Judging a book with no cover

If I’m going to see any more heaving bosoms around here, I suppose I’m going to have to track them down myself, since my wife Kara won’t be bringing them into the house anymore. The same is true with half-naked pirates, though the loss there will be much easier to deal with.

The blame for this newfound propriety falls upon Kara’s new e-book reader, a Christmas present from her sister, which allows her to download romance novels directly to a piece of plastic, so Kara no longer needs to buy the colorfully covered books that have been festooning various household surfaces for the past several years. Goodbye, barrel-chested Highlanders. Adios, swooning maidens, with your certain body parts swooning more visibly than others. I wish you all much happiness on your voyages of self-discovery and other-people’s-selves-discovery, and I hope you don’t catch a chill.

Fortunately, the adjustment to e-books is made easier by the publishers’ policy of charging the same amount for the vast majority of their books, regardless of the delivery method. This affords you and me the advantage of not having to share in any of the cost savings from e-books. We’d probably just waste our share of the cash on SUVs, Snuggies and high-risk mortgages, anyway.

As much as it doesn’t make that much sense to me that a few electrons should cost the same as a product that has been chopped down, processed, printed, shipped and displayed, I do understand publishers’ desire to protect their intellectual property, and to keep paying writers for their work. I’m especially empathetic because the written word has been quite a gravy train for me over the years. As long as the train is pulling into McDonald’s, and sweet and sour sauce counts as gravy.

“I really like reading books this way. I didn’t think I would,” Kara said as she lounged on my parents’ couch after Christmas.

“Mmm hmmm,” I replied from the other end of the couch, my mouth stuffed full of caramel popcorn. I’d made the mistake of pulling over my parents’ barrel of popcorn from under the Christmas tree, the kind with dividers to keep the different flavors from consorting with each other.

These barrels have been diabolically planned. The saltiness of the cheese popcorn makes you crave the sweetness of the caramel popcorn, which makes you crave the saltiness again, and the cycle continues until your wife notices that you weren’t really massaging her leg, but wiping the cheese powder onto her lap blanket.

“I know you’re just doing that to get the cheese off your fingers,” she said, and I looked down in shame at the half-empty barrel on the floor. Ordinarily, a barrel that size has rodeo clowns jumping out of it, and I’d just mowed through enough of its contents that the dividers were starting to collapse upon themselves. I brushed the multi-flavored debris off my chest and shoved the container back under the tree.

“Look, you can play Minesweeper on here, too,” Kara said, handing me her e-book reader. “I cleared the easy screen in 42 seconds. See if you can beat it.”

After a few attempts, it became clear to me that Kara has missed her calling. With my thumbs clicking the buttons as fast as they could go and my dusted-off neurons firing harder than they had since Calculus II, I still couldn’t get under 50 seconds. More often than not, anyone depending on my minesweeping skills would have been joining me in Davy Jones’ locker, stuffed in there with Davy Jones’ sweaty gym shorts.

Kara should be working on a gunboat somewhere, standing in the crow’s nest, leaning forward with binoculars to her eyes. With her experience, she could quickly clear vast oceans of mines. And also spot any danger from half-naked pirates.

You can wipe your cheese powder onto Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

I prefer my rump not shaken, nor stirred

With a flick of her wrist, my wife Kara sealed my fate.

“Dude, that’s not cool,” I said.

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” she replied. “Or at least really funny.”

Even after ten years of being with your wife, you can still discover whole new depths of evil she was hiding from you the entire time. If you’re anything like me, you won’t discover how sinister she can truly be until you’re standing in the middle of your in-laws’ living room, realizing that you’ve just been tricked into dancing to a song called “Rump Shaker” in front of a large percentage of your extended family.

This predicament began innocently enough.

“I think you’re all going to like the Christmas present that Dad and I got for each other,” my mother-in-law said to her three daughters and their respective hangers-on last weekend. We were celebrating Christmas a weekend early, in large part because Kara’s sister Jill is an anesthesiology resident at a hospital in Philadelphia, so her schedule has little time for things that don’t involve knocking people out. Even during major holidays, people still need to be knocked out. You can probably think of several people in your own family who could use it.

