My best sister's wedding

I suppose, if you’re going to get all misty-eyed in front of people, that only your sister’s wedding is as good a time as any. Still, there’s no quicker way to have your Man Card rescinded than to tear up in public. And if you have to pause to compose yourself while speaking during the ceremony, and then you STILL have trouble getting the words to crawl over the lump in your throat, then you should probably brace yourself to get kicked out of the Man Club entirely.

This is the situation I found myself in last weekend, as my family came together in San Diego (where the weather can, as we found out the hard way, jarringly swing between 71 and 73 degrees), to celebrate my sister Amy’s wedding. In my defense, the majority of the ceremony was a full-out sobfest, with enough blubbering to power all of the oil lamps in a Charles Dickens novel.

Much like how yawns can be passed to innocent bystanders, I must have caught the tears from somebody in the audience. That’s the only logical explanation available, and it’s the one I will be bringing forward to the Man Board at my hearing.

Amy and Jaime had decided to have their ceremony on a boat floating in the bay, with just their immediate family members present to witness their most special of occasions. The ceremony was probably so emotional because there was no groom to stand there, ashen-faced, staring at the EXIT sign (or in this case, the dinghy) and thinking hard about his remaining options. Of course, when I was a groom, I was so psyched to get married that those kinds of thoughts never came close to passing through my mind, and I in no way wanted to do anything that would have caused my wife Kara to get as angry at me as she did when she read the first draft of this column, before I added this sentence.

If you’ve never attended a wedding that featured two brides, you might not have realized just how vestigial grooms really are. At my own wedding, I doubt anyone besides my then-fiancée-for-a-few-more-seconds Kara would have noticed if they’d have wheeled a scarecrow out to take my place. After the kiss at the end, Kara would have picked the hay out of her mouth and the party would have gone along as planned, with the only other noticeable difference being that the scarecrow would have made a much better dance partner.

Delivering a short speech during nautical nuptials presents challenges that land-lubbing speech givers might not appreciate, and where the danger of going overboard during one’s speech is quite literal. All of the family members who spoke last weekend, though, managed to hang onto their sea legs, if not their dry eyes.

Kara ended the ceremony by reading a poem to accompany a Celtic stone-tossing ceremony, during which each family member made a wish for the couple and threw a stone into the bay. Earlier in the day, we’d helped Amy and Jaime collect rocks for the ceremony from under the bushes in the front yard of Jaime’s brother and my co-best-man, Steve.

After the ceremony, as the two families relaxed and laughed together, and Jaime’s five-year-old cousin Kyler hammed it up for the cameras, posing in her flower girl dress like she was the week’s winning contestant on “America’s Next Top Model,” Jaime told Steve that we’d gathered rocks from his yard.

“Dude, I collected those rocks from all over the world!” Steve said.

And I thought, or maybe hoped, just for a moment, that he might get publicly upset enough to have to join me at the next Man Board hearing.

As providence would have it, we’d stopped at the beach and picked up smoother rocks for the ceremony, bringing Steve’s rocks back and dumping them under his bushes. Apparently, except for the occasional man tear, fate was smiling upon all of us that day.

You can throw stones at Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

'Til next summer...

Here's a shot my mom took about a month ago in Rangeley, Maine. If we tried to do that today, we'd probably land on an iceberg.

When hadrons and puppies collide

Last week, for the first time, I saw my buddy Josh burping. Of course, all through college, I’d seen him belch plenty, but this Sunday, as we sat in his living room, I watched in amazement as he gently patted the back of his month-old son, Isaac.

Whenever I see a buddy of mine with a newborn baby, it gives me the feeling of standing in the back of the plane with the wind whipping, watching all the other paratroopers disappearing into the night air, knowing that my turn can’t be far behind.

But last weekend, my wife Kara and I were excited just to have the chance to visit; since Isaac was born, scheduling a tee time with the Pope would have been easier than catching up with Josh and Jaime. New parents are rich in many things, but time is not one of them.

