Strange Days Indeed

Beckett Using his new tooth:

Regular readers of this column (in its previous incarnation as an email letter) will recall the time when Bruce thought it would be fun to attend a conference at Dartmouth during the autumn foliage (and have Jeanne along), but neglected to reserve a hotel room, and ended up spending the night camping in a tent in torrential rain which created a huge puddle (lake?) which came four inches up the side of our air mattress. Perhaps my life is destined to a kind of Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the same.

Recently yours truly was invited to give a talk at Hahvahd. They are clearly on a different budget than UMass because they offered to put me and Jeanne up in a bed and breakfast close to Harvard Square for two nights. So we decided to make a family outing of it on Hahvahd’s dime. We would go down in Friday evening, and on Saturday afternoon, while I tried to elucidate the finer points of Japanese modern dance, Jeanne and Beckett would tour the neighborhood, and then we would all visit friends in Boston the next day. Everything seemed set for a great weekend. But then Beckett decided that it would be an appropriate time to get croup, a 103 degree fever, and cut his first tooth the few days before the talk. We had him on antibiotics and the doctor cleared him to travel, but cautioned us that the seal-cough of the croup could scare Beckett so we should immediately comfort him in the night and not make any attempts to do any “Ferberizing.” Our parenting philosophy doesn’t align with Ferber, but we have made some attempts at sleep training, so we resolved to be extra gentle on poor Beckett.

We made the drive to Cambridge and checked into the bed and breakfast, only to find the promised queen-sized bed was actually a full, and Beckett refused to sleep in his pack-n-play. What is more, he would only sleep touching one of us and even then thrashed around and flailed all night long. At about 2 AM I decided that this was not conducive to my giving a good talk the next day, so I yielded the bed to him and Jeanne and took the little half-mattress out of his pack-n-play and one blanket and retreated to the floor. So yes, the night before my debut at Hahvahd, I slept half of the night with a little teething febrile croupy boy pounding on me, and the other half of the night half on a pack-n-play mattress on the floor. As I gave my talk, I couldn’t help but feel some sort of strange satisfaction at the appropriateness of the guy who gives a presentation on weird Japanese modern dance having slept the previous night hanging off the edge of a three-by-two pack-n-play mattress. As they say in the commercial—It doesn’t get any better than this. Or as John Lennon says—Nobody told me there’d be days like these.