Sunday, January 15, 2006
Why He’ll be Named Schwa
It’s been a while since I just sort of checked in and let you know that life is an endless chain of hilarity and delight. Of course, with any chain, there are kinks along the way, but so often those are what make things interesting.
This week has been full of hazard removal, latch installation, crib lowering (down to the lowest setting, and he’s still rather jauntily swinging his arm over the siderail like he’s ready to launch a crescent kick right out of the crib), and installation of mirrors on the nursery wall, which was cool because I think we’ve had those damn mirrors since late August.... We checked out day care for Zach, and had our last meeting with the social worker preparatory to finalization of the adoption in court.... and woven in among all these domestic benchmarks were so many random perfect or hilarious moments: going to Clement Street and getting a plate of “the most delicious noodles like these I’ve ever eaten,” in Kel’s inimitable words. Or, when we saw that the local Round Table pizza had closed (no great loss in this ‘hood full of so many authentic and sophisticated pizzas), with a sign taped to the door that read “SCA meeting has been moved to (other location)”; I found this hilarious because if the best anachronism that the SCA can come up with is Round Table Pizza, they have bigger problems then finding a place to meet. Or, when we went to Ft Point and walked the battlements, staring down a fresh breeze off the Pacific and marvelling at the depth of texture and color we found in the masonry (I’ll have to go back soon with the camera). Or, when we went for a walk in the park and found ourselves pushing Zach in a swing right next to our friends Zoe (in swing) and Jackie (pushing her), and as we chatted Jackie mentioned that today was “local families free day” for the museums all over the city, including the Conservatory of Flowers, which was just a short stroll away and a great half-hour’s diversion, especially for free. There were so many ordinary good times over the past week that I have serious trouble remembering them all. But then there’s the other matter I thought I’d share with you.
I am not aware of how to make my keyboard make an umlaut, so I can’t really give you the proper spelling of an article of babygear I’ve been wearing more frequently lately - the Bjorn. The “o” has two dots over it, in the original. I’ve always liked the umlaut as a linguistic phenomenon, and frequently just pronouce words in the course of conversation as if umlauted. “This is delicious s^oup,” for example, with the “^” taking the place of the umlaut, which I think is a decent work-around under the circumstances. “Cr^uller.” “Hang^ov^er.” “Gl^utenp^o^open.” Anyway, I like umlauts but never really thought about what they represent ideographically. Now, with the Bj^orn in my life, I have had to deal with umlauts on a daily basis and I think I now know that they’re actually representitive of orchids. Castanets. Nurts. The umlaut is a pictoral image of testicles. And the connection is the Bj^orn Ding-Dong maneuver.
With the B-D-D, you start out wearing a bjorn baby carrier with a baby in it, while, simultaneously, carrying a standard scrotum in the typical infra-abdominal fashion. Those are the two basic pieces of equipment. You get the baby facing out, grinning and waving from the center of your chest like some kind of conjoined trans-generational quirk of heredity,and then you get him - or her, I’m sure - a bit excited about something (let’s say, a leaf), and he starts kicking his chunky little feet back and forth, and before you are even aware it’s coming he’s smashed each of his calcanei in quick succession right into your umlauts. It’s a rapid procedure, left-right, so quick you don’t even have time to start cowering from the first concussive blow to your unsuspecting lefty teste, when, just as the awareness of impending, blinding pain dawns on you, but before that pain has even begun to wrack you, your right oyster gets whomped into nutbutter by a second swiftly-backdrawn heel.
You can’t really collapse or scream - you’re holding a baby, for god’s sake, you can’t look weak in front of one of them or they’ll tell their friends and everyone will be making fun of you and whaling on your umlauts next time you go out. You gotta represent. So I just wince and find a wall to lean against for a few minutes, and then I stagger on along again. That’s what fatherhood is about, I guess. Wearing a dorky harness designed to get me kicked in the groinads by my own progeny. It’s a metaphor of some sort but I think I prefer not to pursue it at the moment. The wounds are still too fresh.
And that’s why I have decided never to name a child of mine, “Umlaut.” However, I am still seriously considering “Schwa.” It’s suave and unique, and I don’t find it appearing on any scandanavian baby gear, either.