Of course, upon our arrival, the scene lost whatever serenity it may have previously had. As soon as Jaime opened the door to greet us, our rocket-propelled puppy, Memphis, bolted inside towards their pug, Lou. The two dogs met with a force unseen outside of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator that was plugged in for the first time last week and which, as you may or may not have noticed, did not create a black hole and suck the earth into oblivion last week as some had predicted, much to the dismay of all the kids who didn’t do their homework the night before. You can never trust the forecasters to deliver a black hole day when you need one.

With the two dogs racing around the floor, tackling each other into various home electronics devices and sloshing drool across the room as if it was being tossed from buckets, I watched as Josh calmly cradled Isaac against his shoulder.

“Hey, buddy. Are you about to spit up on m…Yeah, saw that one coming,” he said, deftly toweling off his shoulder.

“Is it bad, dealing with all of the spit-up and the diapers?” I asked, grabbing for Memphis and catching a handful of air as she streaked by.

“It’s really not a big deal,” he replied. “You get used to it pretty fast.”

Last year, I read about a scientific study in which various mothers smelled a row of dirty diapers, one of which belonged to their own child, and ranked them from most (relatively) pleasant to most foul. Invariably, though they had no way to know which diaper was from their own baby, they ranked their child’s as the best-smelling. Which leads to the question: how did they get anyone to sign up for that study? Still, the notion that nature has some tricks to help you deal with the more unsavory aspects of child-rearing is comforting, especially for those of us who would rather dig ditches than change diapers.

After gently wiping off Isaac’s face, Josh pointed him towards me and said, “Look! It’s Tall Uncle Mike!”

Historically, height has really run through Josh’s family. So fast, in fact, that nobody has been able to catch it.

Isaac stared at me, or at least in my general direction, and gurgled. I held up a finger up to his hand, and there was just something surreal about the way his little fingers wrapped around mine. It was so cute that, for a moment, I stopped feeling guilty that you could have put three of him and a St. Bernard in the moose-print pajamas we’d just given him.

Luckily, Josh didn’t ruin the moment by trying to pass Isaac off on me. I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to baby holding, and it seems unfair to practice on a baby that has no say in the matter. I’m sure I’ll figure it out someday, but for now, if we’re hanging out and you need to set a baby down, I hope you won’t mind if disappear into a black hole.

You can swaddle Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Married without reservations

“When’s the last time we went out to dinner?” my wife Kara asked last week.

“Two days ago,” I said.

“When’s the last time we went out to a place that didn’t have extra value combos?” she asked.

I was stumped. Technically, Wendy’s doesn’t call them “extra value combos,” but somehow I sensed that bringing that up wouldn’t get to the root of her question.

The last time we’d been out to a non-paper-napkin dinner had been about a month prior, on our fourth anniversary. Depending on which source you believe, the fourth anniversary is either the fruit, flowers, linen, silk or appliances anniversary. The “appliances anniversary” suggestion must have been a joke, because anybody who would choose to get their spouse an appliance on their anniversary clearly would never have made it to see the fourth one.

When I reminded Kara about that dinner, she parried my thrust, saying that while that dinner was nice, everyone goes out for their anniversary, so it wasn’t the same as going out spontaneously. Apparently, anniversary dinners are like preseason games: they don’t count towards your record, but you get in trouble if you try to skip them.

“I hope you’re not saying that we’re not as romantic as we used to be. There’s plenty of romance going on around here,” I said as I continued romantically scrubbing the dog vomit off the arm of the couch.

Later that night, I decided that maybe she was right: what’s the point of having money if you’re just going to tuck it into a well-diversified portfolio with long-term growth prospects when you could be blowing it on frivolous meals that will be forgotten as soon as the chewable Rolaids start working?

I marched over to our phone and made a reservation for that coming Friday night at an Italian restaurant that we’d been meaning to try for the better part of a decade and for which we’d just never found the right occasion. Incidentally, if you’ve never dialed 1-800-GOOG-411 to find a phone listing for a business, your life is about to dramatically improve. It’s a free service from Google that further relegates phone books to the world of impromptu booster seats. Full disclosure: in return for my endorsement, Google allows me use of its web searching software free of charge.

