Taking a (lemonade) stand

As our small family strolled around the bend at the top of the hill, we stumbled right into a cleverly laid trap, devised by some neighborhood kids to separate innocent pedestrians from their money.

“Oh, cute, a lemonade stand,” my wife Kara said.

Four kids stood beside a card table at the end of a driveway eyeing us thirstily, rubbing their hands together and probably muttering something about “rubes” and how people like us are born every minute.

As we got closer to them, I broke the bad news.

“Sorry, guys, we didn’t bring any money with us,” I said, patting my shorts to give the International Sign of Empty Pockets.

The oldest kid, probably about nine, said, “It’s okay, you don’t have to pay,” as he poured two plastic cups from his pitcher.

The other three looked at him as if he’d just stomped on an iPhone. The motion to hand out free lemonade to random old people had clearly not been discussed in committee.

“You can’t just give it away for freeeee,” one of them said in the kind of little-kid whisper that’s louder than an adult’s speaking voice.

The ringleader brushed them off and held out two cups for us, not at all bothered by the flaw in his business model.

“That’s really sweet,” Kara said. “We’ll come back and put a dollar in your mailbox tonight.”

As we strolled off drinking the first lemonade-stand purchase we’d ever made on credit, I was impressed that the kids were at least selling a decent product. When I was their age, my neighbor Louie and I went around the neighborhood selling dogwood flowers we’d picked from a tree in the backyard, a product so useless that Brookstone might consider selling it if the flowers vibrated or cleaned your golf tees. Our business folded after making twelve cents more than it would have without Mrs. Yacoe’s pity.

Louie and I brought the same acumen to mechanical engineering that we did to the business world. Our prototype model for a zip line out of my tree house consisted of a rope running from the tree house to the bottom of a pine tree fifty feet away, with a log of my parents’ firewood serving as a seat. We tied a rope to one end of the log, ran that rope over the zipline, then tied off the other end of the log.

“This is going to be awesome,” Louie said, positioning himself onto the firewood, his feet dangling.

He pushed off of the tree house and hung in the air for a moment, stationary. I remember the look of surprise on his face as he looked back at me, amazed that he wasn’t zipping anywhere. In slow motion, the log began to tilt, and in a moment, Louie was plummeting eight feet into the vegetation below.

“Eww, I landed in the pee bush!” he screamed.

Technically, it was a rhododendron, but Louie’s taxonomy was more apt. Before Nintendo had been invented, little boys could only entertain themselves by peeing from the highest points they could find, a fact that my dad failed to appreciate that time he was building the lower deck when the highest point Louie and I could find was the upper deck.

In any event, back in our neighborhood, Kara settled our debts in the ringleader’s mailbox that night. The following day, he was out there peddling his citrusy wares by himself, clearly the member of the group with the most staying power, the Justin to their ‘N SYNC. This time, he wore a navy blue sport coat with big brass buttons, as if maybe he was considering opening franchises in adjacent driveways, or perhaps selling insurance. Which would probably be much more lucrative than the dogwood flower business.

You can make lemonade out of Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Procreation as contraception

“We’re not going to have any kids. It’s final, that’s the decision,” our friend Colleen said as we strolled around our neighborhood. She braced herself for the ensuing argument. People with kids are always trying to pressure their childless friends into having babies, most likely because certain emotional states seem to love company.

“Are you going to get a boat instead?” I asked.

As I understand it, the payoff for not having kids, besides the millions of extra hours of sleep, is that you get to have a boat. Also, you get to live your entire adult life without having the term “urine-soaked” apply to you.

Though she might have been expecting one, Colleen wasn’t going to get an argument from us. Back when Kara was pregnant, we used to work on our friends, saying, “Aw, come on, have one!” like we were offering them a Chiclet. But now that we’ve lived through the first ten months of parenthood, we’d never dream of pressuring anyone else into it, even those, like Colleen and Chris, who would be primo parents. The decision to upend your life and permanently pause your video games needs to come from you and your partner alone, not from those who might be looking to score an occasional playdate out of the transaction.

