We have no phone numbers stored in our house phone, which we’ve kept as a relic of a simpler era, a time when you could actually get stuck on the phone with people who weren’t even calling to talk to you.
“Oh, hi, Aunt Darla. No, Mom’s not here. Yes, I’d love to hear about your goiter.”
But with my cell phone stranded all the way upstairs, an impossible journey away on my weakened, beflanneled legs, my only hope for summoning my wife lay with our quaint little house phone, the telecommunications equivalent of a butter churn.
It’s often said that Einstein didn’t know his own phone number, so perhaps I can be forgiven for not knowing my wife’s. As I suffered on the couch, I sifted through digits in my mind, searching for a combination that sounded right. Remembering phone numbers is a skill that just isn’t relevant anymore, like knowing basic grammar, growing sideburns or wrestling bears.
It’s not that I don’t regularly call Kara. At the mall, our cell phones free me from the prison of standing outside the women’s dressing room, holding her purse. Now I’m allowed to wander off, a free range husband, stopping every fifteen minutes to press the button to dial “Kara’s Cell” and to say, “I’m walking past Auntie Anne’s for the fifth time. Are you done in there yet?”
“Just trying on two more things,” she’ll reply, and I’ll swear in the background I can hear the tap-tapping of the thimble making its way around the Monopoly board as Kara hurries to finish her game with the sales clerk. That’s the only possible explanation for what’s taking so long back there.
In the end, when I began to feel so sick that wetting the couch sounded like a pleasant alternative to standing up again, I had to humbly call my parents to ask for my wife’s phone number.
“Kara’s over at a friend’s house and I need someone to dote on me. Can you get me her phone number?” I asked.
After I explained that I couldn’t call Kara with my butter churn, Mom went off to grab the phone number. Just then, from our driveway, Kara pressed the button that makes the dog fly into a barking frenzy and also raises the garage door. I pulled the hood on my sweatshirt tighter to look extra pathetic when she came in.
As it turned out, I had gone from perfectly healthy in the afternoon to running a fever of 103 by the evening, setting a new personal best, though a dubious one, like the time I held it at summer camp for six days.
“It sounds like you have Lyme disease,” my mom said later, remembering her own bout with the illness. You get Lyme disease from an infected tick bite, which at first sounds awesome, like how Peter Parker turned into Spiderman, but instead of being able to shoot webs out of your wrists, you get flu-like symptoms and weird rashes.
In all seriousness, Lyme disease, much like the Wu-Tang Clan, is nothin’ to mess wit’. (For those familiar with the original Wu-Tang lyrics, forgive me for cleaning them up. This being a family publication, we’re not allowed to say “ain’t”.) But I wasn’t ready to accept Mom’s diagnosis, since a fever can be caused by a million things, like typhoids, cabins and Saturday night.
Mom did scare me enough to actually go see a doctor the next day, something I usually won’t consider doing while I’m still ambulatory. I’m still waiting for the blood test to come back, but since I’m feeling much better now, I suspect they’ll be negative, like my chances for getting any more pity.
You can get stuck talking to Mike Todd at
All we want is an automobile that can seat two parents, two children (one real and one extremely hypothetical) and two visiting grandparents, with room to squeeze in a stroller and a dog, while still getting at least 25 combined mpg. We’d also like it to look, if not cool, then at least not painfully uncool. And we’d also like onion rings that make you skinnier.
Plenty of cars have more seating than Carnegie Hall, but the extra room always comes at the expense of fuel efficiency, making me feel like the bad guy from “The Lorax” just for looking at them. But our current fleet of one small hatchback and one smaller two-doored baby-hater just isn’t conducive to a baby-hauling lifestyle, so we’ve started considering our alternatives. We knew it would be tough to find an Earth-friendly large car, but we’re finding it nearly impossible to even be Earth-cordial.
This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced the clash of parenthood and treehuggerism. Since our son Evan was born just over a year ago, I’ve thrown away so many diapers and plastic bottle liners that when I try to high-five a tree, it leaves me hanging.
“Sounds like you need a minivan,” my buddy Johnny said over the phone recently.
“Yeah, we might. We’ve been looking,” I said, surprised to hear a friend advocate what is clearly the most logical choice for us. In general, our friends without children seem to harbor a deeply felt animosity toward minivans, as if they spent their respective childhoods receiving atomic wedgies from Dodge Caravans.
“Dude! I was kidding. I can’t be friends with you anymore,” Johnny replied.
I didn’t tell him that Kara and I have gone so far as to look at some minivans at a local dealership.
“We prefer to call it a swagger wagon,” the salesman said, parroting a line from a
Sometimes, I suspect
Seriously, “Mommy like”?
Are they trying to make it impossible for a fair-to-moderately self-respecting dude to buy a minivan? This seems like purposeful sabotage. Daddy no like.
The only car we’ve seen that meets our requirements for space and fuel efficiency is the hybrid Toyota Highlander, the biggest tease of the automotive world.
“It costs $9,000 more than the comparable non-hybrid Highlander,” Kara said, researching on her computer after we got home.
“But we’d save on gas,” I said.
“At $4.00 a gallon, we’d break even in 25.4 years,” she replied, helping us both to locate the boundary between idealism and reality.
Fortunately, we’re not in a huge rush, so it looks for now like we’ll just keep wedging ourselves into the cars we have now.
Also, with all this talk of upsizing, I hope it was clear to any of Evan’s grandparents who might have been writing their own stories between the lines that the above-referenced second child is more hypothetical than the Higgs boson, and will remain that way for some time. Kara’s not pregnant, is my point. But if she gets that way, we might need your help knocking out a windshield to make room.
