Two-week hiatus

You ever get that feeling that you'd rather just send an old column to your editor instead of killing yourself to write a new one?  Dude, I had that same feeling!  Two weeks in a row, unfortunately.

Here's the one I sent in last week.  It makes me worry that I was a funnier person in 2006.

Anyway, if you can't dazzle them with a new column, baffle them with cute baby pictures!

Send in the headless clown

If you're going to decapitate a clown, the best advice I can offer is to try not to decapitate one that has sentimental value to your wife.

I found this out the hard way about eight years ago, when we were moving into our first house, which was the size of many people’s first Tupperware.  I leaned a rug against the wall, which seemed like a harmless thing to do, until two hours later, when the rug slid and landed squarely on a ceramic figurine of two clowns that I’d never noticed before, smashing the head of the formerly happy guitar-playing one.

When Kara came into the room to see me sweeping up the carnage, she started to cry.  It’s true what they say: there’s nothing sadder than a headless clown.

“I know it’s silly, but I’ve had those clowns since I was a little kid,” she said, picking up the now-macabre knick-knack and rotating the base.  When she let go, the figurine played “Send in the Clowns” as it slowly spun on the floor, a strangely wistful song for a kid’s toy, as if it knew things weren’t going to end well.

I dumped the clown-head shards from the dustpan into a baggie, tucking it aside as if someday, armed with some Elmer’s glue, I’d reassemble the seven million fragments.  Over time, I came to accept that even a best-case scenario would have the reanimated clown looking like Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.  Once you’ve decapitated something like that, it’s very difficult to recapitate it.

A few days ago, just before our eighth anniversary, our son Evan found the headless clown on a bookshelf in the guest room, where we’d put it to remind our guests what happens if they step out of line.

“That’s a great idea!” I said as Evan spun the base wrong way.

The eighth anniversary is the pottery anniversary, and my attempts to get Kara to start smoking so that I could make her an ashtray had failed.  Replacing her beloved and beheaded clown, though, was the perfect gift idea.

Finding a thirty-year-old musical clown on eBay took about three minutes.  An hour later, the auction was over and the figurine, a near-perfect match, was mine.

If you want to be a thoughtful gift giver, it turns out that a really effective method is to destroy your significant other’s sentimental objects so that you can replace them eight years later.  It’s called playing the long game.

We needed a little romance this year, too, since we spent our anniversary with our infant and our constipated three-year-old.

“Gotta go poo poo!” Evan yelled, prancing in place to celebrate his parents’ big day.  We were in the woods behind our house, turning over rocks to find critters.  We had just hit the mother lode: a salamander.  When Evan stopped paying attention to it, I could tell the situation was serious.

“Let’s go!” I said, scooping Evan up, already running as I slung him over my shoulder.  Evan had been using the potty exclusively for about two weeks, and I had no intention of having his first accident be on my shoulders.

Like a great freight train, we barreled across the backyard, CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGA gotta go POO POO!

“What’s going on?” Kara asked as the door flew open and we stormed past.

“AAAAHHHHH!” Evan replied.

 Skidding into the bathroom, I dropped Evan to his feet and yanked his shorts down.

“Did we make it?  Did we make it?” I asked.

Evan looked at me as if I was unhinged.

“Don’t hafta go,” he said.

Someday, our anniversaries will once again be marked with nice dinners.  Until then, all I can do is wait, and maybe rip the arms off of Kara’s old teddy bears.

You can skip to the loo with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

If a tree falls and a toddler hears it…

With several cracks and a boom, the old oak tree shattered the silence of the evening, losing its lifelong battle with gravity.  At the first crack, we glanced around the patio table at each other.  At the second crack, we all turned to look into the woods.  When the whole tree started to come down, we jumped up from the table, trying to decide whether we were about to become acorn cobbler.

Rather than falling toward us, though, the tree folded in on itself, imploding like a well-executed building demolition.  Our friends Julie and Sergey, who might have since decided that they’d prefer to dine in places less prone to arboreal ambush, looked at each other and said, “Whoa.”

