We are in the land of happiness and spousal ancestors now, at the beach in the southern Caribbean coast. I have been looking forward to being here for months, but as usual I spent the first three or four days trying to stop feeling inexplicably late. I would sit on the beach for a while, remark on the waves, sunset, trees, you-name-it, and bound up to demand what’s next. Yesterday I finally unsnapped and took a two hour sprawling snoring sticky nap with the baby in the afternoon while V worked. (He’s staying on top of things, though I’m not getting much done. Next time we will arrange for a babysitter in advance.) Afterward we went to a little place near the beach to drink Campari and snack happily on french fries and a “carpaccio” of raw fish. On Saturday we went to the little farmer’s market where we bought, among other things, some of the most complex and delicious honey I have ever had. It tastes first of pure honeyness, then flowers, then like a fruit reduction of cas and lime and passionfruit and some other tropical fruit I can’t identify. (I have eaten up half the bottle already in an effort to understand the flavor.) The farmer and his wife from whom we bought it have a workshop up the hill north of town, which we visited two years ago. I will go back and buy banana vinegar, cacao butter, coconut oil, and lots of chocolate in a variety of forms before we leave. We tasted a snake fruit and spoke with Ancel Mitchell. I bought her booklet on local plants and food and lots of her dried fruit for Aure. The booklet describes local produce and edible wild plants. For someone from a temperate climate, the riotous fecundity is dizzying, the vivid colors and mad shapes all look suspiciously fleshy and potentially poisonous. (I’m pretty sure I wrote once about tasting some fruit at the beach that numbed my whole head, throat and hands. Tasty! Lethal! Yesterday a Canadian woman was telling me how to know when you’ve eaten a piece of fruit recently sat on by a poison dart frog. She claims it feels about like that.) It’s impossible to know where to start. (Ancel describes people who come to the farmer’s market, look around and end up sheepishly buying an apple from Washington state.) In fact, maybe it’s that way for the Costa Ricans too. I’ve always wondered at the simple and mostly quiet food here. The common dishes rely on a few consistent ingredients. Made indifferently, they taste, well—indifferent. Though there are exceptions: the grilled pork belly on a corn and flour tortilla with a heap of pickley vegetables and carroty hot pepper sauce on the street, spit roasted tepesquintle downstairs at Le Monastaire, a sticky-tender-crispy pork chop in chocolate sauce in an anonymous Caribbean soda, a simple fish tartar and a tropical fruit flambé at La Parcela, some astonishing fish tacos and cold avocado soup at a tiny hotel south of Dominical, brothy corn and pork tamales wrapped in banana leaves, cheeses and raw creams from Turrialba, a very spicy patty from a covered basket on the arm of a fat old lady who waddled out of the forest like an arthritic good fairy in the park at Manzanillo, Torta Chilena (not Chilena at all, but very Costa Rican and dreamy and easy to find), lots and lots of chicharron and gin with gingerale. Oops– now I am just listing good food I have eaten here and I will stop because it is easily findable in the same ways it is elsewhere.

The other day I got this craving for the literature of my early youth. (The ladylike literature. There was also a good amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the same epoch.) I loved all things L.M. Montgomery, but the Emily books were my favorite because they were a bit darker than some of her other stuff, though there were no walking heads or thoats. I found all the Emily books online, but of course forbore to read them because copyright is such a vital institution within our culture. While I was not reading them I thought of a few things. Thing 1: Boy, are these ever about a pretty naked ambition. Getting paid and being published was just part of it so it wasn’t all Room of My Own business. There was a grand obsession with fame. Huh. Did I want to be famous when I was little? I don’t remember, exactly. I also don’t recall how shadowy all the other characters in those books actually were. Emily was the only person with a real face and personality. I’m pretty sure I didn’t mind that at the time, though it bugged me a bit as an adult. Finally, I started thinking about how people used to live in one place all their lives and how some people still do and how one’s actions accrete and everyone knows everything about you and the only way to live anything down is to keep on living, right there in the same place, to keep laying down layers of yourself. I and most of my close friends grew up saving our energy to go bursting out of the places we grew up. It’s so (modern) American to start fresh over and over again. I can’t imagine the weight of knowing that all of my actions were public and known and that I would have to live right there among them for ever and ever. Even if the reality is that more of me is known now, electronically, it’s not the same. I can unplug and walk away. A friend of mine once said, I don’t mind people staring at me when I’m naked as long as I don’t know about them. Exactly.