Eventually, doctors get enough vacation to spend more time on the golf course than your average sand trap, but they have to put in their time for many years first, working insane 30-hour shifts and 90-hour weeks. Jill’s schedule for the past several years has taught me a lot about our health care system. Apparently, our youngest medical professionals do their best work when they haven’t slept since last Tuesday. This seems like a good strategy, because we want these people as sleep-deprived as possible when they’re coming after us with syringes, scalpels, sigmoidoscopes and whatever other pointy instruments they can get their hands on.

“What’s the present?” Jill asked her mom. Incidentally, I’ve started practicing calling my mother-in-law “Mom” as well, just like her biological kids. You’d be surprised how many years you can coast by without ever addressing some of the most important people in your life by name. With in-laws, my limit turned out to be a decade, but I know some people who plan on calling their in-laws by various pronouns in perpetuity.

“I can’t tell you until we open it. But you’ll like it,” her mom responded.

“Did you get us all a trip to Hawaii?” Kara’s sister Sarah asked.

“No!” her mom replied.

“Hooray! We’re going to Hawaii!” Sarah said.

Sensing that speculation was going to run rampant until they opened their gift, Kara’s parents unwrapped a toaster-sized box to reveal an Xbox 360 with a Kinect sensor, which allows video gamers to act out motions to play a game, rather than using a controller. In the worst-case scenario, this means that to play a dancing game, you actually have to shake your rump.

While the technology is very cool, it seems to fundamentally miss the point that video games are supposed to be celebrations of sloth. Now I can envision a future in which I have to tell my son, “Sorry, Evan, I know you want to play outside, but you need to get your exercise in front of the TV first.”

To play the dancing game, you have to stand in front of the sensor and imitate the dance moves of the virtual dancer on the TV screen, right in front of the real people who are watching.

“I don’t think there’s enough beer in the world to make this fun for me,” I said. Undaunted, Kara dragged me onto the living room carpet and selected the “Rump Shaker” song while Jill taped the proceedings with her camcorder.

Hopefully, whenever someone tries to play that video, I can get Jill to knock me out first.

You can shake your rump with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Making Craigslist, checking it twice

“Still available and in good condition?” came the promising response to my ad on Craigslist, the free online service that connects you with people of varying degrees of sanity to buy and sell items of varying degrees of brokenness.

I’d posted an ad earlier that day in an attempt to sell my 2003 Toyota Matrix, a car that had served me well over the years, but was not designed to handle a growing family that is often toting a dog, a baby and a stroller the size of an SUV. When we roll out of town for a weekend trip, we leave a trail of popped rivets behind us, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. (Figuratively speaking, of course. I don’t know if cars actually have rivets, but if they do, mine hasn’t popped any. Especially if you’re interested in buying it.)

Incidentally, are you familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel? The happy ending (spoiler alert!) is that the two kids murder the old lady who tried to eat them and end up back with the dad who tried to kill them by abandoning them in the woods in the first place. If I was a therapist, I’d advertise on the rear book jacket. No wonder we, as a culture, have switched to Dora the Explorer.

My wife Kara had already taken care of the haggling part of buying a bigger car, a feat she’d performed entirely over email. We’d read that this was a better way to do business, safely removed from the glower of the salesperson and their entreaties to increase your paltry offerings, lest you enrage the manager behind the curtain.

“They just asked if we wanted floor mats, too,” Kara said to me from behind her laptop.

I’d always assumed, incorrectly, that a floor mat was a part of the vehicle. Yes, we’d like floor mats, and we’d also like to upgrade to the package that includes a steering wheel.

In the end, Kara drove a very good bargain, so it was my turn to chip in and sell our current wheels. Enter our friend Justin Thurston, who sent the response to my Craigslist ad.

