After a thanksgiving feast, it's a great idea to take a family walk to give ourselves the illusion that we're somehow actually working off the potato, cheese, and corn flake casserole, corn and cheese casserole, cheese and cheese hot dish, and macaroni, cheese, potato, cheese, and cheese bake. Okay, so that last one was an exaggeration - but you get the picture.
Anyhow, after rolling around on the floor, bloating, wrestling with Finnegan, and generally hanging out feeling large, we went for a nice stroll in the nighttime air. The neighborhood was thick with the smell of sweet mesquite firewood, and the air was crisp. Sans stroller, Finn was decked out in his starch white shirt, grey-brown irish old man pants, and a great khaki vest that would make Mork and Mindy proud.
"One, two, three!" we cried, one of us on either side of Finn, holding his hand and, on "three," lifting him up into the air for a great moonwalk and an ever greater giggle."
"one, twooooo..." he'd say just after landing, our cue to start the count over and again hoist him up into the air. He made it to "three" all by himself once, too. I suppose one just needs to have a vested interest in something in order to learn it quickly.
"oooooo!" he cried, jumping up and down and pointing. He had seen his first Christmas light display on a house, complete with a tree, a nice outline of the windows and roof and, as a bonus, a big red truck parked in the front yard. It couldn't get any better than that. We walked onto the sidewalk path and kept on moving toward Baseline road.
After walking for a while with Finn, the ambulatory dynamic gets a little weird; he passes from walking to mama, from mama to dad, from dad back to the ground, and the ground to either running, sitting, or back to mama. Each of these phases lasts anywhere from ten seconds to three or four minutes, and really sheds light on the adult idea of wanting to get from point A to point B in some sort of linear fashion. It's a great lesson in stopping to smell the roses. Or the oranges. Or the cactus. Or even the fresh cut grass while one rolls down a dewy hill.
During one of the "on the ground" phases, Finn decided to start crawling on his hands and knees. Okay, we thought, he's allowed to regress a little. We'd do the same thing if we could.
Well, after the hands and knees were well-established, he started going from sidewalk to asphalt. This was not an ideal situation. We'd pick him up and try to set him on his feet but lo, the patented young-child-rubber-legs phenomenon kicked in and again he was crawling on the ground.
Yet the next time, after crawling for a bit, he decided to go completely flat on the ground and put his forehead to the sidewalk, saying something that sounded like "food, food" and kissing the sidewalk. Odd, we thought.
For many blocks we played the hold-me, put-me-down, let-me-crawl, let-me-go-belly-down-and-kiss-the-sidewalk game. After about twenty minutes of this, we finally made it to the edge of the cul-de-sac where we live, and he ran around in some rocks for a bit - only to return again to the sidewalk. This time, he got down on his stomach and held his head just above the concrete. I got down hear him to see what all the buzz was about, and realized that he was looking directly at a very dark, very sharp shadow of his own hairline cast from the sodium-vapor lights above.
It had been his shadow the entire time; he'd been experimenting with it during our walk, trying to figure out where it came from, how to touch it, and how to make the darn thing go away. Realizing this, Ingrid and I started waving our arms and legs around like crazy people, making every kind of shadow puppet and going through a range of modern dances.
Finn, withdrew, backing up a few steps and looking very nervous.
Ah, we realized. The shadow is scaring him. That's why he wants it to go away, and maybe why he keeps kissing it - because he wants perhaps to make peace with it. We slowed down our movements, and tried to show him it was us - and him - casting the shadows.
We are pretty sure he at least kind of got the idea, because he stopped crawling around on he ground, kissing the sidewalk, and avoiding the weird dark thing that had been tailing him the entire time. Time will tell, I suppose.
