Consuming

I took Jack and Dimitri to Target yesterday to get some food shopping done and to give Erin a chance to do some work without having to mediate any toddler disputes. Those of you who live in the New York area know that yesterday’s weather was cold and rainy, which seemed to mirror the mood of the suburban shoppers who were trolling the isles with blank looks on their faces, piling mounds of useless crap into their carts and muttering about the economy.

Jack was asleep when we got there, which was a relief, as he has been in some kind of foul mood lately, probably brought on by the onset of cold weather and the concomitant restriction of his daily access to the local playground. Target has these nifty carts with baby seats attached, so I slung Jack’s sleeping body into the seat and put Dimitri in the basket where I proceeded to cover him up to his neck in juice boxes, cereal and chicken nuggets. By the time we got around to the toy isle I was starting to become concerned that someone was going to drop a dime to Children’s Services, so I pulled him out of the cart and let him wander around the toy isle.

Whenever I go to Target I invariably end up spending $50 or more on crap that we don’t need, but I am a fairly soft touch when it comes to children begging at my feet. I talk a good game when Erin is around, but will fold fairly easily if presented with a quavering lower lip and moist, teary eyes. They boys haven’t quite figured this out yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Yesterday’s haul was an old school Pac Man Video Game and a DVD of Cars, the movie. Whatever I saved by buying my chicken nuggets at a big box store, I lost in extraneous spending on consumer goods. Such is life in the suburbs. I thought after years of living in New York City I would be immune to the hustle, but suburban shopping malls have elevated the task of separating you from your money to an art form.

Well, at least I paid cash and didn’t kill anyone in my rush to the electronics department like some other consumers did in Valley Stream the other day. Jack slept the whole time and only woke up when I wheeled the heavily laden cart out into the parking lot. When I pushed out from under the protected awning he was pelted in the face by freezing rain and sat bolt upright trying to figure out where he was. It was an interesting feat of manual dexterity to steer the cart, hold Dimitri’s hand and keep Jack from jumping off the seat simultaneously. Fortunately, I have been working on my juggling skills lately and am happy to report I can keep several balls in the air at once. We made it home without incident and had a fun day overall.

Name Calling

I’ve been having a bit of an identity crisis at home lately. I used to walk in the front door at night to Jack greeting me with some variation on the word “Daddy” and Dimitri saying something like “hello Mark”. Very nice; it’s always pleasant to be greeted by one’s family when you get home after a hard day of work. Lately, I’ve been opening the door and hearing a chorus of Marks from both boys. Jack has apparently demoted me from “daddy” to “Mark” because he hears Dimitri call me Mark and figures that since his big brother is worthy of emulation in most other areas, it must be so with his father’s nomenclature. In the beginning, I admit that I harbored some resentment against my own son for what I perceived to be an unwarranted informality in our communications; it bothered me for a few weeks, now I don’t care so much. After all, these things have to be put in their proper perspective. I’m sure he’ll call me much worse when he becomes a teenager. I do attempt to correct him by repeating “daddy” over and over right back to his little smiling face when he runs after me calling, “Mark, Mark, Mark”, but it hasn’t worked. He either doesn’t get my point or, as I suspect, just enjoys seeing my minor freak-outs. It’s entertainment for the boy. In the scheme of questionable behavior, this one doesn’t even rate.

Discipline

I have been struggling with the concept of discipline lately. I read somewhere, not too long ago, that spanking is a sign of lazy parenting; it might be effective in the short-term, but it also reinforces the idea that physical force is an appropriate way to solve problems. This is not a message you want being internalized by toddlers who, by nature, have poor impulse control. Small children are nothing if not master mimickers. That swat on the behind you dole out to your four year old will eventually trickle down to the behind of your two year old. I have therefore, somewhat regretfully, come to the conclusion that spanking as a way of imparting discipline is not somewhere I want to go. I say regretfully because despite the evidence to the contrary I feel like it is appropriate in some circumstances. Unfortunately I realize that I am not enough of an expert to be able to discern which circumstances. Ultimately, I would rather err on the side of less spanking than on the side of too much.

A close second to spanking in the chest of parental discipline tools is yelling. I think yelling can be utilized effectively if it is administered in small doses; otherwise it loses its shock-value and makes the yeller (i.e. you) appear foolish. My experience is that yelling is effective to stop your child from wandering into the street and to keep their hands away from the stove but is of limited utility beyond that. After all, chances are they can yell louder than you. A band-aid on a bullet wound, yelling is.

So what does work? The American Academy of Pediatrics consensus conference on corporal punishment and guidelines on effective discipline identified three essential elements of an effective discipline program: a learning environment characterized by positive supportive parent-child relationships; a strategy for systematic teaching and strengthening of desired behaviors; and a strategy of decreasing or eliminating undesired or ineffective behaviors. A concise paper which expands on these elements may be found here.

While these techniques are no doubt effective, they also require a scientific approach to child-rearing which is often difficult to keep in the forebrain when your darling son is pouring yogurt all over the rug or creating a Picasso on the living room walls in permanent magic marker. This is where parenting becomes an exercise in detachment. While your initial impulse might be to wallop the behind of the budding young egocentric artist and truck him off to his room for an extended period of shrieking behind a closed door, the conscientious parent takes a different approach. Instead of spanking and yelling, the conscientious parent should schedule a time-out. The time-out has to be used carefully though, lest you simply take a bad discipline situation and make it worse. Time Out is the place to teach the child about his behavior, but the screaming the child causes the sleepy/overworked/underappreciated/stressed out the ass parent’s brain to become confused. The confusion from the crying, screaming or constant demanding short-circuits the parent’s ability to think clearly about what to do next. Not being able to decide what to do next makes the parent frustrated or angry, and can cause yelling to begin. When yelling begins, the child shuts down. As we’ve already seen, yelling is ineffective.

Ultimately, the disconnect between a parent’s expectations for behavior and the child’s ability to conform to those expectations is where the problem lies. It is hard for a parent to remember that adults have the ability to use reason but preschoolers won’t even develop the ability to use logic until around age 7. Sharon Silver, the “Mommie Mentor” thinks that sometimes the best way to get a child to do something is to “speak their language”, i.e. the teaching a parent does needs to be done at the preschool level, a time-out has to be structured to take into account the true amount of time your preschooler can pay attention and hear you when he’s emotional, and the ability to “try again” needs to be included with your discipline.

This is a lot to think about in a stressful situation. This is also a very long post so I’ll pick up on this tomorrow.

Flying

An airplane, twenty-five thousand feet over the heartland. The man is tired but cannot sleep. The plane rocks gently with turbulence and the man is suddenly aware of his life. Not of the day to day activities like eating and brushing his hair, but of other things. He is getting older, he has a young son at home, and he is hurtling through the sky at 600 miles per hour inside of a tin can. The man tries to occupy himself, first with a book, then with a magazine, finally with his I-pod. No relief. The man peers out the window and watches the clouds, then underneath the clouds, the ground. The man is flying west, over Pennsylvania, and the fruited plains stretch out before him. There are dots far below. These may be houses, or office buildings, or factories. Inside there are people. There is no difference between the man in the plane and the people in the buildings. Correction. There are small differences. But the differences are insignificant. All suffer. All will die. Life is a terminal condition. There is no cure.

The luckiest among them will scurry around for 70 odd years doing this and that before their bodies succumb to sickness and they die. At their funerals, people will say nice things about them and then these people will return to their buildings to go on with their own lives. The people try not to think about the fact that one day there will be another funeral where, hopefully, people will gather to say nice things about them.

Not all are lucky. Some will die early. Accidents, disease, sudden medical complications. The man knows about sudden medical complications. They caused the death of the man’s wife. She was giving birth to the man’s son and then died. Unforeseeable, they said. One in a million, they said. Even then, standing at the foot of the bed with his hand on the button of the respirator, the man knew that the last thing one could say about death was that it was unforeseeable. Only unexpected.

The man remembers. He remembers leaving his wife’s room and walking to the elevator. He remembers taking the elevator to the nursery, picking up his son and going home. He remembers that the day was cold. He carries his son into the house quickly and looks into his eyes. Love. Acceptance. Determination.

