If I were to try to tell you why today felt good, you’d horripilate at least. I’m used to that. I’ve been living at this level for about six months now, reorganizing the household as though I were Peter the Great designing the Table of Ranks.

I did get in a bit of writing. Two new Friday movie pages, one of them written last week but polished this afternoon, after I wrote the other from scratch. Pathetic, really — but headed the right way. You’ll be more interested to hear that Megan and Will dropped in. Yes, just like a sitcom! They were in the neighborhood (to see the new pediatrician, who’s up here) and wondered if they might just stop in. Does it get any better than that? In a word, no. I got to dandle Will for fifteen minutes. Then, before I had a chance to think of all the things that I was supposed to be doing, he was whisked away.

Will is on some sort of cusp, as how can he not be at a time when the period of a week has only just ceased to consitute a double-digit percentage of his life-span so far. At nearly eleven weeks of age, he is putting a lot of the newborn’s self-absorption behind, and trading it in for imperial toddlerhood. It’s the move from “universe” to “center of the universe.”

While I was holding him, his mother thought that perhaps his head was not quite as well-supported as it might be, and she gently pressed it back into my arm. He shot it forward the instant she released it, and her apology to him was all the reassurance that I needed. Did I tell you that he is such a prodigy that he is already (we think) teething?

At one point, we found ourselves in front of the full-length Second Empire mirror that my mother installed in our Bronxville foyer. There we all were, suddenly on the other side of where we’d been. Will’s face registered the sense of a slight problem, but he was not surprised; he did not wonder how we had vaulted through 180 degrees of space. None of the concepts that would ground such an observation are available right now. It occurred to me that the mind is much like the Internet (o irony): information is distributed among countless packets of neurons, all of which, in the case of the mirror’s reflection, are probably present in Will’s sensorium right now. What’s missing is the ability to put the packets together, as the Internet does when You’ve Got Mail. But because the packets are indeed all there, there will probably never be a moment in which Will suddenly understands what mirrors are all about. Bits of knowledge will have fused imperceptibly into understanding.

If I beg your indulgence of grandfatherly boasting, I also assure you that if Will were to do anything seriously ahead of himself I’d be stricken with alarm. I don’t want him to grow up a whit faster than his wont, and I look forward to many objectively tedious hours over the next six or seven years. But this afternoon I felt nothing less than joyous about his parents’ way with him. In one sense, certainly, we have all remade our lives somewhat to accommodate Will. But then, we’ve remade our world precisely to suit him, so that he can be part of a social bustle right now. If we adore him, it’s to make it easier for him to be part of our larger world.

Call it imperial (grand)parenthood.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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