The Ferris Files

We imagine for Dubsie a life of sand in the toes and cleats in the snowboarding boots, of a nose that is sunburned despite the application of high-SPF sunscreen, of turkey chili nachos gobbled down at the ski lodge in order to make the backside by 3 p.m., of topographical maps and heavy-duty shoelaces and waxing a surfboard better than any girl in fifth grade.

One part of her education was to have happened last month, when I carried her onto the pleasant white-sand beach of a Caribbean island for a class entitled Sand 101, Its Uses as Construction Material.

Dubsie was serene when carried on high, but as I bent to establish first contact, her face took on an expression of extreme distaste. She tucked herself into a ball, her feet retracted as if I were lowering her into a pot of boiling fish heads.

“It’s great, Dubsie!” I’d say encouragingly. “You’re going to love it!” Mummy would urge.

But sand was soft and messy and stuck to the princess’ feet. It was nothing like the firm, flat floor of her playroom. After a few failed attempts, I just plunked her down in the deep stuff, saying to myself she’s a kid, she’ll figure it out. She stood rooted to the spot, a damsel stranded on her desert isle, fussing until someone came to her rescue.

After many tries, she deigned to stand on the strand, where the wet sand was hard and flat as the asphalt playground she knows from home. By the end of our visit, if you nudged her to the edge of the beach blanket, she would delicately visit with it, picking up a few grains and pouring them onto her thigh.

Soon after we returned, Washington D.C. had its first snowstorm of the season. I quickly bundled Dubsie up and sallied out the front door for Snow 101, Its Uses as a Projectile.

An inch of snow stood on our lawn, and again I endeavored to lower her into something pale and soft. But her boots drew up near her chin, as if Daddy was dropping her onto a bed of rusty nails, and she turned to look me a look as if to say I thought we’d gone over this.  Finally I got her to stand on the walkway, where the snow had mostly melted. Her eyes darted around white desolation of our front yard and she cried, “Hands!”

Exclaiming the names of body parts is one of Dubsie’s favorite means of communication. (“Arms!” she says when wants you to cuddle her in bed. When you wrap one arm around her, she barks, “More arms!”)

OK, Dubsie, I told her, I get it, your hands are cold. Why don’t I tuck them into my gloves and we’ll go for a little walk around the block, experiencing the snowflakes drifting down, gathering on your sweet little lashes…

“Eyes!” Dubsie cried.

So we retreated back indoors, where Dubsie surveyed the few chunks of snow that had managed to accompany us back from the howling wasteland, and had a good cry.

“Dubsie, do you want to play in the snow?” “No!”

Each morning I feed Dubsie her standard breakfast of steel-cut oats, half a mashed banana, a dollop of whole organic milk and — here’s the kicker — a whole hard-boiled egg, shredded into little bits.

Most observers are not fond of this recipe. (“Gruel?” said a seven-year-old boy recently. “You feed her gruel?”) Adults look at the gelatinous beige concoction, spotted with mottles of egg, and then look at me, as if wondering what sort of man would inflict this meal on such a sweet little girl.

I am obliged to explain that, sure, you might find it disgusting, you with your mature taste buds, but it’s a nutritional wonder for a toddler who can be easily fooled. You’ve got your complex carbs (the oats), fat (milk and yolk), protein (egg white) and a sweet, all-natural banana finish.

And besides, you can’t argue with results.

Since she started on solid food over a year ago Dubsie has eaten astonishing quantities of it, day in and day out. She is bumping up against the top of the growth charts while maintaining thighs as plump as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. She has opened her mouth wide to accept spoonful after spoonful, month after month, at least until a few weeks ago, when she began to discover the astonishing Power of No.

Yes, it’s No now, invoked in response to everything, morning till night, uttered like a mantra, addressed to anyone who ventures to offer any food or toy or activity, at almost any time. Such as to her Mummy, at dinnertime:

Mummy: Are you hungry?
Dubsie: Mmmm hmmmm.
Do you want chicken?
No.
Do you want rice?
No.
Do you want…umm…(searching fridge)…carrots?
No.
Do you want two giant fistfuls of candy?
No.

She states the negative with relish, with gusto, with a rising and dramatic Nnnnnnno! that betrays how much she enjoys saying it. Think of how satisfying it must be, as a little creature just discovering words, to find that No — a single syllable and one of the very easiest to pronounce — can stop a full-grown adult in his or her tracks. How intoxicating. You’d want to say it all the time.

Dubsie is working through the varieties of negation, scoping out her personal style. She likes Not! and Naaaah! and occasionally adds a Go ‘way! The one that leaves me particularly dejected is when she yells Nope! and puckers her lips to pronounce the P with a percussive pop.

So there I was last week, a spoonful of gruel in my hand, parrying with a year-and-a-half-year old reveling in her Power of No. I thought that I should propose to Congress, or perhaps to Merriam-Webster, that we permanently retire the word No and replace it with a word that requires some grown-up enunciation, like lilliputian, or prerogative.

But the utterance itself didn’t matter. I needed only to look at her expression of extreme distaste to know that she had exercised her lilliputian prerogative. Every time I brought a dripping spoonful near her mouth, she swatted at the air as if battling a cloud of mosquitoes. Then this little girl, my own daughter, looked me straight in the eye and made a brilliant counter-proposal.

“Daddy eat it,” she said.

Dubsie dearest. Photo by Vita Images.

Because the years are short, because the Year is New, because my daughter Dubsie is 20 months old and growing and morphing faster than a busy father can take note, I resolve to blog about her, every week, during the year of two thousand fifteen.

We climbed the stairs last night without my first turning on the light. Dubsie enjoys being carried up the stairs, a strong forearm under her ample rump. As we reached the landing, her voice came out of the blackness and surprised me. “So dark!”

So dark? Wait, when did she learn that the word “dark” meant the absence of light? When did she learn to precede it with the the adverb “so” in order to form a comment on said darkness? Isn’t this girl who was drooling all over herself, like, yesterday?

These discoveries, hers and mine, are what I want to capture here. I am minding the admonishment that I heard from seemingly every parent before Dubsie was born: that it goes by so fast and you need to capture the tics and foibles of a developing personality before the new ones arrive and gallop them flat in your memory.

Discoveries, yes, but also the tears, the messes, the frustrations, the things that will be broken.

“The Sandbox” is what I’m calling it. Children have sandboxes so they can create and reshape and epically destroy with nothing in the way of consequences. Adults also need such sandboxes. My sandbox has to do with noticing life and writing about it in ways I wouldn’t usually. For example, I never have started a sentence the way I started the opening sentence of this post, with a series of repeated “becauses.” Writers care about stuff like that.

Dubsie and I are both groping along in the dark, as I learn to be a father and she learns to be a person. May this journal be the flashlight that reveals, if not where we’re going, than at least where we’ve been.

Your correspondent has returned from India and is infused with a sense of gratitude. Gratitude for the simple things that America provides that India does not, like tap water fit for drinking, a lack of shame around eating meat, and the opportunity to let my malaria meds expire. But what I am grateful for above all else is sidewalks.

India does have margins on the border of roads that might be defined as “sidewalks.” But the term “sidewalk” presumes that what occurs there is walking. This is patently not the case in India, mainly because there are so many other creatures and objects already occupying the space reserved for the hapless pedestrian. Many of these obstacles are surprising and most are outrageously unsafe. In a salute to Indian craziness, here is a partial list of what occupies the “sidewalks.” Enjoy.

Open Manholes

Cars

Continue reading Photo Essay: What I Stumbled Upon in India