“Fresh fish!” I yelled, writing a thoughtful response to Justin, explaining the wonderful condition of the car and laying the groundwork for a business relationship that would benefit us both.

A few moments later, Justin replied again: “Good to have your reply. I am justin thurston from Vancouver, WA. andwould have loved to come and inspect it at your place myself, but I ama UNICEF work and presently off Haiti where there flooding and

Hurricane.”

I can understand how a 2003 Toyota Matrix would be really helpful in that situation, but I began to suspect that Justin was not being completely forthright with me. The rest of his message explained how helpful I could be if I just sent some very personal financial information his way.

Justin’s email baffled me in the way that most spam does. When I’m sending out an email to ten other people in my department at work, my finger hovers over the mouse button, twitching, as I proofread the note countless times, worried that coworkers might make warranted inferences about my intelligence if I mix up “their” and “there”.

If you’re a spammer, and your email is being sent to ten million people, wouldn’t you at least run it through a spellchecker first?

Anyway, if you take anything away from this column, I hope it is this: 2003 Toyota Matrix, power windows and locks, excellent condition. Dog and baby only barfed in it a few times. All offers considered, especially ones from actual humans.

You can verify your checking account information with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Evan's first word

I don’t know the drill

“Oh, I don’t know, whatever you pick out will be great,” my wife Kara said to her mom on the phone, as I waited for her to notice what I’d just done.

“What about you guys? You’re always so hard to shop for,” she said, my shame deepening with each passing moment, my failure nakedly on display but not yet noticed.

Kara finally looked at me and sensed something wasn’t right.

“What?” she asked with her eyes.

“I’ll fix it,” I mouthed. “And I’m sorry.”

Her eyes darted to the home worsening project I’d recently embarked upon. The original idea had been for the project to be of the home improvement variety, but things took a turn south once I started operating power tools.

“Oh, no,” she said.

Our silverware drawer sat on top of the kitchen counter, empty, the mighty wind of my humiliation whistling through the single hole drilled right through the front of it.

I’d been installing Tot-locks on our kitchen cabinets and drawers to make cooking as annoying as possible. That way, we’d have to eat more pizza to survive. The secondary benefit would be that our child would have to find a hobby other than dumping the contents of our kitchen cabinets all over the floor.

To our son Evan, the kitchen had become a giant Advent calendar, with every door hiding a wonderful surprise, a surprise that must be removed, spindled and mutilated as quickly as possible. He’d spent the bulk of the previous day standing next to our open kitchen drawer, gleefully tossing our most prized food preparation documents (takeout menus) into the air.

So I had started working my way around the kitchen, installing locks that would make even the most stubborn adult stop and ask himself, “How badly do I really need a spoon right now?” In our house, yogurt had just become finger food.

The Tot-locks open with a magnetic key that lives on the fridge, so when you’re installing the locking mechanism, you have to drill deep enough into the back of the cabinet or drawer so that only the thinnest sheet of wood would separate the lock from the key. This type of precision should not be expected from a person who finds a toilet to be an impossibly small target.

When the drill bit came roaring through the front of the drawer, right next to the handle, my shame was intensified not only because Kara was talking with her mom, instantly giving my failure a wider audience than I would have preferred, but also because I’d been using the fattest drill bit I could find, the kind you’d expect to see mounted on the front of a vehicle bound for the center of the Earth.

Hopefully, Evan won’t be afflicted with the same sort of mechanical ineptitude that plagues his old man. He’s already showing some promise at accomplishing tasks normally left to adults.

“Babe, why is our cable bill twenty bucks higher this month?” Kara asked recently.

“I have no idea,” I said, then we both looked at Evan, who was holding the cable remote up to his ear like it was a phone. He held out his phone and started dialing it by mashing random buttons.

“Mweh?” he asked when he held the remote back up to his ear.

