The Italian Job

I’ve been getting travelogues from my brother Ken for several years now and they always have a familiar arc to them. Ken and his family go off to some culturally significant ancient Native American Ruin which demonstrates advanced architectural design in terms of knowledge of subtle tremors in the gravitational field caused by the movements of Alpha Centauri on the 22nd day of each month at exactly 2 PM. When quizzed afterwards, the boys invariably reply that their favorite part of the trip was swimming in a second-rate swimming pool in a second-rate motel, or playing with their gameboys, or going bowling at a quintessentially ramshackled bowling alley in the middle of an almost-ghost town. Recently, our friends told us that if we were going to travel to Italy, we should either go now, or wait until Beckett was 16. The thinking being that at the moment he is still portable and enjoys colors, so if we took him to a dull art museum, he would enjoy it anyway. So we decided to cart him and ourselves off to the Mediterranean climes and meet our friend Charlotte as well. So with Ken’s experience in mind, we wondered what reports we would come home with, and what would be the disparity between our trip and Beckett’s trip.

First our trip. It’s hard to know where to begin. We were enchanted by Italy as have been millions of others, so anything we could say would probably sound pretty old hat. However, despite that, there were highlights. We loved the back ways and winding streets of old Roma. I had this feeling that here, we think that we should repair stuff, but there, the age is part of the charm, so you might open up a hip Fendi shop in a 300 year old building with stucco peeling off the walls, and no one thinks this a problem but rather they assume that this is a marker of just how with-it Fendi is in the first place.

We went to all the old sights: We loved Trevi Fountain exploding out of the city: all water and motion. In general, each of the stops along the way repaid the fame it has accrued. The Pantheon with an orb of blinding light ready to shine on each of the gods for their brief hour in the limelight each sunny afternoon. The Roman Forum and the Palatino with their echoes of politics, pomp, and commerce still echoing down the eons. The Coliseum with rather more morbid echoes ringing through its grandness (although not the echoes of Christian martyrs we learned). To break up so much greatness, we interrupted ourselves each day for lunch, and soon adopted the practice of stopping for Gelato once or twice each afternoon.

[Jeanne and Charlotte ensure their return to Italy by throwing coins into Trevi Fountain.]

An irony awaited our lunch time. I managed to develop 23 canker sores in my mouth on about the third day of the trip. Imagine going to Italy, and having 23 axes thrust at right angles into your culinary plans. Each day, I tried to delicately slide unbelievably delicious food strategically past the canker sores and into the one corner of my mouth where the taste buds were free to indulge in their gastronomic whims without the baneful affect of cankers. We had salads with arugula, pears, and thinly sliced pecorino cheese; pasta with just a hint of nutmeg and garlic flavoring the oil, little platters with six different kinds of salami on them. Pizza with just a thin layer of cheese and some fungous morcels. Rabbit, boar. It was all so light and great. We wanted to eat several times a day (and I wanted to have several fewer canker sores). And then there were the aforementioned Gelatos. These were like unleashing Trevi Fountain in your mouth—an explosion of flavor. And so many different kinds to choose from. I forsook Chocolate for most of the trip, and didn’t miss it as I had hazelnut, praline, mango, passion fruit, coconut, sweet cream, pear, peach, green apple.


[ Beckett looking for cigarette butts at the Roman Coliseum.]

That was our Roma. What about Beckett? Well for starters, our friends accurately predicted that he would enjoy most of what we enjoyed. He probably appreciated Trevi Fountain even more as basic movement than we did, as he has yet to learn to distinguish a hippocamp from a horse or hippo (or the hippocampus for that matter), but he seemed enthralled by the bursting water. However, he also enjoyed some things that we might normally have overlooked. For example, when we went to a public plaza we usually concentrated on the fountains or sculpture, but Beckett hunted out the cigarette butts, and other artfully shaped rocks and pieces of glass or moss and examined them closely and then put them into his mouth to thoroughly ascertain their confirmations and properties. Just to reiterate, where we enjoyed the food, he also saw fit to savor the flavor of the Italian rocks and stones.

He also paid close attention to the often-overlooked floors of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. He often insisted on being allowed the feel the texture of a wall, or gently stroke the rails of a fence or bars of a gate. While eating he discovered the joys of Italian Breadsticks. One good quality breadstick might last him an entire meal of gourmet gnawing as he savored the satisfying crack of breaking off a piece with his brand new teeth and then allowing his gums and saliva to melt the stick so the flavor could trickle past each taste but and down his throat. We even got in some of our best mean-time conversations while our little gourmand got down to the business of testing which breadstick deserved the prize for Italy’s Best. We also lost his Gerber Rice cereal, so he got to experience the finest of Italian baby culinary creations: a baby food called Plasmon. This sounds like its one step better than breakfast of champions. With its plasma overtones, it’s more like breakfast of superheroes.


