He dragged down the sidewalk home. Walked in the front door. The screen door slapped to behind him with its characteristic whack.
From the kitchen: “Hi hon!”
“Hi Dad!”
It was Anna and Nick’s day to come home together after school.
“Momma Momma Momma!”
“Hi Joe!”
Refuge. “Hi guys,” Charlie said. “We need a rowboat. We’ll keep it in the garage.”
“Cool!”
Anna heard his tone of voice and came out of the kitchen with a whisk in hand, gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek.
“Hmm,” he said, a kind of purr.
“What’s wrong babe.”
“Oh, everything.”
“Poor hon.”
He began to feel better. He released Joe from the stroller and they followed Anna into the kitchen. As Anna picked up Joe and held him on her hip while she continued to cook, Charlie began to shape the story of the day in his mind, to be able to tell her about it with all its drama intact.
After he had told the story, and fulminated for a bit, and opened and drunk a beer, Anna said, “What you need is some way to bypass the political process.”
“Whoa babe. I’m not sure I want to know what you mean there.”
“I don’t know anyway.”
“Revolution, right?”
“No way.”
“A completely nonviolent and successful positive revolution?”
“Good idea.”
Nick appeared in the doorway. “Hey Dad, want to play some baseball?”
“Sure. Good idea.”
Nick seldom proposed this, it was usually Charlie’s idea, and so when Nick did it he was trying to make Charlie feel better, which just by itself worked pretty well. So they left the coolness of the house and played in the steamy backyard, under the blind eyes of the banked apartment windows. Nick stood against the brick back of the house while Charlie pitched Wiffle balls at him, and he smacked them with a long plastic bat. Charlie tried to catch them if he could. They had about a dozen balls, and when they were scattered over the downsloping lawn, they recollected them on Charlie’s mound and did it over again, or let Charlie take a turn at bat. The Wiffle balls were great; they shot off the bat with a very satisfying plastic whirr, and yet it was painless to get hit by one, as Charlie often did. Back and forth in the livid dusk, sweating and laughing, trying to get a Wiffle ball to go straight.
Charlie took off his shirt and sweated into the sweaty air. “Okay here comes the pitch. Sandy Koufax winds up, rainbow curve! Hey why didn’t you swing?”
“That was a ball, Dad. It bounced before it got to me.”
“Okay here I’ll try again. Oh Jesus.”
“Why do you say ‘Jesus,’ Dad?”
“It’s a long story, ha. Okay here’s another. Why didn’t you swing?”
“It was a ball!”
“Not by much. Walks won’t get you off de island mon.”
“The strike zone is taped here to the house, Dad. Just throw one that would hit inside it and I’ll swing.”
“That was a bad idea. Okay, here you go. Ooh, very nice. Okay, here you go. Hey come on swing at those!”
“That one was behind me.”
“Switch hitting is a valuable skill.”
“Just throw strikes!”
“I’m trying. Okay here it comes, boom! Very nice! Home run, wow. Uh oh, it got stuck in the tree, see that?”
“We’ve got enough anyway.”
“True, but look, I can get a foot into this branch … here, give me the bat for a second. Might as well get it while we remember where it is.”
Charlie climbed a short distance up the tree, steadied himself, brushed leaves aside, reached in and embraced the trunk for balance, knocked the Wiffle ball down with Nick’s bat.
“There you go!”
“Hey Dad, what’s that vine growing up into the tree? Isn’t that poison ivy?”
Let’s rehearse what we know about who we are.
We are primates, very closely related to chimps and other great apes. Our ancestors speciated from the other apes about five million years ago, and evolved in parallel lines and overlapping subspecies, emerging most clearly as hominids about two million years ago.
East Africa in this period was getting drier and drier. The forest was giving away to grassland savannahs dotted with scattered groves of trees. We evolved to adapt to that landscape: the hairlessness, the upright posture, the sweat glands and other physical features. They all made us capable of running long distances in the open sun near the equator. We ran for a living and covered broad areas. We used to run game down by following it until it tired out, sometimes days later.
In that basically stable mode of living the generations passed, and during the many millennia that followed, the size of hominid brains evolved from about 300 cubic centimeters to about 1200 cubic centimeters. This is a strange fact, because everything else remained relatively stable. The implication is that the way we lived then was tremendously stimulating to the growth of the brain. Almost every aspect of hominid life has been proposed as the main driver of this growth, everything from the calculation of accurate rock throwing to the ability to dream, but certainly among the most important must have been language and social life. We talked, we got along; it’s a difficult process, requiring lots of thought. Because reproduction is crucial to any definition of evolutionary success, getting along with the group and with the opposite sex is fundamentally adaptive, and so it must be a big driver of increasing brain size. We grew so fast we can hardly fit through the birth canal these days. All that growth from trying to understand other people, the other sex, and look where we are.
Anna was pleased to see Frank back in the office, brusque and grouchy though he was. He made things more interesting. A rant against oversized pickup trucks would morph into an explanation of everything in terms of yes or no, or a discussion of the social intelligence of gibbons, or an algebra of the most efficient division of labor in the lab. It was impossible to predict what he would say next. Sentences would start reasonably and then go strange, or vice versa. Anna liked that.
He did, however, seem overly impressed by game theory. “What if the numbers don’t correspond to real life?” she asked him. “What if you don’t get five points for defecting when the other person doesn’t, what if all those numbers are off, or even backwards? Then it’s just another computer game, right?”
“Well—” Frank was taken aback. A rare sight. Immediately he was thinking it over. That was another thing Anna liked about him; he would really think about what she said.
Then Anna’s phone rang and she picked up.
“Charlie! Oh dovelie, how are you?”
“Screaming agony.”
“Oh babe. Did you take your pills?”