Sidebar (And 2 New Teeth for Olie)

Finally took a week of badly needed vacation time. The week off was frontloaded with heavy social activity centered around the 4th of July party noted earlier, but the pace slowed somewhat thereafter allowing for time to read and reflect. I’m embarrassed to reveal that it had been a long time since I had read fiction. A book titled “Reading Lolita in Tehran” caught my eye given Bush’s obsession with casting Iran as one axis of his evil triumvirate. A critical theme in the book revolves around women losing their freedoms during the 1980’s as the new conservative regime in Iran clamps down on what they view as western (primarily American) influence and decadence.

The narrator is a female literature professor teaching English fiction classics at the University of Tehran. After earning her doctorate in America, she elected to return to her family and her homeland. She spends the next 18 years in Tehran, and while the shifting sands are not lost on her, like many she avoids acting until much too late. Suddenly, everyday freedoms are gone and she faces a world where her grandmother had far greater intellectual and outright freedoms than does she. It’s a fascinating read, contrasting markedly and substantively with our own leftist shift in the U.S. during the 1960’s and also interesting for the insights it offers into the confusing mix of pro- and anti-American sentiment eminating from that region even today.

Back to Olie…he’s got two more teeth coming in now. The top two have now appeared giving him a rabbit-like quality. I'm here to tell you that this kid just gets cuter with each passing day. Gerber Baby, he’s been called. We’re about 1-2 weeks from him busting out all over the place (here comes the childproofing). He’s so ancy now, can’t stay still, constantly rolling every which way, but still no crawling yet. And he’s inherited that bruising, Herculean strength. He may turn out to be the type that skips crawling and goes straight to walking upright.

The end of the vacation played out poorly as Olie contracted the California plague and consequently we were visited by the Hyde side of our young son. Most unpleasant were those few days (for us and him), though we still managed to log a few hours at the beach between trips to the hospital and overall sleeplessness. Still, even within the unpleasantries, there managed to be a few tender moments. Seriously weakened by the virus and the voluminous fluid in his chest, he became inconsolable for long stretches, but eventually with exhaustion could be comforted via aggressive cuddling from dear old dad. He primarily seeks consolation from either his mother or his thumb, but something about a cuddle from dad freed him that day, if only briefly, from his general state of misery.