Then there was the “washbasin” in every bathroom that was just his height. Not one to let the foreignness of a bidet make him squeamish, Beckett insisted on mastering the protocol for this new hygienic instrument. He spent a lot of time learning how to manipulate the faucet so he could fill it, and the drain so he could keep water in. And then he would splash water on himself with, I suppose, the intent of washing himself, which is just what one is supposed to do in a bidet.

[Now, just what are you supposed to wash in here anyway??]

There was one area where he insisted on having the exact same experience as us. This was in gelato eating. He quickly ascertained that the kids of other nationalities got to share in the joys of gelato and he wasn’t about to be left out. So if we were eating gelato without giving him some, he would let us know immediately of his displeasure. And when you think about it, the spoons they serve with gelato are much closer to his size than our size, so he probably assumed that we were eating something that was rightfully his. So the solid food chart that we had been carefully following (which doesn’t exactly suggest sugar or ice cream by the eighth month) went flying out the window. When in Rome with a baby, do as the Roman babies—is what I have always said.

Motivated by his superhero cereal, or by all the people wearing hip fashion all around us, Beckett also insisted on crossing the line from observer to run-way model. While in the Coliseum, we decided to take a picture of Beckett crawling through an aqueduct water way—basically a glorified ditch—which was just his size. When we finished, we turned to find 30 other tourists also taking pictures of Beckett “sashaying” down his aqueduct catwalk.

[So calm and collected in front of all those cameras (which are behind us as well!!)]


Perhaps egged on by such ego-boosting experiences, Beckett also demonstrated an extroverted quality that should aid him immensely in his life. He decided that not only should he see Italy, but also that he should make friends with all the Italians. He is undoubtedly helped in this task by the fact that Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, but practically everyone we saw wanted to greet him, pinch his cheek, shake his hand and comment on him. Beckett amiably smiled back and gurgled at all of them. We tried to study a little Italian, but what we learned best was how to talk to babies. We heard the same gushing compliments and the same questions so many times that finally we turned them into nicknames for Beckett. Consequently Beckett came home with more than just memories and souvenirs—he picked up a lot of nicknames as well: Piccolo, Otto Mesi (eight months—as in “how old his he?”), Segnor Dentini (Mr. Small Teeth), and of course, the inevitable Plasmon Boy! Who knows, these nicknames might stay with him long after everything else Italian has long worn off (although we have had to start calling him Nove Mesi instead).

After Rome, we rented a car and drove through Umbria and Tuscany where we enjoyed the checkerboard vineyards, olive orchards, and wheat fields of the rolling hills, and the walled castle towns on the tops of the hills. These towns were mostly off limits to all but local traffic, so we parked outside and spent time wandering the narrow cobble stone streets. As a Utah native who loves the red rock country, one thing I particularly liked was the differing quality of the stone in the different towns. Assisi with its predominantly cream color shading to white; Spello with is yellow stone and multitude of flowers; Montepulciano with its brownish red hue; and San Gimignano’s gray.

Then we headed for the coast with a stop over at Pisa to see the leaning tower. It leans all right; it seems a wonder that it stays upright at all, but apparently the local government can’t afford to lose the tourist revenue so our guide book reassured us that the engineers had done what they needed to do to ensure that it would stay leaning for the next 200 years. Our destination on the coast was the Cinque Terre—the five lands. Five small steep villages in successive ravines along a section of the coast. We ate fresh seafood, hiked pitched trails between the towns, ambled along the shore, took boat rides and spent time on the beach. Beckett continued his friendly ways by charming the maitre de at one restaurant to tend him for the entire meal, and he also continued his strategy of finding treats that we had overlooked by ingesting a healthy sample of the flavor of Mediterranean sand while on the beach, something which we would never have thought to do on our own.

We ended in Florence. Florence is just nuts. That is really all there is to say about it. There is so much great art, so many beautiful churches, so many historic buildings. You feel as though you have been hit by a gushing art-architecture fire hydrant, which threatens every moment to knock you over. You find yourself seeking out small plain patches of sidewalk to rest your eyes. We hiked to the top of cathedrals, wandered through museums. We ascertained for ourselves why it is that people adore Michelangelo, and Raphael. We went to gelato shops and as soon as we finished one dish of gelato, went back to the counter and coughed up more Euros for more, and the percentage of gelato we fed to Beckett went up and up. It was in so many ways a wonderful end to a wonderful trip.

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.

Things that go Bonk

I'm sorry this is sideways, but Aunt Allisa, this is for you. Try turning your monitor on its side.

