On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (5 page)

Like all dump trucks, rare species in the city, this one passed us all too quickly. We proceeded along, looking down toward our feet. I became increasingly aware of the accoutrements of the street that beckon suggestively to someone with eyes two and a half feet off the ground. Tree guards, impotent iron fencing or enclosures which surround a tree pit, are not only of interest to
dogs, familiar with their odorous messages, but also to the child whose hand can run smoothly along the railing. Mushroom-hatted fire hydrants are silent sentries at child height. The urban child is, unfortunately, trash height on garbage day; my son initiated
blech
as a spontaneous commentary before I got a chance to express it myself. The furniture of the street—the appointments of the sidewalk—is scattered hither and thither and coordinated by no master architect. It is visual cacophony. Over time, this furniture proliferates, “whelp(ing) whole litters of new objects,” as one landscape architect bemoaned. Where one newspaper box beckoned, three more have sprung up; light poles are scooted aside for traffic-light and sign poles. These keep company with the tree guards and fireplugs, and also mailboxes, bicycle holders, bollards, pots. Our block, well whelped, even has benches—and a telephone booth, now an ancient relic in the city.
³

It was none of these items that my son found on our walk, though. He approached a pipe extending from a building’s outer wall, and he patted it on (what appeared to be) its head.

Its two heads, actually. A protuberant two-headed hydra, the pipe was gloriously red and capped at the end. A short chain dangled from its belly. My son’s new pet was a standpipe.

I had seen standpipes before, of course. You have seen them. We
see
them. They are everywhere, growing off of sides of buildings and sprouting from the sidewalk on short stalks. They are red or green or yellow or proudly shiny brass. What I had never done was look at them.

I can now tell you that there are five standpipes on our block, as we have five tall buildings on our street, and a standpipe is required in New York City for any building above six stories tall. Should there be a fire, the pipe provides a backup high-pressure stream for firemen’s hoses. Along the city streets there are dozens of varieties of standpipes gargoyled on buildings or lying flush along their walls. This overlooked bit of outdoor plumbing is only used in an emergency: it runs into the building and is tied into the building’s water supply. In an apartment building’s stairwell you may see the pipes running to and from a rooftop water supply: the actual upstanding pipes.

 • • • 

As we moved away from the standpipes, after much petting and admiring of its component parts, my son turned and waved,
Buh-bye!
To him, the standpipe was as much a fellow creature as the bipedal primates peering down at him. His understanding of others was limited, and inculcating him with the rituals of wishing farewell was the beginning of getting him to acknowledge others. That “others” included standpipes now was fine by me. He greets and asks after the health of his trains; he tells his stuffed bunny that it “won’t hurt” when he listens to the bunny’s heart with a stethoscope; he kissed and bandaged our bedroom wall when he knocked into it with his head. Someday my son will need to learn about the organization of the actual social world. He will attend preschool, where the mandate is mostly “socialization,” allowing kids to leave their independent satellites and start figuring out other people—and distinguishing people from standpipes, stuffed bunnies, walls, or trains. Someday he will need to learn about what built the city in which he lives, about who governs it now; about the people living in his neighborhood and the people living in other neighborhoods. He will learn about people who
want things from him, or who will do things for him, or with whom he will compete or cooperate.

Someday, he will appreciate others’ perspectives, have an idea of their histories, their motivations, their choices, their moods, their own childhoods learning these kinds of things. He will be sympathetic. He will be kind and, we hope, polite.

But not yet.

He is quietly but plainly rude. He gapes. He points with abandon. His behavior on the street is baldly impudent. He stares fixedly, penetratingly, at people as they approach, as they sit near us, sometimes even as they smile at him. He pivots fully around on his toes in order to stare at passersby. The infirm, elderly, and decrepit already register with him as
unusual,
and he stares even more at them. Walking down the street with him recently he extrapolated from our talking about the various colors of the parked cars to suddenly say “White! White!” while indicating the three (yes, white) people innocently going about their business near us.

On this day, a profoundly limping man, destitute and dressed too warmly for the weather, was clearing a path ahead of us with his presence. He was gesticulating and making exclamatory pronouncements to himself. He lurched around, the picture of menacing. Other people on the sidewalk were not simply not looking; they actively engaged themselves in other activities—a sudden phone call, a fleet-footed maneuver to step into the street—that preempted any possibility of looking. I swallowed my urge to abruptly change our path.

Instead, I peeked down at my son. He held his lips tightly closed, curved around his teeth. He slowed and grasped my fingers tightly in his fist as the man approached us. This lurching, menacing man stopped in front of us and stared at my son, taking him for an audience. My son was silent and attentive. It read as a critique. After a beat, the man transformed: he smiled at him. In
front of my son, he was unable to keep up his normal routine of an outsider among adults.

And I learned a new way of dealing with crazy-looking strangers on the street.

On a typical walk with a toddler, every person must be stopped for and stared at. But my son did not discriminate against nonhumans. Each dog deserved giggled commentary and a proffered hand for sniffing; pigeons were to be run after; squirrels, to be bemused by their magic disappearing acts on tree trunks. Nor did my son discriminate against nonanimals. Indeed, he treated social encounters as if they were with inanimate objects, and he treated inanimate objects, like the standpipes, as though they were social players. His attention was only dislodged from the departing limping man by the sudden emergence of another man out of a building’s side entrance. He was an employee of the building, dressed in overalls and lugging a trash bag behind him. He swung the bag summarily ahead of him; it plopped unprettily by the curb. The man then reached forward and placed a single shoe on the bag before retreating inside. We were agog. At least, my son was.