Of course, this doesn’t stop random passersby from asking me and Kara when we’re going to have another baby, which seems a lot like walking up to someone as they crawl out of the smoking wreckage of their overturned vehicle and asking, “When are you gonna do that again?”

“Not anytime soon, I hope,” you’d reply, in either situation.

We’ll get around to expanding our family eventually, and I don’t mean to imply that parenthood has been a bad experience. Sometimes, it’s been terrible. Most of the time, terribly rewarding.

For us, having a baby is like this: There’s a restaurant on the Jersey Shore that gives you a free T-shirt if you can eat an entire XXL pie by yourself. Several years ago, Kara agreed to go there with me and two of our guy friends on the condition that she could order just a salad. We all agreed, and then pressured her into getting a pizza anyway.

“We’ll help you out down the home stretch. We promise,” we lied.

With our three plates clean, and half a pie remaining on Kara’s plate, the three guys just stared at the table, trying not to make eye contact. We just couldn’t eat any more of that pizza.

That’s how Kara and I both feel about having another baby right now. We just can’t eat any more of that pizza, not yet.

“I just wanted a stupid salad!” Kara says every time I wear my awesome T-shirt.

Several of our friends are standing at the edge of the gene pool and deciding that it’s doing just fine without their contributions. Colleen and Chris were visiting us with another couple last weekend, who also floated the possibility that they might not have kids.

“Oh, can we go to a place that has a bar in the pool?” one of them said, as they planned the trip the four of them are taking to Cancun this summer. Poor, poor childless people.

“It’s gotta be a place that doesn’t allow kids. I don’t need all the ruckus while I’m trying to relax,” came the reply, as our son Evan banged spoons together in the next room.

Then Kara and I entered the room, and everyone fell silent.

“Sorry, we started talking about it when you weren’t here,” they said, looking like they’d been caught eating sundaes by their lactose intolerant friends.

Among his many powers, Evan has rendered our passports completely useless. Unless one of us makes a break for it.

You can sail away with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

You can go home again, but your stuff’s gone

“Here,” Mom said during their recent visit to our house, dropping a trash bag full of treasures from my old room into my current garage. Dad followed, carrying three large boxes of junk non grata, setting them down with a smile.

At some point, parents of adult children will rebel against having their homes used as self-storage facilities. My in-laws are still trying to figure out how to get rid of their kids’ kayaks, wedding dresses and trophies from soccer tournaments held when ALF was still on the air.

As of last month, the lease abruptly ended on the closet in my old bedroom, a mere fourteen years after I’d moved out. Apparently, my parents have never heard of the term “grace period.”

The benefit of being the youngest kid in the family is that when you’re in middle school and your sister goes to college, you get to pick the best room in the house (hers), and it stays yours forever, rightfully stolen. Or so I thought.

Giving up my room in the basement has been a Band-aid that my parents have been ripping off for about a decade. I’ll never forget coming home after graduating college to find that they had turned my room into a guest room. I’d been demoted to guest status. No more Phish posters on the wall. No more glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. It was all wrong. The bedroom in the basement is supposed to remain a museum, in perpetuity, to your son’s tastes during his senior year of high school.

“It took us three hours to scrape those stars off the ceiling,” Mom said.

“But they were in the right constellations and everything,” I protested, too late. The stars were already aligned. In the trash can.

Their recent drive to rid their house of my belongings made much more sense last weekend, when we brought their grandson Evan for a visit. We hadn’t visited since Christmas, largely because driving four hours with an infant presents certain challenges that we’re just learning how to handle. Remember that scene from the movie Tommy Boy, when the deer wakes up in the backseat and proceeds to shred the car from the inside out? It’s like that, but without antlers.

When we arrived at their house, my wife Kara was the first to head down to the basement. After a few moments, her voice drifted up the stairs: “Awwwww.”

