New Little Dude

There aren't any rules about who gets to have kids and who doesn't, and I guess that's just as well, though we all know people who should have been steered toward hamsters instead. But let it also be said that every now and then the very best people become the best parents and might even have the best ingredients on hand when they're whomping up the little buggers. Like, maybe the chile is a gift to the whole world. Like, is it possible the new arrival will descend on a golden cloud with pudgy arms raised in benediction? Because we could use something like that right now.

That's sure how we felt when our friends' first baby rolled off the assembly line. We couldn't imagine a luckier child, and more than the usual effort had gone into his production. And now he has a baby brother. The docs said his mother was already "geriatric" for the first one, which seems rude and, as far as I can tell, means "over 26," but the point is it can be a bit of a challenge to seal the deal in these cases. Which makes this new one a plumb miracle. Oh, sure, lots of people refer to all babies as miracles, but just between you and me, some of them are a little disappointing, Lord And Savior-wise.

Thing is, though, that first child had tributes rained on him, toys and swaddling and onesies and furniture and college funds and what-have-you. We provided some of that rain ourselves, and I even made him a complicated quilt that took a long time to put together. Not nine months, but still.

This child?

Big Brother

Haven't sent him a thing. Big brother's old clothes should work--he doodled in them, but they have a washing machine. They'll give him a name at some point. We should probably send him something cute. Any minute now. We should, but we probably won't get around to it. He's already got something his big brother will never have.

He's the youngest.

And that's the greatest thing ever. Dave and I, we know. We're both the babies of the family. We had it made. The people in charge would snatch us out of the way of a speeding train but other than that? Go play. Figure it out yourself. Mommy's napping.

 

I'm the last of four children. Our parents were fairly strict. By the time I showed up (let's not pretend there was any planning involved) they were old, too. They didn't torment us with their visions for our future, but they definitely had standards for our behavior and were not remotely wheedleable. As a Brewster child, you might not get what you wanted, but you didn't suffer over thinking you mighta coulda if you whined long enough.

You wouldn'ta couldn'ta.

And even so, when all of us got together as adults, and I made some kind of casual but shocking pronouncement, and my parents shrugged and wandered off, my oldest sister looked at me in disbelief and said "You've done wonders with Mom and Dad!"

The number of photographs of me as a child are in the dozens. Yeah, sure, there are even fewer of my brother as a child, but those Daguerrotypes don't hold up. These days, first children are immortalized in pixels a thousand times a week, and the second child has to settle for his mug shot.

So listen up, new little dude. Your big brother is pushing Three, and he may be all walking around upright like a genius tyrannosaur and everything, but at some point  he's going to do some things, some currently unimaginable things, that your parents are going to want to talk to him about. They're going to want to talk to him about his choices and how what he does affects other people and ask what he really wants out of life, and with you? They'll be all, Whatever.

 

You grab that Whatever, child. That's a wide, wide landscape, and it's all yours. Go play in the mud, devise your own private troubles, and then shine, shine, shine.

The Damnedest Thing

I'm going to tell you about something. It's the damnedest thing. Most people probably don't even think it's the damnedest thing, because they've gotten used to it, and I'm sorry for them. They've gone way past being thrilled with the orange in the Christmas stocking and are all the way up to being bored to tears with the mound of whizbang toys under the tree. But this is the damnedest thing.

Not all that long ago if you had a baby, nobody knew about it except the folks in your cave, or the next farmstead over. Maybe some of your family took off for the hinterlands years ago and you're lucky if you ever get a letter, scrawled out by candlelight and stuck hopefully in a passing saddlebag. You might not even want to write to them about your new baby because by the time they

get the letter it could have been taken by the yellow fever, or one of the other colored fevers.

