'Oh noooooooo!'

     Harry Weese is a great Chicago architect whose love of triangles has already been dissected here on EGD — his two most significant Chicago buildings are the SwissHotel, an equilateral triangle at 323 E. Wacker, and the Metropolitan Correction Center, an isoscoles right triangle at 71 W. Van Buren. 
     His other downtown building, the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, 55 E. Wacker Drive, is certainly not a triangle. More of a, well, I'm tempted to take inspiration from my colleague Lee Bey calling the new entrance to the Museum of Science and Industry a "carbuncle" and label it a "boil." Round in a bad way. He should have stuck to triangles.
     Which is ironic, because Weese's masterwork is also not a triangle. Nor is it in Chicago, In fact, it's not a building at all, but the Washington DC Metro, whose vast, vaulted poured concrete interiors were designed by Weese. I feel a burst of Chicago pride every time I travel through them, such as a recent visit to Washington to meet Grandbabe #3. 

    I figure, at least a few readers don't know about this, and might appreciate being informed.
    The visit, I'm pleased to report, went very well. Grandbabe #1, now 16 months, seemed to remember me, or at least took to an older gent who wanted nothing but to read to her and tell her stories and dance and sing and whatever else she cared to do. 

      We spent a good amount of time stacking colorful boxes and then knocking them over, which I pretended was a shocking event — I put my hands on my ears, elbows out, stared wildly, and uttered a boggled, "Oh nooooooooo!" — a good-natured mix of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and Macaulay Culkin's hands-to-cheeks dismay gesture in "Home Alone." She would mimic the expression, pressing her hands to her ears.  It soon became the payoff of the stacking process, and we would press our hands on our ears and beam at each other in mutual admiration, delighted to be sharing his secret, this incredible witty spin we had invented. 
    The other noteworthy moment came when, suddenly at a loss for a story or song, I noticed her toes and went for the traditional. "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef..."
    At that point, for the fourth little piggy, some long-dormant neuron fired and I said, "this little piggy had LESS roast beef than the previous piggy, but still enough roast beef to meet his nutritional needs."
   Where did THAT comes from? All I can think is that my wife, who is nothing if not kind hearted, felt bad for the hungry little piggy, denied roast beef, even though it only existed in myth, and decided to give the poor swine some cold cuts. Or it could have been me, making fun of her kind-heartedness. 
     Anyway, part of effective parenting (or, I suppose, grand-parenting) is keeping the process interesting for both yourself and your charges, and this door opening for the fourth toe, formally called the digitus quartus pedis (Latin for "fourth toe") or the "ring toe," to correspond with ring finger, has kept me creatively engaged. 
     "This little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy COULD have had roast beef but, being a vegetarian, opted for a chive cake instead...")
      A chive cake being an actual foodstuff that I watched this girl knock back at a Laotian restaurant. You learn a lot in this grandparent business, if you do it right.