There used to be located in the heart of Manhattan’s SOHO an irrationally fancy food store named Dean and Deluca, a great place to invest a significant amount of what should be your children’s inheritance on an apple and a pouch of French lentils.
Lines were long for coffee and nibbles in the morning, and then again right about that time in the afternoon when folks south of Houston convinced themselves that they deserved something very nice to eat for lunch.
So one day that was me. I. Whatever. Actually we, because my nine month old was with me in a stroller. Honestly, this was a very fancy crowd, but there were so many fun things to see here, so I faced the stroller forward and picked up an unaffordable lemonade, narrating the experience through the little fabric sunroof as we passed brightly colored marzipan and endless jars of imported plum tomato paste.
We were waiting to checkout, and I was humbly taking baby compliments from the women behind me in line when we heard, “Stop it.” from the woman right in front of us.
“Stop it!”
So here in New York there’s a three step process for this sort of instance of irrational yelling: first, we check for white earbuds. If the ears are clear of technology, we follow the gaze. This is a precise measurement, there’s always a lot of people around, and they could be yelling at that person right next to you, in which case you need to quickly yet politely step away from them. If it’s not the person next to you, but indeed, it’s YOU, then you disregard the people around you politely stepping away and begin to either ignore or emphatically engage the talker.
So. No earbuds. Not looking at me. Ok. She seemed to be looking at… her own feet.
Well, hey, my dogs have barked after a long day in the Big Apple. Absolutely. I can understand –
“Stop judging me!”
Wow, my feet are pretty easy going for appendages, maybe hers are more complex.
And then she looked straight at me.
“That baby’s judging me. Stop judging me, baby!”
Now I’m concerned. (I know, “NOW you’re concerned?”) The shift in her tone was very specific - addressing me, she was emphatic, pointing out a fact; but she was clearly combative to the baby.
So I immediately turned the carriage around, and, well…the most honest way to describe the look on the baby’s face was… ruthlessly quizzical.
The baby was definitely judging that lady.
Now my tone changes, because this woman is no longer irrational. Her assertion is entirely correct.
I panic. I turn to the women behind me. They are both covering smiles, pretending they’re scratching their noses.
I go for logic.
“Oh, she hasn’t eaten. You know how it gets.” The “hangry” defense, one of the most uniformly human experiences; surely it’s gonna connect because we’re all buying food, right? It’s lunchtime!
“That baby was judging me.” she reasserts, and the check-out clerk calls to her, then calls again. She backs away towards the counter, keeping her eyes square on me the entire time, while I smile like I’m welcoming her to Fantasy Island.
The women in line behind me, from behind their hands, said,
“You handled that pretty well.”
“Well I really… I mean, I didn’t know.. I mean the baby does look kind of intense.”
Which was true, both eyes still purposefully narrowed.
“Maybe it’s gas?” I said. It wasn’t gas.
“No” said the second woman behind me, ”It probably is that woman. Babies know things.”
Up until that time, I believed that innocence was inexperience. I assumed, for example, that babies were unable to throw that high a level of shade because they had yet to attend a high school reunion cocktail party. But there it was. Now an apparently unshakable belief that an infant has to power to deeply and personally condemn you says a great deal about the believer and their general philosophy on life.
There are, in my opinion, three life philosophies:
Doom - no matter what you do, it’s all gonna go pretty badly
Karma - it all depends on what you do
& Salvation - no matter what you do, things are gonna be just fine.
You can believe all of these, but only one at a time.
In childhood, if we’re very lucky, we have a period of time when all the stories we are told end with “and they all lived happily ever after”, which inspires our confidence. Salvation.
Doom is the cautionary tale, all those fables where something crappy happens to a fox then they say ”and the moral is…” Be afraid, be careful, be - oops, you’re dead anyway. Sorry.
But the philosophy that what you do does matter, that balance is a ubiquitous science of temporal consequence where every personal action, seen or unseen, will come to bear, is to some the most terrifying of these options. Karma.
I personally feel that karma is very comforting; “the love you take equal to the love you make” and all that, but what Hitchcock-level crime do you have to commit to feel the eyes of justice burning you from a face whose mouth holds a little rubber giraffe? Murder??? Unpaid Parking Tickets? Did you cheat at whist? Point being, you don’t believe a baby’s judging you unless you believe that you are guilty of something. The Tell Tale Heart, in a checkout line, wearing a disposable diaper. Karma.
To the point of the woman behind me, I probably should have responded to “That baby’s judging me.” with “What have you done?”, but, nyaa, it was probably just gas. [It wasn’t gas.]
The Original Law Firm