Da Da Da-Da, Da Da Da-Da Pa-pa’s World (sung to Elmo’s theme)

Hope said something interesting a couple of weeks ago. “You can have your man cave back.” I was evicted from my he-bunker due to the children’s need for a playroom and Hope’s need to remove their clutter, remember? I’m happy to report both parties are finding this arrangement to their liking. “Yes, if you go further into the basement,” she continued. “We can set you back up to the way it was.” I’m presuming by “we” she means the children and her? I’m glad my being further out of sight is so top-of-mind.

Let me explain something to you. Deeper into our basement…crossing the threshold separating the new playroom and what lies beyond is what the impenetrable jungles of the Congo must have been like at the time of early white exploration. In short, from man cave to bloody kerplunking.

Despite my griping, I’ll take it. I’ll barge my way past the Christmas crapola, the assortment of furniture that will become archeologically significant thousands of years from now, and take over the same way a burrowing animal would. It won’t be pretty. Though it will be mine. And, seeing as I’ve already started telling my son about various ghosts living in the dark nether regions of our basement, he seems to be spending less time in his play area than before. I guess, I’ll have the old place all to myself?

But enough of this, the point of this posting is Hope’s new job and the fallout.

She left for San Francisco to meet her new workmates during the heaviest floods in state history. A Biblical downpour, lasting almost three days that equaled the length of her impending West Coast stay. This was the week leading up to Easter. I had the distinct feeling that my time with my children was to be the equivalent of the religious festival we visited in Guatemala a couple of years ago: Semana Santa (Holy Week), meaning I would serve penance, be crucified and rise again just as Hope got home.

We’re not a religious lot. Of the four of us, I would say that Samson is probably the most in touch with his spiritual side. Both children go to a daycare center where religion is part of the curriculum. Did we have any idea of this at the time? I can’t remember. Is it bad that parents send their children to be religiously inculcated just because they get a discount for sending both to the same place? Hey, it’s not like we’re sending them to a Jihadist madrasah. A little apostolic scripture never hurt anyone. And to be sure, Samson has come home with many a story that neither Hope nor I have any idea about. Anyone know the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? He is becoming well versed in the ways of JC, that one. And his summoning of His name at the tiniest incident—like who will make the dill seed I planted grow—is directly attributed to his child-minding surroundings. In the car, the other day, he put one arm over the other and said, “What’s this?” I guessed Ninja Star. “No. A cross,” he said. “It’s what Jesus was put on.” Hey, what can I say it’s a life-style choice? But as with any true believer, their fervency requires tempering to keep it free from fanaticism. Last week, he had logged onto PBSkids.org for a little downtime. For some reason, the wireless connection kept dropping, so much so that from the young man’s mouth as he banged his fists came the confirmation of his faith, “JESUS CHRIST, why don’t you work!” Immediately, I gave a quick sermon on how referencing Jesus Christ has transcended faith into the common vernacular, which he’s forbidden to use in public under any circumstances. I also made a mental note to get a permit for my slovenly mouth and the wayward language spewing from it.

The first two days of my being Papa-Mama went without a hitch. Wednesday and Thursday morning, I got up an hour early to fix the kids their lunch boxes and figure out what to defrost for dinner. Hope is much more regimented in the mornings about this sort of thing. Bing, bang, boom. Done. Me? I wander through the cupboards in some strung out afterglow. Hmm, shall I cook lentils? A carbonara would be nice, but we don’t have cream…oh, that’s okay I’ll use milk. Wait a minute, I’ll quickly knock up a Spanish omelet...just peel some potatoes and boil them at SIX IN THE MORNING???!!!! Needless to say, the kids were late for school. Returning home from having dropped them off, I’d clean up the breakfast bomb crater and sit down to do some work. Ah, work. How to settle into concentrating on what pays me a wage having just survived the three-hour tornado is a feat many do, but few appreciate?

Four o’clock. Time to get the kids. And here’s how it goes. Go to Samson’s class. Don’t forget to pick up his lunch box, stuffed bear and any religious drawings or Old Testament scripts that he has copied and put to memory, then onto Amelia’s room. Back up. Where’s Samson? Go back and get Samson. Now, onto Amelia’s room. Get Amelia who keeps running away. I grab her with one arm as I’m signing her out with the arm that’s holding her lunch bag, wet clothes and her pink bunny…the same arm already holding Samson’s sundry belongings. I blink goodbye to her caregivers, on account that my limbs are weighed down and Amelia’s jacket is in my mouth. And we’re off to the car. Samson runs away to chat with friends and Amelia is crying as she’s buckled into her car seat. I walk back to the daycare center picking up what I dropped on the way to the car. I corral Samson and we’re heading home.

During the festival of Semana Santa enormous floats with the images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus of Nazareth are carried on the shoulders of some 50 devotees or curcuruchas through the streets of La Antigua. Carrying 7000 pounds for a couple of blocks (only to be relieved by more curcuruchas) is a symbol of penance…atonement for one’s sins or wrongdoings.