My parents’ storage room, the room where broken space heaters previously went to live out their golden years under piles of old wreaths, where grabbing a canteen off the back shelf had once required a harness and climbing equipment, had been converted into a nursery.

The junk was all gone. A crib sat against the far wall, next to a rocking chair and a changing table. A nightlight cast a dim glow from the top of a filing cabinet.

“We’ve been busy,” Mom said, marking the understatement of the weekend.

Creating a new nursery for Evan meant that we didn’t have to sleep with his crib in the guest room anymore, which was fantastic news for us. While Evan is a wonderful baby, when you’re trying to sleep, he’s a worse roommate than the one my buddy Derek had in college, who used to wipe his butt with Derek’s towels.

My folks had taken enough stuff to Good Will to warrant a memorial wing. They’d even removed all their dusty old liquor bottles, which was just as well, since most of them had turned into water over the years anyway. Teenagers seem to have that power. Kind of like Jesus, but in reverse.

Anyway, Evan enjoyed his promotion and slept peacefully in his new room, which he should have dibs on for at least the next thirty years.

You can watch ALF with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Giving caution the finger

If you ever find yourself saying, “My friends spent an hour on the beach looking for the rest of my finger, but they never found it,” there’s a decent chance that you haven’t had the best week.

Last Saturday, I learned of my buddy Rob’s dedigitation when he texted a gruesome photo to my cell phone.

“Good lord!” I said, wincing.

“What’s the matter?” my wife Kara asked.

“Rob just texted me a picture with the top of his right ring finger missing. Doesn’t he know that it costs me a dollar to receive photos to my phone?” I said.

Of course, a good friend losing a beloved body part is not really a proper occasion to complain about donating a dollar to Verizon, but if someone had asked me which of my friends would find a way to chop off the tip of their finger, Rob would have been pretty high up on a very competitive list.

On ski trips in high school, Rob would launch himself over dump-truck-sized jumps with an impressive disregard for his own well-being, sometimes pulling off stunning landings that would earn disbelieving praise from anyone witnessing his flight path, though sometimes he’d land on various non-load-bearing bones as he tumbled to an abrupt stop at the nearest tree trunk, scattering assorted skiing implements and winter outerwear across the hill behind him as twelve-year-olds shouted, “Yard sale!” from the chairlift.

On a ski trip after college, after watching Rob jump off of a twenty-foot cliff and land softly in the powder below, our friend Johnny turned to me and said, “Did you know that Rob doesn’t have health insurance?”

It’s too bad he couldn’t have borrowed mine, since the biggest risk I take while skiing is sipping the hot cocoa before it has a chance to cool down.

Rob lives a few blocks from the beach in LA now, and has taken up kitesurfing as a hobby. Kitesurfing is a sport in which mentally unbalanced people tie snowboards to their feet and let giant kites drag them around the ocean. Rob once let me fly his smaller practice kite in a parking lot, and when the wind caught the kite for the first time, it yanked me off my feet like I was holding on for dear life to a dragon’s leash.

Photos courtesy of Rob "Nine Fingers" Kalmbach

Last week, as Rob was in the process of landing his kite on the beach, he lost his balance for a split second and reached his hand out to steady himself just as the kite, according to Rob, “powered up.” As the kite shot into the sky, its line sliced through the air with enough speed to shear the top half-inch of Rob’s ring finger clean off, marking the first of several days in which Rob would find it “kind of tough to type.”

Part of me feels terrible for Rob, though he fortunately now has health insurance that helped to make his finger almost as good as new, if just a bit shorter. But the other part of me is a little jealous that not only has Rob earned himself a conversation starter for life, but he also managed to mangle himself in such a cool way. The coolest way I could ever hope to auto-amputate anything is through a freak bagel mishap, at best.

Incidentally, someone once told me authoritatively that bagel-slicing accidents are the number-one cause of emergency room visits. If that is true, perhaps subsidies for English muffins should have been included in the recent health care bill.

