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November 19, 2005
Flying over Nebraska
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 dhousman at November 19, 2005 01:26 PM