Giving park goers a comedy show

Here's a site for you: The Boy and I were at a park today, desperately trying to hold on to the last of a three day weekend. He was on his bike, practicing, having recently learned how to ride it without the aid of two extra wheels.

He was being guided by yours truly, who also was practicing -- and failing -- how to stop on Rollerblades without the aid of a tree or the ground or another person at the park.

I recently got the Rollerblades because I have a death wish. Hurtling down an incline with only one small piece of black rubber to slow you own is my idea of a good time. I also figured that it would help me lose some weight, as the body indeed weighs less when it is missing a limb or a chunk of torso or a head.

So on I went, and wisely decided to use them while The Boy rode around the park on his two-wheel bike.

(By the way, do you know those commercials in which the father is shown proudly and happily pushing his son/daughter/complete stranger down the street on a two-wheel bike for the first time? They never -- ever -- show you the part where the child tumbles and hits his head and ends up in the hospital. Nor do they show the argument that ensues when the stubborn child refuses to follow any guidance whatsoever on how to start the bike. And they definitely don't show the kid, angry, frustrated and woozy, shout "TO HECK WITH THIS! I'M WALKING!" before going back home. Not that my kid did that. I'm just saying. They don't show anything like that.)

The Boy actually does quite well on the two-wheel bike, yet he's still more wobbly than a single-footed penguin in a wind storm. And sometimes he doesn't have that brake thing down, like when he went down a hill this afternoon and his brain refused to tell him how to stop, so he kept riding with his feet scraping the ground. I, at the top of the hill, looked down upon my hurtling son, and was completely helpless because if I started down that hill after him I'd be hurtling even faster and would be much more helpless. It'd be like jumping in to save a drowning man when you can't swim yourself.

Fortuitously, he managed to stop himself along the way. But I did not -- yes, I still went after him -- and I sailed right past him, hurtling at top speed and wobbling to and fro in a desperate effort to keep from falling. And by some miracle, I managed to avoid that fate. I also managed to avoid landing in the lake, a feat of which I'm quite proud.

We continued to ride around the lake, which was well populated with picnickers and people who arrived from nearby neighborhoods having heard of the father-son slapstick bike riding-rollerblading team.

Throughout the rest of our trip we took turns hurtling down hills and screaming for our lives and being laughed at by passersby. But we managed to make it fully around the lake, and when I arrived at my car I got down on what was left of the skin on both my knees and thanked the Good Lord that I made it back alive.

I have no attention ... Hey! Look at those fish!

I have no attention span. It's true. I've never had one. It's not really an issue, for the most part, and I gave this fact little thought -- until I married The Wife.

The Wife has a tortoise-like attention span (I'm assuming here that tortoises have long attention spans, given that it takes them so dang long to get anywhere that they have to be patient just walking around the yard; but who knows? Maybe they're constantly getting distracted, but they're just slow about it.)

So I'm constantly reminded about my short attention span because she regularly devours books by Tolstoy and I can barely make my way through the Sunday comics without getting distracted by the Best Buy ad.

She also makes me realize how much of a slob I am at the dinner table. The Wife is the single cleanest eater I have ever come across. When she finishes a meal her plate is cleaner than it was when we took it out of the cupboard. My plate somehow accumulates food, silverwear, dirty napkins, chunks of the newspaper and random mystery items.

The floor around her seat is sparkling clean. The area around my seat looks as if a pack of wild hyenas had been eating there ... and didn't like much of the food they were being offered. My side of the table needs its own street sweeper.

Where was I now? Oh yeah, my attention span, or lack thereof. It's short. And I find it absolutely challenging to get myself through a full-length book. If it doesn't contain hobbits or details heretofore unknown historical details, I usually just get bored with it and distracted by my laptop.

So I rarely read anything longer than a magazine article but feel horribly guilty in the process. So I try. I once tried listening to all those books I never read on tape. But then I found myself unwittingly trying to flip the radio stations.

That's also why I don't like watching movies on TV -- I'm such a nasty channel flipper that I usually end up watching only bits and pieces of whatever movie it is I was watching. The other day, for instance, I watched half of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Worse, I didn't even catch the movie's three funny parts. Indeed, there are several movies that I've seen bits and pieces of, forcing me to order them on Netflix to get the whole thing.

(And yes, I have paused notably dull movies on DVD for a channel flipping session.)