Even at the time I was born, and for quite a few decades after, people had to wait for the baby to hit air before anyone knew a thing about it. First thing anyone said, including the woman who'd been harboring it all those months, was "what is it?" Like maybe it could have been a badger or a hamster or something. Oh, some busybody might have made pronouncements about the nature of the baby in utero by dangling a threaded needle over it, and declaring it was a boy if it swung in a straight line, or a girl if it swung in a circle, but that's totally in Ouija territory, and just as accurate. Mom would send out a batch of pastel greeting cards to her home-town friends with a big-eyed baby painted on the front and "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!" printed inside, and the closer family members would get a black and white photograph tucked inside too, of a squinty and irritable-looking critter that in no way resembled the adorable infant on the front.

Yes, every now and then, but not that often, the question "what is it?" would be answered with a rumpled smile and a quirked eyebrow, because the answer was complicated and not that clear, and the infant would be handed back to the doctor with the instruction to "make it regular," and there would be decisions and incisions, and maybe everything would work out, but not always. Hallmark failed to produce cards that proclaimed "We don't know what it is!" But maybe they do now. Things is diff'rent.

Still, when I was born, mail service was quick and cheap, and Grandma and the relatives could rely on getting updates throughout the year and maybe another photograph at Christmas, but nobody expected to be kept apprised of all the details. That is how a child who would be over the moon to receive a stuffed animal, any stuffed animal, kept getting dolls and sweater sets from the aunts. Not enough information. But that's just the way it was.

These days, there is nothing on this planet that doesn't fit in our pockets. Not for Dave and me--we're back'ards. We're not as smart as our phones and we get back at them by leaving them behind most of the time. We live in a constant state of underinformation that would quake a younger soul. But let me tell you about this thing. 

There we are on a mountain. We've hiked eight miles in from the nearest road. We're peering over a ledge into a ravine at a river that threads all the way down from a glacier in a mighty peak, and there's a tweedling coming out of Dave's shorts, and it is a photo of our niece and her brand new baby, her beautiful much-anticipated much hoped-for actual baby girl, in pixels shot through the ether from a thousand miles away and reassembled in Dave's phone in the wilderness, and we burst into tears at all the beauty, and all I'm saying is no matter what you think, that is the damnedest thing. It is.

Birthday Boy

Today is Oliver's birthday. Not the anniversary of Oliver's birthday, but his actual one. Did you feel that planetary wobble? That was our boy. He was supposed to show up more than a week ago, but he was disinclined, and had to be evicted. Baby Oliver, my great-nephew, is the first new thing in our family in thirty-one years, and is a production of the last new thing.

I don't really blame him for holding back. It's a scary world out there. Dave thinks I am unreasonably optimistic, but he's wrong. I am constitutionally wired to veer towards cheer, but I'm not really optimistic at all. I think we're going down, but I also think, in the context of each of our little lives, that we must continue to do our best, and that means we need to pay attention. As a species, we're still a teenager, and we're trashing the place because we are lacking an adult perspective and we don't think we'll ever die, but the ugly truth is not all teenagers make it to adulthood. We might party down and wreck the car and crash and burn and take some stuff down with us, but after the teddy bears rot off the milepost marker, no one will remember us.

Now that Oliver's here, I think it would be a swell time for all of us to try a little harder. Start anywhere. Start small.

Are you a sad, wounded, pea-hearted troll who slithers onto the internet at night to say nasty things to people, and you can't bring yourself to just say nothing at all? Maybe you could work on your spelling.

Are you a more responsible soul, standing in line at the store to pay for a shirt, a bottle of water, and a snack-pack? Pay attention, instead. You've got time; the old bat up front hasn't even started excavating her purse for her checkbook yet. How old was the person who stitched your shirt, and what did she get paid? Maybe it's cheap for you because somebody else is paying. And let's take a look at that snack. All those adorable little plastic compartments so you don't have to risk your crackers rubbing elbows with your cheese-like product! The plastic is a deathless unit of petroleum that contributes to global warming on the front end and spins forever in the ocean destroying sea life on the back end. The cheese-like product is manufactured using more petroleum and some minor contribution from cows that have been zipped up with antibiotics that are being outwitted by virulent bacteria right now, to our eventual regret. Maybe you could have an apple. Maybe you could grow an apple.