“It feels much better now,” Rob told me a couple of days ago. “And even if my friends had found my finger, the doctors wouldn’t have been able to put it back on.”

So while Rob recovers, at least he can take some solace in that, if even just for a few moments, he made a lucky seagull very happy.

You can give Mike Todd the finger at mikectodd@gmail.com.

P.S. If you're dying to see disgusting pics of Rob's finger, scroll down in this kitesurfing forum (Rob's name in the forum is Wavehucker.) If you clicked that link, I bet you're the kind of person who inhales really deeply when somebody goes, "Oh, man, that STINKS!"

Invasion of the personality snatchers

“Hello,” my buddy Josh said when he answered the phone last week, and I could tell immediately that something wasn’t right.

“Aw, dude, you’re still at work, aren’t you?” I asked. It’s easy to tell when a friend answers the phone while they’re still at work, because they’ll sound just like themselves, except with their souls removed.

“Yes, I am,” he replied in a calm, hollow monotone, the kind of voice someone might use to lower your guard just before they lunge across the table at you.

It was strange to hear Josh’s vacant voice on the other end of the line. He usually calls me during his afternoon commute on his way to pick up his son from daycare, catching me in the final minutes of the workday.

“Now’s not a good time. I’m just packing up to leave for the day,” I’ll say.

“Tell me when you’re walking down the hall, past everyone’s offices,” he’ll reply.

“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I’ll say.

“You’re walking down the hall right now, aren’t you?” he’ll say, giving me a single instant to cover my cell phone’s earpiece with my thumb before he launches an unbroken string of high-decibel obscenities into the phone, continuing his never-ending quest to humiliate me, a quest that began in college when he’d hide home enema kits and feminine hygiene products under the microwave pizzas in my shopping cart.

But this time, he was subdued, domesticated, neutered. Or maybe spayed, whichever one happens to dudes.

“Shouldn’t you still be at work?” he asked.

“I left a few minutes early today, since I got in two hours early,” I replied.

Being an early person at work is an adjustment, since you have to find the right time to casually mention to everyone else how early you came in. Sure, the good parking spot you snagged should tip everyone off, but what if they didn’t notice? It’s tougher than you might think to squeeze a mention of a beautiful sunrise into a team meeting.

After thirty-two years of unsuccessful attempts at becoming a morning person, I’ve finally discovered the trick. The people who manufacture alarm clocks might want to consider dumping contraceptives in the water supply before babies run them out of business; it’s been nearly a year since I awoke to something other than the sound of our son crying, and never has the world seen a more effective person-waking device. Terminators are made to kill people. Babies are made to wake them up.

Sometimes, it’s his crying that wakes me up directly, other times his morning whimpering sets off a Rube Goldberg-type chain of events, causing the dog to wake up and flap her ears back-and-forth, making my wife Kara roll over and groan, compelling her knee to extend, swinging her foot across the bed and into my butt, forcing me to light the Bunsen burner that slowly ignites my synapses.

That morning, as Kara and I stumbled around the house at 5:20am, she opened the refrigerator door and said, “I need milk for my coffee.” And then she uttered a sentence that I had never heard before in all of my thirty-two years (twelve years, if you subtract PlayStation time). As she spoke, my brain twitched, trying to make sense out of the strange combination of words coming out of her mouth.

She turned to me and said, “What time does the grocery store open?”

And there, in those seven simple words, was the perfect summation of parenthood. What time does the grocery store open? It’s a question that someone without children could never dream up in their wildest imaginations. And if you asked that question to a single person, it would sound to them as if you were speaking Klingon.

You can shout obscenities into Mike Todd’s earpiece at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Taking our show on the trail

What’s a ton of prevention worth?

“I remember when we used to have electricity,” I said to my wife Kara last weekend, holding the plug to the vacuum cleaner in the air. “That was so awesome.”

We’d been guilted into the cleaning our house by our son Evan’s daycare provider, who told us as we were picking him up last week that, “I have to wait until you pick up Evan in the afternoon before I can vacuum. It really seems to scare him.”

