In the middle of a bedazzling fireworks show
Dear Francis,
I hope this letter finds you with a certain croquant la vie à pleines dents, as the French might put it. I am writing this on a blessedly cool Saturday morning. The heat has been unrelenting the past month and a half, and today is the first day with a little hint of autumn in it. It will be hot again in a few days, but clement afternoons and evenings will become more and more the norm in the coming weeks. I cannot wait.
Saturday mornings are for sitting in coffee shops with my son. The coffee shop — or coffee house — has a rather intriguing history as an incubator of subversive political and social ideas. T'was many a revolution, after all, hatched in a dim coffee house along some cobblestone street. Perhaps my son will eventually change the world (for the better, hopefully!), and we will trace the spark back to all the time he sat in coffee shops, burbling and cooing and letting the sights, sounds, smells, and din wash over him.
In the past, I would have brought a book with me to read while I sipped my coffee on a springy armchair, but my son is getting to the point where he is becoming aware that he exists in a world brimful of other people and things. Instead of reading, I held him as he rubbernecked with an admixture of excitement and wariness, like someone who has fallen asleep and woken up, unexpectedly, in the middle of a bedazzling fireworks show.
This particular coffee shop is illuminated with warm lighting and bedecked with all manner of bric-a-brac, and it stands athwart the misguided impulse, so common these days, of designing cafes to look like small modern art museums. You know what I mean, right, Francis? You walk into these uninviting places and the walls are white and bereft of decorations, the the seating is hard and uncomfortable (good luck finding a cozy chair to sink into), and the baristas give off the unmistakable hauteur of Ivy League art students.
A month and a half ago, my son would have either been asleep in the stroller beside me or dyspeptic; he certainly would not have shown any awareness of his surroundings. Today, his eyes gobbled up the dark-green house plants near our chair, the guitars on the wall, the glowing vacancy sign affixed to the ceiling above us, the blur of patrons shuffling past our chair to the front counter, the barista's cordial chatter. He has changed so much in a few short weeks that I almost feel as though the stork surreptitiously swapped out our baby for a new one.
My goal when he was very little was to walk him about in the stroller, so that he would fall asleep, and then park him near me at the coffee shop while I read or typed away on my laptop, attending to other things. But these days, I am more than happy to hold him as he swivels his little head around and takes in the sights.
This brings me to a point I've been meaning to make to you. There's a certain kind of irritating Millennial discourse that treats children as a burden. The verb one commonly encounters in short-form video rants and essays in trendy, liberal magazines like The Cut about children is "drag," as in "I dragged my children to the restaurant with me." The implication is that it is quite unpleasant to bring one's kids out into public.
Francis, I could not disagree with more vehemence. Children are challenging, yes, but they are also life-affirming. Children help you see the world anew. It is hard as an adult to continually seek new experiences, and certainly one cannot do something novel every day without a great deal of money and time. But when you have children, you end up experiencing all the little mundane things we all take for granted — automobiles, trees, people walking their dogs, bugs crawling up a tree, your favorite movies and albums, and so forth — through their ingenuous eyes, as though they were all strange and unprecedented. Everything, and I mean everything, is riveting to them (so long as they are not hungry or tired, admittedly).
When I take my son to my favorite coffee shop and he decides to stay awake and goggle at everything and everyone, I am not disappointed that I cannot spend my time doing activities for me. When I hold him upright on my lap, allowing him to see the world and take it all in, I am giving myself a new perspective on the ordinary.
Burden? Forsooth. As the newspaper editor Walt Streightiff reportedly said, "There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million" — in a coffeeshop alone, I might add.
With love, SEW