Category Archives: Life

Just to clarify

I’m not that Damon Wood.

It’s hilarious and ironic though. Imagine my bemusement: having had this fantasy for years that one day I’d be called (by, I don’t know, whoever makes those calls) to play in James Brown’s band… and then discovering one day that James Brown’s band did, in fact, fill that slot toward the end with some other blond white-boy guitarist named Damon Wood.

Would it… drive you nuts? Make you quietly giggle with the delusional certainty that the universe has played a very small and personal prank on you? Does the universe use The Google? Or does it just punish you for running one too many vanity searches?

What are the odds? Apparently, 100%.

Oh well. At least Prince* is still around… and I’ll bet he’s desperate for my help! Anyway, I’ve been meaning to clear that up for a while. I’m sure the music world will breathe a huge collective sigh of relief.

So, Damon: right on, bro! I mean, the other Damon.

*EDIT 2016: Ugh, my heroes are checking out left and right.

Okay, maybe “berry” wasn’t his very first word.

Okay, I think I’ll be qualifying Enzo’s utterace of berry as his first noun, as opposed to his first word, and maybe even only first one that I’ve heard… or noticed.

Being the wiggler that he is, Enzo requires a certain amount of holding and wants to see whatever it is I’m doing at the moment, especially when I’m cooking. He loves this. And I get the sense that he does this at his mom’s house too, because last week he started reaching out toward the stove and whispering: hot. And then pulling back, as if he’s been instructed to stay away from the stove because it’s hot.

So, at the very least Enzo has been saying hot for some time prior to the berry episode.

Driving: Smoking Section songs

Funny. I drove to work today, and as I usually do I picked up a pair of passengers at the BART station to carpool with.

As any of you who do the Casual Carpool thing probably know, there aren’t really any rules about what to play on the car stereo during the ride, though the default seems to be NPR. These days I can’t stand NPR, so when I’m by myself I listen to KPFA; but when I have passengers on their way to work, I philosophically feel that it’s not my job or right to fill their heads up with news or opinion of any stripe. (I wish all drivers felt this way. Especially the ones who listen to AM talk radio. Yikes.) So I like to play music instead. Let them get mad at the news on their own time. I’d rather help them start their day neutrally and peacefully with some good music.

(It’s obvious that I’m over-thinking this. I think I’m turning into Kramer from Seinfeld. If I’m not careful I’ll start cooking up ways to provide my passengers with hot espresso and Le Monde.)

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Enzo’s First Word

I think we may have a winner. If you don’t count the word “Hi,” which he uses to greet everyone and everything all the time, I believe Enzo’s first recognizable noun, used correctly and in context, is berry.

I’ve been giving Enzo sliced strawberries in the morning lately, and he enthusiastically devours every bite. He notices now when I take the container out of the fridge, and gets very excited about this. At the same time, some of his most-used phonemes lately have been in the “bree? bui? ba? maiee?” range (as Jacki so precisely noted), which gets him close. But this morning, it all came together: after I placed his strawberry breakfast on his high-chair tray, he picked up a slice and held it up to me, and announced: Beyee?

Actually, Uncle Drew was the first to make this call, last night at dinner. At the time, I sort of passed it off as a coincidental syllable (there were strawberries on the table, and Enzo was very chatty at the time). I should know better, seeing as how E and Drew have their special thing. But this morning’s sample had a nice, lab-conditional clarity about it.

Berry!