Happy birthday to Samuel

He turns five tomorrow. Quite a ritual awaits him at school. He’s to carry a globe around the classroom five times while his teacher and classmates sing to him and eat granola bars. Photos of his short life will be displayed.

Karin & I worry about the singing, which Samuel doesn’t always take to; but we’ve drilled the expectation into him, and he bears it stoically.

He now seems to like school. He was downright excited at the bus stop this morning after what must have been a too-long Fall Break.

(The driver took the wrong street but quickly turned around and came back for Samuel.)

He’s losing various perks: the WIC vegetables, the books from Dolly Parton, the visits from privately funded social workers. But he wouldn’t eat the vegetables, anyway; and he continues to peruse the books that arrive for Daniel.

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I ought to mention, today I saw one of the brightest “firework displays” of my lifetime: Madrid’s and Dortmund’s rehash of last season’s Champions League final. I have no love for Madrid, but my goodness, what talent, what tremendous self-belief. Pedigree is real.

We feed our children

Another “dine-in” attempt – this time with Daniel and Samuel, at a Chinese buffet. It was a success. Buttery cabbage on buttery whitefish on buttery, spicy, sugary chicken, on buttery noodles, with dumplings. Daniel ate for free; Samuel’s rate was reduced; the boys mostly stayed in their chairs. You could see the calories rushing through their arteries and veins, draining away their consciousness.

Not the fetus’s, though. “ ‘Pip’ loves this food,” Karin said. “He’s dancing around.”

Daniel heard a very tiny baby crying in the restaurant. He smiled. “Meow, meow,” he said.

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I’m sorry to admit, our sons have terrible eating habits. Daniel wakes up at 6:30 or 7:00 and begs for candy. (No, I don’t give him any.)

He may have finally turned a corner. He’s been asking for meals with more balance: today, peanut-buttered toast, strawberries, and Spanish rice.

Now that Karin is “in pig” (Nancy Mitford’s phrase), our WIC allowance has been raised: At the end of each month, we realize we haven’t claimed anything like our full share of vegetables. So, half-panicked, we go to the store and pick out avocados and other “costly” free items. This month it was dragon fruit, from Ecuador. I wondered if any of the fruit we looked at was descended, nearly or distantly, from Hoku’s parents’ farm.

Back to the WIC doctor’s

… went the children yesterday. Daniel is in the 99th percentile, height-wise, and Samuel is in the 42nd; when he was Daniel’s age, he was in the 5th or 8th or thereabouts, so he is coming up nicely. We collected our WIC points and, to celebrate, bought McGriddles and hash browns (not with WIC points). Later my parents came over for Daniel’s birthday, and we ate burgers and chocolate cake. Daniel received cards, motorcars, dinosaurs, and books; Samuel, whose birthday it wasn’t, received a road map of Kentucky. And The Hobbit. Today I scolded him for coloring over Tolkien’s maps.

Samuel’s Hobbit is a gift for me, in a way, because I get nervous whenever he pulls my Hobbit off the shelf, which he started doing after he watched the cartoon starring John Huston and Orson Bean. I bought myself an extra Hobbit, too, just in case.

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“Indiana Bill Threatens Faculty Members Who Don’t Provide ‘Intellectual Diversity’ ” (Inside Higher Ed).

Ours is the latest state to have its universities meddled with.

In John Williams’s novel, Stoner (1965), a young academic ruminates with two colleagues about the purpose of the University:

“And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”

The speech is recalled later in the book:

“Gordon, do you remember something Dave Masters said once?”

Finch raised his brows in puzzlement. “Why do you bring Dave Masters up?”

Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said – something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as – as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as … The only hope we have is to keep him out.”

Is it a good idea to sponsor a refuge for brainy misfits? Maybe; maybe not. But force it to look like the world, and it’s no longer a refuge from the world; it’s no longer a university. It’s just another department of the world, doing the same things the world does (but issuing lots of publications). Which makes it redundant, inefficient, and certainly not worth paying for, doesn’t it? I see what you’re really up to, GOP.

Happy birthday to Daniel

He turned one today, the livelier of my two lively sons.

He and Samuel usually leave me plumb tuckered out. But today it rained and Daniel considerately did a very long birthday nap.

This morning, Karin took him to the WIC doctor’s where he enjoyed looking at himself in a funhouse mirror; alas, there are no photos of the occasion. This photo, from a few days ago, shows him looking in an ordinary mirror.

Here he eats his birthday cupcake.

More? OK, one more. We took him to the food court a while ago:

“Sons who are born to a young middle-aged man / are like arrows in the hand of a warrior.” (Psalm 127:4, International Children’s Bible)