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We received our Christmas Eve luminary kit from our block captains this morning; eleven white paper bags, eleven white candles, and two quarts of sand in plastic bags. That’s one paper bag luminary for each square in the concrete sidewalk outside our house. Around four o’clock PM, all our neighbors were out folding bags, scooping sand, and setting candles. Around five o’clock, wooden matches were getting inserted gingerly down into the mouths of the bags. It’s not a windy night, so the candles will still be burning early tomorrow morning.

It’s difficult to describe the luminaria’s effect, just as it’s difficult to describe the sense of community on this street. The bags are pretty, and the flickering effect of all those candles stretching in an organic line up and down the street is… well, real, in a way that six foot inflatable snowmen aren’t. I don’t want it to sound like I’m in the middle of a Thomas Kinkaid painting — though the line of luminaries are easily pretty enough to be the subject of entire stores’ worth of mall art. And I don’t want to make it sound like this prettiness only comes at the expense of crippling small-town fascism, though every sitcom writer working for the past fifteen years would find it easy to imagine that plot. The captains are low-key, the luminaries are pretty in a way that makes you sorry they’ll be gone tomorrow, even while you’re looking at them right now. This is just a really, really great street.

Kate’s parents live nine luminaria away, and in March, my dad and stepmother will be moving in to a house just fifty-nine luminaria from our front door. That’s a short tricyle ride, or a medium-length pogo-stick journey; we know, because there are several pogo-stick experts in training within ten luminaria of us. We are all very, very lucky. Merry Christmas!

The new house has enough room for a proper, tree-sized tree, and the three had enough room for three long strands of colored lights, and so I did something I hadn’t for maybe twenty years: I put the lights on the tree, turned out every other light in the house, including the stove light, nightlights, and everything else, and basked in the rosy, diffuse, multicolored light. It was almost as good as I remembered, though the new pink lights included on colored strands are jarring. I think that we might become a White-Light-Only family next year, though I have no intention of switching to pinecone-only wreaths and other trappings of yuletide austerity.

There’s a Secret Santa program at work; kids from inner-city PS 111 turned in letters asking for (with astonishing uniformity) Xbox units, Gameboy Advance units, and a short list of GBA games. I had to compose and distribute a company-wide email explaining what the kids meant by asking for “leaf green.” Colleagues expressed concern: “should we really be getting these kids video games for Christmas? Aren’t they awfully violent?” and I tried to advocate for the kids: “Game Boys are great! Training and trading Pokemon are training these kids to take part in the new information economy!”

But then I choked when I did my own shopping, and I bought my kid — young 9-year-old Yusuf — a copy of the Smithsonian Children’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of American History, and a starter Lego set that allows kids to build cool geared machines. It’s not a terrible present, though probably not what Yusuf was hoping for. I’m kind of surprised at myself for getting such a… teacher-ly present. I hope Yusuf understands, and that the encyclopedia actually comes in handy. Hell, at the very least, he can use it as a level surface for arranging GameBoy cartridges.

We also visited the Christmas display at the Brandywine River Museum over the weekend, and we got to see the train exhibit — a darkened room with dozens of model trains, including a freight train with 67 cars that loops repeatedly in, over, under, and around itself through all kinds of hills, over bridges, and around embankments. This was one of the Wonders of the World when I was a kid, and still remains… fairly decent, though sadly somewhat diminished, just like the glowing colors of the Christmas tree. I wonder if I’ll ever get that feverish Christmas excitement back, or whether I’ll need to do it vicariously through the little baby in the reindeer antlers pictured above. Frankly, either way is fine. Merry Christmas, y’all!

My mom’s a photographer; when I was growing up in Austin, Texas (this was when my dad was hunting UFOs), I remember when she covered a national Frisbee competition. I usually get this stuff all wrong, but I have very distinct memories of lean Texans in bandannas hurling Frisbees over huge distances, and their lean Texan dogs (also in bandannas) leaping impossible distances into the air to catch them.

Austin was a cool city. There were many Frisbees and many dogs in bandannas. So my archetype of coolness, imprinted from childhood, is composed of equal parts dogs in bandannas, and motorcycle sidecars. Not sure how the sidecars got in there, except that they are obviously inextricably linked to dogs in bandannas. And Frisbees.

