June 15, 2009
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June 15, 2010
Happy Birthday, Little Man “Grab him!” a neighbor called as the
“Thanks, we’ve been trying to get our hands on him,” the neighbor said. “Not sure who he belongs to, but he looks lost.”
The animal’s tags provided no contact name, so we didn’t have much choice but to leave him with the neighbor and head on our way. A few minutes later, an SUV idled past, and the frantic driver asked if we’d seen a
“Nope, sorry,” we replied, and as he drove off, we all high-fived to celebrate a practical joke well-played. Sometimes, I wonder if he ever found his pet rodent, but the more important thing was that we all had a good laugh at his expense.
But in real life, I got in his car and drove back with him to the neighbor that was temporarily running a
“Your dog’s in the house around the corner. The greenish one, I think,” I said.
“Wasn’t it tan?” my wife Kara asked.
“It might have had shutters,” Colleen chimed in.
So after hopping in a stranger’s car (which I hardly ever do without the promise of candy, preferably peanut-butter-based), the man did what any responsible dog owner would do after losing his beloved family pet: blame his wife.
“I told her not to leave him tied up in the backyard alone, especially with all the hawks we have around here,” he said. He had a point. To a hawk, a
Then he said, “I told her, ‘You want to see what fifteen-hundred dollars looks like flying off over the horizon?’”
I tried not to flinch at the number. Did you know that a
By comparison, our dog
In any event, perhaps that lady in
Her story stuck in my mind because it contained this line, in explaining why the thirty-seven pound bag would have created over one hundred pounds of street drugs, had she not alerted the police: “Dealers typically dilute the cocaine with baby formula or some other odorless, flavorless material.”
Now I’m no drug dealer, though watching all five seasons of The Wire should count for some sort of apprentice certification, but clearly, anyone who chooses to dilute drugs with baby formula has never had a baby. One glance at our most recent Babies R’ Us receipt would show even the novice criminal that it would be much more cost-effective to dilute cocaine with something less expensive than baby formula, such as more cocaine.
You can return Mike Todd to his rightful owner at
“Sorry, it must have fallen out of my pocket,” I said, taking the quarter and dropping it in my change jar. If I hadn’t taken that quarter, I wondered what Kara might have done with it, since the change jar seems to be a historically masculine phenomenon, like Old Spice and war. Where do women keep their spare change? Every guy on the planet has a coffee can somewhere filled with change, and he wants you to guess how much was in there the last time he cashed it in. Filling change jars is how we pass the time when we can’t be scratching ourselves, playing Call of Duty or both.
The last time we visited my parents, I was walking out of the grocery store with Mom when she said, “I dumped your dad’s pennies into that Coinstar machine a couple of weeks ago. It was fun.”
I stared back at her, aghast. A Coinstar is kind of like the coin-sorting machines they have at many banks, except instead of being free, it provides the service of skimming 9% off your hard-squirreled money.
“But the bank does it for FREE!” I said.
“Well, it was fun,” Mom replied, and I could tell that my financial advice would be more appreciated by the kid at the Skill Crane machine. Still, except for the ones that dispense earthworms, I have a hard time thinking of a vending machine I’d be less likely to use than a Coinstar, the no-armed bandit.
The last time I liquidated my change jar at the bank, there was almost half a stitch in that thing. A stitch is the new monetary unit that Kara and I invented recently, after we brought our son Evan to the ER for a small cut on his head.
A few weeks later, Kara held the bill in her hand and said, “Guess how much Evan’s stitch cost.”
Trying to go ridiculously high, I guessed $600.
“Higher,” she replied, and my stomach sank lower. A nurse had spent fifteen minutes stitching Evan up and calming his traumatized parents, a sure and soothing hand for which we remain eternally grateful, but I was beginning to wonder how we had spent this much money without scoring at least a small powerboat.
“Oh, just put me out of my misery,” I said.
“Just over $700,” Kara replied, putting me out of, and into, my misery. “It would have been $1,800 without insurance.”
Clearly, we should have saved the stitch rather than letting Evan’s pediatrician throw it away, since it was woven from the downy undercoat of a virgin Sasquatch.
Still, we can’t really complain. The hospital had successfully transferred the trauma from Evan’s head to our bank account, while also giving us a handy new financial term.
“Oh, come on, it doesn’t even cost a tenth of a stitch,” you might hear one of us saying.
In any event, Kara’s right; with Evan crawling around the house eating everything in sight, it’s time to be more careful about flinging coins around. Besides, if I ever decide I’d like my spare change devoured, there’s always Coinstar.
You can give 9% of your spare change to Mike Todd at
Even a decade ago, the thought of being excited about shrubbery would have been exceedingly depressing, but I’ve found that with each passing year, it becomes easier and easier to get jazzed about small-leaf rhododendron. And Imodium AD.