The man’s biggest fear is that he will be one of the unlucky ones. This fear gnaws at him in strange places, like when he is riding in airplanes twenty-five thousand feet over the heartland. It pops up in his mind when he is driving a car, crossing the street, and every night before he goes to bed. The man knows of impermanence. He has seen life’s fragility first hand. He worries for his son.

Home. Far below and far away. The man’s son is almost two. The man lives with a woman and her son. The man loves the woman and she him. They are a family. The man is happy; he has found a person to share his life with. His son is happy; he has found a brother. Things have gone well-better than he ever hoped for. And yet. Even in his happiness the man knows. He knows that at any moment it could end. But not right now. Right now, sailing above the clouds, the man is very much alive.

Children Of The Corn

A New Post, Finally

So, it’s now fall. October is a busy month in my line of work. Over the course of the next three weeks I have to attend a conference in California and a mock jury proceeding in Indiana. I also have two weddings and a visit from Becky’s parents that have to be fit into the schedule. I don’t mind being busy; I feel like I have been constantly busy since Jack was born, but I do like my downtime. Erin and I rented a cabin up in Woodstock for the Columbus Day week-end and plan to do some fall related activities involving apples and pumpkins. We’re also bringing the bikes and will be able to bike around with the boys and watch the leaves change. I’m really looking forward to some time in the woods.

My plan to run the marathon has devolved into a plan to run the ½ marathon. I simply do not have the energy to dedicate all of my free time to putting in long miles on the road. I was running a 12 mile training run last week and somewhere around the 9th mile I started asking myself why the HELL I was putting myself through this again. 40 year old knees are much weaker than 30 year old knees. My current training schedule has me hobbling around like an old goat and eating like a young pig. I actually put on 4 pounds since I started this training routine, which is the opposite of what I was trying to do when I started running last year. So, I’ll accept the Buddha’s “middle path” and set my sights on something more manageable. 13.1 miles is enough.

Jack is starting to put together words into things that approximate sentences. He is also answering my questions with a string of words delivered in an authoritative tone that makes me believe that he knows what he is talking about.

“Are you ready to go to bed Jack?’
“No, not me!”

“Jack, would you like a cookie?”
“Coo-Key….thank youuu!”

That sort of thing. When tells me he wants to read a Thomas the Train book, he goes and gets a Thomas the Train Book. (Of course, he still calls his stuffed giraffe a monkey, but in all fairness, the giraffe has no neck and was inartfully sewn with vaguely simian features so I’ll give him a pass). I find this all to be endlessly fascinating, the development of my child’s mind. I can see a whole lot of innate laughter and happiness in his personality which makes me very happy. He has a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step and he dances whenever there is music playing.

Jack’s exposure to other kids in the park every day has been good for his social skills and he has also been learning a lot from Dimitri. My own relative misanthropy aside, I suppose I can accept the fact that humans are social beings at heart and thrive in the company of others. Jack certainly has taken off with his development since he has been hanging around with Dimitri every day. I don’t know where he stands in the playground hierarchy, but he is hardly the shrinking violet around the house. Last night he and Dimitri were taking turns hurling themselves off the sofa onto the floor and when Dimitri wasn’t jumping fast enough he was assisting him with a little shove in the small of the back.

The one place that I have been slacking off is in the television arena. Like every single other parent in the United States I vowed before he was born that the television would not fulfill the role of loco parenti. No, I would be an engaged parent, reading the great words of literature to my attentive son who would reward my efforts by spontaneously playing Rachmaninoff pieces on the piano by the age of three. Yeah, you know how that goes.

At least I try to keep the idiot box tuned to Noggin, whose slogan is, “like pre-school on TV.” The channel is way better than the endless commercial that is the Cartoon Network, but I still worry when Jack stops what he is doing to stand mesmerized at the blues guitar stylings of Moose A. Moose and the Business Mouse. Plus, the repetition of themes in the shows is so grating and the songs so insipid I have caught myself thinking extremely uncharitable thoughts about the Backyardigans and reminiscing in silent glee about the guinea pig I ate in Peru that looks exactly like Linny on the Wonder Pets. Mmmm.

Running and Jumping

Yesterday I decided to sign up for the Philadelphia Marathon. The race is scheduled for November 23, which gives me nine week-ends to fit in training runs ranging from 12 to 20 miles. I figure I can fit them in either on my work from home day or on the week-end day when Bin Ladin comes over for a visitation. Back in 2006 I planned to run a marathon in 2007, which would have been the 10th anniversary of the last marathon I ran. At the time I was interested to see whether, at the advanced age of 39, I still had enough gas in the tank to get through 26.2 miles without permanently damaging an organ or body part. Obviously, 2007 turned out quite differently than I had envisioned so I now get to attempt the distance at age 40, which will officially put me in the “master runner” category. “Master runner” is a term bestowed on people who have reached the apex of their running careers and are starting the long slow slide into physical disintegration. I first found myself placed into that category in the Long Island ½ Marathon I ran in May. Let me tell you, I found the competition pretty stiff. The older guys have more to prove and you always move faster when you can feel the grim reaper pacing you a few steps back.

It is hard to believe that I have been running consistently for 16 years. By “consistently” I mean that for the last 17 years, aside from the odd vacation and bout with the flu, I have run between 15 and 45 miles per week, every week, since 1992. There were times when I ran less, and times when I ran more, but putting foot to pavement has been the one constant thread running through the fabric of my bizarre-o life.

Last year I wholeheartedly embraced running as a way to help me retain my sanity in the face of Becky’s death and my own terrifying responsibilities as a new father. In early February I joined a gym and drastically stepped up my mileage. The end result was me losing 40 pounds in six months. I literally ran out of my old life into a new reality, which is a strange feeling. I look in the mirror and I don’t even physically resemble the person I was in January 2007.

I remember thinking quite consciously that I was going to need a huge increase in energy reserves to succeed as the single father of a small boy, especially in light of the fact that I was considerably older than the average dad and probably not in the best shape of my life. The first step towards building up more energy was taking the weight off. Taking the weight off meant that I had to stop eating so many bacon cheeseburgers and start shaking my rapidly expanding ass on the treadmill every day. On the week-ends, I loaded Jack into the baby-jogger and took off for the park. That kid logged more miles in his first six months than Ryan Hall did training for the Olympic marathon.

Somehow, it worked. I lost a lot of weight. I have more energy. The constant flow of endorphins into my bloodstream has also made me a very even-tempered and pleasant daddy to be around. Now I’m putting in a base of 40 miles a week and in 9 weeks time I’ll be toeing the line in Philly. I credit Jack for motivating me to put down the cheese doodles and get out there back into life. For that reason, I’ll be running the race for him.

Looking Forward

I haven’t posted here in awhile. Not because there’s been any lack of subject matter to post about (Dimitri’s adjustment to school, Jack barfing all over Erin and I in Fairway yesterday, etc.) but because the financial crisis and the election have completely diverted my attention away from this blog. I reopened my old blog and started posting on the Patriot again. I just couldn’t help it. I think the world is in for a real wake-up call and I’m consumed with worry about what kind of world Jack and Dimitri will be faced with when they head off to college. The cynical/realist side of me expects society 15 years hence to resemble the Times Square of the 1970s and 80s-filthy streets full of pimps and hustlers trying to separate you from your money. I remember what that was like, and while I had a great time wandering around the sordid back alleys of mid-town before it was turned into a Euro-Disney theme park, I could always get on the LIRR and escape back to the suburbs if a situation got a little tight. My worry is that the boys will not have the same margin of safety as I did.

In economic downturns, jobs disappear; Wall Street doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Competition for the remaining jobs will be fierce. Any self-respecting sociologist will tell you that the Horatio Alger myth in America is just that-a myth. Where you get in life is determined more by where you came from and who you know than by the fruits of your labors. Generations of West Virginia coal miners would agree with me. So the boys are going to have to muddle through the best they can. Hopefully we can help them along the way.

