need to call an ambulance as she started to twitch.

So it is a lose-lose scenario. She keeps us awake when she cries and when she sleeps we panic that she might no longer be breathing. My theory on it is that people are supposed to feel post-partum depression, both mother and father, because it keeps the two depressed people closer to each other, fostering monogamy, that otherwise might not happen naturally. So Sarah and I are getting cozy with each other as we go through some tougher nights together.

Posted by Melody at 04:34 AM | Permalink

Posted by Melody at 02:57 PM | Permalink

Last night we were hanging out with Lisa and Dave, who happen to have an upcoming show with the full band and James Li on Saturday night at Sally O'Briens. Madeline had just been going through her tummy time, which is basically a fun time when we watch her struggle to use her neck muscles while lying on her stomach. This is our little fun response to her crying every fourteen seconds after she has breast fed to let us know that she wants to feed again. Sarah appears to be growing weary of this situation but isn't fully into a depressed state.

So while we were eating our Bertuccis pizzas the pink taggie blanket was on the floor of the living room from the tummy time. Thumper marched in with a triumphant look and started rolling about in the blanket. She appeared to have the toy fishing line in her mouth that she vigorously trains for mousing activities but there was no line attached to it. On closer inspection she was frolicking and rolling about with a dead grey mouse. She left it for a moment and I managed to check it for life by holding a small mirror up to it's mouth. Actually I just grabbed it with a plastic bag like I grab dog poop. The mouse was cute and the scene of Thumper dragging the mouse about reminded me of the Iliad when the Trojans were romping about dragging the body of Achilles around. But with a quick toss into the trash our first mouse and severe triumph was complete. Thumper was rewarded with much adoration and agape. We are considering building a gold statue in the living room in her honor.

My guess is that she may have gotten the mouse in the middle of the night at about 3 AM when Sarah and I heard sounds of a struggle and rustling in the kitchen. But with the habeous corpus rule I couldn't find any reason to believe the mouse had been defeated. So I'm not sure if the mouse had been a fun toy for minutes or hours. Either way Thumper was back on duty patrolling the kitchen all last night with another rustling and pouncing sound but no second body. I'm hoping she is a serial killer.

Posted by Melody at 02:59 PM | Permalink

Netfirms must have heard that I have a newborn baby. They just upgraded everyone with ten times the disk space so that what once was 2 Gig is now 20 Gigs. That means that I have plenty of space to house the videos of Madeline doing inane things like spitting-up and crying like a bleating sheep.

Posted by Melody at 02:58 PM | Permalink

We bought the snazzy Metallica Red Peg Pereggo Primo Viaggio car seat at Babies 'R Us for Madeline before she was born. The original idea was that the seat would snap into the Bugaboo Frog but we bailed on the expensive Frog when they switched to the Chameleon. So far our experience with the Primo Viaggio is that it has a really crappy design for the sun hood. It doesn't extend far enough over the baby to cover her head in the sun and when you try to stretch it further it comes off in the back because there is nothing to lock the back to the seat. This leaves you with a floppy thing above the baby. I looked around online for an aftermarket part that might be able to do a better job of covering Madeline to prevent stroller sunburn and general blindness from staring into the sun. All I found was someone who loves the car seat, probably a shill for the Italians, and recommends draping a blanket over the top of the sun hood. Maybe the Carvey family mechanical engineers can resolve this problem with a more professional approach to this. I'll be there is a strong market for a better hood for this sucker. We'd buy one in an instant.

Posted by Melody at 03:02 PM | Permalink

At 4AM this morning when I went to take my evening stroll to the kitchen to check the premises for mouse attacks I found just what I had hoped might happen. The cat, Thumper, was excitedly pacing in the kitchen looking for signs of where the mice might have been. While the stove had some droppings on it from a successful mouse party I also noticed that Thumper was drawn towards a hole near the cupboards across the room near the back stairwell. On inspection I also found a mouse dropping there. I think Thumper is quite happy to now know that she has a purpose in the apartment. Nothing satisfies the mind more than the challenge stress of having a purpose that you are ideally suited for so I think that Thumper is continuing to have a happy stay at the Housman residence. I have new found respect for the cat through this mouse experience. I can see why the Egyptians would worship and mummify cats. They are very useful animals if you are besieged by mice.

Sarah and I cruised through the first season of Lost the past week and a half. Those people have some external driving force that brought them to the island. That is one of the things that makes the story line interesting. So Thumper is Lost here in Brookline and the reason is that the apartment needs to protect itself from mice.

Yesterday we finally watched the six hour extended edition of Return of the King. We had intended to watch it during Sarah's labor but we had very incorrect expectations of what the labor would be like. As I was watching Return of the King I was noticing how Tolkein was very into this concept of every person/thing being tied together in fate whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. For example, when Frodo is about to throw the ring into the fires of Mordor he becomes obsessed with the ring and is about to leave with it when Golem bites his finger off to steal the ring. While Golem is bad, the ring would never get thrown into the fire if Frodo wasn't freed from it by Golem since he became lucid enough only after the ring was removed from his finger.