What am I talking about again? Oh yeah, my attention span. Some people might consider it ADD, but I'm hardly hyperactive. In fact, I'm the antithesis of hyperactive. I'm so hyperactive that The Wife sometimes checks my pulse. This is particularly true when she wants me to react to something.

I never get excited. I could win the lottery tomorrow and my reaction would be something along the lines of, "Hey, we won the lottery. We're multi-millionaires now. Do we have any more blueberries? I'm having a craving and my fingers haven't been stained enough lately."

The Wife, having been raised in the south, believes that all good news should be followed by a massive party replete with relatives, an expansive meal, a big-ass cake and dancing girls. So when she does something great, and I say, "That's great," I have to provide sufficient exclamation, lest The Wife start checking my pulse.

OK, back to my attention span. All of these tangents are extending the length of my post, making it a certainty that I won't read it myself. (I can barely write it; I've taken about five breaks while writing this post. It's amazing I get anything done.)

It's uncertain where my lack of attention span comes from -- my mom, like my wife, does not get distracted by anything. I personally blame TV, because TV is a big, easy scapegoat. Which reminds me of a story of The Boy, a handful of food and a petting zoo goat with muddy fricking paws. Needless to say that I walked around the zoo the rest of the day looking like I fell into the Buffalo exhibit.

I did watch a lot of TV as a kid, even before we had a TV with that glorious thing known as the remote control. But most of the TV I watched was total crap. Ever go back and watch some of the shows you thought were totally awesome as a kid? When you watch them as an adult you wonder why on Earth you ever even thought of watching that program -- kind-of like looking at your high-school yearbook and checking out the girls you used to date. What the heck was I thinking?

Come to think of it, I think that same thing watching Star Wars. Yet I keep watching it over and over again, showing you that I never learn my lesson.

What was I talking about again? Oh forget it. I give up.

Checking out the womenfolk

When last we left The Boy, he was having trouble getting ladies' attention, despite his best preschooler efforts -- somersaults, jumping, laughing, dancing, making a general fool of himself, etc., etc.

He is still having those problems.

This evening, we went to a local park to watch my nephew play baseball, because I love sitting outside in sauna-like humidity desperately trying to make out the shadowy figures through the blinding evening sun.

(Seriously, who the heck makes baseball diamond placement decisions? Are they drunk or just purely sadistic? Hey, Bob! Let's make sure home plate face the sun in the evening so we can blind the parents watching the game! That way they won't chew out the ump because they won't be able to see when he totally blows a call at the plate!)

We took The Boy, because we figured it would be generally wrong to leave a 4-year-old at home by himself. Plus he likes his cousin, and he likes baseball. But when he got there he showed no interest in the game, whatsoever.

His first task was to make me play catch with him, which I did for about 3 minutes. Three minutes playing catch was pretty good for my low-attention-span firstborn, but it was still surprising given that there was exactly nothing for him to do at the game other than watch it. But then I saw what was getting his attention.

Girls.

The Boy spotted two girls, both of whom were slightly older and somewhat larger than he was, playing under a nearby tree. These two, clearly, would be much more fun than hanging around with his boring old dad. But he had absolutely no way to go talk with them. They were girls, after all.

He has no problem talking with boys. Boys are easy.

"Wanna hurl large objects at one another and leap off of tall structures?" SURE! Let's go!

Girls are far more difficult. They presumably don't have any desire to leap off of tall structures or pretend to fight with swords or engage in a game of basketball that ends up looking a lot more like rugby. They're also scary.

So he lurked and he stalked. At first he stood far away, looking at them but making no attempt to talk with them. Then he moved closer. Then he came over by me, grabbed a baseball, and returned to the girls' vicinity, where he started throwing the ball near them -- as if to gain their attention, if not by throwing the ball in their eyesight then perhaps by hitting them on the head with the ball. Or, since this was in the vicinity of the parking lot, by inflicting damage upon some stranger's vehicle.

It didn't work, mostly because his anti-romance father told him not to.

So he continued his lurking, inching closer and closer. He was there, but they made no move toward him, and from our vantage point didn't even so much as look in his direction. But he kept going.

We then realized that the drama behind The Boy's girl stalking was more interesting than the game, a low-scoring affair that my nephew's team was losing. Would he actually talk to them? Would he succeed in getting their attention to become a playmate?