You can stow Mike Todd behind your third row at
Distressed, Evan searched around for an escape route, but we’d already taken the precautionary measure of strapping him into his chair, a la Clockwork Orange. A small crowd watched expectantly as Evan’s eyes fixed on the flickering flame before him. In unison, the assembled broke into an ancient chant.
“Happy birthday to you,” they began, and Evan looked around our kitchen, trying to decide whether to squeal in delight or terror. In the end, he opted for neither, swiveling his head around in a state of complete confusion, as if our family and friends had gathered around his highchair to teach him differential equations.
“Ppptthhbb,” my wife Kara said, trying to get Evan to blow a raspberry towards the single candle in his inaugural cupcake.
Evan is fluent in Raspberry, his native tongue, but in front of so many people, like my bladder at a stadium urinal trough, he couldn’t be talked into performing.
Eventually, it became clear that Evan’s most pressing birthday wish was to no longer have his hands pinned at his side, as Kara and I had been heeding our friends’ warnings about the perils of the birthday candle. I’d like to think I would have figured that one out on my own, since the world is full of better ideas than putting an open flame in front of a person who just developed enough motor control to keep from repeatedly smacking himself in the face.
After a gentle assist in blowing out the candle, we set the cupcake down on his tray as Silly-Band-bedecked children buzzed about the kitchen. Evan’s party was the first time I realized the extent to which Silly Bandz have infiltrated our children’s wrists.
“How many of those things do you have?” I asked our neighbor’s son.
“Seventy-two,” he replied, beaming.
If you’re unfamiliar with Silly Bandz, picture a rubber band. There. You’re done.
Wait, make it cost six bucks for a twenty-four pack. Okay, now you’re done.
Ostensibly, the silliness of the bands is derived from the shapes that they take when removed from the wrists of children whose parents are now several dollars poorer.
“This one’s a turtle!” he said, holding up a rubber band that had been crimped to resemble a crimped rubber band.
The vague shapes that the Silly Bandz take act as a sort of Rorschach test for clueless adults.
“I think it’s a skull and crossbones,” I said, picking up a discarded Silly Band off the floor.
“I see a teddy bear,” Kara said.
“I see a new wet bar for my solid gold yacht,” said whoever invented Silly Bandz.
Anyway, Evan had no idea what to make of his first cupcake. Up until that point, besides the occasional rice puff, his only experience with solid food had been smacking it out of my hands at restaurants.
The highlight of any first birthday party is watching the birthday boy make a mess of himself, a tradition that is often repeated on the twenty-first.
After a couple of tentative pokes, Evan sat back, uninterested in exploring this strange, non-pureed item any further. Kara stuck her finger in the frosting and put some on Evan’s lip. He licked it tentatively and paused, his brain processing this peculiar new information.
All of a sudden, his hands grabbed the cupcake and smashed it into his face like he was reenacting an airbag deployment in a crash test.
His eyes were apparently hungrier than his stomach, though, since that’s where most of the frosting went. Next year: Johnson’s No Tears Frosting.
You can smell like a monkey, too, with Mike Todd at
Surprised by how smooth the sharp blades felt against my skin, I skipped the shaving cream altogether, running the dry razor up, down and sideways across my face. When I was finished, I placed the razor back where I’d found it, leaving no evidence of my subterfuge, except that the blades were stuffed with enough peach fuzz to insulate Al Gore’s attic.
The operation seemed to have been a success until later that night, at basketball practice, when my face began to feel as if someone was beating it with a flaming cactus. My face had apparently ignited itself on fire to protest the hormonal war raging within, and nothing provided relief except the passage of many painful hours.
I decided right then that the next time I needed to shave, which turned out to be just before the senior prom, I’d use enough shaving cream to bury a silverback gorilla, which is very difficult to do, mostly because they won’t sit still.
After college, I worked for a summer on a dude ranch in
“You get one warning, and after that, each time I catch you with stubble will cost you $20,” he said. Bob took it upon himself to teach his young employees lessons that he thought would help us upon entering the real world, where people don’t wear chaps to work unless they’re doing something much more interesting than I am.
Incidentally, did you know that the word “chaps” is pronounced “shaps”? That blew my mind when a ranch hand told me that. All my life, I’d been saying it wrong, which means I’d said it wrong maybe three times. Apparently, their name is derived from their inventor, Dave Chappelle.
Bob forced us to introduce ourselves by our full names at all times, a habit I still haven’t kicked a decade later, mostly because it only costs me an occasional syllable. But his most important lesson came at the end of our staff meeting on that first day.
“The four dirtiest words you can say on this ranch are…” he said, and we all leaned in closer. I thought it was a nice touch to end our first staff meeting with a cowboy-style George Carlin routine.
“That’s not my job,” he continued. “I’d rather hear you say any foul words you can string together than ‘that’s not my job.’ It’s your job to do what needs doing.”
Bob’s lessons might still come in handy for today’s potential entrants to the real world, if the real world hadn’t closed down sometime in late 2007.
Anyway, I still hadn’t worked out a system for avoiding razor burn at that point, so I spent the majority of that summer looking like I’d just been hugging a wolverine that turned on me.
I’m still using the triple-bladed razor I used back then, which is the only thing besides the Internet and the Slap Chop that’s been invented in my lifetime. Dad had a double-bladed razor. Grandpa’s only had one blade. By the time my son Evan starts shaving, he’ll probably just lay a washboard-size razor on the floor and drag his face across it. The new Schick Centipede: One hundred blades so she can get one hundred times closer, if your face is still there.
You can work Mike Todd into a lather at
June 15, 2009
June 16
June 18 
June 21
June 22
June 27
July 4
July 12
July 19
August 15
September 5 
October 24
October 31
November 1 
December 6 
January 1
January 16
February 12 
February 19 
March 6
March 7
March 19
April 2 
April 3
April 24
May 7
May 9
May 16
May 21 
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
Posts
All Comments