Evan, our three-year-old, was inconsolable until we explained, in a move we have since come to deeply regret, that the tree had been weakened by the heavy storm that blew through a few days prior.  This information, combined with a recent power outage and an afternoon thunderstorm at daycare that sent all the kids scurrying inside, has swirled into a perfect storm of childhood fears.

“Go give Grammy and Grandpa a hug,” I said to Evan as I plunked him down in their driveway last weekend.  Usually, he runs down the walkway to wrap his arms around their legs.

“Is it gonna thunder?” Evan shrieked, hands over his ears, pressing his face into my shorts.

“No, Evan, it’s beautiful outside,” I said.

“Is it gonna rain?  Is lightning gonna come?” he cried.

The rest of the weekend, if you dragged him outside, he’d put his hands over his ears and cry.  The ability to ride out beautiful weekend days on the couch will serve him well as he enters his prime video-game-playing years, but as the mountain of angry birds that he’s shot backwards off the screen will attest, he’s not there yet.

Evan is coming to grips with the idea that the world is full of things that even his parents can’t control, which should have been evident after the Eagles’ 2011 season.      

“Tomorrow, we can go to the playground,” I said, hoping that the lure of the slide would tempt him outdoors again.

“NOOO!  I don’t wanna go!” he screamed, eyes wide with terror.

The stormy weather this summer has probably caused many parents to struggle with their kids’ irrational fears of the outdoors, so just in case other families can benefit from our experience, here’s a little script I prepared to help little ones understand the world around them.

“Dear child: I, your parent or legal guardian, have everything under control, and you are perfectly safe.  Thunder can’t hurt you.  It’s just nature’s way of letting you know that random bolts of electricity are shooting from the sky, occasionally destroying things and/or setting them on fire.  If you just flee inside, you should be okay, as long as a tree doesn’t fall and crush your house.  Oh, and watch out for hornets.”  

This isn’t exactly the speech I gave to Evan, but as he kept probing to find out more, I found it tougher to dodge the fact that sometimes, the world’s just not the friendliest place.  We’ve been steadily working on setting his mind at ease, though, helping him to see that most of the time, nature is just begging him to come outside for a frolic.

It is slow going.  It’s difficult to reason with a person who thinks that Captain America is his uncle.

This morning, though, for the first time in several days, Evan ventured out to the car without putting his hands over his ears or mentioning the weather.  The mental storm damage appears to have been temporary.  Which is good, because someday, when he discovers girls, he’ll have all the terror he can handle.

You can make acorn cobbler with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

It’s a dead mouse, after all

“Dude, what’s that sound?” my sister Amy asked from her air mattress in our basement. I shrugged, pretending not to hear the skritch-a-skritch coming from behind the drywall.  Then Amy turned her truth-extracting eyeball beams on me. She’s had them her whole life, but being a lawyer made them worse.

“Okay, okay, we have mice in the wall. But they just hang out in there. They probably won’t come out,” I said.

She took the news better than I’d expected. After one lap around the room, checking for possible entry points, she climbed back into bed, probably deciding that if a mouse came out to visit, she’d just subpoena it to death.

A few days later, we had to start storing our dog food in plastic bins. Some critters had been pillaging our pantry, burrowing holes into the bottom of our fifty-pound kibble bags. Then my wife Kara moved some old boxes in our laundry room to find that the corner of the room had become something of a rodent rest stop.

“This is so nasty. They carry diseases. We need to get rid of them,” Kara said, with “we” being me, and “get rid of” being used in the mobster sense of the phrase.

“What if I just housebreak them one-at-a-time instead?” I suggested.

In the end, I found myself at the hardware store, reluctantly choosing between various instruments of death, like a gladiator preparing to enter the coliseum, except less happy to be there. Poison? Too medieval, plus the unpleasant thought of mice keeling over in random places throughout the house. Glue traps, which just stick a mouse to a sheet that you throw in the trash while they’re still alive? Honestly, if you put down a glue trap, it’s not that you’re a terrible person, it’s just that a non-terrible person wouldn’t do that.

