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Out for our Saturday morning errands, the three of us passed a man sweeping the gutters in front of an apartment building. And the inquisition began:
Robert: What is that man doing?
Me: He’s cleaning the street.
Robert: Is he sweeping?
Me: Yes. He’s using a very large broom.
Robert: What is he sweeping, Daddy?
Me: Leaves and stuff.
Robert: And is there poop?
Me: Maybe, but I think it’s mostly leaves.
Robert: I think it’s mostly poop.
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We were watching the World Series last night when my wife asked, “There’s a guy on the Cardinals named ‘Poo-Holes’?”
And then she laughed herself silly.
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As I slumped on the couch this evening, besniffled and besnotted beside my lovely, enervated wife, my son ricocheted around the pinball machine that is our living room, singing and drawing on his hand and promulgating his many theories—like how you need to say "Excuse me" after you burp, fart, yawn, hiccup, cough, and sneeze (a difficult dictum to uphold when you're sick). There he was, a darling furious ball of energy, and all we could think of was the miles to go before we could sleep.
Eerily, my wife and I locked eyes and telepathically decided it would be great if Robert could somehow manage to strip off his own clothes, run his own bath, wash his own hair, dry his own backside, pull on his own pajamas, brush his own teeth, and sing himself to sleep. We held hands, closed our eyes, and focused all of our mental energy toward an unlikely miracle.
It didn't work.
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It all started when our street crumbled, and commuters awoke to a five-foot-square crater smack in the middle of traffic. At first I was gleeful, because drivers around here are a cranky band of mad-honking speedgoblins, so the idea of a few careening their way into a scraped undercarriage or cracked axle struck me as just desserts. (During the first week, in fact, I liked to lounge at the outdoor café across the street with my morning coffee and toast the hellions as they bit the road.)
Then the DOT came and dumped in a load of blacktop, which the road quickly swallowed. But the road was voracious, the crevasse reopened, and more headlong ninnies nicked their bumpers. So the DOT tried again, this time at 12.45am with a crew of jackhammerers that disrupted every household for blocks. And the street was angered, so it re-re-cracked, finally summoning the fleet of sewer workers who walked through muck up to their armpits for two weeks.
And we thought the road was appeased. And the road said, Au contraire, mon frère.
Another pocket has collapsed about 200 yards up the street, and the muckwalkers are back. One of them told us they’ll be here until Thanksgiving, repairing another portion of our sewer, which is three feet wide by four feet tall, made entirely of brick, and over 100 years old. Since they’ve been here, the noise and stench have been steady, and our cable has mysteriously cut out a half-dozen times or so. (But the road is also lined with several earth movers that Robert gleefully identifies every time we leave the building. One man’s Nuisance is a toddler’s Nirvana.) So if you don’t see a post for a while, it’s probably because the friggin’ broadband has— [System error]
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On a banner night that caps off a banner series, when the Sox raise the AL banner and Steinbrenner's rage is Banner-esque, I'm linking to my new banner page, where all the banners I've noodled with (43 and counting) are left for dead—only to live again, complete the greatest playoff comeback in the history of baseball, and stick it to the pompous Yankees.
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The latest wrinkle in the toddler-centric tapestry of my life is Robert’s and my nightly wrestling match. It begins with his default greeting as I walk in the door: “Hi daddy! You’re home! You have to change into your play clothes and wrestle with me!” So I do as I’m told and sit with my back against the couch, and Robert takes running starts at me and tries to scale the slope of my torso.
My gut makes a nifty foothold, so he often reaches the peak and exults by trying to rip my glasses off. But sometimes, when he flails too close to The Populator, I have to lift him up, bench-press him a few times, and hurl him over my head and into the sofa cushions. (Robert weighed 38 pounds when he last crawled onto the scale at the laundromat, and I’m starting to develop some serious pipes.)
A few nights ago, all three of my biorhythm strands must have been troughing at once, and I arrived home in one of my deep blue funks. The boy and I began our nightly Sofa SmackDownTM, and as I lifted him over my head he pointed out a tear in the armpit seam of my t-shirt. I looked at the hole and responded gloomily with something ridiculous like “You’re right, my son. Life has conspired to rend my armpit, and my soul.” And he came right back with “Don’t worry Daddy, ’cause I can fix it!”