As it turned out, it’s possible to order a Platinum Package from our cable provider simply by pressing a single button on the remote over and over. In a remarkable coincidence, that button happened to be the largest one on the remote. I wonder how many people have subscribed to HBO using nothing but their butts. Probably less than the number of people who can pinch a fork out of their kitchen drawer without opening it.

You can hide your power tools from Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A chomp off the old block

I picked up this life-changing book the other day. Well, I assume it’s life-changing, once the reader moves beyond the purchasing phase and into the “reading the actual book” phase, but I’m not quite there yet, due to circumstances entirely within my control. Namely, the circumstance of preferring video games to life improvement.

A life improvement seemed in order a couple of weeks ago, when our toddling son Evan buried his cute little face into my shoulder.

“Aw, hey Buddy, what’s going OW!” I shrieked (in a very manly way, of course). You probably wouldn’t know this unless you’ve had them sunk into your shoulder, but baby teeth are like miniature samurai swords, not yet dulled from years of slashing through McNuggets. I don’t understand how pacifiers withstand the onslaught without being made of diamonds or Kevlar.

As I pushed Evan away, he smiled at me, my stretched shirt still caught in his razor-sharp choppers. Then he opened his mouth wide and went in for a second helping of shoulder sushi.

“No!” I yelled, grabbing him by the arms and giving my best angry father face, which is an easy face to make when your child has just treated your shoulder like Evander Holyfield’s ear.

“Baby! You can’t yell at him like he’s the dog,” my wife Kara said.

I looked back at Evan, immediately sorry for the emotional scarring his first fatherly discipline had inflicted on his tender, developing psyche.

Evan threw back his head, drew in a great breath and squealed with delight, clapping his hands and dancing. (“Dancing” is a term I use loosely here to define a semi-rhythmic bouncing achieved by flexing the knees, which also describes what I do at weddings when hiding in the bathroom ceases to be an option.)

Kara was right. You can’t yell at a baby the same way you would a dog because as soon as you do, the baby thinks he’s just invented a hilarious new game, while the dog would mope around until you apologize and rub its tummy.

Clearly, I needed a new strategy for communicating with Evan. He had no idea that his actions had failed to live up to our household’s high standards of non-cannibalism. Stern words and angry faces weren’t doing the trick, so I turned to the Internet and ordered Dr. Haim Ginott’s “Between Parent and Child,” a book that received high marks for helping to keep your children from eating you alive, figuratively and otherwise.

Last Saturday night, after Evan went to sleep, I found myself faced with the choice between reading a book that would help me to have a richer relationship with my son and playing a game on my iPod that consisted entirely of shooting birds out of a slingshot. By about the 700^th bird, I’d forgotten all about the guilt.

Another reason I have yet to crack the book is that Evan, for the time being, seems to have renounced his werewolfian ways. He hasn’t tried to make Dada-touille out of me since that one evening, but I think the episode officially marked the transition to a new phase of parenthood: the Age of Discipline.

Our neighbor with two elementary-school-aged kids had warned me that this day was coming.

“As they get older, parenthood becomes less physically trying, and more mentally so,” she said, standing beside her mailbox as her kids played in the yard. “You don’t have to carry them around and do everything for them anymore, but you always have to be thinking and steering them in the right direction.”

As if to emphasize the point, her daughter kneed her son in the crotch, functionally terminating the conversation, so I turned Evan’s stroller away and continued down the street.

Upon further reflection, I think I’ll buy an athletic cup when I go to pick up my new shoulder pads.

You can give Mike Todd a stern talking to at mikectodd@gmail.com.

On jury duty, the jury’s still out

Sixty potential jurors cowered in the back of the courtroom as the lawyer spun the lottery jug with all of our names in it. Everyone stared at the floor, as if not drawing any attention would get them back to their regular lives sooner. It’s not always good to be selected, especially by nature, or a lawyer.

The scene reminded me of middle school gym class, when Louis Poois (not his real last name, at least not when he was within earshot) would get the ball during a game of dodgeball. The entire opposing team would hide in the corner, crawling over ourselves, trying not to be on the outside of our human shield of cowardice.