Staring at all the chemicals and devices that were designed to transport cute little critters off this mortal coil, it was hard not to picture the mice in red shorts, holding hands in our basement and singing “It’s a Small World.”

 The least awful solution seemed to be the old-fashioned mousetrap. I thought somebody was building a better one. What ever happened to that? Still, if a mouse had come shopping with me and witnessed the disturbing array of other options, I feel like he would have said, “Fine, yeah, just get some of the regular ones. You people are sick.”

That evening, donning my coonskin cap, I set about preparing the varmint traps. With peanut butter smeared on the triggers, I set the traps and placed them around the house, careful to put them where I wouldn’t catch a dog or a child. We have enough of those already.

In the morning, I approached the first trap with trepidation. What grisly, splattery scene would I encounter, causing me to get nauseous and leave the room whenever the movie “Ratatouille” came on?

As it turned out, mousetraps don’t actually catch mice, but they do make excellent mouse feeders. All of the traps had been licked clean during the night. One of them had a Post-it note stuck to the trigger, with a tiny scrawling that read: “Do you have anything in a super chunk?”

I could picture the mice fluffing the insulation inside our walls, flopping down with their bellies full, saying, “Do you think that was store brand? I think it was store brand. Would it kill him to give us some Skippy?”

My dad suggested a modification where you tie the head of a Q-tip to the trap with some dental floss, then coat everything in peanut butter, which makes the mouse work a little harder for what is about to be its final snack.

The next night, I tried his technique. At least none of them were wearing red shorts.

You can give Mike Todd some cheese at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A very dairy crisis

The overhead light flickered out, leaving me hunched over the quick-start guide in the dark.  The storm hurled rain onto the garage door as if the house were riding through a carwash.  Other than my tiny flashlight, the only illumination came from the strikes of lightning that seemed to be feeling their way to our front door.

“Showtime,” I said, putting the flashlight in my mouth and the funnel in what I hoped was the hole where the motor oil was supposed to go.

“Add .63 qt motor oil.  DO NOT OVERFILL,” the instructions warned.  I turned over the motor oil bottle to see that it contained 942 ml, which meant, by my quick calculations, that I needed to pour in somewhere between none and all of it.

It was the first time I’d looked at our new generator since I’d taken it out of the box two months ago.  If it didn’t start up soon enough to save the contents of our fridge during this power outage, though, I’d need to save some of our gas to power an escape vehicle.

“Please work, please work,” I pleaded as I dragged the hundred-pound machine to the front of the garage.  The issue wasn't that we were worried about our ice cream stash, or that we'd lose our collection of condiments that, on average, had expired in 2007.

Our freezer was packed full of breast milk that my wife Kara had spent the last four months pumping.  To lose that milk would mean heartbreak for her, and possible arm or legbreak for me, since I’d had months to prepare for the likelihood of a power outage.

Preparing has never been my strong suit.  By definition, the thing you’re preparing for hasn’t happened yet, which means it might never happen, which means you could be playing Call of Duty instead.

“Is it going to work?” Kara asked from the doorway.  She cradled our youngest son, Zack, while Evan, our three-year-old, clutched her knee.  The dog cowered on top of her feet as thunder rattled the windows.  Presumably, cows were swirling around in the wind outside.

“Mmph,” I said, the flashlight offering a handy excuse to dodge the question.

I pulled the rope to release the garage door from the electric opener, so that I could manually open the overhead door like our parents and cavemen used to do.  I dragged the machine into the maelstrom and gave the starter rope a tug.  Who ever thought that the sweetest noise in the world would sound like a lawnmower engine?

Upstairs, dripping, live extension cord in hand, I realized that I’d need to move the fridge to plug it in, which hadn’t budged since two silverback-sized dudes wedged it into its slot two years ago.    

