M A C V A Y S I A

Me: So, buddy…soon you’re going to be a big brother. Are you excited?

Al: Yes.

Me: But listen…when your little brother comes, sometimes Mummy’s going to be really busy. You know, she has to give him milk, and all that stuff. So you’ll be spending a lot of time with Daddy, okay?

Al: No, Daddy.

Me: No? But you know, Mummy’s going to be really busy. In fact, Daddy has to help a lot too. I’ll be changing a lot of diapers. Everybody’s going to be really busy.

Al: No, Daddy! Not busy. CRAZY.

Me: Uh…wow. So you understand.

Al: Yes.

I still don’t know whether to be very impressed or slightly disturbed. Maybe both.

I finally got in touch with William Alexander MacVay Jr, my only living MacVay relative outside my immediate family (well, unless we count his sister, who goes by her married name). Bill, as he’s called, lives in Florida and is a widower of about 90 years old. We had a great chat about his side of the family; while he doesn’t know as much about the family history as I do, he was able to fill in some gaps in my knowledge of the MacVays who stayed in New Brunswick. Bill never had children, so he was delighted that there are still MacVays around to carry on our endangered family name, with even more on the way (ahem). Al even got to talk to him for a minute.

When our conversation was just about finished I was thinking to myself, It’s too bad Bill probably doesn’t have a computer. It would be great if we could stay in touch via email. Too bad. I was about to tell him I’d mail him a printout of the family history when he said, “Here, I’ll give you my email address. We can stay in touch that way.”

“Wh…well that’s great,” I said. So he read out his email address to me.

“Do you have Skype?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, “but I don’t use it much.”

“Oh, you don’t have a webcam?”

“I do, but I don’t have a microphone.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “My webcam has a built-in mic.”

Just goes to show you that the ‘danger of a single story’ that Chimamanda Adichie so eloquently spoke of applies to age as well as culture. Elderly internet users for the win!

I’m sure most little kids have awesome imaginations, so it might sound overproud-daddyish of me (yeah I just coined that term) to say my son has an awesome imagination. He does, though. He can play out epic scenes with his toys, or with invisible friends (and especially invisible enemies). I like to think he’ll be into all sorts of creative pursuits — drawing perhaps, like I was when I was a kid. He sees dragons in clouds and I get all giggly. That’s my boy.

Today he was having a bath and had just dumped half a bottle of kiddie shampoo into the path of a furiously flowing tap, creating impressive mountains of soap suds. “Look Daddy!” he shrieked. “This like snow!”

“Wow,” I said, “look at that! Yes! It’s snow!”

Suddenly he stopped jumping up and down, shot me a ‘what you talkin’ bout, Willis’ look and said, “Um…no, Daddy. This soap.”

Whatever. Come on, he sees dragons in clouds. Tee hee!

After watching Monsters Vs. Aliens, Al and I were playing with some of his toys.

Me (holding the head of a robot dinosaur): Hey guys!

Al (holding a transformer in one hand and a generic Voltron-like robot in the other): Hey!

Me: What’s your name?

Al: My name Robot.

Me: OK. And how about you? What’s your name?

Al: My name Transformer.

Me: Wow, you guys have such original names.

Al: What’s your name?

Me: Uh…Robot Dinosaur…Head.

Al: Robot Dinosaur Head. Haha! (That’s two-year-old-speak for ‘Wow Daddy, that’s such an original name.’)