“Pow!” was the sound you’d hear emanating from the head of Louis Poois’ unlucky target, as the volleyball ricocheted into the gym rafters, perhaps never to be seen again.

Louis would trot back towards his team, arms held aloft in triumph, his armpit hair billowing in the breeze through the holes in his muscle shirt while his victim groaned on the gym floor, the word “gnidlapS” branded on his forehead.

A friend just told me that dodgeball is banned from gym classes in public schools now, and the fact that we began recalling dodgeball games with fondness might be a sad commentary on how much fun the rest of middle school was.

“Michael Todd,” the lawyer said, reading from the card he’d just pulled. Pow! The other potential jurors looked at me with relief as I joined the chosen ones in the jury box.

The jury selection process took the entire morning, as each person in the room had some terrible secret they wanted to discuss with the lawyers in private, out in the hallway. Those who successfully argued their inability to remain impartial disappeared forever. The others came back into the room, dejected, thrown back into the pool.

As the lawyers spent hours walking back-and-forth between their table and the hallway, I began to understand why every available surface in the courthouse had at least one water pitcher sitting on it. Those guys must get thirsty.

The highlight of the morning came when a lawyer asked an old guy whether he’d be able to remain on the fence until all the evidence had been presented.

“I spend my whole life on the fence,” the man replied. “It just depends which way my wife pushes me.”

In the end, I was among eight jurors chosen for a civil landlord-tenant case that ran for three days last week.

“Don’t talk about the case,” we were instructed at every break, so we played it safe by not talking about anything at all. For hours on end, we’d sit in a jury room the size of a cubicle like monks, pointedly not making eye contact.

After one day of this, it became clear that I needed a new game on my iPod. The most popular game in the iTunes Store was called Angry Birds, which involved firing birds out of a slingshot to knock buildings over. I knocked over a lot of buildings as a juror.

“How has the jury found?” the judge asked at the end of the trial.

“Your Honor, the jury has found that while the multi-shot birds do inflict more damage than regular birds, you just can’t beat the bomb-shaped birds for pure destructive capacity. Also, we the jury find that our battery is almost dead,” we replied.

Actually, in the end, we reached a verdict that seemed fair for all parties. I’ve since been lobbying for my friends to start calling me “The Verdict,” which is a much catchier nickname than “The Situation,” a moniker that clearly exceeds the maximum allowable nickname length by at least one syllable.

You can reach The Verdict at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Jury duty is de-liberating

“When you get in there, try not to sound too reasonable. We have Thanksgiving coming up,” my wife Kara advised.

I still held the phone in my hand, shaking my head. The automated message had just confirmed that I would not be going to work tomorrow. Instead, I’d be performing my civic duty down at the courthouse, even though I’d just recently voted, which seems like it should have earned me a civic duty bye for the rest of the year.

You’d think someone with a bald spot that recently earned its own caption on Google Earth would have some experience as a juror, but this summons is the first one that has ever actually forced me to show up somewhere. Everything I know about jury duty, I learned from watching Law and Order reruns.

If there is a male assistant district attorney, I can probably expect him to be replaced after the first season with increasingly attractive females. Also, I’m not expecting too much wisecracking, since most of that will have taken place in the first thirty minutes of the episode, probably in the presence of a corpse, several commercial breaks before I get there.

“A hammer lodged in his head? This guy really got nailed.” That’s the part I’m going to miss out on.

The timing of this summons seems awfully coincidental, as if the court system realizes how much more valuable I’ll be as a juror now that I’m a parent. The past seventeen months have seen a marked improvement in my ability to detect a guilty party. For instance, when the dog trotted into the room this morning wearing a hat made of French toast, I almost immediately knew who did it.

Incidentally, a dog will only wear a hat made of French toast if it (either the dog or the toast) has been properly slathered in syrup. Otherwise, the toast just bounces off her forehead. My son Evan might not yet realize that trying to look up at a tall person’s face will make him fall over backwards every time, but he does seem to have an advanced understanding of canine haberdashery.

