Inquiry into the celebration of Firsts, part 3

It's capitalism, says Grandma R. Firsts can be easily commodified. How does one make spectacle of 100 days? Unwieldy, too specific and too general at once. But Firsts are ongoing, ripe for stirring memories--cards, keepsakes.

Is nostalgia a byproduct of capitalism? Is that a ridiculous question?

inquiry into celebration of Firsts, part 2

It comes back to me: being in the poster and t-shirt store on 8th street. 1984. That poster everywhere of the baby with the spaghetti bowl on its head. Remember that? It was everywhere when I was a teenager--why? Why? I hated that poster. But then I have trouble with the awkward, the imperfect, the struggle. . . That ballet training, the yearning toward perfection and fear of failure overriding natural curiosity. The First? So. Then. I think maybe there is something to celebrating firsts. A need to celebrate the awkward, the misshapen, the mistake. Something in that, in the don’t watch me do this thing I don’t know how to do . . . Like all things about babies, they are both Present and Future. Everything they do contains a nugget of the future, all the other times this task or motion will be done without thought, just a part of life, part of the routine of life.
So, yes, one day she will eat. By herself.
Snap. Click. . . .

an inquiry into the celebration of firsts

We get out the camera, the new blue one with the Lyca lens that my folks gave us cause they weren’t getting enough, or the right kind, of pics of their granddaughter. I stand around, positioning her face in the viewfinder, as our babysitter (whose idea it was to begin with) begins to feed her some soupy rice cereal. Snap and click. Snap and click. Here she is chewing on the spoon. Blowing out when the spoon touches her mouth, the pasty substance smeared all over her face. We will say this was her first meal. Her first meal, her first bike ride, her first xmas. . . and why do e celebrate these firsts? The man who cut my hair tells me that in Korea they celebrate the hundredth day of a baby’s life. The first, after all, is usually awkward, confusing, ill-conceived or at best ungraceful . . . Why not celebrate the second the fourth, the seventh? Is it just the American love of the Superlative?