Two Legs Good, Four Legs Better

The rains came, and the rains left and we were none the worse for wear. Erin’s shower was rescheduled to Sunday so I had the boys to myself in decidedly better weather. We went to the animal farm and fed pellets of food to a variety of slightly crazed goats and sheep. We also took pony rides and had a whirl on the train. That such places exist is a testimony to the existence of parents who desperately need entertainment that a 100th trip to the park can’t provide. One of the main attractions at White Post Farms is a giant sandbox with playground equipment in it which the boys enjoyed more than the animals. I let them root around in the dirt for an hour while I compared parenting notes with the other adults. From what I can tell by talking with my peers, nothing we’re doing is causing any irreversible or irreparable harm. It’s always nice to check though.

Surprisingly, taking two toddlers out of the house into a world where everything within sight had the potential to cause incapacitating injury or death didn’t stress me out to the level I expected it to. Both of the lads were generally well behaved and fun to be with. I was so pleased at my organizational skills that after we pulled out of the animal farm I took them both to Target for toys, followed by a food-shopping jaunt to Waldbaums. Aside from D clawing his way into the contents of the cart in the supermarket, the whole thing went off without incident. Of course, as soon as we got home they both melted down. It was a long day and in the end all that wandering around the suburban jungle pushed them to their collective limits. I’m sure Erin thought they were howling like feral bobcats all day but it truly wasn’t the case. Next week-end we’re planning on a trip to the Long Island Renaissance Fair. No problem.

Beginners Mind

I received a text message this morning from the weather channel warning of the potential for flooding in New York. It wasn’t specific as to time, and since the sun is merrily shining over the Meadowlands I have to assume that ark-building can be deferred until tomorrow morning. The remnants of tropical storm Hannah are winding their way up the coast and are due to hit Long Island some time in the next 24 hours. After the last big storm took out the power in Great Neck for several hours I now know enough to fill the hurricane lamps and get out the flash-lights. I’m not especially worried about losing power. I’m more worried about finding something to entertain Jack and Dimitri if we’re stuck in the house all day tomorrow due to foul weather. I tried to get them to sit down to watch the Chronicles of Narnia last night but quickly realized that the movie was geared for a slightly older audience. Shrek II it ain't.

It is challenging trying to understand the world of the imagination that three year old boys reside in. Dimitri can concoct elaborate narratives sitting at the kitchen table which rival anything C.S. Lewis came up with. Tales of monsters and superheroes, gathered from disparate references which stuck in odd corners of his mind, gurgle forth in stream of consciousness storytelling. It is a fascinating thing to see. At some point in our transition to adulthood we lose the ability to wonder at things and to weave complex fables out of our sensory input. Phenomena that completely amaze us as children; clouds, butterflies, the dew on the grass in the morning, become ordinary and routinized after repeated encounters. If only there was some way to keep this “beginners mind” when we become adults. Unfortunately as we become “educated” we learn to classify and categorize, discriminate between good and bad and assign value to things and ideas. We also become conscious of social structures and accept external limitations on our behavior. Not all of this is bad, after all, if we all ran around as undisciplined as three year olds nothing would ever get done. But I’ll bet we would all have a lot more fun.

Resting from One's Labors

I love fall. It is probably my favorite season. The bounty of the harvest, the rich changing colors of the leaves and the way the light splays across the landscape, all signal the waning of the season of beach and bar-b-q and the beginning of the gentle slide into winter. Labor Day week-end always changes my seasonal mindset and gets me thinking about tweedy jackets and the smell of wood smoke, even though today the mercury is still bumping up against 90 degrees. This past week-end Erin and I decided to forgo invitations to two end-of-summer events and just hang around the Island. On Saturday we threw the boys into the bike trailer and took a ride from Bethpage State Park to Jones Beach, a pleasant 13 mile pedal along a wooded corridor of green that gradually transitions to a wide path along the Wantagh Parkway with striking views of the bay and the Ocean. It was a humid day but the boys tolerated it well, even after we got to Jones Beach and they had to do a lot of walking around to find food. The day started with a downpour and the beach was curiously deserted for a holiday week-end. When we finally got to the ocean, Jack could barely contain himself and ran head-on in the direction of the water shrieking with delight. I had to keep him firmly in hand since if I let go he looked fully prepared to attempt a swim to Europe. While Dimitri loved the idea of the ocean, when he got up close to it, the power and majesty of the waves crashing into the shore proved too much and he had a minor melt-down. He isn’t the first person to be awed by the power of the ocean and I daresay he won’t be the last. Dmiitri has been quite protective of his little brother lately and he was scared that Jack and I would be carried away by the water. We got out quickly. Frankly I was afraid that if I lost my grip Jack would disappear beneath the waves. I’m going to get him swimming lessons as soon as possible, i.e. next summer when the pool reopens. There was also the issue of the jellyfish. The water appeared to be free of the annoying creatures but the stinging all over my body and the pieces of their corpses washing up on the sand gave away their presence. Jack seemed wholly unaffected by them but I needed a cold shower to get the venom off. Next time we both wear wetsuits.

Sunday was visiting day with daddy and despite my bravado in a prior posting, I was treated to the full spectacle of A. sitting on my sofa and raiding my refrigerator. At least he brought a cake. Mocha. Quite good, although it crossed my mind that he might have done something to it. I ate it anyway and it tasted vaguely of sorrow and tears. In the end D. ended up throwing him out after about two hours. The argument started over a DVD and resulted in A. giving his son the silent treatment because he felt slighted. By a 3 year old. Maturity does not necessarily come with age. Dimitri asked him to leave and he actually did. I’m not going to editorialize, just let the facts speak for themselves. We went to the pool in the afternoon and splashed around. A. was forgotten.

You Are Now Free To Move About The Cabin

Sorry folks. I took a week off for a business trip to Tulsa and a few days visiting with Grandma and Grandpa down in Florida. Unfortunately, our trip to the Sunshine State happened to coincide with the arrival of Tropical Storm Fay which pretty much torpedoed all of our planned outdoor activities. Traveling with the two boys on the airplane was less stressful than I expected. There were no major freak-outs or screaming fits, although when we exited the plane in New York, the row we were seated in looked like the Giant Stadium parking lot after a playoff game. I am not the most organized packer in the world but I do get around for business and have developed a fairly static routine that gets me through airports and to my destination without too much fuss. Such a routine approach to travel is impossible when you are also lugging two kids and their equipment around. A flexible approach is best for one’s mental health. The most important lesson I learned is that it is easier to get through security and to the gate if the kids are rendered completely immobile for 99% of the time. I had Jack in a backpack carrier and Dimitri was more or less strapped into a stroller. Newark airport is a pit, but Tampa actually has a carpeted playground next to the Continental departure gates; a godsend if your flight is delayed. Unfortunately for us, our flight was delayed on the way out of New York; we sat on the tarmac for 30 interminable minutes until we had to go back to the gate to drop off a sick passenger.

The only other glitch was on our way through security in Tampa, Erin was selected for “special screening” because her handbag was deemed “too heavy” by the TSA clerk. “There isn’t anything in there that could hurt me, is there?” he intoned as he solemnly poked through a years worth of ATM receipts in a handbag about the size of a vanilla latte. What a dick. He also didn’t want to let Jack’s bottle or Dimitri’s juice through but relented after realizing that he would get the opportunity to tear the rest of Erin’s luggage apart. Such a farce. And completely ineffective at diverting any sort of terrorism. Erin walked through the first checkpoint when the guard’s attention was diverted by a couple of dangerous looking grannies and made it to the second checkpoint without anyone even looking at her ID or boarding pass. I was carrying both suitcases but the geniuses at TSA didn’t realize we were traveling together and didn’t find it the least bit odd that Erin was carrying a small handbag and knapsack, with no checked luggage and two children. No one ever asked to look at my luggage, although I was told by the airline (!) that I was going to be selected for special screening when I got to the airport.

The TSA is the most useless government agency since the CIA. Seven years since the 911 attacks (which the TSA would not have stopped) and there still isn’t anywhere to put your shoes on after you get through the line. Never mind the indignity of being questioned by someone who probably couldn’t get a job at Burger King and made the TSA their fall-back plan. Ah, well, government agencies tend to accumulate like barnacles on a ship's hull - once created, they're pretty hard to remove and they keep replicating themselves. Especially the ones granted some sort of quasi-police powers.

