Of Cribs and Men

I took down the babies’ cribs last night… a sullen reminder that, in fact, they’re not babies anymore.

My son pretended to kiss his crib goodbye, while his twin sister nearly broke her foot on the scattered remains. The three older kids – all past inhabitants of said cribs themselves – were completely oblivious; and my dear wife, of course, tried her best to fight back tears.

As for me (i.e. the guy actually doing all the work), I just kept rolling the same thing over and over and over again in my mind: Damn - these things are a helluva lot easier to take down than put up!

May 2003 - I was in our old house sitting on the floor of what soon would be the babies’ room, surrounded by countless rails, spokes, screws, safety latches, bolts, Allen wrenches, et cetera. The room was a mess. I was a mess. A 25-year-old guy who had never even held a baby, and there I was building not one but TWO cribs for our forthcoming twins.

I don’t remember every exact detail of that particular day; but knowing me, I’m sure I whined to my wife about how hard I worked putting the cribs together… and then I’m sure she suggested we go out to dinner… and I’m sure once we were out we decided to go catch a movie… and once the movie was over we probably scooted over to Barnes & Noble to browse through the zillions of “how to be a parent” books that we most likely didn’t even buy… and then we probably headed home and actually watched SNL live so as to conserve future recording space on our standard VHS cassette.

Boy, have things changed.

In the eight years since I first built the cribs, we’ve moved, I’ve changed jobs and we’ve welcomed a grand total of five wonderful children into our lives. We can’t go to the movies or out to dinner on the spur of the moment anymore – hell, we technically can’t even put our children in a confined space to sleep anymore – but that’s just as much a part of parenthood as lying on the floor covered with seemingly endless pages of incomprehensible “EZ-build” assembly instructions.

According to my math, I have assembled, adjusted and disassembled the cribs eighteen different times – and that’s it. The crib phase is officially over; the bunk-bed phase has begun… and I only hope I can enjoy those last few remnants of innocence before that evil leap to puberty swoops in and changes everything.

Life's (NOT) a Beach

I hate the beach.

There – I said it. No more side-stepping the question or hiding from the truth. I’m putting it out there for everyone to see, hear, feel and know: I unequivocally despise the beach.

Of course this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to admit. After all, my wife loves the beach, as do at least four of my kids (I’m pretty certain that my son Kevin takes after me). Plus, it’s “the beach” – the one place universally associated with summer and fun and relaxation and all that other good stuff that everyone everywhere around the world enjoys. So to say that I hate it is not an easy thing… but it is the truth.

I don’t know when it all started, really, because as a kid we always spent time down in either Old Saybrook or Misquamicut. My brother and I would play in the water and catch crabs in the jetties, while my mother sat in her chair and read her books for hours… upon hours… upon hours. I liked it when the Italian ice truck showed-up, and I’d sometimes even grab a milkshake or some clam fritters at the snack shop; but by and large, it was all kind of monotonous. Some people can just lay there on the beach all day and relax – but even as a kid, I couldn’t.

As I grew older and even more idiosyncratic, the reasons for my aversion became all the more obvious:

·         The Sun. Yes – I know it’s essential to sustaining all forms of life (human and otherwise), but really: does it have to be so bright? And blinding? And hot? Which brings me to another point…

·         The Heat. You know what’s better than being outside in the heat? Not being outside in the heat. Sure, summer is supposed to be hotter than winter. We’re closer to the Equator or the sun or something like that having to do with the earth’s axis – but is it really that much fun to sit outside and boil when there’s a perfectly acceptable alternative (i.e. staying inside and not boiling)?

·         The Sand. It’s impossible to walk on, it coats the inside of my car, and three weeks later I’m still finding it in bodily crevices I never even knew I had.

·         Sand Flies. Because sand isn’t bad enough on its own, it has to have little gnatty pests flying around inside of it.

·         The Water. People piss in the ocean. Hell, even I’ve pissed in the ocean. Am I really supposed to swim in that?

·         Suntan Lotion. Messy, gooey and completely unnatural.

·         Sunburn. First it burns, then it itches… then you start to peel your skin off like an f’n rattlesnake. And as if all of that’s not bad enough, you’ve also increased your risk of cancer.

·         Finally, there are the Seagulls. I’m afraid of birds. All birds. Even little birds – like those teeny, tiny ones that fly away the minute you take a step toward them. And if I’m afraid of a teeny, tiny bird that flies away the minute you take a step towards it, I’m more or less petrified of those ginormous seagulls that fly right up to you and grab the food right out of your hand.

