June in July

 After many twists and turns, literally, my wife and I got back to Chicago to visit our kids and our grandchild June.  She was five months old on July 17 and very different from when we saw her on our last visit to Chicago in April. 

On this trip, we parked the car in Joliet and took the Metra.  Coming into LaSalle Street station felt like old times like we were getting back to normal.  We took an Uber to Dean’s place.

Dean is working from home in a new condo in Pilsen.  He is among the first five owners.  We dropped our stuff off, admired his new digs, and Moe and June arrived to take us north.  Dean had to be on a Zoom call.  We were meeting Don, June’s Dad, at Arlington Racetrack.  He works near there.

It was a hot afternoon, but we grabbed a picnic table under a tree and there was a nice breeze.  We put a blanket on the ground for June, bought hot dogs and beers, and settled into an afternoon of watching the horses run.  Although we talk almost daily, we caught up on being together.  We passed June around.  She was having a good day.  Almost all her days are good.  And different.  She’s growing up at an amazing pace.

And of course, we bet on the horses.  In a typical year, I place bets on three horse races: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes.  When I bet on the triple crown, I read about the horses in the paper a few days in advance, think about them briefly, and make very small wagers.  I am not a gambler or a student of the sport, but sometimes I pick winners.  I find that to be great fun. 

While shooting the breeze we talked about how to pick horses.  Don likes to bet the jockeys.  I was reading the racing form trying to figure out the records of the horses, and he was looking at the jockeys’ ages and percentage of wins.  His theory is, especially in a short race, the skills of the jockeys mattered as much or maybe more than the speed of the horse.

My wife bets the horses’ names, with an eye on the color of the silks.  The last time Colleen was at Arlington, with a group of friends, she won big on an exacta using that method.  Winning big is relative, but she walked away with over a hundred bucks and a story she tells anyone who will listen.   She couldn’t wait to do it again.

Meanwhile, I stuck with the racing form, both the statistics and the short narrative about each horse.  I especially liked the narrative which gave me a short description of the horse’s performance in recent races, conditions the horse favored, quirks and patterns.  I walked through the gate knowing nothing about any horse or any jockey who raced that day and tried to learn it all during the time between races.  Probably not a formula for success.  But I was confident I could figure it out. 

We joked about how we made picks.  Don suggested we hold June face down above the racing form, let her drool, and bet the horse closest to the wet spot.  Good as any other scheme he figured. 

In one of the early races, there was an Irish horse at 8-1.  Bred and trained in Ireland and brought over to the states for the summer.  I’m Irish, and my wife is even more Irish.  June looks very Irish.  My wife pointed out the jockey had green silks. 

“I’m going to bet that horse,” I said. 

Don was running to the window making our bets and there were fifteen minutes or so left to get the bets down.  I turned to the racing form and read about my pick.  I’d learned to note the length of the race.  This race was relatively long.  The narrative writer said the Irish horse liked to break out front but faded from the lead in his last three races.  Bad quality in a long race.  Another horse, the favorite, had won its last three starts decisively.  I had second thoughts.

Don came around collecting money and writing down our bets.  I put a larger amount than normal on the favorite. 

“You’re not betting the Irish horse?”

“I don’t think this is the race for him.”

I’ll be damned if that Irish horse didn’t come from behind in the last eighth of a mile, whiz past the horse I put money on, and win.  Completely against the odds.  That’s what makes horse racing a gamble.

I did win later, on a long shot named Devil Eye.  I’ve been having a devil of a time with this right eye all summer, and it seemed appropriate.  I stopped reading the back story on the horses.  It’s hard to become an expert in a day.  Devil Eye led the entire trip and won going away.  Go figure.  In the end, my wife and I nearly broke even money-wise but finished way ahead after a wonderful day at the track with Don, Moe and June.

We all made our way back to Pilsen.  June slept in the car.  When we got back to Dean’s place the charcoal was going in a grill that had been in a box when we arrived that afternoon.  We dug into appetizers on the patio and began our first family celebration in Dean’s new place.  It got dark, the streetlights came on, and we stayed up late talking.  It was good to be together having a home-cooked meal.   During that evening I thought back to when we first had our parents to our new house in Ottawa.  I’ve traded places with my dad.

We stayed two nights and came home late the third day.  We went to dinner in Chinatown, which was packed, walked with Dean and his partner to a little Mexican joint on West 18^th  for breakfast, planted and mulched around Dean’s patio, and more.  It wore us out in a good way.

But the main attraction, aside from Dean’s new kitten, was June.  We see her almost daily on FaceTime but being with her continues to amaze me.  If I am declining as I approach 70 at the same rate June is developing on her way to her first birthday, I can’t be long for this world. 

Two months ago, June rolled over for the first time.  It was a struggle, and when she went from her back to her stomach, she couldn’t hold her head up very long.  With her face flat against the blanket, she soon became fussy, and couldn’t roll back over.  Her Grandma and I wanted to pick her up right away.  Moe and Don urged us to wait a bit.

“We want her to figure things out by herself.” 

She’s figuring things out all right.  Now when she rolls over, she goes into what amounts to an upward-facing dog and stays that way.  Her arms and neck are so much stronger now.  She can stay in that position a long time.  In the past week she’s gone beyond that and now presses her legs against the floor, sometimes just her feet, going into something of a baby plank.  (Yoga positions.)