She said this peering over her glasses at us, the clear implication being that Evan had never seen a vacuum cleaner in operation before. Kara and I took great umbrage at this charge, which was exceeded in its offensiveness only by its veracity.

“Oh, come on, we still have electricity,” Kara replied. “You just have to take the plugs out of the sockets first.”

Much like Johnny Appleseed spreading a trail of trees in his wake, Kara Socketplug travels around our house, plugging sockets I didn’t even know we had, in preparation for a time when our completely immobile son will start wandering around, trying to jab various implements into them.

“Really? Evan won’t be able to reach that plug until he grows three feet and learns to work a stepladder,” I said, pointing to the outlet behind the toaster.

Also, is it possible that we learned a little too much about Johnny Appleseed as kids? We were led to believe that he was a historical figure on par with George Washington and whoever the second president was, but you hardly ever hear anyone making an argument about what our Founding Landscaper intended.

In any event, of course it’s a good thing that Kara is preparing our house for Evan’s impending mobility, but back when we were kids, we all got along just fine, even though I’m pretty sure outlet plugs hadn’t been invented yet. Sure, a kid occasionally stuck some scissors in there, but that just evened the playing field for lefties, whose scissors were coated in green rubber, giving them God-like powers.

Not only did my parents not have outlet plugs, they furnished their living room with a coffee table that consisted of a huge square pane of glass sitting upon a wooden block, which suspended the four pointy glass corners at toddler-head height. If that table was left on a beach on a remote Pacific island, the natives would immediately start using it to crack open coconuts. And to display their hardcover travel books.

“We did everything wrong when you were kids. It’s a wonder anyone survived,” my mom said recently. Mom’s friend had just been babysitting for her new granddaughter who was having a crying fit, so she put a dab of honey on the end of the pacifier, a common practice from when she’d been a new mom, but which is apparently now a no-no.

When the baby’s mother returned home and found out what had happened, she screamed, “Why are you trying to kill my baby?”

If you’re trying to attract a new mother, you might be better off using vinegar. Honey seems to make them mad.

That scene reminded me of the time we’d brought Evan to a party, and our friend Emily dipped her finger in barbecue sauce and lifted it towards Evan’s mouth. I watched in amazement, figuring she was joking, not realizing she was seriously about to give it to him. Kara leapt into action, smacking Emily’s hand like a Kung Fu master at the last moment.

“Ouch!” Emily said.

“Hiiiii-yah!” Kara replied.

New parents are probably justified in being slightly paranoid, though, because we’re getting advice from the same people who used to rub whiskey on our gums when we were teething, presumably because they’d run out of musket balls for us to chew on.

You can crack Mike Todd’s coconuts at mikectodd@gmail.com.

That's just how he rolls

Spring training for a mid-life crisis

“This is going to be a tough birthday for me,” I said to my wife Kara last week, as her thirtieth birthday approached.

“For you? But it’s my birthday,” she said.

“I know, but I just realized that I’ll never get the chance to sleep with someone in their twenties, like, ever again,” I said, pausing for a moment to allow her time to lavish me with sympathy.

She replied, “Oh, you’ll survive. I haven’t slept with someone in their twenties for years.”

Besides her willingness to be seen with me in public, Kara’s quick wit is one of the things that attracted me to her in the first place. Fortunately, the old battle axe hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

As much as I might joke about Kara getting old despite the fact that she’s nearly three years my junior, the thirtieth birthday can be a tough cake to swallow. Few other birthdays, and certainly none of the ones preceding it, elicit quite the same amount of introspection.

“We never went to Scotland. Are we ever going to get there?” she asked yesterday.

Thirty seems to be the age when our friends who haven’t started families begin to wonder if they’re waiting too long, and those who have started families begin to wonder if they’re ever going to get to visit exotic places again, like Scotland or the movie theater.

“And what about seeing Billy Elliot on Broadway? It’ll be gone by the time we get around to it,” she said.