I, for one, could totally relate, by the way. Girls scared the hell out of me growing up -- to the point that it's a minor miracle that I managed to get married. Girls are frightening to talk to, because they say things like, "NO!" They also say things like "Ew," and "Get out of here or I'm calling the cops."

So my strategy, much like The Boy's, involved making my way slowly into the girls' vicinity -- so to speak -- in the hope that she would notice me. If I succeeded, we connected romantically. If I did not, which was far more often the case, she would say something like, "Let's just be friends," which is just another way of saying "You disgust me. Go away."

So, apparently, my way with women is genetic, at least judging from the single action of my 4-year-old, which is clearly enough to draw a scientific conclusion.

At least, on this day, his goals were modest, to just get the girls to play with him. And on that point, he succeeded, because the next thing I knew they were throwing grass at him and chasing him around the park. Which was usually what the girls did to me in college. Only replace the "grass" with "bricks."

So it begins: The Boy plays ball

The Boy started his career in organized sports this evening with a rousing practice session of T-ball. The day included an hour-long practice filled with lessons that will stay with the kids throughout their baseball and softball lives, like how to throw, how to field a ground ball, how to spit, how to grab your crotch and how to pick your nose on camera. (I think they get to chewing tobacco next week.)

The Boy did well, even though there was no game and even though they spent the entire practice session on all that boring fielding stuff. "I didn't get to hit the ball!" he said.

I did not do so well. I spent several days of practicing my obnoxious drunk parent skills -- repeatedly ripping off my shirt and slurring obscenities, though The Wife noted that I needed no practice at that, given that I rip off my shirt and shout slurred obscenities when I wake up every morning as it is.

Yet, not once during the practice did I yell at the two girls softball players coaching the soon-to-be-kindergartners in the finer points of softball. I had a golden opportunity to enter the Obnoxious Parent Hall of Fame by screaming at young female coaches during a T-ball practice, but didn't do it. Where did I fail?

Perhaps I felt sorry for them. Or maybe I admired them.

See, when I looked at that gaggle of mostly young boys playing catch at the beginning of practice I nearly soiled my shorts. How on Earth are those two going to be able to turn that group into a workable baseball machine in only a few short sessions?

I can't get my kid to eat a full meal in one sitting. If we're playing soccer, I consider it a major victory if he figures out that he's supposed to shoot the ball into the goal. How would I expect to get 25 kids that same age to be able to throw and bat and field? So, even though I was not the coach, I sat there staring at the field, shivering like a hairless cat in Antarctica and fretting for the future.

This probably explains why I didn't go into teaching. It scares me. Young kids freak me out. And I have no desire to teach the older kids, either. I once had the unfortunate task of having to speak at 9 a.m. to a group of high schoolers about my chosen career. It was easily the worst hour of my life. They looked as if they were dragged to the room that morning by prison guards -- and these kids actually volunteered to come to that particular room.

I know some people who have the gift for teaching, and most of them actually teach. God bless them for it. That is a skill I have not.

And yet these two girls, high-school seniors likely, performed marvelously during that practice hour. By the end The Boy had throwing down and was fielding grounders like Ozzie Smith. So I couldn't scream at the coaches, I just lost all of my steam.

For now, anyway.

Maybe these infants aren't so fragile

We are a little more relaxed with The Sequel, our second child, than we were with The Boy. Specifically, I'm not going into the bedroom every 10 minutes to make sure he's alive. And I'm not thoroughly scrubbing my hands before picking him up.

But there remains a belief in the fragility of infancy, and as such every single abnormal symptom he gets if often accompanied by an automatic call to the doctor's office. That call is, almost invariably, greeted by something just short of derision. You poor, pathetic, over-reactive parents of an infant.

Sometimes, this comes from the nurse. But she usually says something to lure the parent in, like "It's either nothing or he's in grave danger." Translated, this says, "I'll let the doctor blow off your child's problem in the office so we can collect money from your insurance company."

Then, when we get to the doctor's office, he sees our child's all-too-common problem, gives an audible sigh and then calmly informs us that there is nothing wrong and "to come back if he starts barfing up internal organs." Then he leaves. And we're alone, our relief at the child's diagnosis completely overshadowed by a feeling of complete and utter stupidity.

I know this happens because I've been there with the firstborn. Once, we took The Boy camping. He got bit by some exotic insect, resulting in a greatly expanded head. Seriously, his head inflated like a balloon, so he looked like an alien -- you know, those guys with the giant foreheads.

