Roundness

Teaching up at the NYU Stern School of Business Business and its Publics second semester writing course, we tried to get the students to deal with questions of their impending corporate life and the rest of the world’s ideals of decency, fair play, and family time. Of course, those young thoroughbreds just wanted to run, not be slowed by niggling concerns of how to balance work and family life. I gotta say, as much as I’d get frustrated at the young men’s assertion that they’d just go get themselves a wife who would deal with family life (and the rather limpid response on the part of the young women to whom this was indirectly directed), I acted just like them. Family life? Now? Don’t you know how busy I am?

One of the readings from that section of our collection was an article on the Confuscian ideal of roundness – of being well rounded not only in action, but in character, in honesty with oneself and others and having a work life that was honorable and important and a family life that was balanced and connected with the rest of your world. Occasionally, our first-generation Asian students would engage with this idea, either as a way of sorting their ideas through the essay or arguing that such notions were bosh in the 21st century. I do remember liking the visual implications of the metaphor, though. Roundness. Round like a donut, or a ripe fruit. Round like your favorite CD, the earth, a coin from a foreign country.

I too, have achieved roundness these days. I have an audacious belly that stands straight out from my achin’ back and mystified hips that rolls and sways with the movements of the little critter inside. This is my official due date, and aside from some emphatic wiggling, the only thing I’ve heard yet from my son, Connor, is that it’s going to be a while. The doc was shaking her head, warning us that if this baby gets too big, I won’t be able to deliver at all. I don’t know what I hate the most, the idea of missing out on all the vagaries and wonders of a normal trip down the Labor and Delivery ward, or having to wait even another day to get this baby in my hands.

Nonetheless, my work deck is cleared, my mother is arriving, the house is room by room not only being cleaned but rewired. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m preparing for my incoming infant in style: with a pair of electricians bonking away in the kitchen. They are sweet, fast and exceptionally tidy. Nonetheless, I think we’re all a little mystified and perhaps a little embarrassed to be sharing this week together.

“But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high.” I’d best re-arrange the Netflix queue one more time and try to get some sleep before morning really breaks.