Whose America?

WE'VE re-fitted the entire day around the fireworks. The kids usually go to bed around 8 p.m. or so (though Q has still been coming out routinely until 9:30 sometimes), and the various local displays supposedly launch at 9:15. The Boy has already promised to nap in exchange for staying up. Q says that she doesn't want to watch them--too scary--but we want to keep her up to give her the option just the same, and we let her sleep extra long in the afternoon just in case.

The Fourth means lots of different things to different people, and with kids the focus tends to drift toward the sensorial. Still, my Lovely Wife and I note that for breakfast we eat blueberry scones with what we call "cappuccinos" (kid-friendly frothed milk in tiny cups). For lunch the kids have lo mein with tofu (my wife and I eat leftover Indian food), and my wife makes enchiladas for dinner. Our babysitter is from Poland; most of those who work in our apartment building are either Irish or Eastern European. The playgrounds and parks host enough languages to make the U.N. blush. This city, in many ways like this country, is truly international in its nationality.

The Boy and Q do nap well, after a longer day outside under thunderheads menacing over the river. The rain finally starts when what passed for sunlight today starts to fade, but NY1, the local news channel, assures us that only a fierce electrical storm will squelch the festivities. About 9 p.m. or so, we head up to our building's roof deck. The really big show, the one conspicuously sponsored by Macy's and shown on NBC in high definition, gets thrown on the East Side, which means that we can't really see that much from where we sit this far west. Still, from 19 floors up looking over the Hudson, you can usually spot close to a dozen smaller displays up and down New Jersey, culminating in a reasonably big show over Liberty State Park a little upriver (towards us) from the Statue of Liberty.

In the soft rain, the first rockets go up to bloom like a half-dozen great ideas striking at once. Q, having practiced all day at being scared of the fireworks, buries her head in my neck. I pivot to give her a chance to see how harmless they are, probably a mile or so away across the wide river and nearly noiseless at this distance. She flips her head to my other shoulder like a squirrel keeping the tree between itself and what bothers it, so I don't press things. Eventually, she asks for mom and for inside. (Once inside, she won't even watch them on TV.)

I go over by The Boy so that he doesn't have to hold an umbrella while he watches. The river is a constellation of lights from small boats. He meets every explosion with one of his own: "It's a red one!" "That one looks like a flower!" "How do they make them in a heart shape?!?" He doesn't want me to answer; just listen. I'm happy to. He can stand and see over the roof deck railing this year. He manages to keep up his excitement for about forty minutes until the finale, made up of more explosions than I can keep track of. When the sky finally does go black, all the boats sound their horns in applause. I don't need any light to see The Boy's smile.

The Macy's spectacular is still discharging. We can see the ruby glow to the northeast and the southeast, so I suggest to The Boy that we go to the other side of the roof deck to take in what we can. The other spectators from our building return to their apartments and their drinks, and we're left more or less alone high up in the air. Through the gap in the skyline where the Twin Towers used to loom, we can glimpse the crowns of fireworks over on the East River by the Brooklyn Bridge, but the gap and the sounds and the colors remind me too much of new wars rather than the old one being represented above us. When The Boy says he'd rather go in and check on Q, I quickly agree.

It's late. Q is already in her pajamas when we arrive. The Boy talks a stream as we urge him into his sleep clothes--pajama bottoms and one of my wife's many black t-shirts. Before bed, we always sing a song. Often, we sing "Happy Birthday" to Snowman (it's a Q thing; don't ask). Tonight, we decide it's fitting to sing "Happy Birthday" to America. After we finish, as I turn out the light and turn to leave the kids to sleep, The Boy asks, "Who's America?" Good question.

Happy Fourth, everyone.

No doubt, Q

Overheard conversation between my lovely wife and Q while my wife was putting on her makeup this morning. Q was pretending to put on makeup, too, running an empty brush along her cheeks in imitation of her mother.

Lovely wife: When you grow up, you're going to break some hearts.
Q: I'm going to break some hearts and squares.

No doubt, Q.

(Picture taken by The Boy, by the way.)

The (Big) Boy

I was away at Las Vegas for an academic conference for a few days, during which my lovely wife shouldered the child burden full on. (By the way, Vegas is surreal enough, but imagine a gaggle of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists meandering through casinos wearing nametags on lanyards, and you get surreal surreal.) My profession and schedule allow me lots of time with my kids, but rarely do I have them for 24 complete hours without relief, let alone 48. Respect, as my students might say.

In any event, we took The Boy to his four-year checkup this week. His annual last year was an eye-opener for me, primarily because the nurses and doctor spoke to him directly and not to or through me. Things this time followed a similar pattern, and when the nurse did ask me something (whether he can draw a square, for example), I asked him (turns out he can). He filled a specimen cup like I have to when I get my checkups (though he did so, unlike me, without a trace of self-consciousness). And this time he did manage to respond properly to the hearing test--except when Q said something right in his open ear in the middle of the beeps. After I took Q for a little walk, he finished fine with only his quiet mother watching.

In any event, here are the results:

Height: 3 ft. 5 1/4" (75th percentile)
Weight: 33.5 lbs. (25th percentile)
Everything else: Healthy.

He's so good at the doctor; he never cries however much they poke him with sharp things or shine lights in his eyes and ears. And they do poke him. A lot. Both he and Q score lollipops and stickers for their troubles.

It's obvious and cliché and everything but true just the same: He's changing fast and getting big. It's wonderful, actually.

