In which young Seamus makes some new acquaintances, some of them Nice, and some of them Not.

Seamus has his first encounter with a stranger today, and I'm sorry to say that it did not go particularly well. We bundled him up in his brand-new car seat, complete with warm, snuggly insert (I had stumbled out into the sunlight on Monday, in a zombified state, to purchase these items), and took him in a Zipcar to his very first doctor's appointment: a routine newborn checkup.



First, we had to get him in the car, though. Our street is ancient (by U.S. standards, anyway), narrow, and completely parked-up almost 24 hours a day. This makes drop-offs and pick-ups extremely challenging, especially during business hours. When I brought the Zipcar around, Nanabanana and Greta were waiting for me in our building's lobby, but I couldn't stop and pick them up without blocking traffic. In some places in the world, drivers will patiently wait a moment for a car on a narrow, one-way street to load up a few passengers, especially if one of them is an infant. New York is not one of those places. To avoid a cacophony of horns and possible violence, I did what everyone else does on John Street: I pulled up halfway on the opposite curb and waited for my passengers to emerge. (See Nanabanana's CSI-worthy recreation of the crime scene, below).



Directly behind me was a UPS truck. Directly in front of the UPS truck was an annoyed- and officious-looking metermaid (is there any other kind?), writing the UPS truck a ticket. I put my flashers on and waited for my passengers, nervously expecting the metermaid to knock on my window at any moment and tell me to move along.

Greta et al. and the metermaid converged on my Zipcar at the same moment. Just as Nanabanana was gently heaving Seamus' carseat into the vehicle, the metermaid said, "You can't park on the sidewalk!"

"Okay, we're just getting our baby inside," said Greta.

"You can't park on the sidewalk," repeated the metermaid, while Sandy and I struggled with the carseat. I had securely installed the seat's base in the Zipcar ahead of time, but it took some fiddling to get it to snap into the base.

"We're just trying to get our newborn baby into the car! It's taking a minute, because we've never done it before," said Greta, annoyed.

While walking away from Greta towards the front of the vehicle and pulling out her citation pad (which is actually an electronic device these days), the metermaid announced, "Well, if you're going to be rude about it, I'm going to give you a ticket."

What then ensued was a battle of wills between Greta and the metermaid, with Greta pleading, cajoling, and berating the metermaid, who, as is the rule with her kind, responded in much the same way that the Spanish Inquisition did to pleas for mercy. The metermaid primly responded, "You're not any better than anyone else," wrote up the ticket ($180), and handed it to Greta, who angrily flung it into the vehicle, and then promised the metermaid an eternity of torment in the afterlife. (Though Dante somehow fails to mention it, I believe there is a special circle of Hell reserved for just this sort of metermaid.) Even I, placid though a normally am, was moved to roll down the driver's side window and yell, with all the sarcasm I could muster, "Have a nice day!" at the metermaid's implacable retreating back.


As a result of this incident, Greta, suffering from exhaustion and post-partum hormone fluctuations -- and never having had much patience for senseless bureaucratic injustice in any case -- showed up at the doctor's office with red eyes. Fortunately, Dr. Chaudhary was lovely in every sense of the word (I had to swear to Greta later that I didn't pick her from her practice's roster because of her attractiveness), and declared Seamus to be an extremely healthy young man. In fact, he's been nursing so well that, ahead of schedule, he's almost completed gained back the 10% of his weight that babies lose after delivery.

The practice where Dr. Chaudhary works is really nice -- very holistic and alternative-treatment-friendly, as befits our status as secret hippies. On the aesthetic front, their waiting room looks nothing like a doctor's office waiting room -- it's a huge space with big, plush couches and huge windows overlooking Broadway. I knew we had come to the right place as soon as I saw it; it suggests that the people in charge care about their patients' peace of mind.


Seamus had to get his heel pricked for the standard metabolic-disorder screening tests, but that was the worst of it. Now, of course, I'm worried that Seamus will have picked up avian flu or something while he was out of our same little apartment, but I'm resisting the urge to wipe him down with Purell. I'm also resisting the urge to consider Seamus' encounter with the metermaid a bad omen -- I figure that, for the rest of his life, everyone else will seem very nice by comparison.

Now that I think of it, I believe that this metermaid is, in the alternate reality to which Dr. Seuss had access, the Nooth Grush on the toothbrush ("Well, some are nice, but he is not.")