Laid-Off Dad

Devil beards don't just grow that way, you know

Remember that post I did about Honda? That wasn't sponsored. I can see how it might have seemed like it was, since the brand was slapped right there below your noses, but that was just a tip of the cap for loaning me a car for 10 days after my own wheels died suddenly. They didn't give me a cent.

This post is different, though. It's sponsored by Philips Norelco, a company I feel very happy to work with because they came on board with Dad 2.0 first, by supporting our Movember team. They came to Austin as well, and I hope they continue to support us dad bloggers for a long time to come.

Besides, they're paying me to tell you about stuff I use anyway.

I grew up mostly indifferent to hockey, because I was never much good at skating. But that all changed after the U.S. hockey team won Olympic gold, and my friends spent our afternoons playing street hockey in front of our houses (and yelling "Car!" every 45 seconds).

Then, two years later, the Colorado Rockies moved to the Meadowlands and became the New Jersey Devils, and my home state had a hockey team. I took to them right away, despite their hideous red-and-green color combo and a logo that looks like a bull with its leg on the couch.

They were uggos, but they were our uggos.

They got wise after a few years and ditched the green for black, thus fully embracing Satan. And now, Our Uggos have the chance to win their fourth Stanley Cup, against the L.A. Kings, who were a curiosity when they swiped the Great One from Edmonton but otherwise have no reason to exist, much less advance to the finals as a No. 8 seed.

Hockey players are famous for being superstitious freaks who gargle Sudafed by the gross forego shaving during the playoffs. So that's what I'm doing (see left), even though it's been almost 90 degrees here lately, and my kids complain that daddy's face feels like a woodworker's rasp, and I'm going to attend my 25th college reunion this weekend looking like Freud's grandpa.

Because it's the Devils, man. Hail, Satan.

Anyone who's read Shakespeare knows that kings are corrupted by power, and they always let the Devil play on their vanity until they tragically overreach and end up with their head on a pike. I eagerly await Ring Number 4.

Thanks for reading this far. If you're willing to tolerate this creeping commercialism, I'm grateful. And as a show of my personal thanks, I will make you this solemn promise: Throughout this campaign, I will not stoop to John's level and somehow make every shaving post about my nards.

Slap-happy camper

There are times when I hate being 46. Like this weekend, when I had this great plan to surprise the boys with a new tent. It arrived Wednesday in a large box, which I placed in the middle of the kitchen on Thursday night. They would wake up, plod out for breakfast, see this huge box with AWESOME NEW TENT in big, black letters on the side, and freak out! Thank you thank you thank you, Dad! It's Christmas in May! Just in time for the Memorial Day weekend, so we can camp out and sleep in, and pretend we're in our secure bunker fending off alien ninja spider turtles and YOU'RE THE BEST DAD EVER! 

They didn't do any of that.

In fact, they woke up and walked right past it. Six or seven times. This three-foot-tall box in the center of the house's traffic pattern. A few times, I talked with them as they munched their English muffins and took pains to move the box a few inches here and there, so they might be curious (or annoyed) enough to wonder what the hell I was doing with that whateveritwas.

Bupkis.

I wanted to create some semblance of anticipation before they left the house for school, so I said, "Hey, look. What does it say on that box there?" And Robert said, "It says it's a ... tent? Cool." And TwoBert said, "Is this a surprise? Because I think it's a tent!"

A tent it surely was.

Hours later, we had the thing set up and ready for action, and the pork butt was smoking in the Weber, and after a great meal the kids schlepped sleeping bags and pillows and ten books about global domination (Robert) and two dozen stuffed animals (TwoBert) and flashlights and LEGOs and the bathroom plunger and everything else you might need to repel alien ninja spider turtles.

And we camped out. And I spent the entire night inhaling spores and sneezing them out again, to the detriment of the brain parts that govern sleep. Of which there was very little.

I might have recovered more readily from this in my camping heyday, when my hair flowed full and thick atop my head and Mark Zuckerberg was teething. But now, at 46, it's taken me four days to restore some semblance of perception and motor skills.

There was also the dissonant aspect of having a tablet in the tent with me, so I was at least able to read and listen to baseball and watch George Carlin videos while sneezing violently into anything padded. The downside is that, when you reach for it when it's finally light again, in that sliver of time before you release the slide-lock, the tablet functions as a mirror that shows you just how trollish you look after 90 minutes of sleep. A cautionary tale for the early 21st century, to be sure.

After I mentioned that I'm still coping with these allergies, my friend told me to "get some dark local honey." And I thought, OK. Maybe she can score me some Claritin.