The very creation of the TSA was a triumph of Republican free-market ideals combined with the persistence of bureaucracy; a dangerous combination that succeeded at nothing other than funneling large sums of tax dollars into the pockets of private security companies. Created in November 2001, the TSA’s goal was ostensibly to secure our nation's transportation system by replacing private airport security screeners with "fully trained, professional" federal screeners. The head of the TSA went about this, of course, by hiring a private company to train and provide the screeners. While this proved that they were adept at the particularly Republican, supply-side skill of creating something no one needs and then billing them for it, (TSA blew through its original $2.4 billion budget requested an additional $4.4 billion by the summer of 2002) the architects of the TSA were much less effective at their actual mission of keeping weapons off airplanes. The TSA regularly fails its own security tests. In 2002, TSA documents revealed that their screeners were missing 24% of mock weapons in undercover tests, with some airports experiencing a 50% failure rate. LAX had a 41% failure rate. They even failed when they realized they were being tested, as screeners had begun to recognize the testers but still failed to find smuggled weapons. That would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

All of this is to say that being dressed down by a government lackey in an airport while juggling two kids and all of our stuff was a crappy ending to a difficult trip. Next time maybe we’ll take the train.

The Olympics

I’ve been watching the Olympics this week and wondering about those kids. The amount of training necessary to perform at such an elite level is incredible and has to start at a very young age. In fact, from what I’ve heard children as young as 3 can sign up for swimming and gymnastics programs. By the time they’re a few years older, they can avail themselves of early morning and late evening training sessions in specialty gyms dedicated to producing the next generation of Olympians. But seriously, at 6 or 7 years old what kid in his right mind really wants to spend 12 hours in a gym banging out floor routines? The only logical conclusion is that it isn’t what the kids want, it’s what the parents want.

Whenever I see those teenage competitors in gymnastics or diving I seriously wonder about their overall mental health. Can you really say that spending hour upon hour perfecting one thing with single-minded determination is good for a developing brain? These kids are trying desperately to please their Type A parents by bringing home a gold medal. Unfortunately, the law of averages being what it is, most of them won’t (odds are roughly 1 in 1,000,000). So why do they do it? I think the parents who push their kids into such a hyper-competitive environment must have some serious unresolved psychological issues. Youth sports activist Bob Bigelow calls it "the Tiger Woods syndrome" i.e. parents think they have to push their little kids earlier and earlier to give them a leg up on the competition.

Have you ever taken a close look at Tiger Woods? He might be a great golf player but he has the face of a robot. When he does poorly he becomes enraged; even when the reason for his poor performance is because he is playing with a broken leg. Such dedication! What a weenie! Clearly Tiger could have benefited more from drinking the occasional six-pack behind McDonalds and sneaking cigarettes with his friends (assuming he had any) rather than spending his entire childhood at the driving range becomming intimately involved with his drivers. What kind of freak can bounce a golf ball up and down repeatedly off a seven iron? That takes a long time to master and it isn’t even a golf skill. It sort of looks to me like a slightly less destructive version of a dog chewing all of its hair off in one spot because it’s stressed out. But I digress.

According to Dr. Charles Yesalis, a Penn State professor of health and human development. "Kids doing sports activities three to five hours a day for five days a week is almost child abuse. When you talk to kids away from their parents, they feign injuries because they're burned out," he says. "They don’t want parents to know because of their financial and time commitment." Ultimately the question to ask your children after getting them involved in any intensely competitive sport is, “are you having fun?” Childhood is supposed to be about fun, isn’t it?

A Question for the Readers

I’ve been feeling a touch maudlin lately and I’m not really sure why. I was putting Jack to sleep tonight and I started thinking that I should make a video for him in the event that I, well, die, before he reaches an age where he can remember me. I can tell him all about my life and Becky’s life and maybe he’ll understand something about his place in the universe and blah, blah, blah. This is weird, right? I actually sat down and filmed myself telling him he should be a good boy if anything happened to me while I was in Peru, but I deleted it because it seemed too freaking bizarre. Yet I’m thinking about it again. I’d guess this sort of thing never enters the mind of most parents,  but having seen the random slice of the karmic axe first hand it seems sort of reasonable to me. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Good idea? Insane idea? I’m not really sure. Being a lawyer, I can be a bit of a blowhard so I wonder if this is more about ensuring Jack thinks about me in a certain way rather than being a really strange instruction in the ways of the world. I was adopted when I was 4 months old and therefore have no idea what version of genetic roulette I’m playing. Will I live to be 100 or am I doomed to flame out at 50? No clue. 

I think this whole idea has come up because of something my sister-in-law said at the family reunion a couple of weeks ago. She noticed Jack calling Erin, “mama” and said, quite correctly, that she was the only mother he would ever know. She didn’t mean it in a bad way, just a factual observation but  its also very true. As sad as it is to me that Jack will never know his mother first-hand, it really isn’t sad to him. That bites a bit. He will grow up without having had a first hand experience of Becky and will know her only through photographs and remembrances of friends and family. That is a very odd concept for me to wrap my head around. Of course, being the self-absorbed fool I am but it bothers me that if I drop dead tomorrow he will think of me in the same way. So maybe this is all about me? I don’t know. Mind you, this is not to take anything away from Erin, who loves Jack as if he were her own son. I can’t even conceptualize where we would be if she hadn’t come into our lives. My love for her is without limit. She and Dimitri have enriched my life in a way that  I never would have thought possible a year ago. 

But if I were to make such a video, what would it say? I love you very much and your mother loved you very much? I think that is kind of obvious. Do I attempt to convey my philosophy of life, i.e. don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t sweat the small stuff (and its all small stuff)? Seems kind of trite. Do I tell him about my views of religion and rationalism? Also a bit superficial since I assume he will have access to my old blog as well as this one which more than adequately represent my views on everything from the New York City subway system to the state of civil liberties in America. So what would I say? I would appreciate your input.

Sleep Deprived and Twitchy

Erin and I found ourselves stretched a little thin yesterday as the boys' boundless energy ran up against our more limited supply. At some point in the mid-afternoon, probably around 4 or so, we both hit the wall at the same time. Thinking back on the events of the week-end, I now realize we were contending with a perfect storm of behavioral issues. These included Jack’s sore molars, loss of appetite and resulting moodiness and Dimitri’s return from a visit with his father, which often triggers a cascade of bad manners and general grumpiness. We are usually pretty good at dealing with the boys' high-octane personalities, but we have been laboring mightily to get the apartment in shape and when Sunday night rolled around we were both pretty tired. There is, of course, no way to turn them off or turn the volume down. You just have to roll with it. Which isn’t to say you can’t carve out a few minutes of sanity here and there. I ran out of the house at 7:45pm after eagerly volunteering to jump-start E’s car which had been sitting powerless and forlorn in front of the post office for a few days. After successfully getting the motor to turn over, I hopped in and took a cruise to the gas station and filled up before taking a long slow drive back. (To charge the battery, of course). By the time I hit the front door I knew I was going to survive the rest of the night without resorting to anti-anxiety medication, whiskey or cigarettes.

I have discovered that dealing with two boys is a lot more challenging that dealing with one. Mathematically, this doesn’t make sense. There may be two boys, but there are also two of us. In theory *we* should have the upper hand, insofar as we are more mature, wiser, carry a certain air of parental authority and can manipulate their environment to produce desired behavior. (After all, we control the food supply). What I apparently failed to consider was the fact that they are younger, faster, more motivated and work devilishly well together. This takes our intellectual and physical advantage and nullifies it through their sheer application of boyish energy. Most times we have a lot of fun, but sometimes they get the upper hand and wear us down to dust. I can usually tell I’m in trouble when I feel like going to bed two hours before Jack does. I feel like I now understand why people do this when they are a lot younger.