Of course, our restricted recreational activities these days are much more a function of parenthood than age. Ever since the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman came out, you occasionally hear someone mentioning their Bucket List, the list of everything they want to do before they kick the bucket. I realized then that I was witnessing Kara going through her Minivan List: the list of everything she wanted to do before she began serving her ten-to-twenty-year sentence in a minivan.

When you’re parenting a nine-month-old, it becomes easy to imagine that, for the rest of your life, “fun” will begin with chirpy voices saying, “It’s learning time. Yippee!” when you push the big red button beside the Fisher-Price logo.

“Well, at least when we’re able to go out and have fun again, we’ll be eligible for senior discounts,” I comforted her.

Last weekend, we watched a bit on TV in which the comedian Louis C.K. noted that parents are better at appreciating the little things in life. He said that the walk around the car to the driver’s door after you’ve put the kid in the backseat is a miniature vacation, “like taking a Carnival Cruise.” That may be true, but I think Kara will be looking for something a little better than that for her birthday.

The roundness of a birthday number puts extra pressure on a spouse to come up with a good idea for a present. For my thirtieth, Kara booked us on a hot air balloon ride, which is going to be a tough act to follow. With a baby in the mix now, trying to think of something in that same vein is going to be difficult. Skydiving might be fun, but I’m not sure our Ergobaby carrier is safety rated for speeds approaching terminal velocity.

To get too disheartened about our inability to venture further beyond the house than Babies R Us, though, we’d have to completely overlook the time-honored tradition of peeling out of the grandparents’ driveway while a baby-laden carseat spins in place on the welcome mat. We may not get as far as Scotland this time, but a weekend is plenty of time to knock an item or two off the Minivan List.

You can blow out Kara Todd’s candles at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The text is on the wall

“Guess how many text messages went through my daughter’s cell phone last month,” our friend Judi said over lunch recently.

You have to be careful when somebody asks you to guess how many. The correct answer must be wacky or they wouldn’t be asking, but you don’t want to steal any thunder by overshooting. That’s why I always guess fifteen, no matter what the question.

“Fifteen,” I guessed.

Honestly, I have grown so cynical and jaded in my ever-advancing thirty-two years that I thought nothing could amaze me anymore, except maybe the movie Avatar, and also people who think that snow in the Northeast disproves global warming.

Judi set down her drink and said, “Eight thousand.”

I wish I’d been drinking milk at that moment so that I could have sprayed it out of my nose in a great white plume, which would have been the only appropriate reaction.

Eight thousand text messages in one month, assuming 31 days to a month and 16 hours of consciousness per day, and not subtracting the hours the average teen spends daydreaming about vampires or the Jonas Brothers, equals one text every 3.72 waking minutes, though you might want to run those numbers past someone who uses math for something other than tips.

On my texting plan, Judi’s daughter would have rung up $1,600 in charges in that month. I’m on the “Either You’re Old or You Have No Friends, or Possibly Both,” plan, which charges twenty cents for a text message, and a buck or two if someone sends a picture.

“Aw, dude, I-Ball just texted a picture of his kid dressed like a Nittany Lion,” I’ll say.

“What? It’s cute,” my wife Kara will reply.

“You know what would be cuter? Not paying two bucks to look at it,” I’ll reply, then immediately I’ll feel like an old crank railing against technology, probably the same way my grandfather would have complained about color TV or microwave ovens. It’s just a shame nobody’s invented a way to attach a picture to an email so that I could see I-ball’s kids for free.

When a friend looked at my phone recently, she said, “Wow, that doesn’t have a keyboard on it? I didn’t think they still made those.”

It’s true that my phone is technologically ancient, having been purchased nearly two entire years ago, but there was a time when all phones just had numbers on them. You only used those little letters above the numbers to dial 1-800-MATTRES, or, if you were twelve, to make crank calls to 459-HUMP.