I’m torn between my curiosity of wanting to learn how a court case actually works in real life and my longstanding affair with not doing extra stuff. My number has been called, though, so I suppose my preferences at this point are rather moot. If being a juror is actually as big of a drag as the general consensus seems to suggest, the best I can do tomorrow is show up and hope they find me as unreasonable as the people who’ve known me longer.

My most memorable brush with the criminal justice system to date occurred at a dinner party several years ago, where the person sitting next to me was a defense attorney. The sentence preceding this one sure started with a lot of potential, didn’t it? Sorry it didn’t end with me face down on a gravel road, taser clips sticking to my back while $100 bills quietly fluttered out of the ripped-open burlap sack a few feet away.

Anyway, from her descriptions, it sounded like she’d defended some pretty unsavory people.

“Does it make you uncomfortable defending someone you think might be guilty?” I asked, doe-eyed. Woodland creatures began peeking through the window, wondering if I might lead them in a song-and-dance number as we cleaned the kitchen after dinner. A bluebird landed on my shoulder, shook its head and chuckled, then flew off.

“Oh, Honey,” the defense attorney said, putting her hand on mine and turning to me as if she were explaining the world to a four-year-old. “They’re all guilty.”

Come to think of it, that might be a good story to bring up tomorrow.

You can tell Mike Todd the truth and nothing but the truth at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Pigeon spikes, and other parenting tools

As the fateful jogger approached, I smiled and asked, “How’s it going?”

He gave me a look that conveyed annoyance, as if I’d just asked how much money he made. He said nothing as he jogged past, and in a few moments his footsteps trailed off on the gravel behind us.

“What a jerk,” I thought, just for a second, and then my mind wandered to other things, like why are all the light bulbs in Outback Steakhouse pink? Do Australians like pink food? Do our minds make pink food taste better? And if so, would some pink light bulbs in our kitchen make my blend of Corn Pops and Special K seem more like something an adult should be eating for dinner?

As we continued along the loop trail under the nearly barren trees, my son Evan began complaining from the peanut gallery, which is the seat he occupies on my back.

Evan and I have been getting out in the woods pretty regularly this year, mostly because it’s easier to keep an eye on a toddler when he’s strapped into place. We haven’t figured out how to put this finding to use outside of the backpack, but if Babies R’ Us ever starts selling mini versions of the hand truck they used to wheel Hannibal Lecter around in the movies, I’d start digging through the trash to see if I’d recently thrown out any 20% off coupons.

When Evan’s riding in his backpack, he’s not climbing on top of our baseboards to give him just the extra height he needs for his head to loom over the picture frames on our end table like Godzilla’s head over the Tokyo skyline. As he gets taller, the items on our various household tables continue inching toward their respective walls, cowering in bunches for protection, just out of the behemoth’s reach. Perhaps installing pigeon spikes on the baseboards would buy us some time.

In any event, with my wife Kara out of town last weekend, I fled for the woods with the child on my back. Sometimes, I wonder if Henry David Thoreau, one of the few non-assassins who gets to be remembered with his middle name, also retreated into the woods because he was scared to have a toddler running loose all day in his living room.

Probably not. If he’d had a toddler with him in the woods, his quotes would read something more like: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, especially if they forget to pack a grilled cheese sandwich. Then the desperation gets really loud.”

About three-quarters of the way around the loop, I decided to give Evan and my shoulders a break. When I took him out of the pack and set him on the ground, he stood there with one foot up like a flamingo, grabbing onto my legs for support.

“Your foot fall asleep, Buddy?” I asked, then I saw the problem. He’d kicked off one of his shoes, a present from his grandparents, sometime in the last three miles.

I backtracked for ten minutes without finding anything. The thought of re-doing the entire hike was too much to bear, so I turned around and started plotting a course to the nearest children’s store, where Evan would get the cheapest replacements his daddy could find. It’s not like he’s trying to shave time off his 40-yard dash.