Naturally, we called the doctor. (In our version of "roughing it" we have cell phone service.)

US: Our kid's head is the size of a large watermelon! HELP!

DOCTOR'S OFFICE: (Audible yawn) It's no big deal. He's just having a reaction to a bug he hasn't been bitten by before.

US: But his head is the size of a small office building!

DOCTOR: Has it popped?

US: What?

DOCTOR: The head. Has it popped?

US: Uh, no. And Thank God for that!

DOCTOR: Don't call back until it does. (Click)

Truthfully, I can't imagine being a pediatrician, because those guys must deal with an enormous number of parents who fly through the doors in an absolute panic because their newborn sneezed twice in 14 seconds. I don't even want to know what that's like.

Still, it's difficult to feel anything but silly when it turns out to be nothing -- like we did a couple of days ago, when The Sequel wouldn't quit crying and had an absolute obsession with his left ear. We knew it was an ear infection. And we really knew it when the nurse said we should come into the doctor's office immediately.

And yet when we got there, the doctor on call mumbled his way through the exam, looked in The Sequel's ears, said there was nothing wrong with him and left.

We learned our lesson: No more over-reacting. So yesterday, when The Sequel again got unusually fussy on the night I was tasked with watching him -- of course -- we held off. And we held off even though the skin around his eye began getting pink and he kept rubbing it. It's not pink eye. His eyeball isn't bloodshot and leaking, I thought. When the pink was still there in the morning, we called to get the doctor's "It's nothing" over-the-phone diagnosis so we could confidently go to day care.

(Pink eye is like a scarlet letter. People avoid pink eye victims like they avoid lepers. Yet pink eye in an infant, especially one in day care, is inevitable. Babies and pink eye are like babies and crying. Or 90s baseball players and steroids. Or politicians and extramarital affairs. It's going to happen sooner or later.)

By the end of the day, it did indeed look as if The Sequel had pink eye. So I took him to the doctor. We got the same guy, who needed five seconds to say "pink eye." But then he gave me this bit of news: "And he has an ear infection."

Wait. Didn't you just tell us two days ago that he didn't have an ear infection? I give up.

Musically solidifying my dorkitude

On Saturday, we went to a garage sale. We went to a ton of them, because a local neighborhood here was having several on the same day, a square mile of cheap, moldy, half-broken junk.

I love garage sales, not because I periodically get something -- which I do -- but because I get to look at other people's garages. Or yards. And ogle whatever it is they have in there. Usually, I look inside at the neat shelves of tools and yard implements and think, "I'm going to reorganize my garage the second I get home." And then the second I get home I've completely forgotten about that declaration.

But other than the open house, the garage sale is the only chance you get to look into your neighbor's lives without being invited over (and, unlike the open house, you don't have to avoid looking into the eyes of the pushy real estate agent in the faint hope that you can avoid telling them that you're "just looking." Most people holding garage sales know you're just looking, and besides not getting a sale on a $1 set of used glassware is a heckuva lot less disappointing than not getting a sale on a $300,000 piece of property).

This wasn't even our neighborhood, so we were just there for the conveniently placed junk sales. And we soon found ourselves with plenty of junk you'd expect to find at a garage sale -- a bunch of used CDs, an overpriced baby book, a nonworking toy purchased in an effort to prevent The Boy from crying and a Christmas plate "so we have something to put cookies for Santa on," The Boy said.

Most of these garage sales are the same. They have racks or tables of old clothes that don't fit me or trinkets I don't like and every other one has a cheap ink jet printer that looks remarkably new but that you know completely and totally sucks. And I've usually arrived late, so that everything good is long gone. Then I went into one garage sale that looked like it was being run by a guy who collects old video games and has a vacuum cleaner fetish.

The homeowner himself sat in the shade in shorts and a short-sleeve shirt that was fully open to reveal a rather ample midsection, once again confirming all my own reasons for keeping MY shirt on during the summer months, no matter how hot I get. (I, unlike some of my male colleagues, care about the public's general welfare.)

The homeowner's dark, somewhat curly hair hadn't been combed in a month and he spoke with a heavy Greek accent. (Or maybe it was Italian; regardless, it was one I could not imitate; every time I tried imitating him later on that day it came out like I was from India.)

It was here, and under The Greek God's watchful eye, that I came across the coup de grace of my garage-sale career: an accordion.