As Kara and I sat at the table with a small tea candle between us, I asked her what I was going to order. She always knows what I’m going to order. While I’d once been impressed, I was beginning to think that her uncanny ability was closely correlated with my stunning predictability. But this time, she couldn’t possibly have known that I’d been eyeing up the rigatoni.

“The rigatoni,” she said.

“But it has ham in it!” I replied. I’d been reluctant to order anything with ham in it ever since we’d watched a Discovery Channel special on pigs. The pigs in the show were able to master a simple video game, using their snouts to maneuver a large red joystick, the kind you’d see on an old Pac-Man machine. When the pig moved a ball on the screen to the correct position, it would receive a treat. A Jack Russell terrier couldn’t master the game after years of training, but the pig just picked it up intuitively.

I watched the show feeling a growing sense of guilt. Something about eating a fellow video gamer just seemed so wrong. The pig was better at video games than many human players, and it had a better complexion, too.

But Kara knew that my empathy for my compatriots would only go so far when they were mixed with pasta and béchamel sauce and topped with Gorgonzola cheese.

You can discuss your reservations about Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

You are the wind beneath my ears

You say tomato, I say Dorito

As my wife Kara and I cruised the aisles of the grocery store in preparation for a visit from some out-of-town friends, I looked down into the cart and beheld a menagerie of items that surely must have belonged to somebody else: diet root beer, low-fat cheddar cheese, no-taste sour cream, joyless cream cheese and soul-crushing baked potato chips.

“I think we accidentally grabbed Richard Simmons’ cart,” I said. Back home, we’d already stashed some cases of light beer for the big weekend. Light beer. It was almost too depressing to contemplate. It wouldn’t be long before we’d be partying with V-8 juice and those carrot shavings that have the raisins mixed in.

For the first thirty years of life, I knew that most food came with nutritional information printed on the back, but it was one of those facts that never seemed to have any bearing on me personally, like knowing that male seahorses are the ones that give birth and that Tulsa is the capital of Nebraska. But as the years have sped up and the metabolisms have slowed down, the back of food packaging has become more interesting than the front.

“This bag of Smartfood has 45% of my daily fat intake,” I told my dad on vacation recently as he drove us back from a hike. We’d rewarded ourselves for a day of tromping through the woods by stopping at a tiny general store and cleaning the place out of anything that contained cheese or cheese-like substances. I thought I’d made a responsible choice by choosing Smartfood popcorn over Doritos, but apparently Smartfood is only the smartest choice if you’re an underweight sumo wrestler.

Dad reluctantly handed me his bag of Cheetos like a bad cop turning in his badge.

“I don’t really want to know, but tell me anyway,” he said.

“Let’s see…looks like 60% of your daily fat intake,” I said as Dad winced. “This bag was supposed to have four servings in it.”

He took the bag back and turned it upside-down, dumping the remaining crumbs into this mouth. “Well, there must have been a mistake, because this bag clearly only had one serving in it,” he replied.

Food was much easier to purchase when the only food-related issues that really mattered were whether or not your slice of pizza had enough pepperoni on it and whether you could scarf down the entire cone before it started to melt. Once you have to start worrying about calories and fat grams, things get way too complicated. I want my food simple, the way nature intended: partially hydrogenated.

Trolling through the grocery store to finish up our trip, Kara lamented not being able to find the last few items on our list. Healthy things are harder to find because they don’t have neon packaging and mascots, just pictures of smiling farmers beside the higher price tags.

By far the most difficult item to find in every grocery store I’ve ever visited is a can of sliced black olives. It won’t be with the jars of olives, and it won’t be with the cans of vegetables. You will wander through the aisles, wondering why you married the only person who enjoys putting sliced black olives on everything short of cereal, until you find them stuffed under a sack of rice in the storeroom.

“Okay, all we need now is a cucumber,” Kara said. “Why is it so impossible to find anything here? I don’t think they have cucumbers.”