4

We wake up to low clouds the color of the street outside. Which is not a good color, given that we've planned to have The Boy's fourth birthday party in the park behind our apartment building.

He's already had one birthday party at school. Q, my wife, and I brought cupcakes for snack time on his birthday proper. (His friend James pumped his fist with a "Yeah!" when The Boy set a blue-frosted one on his plate.) Everything's a teachable moment, and his teachers had him hold a globe and circle a sun on the floor four times while the class sang. Q got to wash her dishes (and a few others besides), and we still talk about that.

In many ways, it seems like The Boy has been turning four for weeks. Even before his party at school, his grandparents got him a bike that he's ridden like mad all over the park paths, and his Ong Ngoai and Ba Ngoai (grandpa and grandma in Vietnamese, which is what we call my wife's parents) sent him a box of games and toys and clothes. Today, though, is the official birthday party. No playroom this time; it has been too nice to stay inside. We've invited his classmates to the park, too, along with several of his friends from the building. It turns out that unfortunately quite a few people can't make it due to illness or absence, but the number still ends up being substantial.

The weather improves; the party goes as it should. Though it seems effortless and casual in design and execution, my wife, as usual, has spent a lot of time thinking and doing for this. She had originally organized the party around a space theme, but The Boy re-insisted on Formula 1 race cars, so we have a box of little plastic rockets interred like cheap time capsules in our closet. Race cars, then. This morning, after literally putting the icing on the cake, my wife quickly draws ten or so outlines of race cars, and we tape them down outside for crayons and chalk. She's already ordered two-dozen balloon racers—super light plastic cars pushed along by balloons thin enough for the kids to blow up themselves. Those definitely are a hit. She even had the sparkling idea to make stop-light Rice Krispy treats—yellow rectangles with appropriate colored M&M's all in a row. (Q quietly disabused the treats of their candy while the rest of us were otherwise occupied. You should have seen her chocolatey face.) Everyone takes home a race-car kite as well. And instead of a galaxy of planets, my wife fashions a cake in the shape of a figure-eight racetrack, complete with lane piping (in delicious buttercream) and die-cast race cars speeding towards hand-drawn checkered flags. When she brings it out towards the end of the party (after the de rigeur pizza), all the boys gasp audibly almost in unison. It's absolutely delicious, too.

(We also lucked into some entertainment for many of the adults as well. The monstrous new condo building across the street is almost complete, and workers were dismantling the equally monstrous crane that had been a fixture over the playground for months. To pull it down, a crew brought in the largest crane truck in New York City, and many of the men were pulled to the fence to watch it work. They—um, we—haven't come all that far from appreciating cars on a cake, it seems.)

After everyone leaves and we take in Q for her afternoon nap (soaked, as usual, from the water in the park), my wife and I confirm our separate senses that The Boy had mixed feelings about the morning. When he gets hungry he gets upset easily, and that happens as we more or less expected right before the pizza arrives, but he's also draped in a lingering kind of melancholy that pulls his mouth down and pushes his head onto his shoulder.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote that when a child learns language and moves from simply crying to speaking, language doesn't get in between the feeling (pain or hunger, say) and its expression (crying), but instead replaces it. Speaking, in other words, is just another type of crying. I happen to think that this picture is strictly false for a host of pretty involved reasons, but it's arguable that one part of growing up is managing one's expressions, whether crying or via language or otherwise. Language helps, no doubt, but it also probably introduces all sorts of complexities and complications that tangle us up in ways unavailable to wordless creatures. (It's also intriguing to think, if Wittgenstein is correct, that we're walking around still essentially crying to each other, e.g., when picking up a coffee from a cart on the street.)

I mention this because not only do my wife and I agree that The Boy didn't fully enjoy himself at his party, we also think that he's been expressing that fact in rather non-kid ways. When we asked whether he had fun, for example, he first said "Yes," and then, after looking down and pausing, "Just a little." My wife thinks he answers in this way because he doesn't want us to feel bad—doesn't really want anything at all, in fact, but can't help expressing himself. One of the cars from his cake did go missing, and several of his friends weren't able to make his party. But he did get many presents that he likes very much and he sees most of his friends routinely at school or on the swings or for play dates. He did fiercely love his cake, too. In other words, it's not simple, raw want that's the culprit here; it's more complicated. Honestly, we're not sure what it is exactly. (And still aren't.) That's a solid sign, I suppose, that he's growing up inside as well as out.

We become who we are by trying to figure ourselves out, by telling our own story to others and to ourselves. Work in developmental psychology tells us that we start to have lasting memories about the time that we really come into language and into telling stories, around age four or five. As I've mentioned before, this is also roughly the time at which the domain of thinking gets much more complicated for kids. He's been talking well and remembering for a while, but lately the differences have been remarkable. (I should also note here that at his party, upon hearing that Q had just turned two, one parent remarked that she "talked like a high schooler." "In both content and attitude," I replied.)

Complication can be good, too. I will never forget (in part because I write this now) how he hugged me the day of his party at school. When Q, my wife, and I first arrived in his classroom, he knew why we were there. When the room's attention all fell on him at once, he became proud, embarrassed, happy, and nervous all at once. He smiled—glowed, rather—in the light of it all, and wrapped himself firmly around me, holding there for several beats.

He didn't need to say anything to tell me everything.

The Birthday Boy

Happy Birthday, son.

I am proud of you, and I love you.

Welcome to four.

—Dad.

(Note: Cupcakes for entire school class, care of Mom. She's going to make his party this Saturday in the park out back a formula one race car wonder. Details, no doubt, to follow.)