I’ve gotten so old, I can remember when “text” was a noun. And also when Geraldo Rivera got hit in the face with a chair. That was really big news back then. These days, I feel like Geraldo could get hit in the face with a sleeper sofa and nobody would care.

I’ve always held out hope that I might be the first cool adult in history, but now I understand why so many countless millions have failed before me. Just when you start to believe that teenagers might think you’re cool because you still say the word “dude” without irony, they go and develop a new language, one that is spoken entirely with their thumbs.

“It’s just how they communicate now,” Judi told Kara and me as our mouths hung open, occasionally forming the words “eight thousand” silently. Judi was like Jane Goodall, explaining apes to people who would never understand without living in the jungle themselves. Fortunately, our son Evan isn’t a year old yet, so even though he’d be obsolete if he were a cell phone, our family won’t be moving to the jungle for about twelve more years.

You can send text messages via email to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The ladies’ room: Not just for ladies anymore

“Oh, man, this is an important one,” I said as my wife Kara glared back at me.

“Ready?” she asked.

“OK, I’m ready. No, no, I’m not ready. OK, let’s do it,” I replied.

Our eyes locked like two heavyweights listening to the referee as he told us to have a clean fight.

“Here we go,” Kara said, holding up her fist between us.

“One-two-three, shoot,” I replied. In my head, I’d been planning to go with scissors all along, but my hand mutinied and went with paper instead. And there were Kara’s two fingers, outstretched, making a V for victory, a V that opened and closed as her fingers scissored through the air.

With the grim reality of Kara’s victory confronting me, I pulled the diaper bag over my shoulder and picked up our son, whose pants were filled with a grim reality of their own.

“Have fun back there,” Kara said, smiling.

We were eating lunch in a pub that had only half of its power restored after another hernia-inducing snowstorm. I pushed open the old wooden door to the men’s room, hoping to find a changing station, though guessing that I was more likely to find the entrance to Narnia. What I found was a pedestal sink, a john and a urinal crammed into a room that might have fit into a breadbox, if breadboxes still existed.

“Oh, Buddy, we’d have to plant your diaper on a flagpole in here,” I said to Evan as he stared at the candle beside the soap dispenser, the only source of light in the room. Perhaps blueprints for nuclear submarines had been drawn up in that room, or great novels written, but I can say with some degree of certainty that those walls had never seen a dirty diaper. The only viable option for changing Evan was the floor, which taught me that I actually do have some standards.

Kara and I treat our rock-paper-scissors results as binding contracts, so returning to the table as a failure was not an option. Evan and I exited the men’s room and made a U-turn, knocking with gusto on the ladies’ room door before entering.

A strange new wonderland stretched out for acres in front of us, adorned with ornate mirrors and vases full of flowers. The candlelight brought an ambience that made me check the floor for a trail of rose petals. I placed Evan on the ample countertop and began rummaging through the diaper bag, which Kara had packed as if, after lunch, we might decide to through-hike the Appalachian Trail. I started pulling everything out of the bag, burying Evan under three outfits, seven bibs, assorted bottles and medicines, and still no diapers. Finally, I found them in a secret compartment, presumably designed to foil muggers.

Evan and I emerged from the ladies’ room triumphant, though I hope he didn’t get too spoiled in there. In the Spartan future waiting for him in the men’s room, he’ll be lucky if the cruel world throws him a urinal divider.

Not every man takes his diaper-changing responsibilities so seriously. A couple of months ago, while Kara and I picked up a pizza together, our favorite pizza man said, “Angela and I raised six children together, and I never changed a single diaper.”

He said this beaming with pride, looking at me to see if I was impressed.

I glanced at Kara, whose jaw had dropped. As he continued to brag with our pizza on the counter between us, I began to worry that Kara’s gaze might burn the crust.

In the parking lot afterwards, she said, “I can’t believe that guy never changed a diaper. Seriously, I think I would kill you.”

And perhaps she would. But I think she was missing the bigger point, which is that our pizza guy must be the world’s best rock-paper-scissors player.

You can try to change Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.