Crooner Eddie

As I (Nonno, just arrived today for a short visit on my way to Italy) sit here listening to Eddie talk and sing himself to sleep, I suggest that he's going to be a crooner.  He is singing the ABC song, "The wheels on the bus go round and round," and other top hits.  His parents inform me that he is also a poet, quoting appropriate verses as the situation dictates.  On the way to Whole Foods he announces, "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig!" and on the way back he proclaims, "Home again, home again, jiggidy jig!"  When it rains, he commands, "Rain, rain, go away.  Come again another away.  Little Johnny wants to play."  In the park, when he saw kids playing, he intoned, "Boys and girls come out to play!"  Expanding his repertoire beyond nursery rhymes, when picking up his toy tiger he declaimed, "Tiger, tiger burning bright."

He has mastered tunes and memorized entire books.  In that he follows in the footsteps of his papa, who memorized "Are You My Mother?" when he was a pre-schooler and thus he could fool people by giving the impression that he could read.  Eddie fooled his father in a similar vein.  He, Eddie, loves to look at ads for books on the back cover of other book or in magazines.  I noticed this myself today, when I read one of the Kolya books to him (books we got for Kolya when he was a child starring him as the hero): Eddie pointed to the ads on the dust jacket, and I read the titles to him.  Well, when papa took him to the library recently, Eddie picked a book from the shelf and exclaimed, "The Pig Parade!"  Papa was amazed.  He had never seen the book and had never read it to Eddie.  He marvelled, "Whaaaat!  Can he read?"  It turned out that Eddie had seen the ad for the book when reading with mommy and she had read the title to him, and he remembered the cover.

Strangely enough one of the two Kolya books that grandma Subie sent to Eddie is titled "The Big Parade," and when nonno read the title, Eddie shouted, "The Pig Parade!"

Trains

Last week, there was an open house for the MIT Model Railroad Club, and I wanted to take Eddie. So I asked him "Do you want to go see some trains?"

"No," he said scornfully. Huh?! I guess he was thinking "I see trains all the time, Papa, get a grip!" He continued "Go library." (Pronounced "whybwerry.")

"But these are little trains!" I told him. Eddie seemed taken with this idea. "Little trains. Little trains," he said. But he still thought he'd rather go to the library.

Well, Papa wanted to see the trains, so that's where we went! We walked over to MIT and across its campus, a good long walk. On the campus, Eddie noticed a really big sculpture and pointed it out. I saw that we could go underneath and said "Do you want to go under it?" Eddie said "No." I thought he was just being knee-jerk negative, so I said "C'mon, let's go under!" But as we got close, Eddie said "No! This way!" and pointed around it. He really meant it—he didn't trust that sculpture.

As soon as we got through the door to the club room, Eddie said "Wow. Wow wow wow. Wow! Wow wow! Wow!" He was totally entranced by the trains. It wasn't a big room, and it was full of tracks with little buildings, people, trees, farms with animals, and so on around it, with six trains running around them. Maybe a dozen other people were there for the open house.

We walked all around the layout. For a while, Eddie sat in a corner watching the trains go around a big loop-de-loop where they change altitude. He was watching intensely, not smiling, when he suddenly announced "Eddie happy."

See? Sometimes Papa knows best.

There was also a big model of the Green building at MIT, a big rectangle of a building with windows in a big grid, and controls so that you could play Tetris with lights in the windows, reproducing a hack that MIT students did with the real-life Green building in the past. Eddie enjoyed pushing the buttons and making the lights move. He was not very good at Tetris, though (his favorite button was the one that makes the shape go straight down.)