This picture is not only worth a thousand words; it sucks them right out of my head.

The multicolored bulldozer in the foreground is, like the semi-cum-backhoe rig in the box, a Bruder Toy. It is also, plainly, a toy. I bought it for Will last summer, to play with on the beach. Will likes to plow it around the sandbox at Carl Schurz Park, and so do the other boys, most of them older if no taller. I thought that it might be nice for Will to have another vehicle to go with the “digger,” as he calls it — something to share, so that two could play. Now, if I were Will’s mother, I’d have done some research, and (possibly) discovered that the bulldozer comes from Bruder’s Roadmax range. Instead, I spent about ninety seconds glancing at Amazon pages before making a selection and breezing through checkout. You behold the result. Instead of a toy, a 1:16 scale model of a Mack truck and a JCB 4XC. The good news is that Megan says that Will is ready for the “more advanced” stuff.

Another nice thing is that, if we give the big rig to Will for his birthday, on New Year’s Day, he’ll be officially old enough to play with it safely. Almost every toy that I’ve seen in the past couple of years that isn’t intended for newborn infants carries the “3+” mark. (Lawyers!)

Still, it does look daunting. It’s obviously a lot more truck than I bargained for. It was somewhat, but not much more than twice the price of the bulldozer. Which made sense — it’s two trucks, after all. What I wasn’t factoring in was the great difference in prices at Amazon and at the toy shop in the East Village where I bought the bulldozer. At Amazon, the bulldozer is less than 30% as expensive as the Mack rig.

You may wonder what I’m doing with Will’s digger. It’s one of his toys that lives here. The big truck will stay uptown as well. (“Where are you going to put that?” Kathleen fairly wailed.) Megan says that, while Will would be happy to have it in his bedroom, there is no more “parking space” at his house. This is very true. Will is the very enthusiastic owner of a fleet of cars and trucks of all shapes and sizes that already has an air of serious Interstate commerce. He likes them big, and he likes them small,  and he likes them to make noise, although he’s happy to provide that part himself. The big trucks can sometimes be “heard” telling the little trucks that they’ll take care of them. 

Now he will have a truck that carries another truck.

***

For the second day in a row, I read a French novel for an hour in the afternoon. I am hoping to make a habit of it. I was certainly more fluent this afternoon than I was yesterday. I figure that I can spare an hour of reading in English. I read all day long — whenever I’m not writing or working round the house — and that goes a long way to explain what I flatter myself to consider my fluency in my native language. (Merely writing in English wouldn’t be very helpful.)

The difficulty isn’t in reading French (the tedium of looking things up in the dictionary, because I’m not quite sure what the author has in mind with such-and-such a phrase); it’s in scheduling the day. I’m not good at that at the best of times, and, lately, I’ve let myself go completely, doing just what I like and nothing else. I exaggerate, but it’s not wrong to say that I do most things when I want to do them, and not because it’s time to do them. I’m hoping that spending an hour reading in French will become, if not a habit, then something that I want to do — something unmixed with oughts. The more I read, the more fluent I’ll become, and the less dico hunting there will be.

The book that I’m reading is Patrick Deville’s Pura Vida: La vie et mort de William Walker. Walker was an American adventurer in Central America who was executed in Honduras in 1860. A great deal of the early narrative takes place in present-day Managua, and references abound to people and places that I’ve heard about from Fossil Darling, whose mother was a native. On page 29, there’s a reference to La Marseillaise, the French restaurant (run by a Swiss) where Fossil hosted a party for his extended family in the Nineties. It’s this topicality that is getting me through a book that might otherwise fail to appeal.

I’ll know that I’m fluent when I stop having embarrassing little moments like this afternoon’s with one of the chapter headings,  a remark by Bolivar: Celui qui sert une révolution laboure la mer. I had to check it out on Google, with the search “He who serves a revolution” “the sea.” Because I couldn’t really believe that laboure was to be taken literally as plows. The worst of it was that I’d seen the line before, and pondered the futility of revolutions that Bolivar learned the hard way. What was clever in English was incomprehensible in French, because I lack the metaphorical reach in the latter tongue. Nobody plows the sea actually. My blunder, my literal inelasticity, renders up close and personal the difficulty that many people have in reading in their own language. That’s the one and only time that I’ll allow myself that excuse.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 at 10:46 am.