“There’s a whole pile of them right there,” I said, pointing to a tray filled with oblong green things.

“Those are zucchinis,” she replied.

“Aren’t those the same thing?” I asked. I still think she was trying to trick me; nobody can tell me that zucchinis and cucumbers aren’t the same thing. I didn’t just fall off the radish truck.

You can steam Mike Todd (he’s healthier that way) at mikectodd@gmail.com.

This fall: the perfect time to get your goat

During the long drive last week to join my family for vacation in Rangeley, Maine, deep in the woods where no interstate dares to venture, my wife Kara and I witnessed something very disconcerting: the leaves, quite without permission, were already starting to change.

Perhaps our proximity to Labor Day (which, if things had been done right, would be Labor Week) should have been a pretty good indicator that the time had almost arrived to start girding our collective loins with fleece outerwear. Still, now that we’re back home, we can’t get it out of our minds that fall is out there, slowly creeping across the Great North Woods, inexorably making its way south. The Vermont teddy bears are next, then it’s coming for us. It’s like that terrible thing that spread across the country in the last M. Night Shyamalan movie, “The Happening,” except instead of killing everyone, it makes us put our shorts in storage. At least I think something like that happened in the last M. Night Shyamalan movie; I only watch his previews anymore. His recent movies are like tomato slices on sandwiches: it seems like life would be more fun if I liked them, but I just can’t make myself.

With fall sneaking up on us, the reader(s) of this column would probably like to see a Fall Fashion Blowout written by someone who hasn’t been wearing his big sister’s Spring Fling T-shirt since 1995, but I picked up on a new trend in Maine last week that everyone needs to know about, and it’s much more useful than having a magazine tell you that wearing giant sunglasses makes you look like an heiress.

After a long hike, as my family finished resting at the top of Tumbledown Mountain and prepared to come back down, a small group of hikers wandered into the clearing with a medium-sized dog trailing behind them.

“What a funny-looking dog,” I thought, noticing its long, floppy ears, its short snout and its black hooves. Hooves?

“This is Moony,” one of the hikers said, patting the creature on its haunches. “He’s training to be a pack goat.”

As we stared in admiring disbelief, the hiker went on, “Pack goats are big out West. They’re starting to show up on the East Coast now. Moony’s an American Gray Nubian. He was originally supposed to be a meat goat, but we liked him so much, we decided to keep him.”

You heard it here first: this fall’s hottest new fashion accessory comes with bleats. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, I’m sick of lugging this laptop bag into my cubicle every day,” now you have a solution. Finally, the fashion industry has given us something functional.

And if you ever find yourself thinking that it’s too much trouble to be nice to people, just think of Mooney, who proved that you never know when having a winning personality will keep you off the dinner table.

When we returned from the hike, Kara observed summer’s last parting shot.

“Oh no, Babe” she said from behind me, in the voice that she uses when she’s just noticed something horribly awry. Unfortunately, this happens often enough that I recognize the voice.

I froze, waiting for her to brush the spider off my back. But it was worse than that.

“Your, um, spot is looking a little red,” she said.

When your bald spot begins to require sunscreen, there’s no denying it anymore. You can avoid holding one mirror behind your head in an effort to remain blissfully ignorant, but UV rays never lie. I’m pretty sure that getting sunburned on my scalp officially marks my first Indignity of Old Age. But if I’m maintaining the appropriate perspective, I suppose I’ll hope for it to be the first of many.

You can nibble on a tin can with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Tiny bags of pretzels for the soul

Last week, I accidentally attended marriage counseling. With our fourth anniversary behind us, my wife Kara and I are actually doing quite well, despite the fact that she won’t let us get the orange juice with the pulp in it. But on a flight that connected home from Atlanta, I found myself sitting beside the happiest couple that had ever coupled, and the conversation that ensued was the most personal I’d ever had on an airplane, meaning that we covered topics other than complaints about the airline that was delivering us safely to our destinations.