As I pulled the fridge with all my strength, determined not to be responsible for losing all that milk, I thought of the mythical woman who lifted a car off of her child.  An-inch-at-a-time, the fridge slowly slid across the floor, exposing the plug in back.  The adrenaline surge must have helped.  Also, the wheels on the bottom.

I marched into the basement, triumphant, anxious to regale my family with tales of heroism and humming refrigerators.  By the light of their flashlights, I could see that Kara had brought the iPad downstairs for Evan to play with.  When I was a kid and the power went out, we had to play board games by candlelight and talk to each other.  It was horrible.

But Evan wasn’t playing with the iPad.  With the thunder still rumbling angrily outside, he held Zack’s hand.
“It’s okay, Zack.  Don’t be scared,” Evan said, over and over.

It was enough to melt our hearts.  But not our breast milk.

You can knock out Mike Todd’s lights at mikectodd@gmail.com.

An advice column, minus the advice

Some advice is timeless and universal.  Don't keep your toothpaste and your Preparation H in the same drawer, for instance, unless you're ambivalent about which one you apply orally.  Or you're open-minded about which parts of you are minty fresh.  But parenthood invites all sorts of advice that isn't so clear cut.

When my wife and I were expecting our first child, I asked my friend Josh for his advice, since he’d already taken the parental plunge a year earlier.

“The number one thing you should be prepared for is crazy, conflicting advice from everyone you’ve ever met,” he told me.  “Just ignore it all and figure out what works for you.”

Josh was right about the amount of advice new parents receive, even when they’re not seeking it out.  One time, I even got parenting advice while waiting in line at the grocery store deli.

“He’s so adorable.  What’s his name?” a friendly woman asked, insisting that I go ahead of her in line.

“Quarter-pound of turkey,” I replied, frantic to start the cart moving again before Evan started wailing at the lack of motion.

“Sorry, it’s Evan, and thank you,” I said.

“Well, he’s precious.  Are you getting him vaccinated?  You should really look into it before you do.  Vaccines can cause autism,” she said, repeating polio’s favorite rumor.  Suddenly, there seemed to be a dramatic increase in the amount of bologna in the vicinity.

I reached into the car seat, putting Evan’s binky back into his mouth to buy a moment.  I understand why people are suspicious of vaccines – there does seem to be a global conspiracy to keep us all alive longer, perhaps so that we can purchase more drugs, which will also keep us alive longer -- but I’m much more suspicious of whooping cough.  

“Oh, I read that the doctor behind that study lost his medical license.  He’s a quack,” I replied.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Nothing.  Thank you so much for letting us go first,” I said, taking my turkey and hitting the road.  She was nice, after all, and I got the distinct impression that neither of us was interested in having our minds changed by some small talk next to the pimento loaf.

Last weekend, I found myself in the odd position of being the dispenser of advice.

“What are we in for?” my sister Amy asked during her weekend visit.  Her wife Jaime is pregnant with a baby girl, ensuring not only that our two sons will have an awesome new cousin to play with soon, and that I’ll be getting a promotion to Uncle Mike, but also that Amy and Jaime’s household will be in very little danger of ever facing an estrogen shortage.

As she waited for an answer, my infant son, Zack, squirmed in my arms, wincing at the cold milk in the bottle.

“Don’t look at me, Mr. Brainfreeze.  You wouldn’t wait for the bottle to get warm,” I said.

With two young kids of my own, it seemed like I should have some advice for Amy more helpful than “go do everything you can’t do while toting a tiny screaming and possibly barfing human, because you won’t be able to do any of that stuff anymore.”

Otherwise, I’m not really sure what advice works universally for all parents.

“When they’re screaming, it means they want you to do something you probably don’t feel like doing.  Also, as long as you say it nicely, babies can’t tell the difference between regular words and cuss words.  That’s really useful for the first year,” I said.

Amy nodded, realizing that the Internet would be a much more valuable parenting resource than her brother.

