She's with child, I'm ready to chat
Valentine's Day must have been busy this year, because I've seen an unusual amount of very pregnant women around town lately -- on the elevator, on the train, in the streets
There is something about a woman great with child that seems to invite comment (At least I hope there is; maybe it's just me. One of the pitfalls of writing a column is the risk of approaching a topic as if it reflects the general human condition only to find out it is more of a unique personal perversion).
Anyway, as a guy who likes to strike up conversations with strangers as it is -- a trait some might refer to as being "chatty," though I prefer to think of as "piercing my Clint Eastwood-like steely silence" -- it sometimes takes all I have to suppress the impulse, because I assume it would be intrusive and annoying to the gravid woman who is minding her own business, gently baking the bun in her oven.
To my credit, usually I succeed in keeping my yap shut, though it's like holding back a brace of eager bloodhounds. Just the other day, I was on the elevator with this woman tending a cantilevered belly. I began assembling my comment.
"I know you're not supposed to assume a woman is pregnant unless you actually see the baby coming out," I considered, as an opening. "But I'm going to go out on a limb here . . ."
I kept quiet, since the remark seemed not witty, but gross. And really, no matter how pregnant a woman seems, there's always the risk she's merely obese.
So given the risks, from whence the impulse? Goodwill, friendliness, a desire to cast a ray of illumination on the hidden rocks ahead. What I really want to say is, "You know, you can just prepare formula with warm water as you need it, which saves the time and bother of making it with cold water, storing it in the refrigerator, then heating it up. We didn't figure that out until the second child. . . ."
Though really, would anybody listen? I can't imagine some young mother, breezily caring for her newborn, explaining to a pal, "Yeah, it's an idea I got from some strange guy in an elevator."
Better to keep quiet. If possible.
"Don't try to part the traffic with your baby's stroller," is another good piece of advice. Surely you've seen parents do it. They get to the corner of a busy intersection and nudge junior past the curb, letting the stroller drift, almost as a talisman, a charm to see if the oncoming cars pause out of respect.
Not that the parents do this consciously -- if the child were toddling, they wouldn't say, "Step into traffic, honey, and see if the cars stop." But the sense of new parent entitlement is very great, and they're impatient -- probably late to their SafeBaby class -- so the temptation is to lead with little Nellie and assume the world will defer.
People are so strange. They buy organic baby food because the regular stuff is poison. They obsess over the tiniest risk. And then they blithely push the stroller containing their entire world in front of a speeding truck because the sign says "WALK" when, as everybody knows, "WALK" is an invitation to temper caution with hope, no more.
Needless to say, I'm thinking of that new mother who got her stroller, with her 22-month-old daughter in it, stuck in the closing doors of an L train at the Morse Avenue station Monday night. The baby tumbled to the tracks, and it was a miracle -- whoops, a fortuitous piece of random luck -- she wasn't killed.
I wasn't there, so don't want to assign any blame. Maybe the doors snapped shut in an instant, traplike, catching the mother unaware. Or maybe she was in such a hurry she pushed the kid through the closing doors. Though I will observe that while L doors do not snap shut traplike, people do tend to rush about in a mindless panic, leading, as I said before, with their children.
John Freeman, the editor of Granta, will be reading from his new book The Tyranny of E-Mail at the Clybourn Barnes & Noble on West Webster Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m.
No, wait, that isn't right: John Freeman, the handsome young editor of Granta, the British literary quarterly that devoted its current issue to Chicago, will be reading from his new book, The Tyranny of E-Mail ...
OK, almost there: John Freeman, the handsome young editor of Granta, the British literary quarterly that devoted its current issue to Chicago, including an essay by me for which I was paid a big sloshing bucket of money, will be reading from his new book, The Tyranny of E-Mail. ...
There, that wasn't so difficult. But revealing the conflict isn't quite enough, is it? In my mind, you have to also be critical, in order to show that your powers of observation haven't been softened by self-interest.
The book is a polemic against e-mail wrapped in a brief history of communications. I liked the history part very much -- who knew that the "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night," motto associated with the Post Office is actually Herodotus?
However, the argument -- that e-mail is destroying our productivity if not ruining our lives -- didn't convince me. But why trust me? I'm biased. Read the book and judge for yourself.