Engaging in conversation with the person sitting next to you on a plane is risky. If you get done talking before they do, there’s no way out that doesn’t involve an altimeter, the exit row and a parachute. You can’t just say, “Well, it was nice talking to you. I’m going to turn the other way and stare out the window now. We can still play elbowsies on the armrest if you’d like. Bye!”

But the folks next to me this time were quite pleasant, still basking in the glow of ditching their four kids with the grandparents for a week, and after we’d talked long enough for me to name-drop Kara, the man turned sideways in his seat and said, “So, how do you like married life?”, staring at me intently to signify that he wanted a real answer.

Before simply blurting out, “Oh, it’s great,” I thought about all the things that Kara and I argue about, and realized the great coincidence that our arguments seem largely based on actions that tend to originate with, and emanate from, me: knuckle cracking, fidgeting with the battery caps on our remote controls until the plastic tabs snap off, chewing cereal like a moose chews floating clumps of grass, refusing to blow my nose on the grounds hthat sniffling is far less disgusting, etc.

The great thing about nearly all of these personal flaws is that they are what the insurance industry calls preexisting conditions. If your spouse knows about your preexisting conditions but chooses to marry you anyway, that’s their fault, not yours. You are only responsible for the annoying things you started doing postnuptially.

“Oh, it’s great,” I said, and that was the truth. If a couple’s worst marital strife centers in any way around the manner in which one of them consumes Cracklin’ Oat Bran, things can’t be all that bad.

The man went on to explain that he was interested because he was a marriage counselor. “There are five languages people use to express love: physical touch, servitude, words of affirmation, gifts and French.”

Actually, French wasn’t one of them, but I thought I was doing pretty good to remember four out of five when I still can’t dial Kara’s cell phone from memory.

“Rarely do two people get married who send and receive love using the same language,” he said. “Most marital problems come from people not understanding how their partner wants to receive love, or how they’re trying to send love.”

I’d never heard love described like a FedEx package before, but overall he was the least kooky stranger who’d ever offered me free advice.

His services might have been better applied to the couple one row forward. When the plane landed, the woman directly in front of me stood up quickly, cracking her head with gusto on the bottom of the luggage bins.

Without pause, her husband said, “Hey, watch your head when you stand up.”

He looked around to see if anyone else thought his wife’s near-concussion was funny, completely oblivious to the fact that she was rubbing her head and giving him a look that could have destroyed the One Ring much faster than the Fires of Mordor.

You can put Mike Todd’s tray table into its upright and locked position at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Love Boat’s newest crew member

“Guess where I am right now?” my buddy Josh asked me on the phone last Friday. The way he asked, it seemed like he expected me to know.

“Holy cow, today’s Friday, isn’t it?” I said.

“You’re the worst friend in the universe,” he replied. Earlier in the week, he told me that Friday was the day his wife Jaime would be going in for a scheduled caesarian section. You can see how a detail like that would slip one’s mind, what with McDonald’s revamping its dollar menu and the new Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants movie coming out. The brain only has room for so many details.

In my defense, when I first heard the news about the C-section, I’d offered to come to the hospital for the big day, mostly because my idea of proper pregnancy etiquette is informed almost entirely by sitcoms. I have no idea what real-life friends are supposed to do in these situations, but TV friends almost always hang around waiting rooms, exchanging witticisms, accidentally knocking trays out of doctors’ hands and sometimes actually delivering the babies themselves. In reality, though, waiting room seats are best filled by family members, even if they aren’t participating in enough love triangles to keep a multi-threaded plot moving forward.

Josh and Jaime’s new little son displayed his first prenatal predilections towards orneriness by turning sideways in the womb just before he was scheduled for his big introduction to the world, necessitating the appointment for the doctors to pull him out of the womb in a procedure that must have looked, I can only guess, something like when the spaceship pulled Keanu Reeves out of his pink Jell-o pod in the first Matrix movie.

Before their little Eval Knieval started pulling his first attention-getting stunts, Josh and Jaime had been preparing themselves for giving birth the old-fashioned way, with an epidural and lots of swearing, by attending birthing classes, which Josh would then describe to me in graphic detail.

