other peoples kids

The wife has been urging me to attend one of her Parent Participation classes and this week I acquiesced.

It was held in one of those temporary trailers, about 10 yards from my old kindergarten classroom, where I'd made a gingerbread house that my dog dragged off the sideboard and demolished.

Places fixed in memory are disorienting to revisit decades later.
The playground was tiny, eroded to a nub by time and parking lots for cars and classrooms. The gray steel pipe altars of my youth had morphed into colorful vinyl structures without a single a hard edge. The original buildings looked like they hadn't been painted since my stint learning the alphabet.

Babies have magnetic fields that call to each other and collect stray attention like iron filings, which is a mixed bag for an observer like me. The wife seizes these opportunities to socialize and compare childrearing notes, my interest is entirely based on how the alien baby compares to Fuss.

The class was one of these street encounters writ large, a double handful of infants instead of one or two. The group environment threw his numerous advantages over the proletariat into stark relief.

The other babies lay dormant on the rug while Fuss scrambled around stealing their toys and scaling their parents. Aside from one other bruiser, a hunk named Bruce with cheeks like a sumo wrestler, Fuss dwarfed the field. The rest were comparatively scrawny & wizened, like a demographic sample from a refugee camp. Even compensating for the glamour cast by your own child, Fuss shone out like a chunk of gold in a riverbed.

This was some comfort during 'sharing time' when the assembly surged forward bearing tales of their child's prodigious appetites for sleep, straining heroically to raise the bar of slumber beyond the reach of their cohorts.

By this measure, if no other, Fuss lagged far behind his contemporaries.