- Although they are poor, Nabokov and his wife do everything they can to give their son a childhood as good or better than their own.
- Vladimir is close to his infant son in these years, burping him after he is breastfed, attuned to his habits and quirks.
- Even though it was many years ago, Nabokov confesses: "You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher's knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb." (15.2.3)
- Vladimir pushes the pram (that's British for stroller, FYI) all over town, and when his son is old enough, he gets a toy Mercedes car, not so different from the one the Nabokovs had in St. Petersburg.
- Nabokov notes that many male children are obsessed with all things on wheels, and references Freud ("that Viennese Quack") in a joking manner, what he would have to say: that wheels are about escape.
- Nabokov says that wheels and forward motion remind him of the circulatory system, or the physics of gravity.
- Even chromosomes, built like roller coasters, have a forward-moving feeling to them.
- A roller coaster, he proposes, is a bit like that spiral he was talking about before.
- As a small boy, his son is obsessed with trains, and waits on bridges with his parents to watch them pass.