At this point, there’s really no reason to pretend that coolness is an attainable goal anyway. After eating a few slices of pizza last Saturday night, I officially stepped across the wrinkly threshold to oldpersondom. Just before climbing into bed at 10pm, I preemptively popped a Pepto pill, then paused, realizing in horror that this was first time in my life I’d taken medicine for indigestion I didn’t even have yet.
It was like that scene from The Matrix – once you take the pink pill, there’s no turning back. I’ve seen how deep the rabbit hole goes, and it ends at the early bird special at Denny’s.
Our new shrubs look just fine, exactly how you’d expect a few freshly planted bushes to look, but they represent something much more: a hard-won victory, however fleeting, of order over entropy. Over the past few years, the flowerbed we’d inherited from the previous owners of our house had turned into flower bedlam, a tangled embarrassment of scraggly flowers, vibrant weeds and assorted dead things.
“That’s a weed, I’m yanking it,” I’d say.
“No, no, I think that’s a mum,” my wife Kara would say, pleading for the life of each plant individually, like my sister used to do with every fish my dad ever caught.
Finally, last weekend, armed with a shovel and a wheelbarrow, I successfully beat back the forces of chaos and their dandelion hordes. There’s just something about the smell of compost, the feel of dirt under your fingernails and the taste of peat moss wafting in your face, something that makes you wish you were paying someone else to experience them.
By the way, the lady at the nursery tricked me into buying two bags of compost. I didn’t really know what compost was, except that it was good for plants and that hippies liked to carry on about it. I’d already paid by the time I went to pick up the bags, which pictured a large cow on front and proudly proclaimed, “Composted cow manure. Made in
“Made in
The current motivation for pulling our house out of disarray is our son’s upcoming first birthday party, which promises to be the most fun he’ll have no idea that he’s having. Of course, attendant with inviting large numbers of friends and family over to your house is noticing that the place is falling down around you.
Kara and I had known for some time that our front steps were a little rickety, as apparently the original builders didn’t foresee the unlikely event that people might walk on them. After returning from the hardware store with seventeen dollars worth of brackets and braces, ready to strike another blow against disorder in the world, I discovered that the bottom of the steps had completely rotted out. I’d have better luck reinforcing a Kit Kat bar.
Fortunately, I have other things in life to help keep these minor inconveniences in perspective. Like the leak in the attic.
You can plop Mike Todd in your compost heap at
Foreshadowing the scene I was about to encounter, the dog came trotting through the living room with great stripes of mashed green beans laced across her back.
As I entered the kitchen, I saw Kara sitting next to our son Evan, who was perched in his high chair, conducting an orchestra with his rubber spoon. From the looks of their surroundings, the Jolly Green Giant had just spontaneously combusted in the kitchen. The floor, the baby and the wife were all spattered with thick green goop.
“He got a hold of the beans,” Kara said.
Evan looked at me and gave a Bronx cheer from behind his bean mask. He doesn’t know any words yet, but he often delivers lengthy monologues using nothing but blown raspberries.
“Try to use words,” Kara will say to him as I blow raspberries back. She’s only worried that we’re not doing enough to encourage his verbal development because she doesn’t understand that up until the age of twelve, little boys carry on their most meaningful conversations in fart noises anyway.
When Evan was smaller, and the thought of being able to eat mashed green beans was just a legume in his eye, Kara asked her cousin Roscoe, a parent of two, “Does it ever get any easier?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Roscoe replied after a moment. “But it doesn’t really get any harder, either. As soon as you stop having to worry about one thing they outgrow, you start having to worry about something new they get into. You just keep trading one thing for another.”
We found that to be an interesting notion, that parenthood is just a constant flow of new challenges of roughly uniform difficulty. I’d be inclined to conjecture that nothing is as hard as the first few months of parenthood, when we’d fall asleep at the base of the crib because we were too exhausted to crawl back to bed, but then I’ve never experienced potty training, which I gather can turn parts of your house into a sort of demented Jackson Pollock painting.
Our newest challenge is dealing with a mobile Evan, who has just discovered the wonders of crawling, and whose middle name should now either be “Danger” or “Faceplant.” His favorite activity, when he’s not trying to topple a bookshelf onto himself, is to motor around the floor, picking up dog hair and eating dust bunnies. Essentially, our child has turned into a Roomba. (If you’re unfamiliar with Roomba, the little vacuuming robot, you can simulate ownership of one by dropping a metal trash can lid on your carpet and telling your friends, “I don’t know why it’s not working.”)
Anyway, whether there’s anything to Roscoe’s theory or not, Kara and I have noticed the challenges of parenting evolving lately. For instance, as Evan slowly shifts from bottles to solid food, we’ve had to evolve to using simple tools, like putty knives, to clean the kitchen.
The wealth of pureed food flying about the house has been enthusiastically greeted by the dog, who has proven to be a valuable ally in the fight to de-Gerberize the house. While Evan might not be the most effective vacuum,
That day,
You can show your Roomba off to Mike Todd at
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