About that water. Tremendous news, maybe you've heard? We get water pumped right into our houses now. Not that long ago that would have been an unthinkable luxury. It's clean, too, because we got together and bought ourselves some protection with our tax money. You could pick up this uninspected fluid in the handy petroleum package so that someone gets some jingle in his pocket for the privilege of privatizing something that should be owned by all of us, or you could just turn on the tap for practically nothing.

Are you someone who is getting a whole lot of money and a big microphone that broadcasts to the whole world and all you can do is make fun of the First Lady's ass and whine that she's trying to take away your Twinkies? Seriously, dude? Maybe you can think of something more constructive to do.

Or maybe you're in a position of actual power and you're devoting your days to making sure that the people who have all the money get to keep it and add to it. Is this your legacy to the world? Give it a little more thought and do the right thing. Do one right thing. Extra credit if you can do it without getting your penis in the news, but we'll let that slide for now.

Start anywhere. Start small.

Or are you really wicked wealthy? So wealthy that you could give away 95% of it and still be wicked wealthy? Maybe you could let a little of it go, or maybe you could send a little down the line to the people who got all that wealth stacked up for you. Because, honey, you didn't earn it. Know how I know? It's not possible to earn that much money. You amassed it, honey, and that's about the most shine we can put on it. Maybe you could see that all those people who contributed to your fat bottom line could get more of a share. Maybe you could decline to do business in countries that do not care for their workers or the environment. Or maybe you could save a watershed a week, or cure malaria. Does that whole line of thinking make you pucker? Okay. Maybe you could merely call off Twinkie-boy with the microphone and tell him to quit making fun of the First Lady's ass just to raise the rabble that keeps electing the people who are allowing you to amass more money. Maybe you could quit buying those politicians who are raising all those armies for you so you can keep all those resources under your control and continue to trash the planet while the rest of us try to get some of it cleaned up, and maybe you could quit paying those people to come up with ideas like manufacturing all this fake uproar you don't even believe in about gay people so the ignorant keep coming to the polls and voting in your minions so you can keep all of your money and get even more. No? Baby steps, then. Maybe you could pay some damn taxes. Start small. Start anywhere. Start.

Because it's Oliver's birthday, and it's time we grew up.

What We Have Here Is A Failure To Procreate

The end of the Brewster line (arrows)

Out of four of us siblings, only my brother managed to eke out a child, and he totally didn't mean to. Only a small part of him wanted a child, and that was the part that won the day. We're all pretty thrilled with the results, though. My niece turned out way better than we dared hope. She, however, isn't doing anything about having children herself--quite the opposite--so it looks as though this particular branch of the Brewster tree has gone stumpo.

Grand-nephew in production

Dave's side is doing a little better. He has one sibling, and she, the rabbit of the family, produced two entire children, both of them top-drawer items. We two, on the other hand, have manufactured nothing, and at this point, if we do, we will have to gin up a whole new religion over it, which would be a tremendous bother. Ours was a conscious decision not to procreate. Genetically speaking, we were too likely to produce flatulent progeny with poor eyesight and no ambition, unless of course they rebelled, but we couldn't take that chance.

It's all worked out for the best. We have not been exposed to diapers or adolescent insolence, and no children have been scarred by our singular version of couth. The niece and nephew most likely to have been harmed by exposure to us have come through unscathed, if a little deficient in useful computer skills, and outside of the family we have also been able to collect a set of fine, pre-wiped, post-angst twenty-something friends through the ruse of feeding them or renting a house to them. We're pleased.

Now comes the news that the nephew has defied tradition by charging right out there and whomping up a whole new person. Yes, he is all set to produce us a brand-new baby, with invaluable assistance from his wife. For a family that could hold a reunion in the back of a Volkswagen, this is thrilling news indeed. Especially since there are a lot of good genes in play from both parties involved. This one should be a humdinger. We've already seen him--there are photographs. So far, he's small, although not for his age; he's black and white and shades of gray, with a grainy texture. He has nice flippers with very long fingers; I dream of a piano player and Dave fantasizes someone who can palm a basketball. Either way, we are standing by ready to instruct. Somebody else bags up the poop, right?