I’m not sure what it is I’ve done. I’m just trying to be a dad. My sights aren’t particularly high in this department, either. I’m not a model anything, but that doesn’t mean I should go an entire day with no time to take a whiz. Is this domestic penance that I’m enduring…a past wrongdoing for which I’m now not allowed to piss?

Dinnertime. As my mother-in-law puts it, “Arsenic hour.” On the Thursday, a good friend came in from Boston to spend the night…catch up and enjoy the art of reconnecting, as civilized people do. Not exactly. Not even close. Cahill, a gentleman for whom children represent other people’s problems was thrown into dealing with one child while I calmed, bathed and pumped the knock-out-bottle into the other. He hadn’t even sipped his first martini before Samson screamed, “Cahill! Let’s build a rocket!” An hour later. There it stood. His martini…as unwanted as a witch’s tit. It was 9pm and dinner hadn’t even started. In the end, with Samson up way past his bedtime, we got down to the manly sport of eating steak, drinking vodka and telling whoppers. Samson fell asleep on the sofa. And a while later so did the rest of us. The next morning, Cahill left. He’s no dummy. Then it was just the kids and I. By 3pm I was deciding whether it was bad parenting to want to feed them, bathe them and put them to bed. I decided it was: a majorly big sin for which I would carry 7000 pounds of guilt without the help of 49 other dudes.

Before I knew it, dinnertime had come round again. Quick, go, go, go. Chop, sauté and boil as the children played with the one object that hadn’t been upturned, rifled through or obliterated by cushions and blankets: our bowls of onions, garlic and potatoes. In seconds, the kitchen floor turned into a plain covered with onionskins and stray onions barreling all over the place. I’d had it. “E-nuff!” Yelling felt good. It took the pain away in my lower abdomen that pulsated from not going to the bathroom since this morning. “But papa,” came from number one son. “I’m not papa. I am Mister Pick-Up. Mister. Pick-Up. Because all I do is pick-up, pick-up, pick-up!!! Who am I?” “Mister Pick-Up,” replied Samson agog at the dissonance between what he thought his father should endure and his unreasonable protestations. They were two and I was one. If this were a war I’d have been out-numbered by an entire regiment.

With the children eating, I sneaked off to the bathroom. Being a parent is to do, and be thinking of doing, multiple actions in the course of performing one single action. You fix the sticky handle on the toilet cistern while you whiz, because who has the time to do both with any sense of pleasure? With both children fed and bathed. We settled down to read a few books. Both crawled into their favorite nooks, which my body provided and as I read Amelia cooed, “Papa” over and over again while stroking my hair. If we had just been through arsenic hour, here was the antidote. Even though their mother was 3,000 miles away, they were content. Happy with, what in their minds was a good day. And who was I to think differently? As they fell asleep I managed to put them both to bed. Pulling Samson’s sheet up over him and BearBear, I detected something in his face, where locks of still wet hair curled about his forehead, framing his happy disposition as a testament to a Good Friday, that had been pretty dam good.

Hope called, that evening, to say things were going well, but air-traffic was snarled and she would be delayed by an extra day. Oh well, my resurrection will just have to wait a day. Da da da-da, da da da-da Pa-pa’s world.

The Cursive Son

Our son, Samson, has informed his mother that he won’t be living with us for much longer, on account of the fact he wants to be a famous magazine writer. According to our future National Magazine Awards winner, famous magazine writers don’t live with their mamas and papas and so we should prepare ourselves for his inevitable departure. Not bad from a four-and-a-half year-old.

Even in my darkest fears of how environments can shape a child’s pliable character, (hence my demands for raising Samson for the first two years of his life in a Skinner Box. See picture. Happy little dude ain’t he?), did I think that my eldest would want to follow in his father’s footsteps. I mean, I’ve had my share of acclaim, but famous? “We don’t set out to be famous,” I told him. “Look at your father. I’ve remained true to the integrity of my trade; I’m a nobody.” Why had fame taken root in his little unspoiled mind?

Seriously, though, before he leaves I need a word with him. It’s not his exodus that concerns me. At four-and-a-half he can work a computer, use the TV remote like Liberace, make himself food and use the John, so that’s not the issue. The issue is his choice of profession. Publishing? Why not boxing? Publishing! How about a job with Blackwater, or whatever it’s now called…something useful? Stop runaway Toyotas? But publishing!?

No doubt you’ve guessed from my last posting what I think about my industry. Bitterness, you might think? Ego dyspepsia? Slit my throat on my editor’s desk to have her not strike the meaning from my 600-word piece on window boxes? And yet, my dismay comes from a deeply vested connection to the wonders of bringing people entertaining reading material. I’ve been in this game since the mid-1980s and let me tell you, back then, journalism and life were joined at the hip. You were knee-deep in what you reported on. The office was just a place where you’d collect messages. Your desk and chair: placeholders for when you became too old for three-hour lunches and a belly full of hearsay. These days you’re expected to write from your desk, interview people via telephone, read a person’s or company’s web-site and press releases, and then for the atmosphere cobble together something plausible, because atmosphere can’t be fact-checked. Like the correspondents covering the Iraq War, we’re embedded…contained by our L-shaped desks and task chairs: publishing’s version of the couch potato.