So yes – I hate the beach. But make no bones about it: when my wife and kids want to go, I’ll still go - stumbling across the sand in my Nike’s, sitting upright in my chair under two umbrellas, leaping to my feet every time the mere shadow of a seagull enters my airspace – because that’s what you do for the people you love*.

*An adage I hope my wife remembers next time there’s a new Jason Voorhees/Michael Myers slasher-flick out in the theaters.

Vacation: All I Ever Wanted

Merriam-Webster defines the word vacation as “a scheduled period during which activity is suspended”… which leads me to believe that neither Merriam nor Webster ever had small children.

We just got back from a sojourn to Martha’s Vineyard with our five kids, and both my wife and I are totally spent.

First there’s the prep work… then the packing… then the driving… then the unpacking… and then the whining, tattling, complaining, hitting, shoving, pulling hair, forgetting to go potty, refusing to sleep in a strange place, and general chaotic delirium that naturally develops among even the smallest assemblies of toddlers when they’re over-excited/over-tired and out of the normal throes of life.

Trust me: it’s rough.

Not that I’m anti-vacation. Quite the contrary, in fact. If anything, I’m the one who pushes the annual family vacation – insisting they’re essential to building great childhood memories. When my brother and I were kids, our parents took us on vacation every year; usually for a week, sometimes even two. In the early years we went camping at some Yogi Bear-themes campground in Massachusetts. Then when we got older we did the whole rent-a-cottage-by-the-beach thing in Rhode Island. And those last few years, before I went off to college, we took even longer trips to places like Provincetown, Virginia Beach and Ocean City.

All of our vacations are cataloged somewhere in my father’s meticulous array of photo albums, and just about every picture carries with it some innocent memory of the four of us: my parents, my brother and I. Every now and then I’ll look back on those photos and remember just how fun and adventurous, how carefree and relaxing those vacations were… and I’ll think to myself: what the hell happened? When did these vacation things turn into such a giant ball of stress?

My parents laugh whenever I share these laments with them, usually accusing me of having a selective memory.  Apparently my father nearly had a panic attack every year trying to put the goddamn tent together; and when it would rain (as it inevitably did every time we’d go camping), the tent would leak, thus forcing us into a nearby motel. Then there was the year the muffler on our station wagon fell off and we drove home going 20 miles-per-hour… and the year I spiked a fever and never left the hotel… and the year my brother and I cried on the ground, making a public spectacle out of a blown call in a wiffle ball game… and the year my brother poured orange soda into his ear… and the year I hurled sand at some lady sitting on the beach… and, of course, nothing could top the year my parents’ lounge chairs flew right off the top of the car smack-dab in the middle of I-84.

So while our family vacations may have been fun/adventurous/care-free/etc. for us when we were kids, they clearly weren’t a picnic for my parents. Yet thankfully, year after year, they managed to toil through - leaving my brother and I with a treasure-trove of lifelong memories.

Yes - my kids were a little crazy, and yes - my wife and I were a tad frazzled, and yes – we vowed several times to never ever ever go on vacation again; but then our daughter popped her little head up from behind her brother’s car-seat and declared: “Mommy, I have fun in Marfa’s Vinnerd”…

And in that instant, it was all worth it.

Struggling With The "Why"

My wife went to a wake for a 10-year-old boy last night; and though it wasn’t as bad as she expected, it was still the single worst experience of her life.

I am ashamed to admit (yet I admit nonetheless) that I was somewhat relieved I didn’t attend due to a confluence of a) not really knowing the family and b) not really having anyone else available to watch our kids. Death, in and of itself, has never really been an easy thing for me to grasp… but the sudden, accidental death of a 10-year-old boy is utterly inexplicable.

Maybe it’s because I’m a father.

Maybe it’s because I used to be a 10-year-old boy.

Or maybe it’s just because I’m human.

(insert depressingly audible SIGH here)

At any rate, the one thing that popped into my head every time I thought about this horrific tragedy was a paragraph from Stephen King’s “The Body” - a novella far better known by its theatrical moniker: Stand By Me.

There is a scene at the end of the movie when the four friends finally discover the body of Ray Brower, a boy about their age. The image on the screen shows the boy’s sneakers dangling in a bush while The Narrator explains: “The train had knocked him out of his Keds just as it had knocked the life out of his body.” But then they move on, depriving the audience (as movies-based-on-books so often do) of the seminal passage in the entire book:

That finally rammed it all the way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore or get the runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No. 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his friend sin the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered. The kid wasn’t going to wake up at two o’clock a.m. on the morning of November 1^st this year, run to the bathroom, and vomit up a big glurt of cheap Halloween candy. The kid wasn’t going to pull a single girl’s braid in home room. The kid wasn’t going to give a bloody nose, or get one. The kid was can’t, don’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was the side of the battery where the terminal says NEG. The fuse you have to put a penny in. The wastebasket by the teacher’s desk, which always smells of wood-shavings from the sharpener and dead orange peels from lunch. The haunted house outside town where the windows are crashed out, the NO TRESPASSING signs whipped away across the fields, the attic full of bats, the cellar full of rats. The kid was dead, mister, ma’am, young sir, little miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. The kid was disconnected from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead.