You can get measles with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A real piece of road work

“We’re doomed,” my wife, Kara, said as a pulse of brake lights started at the horizon and streaked down the highway toward us.  In a moment, our own brake lights illuminated, and our hopes dimmed.  Our worst nightmare was coming true: a traffic jam with a toddler and an infant in the backseat.  Oh, and a dog, our loyal and much-loved afterthought.


“No, no, no, this can’t happen,” I said.  Children on road trips are like sharks.  They must maintain forward momentum.  Also, they might eat you.

As soon as the speedometer hit zero, Zack, our three-month-old, began voicing his displeasure with quiet, distressed grunts.  Evan, our three-year-old, recognized the warning signs and cupped his hands over his ears.

“Zack gonna start cryin’,” he said.

“ROAD WORK AHEAD,” the orange sign said, so I assumed (as foolish as it now seems) that someone up ahead would be working on the road.

“Evan, there’ll be some big construction trucks up here,” I said, trying to make lemonade out of lemons, and also lying.

“Trucks?” Evan asked, straining against his shoulder straps to look through the windshield.

“Well, not yet, but they’ll be coming up soon,” Kara lied.  Meanwhile, Zack started mixing in some little squawks, like an opera singer saying, “Mi mi mi.”

I really wanted to see some big trucks, bulldozers and stream rollers to help smooth Evan out, since he was still angry at us for not inviting him to our wedding.

That weekend, Grandma had been showing him the album on her coffee table, full of pictures where Kara looked radiant (just like she still does, and I’d say that even if she wasn’t the first person to read this column) and I still had the ability to clench my bald spot shut.

“That was a great party,” Grandma said.  Then she flipped the page to the wedding-cake-cutting, and Evan became incensed.

“Why can’t I have cake, too?” he asked.

“Because you were born five years after the cake was eaten, buddy,” Kara said.

“But I wanted to go to the party!” he screeched.

“We would have loved to have you there.  But Grandma would have been mad if you’d happened before the party did,” I said.

“I wanted the cake yesterday,” he pouted.

Comprehending temporal relationships is not Evan’s strong suit.  Yesterday happened yesterday.  So did his first birthday, and that time we saw a moose last summer.  The War of 1812?  Yesterday.      

So we idled down the turnpike, hoping to brighten Evan’s day with some heavy machinery, admiring each cone that occupied the perfectly good lane to our right.  Every time the car stopped, Zack screeched.

After a couple of miles, it became clear that the “road work” was actually just an excuse for the    Department of Transportation to display its beautiful collection of cones.

You could picture a highway commissioner sitting in a swivel chair inside one of those roadside buildings that’s shaped like an enormous breast, stroking the cat on his lap and saying, “What’s the point of owning seven million cones if you’re just going to keep them in storage?  Put them out for everyone to see!  Throw a few blinky barrels in the mix, too.  What the heck.”

As we neared the end of the cone display and could see the jam breaking up, it became clear that nothing resembling construction was happening on that sunny weekday afternoon.  Fortunately, Zack’s screaming began to die down as we sped up.

“Sorry, Evan, there won’t be any trucks.  They just put down a bunch of cones and went home,” I said.

“Why?  Why would they put down buncha cones and go home?  Why?” he asked.

“That’s a fantastic question,” I said.

“There should be trucks if there’s cones,” he replied.  When he grows up, he’ll get my vote for highway commissioner.

You can share a cone with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

See no baby, remember no baby

“How would you like to drive three hours to hold a dead possum that’s been rolled in broken glass?” I ask my out-of-town buddies whenever we catch up on the phone.


Actually, I invite them to stop by to meet my three-month-old son, but their collective responses would work for the possum question, too.

Their lack of enthusiasm for visiting the eardrum-stress-testing facility that is our house stands in stark contrast to my wife’s friends, who have given more bottles to our two children than we have, allowing my wife and I some glorious free moments to collapse on the nearest patch of open carpet.