The only major issue we seem to be having with the mouse hunt is that Thumper's collar includes a bell that may detract from her ability to hunt the mice. A cat has a silent approach and the bell can only be designed to interfere with the silent stalking of the cat. I tried to remove the bell but it is integrated into the collar that she is wearing and it didn't look like a good idea to remove the whole collar. Cat collars are more binding than dog collars since cats are probably smart enough to take off a simple collar.

Posted by Melody at 05:03 AM | Permalink

I noticed in the car when driving with Madeline that she tends to get tired when the car is in motion. This isn't news to anyone that kids get sleepy when you are driving. Some people with babies who can't sleep will drive in circles through suburban streets to quiet their babies. Very young people aren't unique in this inability to maintain consciousness while in a moving vehicle. Leelin the pug dog and countless other dogs uncontrollably nap once the car is in motion only to awake at the park where we are going for a walk.

So this has led me to a theory about Sarah's road rage. Sarah has terrible road rage to the point where she turns into a raving lunatic every time there is traffic that she is stuck in. Well the converse of the sleepiness happens for the babies and dogs as well. When the car stops the baby wakes up, and the pug dogs struggles to make sure he isn't left behind. The alertness of a stopped mammal in a vehicle is at the level of anxiety regardless of whether they are in a hurry or not. Dogs and babies have no real concept of time or traffic, only stopped or moving. So Sarah and countless other drivers may sufffer from what I'll consider to be motion withdrawal. When a car they are driving or riding in stops they get a sudden anxiety attack from the removal of whatever internal brain chemistry passifies them when the vehicle is moving. This is a tough problem to combat because it is a side effect of driving and you can't simulate the magical moving process while you are in traffic. But it does explain why people, including Sarah, me, and my dad will go to extreme lengths to drive a back route that may even be slower to make sure that we are moving the whole time. Maybe a GPS system could help with this. Just keep the driver moving so they don't turn green and rent their clothes as they transform into the incredible hulk while reading the pro-life bumper stickers of the car in front of them.

Posted by Melody at 03:05 PM | Permalink

Last night Sarah and I were talking to Waichi, our downstairs neighbor, about how we have Thumper for the week to help us to combat the wicked mouse population in the kitchen. Waichi was quite interested borrowing Thumper for 48 hours out of the week that we have her because Waichi's problem with mice appears to be more acute than ours. She actually caught 11 mice last year and had just had an incident where she believed that after capturing one dead on she vaccuumed blindly what may have looked like a mother mouse and then took the vaccuum cleaner bag outside. We weren't too keen on loaning out our loaner cat.

Waichi is a renter, not a condo owner, and she has had a long standing disagreement with the owner of the condo about the mouse population. The latest dead mouse that she had found put her over the edge for tolerance and she took digital photographs of the dead mouse and the mouse hole and sent them along with an email to the guy she rents the apartment from. The email basically said that she wouldn't pay the rent until someone came to plug the hole where the mice were streaming into the apartment because it had been open for months.

So today Waichi came back to our apartment to inform us that she had been given notice by her landlord to terminate her lease. The email with the picture of the dead mouse and refusal to pay rent landed her with a tenant at will end point. So Waichi may be moving out and it looks like the mice have managed to remove a fierce ally and opponent in the war against them with their persistence and vigor.

Go Thumper. Get the mice. Get them good. Make them stay away forever.

Unfortunately no mice have been harmed in our condo yet. Thumper spent her first day hiding under the bed and just this morning started to rub up against me and Sarah to provide us with her scent. The mice haven't left droppings since she came but that might because they are scared.

Posted by Melody at 03:04 PM | Permalink

Sarah's sister and her husband Nick were kind enough to loan us their two cats, Curtis and Claudia, for the day on Sunday to help patrol the borders for any rebel mice. Curtis spent the entire time under the bed and Claudia came into the living room for a brief spell to say hello and catch some looks at the cat. We figured there was a chance that the mice could smell the cats and would pack their mouse knapsacks and move downstairs. The initial response looked good as the counter was free of any new mouse poop for a few days. I found a mouse poop in the bathroom bathmat which worried me but I figured it could have been some expedition by the mouse team into the bathroom from months ago. But this morning Sarah found more tell tale signs of the mice on the kitchen counter.

So this evening we now have Thumper, a seven year old female cat, who is Sarah Madden's. It is an exchange where we are cat sitting and she is travelling. We met Madden in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Dedham to do the kitty cat exchange. Sarah Madden is also helping us with our birth announcements. I hadn't realized we needed to send out birth announcements until Sarah brought home some of Madden's (the two Sarahs gets confusing here), great samples of birth announcements. I picked through them with Sarah and I think we have a winner of a birth announcement. Madden is a former event planner and mom who has a burgeouning new business making announcements and invitations called Creativity Counts. She was the one responsible for the pink M&M baby bottles at Sarah's baby shower.