In the past week in addition to turning in a slow spin on her belly, she’s begun to travel while on her stomach, but backwards.  Put something in front of her and she gets excited, works her legs and arms to get it, but goes the wrong way.  Once again, her parents are waiting for her to figure it out.  She works hard.

On the blanket at the track, June’s grandpa couldn’t resist bending her legs, putting her knees under her against the ground, and giving her a tiny push on the butt to show her how to propel herself forward.  She can’t yet do it herself. 

I’m fascinated by how June looks at me through her brand-new eyes.  She has no words of course, and until she does, we just guess as to what she sees and thinks. 

How do babies learn about the world and discover their part in it?

That question began to form immediately after her grandma and I climbed the stairs of June’s home, a Humboldt Park apartment, and held her the first time.  She was a week old.  Her eyes were deep blue and seemed to look right through me. I wasn’t prepared for her stare.  It was disarming.  June’s been staring me down ever since, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, but always so engaging. 

Turns out I’m not the only one obsessed with finding out the answer to these questions.  Her parents are too, and they’re sharing what they are learning.  

My daughter put me on to a Radiolab Deep Cuts podcast made in 2009, which is simply a conversation between two men, Jad Abumrad (JA), then a new father of a two-month-old baby boy, and Charles Fernyhough (CF), a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University.  Fernyhough wrote a book about what he learned about his own baby called A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind.  It’s about what’s happening in the minds of little babies when they are brand new.  The interviewer asked the author the kinds of questions I would have asked him.  Like this.

JA.   When I’m sitting here holding my baby and we’re staring at each other, what exactly is he seeing?

CF.   One difference that relates to the visual system is that the lenses of baby’s eyes are absolutely crystal clear, whereas our lenses, those of adults, they’ve become slightly yellowed and filter out some of the blue frequencies of the light we see. 

JA.   So, wait.  Paint the picture.  What would that be like for them?

CF.  This is my stab at imagining what this would be like for babies.  Imagine being in a Greek village in the summer.  At noon. 

JA.   Sun is directly overhead, and It’s one of those villages where…

CF.   Everything is white.  You know, the houses are all painted white.  You’re wearing sunglasses, and you suddenly take off those sunglasses.

JA.   It’s that bright?

CF.   Yeah.  I think light is a big – it’s probably the biggest shock to newborn babies.

JA.   It’s interesting to consider that such a blinding haze of whiteness might be how the world really is.  We just don’t see it as grownups because our eyes have changed.  Well, we did see that brightness when we were babies, but we can’t remember.  What about sound.  Do babies hear things differently?

CF.   Yeah, we think so.  We think they hear echoes.  I mean the echoes are actually always there, but our brains filter them out.

JA.   Whoa.

CF.   It takes some time for babies to do that.  I mean, the science is complicated, and I don’t think I can explain it quickly, but it has to do with the relative times of arrival sound makes on the two ears.  The brain basically has to learn to make the adjustment, but it can’t do it straight away.  So, we don’t actually know, but we guess that newborn babies hear things in a very echoey way.  And then after a while, they filter out the echoes and begin to hear like you and me.

JA.   Let’s go back to vision.  What about the stare?  My baby really stares at us, and we stare back.  It’s intense.  That I know for sure.

CF.   In the first couple of months, the visual system is controlled by an old region of the brain, the subcortical region.  The cortex is the more sophisticated new part, evolutionarily speaking.  In babies there’s a switch, a handoff between the original control system, the subcortical system, and the new cortical system that allows vision to grow and improve.  But as this happens, and it happens at about two months, there’s a kind of power struggle.  The subcortical region doesn’t want to let go.  So, the baby temporarily loses control of where he or she is looking.

JA.   Really?

CF.   Yep.  The scientists call this sticky fixation.  It’s where a baby will just keep staring at you, as if he or she can’t take their eyes off you.

JA.   Yes.  It’s happening now.  It’s wonderful.  You’re telling me this is a brain glitch?

CF.   Yeah.  I’m sorry.  It’s a very well-documented phenomenon.  I know its bad news for parents who think their babies are staring at them adoringly, but they don’t know where to look.  They can’t control where they look.  Basically, they don’t know how to look away.

JA.   Wow.  Depressing. 

CF.  Yeah, but this might be one of those cases where ignorance really is bliss because the truth is you have to project.  You have to make a leap of faith so that when your baby looks at you and you look back at your baby, you smile.  Because eventually, that will teach your baby how the world works.  Humans operate on relationships, which are feedback loops. So OK, at this moment in time for your baby the looks aren’t genuine and done by choice, but they will be soon. You want to return that gaze and make it positive.

 

June in July, at five months old, is way past involuntary stares and the echoey hearing.  She’s moved on.  As a tiny human being brand new to the world she is tuning into everything and everyone around her.  She is figuring things out at a dizzying pace.  She can grab both feet (Happy Baby) and put her toes in her mouth.  She can sit independently.  I expect her to crawl across the floor any day.  And she has a heartbreaker of a smile.  There’s a whole world out there for her to explore.  I want to watch her do it.  And I hope to be part of helping June learn how the world works.