Showered

Yesterday I did something I have never done before: I went to a friend's baby-shower. Now I suppose that at 30 I ought not to feel shocked by my peers having kids. But somehow it's shocking all the same! My friend, SL, was a near and dear buddy from summer 2000 in Taiwan. She is French and … well, inimitable. Unique. We have not been in especially good touch, despite the fact that we live only an hour and a half apart. Somehow the rigors of grad school … I don't know. But I have always felt very affectionate toward her when I have seen her. And she is one of those rare people I feel comfortable asking a favor of, maybe because she is so considerate and seems to get satisfaction from it. Maybe it's just the fellow foreigner bonding phenomenon. In any case, a really nice relationship.

Not being greatly perceptive about the markers of socio-economic class, I did not discover until much later that she and her husband are extremely well-off and so are many of their friends. I was reminded of this at the baby shower, hosted by one of her friends, SB, at a Central Park West address (near the Natural History Museum--a nice part of Manhattan). The lobby of the building was sort of like a palace, and it took not less than three doormen to get me from the outside to the place I was supposed to be. None of the apartments had numbers on the doors (this must be on purpose). Fortunately, SB had put tiny baby-shower accoutrements on the door so I was able to figure out which one it was! As for the apartment, I've seen Asian art museums with less. Glass cases--in the living room. In the hall. Soaring bookshelves full of really good useful books. Stone statues and embroidered robes and bronzes and pottery. A view of the skyline beyond the green band of Central Park. It was amazing.

Most beautiful, however, was SL in glowing good health with her belly roughly the size of a watermelon!

It was an interesting experience, much more relaxing and fun than I had anticipated. SL has a lot more women friends than I could muster in an analogous situation, and they are extremely varied in age, occupation, nationality etc. Professors, tour guides, graduate students, various other professionals, even a garden designer. Some were hard to talk to, but others were very interesting. As more and more often in settings like these, I realized how exceedingly much I like women. Women are great! Or can be. Of course, I am still often wrong-footed and ignorant in their ways, but gradually I have been growing more comfortable and, more important, more eager to try and be accepted. Which I sometimes am and sometimes not. What I lack is not good manners exactly, but something one step deeper. Maybe tact or--a sense of what I ought not to say. It is much easier to say the wrong thing and offend your average woman than your average man. In fact, men who are easily offended are really difficult for me to deal with! But some women aren't easily offended, and perceive my good intentions despite my mistakes, and these are the ones I get along with the best.

Anyway, SL's baby is "probably a girl." Apparently if it's a boy they know right away but if it's a girl it's just "probably." I found this curious. Also she is not allowed to eat any sugary things and is only allowed one piece of fruit a day, on account of being borderline with worries about gestational diabetes. This sounds awful to me! Another weird and specifically baby-shower related thing was the amount of paraphernalia that attends child-rearing in modern Manhattan. Many articles and accessories whose uses were quite mysterious to me… I kept wondering to myself, does one need all that? What do peasants do?