I promise the next few posts will highlight the fun stuff, lest I convey the mistaken impression that its all wandering around sleep-deprived and twitchy, which, for the most part, it isn’t. :-)

To and Fro

The last two weeks have been pretty tiring. Last week I was in Wilmington on Tuesday for work, and then on Friday we packed the boys in the car and drove down to Virginia to the annual family reunion. 6 hours each way. That’s a lot of sitting still. We got back on Sunday night, and then left again Monday morning for Boston. Three days in a hotel in Boston with two toddlers while contemporaneously engaging in protracted negotiations to settle a complicated construction defect case left me completely drained and fried by the time we pulled out of the I-Hop parking lot in Cambridge and pointed the car towards home. J and D weren’t fairing much better and screamed and/or whined for the better part of the ride home. I am consistently guilty of overestimating the boys tolerance for new experiences as do I consistently overestimate my own ability to deal with their overt expressions of discontent while also attempting to engage in normal, adult activities. As much as I try to remind myself that the boys are just being boys, I still feel like my nerves are chafed raw when I have to listen to hours of whining and protestations whenever we’re doing something that they aren’t interested in. (Like sitting in a car for 4 hours on I-90). I need to work on this. I think the solution is a combination of engaging in activities more suited to their ages and being more aware everyone’s limitations. That and a good swat on the behind every now and then when the protesting itself is completely unreasonable.

I’m not really the type to spend a lot of time sitting around the house and I thought the Boston trip would be a fun family experience. For the most part, it was. We got to go to the old North Church and E and I even hired a baby-sitter and went out to eat alone, an increasingly rare occurrence. I have discovered, however, that work and toddlers don’t really mix. I’m not saying my performance at the mediation suffered, but I was a little more stressed out than I usually am at these sorts of things and I felt like the purpose for which I was in Boston, (work), was taking a back seat to changing diapers and trying to keep the boys from destroying the hotel. It might be a while before I try to blend business and family travel again.

Speaking of being unable to recognize limitations, with some trepidation I booked a flight for the four of us to Tampa to go down and see the folks in mid-August. Jack has flown to Florida twice since he was born, once at 4 months, once at seven. Both times he was a perfect travel companion, but he was sleeping a lot more in those days and didn’t have a little pal to conspire with. I have no idea what to expect behavior-wise from either one of them, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the early flight time and the motion of the plane will rock them both to sleep before we get carted away by the air marshals.

On the Ex

I’m speeding back to New York after a day spent mediating a case in the hellhole that is Wilmington Delaware. I would have thought that with so many credit card companies and banks having their headquarters in Wilmington that the train station would at the very least sport the latest in air conditioning technology. After all, there are a lot of people wearing ties over collars that people can get hot under down here when the economy rolls up the red carpet and decides to head south for the summer. Yet, in the true spirit of Republican miserliness, the lightly taxed multinational banks contribute nothing to the City they call home, resulting in a crumbling infrastructure and a temperature of 95 degrees in the station and 98 on the platform. I was sent here to mediate a case involving an airplane and a pole and the parsing of responsibility for said airplane striking said pole, but was unavailing in coming to a mutually acceptable resolution. The only thing good to come out of the day was the delightfully greasy french fries that I had for lunch. Presently I’m relaxing in the relative luxury of the Acela “high-speed” train to New York, paid for by my employers, of course. After a day spent blustering and being blustered, a fastish train with a bar car and working bathroom are small but necessary comforts. It is here in the Northeast Corridor where one truly gets a sense of the impact of the current run-up in gas prices. Businessmen, “suits” in the internet vernacular, are deserting their automobiles in droves and flocking to the train to make the run from Washington DC to Boston and points in between. The result has been, regrettably, a longer wait in the bar car, but the overall effect on the environment has likely been positive.

Since E. and I moved in together I have been deftly avoiding the issue of how to integrate her ex-husband into our little domestic party. Clearly he has a right to associate with his son and be a part of his life, but his rights vis a vis D. do not, by implication, translate into the right to sit on my couch and raid my refrigerator. I was neither married to the guy nor did I have any of his children, so aside from the necessary contact involved in visitations and such my interest in getting to know him or have him as a member of my circle of acquaintances is less than zero. This is especially so because the first six months of my relationship with E, I listened to a litany of comments about what a manipulative, drunken, abusive, self-absorbed so and so he was, so I can hardly be blamed for harboring a less than rosy picture of him now. I certainly do not want Jack regularly exposed to a person with such a self-absorbed world view.

That said, I have neither the desire nor the inclination to get in between A. and D. D, for whatever reasons make sense to the three year old mind, is rather fond of his father and A., in his own way, seems to be genuinely fond of D. I’m a born cynic and I chalk up this recent interest in son’s well-being to his more innate tendency toward extreme narcissism rather than any desire to genuinely connect with D. A. was more interested in the bottom of the bottle than in D. for the last three years and even in the first months after he stopped drinking he was much more interested in making E’s life miserable than he was in becoming a part of his son’s life. Regular threatening phone calls, incessant focus on himself, etc. E. for her part, is one of the nicer people I have ever met and she is willing to give A the chance to repair his relationship with D. This is a kind and wonderful thing to do, but I know even as nice as she is, she’s doing it for D. not for A.

I wonder if the fact that I could never envision abandoning my own son for ANY period of time colors the way I look at A. Frankly, although he styles himself some sort of macho dude, (on his brief visitations he dispenses an awful lot of fathering tips to random people in the mall who have no idea that he sees his son for about ten hours a month) I see him so much less of a man because he couldn’t handle the responsibility of raising a child.

II suppose my ego is tied up in all this too. While I get to deal with the day to day heavy lifting he gets to show up every other week with a bag of toys and by virtue of his mere presence thinks of himself as father of the freaking year. Of course he is just playing daddy, while I am, in fact, an actual daddy. He chose to be absent from his son’s life and that is something I'm having a difficult time understanding. In my opinion If you haven’t wiped your kid’s ass or changed their diaper, you are merely an uncle, no matter what your genes say.

More on Vaccines

There is an interesting posting today on Broadsheet in Salon which notes that the pro-vaccine lobby has recruited their own celebrity, Amanda Peet, to refute the allegations made by Jenny McCarthy on Oprah last September that vaccines can indeed be linked to autism. In the letters section following the posting the two sides clashed in a pretty ugly display of collective ignorance, although the pro-vaccine side was far more aggressive and seemingly certain in their beliefs. The readership of Salonresides squarely in the left-of center side of the big tent we call American politics so I was a little surprised that the letters ran 2-1 in favor of vaccinations. Personally, I found it interesting how people who wouldn’t trust the government with their privacy somehow think that when it comes to health issues the government is beyond reproach. Here is Robert Kennedy’s story from Rolling Stone from 2005 where he discusses why the general public has carefully and deliberately been led to believe that there is no link between the mercury preservative themerosol and autism. As usual it involves corrupt politicians and the quest for drug company profit. American collective intelligence has become so dulled by incessant propaganda that all the government has to do to create a general belief that something is true (i.e. there is no link between mercury and autism) is repeat it incessantly and get the mass media to repeat it incessantly, and then paint anyone who disagrees with the official party line as a nutcase. They have done this successfully to opponents of the Iraq war and wireless surveillance and, apparently, with people who think that the health of their families is more important than shielding drug companies from liability for creating a generation of neurologically damaged children.

Here’s a pretty stupid idea. Make a brightly colored and tasty candy in the exact shape and size of small hard plastic Lego building blocks. I don’t know about you but I’m not entirely sure that my 18 month old is capable of discerning the difference between candy and plastic. Someone at Lego Headquarters better put the Corporate Counsel on speed dial. I can almost see the legions of plaintiff’s attorneys lining up to file lawsuits over this one.

I'm Back

The boxes are almost all unpacked, the cable and internet are hooked up and the commute is proving manageable and even pleasant. Thus ends the first week in Great Neck. I spent a rather manic day last week getting a slew of mundane things accomplished; parking permit, library card, parks card, DMV, a trip to Home Depot. Unlike the City of New York, you need a permit or card of some sort to access the services provided by the Village of Great Neck. I suppose they don’t want any interlopers from across the Queens line to sneak in and enjoy the cool refreshing waters of the Parkwood Swimming Pool. After living within the five boroughs of New York City for the last 20 years, it is a very strange feeling to be able to access parks, beaches and well-stocked libraries without filling out forms, waiting on lines or being ground into dust by the effort it takes to get to them. I remember discovering when I moved to Staten Island that on the week-end the MTA turned off all subway service from 14th Street to Battery Park (for repairs) every week-end. Going to Manhattan on a Sunday required a ferry ride, then either a cab (impossible to find) or a bus, whose appearance in the Wall-Street area on a Sunday was about as rare an occurrence as finding a unicorn in Red Hook.

