isoglossia

Due to a family emergency, posts to this site are temporarily suspended.

Scene from Joel & Ethan Coen’s film, “Raising Arizona”:

INTERIOR FARMERS’ AND MECHANICS’ BANK

GALE and EVELLE bang in through the door. EVELLE holds a shotgun; GALE holds a shotgun in one hand and NATHAN JR. in his car seat in the other.

GALE: All right you hayseeds, it’s a stick-up! Everbody freeze! Everbody down on the ground!

Everyone freezes, staring at GALE and EVELLE. There is a long pause before an OLD HAYSEED with his hands in the air speaks up:

OLD HAYSEED: Well, which is it young fella? You want I should freeze or get down on the ground? Mean to say, iffen I freeze, I cain’t rightly drop. And iffen I drop, I’m a-gonna be in motion. Ya see –

GALE: SHUT UP!

This is going to be a tough one. The last month has been so tumultuous in terms of you, I am wondering how we can do it justice with nothing but some paltry words and a handful of JPEGs. It is a daunting task. Then again, you have been a daunting baby, so here goes.

In the last month you have changed a lot. It seems that your progress, if charted, would describe an ever-steepening curve. You can definitely sit up, and by this I mean not just remain in a more-or-less seated position while we photograph you only to slump over like a wet sand castle the minute the shutter clicks. No, you can sit your own self up unassisted. And you do all the time. To be lying down in any form now is anathema to you. Unless you are lying on your front getting ready to crawl. Yes, crawl. You can do it. Just a short month ago you could sort of ooze your way in a generally forward direction, amoeba-like. But during August you finally cracked the crawling code, which is (I no longer need to tell you this) “ass up, knees forward!” Now this is your mantra, and you practice it all the time.

All of your motor skills are improving rapidly now. You seem to get it. This will be remembered, I think, as the month during which you figured out how the world works. That it is a lot of work, but that the work brings certain pay-offs. I give credit for this lesson, the final driving home of it anyway, to your American cousins. You did a lot of socialization over there, and I think being exposed to all of those other little people showed you that there is a point to all of this pain and frustration of tasting carpet when you want to move. One cousin in particular, 23 month-old N, showed you how soon you can really be walking and talking.

Talking. You haven’t shut up since we left Maine. Sometimes you are ranting away on some sort of narrative track, it seems. Your squawks of joy or excitement have become much more articulate. But mostly you’ve been complaining. There are days when your whine cuts into our heads like a bandsaw. It’s a constant, sustained nasal moan and sounds like a tea kettle just about to boil steam out of its whistle. We hate this sound more than your actual crying, I think, and to be honest there are times when it’s hard to like you very much. These times are almost exclusively products of the noises you make. You have gotten to be quite the Jekyll-&-Hyde baby, though; in literally one second you can go from the most vexatious little bastard to the charmingest wee bairn in the world. You sing to us.

You were pretty charming for our trip to the New World last month. You travelled well, or at least better than expected, both going and coming, and while there you managed to save your little tantrums and fits of horrid behavior for your mother and father exclusively, so all those American relatives don’t know the truth about you. I think it was very good for you to meet all those people, especially the smaller ones, but also Grandpa and Grandma, aunties, uncles, and dogs and cats.

Firsts this month for you:

• First plane ride
• First time in France
• First time in U.S.
• First night in your own room
• First mosquito bites
• First teeth
• First hot dog

We have watched in anticipation and horror as your sharp little teeth cut their way through your tender little gums. As I write this, four have poked their heads through, but this information gets dated really fast. Your biting has advanced by a quantum leap. You’re crawling around on the floor and the next thing I know is that a moray eel has latched onto my toe. because of this new chewing ability, your patience with being spoon-fed is waning. You want to do it yourself (you want to do everything yourself, except sleep, which you are still boycotting), and you can. You can sit on the floor and scoop up meaty bits of hrenovke with relative ease, and get most of them into your mouth, or at least into my pants or down your mother’s bra.