“Shoe!” My son pointed. This was not one of his first few dozen words, most of which had to do with family, animals, and food, but it was one of the few words in regular rotation in his speech.

I nodded. “Shoe.”

He gave me a look. I recognized the look: the unhappy-pig face from a children’s book by Richard Scarry we often read together. This particular unhappy pig was occasioned by a catastrophic pile-up
of cars and trucks, many leaking tomatoes, eggs, mustard, or other messy truckloads, and all driven by clothed animals. One pig truck driver, in particular, turned upside-down by the crash, was making a face that my son found satisfying to mimic: the unhappy-pig face, we called it. At this point in his development, before speaking regularly, my son was wildly expressive nonverbally. It seemed he employed every muscle in his face to make commentaries and convey emotions. He used his whole body to gesture: extravagant sweeps of his hands, shoulder-shrugs and head-tilts, at once comic and dramatic. All this nonverbal communication was infectious, and I reproduced and exaggerated his gestures and faces—which in turn caused him to mirror and riff off of me.

I knew I did not have long before words, enablers of thoughts but also stealers of idiosyncrasies, muted his theatricality. And so our family had together created a fluid vocabulary of expressions, facial and bodily, that could be applied to a new situation. The unhappy-pig face represented something sad, forlorn—but also a little bit funny. Just as parents do with their children’s early words, I created meaning out of his expressions. An infant saying “Mama” is interpreted as saying the more complete thought,
I want Mama,
or
Where is Mama?
or
I need Mama right now!
The child is communicative, but not fully versed in how to use language, so we interpret her utterance in a way appropriate to the context. I saw my son use the unhappy-pig face in sad-but-silly contexts, and so that is the meaning I gave to his use of it.

But wait. It was a shoe. Was my son really saying that the shoe was sad? That its situation was melancholy? Well, it
was
in a bad way: without a mate, all alone now, the shoe was being tossed. It had lost its laces and was quite smushed. It was a rather unhappy pig.

I was seeing a glimmer of animism in my son, the attribution of life to the inanimate. Psychologists describe a child speaking about the “happiness” of a flower or the “pain” of a broken chair—or
noting the sadness of a single shoe on the trash pile, to say nothing of patting a standpipe gently on its head—as making
animistic errors
. Jean Piaget brought the concept to broader attention when he published his studies of his own children’s language. In addition to observing his children, noting their utterances, he also asked them pointed questions about their knowledge of the world and recorded their answers. One of his daughters proclaimed to him, in her early years, that “the sky’s a man who goes up in a balloon and makes the clouds and everything.” Another explained to him that “the sun goes to bed because it’s sad” and that boats pulled in from a lake at night are “asleep.” Piaget was hooked. For years, he interviewed children, younger and older, about their knowledge of the world. He found them highly animistic. The moon and the wind are plainly
alive,
these children claimed—because “they move”; a fire is alive “because it crackles.” A two-year-old brought a toy car to the window with him for it to “see the snow”; another claimed a car “knows” where it goes because “it feels it isn’t in the same place”; that an unraveling string turns and twists “because it wants to.”

Piaget thought of animism as indication of the child’s cognitive immaturity and poor biological understanding. More recent research has belied this claim, showing very clearly that children can distinguish between animate and inanimate things from an early age. Indeed, Piaget himself saw some early understanding brewing: children regularly attribute vitality to the sun, for instance, because it travels through the day, but they would rarely claim that the sun could feel or be hurt by a pinprick.

So what are children thinking about the sun, or the boats, or the shoe? In my mind, animism results from making a perfectly reasonable inference about a new, incompletely understood object: it might be or act just like the things the child knows about already. The concepts and words one has learned are stretched to see if they fit around this new thing. The newly minted language-user
is playing with the applicability of new words. In some ways, quiescent boats
are
asleep; the trash-top shoe is forlorn-
looking,
if not itself feeling that way. There is a richness in the child’s analogies that we lose when we learn to be obsessed with “appropriate” word use. It is a sign of smallness of mind to think of this appreciation for the shoe’s situation or the blooming flower’s emotion as an error.

While much is made, in scholastic circles, of how to develop a child’s moral understanding, I sense that this built-in animistic tendency gives children a sensitivity that adults cannot teach. The child might, upon collecting a flower, collect several others to keep it “company”; or she might adjust a stone’s position on a path to give it different views to gaze at; or feel obliged to put a stone back where it was found, so that it should not “suffer from having been moved.” Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive. I myself felt I was losing the sensitivity to broken chairs left out on the street that I once had. When I was a younger adult, I insisted on adopting these chairs, taking them in, mending the weave on their broken seats or the fractured leg. I’d give them a fresh paint and introduce them to the rather large population of chairs already living at my house. Soon, though I had no couch for guests to loiter on, I could host a Thanksgiving dinner for twenty on mismatched chairs. I now pass them by. Maybe my son will renew our collection.