~

Some things Aure said recently. I note them because I haven’t got a clue where some of the language and ideas are coming from… I mean, I did read many of those essays on research babies aloud and probably I should keep the uncensored National Geographics full of disemboweled mammals out of his reach.

I don’t like tigers to eat my brains, I like them to eat greens. Greens and leaves. From a tree. And mud. They can eat mud. Gusanos eat mud.

Congratulations, Keeker. You are so crazy! Hmm, what’s your schedule? (To the cat.)

I’m spanking you, I punish you! I hate leche, I don’t like it! I punish you! Go lie down! You need a nap. (To me.)

I eat peppers with gusto. (I double checked this one. You eat them with what, I asked. With gusto, he said.)

I realize I’m a little bit gorgeous and sticky. (Sitting in a pee puddle in the bed.)

~

Watched Julie and Julia online. I’m sorry to say that was not a very good movie, fellas. I loved the blog and everyone loved Julia Child, but bleh. What was I expecting, it is a movie about typing, and sure enough there were a lot of typing scenes with voice overs. I laughed at the first one, but then I realized they were really going to continue with the typing and I sighed and went back to eating my bean stew and tried to concentrate on how adorable Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci were. (My sister once sat next to Meryl Streep in a restaurant, so it’s sort of like we’re friends.) I got up and went to the bathroom when the younger characters started in on the inevitable flight about how narcissitic blogging is and how it makes you not have enough sex with your longsuffering husband. Fortunately everyone got published and lived selflessly ever after because once something’s printed and the author gets paid, the writing magically transforms into a sort of postdated community service coupon with which she can be excused from any of a variety of future misdemeanors (up to three jaywalking or one drunk driving conviction). The dialogue between the contemporary couple was bad. It reminded me of Woody Allen’s younger characters in his more recent movies. The twenty six year olds dress and move and speak like they were twenty six in the early seventies. But no one really says anything in the reviews. It’s odd. Leaves me wondering if I’m crazy, but then, sure enough, I watched a bit of that tennis death movie again and the characters are totally unbelievable. The last few films were so awful (actually I couldn’t bring myself to watch the last two), that they actually soured my recollection of his older stuff. Then I watched Annie Hall and remembered why it’s really one of my favorite movies. I will watch it over and over again forever and ever and not get tired of it. I feel annoyed with him for making me have to like his older stuff better. It makes me sound like some music nerd. Oh yes, speaking of music: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: Ice Cream Man. There you go, a very good earworm.

Reading NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (Thanks Jacquie!) and as usual I am dragging my own particular interest du jour with me through each essay. (Well then, today’s blue plate interest.) As curious as it all is, sometime of the essays seem a bit cursory (though thanks fellas for the fat list of references at the end of the book) and some are stronger than others; and I notice the authors don’t always make connections between them.

