As the Tantrumrageson over whether to put your kid’s photos online, recent circumstances compel me to respond to one of Nathan’s points: “In fact,” he wrote, “only Matt has actually ever put his kids’ pics on this blog.”
I want to point out that I’ve never used Sasha’s picture gratuitously. She appears only when it’s necessary to illustrate a post (and when I don’t feel like scouring the Web for a CC-licensed image to steal borrow). As is the case today. To whit:
The other day, when I picked the kid up from daycare, her teacher presented me with the accompanying batch of school photos, but it wasn’t until last night that Jean and I fully inspected them, with horror that quickly transformed into uncontrollable bouts of laughter. As they like to say on Boing Boing, look at these pictures—just look at them!
Now, Sasha’s a pretty photogenic kid, but in these images, with their cheaply greenscreened backgrounds, she looks awful. Uncomfortable, awkward, unhappy. Check out the one with the bear—she looks like she’s presenting you with a corpse. Oh god, and her hair!
I haven’t seen such insane photography since, well… since I was in elementary school. Which is kind of comforting: Though we can all shoot RAW and adjust the white balance in post, and get our photography lessons from Flickr, and take as many shots as we want on our way to becoming kind of decent amateur photographers, still the same old weird pros are taking the same old weird pictures, with the same awful, DayGlo backgrounds. We don’t have many traditions in my family, but at least now we have this.
I came into tiny Douglas, Arizona this afternoon looking for a couple of people who didn’t particularly want to be found: such is the news business sometimes. Before I could find them, I needed to find a hotel so I could set my gear down, look up a few addresses online, and get stalking.
Fortunately, Douglas is not blessed with a dizzying set of choices for lodging. There’s the Best Western (fairly well rated), the Super 6 (less so), and the creaky Gadsden Hotel, a faded jewel of a hotel and saloon on what used to be the town’s main street, before all the people showed up to nail plywood over half the storefronts and open quinceañera frilly dress shops in the others.
I am, in my third day of this trip, already sick of chain motels/hotels, so that left the Gadsden. The only drawback is its quite low rating on Yelp, just two stars. Why? Because it’s haunted.
Yes, I know, in the Southwest, ghosts are marketing gimmicks, just like the hokey billboard I passed outside of Tombstone that advertised “OK Corral. GUNFIGHTS DAILY!” (I think the Bronx borough president should post something similar on the 135th St. Bridge).
But these guys seemed quite serious about it. They had a plaque saying they were the most haunted hotel in the West or somesuch. They even had a Ghost Book, a curious ledger of first-person reports of the hauntings. But what really got me is how, after I finished an interview, the matriarch of an old ranching family told me about the ghost.
“So you’re staying at the Gadsden?”
“Did you see her yet?”
“Who?”
“Her.”
“The ghost?”
“Yes.”
“So she’s for real, eh?”
“Don’t worry, she just comes in your room and sits on the edge of your bed.”
“OK.”
So here I am. The light is failing, the wind coming through the valley is picking up and creaking much of what can be creaked, and I’m tucked away on the last room at the end of an empty hall, waiting for… I don’t know.
I don’t believe in ghosts. I try not to believe in anything I can’t see. But especially since my uncle was killed, I’ve been thinking I might want to believe in ghosts. If they actually existed, it would of course be proof of some kind of afterlife, not just for poor Al, but also, not incidentally, for me too. Who cares if it’s a horribly repetitive afterlife, the same moaning and rattling of chains down the same corridors for eternity? Who cares if it’s essentially one big OCD freakout, trying over and over again to open the same doorknob until the End of Days, just because it was the doorknob you failed to open while you were being murdered? Even something petty and small beats my current Best Guess at the Afterlife: pure black nothingness.
My daughter’s relationship with her imaginary friends has me thinking that maybe there’s some middle ground between believing in ghosts and disbelieving. I think she knows her imaginary friends (who have their own mortality issues) are not real, but she still has a deep and complex relationship with them, one that satisfies some concrete emotional needs.
So maybe it can be the same with my bedside visitor tonight. Even if she doesn’t show, I’ll let myself hear her in the rattling window or the sagging floorboard. And in that way she’ll calm me and tell me what I really want to hear: that ghosts are real, but death is not.
Like most parents, perhaps especially New York City parents, I spend my days gripped by sudden, irrational anxieties—the latest of which involves our daily ritual in the bowels of the subway system. This is how it goes:
It’s evening, and I’m bringing Sasha home from daycare. We patiently wait on the sidewalk outside the East Broadway F-train station until the stream of departing passengers ebbs, then—with an “Yi, er, san!” (“1, 2, 3!”)—I lift Sasha and her stroller and schlep it all down the stairs. This provokes a mild bit of sub-anxiety, when I contemplate the stroller suddenly and catastrophically collapsing, but that’s just a minor concern.
No, the real concern comes at the turnstile. If this were a modern subway system, or if the MTA could afford to staff its stations properly, I would have no anxiety. Instead, what I do is position Sasha directly in front of the emergency exit, then whip out my MetroCard, frantically swipe it, and rush inside to open the door and drag Sasha in. Every single time, though, comes a terror: What if she’s not there when I open the door? What if, in that instant when I erect a barrier—an easily traversable barrier—between us, someone snatches her?
I realize this is completely irrational, and flies in the face of my utter willingness to endanger her by putting her photos online, but there it is. It won’t happen, not least because running away with 30 or 40 pounds of baby and stroller is a move no kidnapper can pull off, and the stroller’s clumsy, awkward seat belt system ensures the evildoer couldn’t simply take the kid and leave the cannoli Maclaren.
But the fear remains, taking the place of all the other irrational fears I’ve meditated on when I should’ve been doing other things: the fear that South American guerrillas would invade my family’s home and drive me into the woods behind the barn, or the fear that a zombie plague would trap me in my apartment with a dwindling supply of fresh water. Compared with these nightmares, my F-train kidnapping scenario feels almost plausible, and gut-wrenchingly so.
Surely I can’t be the only one who experiences this, can I? And surely this phenomenon—the practiced drop and dash through the turnstile, with or without anxiety—has some catchy name?
Of course you all knew that today was “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.” That goes without saying, given the fine parents you all are. (I had no idea—thank you New York Times Motherlode blog.)
How could you forget, what with all the media blitz promoting it, and the fact that your boss has been begging you to do it for months now (he’s so sensitive), and hell, it’s tax-deductible (it’s not). Merry Kwanzaa!
Please do check out the website for the organization that backs this activity, the imaginatively named “daughtersandsonstowork.org,” at least to see the ways in which you can “Get Inspired by Barbie.” (Did you know she’s had over 120 careers? That girl gets around.)
Anyway, don’t know that bringing your kid to work helps with career goals at all, but it certainly can’t hurt.
As the Tantrum rages on over whether to put your kid’s photos online, recent circumstances compel me to respond to one of Nathan’s points: “In fact,” he wrote, “only Matt has actually ever put his kids’ pics on this blog.”