“It’s not bad enough that babies come out all encrusted in goop and nastiness,” he would say, and then he’d go on to describe, in hushed tones and words not fit to print in a family publication, something called “the afterbirth.” I remember sixth grade health class fairly vividly, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any talk of afterbirth, or maybe I just missed it because we were throwing clay from art class at each other every time the teacher wrote on the blackboard. As Josh regaled me with tales of the video he’d just seen in class, I felt like we were on the see-saw at recess as the older kid explained where babies came from, which was pretty much the case, minus the see-saw.

“They actually put this stuff in a bowl and poke it around and examine it like it’s the most interesting thing in the world,” he’d continue, “But the husbands usually don’t see that part anyway, ‘cause they’re out in the hallway high-fiving and making phone calls.”

And so it was that he called me from the hospital on Friday, after the first round of high-fives. Little Issac Phillip Perlson was resting comfortably with mom after their first of many big days together.

“Did you name him after the Isaac from Love Boat or after the Isaac who invented gravity?” I asked.

Turned out it was a family name, and a fine name at that, if perhaps lacking the pizzazz of a “Tulula Does the Hula From Hawaii,” the girl in New Zealand who recently made headlines after successfully suing to have her name changed. My suggestion to Josh and Jaime of “José Does the Pasa Doble From Newtown” never quite got the traction I thought it deserved.

So all is well with the new family, and the stress of going through with a C-section did apparently have some benefits.

“Isaac is already perfect-looking,” he said, as he rode his end of the see-saw towards the sky. “When they come out the normal way, their heads get all squooshed like deflated basketballs.”

You can send emails to Mike Todd’s delivery room at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Backyard Chainsaw Massacre

About a month ago, a maple tree in our backyard gave up the photosynthetic ghost and came crashing to the ground at the edge of our property. The last leaf had barely fluttered to rest before my wife Kara had whipped out her favorite landscaping tools, the credit card and the telephone, to set about making the tree disappear. When I realized what she was doing, I dove across the room like a bodyguard taking a bullet, yelling, “Nooooo!” in slow motion as I lunged for the phone. I knew a Tool Purchasing Opportunity when I saw one, and Kara was about to waste it.

No tool can bestow undeserved coolness upon its owner like the chainsaw. You don’t even have to use it. You can just take the chainsaw out of the box and mount it on the garage wall like a trophy. Your friends will look at your trophy and admire it, while you hook your thumbs through your suspenders and say, “Yup, that’s an 18-incher right there. Bagged it just down the street at a little spot I know. Put up quite a fight. Took all I had just to wrestle it into the shopping cart.”

“Oh, no, that’s the last thing we need,” Kara said. “Remember when the chain snapped on Nelson’s chainsaw and smashed his safety goggles? He had to get stitches on his forehead.”

Leave it to Nelson to wreck all the fun for the rest of us.

“What if we talk to Gary first?” I asked. Our friend Gary works in landscaping and has actual credibility on a topic, a peculiarity among my buddies.

Kara reluctantly agreed, and when I broached the topic at lunch with Gary, he replied, “Oh, there’s a great five-hour safety course you can take. I’ll email you the contact information for the instructor.”

I wilted. Five hours. You could cut a tree apart with left-handed scissors in five hours. Besides, what could an experienced safety expert tell you in a full day of hands-on instruction that a Google of “chainsaw safety” couldn’t tell you in thirty seconds? Not much, I’ll continue assuming.

After reaching an agreement with Kara not to fire it up without adult supervision, I purchased a chainsaw and the sundry quart bottles that the hardware clerk threw into the cart. If you’ve never owned one, you might not know that you can’t just put regular unleaded fuel into a chainsaw; it requires a special mixture of gasoline and testosterone.

