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collage of unfinished sentences
Tuesday, December 28 2010
Penny came over with her little son Milo this afternoon while Gretchen was reading by the fire and I was about to launch into a major tear-down of the CD carousel mechanism of Gretchen's old Aiwa stereo (which I would also be doing by the fire, by far the most comfortable place in the house).
So then all of us were hanging out by in the living room while 18-month-old Milo rambled chaotically around the first floor. Because of the constant distraction (which included a bowel movement, the associated grimaces of which a toddler doesn't bother concealing on his face), our dialog was little more than a collage of unfinished sentences. First the kid started scribbling in pencil on our brand new rough-maple coffee table, and then moved on to performing scratchiti on that same surface using the metal roller of the cigarette lighter I use to ignite the woodstove. From there Milo ranged out more widely, and I needed to save an iPhone once and then, several times, Deborah's ceramic art (which performs a form-over-function occupation of an entire piece of otherwise-useful furniture). Sometimes Milo would get too close to the stairwell down to the basement, which has not been fenced in a way that would stop a suicidal toddler, and Penny would have to jump up and go fetch him. Milo didn't seem to understand much about concepts such as safety and the desire to keep unbroken things in their unbroken state or unflung things in their unflung state, though he did grasp the danger of the woodstove. He kept pointing at it and declaring, "Hot!" and doing his best to avoid it in his otherwise-random trajectories. Another word he used at one point was "bagel." Several times he gently held a telephone up to Sally's head in a way that would have been useful to her had one of her friend just called and she hadn't been deaf.
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