On the beach at Gagra

My favorite response to my announced plans to spent the last two weeks in and around Abkhazia came from a guy I work with: “say hi to Borat for me.” It’s funny, of course, because Abkhazia is nowhere near the real place that the fake Borat supposedly came from. But it is a gentle reminder, which I often need, that people in the west neither know nor really care about small, damaged places like Abkhazia. I need that reminder because otherwise I find myself talking with a lot of excitement and spittle about those places in inappropriate venues, such as PTA meetups, cocktail parties, and meetings with editors.

The short version of Abkhazia, which I just came back from over the weekend, is that they won their war and then lost the peace. So they are de facto independent, yet shunned and struggling. It looks like the war, which ended in 1992, ended yesterday. There is very little work, abandoned homes are everywhere (many still with bullet holes pocking the plaster), and every man I asked about it said they have at least a handgun and an AK47 at home (some even have M16s looted from retreating Georgian troops in the Khodori Gorge in 2008).  All of that for a place that could actually be quite blessed, wedged between the warm Black Sea shore and green mountains with white peaks. It is like Cuba, as I told my wife after I got back, without the smiles.

I’ve got some ideas about who is to blame for their long troubles, but I’ll leave those for the article I’m writing about the place in a few weeks. For DadWagon, it seems most relevant to say that once again I am awed by the many seemingly terrible places where children manage to grow up and survive and sometimes even thrive.

There are, I’m sure, residual damages for the kids in Abkhazia. Twenty years after the end of the war, we heard time and again that the youngest generation was even more nationalist than the generation that had fought so savagely for independence. War doesn’t just wash off in a generation. And then there’s the poverty.  Everyone talked about the lack of jobs, the high drug use. Facilities are crap: A schoolhouse we visited in the ethnically Georgian southern district of Gal was half occupied and half abandoned. The teacher there said they needed textbooks, supplies, and more, that everything they had was donated from WorldVision and UNICEF.

But even that school was sending some students to college, either in the Abkhaz capital of Sukhum or in the nominal enemy’s capital, Tbilisi. And we met people who are smart and high-functioning even though they grew up not just in Abkhazia, but during the war, when irregulars on both sides were stringing the ears of their enemies onto necklaces.

I’m still jetlagged. I’ll write more about this later, I think, and post a few more pictures. But sometimes I think it’s all just a lark, this idea of parenting well. There are kids attending to my son’s $20k-a-year Montessori who are going to be extremely fucked up and malcontented adults. My son could be one of them. And there are kids who are growing up in the mossy squalor of some small Black Sea ethnic enclave who will grow up to be happy and successful. I don’t mean to trivialize the need to have access to clean water and security and safety. But once those barest minimums are covered, maybe the children are just going to be who they are going to be, and all our daily interventions and niggling corrections are just warring without purpose.

Since this last Monday, Tomoko has been leaving for work early and returning home late. This last for three days, at which point she left town on a two night work trip. Needless to say, things have been rather harried in my household as a result. A sign of my not having things totally together? JP, last night during dinner: “Breakfast for dinner? Awesome!” (I then pass the syrup).

Anyway, it was during this period of over-taxed parenting that I discovered a use for the Nook JP’s grandmother just bought him: it speaks! Or, actually, what it does is read, out loud, on demand, which is good when the baby is screaming, JP is whining, and all I want to do is watch television and weep.

I can set JP up with this evil little device and let it read to him…so that I don’t have to. Can anything be more wrong? Can anything be more right?

I…ask…you.

Not only does this device ruin any possible attachment that JP might have toward actual paper books–it also allows me to avoid bonding with my child by reading to him.

Nice! Don’t you just love expensive electronic devices that play to your baser urges?

One thing this whole Nook thing has been calling up in my brain, (with my wife out of town) is nookie. Which leads to nookie-cookie, because I am a three-year-old. Which then leads to the punchline of a joke that used to literally slay me when I was in second grade: lookee, lookee, balls on hookee!

The only problem was that I couldn’t remember the joke that went with the punchline. So I looked it up (thank you totally random forums.dealmac.com): “Three prisoners trying to escape jump over a barbed wire fence, first two are silent, last guy screams and they get caught. When asked why he screamed he looks up at the top of the fence and says “Looky, Looky…”

Which actually doesn’t sound like the joke I used to know. But it’s still funny.

The Onion anticipates DadWagon’s next big move. Or, if we don’t actually escape from New York, we will certainly start fantasizing about it, around the time that the white snow turns ochre with dog feces and frat vomit. The article’s money quote, as far as I’m concerned:

“This is no place to raise a kid, that’s for sure,” said 32-year-old Brandon Rushing, a lifelong New Yorker. “I grew up here and I turned into a giant asshole. Why would I want that for my son?”

Sasha is now at an age—18 months—when, although she’s fully capable of walking three blocks to and from the subway (with a parent, of course; she’s not free-range yet), she’s not entirely sure she wants to. “Bao-bao!” she says, lifting her arms to be carried. Then, a few minutes later, “Down!” or “Walk?” She walks, or even runs, and then it’s back into the arms of myself or her mother.

Yesterday, I took her to the Preschool of America, a task that is usually her mother’s. We got out of the F train at East Broadway and crossed the street, which is when she asked, a bit to my surprise, to walk. I set her down and she took off across the sidewalk.

Then she tripped.

This was not, in itself, an unusual occurrence. Kids trip, adults trip. We fall down, maybe scrape our knees or our palms, cry a bit, get back up.

But this time, Sasha landed on her hands—and kept going. She did a full somersault, grazing her forehead on the sidewalk, and winding up on her back, tears bursting from her big eyes. I may sound calm now, but damn, that was scary. A scraped knee is one thing, but a head injury? Not what we like around here.

Of course, she was fine, and now, 24 hours later, what I remember most is the look on her face as she was completely inverted—a look of complete and utter surprise, a shocked discovery that the laws of physics allowed such spontaneous slapstick. Sorry, Sasha: I may be giggling at your pratfall, but one day you’ll understand. One day you’ll see me skateboarding.