So much more than the sum of its (auto) parts

When I think about how I've spent my adult life, I'm very thankful that most of it has been car-independent. (Auto-autonomous?) Living in New York City may have relegated me to dingy subway cars, plodding buses, and daredevil cabs, but in all cases I was spared the expense of oil changes and tire rotations. And someone else always did the driving.

That all changed when my marriage ended and I moved 10 miles away from my children. I knew then that I would always back to my kids as quickly as possible, as often as possible, and I sure as hell wasn't going to bring them all the way back to my place on public transport. I needed my own wheels.

So I bought my sister's '99 Honda Civic, which was the perfect city car. Unassuming enough not to attract thieves' or vandals' attention. Small enough to wedge into cramped parking spots. And reliable enough to exceed 150,000 miles without needing much more than customary maintenance.

Over the next three years, that little car was invaluable. I used it all the time to bring the kids back to our old neighborhood for Little League games, playdates, and pancakes at our favorite diner. I took them to school down the manic West Side Highway (which scared the shit out of me ever since I saw a dude doing 40mph and working a crossword puzzle on his steering wheel). I drove them north to see their grandparents, and south to see their cousins.

But it's most important asset was intrinsic. When I felt most separated from the family I still so deeply mourned, just knowing it was parked out front and ready to take me to my kids, under my own steam, helped bridge that gap.

Cut to: May 2012. While driving back from the airport after Mom 2.0, the Civic had a catastrophic event. The water pump failed, which stripped the timing belt and caused the engine to overheat. Now, the engine has no compression, and a rebuild will cost more than I paid for the car.

Not only was I saying goodbye to the car that helped me weather the worst storm of my life, but I needed new wheels in a hurry. (Moxie chauffeured me to the grocery store a couple of times, but that was an untenable model.) So I called my Honda people, who sponsored Dad 2.0 and whom I'd just seen in Key Biscayne, and asked if they had any short-term solutions.

The next day, this arrived in my driveway:

That's right. Elton might have been taken to the pilot, but they brought the Pilot to me.

No money changed hands. I merely called for help, and they responded. This post is in no way sponsored; it's just a solid in turn for a solid. It makes me happy to have driven Hondas for 30 years, and it made the decision to lease a new CR-V all the easier.

So now I've got my new wheels, the first new car I've ever owned. It seems really strange. If, on the day I graduated college, I had asked the universe to tell me when I would own my first new car, I'm not sure I would have expected the answer, "25 years from tomorrow."

The CR-V is much better suited to Michigan winters and growing boys with growing entourages. The next step is to find a resting place for the Civic, whose loss I feel more deeply than I expected to. I hope to donate it to charity, because I know if someone decides to invest in her, she's got a lot of life left. If you have any donation suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Thanks, Honda, for helping me out of a tight spot. And double thanks for sending me such a tricked-out model to spoil my kids with. When they saw that my new CR-V doesn't have a rear DVD player, they were truly pissed.

Mouth, meet keyboard

Today is TwoBert's seventh birthday party, and I don't have a lot of time. The kids are due here in about 20 minutes, Moxie is running some last-minute errands before she brings over the cake, and the three of us are tidying up and hoping to make the place smell a little less like feet. 

I had a revelation at the Mom 2.0 Summit (which I plan to write about soon) involving the importance of idle thoughts and their relation to creativity. This revelation happened to happen while I was speaking about it during the 12-by-7 Ignite-ish session last Friday afternoon. (Go figure.) I was talking about how just saying "I wonder if..." is such a cool thing, because given the size and power of parent blogging, the most basic "Hmmm" moment can become a humongously cool thing really quickly. (I'm looking at you, JC Penney Shop-In.) I realized I've been holding off writing here because I've been taking the posts a bit too seriously. Of all the blogs to which I contribute, this is the one that's meant to be the most spontaneous and expressive. So really, what's the big deal?

And thus, my strategy today is to give myself a hard deadline to write something before the kids descend on Castle Frenchington. So I'd like to take this moment to announce that we have a pet cricket. He's taken up residence somewhere in the bushes in front of our picture window, and he is all about the continual, 24/7 chirpathon. TwoBert has named him Pinocchio, because he is savvy enough to know that "Jiminy" is too predictable and yet wants to maintain authentic reference to the literary work. (Or at least I choose to think that.) I am hoping that, if indeed Pinocchio is to serve as some sort of cricket-based conscience, Robert will heed his chirp before giving his brother yet another atomic wedgie.