The kicker is that I’m not paying for any of it. Since I don’t own a home I am simply leeching off the super-rich up in Kings Point who probably pay more in property taxes that I make in a year. Granted I don’t have my own personal tennis court or even a backyard, but if I exit my apartment building and turn left I can be in a pleasant fully-equipped –for-children park in less than a minute and there are something like a hundred million public tennis courts in Great Neck.

Of course the home front will take a little bit of tweaking until everything is up and running but that’s to be expected. The move is a big deal for all of us. Aside from some miscommunication earlier in the week-end Erin and I have been fitting together quite nicely and the kids have been getting along as well. I did have to hide the Shrek II DVD yesterday after realizing that D-Train was on his 3rd viewing and I was getting starting to get alarmed that he was doing some permanent damage to his brain’s processing unit. Jack has also been in rare form since he has 4 teeth coming in at the same time. This has made him rather unhappy and me a little jumpy. Last night he had clearly reached his limit for travel, pain and hunger and he let me know it in no uncertain terms. Children can make some very annoying noises when they’re upset. Noises that zero in on your one irritated nerve and pluck it like a bowstring. Thank god when I put him down to sleep last night he had the decency to just roll over, insert his thumb, and drift off to the place where there are no molars, the chicken nuggets are always crispy and the sippy cup is always full of juice.

Pictures

Here's a link to some random photos I uploaded from the hard drive. Some day I'll get around to labeling who's who. If you know me, chances are you're here somewhere. If not, you will be soon!

http://flickr.com/photos/27431606@N00/sets/72157605816687586/

ps I have no idea how to post a link from my Ibook so if you need to, cut the link and paste it into your browser. I'm a work in progress.

M

Movin' On Up

I’ve got almost everything stuffed into medium sized boxes ready to stick in the truck tomorrow. Jack has been climbing up and over those boxes and reaching heretofore unreachable heights on the dining room table. He seems very pleased with his newfound athleticism. I’ve been worrying, probably needlessly about the effect the move is going to have on him. The Brighton Avenue house is the only home he’s known and I don’t relish the idea of taking him out of a familiar environment to someplace strange and new. On the other hand my guess is that he is too old to have developed an attachment to a specific place. Anyway, I’m bringing the couch and rug so the new apartment won’t be so unfamiliar to him.

Packing up hasn’t been easy. The house was full of memories that I hadn’t had the time or inclination to address over the last 18 months. Sorting through old pictures, clothes and boxes full of stuff has led to a lot of bittersweet nights recently. I know in my heart that I’m doing the right thing by moving to the next stage of my life, but it’s still hard. It’s going on four years in that house and I’ve become attached to the place. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere since Becky and I left the Bronx in 1992. For some strange reason I’ve also become attached to Staten Island. Despite the fact that I have choked down more red tomato-sauce based products there than I ever dreamed possible, I’m going to miss the place. So much of the rest of New York has become overrun in the last ten years by snarky hipsters and wealthy yuppies. Staten Island is one of the few places in the City that still feels like the New York I remember from the 1970s. Maybe it’s all those Italians that walked over the plank from Bay Ridge and stopped off for a generation on their way to Jersey. Whatever the reason, living on the North Shore of Staten Island made me feel in touch with the harbor and the City in a way that Brooklyn and Inwood never did.

I have reservations with both Budget and U-Haul for tomorrow; I figure that at least one of them will have a truck for me. I might be off-line for a few days until I get the cable hooked up and my internet access back.

Metatarsophalangeal Sprain

On Saturday Jack and I are moving to Long Island. As luck would have it, while I was down in Virginia this week-end I took a stumble down a spiral staircase, spraining my foot and thereby making the physical part of the move even more excruciatingly painful than I expected it to be. I suppose I have only myself to blame. I had a few too many glasses of white wine at Nicholas’s baptism party which made negotiating the (albeit glossy and newly refinished) stairs more of a challenge than it ordinarily would have been. Well, as they say, shit happens. Hopefully I’ll be a bit more ambulatory on Saturday when I have to start putting large pieces of furniture onto a truck. My doctor told me not to do it but I don’t see him volunteering to move my dining room table.

Being inactive is driving me insane. I use vigorous aerobic exercise as a form of meditation and release and I keenly feel its absence even after four days. Today I found myself contemplating hobbling down to the gym to try out my foot on the elliptical, but then I reminded myself that it was just such an unwillingness to rest after the Long Island ½ marathon that introduced me to the elliptical in the first place. Since January of 2007 I haven’t taken more than a day off from running unless absolutely forced to do so by searing pain. I find this to be a character-building experience and a test of how far I can bend my body to the will of my mind, although anyone looking at it from the outside besides a zen practitioner or another runner would probably judge me insane. There are intangible benefits from exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss. When I run 5 miles or spend 45 minutes on the elliptical I get into a zone. A dropping away of body and mind, if you will. It’s a nice way to break up the day and can become a bit of an addiction. I suppose now that I’m laid up for a couple of weeks I’ll have the chance to meditate on my attachment to exercise.

With the move, I’m looking forward to again being within walking distance to the train station and to enjoy the experience of commuting by mass transit, although “enjoy” might not be exactly the right word. I do know that driving to New Jersey was wearing me down and not doing a great deal for my disposition. Not to mention the cost. I have to fill up the car 6x per month at a cost of $52 per tank, plus $8 per day in tolls. This comes out to be $312 per month in gas and $160/month in tolls. My new commute will cost $255 for two monthly tickets, minus the $120 I get back as a subsidy from my company for commuting by mass transit. I’ll be saving over $300/month in commuting costs alone, and doing my part for the environment at the same time. I also won’t have to pay New York City income tax. More money lying around for Jack’s piggy bank I suppose.

Call Your Congressman

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-Abraham Lincoln

I am dipping a toe back into politics and constitutional law for a moment because tomorrow the Democratic House is going to vote on what they claim is a "compromise" on FISA and telecom amnesty. The bill as written would cede vast powers to the president to spy on American citizens without warrants and grant the telecoms broad immunity for cooperating with the government in spying that has gone on since 2001. As my frieng Glen Greenwald notes in his Salon article, "In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected. "

The ACLU is working hard to stop the bill in its tracks but without any support from Democrats it may be impossible. Carolyn Frederickson of the ACLU has this to say about the wairetapping provisions of the bill:

"This bill allows for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans' communications. The court review is mere window-dressing –- all the court would look at is the procedures for the year-long dragnet and not at the who, what and why of the spying. Even this superficial court review has a gaping loophole –- "exigent" circumstances can short cut even this perfunctory oversight since any delay in the onset of spying meets the test and by definition going to the court would cause at least a minimal pause. Worse yet, if the court denies an order for any reason, the government is allowed to continue surveillance throughout the appeals process, thereby rendering the role of the judiciary meaningless."

It is also worth noting that in 2006, when the Congress was controlled by the Republicans the administration tried to get a bill passed legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, but was unable. They had to wait until the Congress was controlled by Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to accomplish that. A sad day in American history and not the kind of country I want my son growing up in. The Democrats are feckless sell-outs and every last one of them who vote for this bill should be charged with treason.

Risk

Father’s day week-end was pretty cool this year. Erin volunteered to watch Jack on Saturday so I could get in a day of diving out at the old rock quarry near Bethlehem Pennsylvania. Diving in the quarry was a good way to refresh my diving skills and make sure all my stuff was working right. Dave and I headed out at 6am and despite a few equipment issues, it ended up being a good day. My SPG flooded at depth but thankfully continued to work so I didn't have to abort any dives. Dave had some rather more serious fin issues. A small plastic piece the size of a toothpick almost ruined the day for him.

