DADWAGON

The NY Daily News, always on top of the important stuff, has this item about a Danish-Norwegian artist named Nina Maria Kleivan who made unusual sartorial choices for her baby for a photo essay. MomLogic has a fuller gallery: it’s not just Baby Hitler, but Baby Mao and Baby Khomenei.

From an interview Kleivan did with Israel’s Ha’aretz:

We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other… Even my daughter could end up ruling Denmark with an iron fist.

Let’s leave aside the fact that no one will end up running Denmark, a nauseatingly consensual society, with an iron first.

Apparently Kleivan’s father was a resistance fighter, and she has some Jewish family, and I’m not inclined to be offended anyway. I am even, in fact, a little tempted to find out where she got those clothes (surely the Interwebs can bring us babyhitler.com, with some tagline like “Even your first baby will love the Third Reich!”).

If nothing else, I think the get-up might get me something I’ve craved for a while: more fist-fights with fellow Upper West Side parents.

When I came home from the airport yesterday afternoon, things did not go quite as I’d hoped. That is, Sasha did not bound through the door into my open arms, screaming “Daddy!” Instead, she was still in the fog of sickness, drips dripping from her nose, eyes a little crusty. She was clingy and weepy and sensitive, and refused to be held by anyone but her mother. She was, in short, not the exuberant, outgoing, silly-cute child I’d missed so terribly in Italy.

Really, it was pretty awful. Like she had no idea who I was, and couldn’t trust me. I went back and forth: Was this just the illness, or had the week of illness somehow changed her personality completely? Waves of regret came over me. What a miserable father I’d been to go away for so long, and to neglect Sasha and Jean in their hour of need!

There was, however, one moment of hope, during which I briefly chased Sasha on all fours, eventually extracting a weak smile. And this morning, after an awkward diaper change and a slightly more enjoyable game of peekaboo, she even reached up her arms to me and said, “Bao-bao!” (Chinese for “hold me.”) For a little while, she even happily sat on my lap and bashed the computer keyboard, playing Alphababy, before it was time for daycare. Will she remember me when I pick her up in a few minutes? Or will I again be a stranger? If it’s the latter, at least I’ll be a stranger who plays peekaboo.

My wife and I stayed home from work sick this week, she on Tuesday, I on Wednesday. We have picked up slightly dissimilar colds, both fugal variations on your average winter bug. (Hers comes with fatigue and congestion, mine with a cough and nausea. Fun.) Meanwhile, our son is perfectly well, apart from a very slight bit of postnasal drip that he’s been carrying around for weeks.

Childcare, when you are sick, turns into a battle between you and your own infectious self. You can’t tend a baby without picking him up, touching his mouth and hands, or putting your face near his. Hand sanitizer isn’t practical twenty times a day; constant hand-washing may be a little better, but not foolproof. We’re even sleepier than usual, because we are kept awake by our own wheezing as well as late-night baby-tending.

What I wish I knew was whether he was susceptible at all to this virus I’ve caught. It is entirely plausible, after all, that he brought it home from daycare, or that I picked it up there, from a doorknob or other surface. If he’s been marinating in these germs all winter, and built up a fierce immunity, it’d make me a lot less uneasy about (for example) feeding him with my ungloved hands. If on the other hand he is likely to catch this nasty thing, I really do need to take steps, both to avoid putting him through it and to save his parents’ sanity. Because if he spends next week coughing and wheezing as much as I am now, it’s going to be a long hard couple of days around here.

This week we are in Los Angeles, and once again I am torn between wondering why we don’t live here and how we would ever survive.

For a weird start to any stay in LA, try walking somewhere. I trekked two miles down Overland looking for coffee and wifi, and didn’t see another human being for almost the entire time. It’s a lonely feeling, being a pedestrian here, like you are the last human alive in a world of four-wheel internal combustion beings. It now makes sense to me that the Terminator is governor.

I did see one person at the intersection of Washington and Overland, a typical collision of 8 lanes of traffic lined by Robek’s, Subway and Starbucks. It was a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. They, too, looked lonely and half-crazy; they must have been if they were walking somewhere in all this concrete.

There was also that earthquake that woke up the westside Monday night (although I was still up at four in the morning, for reasons too stupid to mention). My mother-in-law has earthquake safety handouts from her block committee. The recommendations involve too much setting aside canned food and not enough prayer, frankly: getting under a chair when the entire roof may fall on your head seems about as effectual as assume the crash position when the aluminum tube of jet fuel that you’re flying on is about to speed into the side of a mountain.

But who can complain when it’s 67 degrees and sunny? When there’s Griffith Park and pony rides and a little kiddie train just a short drive from the world’s most awesome French Dip and beer restaurant? Due to the unlikely union that produced my wife, we spend lots of time in two remarkably pure ethnic enclaves: Mexican East LA and Japanese Gardena. I’ve spent long days being the only non-Mexican I’ve seen, where the bussers at King Taco speak Spanish to me because I must just be some kind of albino Michoacano. And for the funeral of my wife’s grandfather years ago, hundreds of Japanese-Americans and seven priests packed the Gardena Buddhist Church; me and half of my wife were the only non-Japanese that I can remember seeing there. These are appropriate ways to do Los Angeles: great food, too much sun, and an uneasy feeling that in a city of angels, you are an alien.