Beckett can talk!!!...Japanese

We are proud to announce that Beckett has just passed the sixth month mark and has demonstrated advanced verbal skills as he can definitively say several vocabulary words. They turn out to be all Japanese which makes the accomplishment that much more impressive. His first word was very clearly “eiga” which means “movie” in Japanese, leading us to conclude that he is going to be a worthy successor to his father who studies theater and dance, and also that he will fit right in with the current generation of visual media obsessed kids. He then followed this up with “aita,” “haita,” and “daita” which are respectively the past tense for “opened,” “wore shoes or socks,” (Yes, you got that right--"wore shoes or socks"--I told you he was advanced) and “hugged.” The fact that he has mastered the past tense in Japanese is even awe-inspiring. We are anxiously waiting for such words as “taita” (cooked), “kaita” (wrote), “saita” (bloomed), “naita” (cried—although he seems to do this just fine already), “maita” (twisted or sowed), and “yaita” (fried). In due time we are planning to work on the present tense, and also on Japanese verbs which have different conjugations. Meanwhile, we have nicknamed his stuffed dog, “Daita” (hugged) to describe what Beckett has begun doing to him on a nightly basis—perhaps squished would be even more accurate, but Beckett hasn’t shown any signs of saying “squished” yet.

Beckett with Reading material which undoubtedly enables him to speak Japanese at an early age
(Spots and Dots is the name of the book)















Addendum: Beckett can also say DaDaDaDa. This should have one more piece of incontrovertible evidence about how smart Beckett is, but as it is, no thanks to Nate and Paul, we have been calling me, Papa. So now its obvious that he doesn't mean "Dad" by this, but he is merely babbling. We are waiting for the Japanese word for Papa, "Chichi" to pop out any day now--just as soon as he gets to Japanese nouns.

No More Paranoia for Us New Parents

Beckett caught his first illness. We had been rigorously washing his toys every time his friend was over and feeling a little paranoid, so finally now that he has passed the six month mark, we decided that we could relax a little. Well it turns out that we weren’t paranoid, because our friend’s son came over to be babysat and had a runny nose, and within a day of sharing toys with him, Beckett had come down with his first runny nose. Now he comes trailing clouds of glorious mucus behind him. We also then picked up the cold, so I like to think of this as contributing to the closeness of our little family. I have ascertained that one way to get him to put up with having his nose blown is to blow mine first and then wipe his so he can be just like me. Our newest motto: “The Family that blows together, grows together!!”

Beckett mouthing every toy in sight to share germs:

Our New Mop

Its a dirty little secret that we don't really like to have noised around too much, but we really decided to have a child because of all of the free labor we could get out of him down the road. I figure that some day, we can have him clean the bathrooms once morning a week, vacuum, take out the trash, sweep, and we will still have several mornings a week left over for odd jobs. Maybe we will even buy a cow and have him milk every morning and night. At the moment though, he hasn't quite advanced that far in his skill levels, but he has begun to scoot backwards around the house in preparation for real crawling, so we decided to use him as a new mop.











There is one other plus about this arrangement. This new mop comes with an opening that spews forth its own milky white cleaning solution and special scrubbers to spread the cleaning solution around and work it into the cracks. When it gets finished buffing the floor, you can't imagine the shine!?!

Me and Maxi-Me

[Just who is calling the shots here?]

There is a funny part in the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in which an earthling finds out that humans are only the third most intelligent life form on the planet (after mice and dolphins), and that the entire earth is actually a very complex experiment concocted by the mice to see what the humans will do. The mice spend their time running on wheels and faking like they don't know their way through mazes to see how the humans will react. Recently, I feel as though perhaps I am actually only the third most intelligent life form in the family. Of course there is Jeanne, who obviously ranks above me, but perhaps she is not really in charge either...

[The Head Chef being held up to view
the culinary concoction and otherwise
assisted by the sous chef in the kitchen.]

One of Beckett's new tricks is that he turns himself around in my arms to face out before I think to do it. My brother Ken told me that babies like to face out and see the world and see what we are seeing, so when Beckett came along, I just made it a habit of carrying him facing out all the time unless there was some specific reason to carry him in some other way, such as cradling him, or burping him. Up until now, I didn't think much about it. I just did it. But now he started turn himself outward right as soon as I pick him up--as if I haven't faced him in the proper direction quickly enough. So I end up feeling like a chauffeur. This feeling is heightened when he grabs one of my fingers in each hand. Then I feel like the character Linguini in the movie Ratatouille with Remy (AKA Beckett) steering me from his pilot's seat and using my fingers to indicate whether I should turn left or right rather than pulling my hair.



[While he sits safely in the lap of his personal servant and attends to pressing business on his amazingly fast micro-computer, Me allows Maxi-me to play with a large toy computer that looks real so Maxi-Me can feel that he is just like Me.]