04 January 2007
Baby Book
As an unemployed man, I am stunned to find that I have no time to spare.
It is counter-intuitive, having had the holidays off and more than a week to go before I am supposed to start something else. There is some vague anxiety about that, as there always is in taking up a new enterprise, but I'm sure it will be fine.
Just as it will be with my colleagues in the intelligence business. November's electoral tidings have wrought a massive change in the landscape. The Democrats are coming in today after their dozen years in the wilderness. They are feisty, and have abandoned the inclusive rhetoric of the campaign, just as the Republican Revolution cut the Democrats out when their gaily-painted carnival wagons arrived.
There will be no discussion or amendment of proposed legislation in Speaker Pelosi's grand “100 Hours” of legislative Blitzkrieg. That also changes the cast of characters who will have to deal with their new Congressional overseers, who will perforce be more intrusive and less inclined to roll over on the course of doing business in the Global War in which we are mired.
The new line-up of personalities to greet this infant year is changing as we watch. The additional news that Ambassador Negroponte is moving on has set all the old Spooks a-twitter.
The press is claiming that the Ambassador is going to accept the position of Deputy Secretary of State, a position that has been vacant for six months. It would appear to be a demotion, since the Deputy is hardly a Cabinet-rank officer, and at best a lateral move. But I suspect that as a career diplomat, the Ambassador found that the endless commitment if the Intelligence Community to counting the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin was tiresome.
It takes a career intelligence officer to have any interest in that sort of arcane art. It will be interesting to see who would be interested in taking on a job that is still in formulation, with a brief amount of time to make an impact, and the loss of the Administration's majority in the Congress.
With all the negatives, solid citizens are stepping up to many of these jobs. New Secretary of Defense Bob Gates is a former Director of Central Intelligence. The General who was snubbed and discarded by Mr. Rumsfeld has been picked to replace the Pentagon's senior intelligence official, a stunning repudiation of the past. The General has close relations with Mike Hayden, who is now director of CIA.
The new DNI will have to pick a deputy, and that decision must wait until the nominee is announced, but we know he is out there, or the Ambassador would not have announced his departure.
There is a new Budget Staff director coming to the House Intelligence Committee, and she is coming from the Office of the DNI. It makes the mind reel with possibilities.
It makes me a little breathless, viewing from the fourth floor at Big Pink. Not having health benefits, I am naturally careful about what I do and where I go. A major terror attack here in Washington would be inconvenient at the moment.
With the prospect of gainful employment staring me in the face, I am driving myself hard to finish some projects that I would not have gotten to if I was going back to work with everyone else, bleary and holidayed out. I am digitalizing things. The scanner has been fairly humming. There is the book I was compiling on my Great-grandfather's trip to the Continent in 1903.
There is the book about Big Pink that I am doing a story-board on; there are two more in progress, one of which was that remarkable diplomatic trip to Burma and North Korea that needs to be formatted and integrated, once the pictures are scanned.
And then there is the baby book.
You could consider it the ultimate act of vanity, scanning the pictures that my Mom so laboriously pasted into the black leather album that is now cracking with age. I am the subject of all the photos and notes, at least until the point when my brother, and much later my sister begin to appear. The small tyke in the pictures is no one I know, and there is only a vague and swaddled recollection of the events that surround these strange images.
The book is actually about my Mother, bless her, and her organizational skills in dealing with her great change of life.
I arrive in these pictures as a blob of protoplasm, carefully staged in various locals. There is a meticulous list of events and statistics; seven-pounds-ten-ounces coming home from Detroit General Hospital; slept twelve hours at night at twelve weeks; turned over “at will” at four-and-a-half months; said “NaNa” and “DaDa” at seven months and apparently has not shut up since.
Later shots feature the young me dressed as a Halloween clown, and a cowboy, and the obligatory nude shot, on the training seat on the toilet.
Having gone through it all myself as a parent, and with the chaos of two little boys jammed into dozens of albums and ancient videotapes, it is apparent that technology is defeating history. The tapes are growing unusable. Some are on Beta format, and others require adaptors to fit in VHS machines that are no longer produced. Soon they will be plastic waste. The pictures may last, but now lack context.
That makes the work that Mom did that much more extraordinary. Her notes are typed neatly, the columns well-aligned, considering the fragile onion-skin paper was in and out of the typewriter dozens of time. The captions on the pictures are clinically precise. The last statistics are dated in August of 1968, when the baby was 17 years old.
The most interesting things about the baby book is not the baby. It is the parents, the time-travelers who appear in the background in their cloth coats in front of the little houses with the small trees. The group shots with the neighbors are the best, all of them propping up the little people that we know now as the Baby Boomers.
Mom and Dad appear to be a confident pair, though painfully young. Dad has jet-black hair, and Mom is thin and elegant. They look optimistic.
Considering what happened in the wide world since, and that we are all still alive, I guess they were right.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com