landlegs

The child peeking out of his fur-trimmed hood is a different child, already, than Axel of three weeks ago. Paradoxically, he is both older and younger simultaneously. I try to imagine what he could possibly be thinking--in a strange land where nothing is familiar: snow? trolley-busses and tramways shucking down our street? a winding concrete staircase leading to a regal, over-heated apartment? People speak, but nothing makes sense. No friends, no trains, no Tuncer. No familiar destinations: the museum, the zoo, chinatown, the library. It's not surprising that one side-effect of so much unfamiliarity is whining.

But out of all this strangeness, a different, older Axel is emerging. On our first or second day here, Axel weaned himself. It was as if he forgot what to do; and after a bit, he told me he was done. Up to this point, nursing had been the gold-standard, nothing else could soothe a fractious Axel quite so effectively. Almost at the same time, he began to stay dry through naps and the night. I'm probably jinxing myself, but I think we may not need to use diapers when we return.

In ways more and less obvious, though, Axel has grown. One day at the park, we'd been here perhaps two days, Axel decided he wanted to go to another park. He confidently took off, out of the playground, up the snowy hill, one hundred, two hundred yards away from where I stood (pointing in the opposite direction towards the park's location). He didn't care, didn't stop, didn't come back--a different Axel than the one from home.

Axel's acclimation here manifests as narration: he states what will happen next. Thus, as I put the key into the lock (the second of four), he tells me: "Mama use these keys. I take off my shoes." Once the shoes are off and the key in the last lock, I hear: "I take off my gloves. I take off my coat. I put my coat in elegator" ("elevator," or what he calls the wardrobe). Before Mychal got here, Axel prepared for his arrival by pre-telling me everything he was going to tell daddy when he got here. (I tell daddy they didn't have a firetruck. They had ambulance.) He stocked up on observations to show Mychal, too: the skylight at the top of our building's stairwell, the brush stacks which he'd watched workers create with chain-saws, the movie playing in the kids' playroom in the restaurant, the merry-go-round in the market playground. There were many--I can hardly remember them all. But they keep popping up, now that Mychal has arrived and Axel can download his stored experiences.

And when things are familiar, time stops for him. Twice we have passed street musicians, whose music stops Axel in his tracks. He listens and watches, tuning the rest of the world out. A half an hour goes by; I ask him several times if he's ready to go and the answer, even as the sun goes down and the wind whisks dinnertime away, is always a firm no.