In the imaginative and linguistic life of a 22-month old, expressing degrees of excitement is a circumscribed process hemmed in by limitations of experience and language. So it is that Izzy has fallen in love with the modifier, “big”. And “big bus” has evolved into “big, big bus” if the sudden appearance of a bus is impressive enough. Indeed, the piling up of adjectives (“big, big yellow school bus!”) reflects the expansion of language and emotion for a little boy who builds a little more into each successive day.

How appropriate, then, that I used to exclusively define worth in terms of size. I fell in love with New York early in life when I first visited at the ages of four and eight. So I’d announce to my mother that New York was “the best” because it was “the biggest”! She would patiently explain that just because something was the biggest didn’t mean it was the best. I’d insist she was mistaken because being the biggest by definition meant that it could not be surpassed.

Of course, my beloved Jets, Giants, Mets, Yankees, Rangers, Islanders, Nets and Knicks (a faux New Yorker growing up in Indiana can be forgiven for glossing over entrenched intra-urban rivalries) were seldom the best — the ‘68 Jets, ‘70 and ‘73 Knicks, and ‘74 and ‘76 Nets excepted. But that only seemed a tragically unjust fluke soon to be remedied by the corrective realignment of the planets. While the cosmology never quite worked out as I hoped, I can’t help thinking there’s grand poetic justice each time Izzy excitedly pronounces that the biggest is the best!