Discovering The Modern Version Of The Playboy Stash

The Wife and I don't watch a lot of television, mostly because we put the TV in the basement, where it's cold and buggy. It's also far away, and we're too cheap to buy a second set. So instead, we watch our fish tank, which has fewer commercials and is usually more entertaining than 93 percent of the selections on at any given time, anyway. We also stare mindlessly at our computers.

The Boy quickly took to our evening family ritual of staring at the computers. He did this climbing up onto our laps and then pounding on the keyboards whenever we were on the computers. The only way to assuage his computer needs was to give in, so we started with friendly little kid sites with lessons on the ABCs and vowels and how to spell words. We'd periodically let him watch Blue's Clues on the web or would peruse the PBS Kids site for him.

Eventually, time and The Boy's learning capabilities provided him with the ability to surf these websites himself. For the most part, our Household Internet Policy was liberal, which was something we could do because The Boy could not spell. He simply learned how to use bookmarks where we'd saved various sites for him. Life was easy.

But then he learned to spell. And he discovered YouTube, but mostly he used it to watch videos of skateboarding lessons or of funny home videos or music videos of bubble gum pop that was fine, even if the music made my ears ache and my musical sense scream.

Still, we kept our eye on what he was watching. And then The Boy came home from school one afternoon with this tale: a friend of his had been surfing the web, and then for giggles typed in a web address starting with the word, "butt."

It's a pretty funny thought, when you think about it. Few things on Earth are as funny to a 7-year-old as "butt," and so a website devoted to butts would have to be filled with flatulence, making it a veritable second-grader goldmine, would it not?

No, it wouldn't. The site was not quite the flatulence festival he expected. Instead, The Boy's classmate discovered the modern version of Dad's closet-kept Playboys.

"He said that he saw a girl licking a man's wiener," The Boy said.

Dangit.

I had long hoped that this day would never come. Oh, in the back of my mind I knew that it would. But I had always hoped that my eldest would never require such "parental guidance" and would simply avoid all bad things for the rest of his natural life so I could go on whistling and staring mindlessly at the fish tank all evening. Alas, that was not to be. His innocence is now gone. His friend had pulled back the curtain, revealing in playground talk that there exists this entire world of nudity and wiener licking, a world his parents had not told him about.

Fortunately, he found it totally disgusting.

"Put a password on that site, Dad," he said. "I don't to accidentally go to the site."

I'm proud of the kid, of course. He was honest, and he was suggesting ways to block his own access to those sites, lest temptation get the best of him. We ultimately did one better, and installed Net Nanny software that we should have probably installed about two years ago, which means that his old man now can't use half of the websites he normally peruses -- such as sportsillustrated.com.

Had he been more like his old man, he would have pocketed that information and then looked at the site when his parents weren't looking. But in my day, we had old-fashioned paper magazines, and we usually found them stashed in someone's father's closet or got them from a friend. Someone always had a source who had Playboys stashed in an attic, or Penthouses hidden under a bed.

We looked at them long before we had any idea why we were looking at them, because we knew that we weren't supposed to look at women with no clothes on. We were doing something forbidden, dangerous. It was exciting, far better than eating paste or playing Duck Duck Greyduck.

So imagine our joy the day that a friend of mine hit the jackpot. We frequently went dumpster diving, looking for toys, preferably, or any neat thing we could find that some idiot tossed away like it was garbage. On one particularly lucrative expedition we came across a large box. It was filled with skin mags of all types. We had reading material for years. We spent hours looking at them. We treated them like gold, and let only our closest friends know of their existence.

To be honest, I have no idea what happened to those magazines. Maybe we lost them, or perhaps my annoying little sister threw them away. Or maybe mom found them and burned them and then lamented to random people about her son's lost innocence. Of course, when I found those mags I was much closer to middle school, and middle schoolers aren't innocent.

Misleading My Spouse For Her Amusement

More than a year ago, my wife held what is commonly known as a "surprise birthday party" to celebrate the day that marked my having survived four decades without being shot for saying something stupid.  As I do every birthday, we went to get hamburgers. When we got there numerous friends and family members were waiting for me, and handed me a funny hat and a blinking button that said "40" on it.

I had no idea it was coming, even though my wife was exceedingly grouchy for some reason about our inability to get out the door in a timely fashion -- most of the time, it is I who is the grumpy one in such instances. Nevertheless, on that day I vowed my revenge, giving me 17 full months of planning a surprise birthday for her.