A few weeks ago, my wife’s pregnant friend, Curry, and her husband, Bob, came to visit during the height of our son Zack’s dalliances with acid reflux, a period we refer to as the Dark and Screamy Times.  If you’re not familiar with acid reflux, it’s a medical condition that causes a baby’s esophagus to turn into one of those horns from the Ricola commercials, blasting a high-decibel wall of sound from here to the nearest alpine meadow.  Fortunately, this only happens when he’s feeding, which is always.

“Here, I’ll take him back.  Nobody deserves this,” I said to Curry as she paced around our living room with Zack, the Human Alpenhorn.

“I can’t be scared of a crying baby.  I’m going to have my own soon,” she said.  In a few minutes, Zack stopped crying.

Curry still had four months until her due date, which should give her ears time to stop ringing.

So I understand that visiting us isn’t the most relaxing way to spend a weekend, especially for my guy friends who would probably only pick up a baby if it was sitting on a six-pack.  Still, when I called my buddy Johnny to let him know that we’d be visiting my parents for a few days, just a short drive from his place, I didn’t expect the conversation to reveal just how deep the rabbit hole went.

“Okay, maybe I’ll drop by and meet your new kid,” Johnny said.

Something in the way he said “your new kid” reeked of evasion.

“Hey, quick question for you.  What’s my son’s name?” I asked.

A pause on the other end of the line.

“Come on, man.  You don’t ask your friend a question like that,” Johnny replied.

“Dude,” I said.

“Okay, fine.  I don’t know it.  Cut me some slack.  Once your friends start having multiple kids, everything becomes a blur,” he said.

The next day, I called our buddy Rob.

“Can you believe Johnny didn’t know my son’s name?  We’ve been friends since the first grade,” I said.

“That’s crazy.  I can’t believe he didn’t know the little guy’s name,” Rob replied.

“Dude, not you, too,” I said.

“I know it!  Seriously.  I just can’t think of it right now,” Rob replied.

These guys are not Facebook friends.  They are actual friends.  We’ve been groomsmen for each other.  I have pictures of these people hanging in our house.  We even talk on the phone at least once a month, like people used to do in the previous millennium.

“You guys were great as high school friends, but as adult friends, you’re not really cutting it,” I said.

“Agreed,” Rob replied.

“It’s Zack,” I said.

“I knew that!” he said.

I can’t complain too much, though.  Childless people have a lot on their minds without devoting precious mental capacity to the names of their friends’ children.  Deciding which movies to see, which countries to visit, how late to sleep in on weekends, which non-plastic-lids-on-the-cups restaurants to patronize, etc.

You can forget all about Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Hardware’s gone soft

Important note in bold font: In honor of the birth of our nation and the more recent birth of two very time-consuming children, I took last week off from the column.  Here's a column from 2005 that ran in the papers instead.  I have no idea what I wrote three weeks ago, so hopefully this will seem new to you, too.

My wife Kara recently tricked me into thinking we were going tool shopping. I know, I know, I should have smelled a trap. I’m like Wiley Coyote – she paints the tunnel on the rock face, and I run smack into it every time.

She fooled me by taking me to a store called Restoration Hardware, and I, for reasons that seemed obvious at the time, expected to find myself in a hardware store. Once we got there, though, I realized it was really a Pottery Barn in disguise. Talk about your dirty tricks. Someday, I’m going to open up a sports bar called “Pillows n’ Scented Candles.”

I actually can’t complain too much about getting tricked into furniture shopping with my wife -- furniture stores always have a place to sit. Shopping with Kara is much more fun for both of us when I can just sit and space out until it’s time to go home.

If it was socially acceptable for a grown man to play GameBoy in public, I’d be a regular furniture shop-a-holic. Nintendo needs to come out with a GameMan for the more mature nerd. It could double as an electric shaver.  (Note from 2012: In this paragraph from 2005, I'm pretty sure I invented the iPhone.  I need to see if there's an app for suing them over that.)