Now about this crawling thing: for a while we thought you might bypass it altogether and go straight for the walking, like your American uncle did so long ago, but no. You finally figured out the ass-hump, and now you can go. This is not entirely a good thing around the house. With all this new autonomy, you have become even more dictatorial than ever. You want what you want and you want it now. Usually whatever you want is the thing we have in our hand, be it remote control, camera, sunglasses, bottle of poison, etc. In fact, you have an unfailing ability to pick out the least appropriate object within your body length and set out on an implacable mission to get that thing into your mouth, dammit. You have developed an unhealthy obsession with the CD collection, and I don’t think it’s the Atomik Harmonik cover art you’re interested in. No, you are bent on destruction. What’s more, you are showing every sign of moving right on to the walking thing ASAP. You scorn your knees.

We’re going to cut you some slack here, given the teeth-cutting, but it’s been a tough few weeks lately, with you becoming more and more needy, and vocally so. You spend a disproportionate amount of time howling, whining, crying, yowling, shrieking, screaming…get the picture? and very little time sleeping. I try to recall the time some war criminals removed my wisdom teeth as an attempt to feel more sympathy for your plight, but I have to admit that it’s hard sometimes. And your mother is exposed to your misery 24/7. I don’t know how she does it. She has been using phrases like “at the end of my rope” and “desperate” and “Dumpster®” lately. I will have to buy her a nicer Christmas gift this year than that Harpic Ready-Brush she got last year. You should start thinking about a gift, too. This has been a hell of a month.

I’ve been known to eat a bag of peanuts now and then, though generally only while strapped into a tiny seat in an aluminum tube hurtling through the sky. But when I saw this packet in the new vending machine we have at work, I just had to have it. Maybe it was something about the imagery, the floating hat against ethereal sky bringing to mind the surrealist art of Magritte. Maybe it was the briskness of the bowler, a business-like gauntlet thrown down to that monocle-wearing dandy and his insufferable tophat. Or it could have been the pure straightforwardness of the name: Mister Nut, a liberal generalist where his narrow-minded, spats-bedecked competitor blindly champions one nut only — in fact a legume! This modestly faceless merchant in the bowler promises no such prejudice against the almond or filbert, cashew, pecan, the pistachio, Brazil, macadamia, cola or walnut. When I saw this pack of peanuts beckoning from the vending machine, I knew: I had found a new nut merchant.

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I’m even willing to overlook the fact that none of the five languages on the packet is Slovene.

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Previous packaging gambits: Croatian tuna-flogging walrus; Self-referential coffeepot.

The exterior of the hospital in Šempeter pri gorici (Saint Peter-by-Gorica) is all Eastery, shiny plates of robin’s-egg-blue with cotton-candy-pink elevator banks. All a bit too much. Despite this, whenever I come around the bend that reveals the tall building I feel my heart tighten in my chest with deep emotion. This is where Adam was born and spent the first week of his life. I made this short drive many times last winter, sometimes several times a day and always with deep emotions — joy, anticipation, concern, worry, hope, and mixed in with all of these an overwhelming new style of love I hadn’t known about before. Those drives have left an emotional memory, so even if I am just passing by the building I still feel echoes of those feelings when the cloying building minces into view.

The main entrance to the hospital faces southwest and the building’s oblique V shape catches the sun even in winter. Plantings include lazy palmettoes and massive bushes of rosemary and lavender busy with bees. Inside things get ugly. The color scheme is appalling, a visual bludgeoning that can’t be good for the patients: dark aqua, mustard-yellow, and blood-red. This last is especially alarming in the elevators, where it is applied to every surface but the floor, where one would actually expect the color to pool quite readily. I’ve never been in a building that’s so hard on the eyes. It’s like it was designed by Mike Brady on PCP.

Today I was there to have my head examined:

I should have had it done a long time ago.
In spite of its aesthetic faults, I still love this hideous building, because that’s where my son’s little life began.