DADWAGON

Congratulations to all the winners of the Pulitzer yesterday, which, given the state of print media, is a little like being handed a lollipop on the deck of the Titanic. But still, a fine honor.

I was particularly glad to see Gene Weingarten’s devastating Washington Post Magazine piece on hyperthermia–babies who die when their parents leave them in locked cars. I read it when it came out over a year ago, and I just reread it today. I had the exact same stomach-twisting reaction to the stories in the piece. But it’s not the omg factor that makes it good journalism; it’s Weingarten’s instinct to dissect these somewhat unthinkable tragedies and explain their legal, psychological and moral components. Stunning.

Spent Saturday night in Baltimore, at my twentieth college reunion, and it was a pleasant surprise. Nobody appears to have gone to hell or fallen apart, at least physically (those people probably stay home, come to think of it), and my wife and kid had a good time meeting people. Afternoon luncheon, campus tour, evening cocktail party, over and out.

Which brings me to my point: I experienced something else new at that final event. We were the only ones who brought a baby. He wasn’t badly received–in fact, lots of old friends cooed over him–and he behaved like a champ. But I have never been That Guy before, and an hour into the event, he was getting sleepy and restless, causing his mother some definite stress, which spilled over to me. It didn’t wreck my evening, or anyone else’s, but I spent the whole party feeling as though a clock was ticking, which I suppose it was: the amount of time left before he melted down. Which he never did do–we got him back to the hotel and into his crib, and that was more or less that.

My particular stance here at DadWagon has been that babies barely belong in restaurants and bars, so how could I justify hauling him to a loud cocktail party? Chalk it up to simple ignorance: I figured that there would be plenty of people there with tiny kids. Turns out everyone else in my graduating class either (a) married and spawned five or ten years before I did, or (b) never had kids at all. Oooops.

Taking advantage last night of an early bedtime for the savage toddlers who cohabitate with me, I decided to go down to Alphabet City to eat cheap Turkish food and act a fool with an old friend for a little while. He has just sublet a place on Avenue C, near Houston St., in a sloping, ramshackly artist’s apartment. Weekend nights there’s a huge club that the cops like to raid across the street. The neighborhood, despite years of halting gentrification, still attracts a rangy mix of bohos and bums and clubkids and hoodlums. There’s a fair amount of little parks, but not many playgrounds and lots of traffic on Houston. It is not, unlike the Upper West Side, an achingly baby-friendly neighborhood.

And yet…

It started when I was getting on the subway at 86th Street: it must have been ’80s throwback night in the neighborhood, because there was a dude smoking crack out of a glass pipe waiting for the C with me (for those who don’t know the backstory, the Upper West Side was actually a bit of a rundown neighborhood, with plenty of drug houses and knife-fighting, during the Dinkins days. These days, well, you’re much more likely to score cupcakes than crack in the neighborhood).

So the Upper West Side is not without its scuzzy side, and Alphabet City is not without its charms. Walking down Houston, I passed a board-fence in front of very condemned-looking building that still had a light shining in the third floor: someone was living there, and from the outside, at least, it looked actually quite cozy. Something about it reminded me of youth. I’ve squatted in houses from Brixton to Berlin, sometime for long stretches, and I have warm memories of the experiences. Squatting is such an intentionally domestic act: you literally make a home where there wasn’t one. You do it without gas or electricity. In Europe, at least, you burn coal and light candles. It combines some of the best aspects of camping and lawbreaking

Thinking those thoughts, I walked into the unfinished hallway of my friend’s building and started up the dusty stairs, when I saw a baby stroller in the ground floor. The building wasn’t Section 8; everyone was living there voluntarily and could have lived elsewhere if they wanted to. They chose to raise a family there. It all made me feel like such a milksop, because I would never think that I could have a kid in that building or even in that neighborhood. My ruca and I, in our 16 years together, have changed mightily, almost always in tandem. But one of the changes is that we’ve become more conventional, more cautious. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t think it’s a natural part of aging. I know plenty of people who grow old without ever becoming rooted and plodding, without building a 401k or trimming a lawn. Actually, come to think of it, they are all photojournalists.

But I can still hold us non-photographers to a certain standard of spontaneity. That we lack such a trait may have something to do with building careers: after all this work, there’s too much to lose if you walked away. So you get cautious with the big things: you wouldn’t want to change careers, and then you become cautious in the medium things (like whether you’d move cities) and then ultimately you end up clinging to the status quo in even smaller issues, like whether you could ever live in a neighborhood that didn’t *gasp* have a Gymboree.

These were my thoughts this morning. It’s not enough to just read the kids Michael DeFeo’s Alphabet City boardbook.  I need to burn my lease, move the wife and kids into a dusty industrial loft and start living like New Yorkers.

There, as usual, to quash my dreams with his tyrannical numberlust is Nate Silver, the statistician wunderkind of the last election cycle, who is now training his graphing calculator at New York neighborhoods over at Christopher’s beloved NY Magazine. I took the quick online test to see what neighborhood would be perfect for us, and found that the Upper West Side was 24th on the list. But Alphabet City didn’t rate either. Number one: Murray Hill, where Christopher already lives. I smell a set-up, some kind of gambit to raise property values around him. But, as often happens when faced with conflicting sets of desires and advice, I will  simply freeze and do nothing. So I will stay in the Upper West Side. Maybe I’ll just take to smoking crack on the train platform to feel the edge beneath my feet again.

As some of the more loyal Dadwagon readers may have noticed, I went on vacation last week and thus was absent from the site. Apparently, my replacement, Warren, left some of my fellow Dadwagoners perhaps hoping I was fatally injured while “knee deep in pussy somewhere in the Caribbean”.

Nathan, who is the author of the above quote was wrong, however. Whichever part of my anatomy reached the pussy, it wasn’t my knee.

Now, Nathan and Matt travel for their work a great deal, and I imagine they have grown accustomed to the sense of disorientation that comes with returning to your child after an absence. I’m not. That helps explain, a little, my reaction when I got back in town yesterday and collected JP from his mother.

First, there was a flood of relief. I don’t know if all parents experience this, but for me, as a divorced father, there is a palpable sense of something gone wrong when I don’t have JP around. This unease only lessens during my time with JP. Not that I don’t appreciate having some part of my life to myself, but no, there is no substitute for the presence of my child, even (or especially) when he’s asleep.

That said, even with me gone from JP for just a week, the return to parenting was a shock. Did anyone out there notice that this raising-a-kid-thing takes some work? Whew. I’m exhausted.