I'd describe the birth announcement further but that would ruin the surprise. Thus far Thumper is hiding behind the two person chair in the living room. Madeline is hanging out with Sarah eating after getting very hungry from the long trip out to Dedham and back convoluted by a trip to the Cheesecake factory to pick-up dinner.

On reflection I have found that the baby is different from the loud adventures of the past. Madeline is a quiet adventure and a personal experience. Her maturing doesn't take place in a bar filled with hip-hop blasting or a stadium full of screaming sports or rock fans. She hiccups and reaches for things and just staying home with her is the adventure. It takes some adjustment to get excited or understand getting excited about the quiet triumphs in life but they are exciting and so far I am very proud of my little girl.

Posted by Melody at 03:06 PM | Permalink

Madeline is over a week old now. She made it through her first Halloween on Monday. We had bought some "Fun size" Milky Ways in the off chance that we were bombarded with trick or treaters. As it turned out these fun size items were more some subliminal need on my part to continue to eat candy on Halloween. But Sarah and I took her for a long walk in the snap and go to justify eating the candy. We passed all five of our historical parking spaces on the walk including the one in the middle of nowhere on the way up the hills in Brookline behind Washington street. As we walked we looked at all of the posh Brookline houses and compared which of them we would consider living in if we were to move to a bigger residence. I am hoping for a real estate market correction (CRASH) to help make it possible to afford or at least make a profit if we were to purchase a home in Brookline. I wish there was some form of crash pulse that you could look at to see how far along bubble bursting has gone in the real estate market. Things are fine now in our two bedroom condo but we won't be able to keep Madeline satisfied in here forever and if a brother or sister comes along it is bound to get pretty tight.

On Saturday night I went out with my family, the old Housman clan not Sarah Madeline and myself, to see the Billy Crystal 700 Sundays show. I guess that is something I'll need to get used to communicating. When I say I went out with my family now I'll need to figure out how to communicate the difference between my parents, sister, and aunt from Sarah and Madeline. I'll figure something out short of specifying the guest list of whoever went out each time. All six of us ate at CPK but were so late that we had to eat at the bar. A group of six is tough to make work in a linear world of a bar. I guess I'll be eating more at tables in restaurants with the baby.

My mom was wondering how she can prove that something extraordinary was happening to her. I was reminded by the bar of Flatland and that my impression of her view of the extraordinary is like that of a 2 dimensional person living in a 3 dimensional world and not knowing it. She doesn't have a firm grasp of probability theory, a fourth dimension, and believes that the supernatural is responsible for improbable events occurring in her life. It isn't an uncommon belief. I think it is also linked to the desire to make meaning out of her life. She doesn't like to subscribe to the theory that life just happens and everyone is along for the ride but the ride isn't in anyone's control.

The Billy Crystal monologue was funny and depressing. Strangely entertainers don't always realize what will be depressing about watching them talk about their lives. In my case I wasn't depressed to hear about his father dying when he was young as much as I was to hear him talk about how his family members and he has been very successful in their careers. I get a twinge of jealousy and fear when I hear someone successful tell the tale of their lives. It makes me think in my internal monologue "What am I doing with my life?". I guess it is the same problem that my mother struggles with but phrased in a different way. I want to associate meaning with my own life rather than just bopping through experiences of pleasure and pain.

I had thought that having Madeline might suddenly knock that fear out of my head but it doesn't. Among the available solutions, and one that I subscribe to, is that a major meaning to my life is relationships with family and the long term purpose of evolution. I evolved to procreate so lets do what the genes tell us to do. I am here because my parents were here and my genes and memes continue through my thoughts, communications, and offspring. So my relationship with my own children is very important. But having a child as a man and feeling like you accomplished something major are two very different things. I was and am incredibly proud of Sarah for being a supermom both laboring without any drugs and knowing the full encyclopedia of infant development as an EI specialist. But I can't exactly take credit for her work. My work thus far has been simple in comparison. I change diapers, cuddle/warm, play, and manage pictures. So it isn't like I solved Fermats last theorum. It is great to have the baby though. I love her so much so I shouldn't wallow in petty thoughts of jealousy for comedian monologuists.

After the Billy Crystal show as I was walking the streets in the theatre district it was a Halloween weekend saturday night. The college age kids and twenty-somethings were out in their costumes roaming between bars and clubs. As I was looking at them I felt drawn to the scene, wanting to be wearing some pirate or inmate costume to go out dancing and drinking. It will be a while before that happens again.

Posted by Melody at 03:08 PM | Permalink