Binoculars

Elizabeth was born cockeyed. No disrespect intended to her state of mind. She has a common vision defect which causes her left eye to wander occasionally outward.

It's a pretty subtle thing, and I never even noticed it. Pam did, though, and when we went to the pediatric opthamologist, he just said, "Oh yeah."

The condition is called strabismus. Its common name is "lazy eye," but according to Wikipedia, "Other names include 'squint,' 'crossed eye,' 'google eye,' 'boss eye', 'cock eye', 'wonk eye', 'cod eye,' 'derby eye,' 'waz eye,' and 'wok eye.'

Nobody wants to hear any of those from the other kids on the first day of school, but the real reason for getting strabismus treated is that it impairs depth perception, which leads to clumsiness and lack of confidence. Worse yet, the brain may begin ignoring signals from the wayward eye entirely, effectively leaving it blind.

Under doctor's orders, we tried patches and then drops as a means of blanking out or fuzzing up the good eye and forcing E's brain to exercise the muscles around the troublesome one. None of that worked, so last week we bit our lips and took our tiny one to the hospital for surgery. The doctor had explained he needed to loosen the muscles on the outsides of both eyes to make it easier for the brain to align them.

I drew the short straw and went into the operating room to be with E until she was knocked out. We were both cool until the anesthetist put the mask over her face and she began to struggle and cry. My job was to comfort and restrain her for the seconds it took for her to go to sleep.

Those were some of the hardest moments of my life. She was so small and so scared, these people were strangers, and she trusted me. When her eyes finally closed and she relaxed onto the table, I choked out an incoherent "Do your best" to the masked marvels who were already going to work and hurried from the room feeling like I'd let everybody down.

The whole thing only took 45 minutes. The doctor told us it went perfectly, which was good to know because her eyes were shockingly bloodshot and she was now a bit cross-eyed. In the post-op exam a couple of days later, the doc said this was exactly as it should be. The loosened muscles will grow stronger in the weeks ahead and pull both eyes back to center.

He also said something else. "My team does 20 of these procedures a day, and they were really impressed with the way you and Elizabeth handled yourselves in the operating room. You really made an impression on them."

I am proud of us both. Even better, as you can see above, she's still smiling at me.

Bottomless Grief

Walking my cousin Judy around lower Manhattan Sunday morning, we found ourselves close to the 911 Memorial. You used to have to reserve a time slot for a visit weeks in advance online, but now your chances are pretty good of getting a ticket on the spot. Judy lives in Rhode Island and hadn't seen it yet, so we got on the short line and went in with her.

For all the agita that marked the process of deciding what should be done at the site, the memorial now seems inevitable, as if this had been the only way the fall of the towers and all it meant could have been commemorated, though of course there were certainly other possibilities that could have turned out just as well or maybe better. This is the one that was chosen and built, and the one visitors now include among highlights of their time in New York.

The picture above shows what used to be the footprint of the North Tower. It's now a square pit with water cascading from its rim into a pool far below, then flowing into a second smaller square chasm whose depths can't be seen from ground level. There's an identical downward fountain on the South Tower footprint.

The designers certainly must have had some specific intentions for what visitors would think and feel as they stand around the edges and watch the water fall and flow into the darkness. But in a memorial as vast as this one, I expect the most lasting impressions are random and personal.

It was windy on Sunday, and strong gusts played hard across the face of the cascades, turning their vertical streams into rhythmic horizontal waves of spume that sent clouds of fine white spray over viewers on the downwind side. As John Lennon is supposed to have said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

Pam noticed that if you reach down below the stone barrier where the names of the dead are inscribed, you can put your fingers into the water before it begins its descent. "Touch it," she said to Judy. "It feels like you're touching the movement of the universe."

Safety in Numbers

I'm used to being asked by friends and relatives if I feel safe. I live in New York City, though not for much longer. I'm moving to Puerto Vallarta on Mexico's Pacific coast.

People who don't live in New York tend to think it's a nice place to visit but they wouldn't want to live there, even though annual reports on crime statistics for decades have ranked New York among the safer cities in the country.

And even fellow New Yorkers look askance when I tell them about our plans for moving to Mexico, where drug wars and kidnaping seem to be the leading industries if you go by what you read in the news. They ask if we have any concerns about security, though what they're really asking is what can we be thinking.

But what I've noticed about the most murderous criminal outbursts in my own country is that they don't happen on the darkened streets of New York or any of the other biggest cities.