So now that I have a little baby, it’s time to start looking at sidecars and bandannas for her. Lydia won’t be ready for frisbees for a few years, and my commuting schedule rules out a dog, but that’s just a matter of time. A sidecar she and I can start on now. At the Turkey Pro a few weeks ago, one fellow Airheads Beemer Club member arrived on his sidecar rig named “Lucifer’s Taxi.” It’s a R100/7 — the same model as my bike — except with a sidecar rig, tricked out in desert tan and with some iron crosses and Airhead logos. The iron crosses aren’t my thing, but converting an R100/7 to a hack rig is VERY MUCH MY THING INDEED. Especially if you can strap all sorts of interesting things to the sidecar. Like a mount for the Commando Projector next summer. At which showing there will be frisbees. And dogs in bandannas, if I’m lucky.

I’m now trying to find sidecar rigs from the late seventies that will look good with the bike. I’ve seen some really cool stuff — like this Chinese BMW knockoff with a jump seat and some other outlandish stuff — but I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be your basic big, blocky, German Seitenwagen rig. Then, according to the best advice out there, I have to practice driving it for a couple of thousand miles before even considering carrying a passenger. Scroll to the bottom of this page, and you can see a Turkey Pro Slow Race contestant from 2001 doing what I’ve since learned is called “flying the sidecar.” Cooooool.

The first Thursday after Thanksgiving is time for the Turkey Pro National, Kate’s dad’s end-of-season motorcycle rally. The Turkey Pro keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it repeatedly goes back underground in order to keep things manageable. This year, one pot of “weenie water soup” (pictured above) sufficed to feed the 60 or so attendees, and the 25 or so competitors in this year’s slow race. More pictures to come. Meanwhile, you can see the helmet stuffed full of contributions, and the specialized slip-joint hot dog tongs.

I’ve periodically posted pictures from the Turkey Pro National; you can see a writeup of the 16th running of the Turkey Pro National in 2001 and pictures from the 18th running in 2003. As far as I’m concerned, though, the best TPN picture ever was taken this year by Kate!

A joke where a priest, a rabbi, and Ayn Rand are waiting for a bus? A literal orgy of capitalism? The Rough Beast driving to Bethlehem in 4WD? I give up.
I’ve had a little bit of Blog block for the past month, because I came across a writer’s challenge that I’m unequal to.

I was in Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, waiting to change trains on my way home at about 6:30PM. The station is a huge, lofty, echoing space, built to inspire awe and lined with frescoes depicting allegorical Important Moments in Transportation. Huge vinyl banners hang from the walls — sometimes welcoming a pharmaceutical conference to town, sometimes advertising SUVs. This night, it’s the latter. There’s a picture of a big silver SUV on a patch of arctic tundra, below the twelve-foot legend “Our Forefathers Didn’t Fight So You Could Spend the Weekend in Traffic.”

That’s enough for an entry right there, but then, loud music started booming out of the north waiting room, a marble-lined, echo-ey vault that was, this night, lined with rows of empty white wood chairs and partially screened with black cloth. A fashion show was rehearsing, and the models walked up the middle of the room, paused sulkily, then turned and walked back, disappearing through a door under a multi-ton bas-relief depiction of nymphs in blowing gowns taming wild oxen with electric whips. All the models’ hair was in curlers, all were wearing lingerie, and all of them were in advanced stages of pregnancy. I’m sure that, as a runway model, you don’t get much practice traversing a catwalk in heels while great with child; nobody looked like they were about to trip, but the baby had an interesting damping effect on the walkers’ sashay, taking the edges off their hip-shoving flounce and softening it into more of a liquid wobbling motion.

On a sofa not twenty feet away, an Amish family (Amish families often take my train, as many commute to the farmers’ markets in the city) sat and smiled unsurprisedly at the tall, thin women in the five-inch heels and the see-through purple marabou capelets.

I mean, christ, E. B. White would have been able to make something of that paean to… whatever it is, but I don’t even have a chance. So this Blog entry has been choking up the plumbing for the past month, as I try to figure out how it all fits together. Too damn bad, I give up. Phew, that’s a relief.

This is the first year that I’ve lived in a house that gets trick or treaters, and it was everything I hoped it would be. For adults, Halloween begins at about 2PM; everyone is out front raking their yards, hanging cobwebs on their house numbers, and arranging jack o’lanterns in the front yard. The children are all out in the yard, too: nervous and expectant like barnayard animals before an earthquake. Ask them questions about their costume, and you’ll get an enthusaistic, but distracted, response. Obviously, they’re all concentrating on making time go faster — which is especially hard on the first day after daylight savings time ends, the slowest day of the year. “Oh, look, it’s only 2PM!” say the adults happily, leaning on their rakes and thinking about all the laundry left to do. The kids go back to swinging in the tree. For the hundredth time.