As evidence of this shifting mindset, back in the early ‘90s, as chief photographer in Eastern Europe for Agence France Presse, I was away from my desk for more than a month. Returning to the cupboard-sized office I rented in Prague, I found my desk was completely obscured by a mountain of faxes sent by head office in Frankfurt wondering where the hell I'd gotten to. The pile was huge. A proverbial avalanche of queries. I put my arm in as deeply as I could and pulled out one coiled and yellowing message that read, “You’re Fired!” Luckily, a three-hour lunch and a belly full of hearsay at the local beer keller took the sting out from that one. My nose for a good story had me tagged as a loose canon, a roving renegade. Let’s hope the famous magazine writer in-waiting uses his nose more judiciously than his father?

As any parent would be, when their offspring has made such an inchoate proclamation, I’m curious to know what a famous magazine writer will pen in the future? By my calculations it will be around 2030, when he places his fingers on the keyboard in earnest. What will the briefs of those commissions be? Based on the way it’s going, I can guess; business to business marketorials on maximizing the click rates of your eNewsletter, 10 ways to make eye-contact with the boss, lists and countdowns on everything from vacation destinations to the top one hundred doctors specializing in treating ED in the Greater Boston area. Publishing, if it isn’t already, will be pure PR, delivering information with a view to reader consumerism. So, maybe Samson’s choice of being a famous magazine writer might instead, morph into becoming a famous copywriter?

If what he’s done to date is any measure of his writerly prowess, then he is well on his way. He has already authored his first book. It’s an untitled work and incorporates drawings, mixed media—by way of wildlife stickers that click when they’re depressed. I ghost wrote a couple of pages, but for the most part Samson’s diary is an original work that touches on his existential wanderings through Christmas, Moray eels and Robinson Crusoe. He’s not quite writing cursively and it appears at times he’s not even writing English, but he’s filling pages, which in today’s literary world can earn you a pretty penny.

If I had my druthers, would I prefer him to be a novelist rather than a scribe for hire in the always-fresh-never-staid world of editorial? You betcha. Would I wish him to have creative control and take it as far as his muses will allow? What father wouldn’t? Perhaps he senses this and wants to make me proud. It could answer this whole famous notion he has in his head? I should be careful. The whole parents’ and their unfulfilled dreams can impact their children to terrible effect. Take Michael Jackson: the epitome of tears before bedtime

In toying with the mark my son will leave on Western civilization, the idea of him writing the next Ulysses is sexy, though misguided. I love the way people say, “If Ulysses were written today, it would never get published.” True that. Though, not because the likes of Joyce aren’t around, they are. The Joyces of a hundred years on are less concerned with a parallel story of the most famous mythological journey of all time and a man’s wanderings through the streets of Dublin. Their schtick is more about posing fiction as fact...true stories of escaping Nazis and being raised by wolves in the Ukraine Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, or raised by gangbangers in South Los Angeles, when you're really a Valley girl Love and Consequences. The need to be famous can make your nose grow just like that. I know shouldn’t be bogging you down with this. Had Samson been raised in a Skinnerian box, tended to his earliest formations with rubber gloves bolted to the structure of his 24-month home, he’d be less susceptible to my influences and less of a slave to his innate desire to emulate them. Equally, Samson could have chosen a more benign trait of mine to follow, like taking enormously embarrassing mouthfuls of food, for instance. But publishing!? I know keeping children in a box seems a little off, but most parents are hip to the idea, no? What do think a crib is?

After his commanding declaration, I’ve been trying to get to grips with what both children will become. Standing by our kitchen island, recently, I looked over to the children’s dining table where my daughter, Amelia, valiantly drank juice from the air hole of her sippy cup while the contents streamed from the mouth piece onto the carpet, and then noticed the leaves at the bottom of my tea cup (That's a big fat James Frey whopper. I use tea bags). I wondered what they might tell regarding the fate of my two babes? Perhaps embracing Samson’s decision is what’s best? At the same time, I should prepare him for all that he is about to endure and enjoy. James Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet, gave his son the sort of treatment that can only fortify a child’s quest for their dreams. Having read his son’s first poem, Wright said in an encouraging tone, “You’re a poet! Welcome to hell.” Notwithstanding, there is Samson's mother. I’m not sure if he’s considered Hope's wishes when it comes to his sallying off to some Paris commune of his own making. I get why this has to happen: the whole creative process and self-discovery thing, but mothers are mothers, especially one who already lives with a writer. She would no more want her son to leave home than to become a writer. And leaving home to become a writer, well, perhaps Wright’s commendation would work just as well in this instance: Samson, “Welcome to hell.” You've just broken your mother's heart. Given this, I wonder whether now is a good time to revisit the Skinner box idea with Hope? What better place from which to write from home?