They happen on quiet college campuses in Oakland or in Blacksburg, VA. On a military base in Texas. In a high school in a predominantly white Colorado exurb.

There may have been a time when such locations would have seemed remote from the alienation, poverty and social disfunction that used to seem like the root causes of violence. But that's not how I look at them now. I see them as insular, culturally monochromatic places where there is enormous pressure to fit in and measure up.

I think you're less likely to find yourself ducking for cover to avoid becoming a victim of random mayhem in a place where oddness, ugliness, incapacity and failure are taken for granted as readily as their more comely opposites.

A Tyrant Is a Person In My Neighborhood

This shameful address is about a half block from the building where I live on E. 56th Street. Walking past it you'd think it was a derelict waiting for a wrecking ball. The street level windows are either blacked or covered in chipped reflector sheets. I've never seen anybody go in or out.

On the dark strip above the blank facade, it says "Republic of Zimbabwe" in letters so faded and worn that it looks like the real sign was taken down years ago and all that's left is the outline of the letters. All in all, it's just the sort of place where you'd expect to find the consulate of a government that has to wear a bag over its head when it goes abroad.

The "Republic" of Zimbabwe is one of the sad places in our world where an entire people is held hostage by its so-called government, a corrupt and barbaric entity consisting of the so-called president, Robert Mugabe, and his loathsome clique of military, police, and their favored private sector cronies, all feeding greedily on the resources of the land and its miserable occupants.

The world doesn't pay much attention because the regime does its brutal best to strangle news about what really goes on there. Among the tools it uses is a national law that gives authorities the right to control and suppress the few news organizations that manage to operate in Zimbabwe, both domestic and foreign.

Rather than accept the terms of the statute, AP decided many years ago to close its bureau in Harare and cover the country with a combination of courageous local freelancers and listening posts in neighboring countries. That hasn't stopped the regime from hounding those journalists, especially at election time, with home invasions, detentions, searches, brutal interrogations and threats of worse.

There are certainly blacker holes on the planet. The Mugabe evils are routine and familiar, made more so for me by this closed fist of a building that I often pass on the way to enjoy the flowers in Central Park. I was doing exactly that earlier this month when I encountered these people, the first sign of life I've ever seen around the place.

They were protesting the arrest, detention and torture of 45 people in February for the crime of watching videos of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. In places like Zimbabwe, information is sedition.

I snapped my picture and went on about my business feeling inadequate. Lines from the James Russell Lowell poem "Freedom" came back to me from school days:

True Freedom is to share

All the chains our brothers wear,

And, with heart and hand, to be

Earnest to make others free.

Retail Recreation

This stately madhouse is the lobby of what used to be the Williamsburg Savings Bank in Brooklyn, at one time the borough's tallest building, though it's in Boerum Hill, not Williamsburg.

The people who commissioned those lofty arches and gilded mosaics certainly never foresaw that one day the space would be harboring a flea market every weekend, but they probably should have. The urge to go shopping strikes me as the biggest single explanation for human aggregations larger than clan-size, and any space large enough to accommodate a market is eventually destined to become one.

It Science is still trying to pin down what distinguishes us from the other beasts, maybe they should consider the will to haggle and trade as uniquely human traits, although it's an astonishing world and I wouldn't be surprised if there are other primates or maybe even some obscure tree frogs or wasps who discovered the joy of buying and selling before we did.

Call it recreation, call it therapy, call it wealth creation, call it a way of life, it's what we do. In a big city, most of your street level surroundings and the visible comings and goings concern facilitation, pursuit and execution of retail purchases. Love is very nice, but it doesn't make the world go 'round. It's the urge to acquire more stuff that keeps things moving.

I was first struck by how urgent and primal the shopping instinct is many years ago when I had to organize a small editors' conference in Sumter, SC. I was told the agenda shouldn't be so tight that it couldn't accommodate some free time for retail therapy.

Sumter was tiny, and the only place to go for that was a shabby strip mall at the edge of town, anchored by a grocery store. But people packed a couple of shuttle vans for the chance to browse the fabrics and notions, greeting cards, pet supplies and hardware that were about all you could buy there. They returned only mildly disappointed, which told me they weren't expecting much to begin with but just needed to do it.

When you're younger, it's about the stuff. You imagine when you've bought it, you and your life will be transformed in some way. Later you realize that this isn't true, but it's too late, you can't quit.

Paul McCartney sang it best: 'Buy, buy' says the sign in the shop window. 'Why, why' says the junk in the yard.