Things speed up as dusk approaches. Relatives arrive to help man the ramparts, kids disappear upstairs for dress rehearsal, and the pumpkins get lit. Finally, the sound of the starting gun — the ubiquitous Spooky Sounds of Halloween tape, played through stereo speakers in Billy and Paula’s window across the street.

Kate and I handed out candy to: four pirates, three soccer players, three cheerleaders, four Eagles players, three beach bums, four assorted ghouls with plastic halberds, threshers, or clubs (three male, one female,) two clowns, two Santas (one large, one small), one land shark with a leg dangling from his mouth, two Freddies, three Jasons, two Dorothys, two power rangers, two Batmans (one regular, one Batman Beyond), two GIs, two druids, two bunnies, one Harry Potter, two cats, two firemen, and no less than thirteen witches. Oh, and a sorority all dressed as Smurfs. Together with all the one-off costumes (one ninja, one ballerina, one poodle-skirt dancer, one patriot — like a pirate, but a drum instead of an eyepatch,) we handed out candy to no fewer than one hundred twenty-six kids between 6PM and 8PM.

A five-year old was dressed as a mouse, with a big, furry head. He climbed up on our porch and held both hands to his ears in an exhausted door-to-door salesman way. “I need a drink!” he sighed, which was startling until I realized he probably was just asking me for a juice box. Probably.

At 8PM sharp, all the porch lights go out, and the pumpkins go into garbage bags. Which was overdue, in our case — our jack o’lanterns had been a couple of weeks ago when Kate’s brother Matt came to visit (more on Kate’s Blog.) His pumpkin had softened from the rapacious, toothy grin pictured above to a soft, lopsided leer. Which was scary, but… moist, and eloquent of summer’s decay.

Lydia wore a strawberry hat, and charmed all comers. Then went to bed under duress.

The class formerly known as “Mommy and Me Swimming”
I’ve been looking forward to baby swim class at the Y ever since we knew that Kate was pregnant. The first class was about a month ago, in the superheated short pool. Lydia wore a swim diaper and a little bathing suit, and she took the water in stride. She likes to stick her tongue out and lick the surface of the water in a calm, contemplative manner. There’s a dirty trick they teach you where you blow in your baby’s face to make them squinch up their eyes, and then you dunk them underwater. She regarded this as a mild breach of etiquette, but really was pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
The first class (formerly called “mommy and me swimming”) was mostly moms and dads together (and the 16-year-old instructor, who passed out floaty toys and chirped “now, don’t let them put these in their mouths!”, indicating the chewed-up nature of some of the foam alphabet letters. At least, that’s what I think she said; it was kind of hard to hear her over the sound of seven babies noisily chewing on the toys. Lydia, Ruiner of Floaty Toys, can do a cookie-monster impression with the best of them: “UMMM-YUMM-ARMM-HOMF-HOMF-HOMF!”)
So anyhow, I took Lydia by myself to the next class, only to discover that the class was now entirely a daddy-and-baby swimming class. Apparently, all us dads had passed the test and received certification in not pissing off the baby too badly. After class, we all lined up at the changing table in the locker room, tearing off swimmy diapers and bundling the chlorine-scented babies back into their onesies.
After class, Lydia sleeps the sleep of the just in her car seat, and I drive in a holding pattern, circling West Chester.

Seneca and Shiznit
Life is very busy, and I’ve been reading Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life during 15-minute lunchtime pizza breaks, as a kind of guilty pleasure. “Be careful who and what you spend your time on!” says Seneca, with a righteous fervor that inspired Elizabethan moralists and continues to live on in the works of God-damned leech on society Anthony Robbins. “For when you look back on your years, and subtract from the total all the time you spent currying the favor of one, all the time you spent in idle tasks, you’ll find that the tally accruing to you is small indeed.”

Seneca was a giant hypocrite, spending lots of time in a busy, lucrative legal practice and writing entire books fawning on rich patrons. What’s more, On the Shortness of Life is written to one Paulinus, who managed all the granaries of Rome, and therefore had just about the most important and useful job in the whole freaking ancient world. Seneca exhorts Paulinus not to waste his time on dull toil, but to contemplate life, etc. So Seneca is definitely the spiritual ancestor of “Who Moved My Cheese?” and other glad-handing idiots.

But, who am I kidding: it’s more fun to get caught reading Seneca in the elevator at work than to be seen reading Jack London, or anything with a big submarine carrying Nazi gold or (god forbid) some elven chick with a sword on the cover.