Even though the chainsaw is still sitting in its box in the garage, I already feel tougher. There’s not another tool that has captured the popular imagination quite like the chainsaw, and for good reason. Nobody would go to see The Texas T-Square Massacre. Jason Voorhees never donned a hockey mask and went after campers with a plumb-bob. Chainsaws are a powerful, scary tool, and mine is much less likely to halve me when it’s packed safely away in its styrofoam. I don’t regret the purchase, though. A homeowner should have a chainsaw handy; you never know when another tree might fall or a summer camp full of promiscuous teens might open up nearby.

Meanwhile, our tree is still out there in the backyard, awaiting proper dismemberment. Fortunately, it fell away from the house, so for now I can just kind of pretend it isn’t there, like a tip cup by the cash register.

On my twenty-first birthday, a friend of mine bought me a sadistic shot called a “prairie fire,” which consisted of tequila and Tabasco sauce. After I let the shot sit for ten minutes, my friend asked, “What are you waiting for?”

“For it to evaporate,” I replied.

The tree is pretty much the same thing. I’m waiting for it to biodegrade. That’s probably what the safety instructor would tell me to do once he saw me with a chainsaw, anyway.

You can put Mike Todd back together again at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Electroshock for the whole family

If you love something, let it go. But first, strap a low-voltage collar around its neck so that it’ll get zapped if it tries to cross your property line.

My wife Kara and I chose this approach last week with our dog Memphis, who is now the proud detainee of an invisible fence. We’d been dithering for months about whether or not we should subject our pooch and ourselves to the training process for one of these fences, but we eventually decided that giving Memphis the freedom to roam the yard without being tethered to one of us outweighed the yelping that would occur when we received the bill.

“How bad does it hurt?” I asked the fence man before we took Memphis out for her first training session.

“It’s not even what you’d think of as a shock. It’s just a mild correction. It feels like shuffling your feet on the carpet and then touching a doorknob,” he assured us. Everyone in the invisible fence business is very careful to steer away from the word “shock,” preferring the euphemism “correction” instead. It sounds much nicer to correct your dog. It’s like she’s a spelling test.

The settings on the collar went from 1 (Brookstone-style massage) to 7 (incapacitate a rhinoceros). The fence man set Memphis’ collar to 2. Wearing that collar with the little plastic box under her neck, Memphis looked like a miniature black St. Bernard, on her way to bring batteries to some stranded robots.

The learning process for an invisible fence required Kara to go just outside of the boundary, kneeling and making a big show of shaking the little white flags that dotted the perimeter while saying, “No!” Memphis of course ran straight out to say hello, receiving a warning beep and then her first correction, which she enjoyed receiving exactly as much as I enjoy receiving things like wedgies and property tax bills. When Memphis responded the way we’d hoped, turning away from Kara and coming back to me, I gave her a treat, which she accepted as she looked up at me with eyes that said, “Don’t taze me, bro. Don’t taze me.”

John Mellencamp once sang, “Sometimes love don’t feel like it should,” which he must have penned shortly after installing his own invisible fence. I could only watch the first few minutes of training through the fingers that were covering my eyes, much like how I’d watch horror movies if I didn’t go hide under the covers every time somebody puts one on. Fortunately for all of us, Memphis learned very quickly. After a handful of corrections, snuggling with a rabid wolverine or taking a joyride with Nick Nolte would have been higher on her to-do list than getting anywhere near those white flags.

After her first day of training, I finally couldn’t stand not knowing firsthand exactly how much juice her collar was putting out. It didn’t seem fair to subject our animal to something that I wouldn’t subject myself to, which, incidentally, is how we found out how much better teriyaki rawhides taste.

I took the collar out to the property line, pressed the metal contacts against my forearm, ignored the warning beep and walked across.

When I came to, I found that the best thing about my experiment was that the paramedic gave me a free lollipop, the big kind with white swirls in it, which helped to make up for the fact that my pants had burned off.

In truth, the correction doesn’t even feel as bad as a carpet-to-doorknob shock. I can see why it’s a sensation that a dog would rather not prolong, but I feel better knowing that we’re not giving our dog freedom at the expense of turning her into a Tesla coil.

You can correct Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.