The birthday boy

Happy birthday (yesterday) to Samuel, who is two. Here he flaunts his new German trainers, which his Aunt Edoarda & Uncle Stephen gave him.

He also got a set of wooden coasters from his Aunt Mary & Uncle Martin (when he visits their house, he plays with their coasters). … Dear me, if I try to list who has given what, I’ll leave someone out. I’d better just declare my all-extensive gratitude.

Other gifts: cleaning supplies (broom, mop, etc.); tools (hammer, power drill, etc.); clothes; greeting cards; books; pumpkins; candy; and cold hard cash.

We took him to two “trunk or treat” gatherings. Until this year, I was barely aware that people did this. Samuel wasn’t interested in collecting candy, but he did enjoy drawing with chalk in the parking lot.

For the record, he was dressed as a lion – not as a bear, as some 40% of his fellow “trunk-or-treaters” thought. Karin’s friend Nora brought her little daughter, Charlotte, dressed as Madeline. In that series’s fourth book, Madeline and the Gypsies, Madeline and her friend Pepito are forced to wear an old lionskin. Therefore, Samuel also was in Madeline costume. (I can almost feel the collective eye-roll. Well, this is parenting: one’s activities and cultural references become more childish. Before long, I’ll be finding meaning in Chuck E. Cheese.)

Or maybe he was Sam the Lion from The Last Picture Show.

Tonight the rain is heavy. Karin & I were in our basement, watching TV, when we saw one of our window-wells fill up with water (like the episode of Get Smart in which a flooded telephone booth almost drowns Max and Ninety-nine). Underneath the window-well, water seeped out from the wood panelling and onto the floor. We moved some boxes away from the deluge and resolved to seal up that window-well ASAP.

August’s poem

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bed in Summer,” from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people’s feet

Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A few remarks.

(1) No wonder it was hard for little R.L.S. to go to bed in summertime. The Scottish sun doesn’t set until who knows when.

(2) Many children’s stories end with the characters peacefully and easily going to sleep; this poem knows better.

A few other classics with a good measure of “sleep ambivalence”:

Charlotte’s Web
Goodnight Moon
Madeline

The perils of routine

Samuel constantly asks to be read to. Is this such a good thing? He seems rather desperate. If I’m not reading to him, he brings a book and slaps it down hard on my lap or face or computer; if I refuse him, he cries; if I begin to comply, he hyperventilates until I’ve picked him up and set him on my knee.

I wonder what I’m doing wrong with the child. He has good objectives, but his methods are terrible.

Today we read the original Madeline four times. We also read three of the sequels, and several books unrelated to Madeline. It must have been over three hundred pages – just of Madeline.

This can’t be good for him, can it?

His diet also needs more variety.

Repetition suited him well enough during his first year and a half outside of the womb. Lately, though, it seems to be making him bored and obsessive.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

World Cup qualifying has resumed in South America. Ecuador will play in Brazil tomorrow night, and at home, against Peru, on Tuesday.

Bad hats

I bought more Madeline for Samuel – all of the stories by Ludwig Bemelmans, conveniently gathered in the omnibus Mad about Madeline, which is introduced by Anna Quindlen. (LB’s grandson also has written sequels; they are not in the omnibus.)

I believe that Samuel would prefer to just listen to the first Madeline again and again, but he did endure all of Madeline and the Bad Hat. That book is about Pepito – the Spanish Ambassador’s little son – the girls’ next-door neighbor. Pepito is a sociopath. The first Madeline is pretty tame next to Madeline and the Bad Hat.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I am struggling to find enough time to read The Sleep of Reason, C.P. Snow’s rather long, penultimate Strangers and Brothers novel. It, too, is concerned with a couple of very Bad Hats. They commit a horrific crime.

As a courtroom procedural, the novel is not at all bad (though the crime isn’t “center-stage” until the halfway point). It even includes a stimulating Law and Order-style discussion of free will.

As soap opera, the novel is so-so. Most of the series’s recurring characters are trotted out. Two of them are especially compelling. The first is the narrator’s father, who is struggling to accept his obsolescence. The second is the narrator’s friend, George Passant: an irreverent, seedy, aging libertine who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Socrates – and who is not inaccurately thought of as a corruptor of the youth. George looms large in three earlier novels (one is even named for him). It’s in this novel, though, that he commands my fascination. Is he partly to blame for how the Bad Hats have turned out? I am disturbed by his inability to confront this question.

(Honorable mentions go to Olive Calvert and Jack Cotery, who make interesting cameos.)

Madeline and its philosophy; a shootout

Winter is here in earnest. Snow covers the ground (thankfully, the sun sets appreciably later than at solstice-time). Samuel and I hardly ever go out strolling any more – unlike the little girls who walk around Paris, “in rain or shine,” in Madeline, which has become Samuel’s favorite book.

We read it daily. I used to struggle with the lines of poetry because they’d often break in the middle of a clause, but now I can utter them smoothly enough. The trick is to stress the RHYMES: “Madeline woke up two HOURS / later, in a room with FLOWERS.”

Madeline is not a very profound book, though the philosopher Thomas Hurka quotes from it to summarize his theory of what distinguishes the virtuous: “They smiled at the good / and frowned at the bad.” He omits the line: “And sometimes they were very sad.” (I suppose that when these little Parisian girls are sad for the soldier who has returned, wounded, from the colonies, it can be construed as another example of their “frowning” at the bad.)

On the other hand, the girls neglect to “thank the Lord [they] are well”; indeed, they are sad that they are not ill (they covet the benefits that their friend receives as compensation for having been ill). Perhaps they are not so virtuous after all.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

And now, some outdated news too important not to mention. Barcelona defeated Liga de Quito in the “return” leg of Ecuador’s championship round and, for the sixteenth time, won the Serie A.

I missed the game, alas. It was held on Tuesday night of last week – not on Wednesday night, as I had expected. Apparently, Barcelona “parked the bus” all game long and waited for the penalty shootout. Not very glorious.

Then again, just winning in Quito is difficult enough. This was Barcelona’s first victory in Liga’s stadium since it was inaugurated in 1997.

I was especially pleased for Matías Oyola, Barcelona’s captain and long-serving midfielder, who played his last game before retiring. He scored in the shootout. He contributed to three of Barcelona’s championships.

Here is a video of the shootout.