I haven’t been diving since June of 2007 and I sorely miss the sport. It is a very Zen experience insofar as it requires a constant attention to your surroundings and total self-awareness. Petty concerns and neurotic thoughts are banished to the fringes while you glide through the water like a largemouth bass, completely focused on the task at hand. Which is not to say it’s easy. Diving in the Northeast is not the friendly splashfest you experience on a trip to the Florida Keys or the Caribbean. Diving in cold water in the quarry requires (at minimum) a tank, regulator, depth guage, SPG, compass, buoyancy control device with secondary regulator, mask, fins, a dive computer, a 7mm thick two piece wet suit, gloves, boots and a thick full head hood plus a weight belt to get all that neoprene under water. If you decide to venture out into the Atlantic you need to add a redundant air system, lights, a knife, wreck reel and signal devices. Probably about 75-100 pounds of gear overall. You’d also better be in pretty good shape since the physical effect of hanging off a boat’s anchor line 50 feet down the water column in a stiff current is akin to what an American flag flapping on a tall pole experiences in a hurricane. Your reward for all the effort expended going hand over hand down the line to the bottom is 20 minutes on a shipwreck in 45 degree water 100 feet down in near total darkness. There are also sharks. Which you really can’t see. For some perverse reason I find this to be great fun. Diving in the ocean in the Northeast is the closest the average middle-age man (or woman) can ever get to exploring outer space. It is adventure at it’s best and there is always the possibility that when diving on a wreck you’ll find an artifact. Maybe even a gold coin. It hasn’t happened to me yet but I’m going to keep on going.

Over the course of the last year I have wondered whether the risks inherent in the sport of scuba are too great for a single father to be taking. I struggled with this question for almost all of last year’s diving season and as a result, didn’t dive too much. I mean, the poor kid already lost one parent. What would happen to him if I got trapped in a U-Boat and took an unscheduled trip to Davey Jones locker? Anyway, I had almost decided to hang up my fins and take up something safer, like golf, when I got hit by a car while crossing the street back in March and my whole perception experienced a paradigm shift. There is so much random shit that can go wrong that we have no control over. I could have been killed right then and there, and probably would have if the car had been going a little faster or hit me an inch or two higher on my back. Living the straight and narrow is no protection against your karma or the vicissitudes of life. The only thing you get from living in a box for too long is a fear of open spaces and I would never want Jack to deal with the world from a position of fear. In order to be alive, truly alive, you need to take occasional risks and push the envelope. I’m not talking crazy risks, but risks where the danger, albeit present, can be handled if you pay attention. Children, after all, are natural risk-takers. They know instinctually that the risk of falling down is the price you have to pay for scaling the coffee table to see what's on top. They don't even give it a second thought. Its when we get older that we start to fret and worry about things we cannot possibly control. We are only here for a short time and the world is so very vast and wide. What do you want to do with the time you are given?

Misplaced Expectations

We’re having a heat wave. The thermometer has been registering 100 degrees for the last three days which is perfect weather to descend to the basement and work on clearing out the clutter. It’s cool and dark down there and I'm finding stuff I haven't seen in years. Jack has been going a little stir-crazy since he has been confined to three rooms in the house which have air conditioning. Sunday night he was literally running laps around the living room so I took him over to South Beach for a little diversion. When we got there it was 7pm and about 95 degrees. I set him loose on the sand after strolling the boardwalk for a while. He approached the water with some trepidation but I eventually had to dunk his hands and feet because he kept trying to suck his thumb which was full of sand. Whether or not washing his hands in Raritan Bay actually cleaned them is debatable. Even so, it was a nice way to end the week-end.

Speaking of the week-end this one was full of activity. Friday night we drove out to Erin’s place, Saturday it was off to Great Neck to measure the rooms in the apartment, then out east to her mom’s place in Mount Sinai and finally further east to Riverhead for a party. I never seem to get any sleep on the week-ends any more, but I suppose that is to be expected. I have been reading a blog lately which is written by a young widow and single mother of twins under the age of two, god bless her. She recently posted an entry which dealt with, among other issues, the concept of “misplaced expectations”. You know, that vision you have in your mind about the way you expect an event or circumstance to turn out which, often as not, turns out completely differently? I can relate. I remember when Jack was less than six months old I consistently scheduled far more activities than he or I were capable of doing in a day and would get frustrated when I was lucky to even get out of the house before noon. For a while this bothered me, but I have learned to replace the ire of dealing with frustrated expectations with the meditative practice of no expectations. After all, I can’t really control how my son is going to behave, or feel, or how much he is capable of doing on a particular day. The only thing I can control is my reaction to the circumstances. Trying to force my vision of how the day is “supposed” to go onto his behavior is a guaranteed recipe for frayed nerves and a cranky boy. I have learned through trial and error, mostly error, that it is much better to let go. Accept that there are limitations on what I can accomplish and that as much as I’d like it to, willing things to go my way aren’t going to make them happen. Jack has been my mini Zen master, teaching me acceptance and nonattachment just by being himself.

Letting Go of Things

I’ve been going through things lately. Physical things (knee, back, etc.). Boxes of things. Over the course of our long relationship Becky and I accumulated a lot of things, things which have sat undisturbed since she "joined the greater number" last year. But the lease is signed in Great Neck, change is afoot and it has become necessary to finally deal with these piles of things that I have heretofore ignored and left to weather the heat and cold of the drafty attic in the house on Brighton Avenue. I have approached this task with some trepidation since I know I will be called upon to sit in judgment of these things and decide which will be relegated to charity and garage sales and which will be granted a reprieve and end up in boxes in yet another storage area, hopefully to be discovered by Jack when he is old enough to ask questions about his mother and what she was like.

If he were ask that question today I’d tell him that his mother was a bit of a pack-rat. After three days in the attic I have filled up 8 contractor bags full of old clothes, books, fabrics, patterns, sewing supplies, wrapping paper and old luggage. In the morning on the way to work I’ve been furtively dropping off these bags at the Good Will boxes across from Staples. (I say furtively because every day the boxes are filled to overflowing and there are rather stern warnings posted all around about the evils of dumping-which is kind of funny for Staten Island-but who wants a summons for making a charitable donation?)

I’m making headway, but I’m down to the things whose disposition completely confounds me. What, for example, do I do with the diploma Becky earned from her Kung Fu school? What about a drawer full of buttons? Old ID cards and drivers licenses? Artwork purchased on our trips that looked good at the time but upon arriving home was deemed too ugly to hang? Picture frames? Framed pictures? Yesterday I came across the box of maps. Whenever we’d travel, Becky always saved maps of where we were along with information about the area; tourist brochures, blank post cards and the like. Not exactly personal stuff, but not exactly impersonal either. In the era of the internet and GPS, I don’t need a map of Maine, but I felt kind of funny tossing it.

I suppose anyone who has lost someone who has been a part of their life for a long time has gone through this sort of thing. I’m finding I can only take it in small doses; an hour a day or so. Otherwise the decision-making process; what stays and what goes, becomes a little overwhelming. I feel like I am directly responsible for the image Jack will have of Becky as the years go by and therefore what I decide to keep for him is a choice I don’t want to make lightly. On the other hand, if I don’t accelerate this process somewhat I might as well move my bed into the attic because I won’t be done until Thanksgiving.

I identify as a Buddhist and therefore intellectually understand that everything is ultimately impermanent, especially stuff that has been sitting in the attic for several years. Let’s face it, a lot of this stuff was jammed up there when we moved in and hasn’t been looked at in several years anyway. For all intents and purposes it was already gone. And yet, and yet. You look at a mundane task like clearing out the attic differently when doing it reminds you that life is short and death is forever. I think today I'll just concentrate on the pantry. There is very little thought involved when tossing out old pasta. Peace.

Computing

It’s been pretty quiet this week, both at work and on the home front. I pulled a completely spastic move when I stepped on my laptop while reaching to close the window in the middle of the night, cracking the screen and relegating the unit to the scrap heap. After much contemplation I’ve decided to go over to the folks at Apple and get an I-Mac or whatever they’re calling their laptops these days. The Windows GUI is just too much of a pain in the ass. All that buggy software and endless scanning for viruses. I have such little patience for that kind of thing. In anticipation of the new computer’s arrival I’ve been backing up everything on my home PC and the distressed laptop to an external hard drive.