In a single paragraph, King impeccably captures the fundamental reality of an untimely death; but more impressively, he does so through the innocent thoughts of a 12-year-old boy who - as if by magic - suddenly understands what death actually is.

Of course understanding the "what" has always been the easy part... its the "why" that I still don't get.

"When In The Course Of Human Events..."

I teach an American Government course at a local university, and this past semester I was forced to endure the following class discussion:

ME: So July 4, 1776… what happened?
GIRL IN FRONT ROW: The Emancipation Proclamation?
ME: No.
STUDENTS: (crickets chirping)
ME: C’mon…anybody?
STUDENTS: (more crickets)
ME: What do you all do on July 4th?
GUY IN BACK ROW: Drink.
STUDENTS: (laugh)
ME: But what do you celebrate?
GIRL IN SECOND ROW: Summer!

With my blood about to boil, I decided I’d express my anger in the form of a pop quiz, which I ever so aptly titled: “Questions My 6-Year Old Nephew Can Answer”. There were three simple questions:

• How many states are in the United States?
• Who was the first President of the United States?
• Who is the current Vice President of the United States?

There were 30 students in the class – and to their credit (or to the credit of their 4th grade Social Studies teachers) 26 of them answered all three questions correctly. But of course my attention was drawn to the two students who thought there were 52 states, the four who thought Abraham Lincoln was the first President, and the two – TWO – who couldn’t name the sitting Vice President (they both answered Hillary Clinton).

To me, it was worse than those “Jay Walking” segments on Leno - because they weren’t random people on the street, they were actual COLLEGE students enrolled in an AMERICAN GOVERNMENT course.

I thought it completely and utterly pathetic… yet sadly, quite American. (Although I shouldn’t have been surprised. A survey was conducted back in 2006 that showed more Americans could name the five members of the fictional Simpsons family than could name the five freedoms contained in the First Amendment.)

Yes – July 4th is about spending time with family and watching fireworks and enjoying the start of summer. But let’s not forget that above all else, it’s Independence Day - the day when a group of brave men affixed their names to a document that told the single most powerful country in the world to shove it.

That bravery – and the 235 successive years of freedom that followed – is the true reason to celebrate.

A Naming Dilemma: What Do You Call Your Former Teacher?

I was at a work function a few nights ago when I ran into (of all people) my 11^th Grade history teacher. Miss McCarthy retired the same year I graduated from high school, and until Wednesday night I hadn’t seen her in almost a dozen years… yet there she was making her rounds at the cocktail party, donning a “Hi My Name Is” lapel sticker that said in handwritten letters: “Elisa”.

Situations like those always cause me to wonder: at what point, exactly, can and/or should you call your former teachers or professors by their first names?

Part of the answer lies with age.  A 17-year-old high school senior can most certainly have a 23-year-old coach or teacher; and the paltry 6-year age differential likely wouldn’t cause any awkwardness in addressing said coach/teacher by first name. But for obvious reasons, the older, more distinguished figures are unquestionably more susceptible to titles.

Demeanor has a lot to do with it too. The laid-back journalism professor or the happenin-ly hip baseball coach usually insist that you call them by their first names while you’re their students, let alone after. But the more staid, traditional authority figures tend to (consciously or not) send out a vibe that just screams: “that’s MR. Jenkins to you, kind sir.”

For me, though, the biggest factor always tends to be the extent to which I liked and respected the person. Like all professions, there are some teachers who have had such an influence on your life that you often think of them even in adulthood… and then there are those who weren’t worth a warm bucket of spit. The ones who impacted your life for the better deserve to keep their title – a sign of respect, an acknowledgment of a master-apprentice relationship. And the ones who didn’t? Eh – they probably don’t remember any of their students anyway.

So for every Barbara (9^th grade geometry), John (11^th grade Spanish) and Ray (undergraduate Shakespeare) in the world, there are plenty of people like Mrs. Sahadi (12^th grade history), Dr. Reiter (undergrad poly sci) and Professor Gilmour (grad school)…

And Miss McCarthy will always be Miss McCarthy.