T:You need any shoes, we got plenty! [He's holding out two fistsful of children's sneakers. Around us on the deck are dozens of other children's sneakers, all neatly arrayed in matching pairs, in orderly rows and columns. Some are also inside the screendoor, out of which T. lately emerged, Coors Light extended, breezing along on an aluminum can buzz. The day is warm; there are occasionally warm days in January round these parts, but usually there's a cool breeze associated with them if they're at all windy. Today was vigorously windy at times, but the wind was strangely warm and even a bit humid.]
Me:It's like a Japanese elementary school!
Guy I've Never Met:*Laughs loudly*
T:Yeah, whatever.
T's Dog: Is attracted to the sent of the turkey eggrolls Cha is frying on the picnic table. I crouch down to pet her (T's Dog, not Cha), she gets all riled up and starts biting my goatee very gently.
T:Stupid fucking dog.
T's house is like a daycare center. There were at least two dozen kids running around when we got there, and it was a blast. L. cooked up some excellent seafood soup and chicken chili; Catcher, down from Alaska, brought along the smoked salmon dip--there was plenty of good food. Typically a group of us gathers on New Year's day to gorge and drink and pretend to watch college football. Most of the old Hereford crew was there with their various broods. Cha and I heard a lot of "not parents" jokes:
Spooge Whore: [upon seeing me watching a room full of 3-5 year-olds completely deconstruct into a squalling turbulence] Just glad none of these babies is yours, aren't you!? Rubbing it in, eh?
Ten minutes later, L. made the exact same comment.
It's a treat to see all the youngsters unrolling into less small actual human being type things. Many of them had precise and determinable personality traits as infants or very small toddlers. I'm amazed at how these characteristics were so present when they were tiny tots, and how all the kids have come out as one could have predicted from their behavior when they were barely capable of speech. I'm down with the whole nature/nurture thing, but how can a child be born inquisitive, or instrospective? Surely such characteristics seem as if they should develop through interaction with the environment/others; is it really explicable scientifically that a child pegged as intellectual at six months is now at age five reciting the names of tongue-dismaying dinosaurs in authentic Greek pronunciation, doing charcoal copies of Durer engravings, and calculating instantaneously calendrial ephemera like the number of seconds since 1973, or how many cycles of the moon in a millenia, or how many days before Santa again makes his suspicious simultaneous gift deposit globally the same instant?
No.
Last night we bought tickets to some New Year's bash at 23 Degrees, which is the name of the new joint open in the space that previously was Spike and Charlie's. The food was really excellent: I had the biggest, most delicious oysters I ever ate last night--and mussels, and mighty meaty prawns, and crab cakes that were beyond buttery and into whatever the next degree of sublimity is after buttery, and pork shoulder with a ginger sauce, and jerk chicken wings, and so much other stuff I can't remember, because there were also two open bars. And three bands, two of which I thought were pretty good, while the other was ok. Two jazz bands (a sax/trumpet quintet of some skill) and a decent piano trio, then a blues band with a strong little singer and a great harmonica player. There was also some Michael Jackson "Off the Wall," so dancing ensued. I'd hoped to leave briefly and run downtown for the fireworks, but we got carried away by the blues band and missed it.
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