Jack has gotten into the computer lately. He’s been scaling the desk chair checking my e-mail and smashing the mouse repeatedly into the keyboard in a child-sized parody of what daddy wishes he could do at work every day. When I try to remove him he protests. Loudly. So, I usually leave him be. Now that I have all my files backed up he can destroy the darn thing for all I care, although I wonder if I should be more firm with him when he behaves like a frustrated stockbroker. Whenever I speak to him sternly he just laughs. I’m really not much of a disciplinarian. I remember telling Becky before he was born that she would have to be responsible for keeping him in line because I’m really just a big softee. I can put on a good act when he’s doing something zany like sticking his tongue in the electrical outlet or trying to play patty-cake with the front door of a 500 degree oven, but I don’t have it in me to restrict behavior that is merely marginally dangerous, like standing on the coffee table and hurling the remote control across the living room. I worry that if I don’t assert my parental authority now he’s not going to let me set boundaries in the future, boundaries which, Dr. Sears tells me, children expect and appreciate. Too much restriction on his activities and I run the risk of staunching his urge to explore and experience the big old world. Too little, and he might end up running around like he was raised by wolves. A fine balancing act indeed.

The Great Outdoors

Ah, camping. The great outdoors, fresh air, the smell of wood smoke and the relaxation of waking up to the twittering of birds as you gaze out the window of your tent to see a light mist hanging over the lake. Well, that’s one way of seeing it. Here’s another: Ah, camping. A long weekend spent chasing two little boys who were constantly running off into the woods in opposite directions when they weren’t sticking their hands in the fire or screaming because they grabbed a molten marshmallow off a smoldering stick.

When I conceptualized parenting, pre-child, the principal visual my mind would conjure up was me sitting next to a lake teaching my son (or daughter) to fish and build a fire. The reality of the camping experience is rather different from my idyllic fantasies. I was prepared for a few challenges but not the constant vigilance required to keep Jack and Dimitri from inadvertently killing themselves with the variety of potentially lethal situations that arise in the woods. Mind you, we spent the week-end not bushwacking through the primordial wilderness but at the Kenneth L. Wilson DEC Campground in the Catskills. The campground was voted one of the most “family friendly” campgrounds in the United States, apparently by people who have neither gone camping nor have a family. There was a lake, to be sure, but it was completely devoid of any fish and the nice expanse of grass leading up to the waters edge which initially appeared like a pleasant place for a picnic was, upon closer inspection, covered with the shit of innumerable Canada Geese.

Have you ever tried to teach a 3.5 year old how to fish? Let’s just say that fishing requires both patience and concentration, traits which are not present in great quantities in toddlers who require immediate and constant stimulation. Not to mention that while I was trying to explain the difference between artificial bait and live worms to Dimitri, Jack was doing his best to hurl himself from the dock into the water, despite the fact that he doesn’t know how to swim.

Then, of course, there were the bears. We were walking back from the lake when I head some rustling in the bushes to my left. Thinking we might stumble upon a few deer, I stopped and peered around a tree only to be confronted with what looked to me like a veritable herd of bears foraging for food. They spooked and ran off in the general direction of the lake. Dimitri was loudly protesting some perceived slight at the time and thus failed to see the bears, as did Jack who was busily trying to reach a branch to gnaw on from his position in the baby carrier, but Erin and I saw them, oh yes we did. Visions of two little boys being dragged off into the woods and eaten filled my thoughts for the rest of the afternoon. That night I made sure everyone took off the clothes they ate in and put them in the trunk of the car along with the cooler and all the food and garbage. Erin and I then spent a restless night on a slowly deflating air mattress thinking every noise we heard was the hungry bear family come to rip open the tent in search for the pack of cookies I had inadvertently left in the front pocket of my pack.

It got better when we could confine them in strollers and back-packs. We spent all day Saturday walking around Woodstock and Kingston and even managed to find an animal farm so the boys could see animals that were in cages rather than ones strolling through the campground. That part was more fun than trying to corral the kids, which was very much like herding cats who suffer from ADD. I think I’ll wait a few years before doing the tent camping thing again. Cabins may be more expensive but you cannot put a price on peace of mind.

"It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period"

May you live in interesting times is reputed to be an ancient Chinese curse. It is said that it was the first of three curses of increasing severity, the other two being, may you come to the attention of those in authority and, may you find what you are looking for. This past week-end was interesting. Saturday was a pleasant day. Erin, Jack and I spent the day in Brooklyn, specifically in Prospect Park and environs since D-Train had a visit with his father in Bay Ridge and we wanted to be close by in case an intervention was needed. Fortunately, everything went smoothly and Jack got to run around in the park and see some small animals from very far away at the Prospect Park Zoo. He also took a turn around the Carousel which he decidedly did not like. We sat him on a horse that went up and down with the rotation of the ride and he had a complete freak-out when the thing started moving. I was alternating between feeling really bad for him and trying to stop laughing. The weather was perfect and I was playing my favorite Park Slope game of guessing which over-paid obnoxious yuppie had spent the most money on their stroller. Park Slope bashing is apparently a popular sport in New York according to this story that appeared the very next day in the Times.

For the record I do not own a Bug-A-Boo, or any of the other $1000 travesties that have become the status symbols du jour amongst the celebrity wanna-be set, but a rather ratty, formula stained McClaren which has given me not one iota of trouble since I bought it for $199 at Babies-R-Us six months ago. I should probably say that I *used* to own a rather ratty McClaren, since early Sunday morning some fucker stole it out of the back of my car while I was getting changed to go out running. At about 8am I went out to the car, unlocked the door, retrieved my I-pod from the armrest and went back into the house to change. When I came back out 10 minutes later, the trunk was popped and the stroller gone. The diaper bag was also dumped into the back seat. Now I live in a fairly suburban block so leaving one’s car unlocked in broad daylight on a Sunday morning is hardly “asking for it”. Unfortunately, the road I live on is the main thoroughfare from the housing projects on Jersey Street to the stores on Forest Avenue so there is always a sketchy figure or two lurking around. I usually give them the benefit of the doubt but no more. I also forget that Sunday mornings are when the crack heads start to get desperate and are on the prowl looking for something to sell. Oh well, lesson learned. I went right back to the store and bought the same model. So far Jack hasn’t noticed any difference.

Nanny State

Well I finally got my box of fresh organic produce delivered to my door, at 9:30 last night. They keep strange hours, those Urban Organic delivery people. Now I just have to figure out what to do with a bundle of Swiss chard that is roughly the size of Jack. Food has been on my mind lately what with the new ordinance that requires all restaurants in the City with more than 15 locations nationwide to post calorie content on their menus. Since New York has basically been turned into a giant shopping mall, replete with chain restaurants and food courts, this affects a fair number of places that I never go to, except for Starbucks.

(Warning, Rant Ahead: As some of you may know, New York City has become a much safer, cleaner and boring City under the watchful eye of our dear leader Mike Bloomburg. Since taking office he has passed a smoking ban, the aforementioned calorie posting requirement and is presently studying whether to move up the required closing time for bars to 2am instead of the current 4am. Mayor buzzkill indeed. What surprises me is how much support he has. Since he was elected in 2001 Bloomberg has successfully turned NYC into a police state by introducing the random searching of bags in the mass transit system and continuing Giuliani’s practice of ticketing people for "quality of life" violations. You know, such dangerous threats to the public order like taking up two seats on the subway, sitting on steps, fonts being too large on store signs, climbing trees in parks, feeding pigeons, "loitering" in front of your own home, using the wrong color garbage bag, etc., etc. Not to mention the fact that he banned smoking in bars yet wrote exemptions specifically designed to allow the upper-class to smoke in certain places. He continues to support the illegal arrests of cyclists during Critical Mass bike rides, supported the NYPD's illegal search-and-arrest methods during the RNC, and even proposed making extended dog barking illegal, yet he remains enormously popular. I just have no idea why. )

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, calorie counts at Starbucks. I’m a creature of habit. During the week I usually eat a yogurt with cereal for breakfast-watching the waistline and all that. On the week-ends I like to cut loose and order a cranberry scone when I pick up a cup of coffee at the local Starbucks. Jack usually goes for banana bread, but has been known to down a bran muffin when he is particularly, er, backed up. Imagine my surprise upon finding that that small pastry with its vague resemblance to a cowpie packs in a walloping 380 calories! The muffin at over 400! Damn you Mike Bloomburg for making me feel guilty about eating overpriced pastry on the week-ends. From now on I’m going down the block to the Italian bakery where there is no talk of calories and the only time you’re made to feel guilty is if you buy too little.