"The Biggie Experience"
Volume 3, Issue 7
Author’s note: I love writing, thinking, talking, and pontificating about my kids in the first person. For today’s Spinning Plates, though, I have adopted the house style of The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section to achieve the emotional distance from the event necessary to report it accurately.
Azad Leoni Cohen loves city buses. On a recent Friday morning, just four months shy of her third birthday, Azad boarded the B65 bus in Brooklyn on the way to dance class, with her middle-aged father and an infant sibling in tow. “I love the bus,” Azad said, gazing out the window of the stoic blue Brooklyn single-decker at a yellow school bus passing in the other direction.
“They call that the Brooklyn double down,” the father said aloud, “when you see a school bus from a city bus.” They, meaning just him, in this case.
Dance class was delightful, per usual. They saw Violet and Violet’s grandfather. The dance teacher, of course, was there, along with a dreadlocked percussion player, moms, dads, aunties, grandmas, and cousins. At the end of class, the dancers - exhausted from plie, passe, and flamingo - received stickers for their achievements. Azad’s said, “LUNCH BUNCH.”
“Come on, lunch bunch,” the dad said after dismissal, weirdly anxious to get to the bus stop, where he would watch three B63s pass with nary a whiff of a B65. While the family waited, a young carpenter affixed a plastic mural of a local prophet to the siding of a dilapidated apartment store.
Then, Azad declared, “I peed,” from the stroller.
“Great,” the dad said, panicking, realizing he had seconds to make a decision. To change the toddler here, on the loud busy street corner? To wait for the public transit that may never come? To steal away into a local restaurant an occupy their bathroom, at risk of missing the precious, finicky bus?
“Can I change you here?” the dad asked, evincing stunning politeness, after doing an absurd amount of mental parenting math. He deployed the spare pair of dry underwear and pants that were crammed next to an Encanto water bottle in the diaper bag, and the toddler calmly participated in the clean-up.
“I’m sorry, is this too loud?” the kind carpenter paused to ask, his nail gun intermittently driving giants spikes of steel into a building-wide advert for the “Biggie Experience.”
“Thank you for asking, but no, please keep going!” the dad yelled over the din, touched that someone would take time from honoring the legacy of Christopher Wallace to support the impromptu costume change. “It could be an hour until we get home,” the dad continued, “We’ve already been waiting forty and it’s not that cold out, anyway, so why not just do the change here, right? I had to make the hard call! I guess I could have waited though?”
Realizing that the man with the nail gun hadn’t been listening for a solid 45 seconds, the dad rounded up the lunch bunch, newly dry, and got on the bus that finally finally finally arrived minutes later. Both children immediately fell asleep in their colossal double-stroller, which occupied an embarrassing portion of the front aisle.
Kids sleeping, in a rare feat of simultaneous toddler-infant napping, the dad realized he had anywhere between fifteen minutes and an hour and a half to himself. He stared at his iPhone between bouts of making awkward eye contact with other passengers. “They’re both sleeping,” he gestured, to no one in particular, with glee, but also terror at the ephemerality of the moment. “What the fuck do I even do?”