When I started this blog, Robert and I were really big into walkabouts. (Here and here are some musty-old posts about it.) He had been on his feet for only a couple of months, and we used to spend hours at a time discovering the neighborhood -- in all its sticky, feculent glory -- from his teetering, two-foot-tall perspective. He was the Mayor of Everything, smiling and gladhanding and making sure not to wander within 100 feet of polling sites.
One of my favorite things to watch him do was position himself behind Siamese water valves and play the two heads like a pair of bongos. There's one such pipe that faces Union Square, and we couldn't walk past it without Robert favoring the crowd with his pint-sized version of Babalù.
I haven't had much of a chance to go on walkabouts with TwoBert, because he is a horribly neglected second child. But today we got the chance, and we made the most of it. We motored around for a good 90 minutes, waving at strangers and leaping out of the way of little people walking enormous dogs. Then we passed that same water valve, and damned if TwoBert didn't start whaling away on those skins, just as his brother had three years ago.
Is it nature? Is it nurture? Is is a universal love for the up-tempo stylings of Cuban immigrants? Theories welcome.