“Oh, yes, I read ancient philosophy, don’t you know. Lofty thoughts, lofty thoughts.” I can’t believe I just admitted that.

Lydia likes to be put to sleep one way, and one way only: I carry her in my arms, put loud music on the iPod, and then I dance around with her for 30 minutes. Any less, and she screams like her butt is on fire when I go to put her down in her crib. I can’t complain (much); it’s impossibly sweet to see that peaceful face when I’m bouncing around to some goofy late-nineties big-beat track by the Propellerheads. Though she’s ruining all the badass tracks in my playlist: now, when I play Pepe Deluxe’s Salami Fever, all I see is my daughter’s sleeping face. Boy, is Lydia going to be embarassed when she brings dates home to meet us. “And then I’d dance around with you like this! ‘Change my pitch up! Smack my bitch up!’ Wait, come back, here comes the bridge! This part is dope!”

In the 1800s, the menfolk would forge ahead into the wilderness, pick a likely spot, then girdle all the trees with a hatchet and wait for them to die. Meanwhile, they’d construct a rude lean-to with saplings and any canvas they were able to salvage from their cargo wagon after they’d overturned it in a couple of dozen mud wallows. Once the lean-to was built and the trees good and dead, they’d proudly invite the wife and children to take up residence in the howling, mossy wilderness, in a dirt-floored hovel roofed with muddy canvas and surrounded by creepy, rotting dead trees. “No place like home, honey!”

Well, our move went slightly better than that. I sent Kate to visit in Seattle during the packing and trucking back and forth, so she could concentrate on the baby, and not on which contractor was going to show up at seven AM and stage an elaborate melodrama in the basement, starring themselves as the hero and all previous contractors to work on the house as foul, hamfisted villains. To stick loosely with the frontier metaphor: you know how when the hero accepts the gunfight with Black Bart, the creepy, lugubrious undertaker oils up and starts working with a folding ruler? Yeah, now imagine that the creepy undertaker is an ASBESTOS ABATEMENT CONTRACTOR. Sadly, Kate was already back home when that bit of the melodrama unfolded.

Anyhow, we’re entirely moved in now, and mostly unpacked, and we own almost the full complement of essential major appliances, and most of them are hooked up and operational. We’ve got a new refrigerator with ice that comes out of the door, which I have wanted ever since visiting friends’ houses at seven years old, and as soon as the plumber arrives for Act V, it’ll even be hooked up. We’ve got a washing machine (ditto: the plumber) and a gas stove (op. cit.) and a dryer that needs me to knock a hole in the cinderblock wall to route the vent. We’ve got newly refinished floors that glow in the afternoon sun, and freshly-painted walls that no longer show the grimy shadows of ancient cuckoo clocks, and we’ve got a cat that thinks he’s just ascended to the throne of a small country.

Lydia is smiling and laughing, and when you put her down to sleep, she rolls onto her left side with a decisive, pronounced “thump”. She’s outgrown the Baby Bjorn pictured below, so I’ve purchased an enormous Kelty backpack that she sits in like a Maharani in a howdah and charms the passers-by.

Kate has some pictures of the nursery.

Shock and Awwwwwww
Walking in public with Lydia strapped to my chest is now like walking around town with a small fusion reactor hooked to my shirt. Or a million-candlepower spotlight, or a small sun, shooting dazzling rays in every direction. Kate and I walked out with her Friday night; it was cool, so Lydia wore a pink sweater and a strawberry hat, both knitted by Kate. This was an unstoppable combination, as I learned when we reached the center of West Chester.

Saying that heads turned would be an understatement. Heads whipped around with painful, whiplash speed. Daughters nudged mothers, grandparents stopped dumbfounded, fiancees siezed the arms of fiances with painful, circulation-stopping grips. Look at the baby! Look at the baaaby! LOOK AT THE B-A-A-A-A-ABY! Lydia, equal to the task, responded with dazzling smiles, delighted with the reactions she’s getting. She plays them like a violin, does Lydia: dazzling smile, then a bashful blink and a turn to the side. “What, little old ME? Aww, shucks.” This is one skillful and dangerous baby.

Having Lydia strapped to my chest is like simultaneously being elevated to the celebrity of a rock star and being reduced to the faceless anonymity of a sedan chair bearer. But I’m getting conceited (how can you not?) when walking down the street. Like an emperor, all I see is faces in every direction, never backs. Ah, yes, a dog walker a hundred yards ahead. Wait for it, wait for it…

“Oh my GOD, what a cute baby!” (Grin! blink, blink, bashful turn)