That day came last week. Well, technically, The Wife's 40th came this week, but her birthday landed on a Tuesday, and nobody celebrates birthdays on Tuesdays. So instead, I'd hold it on a Friday.

I had only one problem: Seventeen months may be plenty of planning time, but it's an awfully long time to hold a secret, which the last time I checked was the top requirement for a successful surprise birthday.No secret means no surprise, and no surprise means a boring old "birthday party," which I can have any old time, even on a Tuesday.

And I ... can't ... keep ... secrets.

Seriously: I'm a reporter by trade. And reporters are glorified gossips. My job on a day to day basis is to find information and tell people about it. I can't exactly turn this tendency off when I get home. And the result has made me notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and bad at not blurting out what I get her each Christmas.

My only saving grace is The Wife's strong desire not to know what I'm getting her for Christmas. She loves surprises. And so when I would taunt her about the gift I bought her in the days leading up to the holiday, rather than beg me like a starving puppy dog to let her in on the secret--which is what I'd do--she just blows me off and doesn't act like she wants to know at all.

Still, this was a different sort of surprise, one that involved considerable planning and the lure of various people, including far-flung family members, into the Twin Cities. So several months ago I convinced them to fly in or drive in from various locations. I then plotted the party in my head -- they'd be at our house when The Wife got home from work, and then we'd have a party a little later. And then I proceeded to bite my tongue for several months.

This was hard. Among the visitors would be The Wife's brother, who lives on the West Coast, and her pregnant sister, who calls Michigan home. How hard? The Wife once planned to unload some baby stuff onto her sister by sending it to her, and I all but had to shove my head into a vat of pudding to keep from saying, "HEY, just wait until they come here for your birthday rather than waste money on mailing it?!"

But, for some, inexplicable reason, I managed to keep this idea a secret. I avoided mentioning it during obvious conversation points. She never got a hint that I was emailing and facebooking various people behind her back. It was a lot of work. It was like a dog climbing a tree and meowing -- it all went against the very nature of my being. And so you can imagine my anger at myself the day last week that I almost blew it all.

It was Wednesday. The entire plan was set. Everybody was to come into town on Thursday night. They'd hang out on Friday. I'd take that day off to prepare for the party, and they'd be here by the time The Wife walked in the door after work. Later on, members of my family and several close friends would join us. And we received video greetings from numerous friends who live in far-flung locations.

That Wednesday, at the end of a long workday, I decided to write myself an email reminder about the menu I was going to serve at the party, and the food I needed to buy. I then clicked "send." But as I sent it, I noticed something wrong.

It wasn't going to my email. It was going to my wife's work email!

My immediate reaction was to begin cursing, and when I was done I cursed some more and then cursed again before frantically thinking of an excuse why I sent my wife an email labeled "party menu" with a lengthy list of food one would only cook at a party. Among the menu items were deviled eggs and pigs in a blanket, which nobody eats unless they're in a large group where nobody notices you actually eating them. The Wife also hates deviled eggs, meaning it would be plainly obvious that a party was afoot.

Dammit. My choices were to break into her office, hack into her email account and delete the email, or simply deny having ever written any email. "I don't know what you're talking about. I never wrote an email listing pulled pork and deviled eggs on a party menu. You must be thinking of your other husband."

But then I realized that, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, my wife, among others, can access her email at home. And then I consulted with some people who advised me on ways to mislead my wife. So, on the way home, I cooked up a frantic story, saying that I had accidentally sent an email to her that I had meant to send to my boss, and that nobody outside the company is even supposed to look at the message. For some reason, The Wife bought the excuse. She let me into her email account. I deleted the message, and then my heart sunk back into its chest. Crisis averted.

The rest of the shindig went well. The Wife never suspected that I was taking the day off on Friday, never noticed smoke pouring out of my smoker for the pulled pork that morning, never noticed the sudden surge of pie crusts in the refrigerator (The Wife prefers pie over cake on her birthday, so I made several pies; I'd personally recommend this recipe here, and I'd strongly recommend this one, but only because all of my guests gobbled it up, leaving none for yours truly.) Nor did she hear me dropping several pots and plans at 3 a.m. during my midnight pulled pork preparations.

When The Wife walked in the door and saw her siblings and their spouses staring at her, smiling, she jumped about 10 feet and then went into "I can't believe you did this mode" for the next several hours. But she might have been the most surprised to discover that I cleaned the entire house all by myself, proving that birthday miracles do happen.