Just then, I heard someone yell “Hey!” from down the trail. The jogger was headed back my way, waving a small shoe over his head.

“When my kids were that age, my wife would have killed me if I’d have come home without their shoes,” he said with a smile.

I thanked him as many times as I could in the ten seconds before he headed back the way he came, then immediately felt terrible about judging him earlier. It’s true what they say: You can’t judge a look by its jogger.

You can enjoy some fava beans and a nice Chianti with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Treats, tricks and leaves

Sorry for the Evan overload, rest of the Internet, but this was a special request from Grammy.

Swiss Family Todd

“Don’t do it, Amy. Please,” my wife Kara pleaded to my sister as our cog-wheel train chugged up the mountain toward the Matterhorn.

Moments ago, in the station, Amy had attempted to sit across the aisle from us in an empty seat. A Frenchman in the adjoining seat performed a couple of horizontal karate chops in the air while saying, “No, no!” to Amy, successfully defending the seat for what we assumed would be his late-arriving friend.

The doors closed and the train pulled away from the station with the friend failing to materialize. Amy turned around from her seat further up the train, a look coming over her face that anyone who knew Amy well would have understood to mean “TAKE COVER!”

Switzerland is a country famous for its chocolate, watches and Families Robinson, and the karate-chopping guy across the aisle from me seemed blissfully unaware that it was also very close to becoming known for its transit-riding, strangled Frenchmen.

Since having a baby last year, Kara and I have been unable to escape the house long enough to see a movie, a fact that has saved me from seeing at least seven Twilight sequels, and which also made the experience of taking a whirlwind tour around Switzerland last week even more surreal.

Amy’s wife, Jaime, recently took a job at the United Nations in Geneva, and the two of them moved there earlier this fall. With the job scheduled to end early in 2011, Kara and I knew that if we waited any longer, we’d forever lose the opportunity to see the birthplace of the hundred army knives I’d lost during my career as a Boy Scout. A homing beacon on those things would have been much more useful than a leather awl.

Our parents all signed up for shifts at our house to look after the toddling terror that is our son. After the same amount of planning that normally goes into a large-scale military operation, we realized that we might actually be going to Europe. One night in early October, Kara clicked the mouse a few times, looked up and said, “Okay, we’re going. I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

We only had four full days to see as much as possible, which turned out to be just enough time to ingest several months’ worth of cheese. It was also enough time to whizz through several castles and across insanely beautiful countryside, but not enough time to get used to paying five bucks for a Coke.

We headed to the Matterhorn on our final day, and on the first of several trains, a Frenchman (or a French-speaking Swiss person, really, but “a Frenchman” is more fun to say, and also to complain about later) stood before the three of us and pointed at the empty seat in our booth.

“Oui,” we said, exhausting 50% of my French vocabulary. Rather than sitting, he shook his head and said many sentences in a row. After a time, we came to realize that we were being evicted. Apparently, you could reserve seats on that train.

I stood and saw no escape. Ten angry faces peered at me from either direction, their corresponding bodies clogging the aisle.

“Babe, you need to move,” Kara said, noting that my bookbag was imprinting a zipper design on a nearby lady’s face.

I wanted to climb over the seats like Roberto Begnini receiving an Oscar, but settled for squeezing through the nonexistent space in the aisle like a gerbil, using the other 50% of my French to apologize to all the people with whom I was involuntarily grinding.

By the time we got on our final train with the karate-chopper, we just wanted some seats and a relaxing ride. Mr. Chopper benefited in part from Kara’s pleas for leniency, and also from the language barrier.

“The best I could come up with in French was, ‘This is my last day with my family, and you are a robber,’” Amy said later.

Judging from my childhood, Mr. Chopper is lucky he didn’t depart the train with his underwear pulled halfway up his back. Wedgies speak in every language.

You can go cuckoo with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.