My private statistical analysis shows that the question most frequently asked of a new parent is “Does he sleep through the night?” The true purpose of the question – in essence as rhetorical as any old “How are you?” out there – is to show the parent that his interlocutor is a person of acumen and experience who can speak of child rearing as confidently and competently as he speaks of missiles in Donbas or about vegetable gardening.
Another fascinating thing about watching a child grow is the gestation of his powers of attention. I do not say “evolution,” though attention is a kind of faculty which is by nature progressive, because I find both evolution and progress conceptually suspect.
The other week, under the pretext of our daily stroll through town, Vasily and I betook ourselves to a terrace bar where I could have a glass of Ricard’s “Pastis de Marseille” accompanied by a cigar and he could have his bare feet tickled by the barmaid.
Time sure does pass. Unbelievably, this is my three hundred and sixty-fifth flight of fancy in this space, which means that were the gentle reader to peruse a single archived post per diem, it would fix him up with reading matter for a whole year.
I fear I may be becoming a kind of Mumsnet figure, jettisoning a past of decadence and dissolution, shelving a present of geopolitical awareness and acumen, and at last becoming more or less competent to answer young mothers’ anxious questions about which talcum powder is best value for money.
What are you doing, I would ask my father towards the end of his life, telephoning him in New York from a succession of tramontane regions that were, to him, as inconsequential as they were exotic. Invariably he would give the same answer: “I am lying in bed waiting for world fame.” World fame never did fall to his share, yet this does not mean that his methodology was flawed.
Some cynical fellow out there has argued that all conversation between people is nothing but power play, with one interlocutor necessarily dominating the other even if the subject of discussion is as inconsequential as what one of them had for breakfast.
Young Vasily, who the other day cleared the nine-months plank at seventy-five centimeters, is showing an early interest in the deck. To be sure, it appears that the laminated finish of a playing card, rather than its relative value in chemin de fer or blackjack, is what fascinates him….
Many tales of modern life, such as the stuff one comes across in middlebrow newspapers, read like brazen inventions. The reader never feels that he is actually inside the freak show, where the Swiss bearded lady, the microcephalic dwarf Zip the Pinhead, and the giantess Anna Swan are vying for his attention.
If a Russian priest can do anything, it’s to find himself a wife. We stayed in Father Vadim’s house for several days, before and after little Vasily’s christening, and I was able to observe firsthand what a force of nature a good popadya, or matushka, or priest’s wife, becomes when pushed to extremes.