Damned if he didn’t. Just one of 3 billion reasons why fatherhood is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
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It's too bad that 1) I don't have a car and 2) bumper stickers are a sure-fire dignity drain. Otherwise, I'd consider getting one of these.
I was just wondering... Normally, if two baseball playoff games are scheduled for the same day, one is played during the afternoon to give the sport maximum exposure and avoid counterprogramming. Do you suppose it’s just a coincidence that baseball owners, many of whom know the president and have contributed piles of cash to his campaign, and the Fox network scheduled both of today's LCS baseball games to run concurrently at night, thus providing the most distraction from the last presidential debate?
Yeah, you're right. I'm just a paranoid boob.
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Now that I’m back working full time, I am once again subject to mundane questions about my “weekend” on Monday mornings. I’ve never liked this empty protocol, because no one ever cares about the answer. But now that I have a toddler at home, there’s a new wrinkle that makes me even more peevish: there’s never much to say about my “weekend,” because my “week” no longer “ends.” Saturdays and Sundays are not so much an ending as an Alternate Exertion Scenario, which requires an entirely different class of stamina and patience.
A “weekend” day starts at around 7:00am (an extra half hour of sleep—how decadent!), when Robert pulls me to the bathroom and makes me watch him take a leak. Then it’s time to eat breakfast and read books and make pizza and assemble his wooden train set and disassemble his wooden train set and watch Noggin and chase him around while he resists getting dressed and shuttle off to the park and acknowledge all the different trucks he can identify and explain how stoplights work and referee a dispute over whose chalk it is and chase him around while he sprints off with his mini-football and explain the legality of the center-eligible button-hook and convince him to come home and take a nap and hope that he sleeps (so we can do a load of laundry or pay a few bills or maybe get a nap ourselves or write a blog entry) and make lunch and ask him not to throw his puzzle pieces around the room and make pizza and tell him we will go back to the park as soon as I can find my keys and shuttle off to the park and play “hike” a couple thousand times (“I want you to put your hands on my butt and I will make a hike to you!”) and chase him around in circles until the sun sets and search for all of his balls and trucks in the dark and shuttle back home and get ready for dinner. Followed by the feed-Robert, wrangle-Robert, strip-Robert, bathe-Robert, dress-Robert, toothbrush-Robert, read-to-Robert, get-Robert-to bed rigmarole that is standard nightly procedure, work or no work.
All of which means my “week” is destined to loop on in perpetuity, or at least for as long as my body can keep up.
On Wednesday, my wife and child will head to the Midwest for a wedding, leaving me alone in the Laid-Off Lair with no rooms to paint and no big projects to accomplish. Which means on Friday, my week will end, and I will spend the next 48 hours doing everything and/or nothing, at my pace. If anyone asks me about my weekend and hangs around long enough for an answer, I might actually have something interesting to say.
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I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. I used to be a junkie. Three or four per week. Hours of after-conversation and vituperative debate. Exhaustive recall of scads of arcane and useless trivia. I even devoted several hours per week toward programming a hobby web site and populating it with trenchant banter about the current and future efforts of the industry. Blogs were bookmarked, magazines perused, trades scoured.
And then, about six months ago, something in my central nervous system just shut down. Or maybe that time when Robert beat me over the head with his toy piano caused more damage than I thought. But after half a year of cold turkey, I can now say that I am officially indifferent to movies.
I used to live the terrible paradox of loving movies but despising the ridiculous experience of having to go see one in a theater, next to some corpulent slob with a fistful of PizzaBites and a cellphone that plays a hip-hop remix of “Rock Me Amadeus.” But I have made it through the darkness. I feel like a reformed chain smoker hiking leisurely at dawn along the Appalachian Trail, breathing the smell of dew-dappled evergreens for the first time...
Oh, shit. That new South Park movie is coming out. Never mind.
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