nyc: meeting rosemary's baby

We hopped on the tour bus outside the Dakota. There was no room on the top floor, so we sat on the bottom. Also on the bottom were a couple in their twenties, their toddler-aged son, and an unrelated woman. The mother and son sat on one pair of seats; the father sat one row back.

The toddler was going through a biting phase. His mother, let's call her Rosemary, kept playfully admonishing him, which only encouraged him to giggle and nip. She seemed to be getting sick of it, but she also seemed to not have any clue how to rein it in. At one point, she started making comments about going to see daddy. Daddy moved forward to sit beside Rosemary, and he took the kid briefly. Meanwhile, the kid's happy shrieks got shriekier. The other woman on the bus decided to leave rather abruptly.

Then daddy decided he'd had enough, and abruptly stood up and moved to the front of the bus, about as far away from his family as he could get without either hurling himself out a window or initiating divorce proceedings. The toddler veered back and forth between playful giggles and rambunctious noise-making. I began praying for space to open up on the upper floor so we could get the hell away from this family. And then it hit me. Literally.

And by "it," I mean the toddler's pacifier. The toddler's disgustingly slobbery pacifier.

Yes. The little hellspawn plucked its pacifier from its mouth and winged it at me. I couldn't help myself: my death glare spontaneously activated.

I stood up, and handed the pacifier back to Rosemary, who began apologizing profusely. She was clearly mortified. I thought briefly about saying "It's okay," but I had the sinking feeling that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out would be a scathing indictment of her parenting skills, so I said nothing. But my glare must have been enough because that child got real calm and quiet after that.

We left the bus at the next stop.