That's from "Junk" on his debut solo album "McCartney." If I ever see it at a flea market, I'm gonna buy it.

Death Porn

The International Center of Photography is exhibiting its Depression era Weegee collection again, surely the largest one-man aggregation anywhere of gabardine-clad dead guys with shiny shoes and blood running from their nostrils.

Why do I keep going back to look at this ugly stuff?

The text blocks on the wall suggest a number of high-minded reasons for appreciating Weegee's body of work, or vice versa if you prefer. He pioneered crime photography, documented a side of life few people witnessed for themselves, produced images in a style as direct and brutal as their subject matter. All true enough, I suppose, but not the real draw.

As a former newsroom manager, I do take my hat off to Weegee for being so accomplished in the skills that make for outstanding news photography, the ones that have nothing to do with working a camera. The key to making consistently great news photos is getting to the right place at the right time, which takes an unusual combination of instinct, guile, grit and luck.

Weegee lived in a squalid little room across the street from the police lockup where high profile perps were taken, and he monitored a police radio more or less full time so he sometimes reached murder scenes even before the cops arrived. Some of the photos in the exhibition show him posing with evidence, and the captions suggested he became such a fixture around the chalk outlines and bloodstains that he often helped officers look for clues.

Leaving the subject matter aside, nobody could deny the passion Weegee brought to his work. He seems not to have had an awful lot of competition for the kind of pictures he became known for, but he was driven nonetheless. I saw a lot of news photographers on the job in my working life, and the best of them were predators when it came to chasing the magic moment, though none I knew were as single-minded as Weegie.

But I don't think any of the above explains why Weegee's pictures still draw crowds. I think people come for the same reason they slow down to look at traffic accidents. Nobody any longer knows or cares who these toes-up people were, and the ICP curators don't even bother to explain why they might have gotten whacked.

Doesn't matter. The photos are as crisp and sharp as they'd be if the victims had been gunned down yesterday, and all you need to know to enjoy looking at them is that they used to be real live people and they aren't you.

Toddlerness

Pam and I are raising this granddaughter, who's now closing in fast on her second birthday. That makes us full time inhabitants of interlocking corporate toy, book and multimedia universes presided over by avatars named Elmo, Barney, Raffi, Biscuit the Dog, Bunny-as-in-Pat-the-Bunny, something called Yo Gabba Gabba with its cast of nicey-nice creatures, and scores more.

It is a strange place to find yourself at age 65, patronized, plied with false cheer, congratulated for hitting a touch screen on cue and invited to believe in a world of good faith, good will, and innocent fun where there is no evil, only misunderstanding, and there's plenty of everything to go around, all sung in major keys and painted in primary colors.

It is cloying beyond description, and some of it is really creepy. Barney, for one, should be arrested and his cadre of zombie children set free as soon as their souls have been located.

Disney has turned Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck into a pair of plastic goodie-two-shoes. I sometimes troll YouTube for the old cartoons from the 30s and 40s. My favorite is Moving Day in which Donald and Mickey can't pay the rent and get evicted by a burly sheriff who bitch-slaps Donald. A close second is Orphans Picnic, which Donald and Mickey go to the park with a truckload of unruly foundlings, all clad in identical smocks and caps like little prison inmates.

I suppose I understand why Disney takes a different approach these days. But still, I know we could make things more real for little people, and now and then I run across evidence that smart people are trying. The other day I found episodes of a UK show called Mr. Maker. Each is a workshop on how to use ordinary household materials to do art projects. In the one I watched, Mr. Maker used a paper cup, a powder puff, glue stick and some construction paper to make a funny dog nose with a floppy tongue in one minute flat. That's a useful skill; we might do that ourselves sometime.

Actually, though, Baby E prefers the colorful drivel, which drives out or covers up the better stuff just like processed cheese and flavored sugar water would run off the vegetables and natural fruit juice if we handed her the keys to the refrigerator. It seems we condition little kids to believe that the world is a sweet, friendly, easygoing place where everyone is respected and treated fairly, because we can tell they love hearing it.

Why wouldn't they? We'd like to believe it ourselves. We know in our hearts that our toddlers aren't the sweetie pies they'd like us to think they are. Every one of them carries the full package of human malignancy that makes the world that's really waiting for them a far cry from Sesame Street.

But then we look in their adorable little faces, our hearts melt, and we can't help wanting to pretend that this bunch will be different and if we just keep replaying Elmo's song it might make it so.