For example, the essay on lying doesn’t quite work—I don’t buy for a second that the particularly sophisticated manifestation of empathy designed to avoid causing harm to another person (kindness), and here described as a “white lie,” is a gateway drug to sociopathic, entitled, cocaine, Jayson Blair kinda lies. (Huh. Did you know he is a life coach now? Well, well.) To equate that kind of empathy with deceptions that deliberately harm others, or even lies to avoid punishment is simplistic.⁰¹ Everywhere else the authors emphasize that children are extraordinarily sensitive to nuance. And I bet they’re right. I bet children are capable of discerning the difference and making a judgment. (Assuming they have the ability to think morally. See? I can make everything circle back to blue plate intrinsic motivation with a large helping of salted morality and hopefully gravy.⁰² Anyhow, I was with them through when they pointed out that children learn to lie by watching us. Skip ahead though to the essay, Plays Well With Others, the short part about whuppin, and I have to say you can’t have it both ways. Either seeing us lie and witnessing or experiencing the violence of corporal punishment sets an example for one’s children or it doesn’t. I don’t buy that lying’s bad but spanking’s fine if the kid’s used to it. I know I’m not a statistically significant cohort, but there’s no way the sheer rage and blind hatred I felt as a daily spankee is good for any child anywhere, African American, Conservative Protestant regularly James Dobsonized, or anything else. The mere frequency did not render it part of a cheery familial wallpaper. Why did the authors accept this astonishing pronouncement so meekly? All I can imagine is that this is an instance of misplaced liberal niceness and a bit of exoticizing of these particular “foreign” American cultures. (Ha! You know I’d be complaining that they missed the point if they’d criticized said Conservative Protestant James Dobson culture.) It’s tricky to be both respectful and critical while still aware of your own ignorance, but they actually opened the can of worms with their excellent essay on how white parents don’t talk about race. Besides my more personal objections borne of a heavily spanked childhood, the larger logic just doesn’t hold up, especially when you consider spanking as part of a focus on punishment as an effort to teach submission and the rightness of working by an external set of motivations. Unless, of course, the parent is actively trying to create unquestioning dependence and squish an instinct to critique. (Raising a soldier or a prophet?)

I can’t stop thinking about the idea of intrinsic motivation and how it’s not so far from whatever it means to be moral or to possess ones own morality. The Tools of the Mind method was really exciting to me. I read a bit about this maybe in the Times and heard something on the radio, but I didn’t quite put it all together with this other thing I was chewing on until I read about it here. The idea is that a way of playing and teaching can allow (not prevent?) children to develop an intrinsic motivation—a powerful patience that allows a person to continue to hold a specific goal in mind under a variety of circumstances. It’s a matter of concentration and conviction. It allows people to work toward a goal in the face of failure, lack of positive reinforcement or external direction, and to put aside the nagging internal dialogue to concentrate on the matter at hand for a long time. I can’t imagine how valuable it is to have this plugged securely into place as a kid. It’s when I start thinking about what the opposite of this looks like that I realize that to lack that thing inside is really something monstrous. An adult who daily and energetically trains to live in unquestioning obedience is essentially amoral. The doctrine of submission becomes a chilling in a new way. If you constantly work at utter dependence on your authority figures (e.g. husband, pastor, Heavenly Father) you are striving to be utterly vacant inside. Utterly amoral. This is a dizzyingly awful thought as it morphs this image from some blurry soldier in a far away war crimes trial to a crisp portrait of people I know, going about their ordinary business, and all I can do is hope that the one of these dread scenarios never overtakes them…

Hmm, what else? The essay on language acquisition in babies was thrilling to me, especially since that stage is so recent for my own kid. (I was thrown back and forth between the parent and the child roles as I read this book. I still feel something like a cranky teen, but I bet I won’t by the time Aure arrives there.) It clarified for me how Aure’s precocious speech was so much a circular matter of him responding to my most obvious characteristic and me responding to and reinforcing the overtures from him that were most easily recognizable to me, and on and on. I think this is why his early use of language feels more personal than prodigy, more like a quirk of our family. I can’t imagine early speech is particularly valuable in itself except to charm the pants off speech obsessed parents. (Me—I like being speeched at!) Which is actually pretty damn adaptive, come to think of it.

You know, I got to the end of the meandering screed and I realized it’s unreadable as is, and must go back and make paragraphs. But where? The paragraph breaks above are pretty haphazard. Did they offend thee? Pluck them out!