The Magic In A Baby

Baby Faces
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
It is the No. 1 train, late-morning rush. We are all wearing our subway masks, everything from studied fatigue to careful blankness. A well-dressed woman enters the car at 72nd Street and sits on the bench across from where I’m standing. Her mask is particularly guarded, utilitarian. A minute passes. I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could. There is a baby crinkling with pleasure in a stroller across the aisle.

This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves. Very few people are immune to the power, the openness of a baby’s unconstructed glance. It stares without rudeness, smiles without solicitation, and somehow it reaches the unconstructed human that remains inside most of us. We get to step outside all the workaday rules of human contact. We get to make faces in public.

The woman got off the train at 42nd Street. As she stood up, I watched her face close like the shutting of a pocketbook. She had been googling the baby — it seems like the only right word — but she had been doing so in a private, shared eye-space, just the two of them. Never mind that we were all watching. That’s another magic in a baby’s glance. It’s so exclusive, and yet so open. You feel thoroughly regarded, utterly looked at and enclosed. In a very short time, that baby would begin finding the constraints, the natural shuttering, that mean growing up. But that morning, it was that woman’s job to keep the lines of communication open.

I caught her glance while she was making baby faces. It was unintentional. It caught me smack in the head, as if I were the baby. I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another? I think about that whenever I take the subway now, inwardly, behind my 1-train mask.

I found this article ver fascinating. The author analyzes something as simple as a baby in a subway. He points out facts we don’t take the time to look at. For example he explains the contrast between a baby and an ordinary adult riding the subway. He starts of by saying, “This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves.” A baby transforms us and makes us loose sens of reality. WE do things we wouldn’t do if it wasn’t for that baby, “I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could.” Here he describes the moms actions toward the baby, just because it is a baby it is acceptable but what if it weren’t, would she be socially allowed to behave that way? A baby justifies many behaviors, which would seem ridiculous if there was no baby on the scene. We can truly be ourselves when we use a baby as an excuse. It also exposes natural behaviors many hide because of what others might think or do, “I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another?”