Anyway, that fake hardware store sure did have a nice place to sit. I found a couch there that was so comfy, it was obviously the result of celestial intervention.

In Greek mythology, Hephaestus, the god of fire and metalworking, crafted a golden throne inside his volcano forge. He gave this throne to the goddess Hera, and when she sat upon it, invisible chains entrapped her. Many years later, that throne was re-upholstered, outfitted with a hide-a-bed, and set upon display at Restoration Hardware (which, by the way, does not sell hardware).

Hephaestus eventually returned to Mount Olympus and set Hera free. If I was trapped on that couch, and Hephaestus came to set me free, I’d say, “Thanks but no thanks, Heph. But hey, before you leave, would you mind using that volcano of yours to fire me up some Cheetos?”

Seriously, if this couch were in my living room, all I’d need to survive would be a remote control, an IV drip, a catheter, and some sort of water-wheel-and-pulley contraption to roll me over every couple of days.
I hung out on that couch until Kara finished looking at all the satiny, aromatic delights of the hardware store. When she came back to retrieve me, I rolled over and checked the price tag, which read $4,000.

“You like that couch?” Kara asked.

“Heck no!” I said. “It’s lumpy. No, no -- don’t sit down. Let’s get out of here.”

“It looks like a nice couch,” she said, eyeing it up.

“Depends on what kind of highway mileage it gets,” I replied. Clearly, nothing costs that much money that can’t be driven home.

Apparently, that couch is so expensive because it is upholstered with the woven chest hair of virgin leprechauns, and the pillows are all stuffed with $20 bills. At least that’s what I assume. We hustled out of there so quickly, I didn’t have time to find out anything else about it.

I didn’t need the temptation. The Couch of the Gods got trumped by the specter of the Unholy Credit Card Bill.

You can munch on celestial Cheetos with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The delinquents of summer

I dashed into my son’s room a few moments after his normal bedtime fussing turned into yowling screams of pain.

“What is it?” I asked, sliding to my knees beside his bed.

“I hurt my finger!” Evan yelped, holding his pointer finger out.  My eyes focused in the dim light, expecting to see Tarantino-esque arcs of blood squirting through the air.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I bited it.  Can you kiss it?” he asked.  His skin didn’t even have a mark.

“You bit it?  Evan, you really shouldn’t bite your fingers.” I said.

“Why?” he asked.  I gave his finger a kiss as he intently stared at me, waiting for an answer.

“Why shouldn’t you bite your fingers?” I asked.  He nodded.  If you’re going to give crazy advice to a toddler, be prepared to explain yourself.

“Because it hurts.  I think you just found that out,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.  Somehow, I’d stepped into an extra inning of bedtime stalling.  We’d already played a regulation game an hour earlier, with seventeen delays for water breaks.  Now we were looking to extend the injury timeout.

“Good night, Evan,” I said, leaving his door open a crack as the normal fussing resumed.

The next morning, I looked out the window to see that summer had officially begun.  The sun was shining.  The birds were probably chirping, though you couldn’t hear them over the air conditioning.  And the kids were off from school, looking for a way to keep entertained, as evidenced by our mailbox lying on the ground, its post snapped in half.

Just when you start to think that kids are sitting around all summer, barely able to suck the Devil Dog debris off their fingers before the next round of Call of Duty starts on their overworked PlayStations, you stumble across some evidence that there are still kids out there who appreciate the value of getting some fresh air while they’re defiling your property.

Evan padded up behind me and looked out the window.

“Why our mailbox broken?” he asked.

“Looks like somebody knocked it over, kiddo,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Good question,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.  Then balloons and confetti fell from the ceiling to celebrate Evan’s millionth asking of that question.

I stared at the splintered post, trying to think of any teenagers around the neighborhood whom I might have offended enough to deserve this kind of postal retribution.  It’s been three years since I passed a teenager who wasn’t wearing earbuds while texting, though, so I can’t imagine any of them emerged from their sensory deprivation smartphones long enough to be offended by anything I might have done.