No, it didn't have a case. And it was musty. The leather strap had broken off and some of the bass keys looked like they'd been stuck for a while. But it was totally awesome. I looked down and said to myself, "I NEED THAT THING RIGHT NOW."

I have only a vague idea of how to play it, and to be perfectly honest I'm afraid that playing it for too long will give me some type of weird pulmonary disease that will require me to spend several months being poked and prodded by world-renown lung doctors at the Mayo Clinic. That thing is musty. It's been in The Greek God's moldy attic for decades, at least, and hasn't been played since polka was popular. (I'm assuming here that polka was popular several decades ago ...)

But I immediately thought of a lifetime of annoying my family members by breaking the accordion out for mandatory Christmas carols, and how the threat of the accordion would keep the in-laws at bay. And then I thought of the endless opportunities to embarrass my children and get revenge for all of those grocery store tantrums and restaurant screaming matches.

I needed it. The Greek God saw me ogle the accordion, and did his best sales job. "It works," he said. When I told him I couldn't play, he said, "Oooooh, it's easy. You have computer? Just go on there. They show you. It's eeeeeasy!"

How much?

"Twenty dollars."

SOLD. That's all the money I had left. I could have talked him down, and I'm sure this accordion is not worth it, but I'm no negotiator and besides, $20 is a small price to pay for an item that will solidify my dorkishness. Small price indeed.

My Boy the budding lawer

I've said before that my negotiating skills amount to roughly zero, which makes dinner at my house a real pain in the butt.

I'm the household "chef," though I use that term loosely. I do the cooking for two reasons:

1. I like food.

2. I decided -- fully on my own, mind you, and without the need for threats of physical violence from my spouse -- that I needed to do more work around the house to make things more equal between The Wife and I. My choice was to either cook or clean. It was a no-brainer.

The moment I begin preparing said dinner, I am subjected to an interrogation by The Boy, who at 4 is somehow convinced that his old man is trying to poison him. (Note to self: Stop reading Greek mythology and Shakespeare to him before bedtime.)

I've always found this a bit odd. I could be making the best thing on the planet -- cream cheese frosting -- and would, because I'm an awesome dad who makes great sacrifices for the happiness of his offspring, let him taste some before I dive in head-first myself.

Rather than eagerly partake in the frosting, he instead gives me a strange look, and then slowly creeps up to the bowl as if he's a wolf and I'm Kevin Costner presenting a hunk of meat. As he approaches the bowl, he does his best Gene Simmons impersonation by sticking out his tongue an inhumanly lengthy distance to taste the most minuscule amount possible. And then he realizes, "Hey, I like this stuff," and dives in head-first.

Despite the frequency of this type of revelation, he still doesn't trust my food choices so far as I could throw Andre the Giant, and so the interrogation begins the moment I turn on that stove. And if my answer doesn't include either "pizza," "meatballs," "burgers" or "mac-n-cheese," then the negotiation commences.

Boy: Do I have to eat it?

Me: Um, yes.

Boy: How much?

It's here where The Boy starts trying to talk me down. He knows that his ability to consume any treats afterward depends fully on his compliance with my draconian dinner requirements, and it's his goal to get those requirements to a level at his liking. I generally don't play along. You'll darn well eat what I give you, boy.

(Is it wrong to like saying stuff like that? Because I love it. It makes me feel, I don't know, dad-ish.)

This doesn't stop the Boy. If I make the mistake of saying "most" or "some," then he wants to know exactly how much that comprises. "How many bites is 'some?'" he asks. And if I make the mistake of actually giving him a set number of bites, then he proceeds to fulfill the absolute bare minimum. Thank God he only knows a few words because one day I fully expect him to arrive at the dinner table presenting a written, notarized contract proposal.

If he is unsatisfied with the terms, as is usually the case, my skinny 4-year-old declares, "I don't need any treats" and then doesn't eat -- until later, that is, when we inform him that the only food he's allowed to eat is either a vegetable or a fruit. He eats a lot of carrots and apples that way.

Some day, The Boy's negotiating skills and his never-ending search for loopholes will come in handy -- say when he passes the bar and I get sued -- but that day won't happen any time soon. (Though I am eager for the day when I can take him to the used car lot or, come to think of it, my boss's office come raise time.) In the meantime, I'll probably have to take some business classes or put myself through law school to prepare myself for his teenage years. Either that or I'll talk him into athletics and burn all his books.