When I pried the door of the mailbox out of the dirt to extract the Netflix DVD that I’d failed to retrieve the day before, I noticed with some relief, and then some guilt for feeling relieved, that a string of other mailboxes down the street had also received the Marie Antoinette treatment during the night.  In fact, it looked like a small tornado had ripped through the neighborhood, treating our mailboxes like miniature mobile homes.

According to the cop who stopped by our house a few hours later, a roving band of teenagers had sown a path of minor destruction around the neighborhood, making several flower pots, garbage cans and mailboxes pay for their failure to be made of cast iron.  A homeowner had heard the racket and chased the kids off, perhaps recognizing one of them as he gave chase, which raised the sweet prospect of justice being delivered.

It’ll have to be delivered to the front door, though, since nobody around here has a mailbox anymore.

You can play mailbox baseball with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The kale of the wild

“I think you’re going to starve here,” I said to my friend Josh on the phone, just before his visit to our house.  Josh is a vegetarian who doesn't eat any processed food, so he was unlikely to find any sustenance in our spray cans of whipped bologna topping.

“Don’t worry about feeding me.  Seriously, don’t even try,” he replied.

“I can’t think of a single thing in our house that you’d even eat, except maybe the birdseed in the garage,” I said.

“Is it thistle or suet?  I’m not allowed to eat suet, but I could go for a nice sack of thistle.  Maybe I could wash it down with some of that red hummingbird juice,” he said.

Josh wasn’t always this way.  When we were roommates at Penn State, we’d eat anything that cost less than four dollars, provided it didn’t have visible mold colonies growing on it.  Or that the mold couldn’t be easily worked around.

“Hey, want to get some pizza from across the street?” I’d ask.

“Doesn’t that place always give you violent gastrointestinal distress?” he’d ask.  We always spoke in clean language like that, just in case any of our words would be quoted in a family publication thirteen years later.

“Yes, but a whole pie is only six bucks, split two ways.  For a three-dollar dinner, I’m willing to accept the consequences,” I’d reply.

Three hours later, Josh would knock on the bathroom door.

“You okay in there?” he’d ask.

“It was worth it,” I’d mutter.

But those days are long gone.  Josh has turned over a new leaf, and probably eaten it.  He’s joined the ever-growing list of friends and family members who have gone vegetarian.  I greatly respect these people and their willpower.  The world would be a better place if everyone did what they’re doing.  I’d join them, too, if chicken tasted like asparagus.  Unfortunately for chickens, it tastes like chicken.

An average meal for Josh consists of a smoothie made from things that an average caveman could have gathered in an afternoon, assuming that the caveman had access to a GNC store stocked with protein powder.  He puts in lots of stuff that a normal person would eat, too, like strawberries, blueberries and almonds, but then he told me the secret ingredient that holds it all together.

“Kale,” he said.

Vegetarians are always trying to tell people how awesome kale is.  This undermines any other argument they might make, because the rest of us have seen kale.  We haven’t tasted it, but we’ve seen it.

Josh might have his near-vegan lifestyle, but I also practice a strict nutritional regimen.  Even when I think I can’t possibly muster the discipline, I dig deep and squeeze hard, squeezing and squeezing until all of the excess mayo oozes out of my McChicken sandwich and onto the napkin.  Voila!  Diet McChicken sandwich.

A variation on that dietary technique can also be applied to pepperoni pizza.  Before you take a bite, hold the slice over your plate for a minute, letting the grease and calories drip harmlessly away.  I call it the Gravity Diet, because anyone who practices it must be really serious.  This is not to be confused with the Gravitas Diet, which went out of fashion at the same time John Kerry did.

In any event, Josh did come to visit for the weekend, and everyone managed just fine.  Our success was most likely due to the fact that we didn’t attempt to eat together.  While I cooked dinner, Josh went outside and stood under an oak tree with his mouth open, hoping for acorns to fall in.

You can clog Mike Todd’s arteries at mikectodd@gmail.com.