From the Archives - Journal for my Younger Daughter

Introduction

Around the time Lindsay, my second daughter, was born, I started keeping a journal about her life. (I did the same for her older sister, and you can see an excerpt here.) My journal project was inspired by those baby books where you put in footprints, birth size and weight, developmental milestones, etc. Those baby books are typically surpassed only by exercise bikes and crock pots in unfulfilled good intentions. Usually the first couple of pages are diligently filled out, and then the new parents get overwhelmed and the rest of the book is blank. 

I endeavored to do better. The result? A mammoth 400-page document, spanning my daughter’s entire life thus far, which I presented to her when dropping her off at college. Here’s an excerpt, emphasizing episodes I think are funny (but which shouldn’t embarrass my kid, who after all has suffered enough, what with me as her dad).

A note on the text: it’s written in the second person (i.e., “you”) because the journal’s real audience is my daughter. You albertnet readers just get a taste.

(Art in this post is by Lindsay’s Grandma Coral, except one picture by Lindsay.)

September 15, 2004 (age almost-1)

I’d forgotten how messy it is when a baby tries to feed herself. You’ll sit at the high chair happily for twenty minutes or more, grabbing everything on your tray, shoving much of it in your mouth, spitting much of this back out, and dropping a lot. Watermelon is a favorite, as are Cheerios (or “ring shaped oat cereal,” as the parenting books call them), refried beans (cold), little blocks of cheese, pieces of bread, cut-up fruit . . . just about everything except baby food, which you never really took a shine to. I’ll be all stoked at how much you ate, until clean-up time when I discover what looks like at least 90% of it on the floor, in your chair, and in the pouch of your bib (when we manage to get the bib on you, which is seldom). When you’re done you scream and cry throughout the clean-up, just like your sister used to do. Then you want to be held, which is a problem because I don’t want to have to change my outfit in addition to yours.

April 7, 2005 (age 1-½)

When I say, “Where’s your nose?” you grin, grab my finger, and touch your nose with it. Then you touch my nose with it. Then you start moving my hand around to different parts of my head: “That’s my ear,” I’ll say, “and that’s my mouth … that’s my cheek.” It’s not entirely clear how much you’re directing the hand and how much I am; it’s like a Ouija board.

You love throwing things away. Every time I empty the trash I have to watch out. The cat’s dish gets thrown out a lot. You’re just like your mother.

April 3, 2006 (age 2-½)

[Our cat] Misha kept getting on the table during dinner. I admonished her, “Get out of here Misha! Go catch some bugs!” (My point was that she’s supposed to be a hunter, not a scavenger, and yet I wouldn’t encourage her to catch birds.) Well, you and Alexa really liked this utterance. I’m not sure whether you grasped the point or not; you may just have seen it as a stock put-down or something. Anyway, the other day we were getting in the car and you and Alexa had some dispute, perhaps over who got what car seat. With a somewhat self-satisfied air (I think you’d prevailed in the dispute), you said, “Go away, Alexa! Go catch some bugs!” Man, she was pissed ... especially, I think, because your mom and I were laughing at what you said. I think this was your first joke ever, or at least your first joke that actually made somebody laugh out loud. I know plenty of adults who haven’t yet achieved that milestone.

April 11, 2006 (age 2-½)

I was reading No No, Jo to you. It’s about a kitten who’s always making messes by trying to help, and each page ends, “But does Sam [or whoever] thank that kitten? Sam says...” Then you open out a flap that shows the kid reacting to Jo’s mess, saying, “No no, Jo!” The idea is that the child to whom you’re reading the book can provide the chorus, or punch line, for each page. But you weren’t doing it. You’d done it before, but this time you were in a needy, weepy way because you’d just awoken from your nap to find the babysitter was here. You like the sitter okay, but of course you recognized that her presence meant your mom would be leaving. (I would be leaving too, but that’s no big deal for you.) It was tough even getting you to let me read to you to cheer you up. I thought you might be coaxed into helping me say the “No no, Jo!” part, so I prompted you. “What does Sam say?” I asked. “Please?” you whimpered.

April 18, 2006 (age 2-½)

We had Easter at your Grandma Judy’s house up in Oregon. After the egg hunt we had breakfast and then a walk. Your mom was enjoying the walking so much that she asked me to administer the chocolate bunnies to you and Alexa while she and my mom walked some more. This seemed like a fine work detail at first, until I saw the size of the rabbits. They were huge! Probably four inches tall, and solid chocolate. Of course you and your sister were thrilled and started gnawing on them right away. Soon you had chocolate all over your mouth and hands. As your mom was leaving she’d said, “Dana, it’s up to you to keep them from making a mess!” I gave you and Alexa each a paper napkin. I policed the devouring of the chocolate for a long while, maybe fifteen minutes, but man, what a tedious job. At several points I thought of taking the chocolate away because it was just too much, but of course that would be like taking candy from a baby. A lot like that in fact. So I tried to encourage you to save some for later. I gave you each a bag to put your bunny in. You dutifully wrapped the bunny in the napkin and put it in the bag, and then, once the delight of this operation wore off, you took it back out and started gnawing again. Finally I couldn’t bear the tedium, not to mention the ghastliness of it all, any longer and started to pack for our trip home. Your mom returned to discover that you (and/or Alexa) had smeared melted chocolate all over the cream-colored upholstery of one of Grandma Judy’s dining room chairs. Your mom snapped at me, I snapped back at her, my mom was hurt because she’d actually bought the bunnies and they’d cost a lot, and at last we fully appreciated the glory of Christ’s resurrection and the thrilling mystery of the rabbit that lays eggs.

June 7, 2006 (age 2-¾)

You were going to tag along with your mom to your sister’s ballet class, but I got home from work right before they left. Your mom saw an opportunity and changed her plan, leaving you home with me (vs. chasing you around the community center for 45 minutes). Oh, man, you were not happy about this—in fact, you had a complete meltdown. I was so exhausted from work, I went straight to my last-resort solution to the crisis: I put in a video for you, which is a rare treat. Then I put a beer in the freezer (we didn’t have any cold) and set a timer to remind me it was in there, lest it get forgotten and burst. When that timer went off, some 10-15 minutes into your video, you thought I’d set it for you, to limit your video time (a standard practice, but one which frankly hadn’t occurred to me in this instance). To my pleasant surprise, you ejected the tape and brought it to me, without any fuss. After that we seemed to be reconciled. It just goes to show, beer is probably the solution to most parenting difficulties.

September 26, 2006 (age almost-3)

You often use the word “instead” when you’re not actually comparing two options. “I want milk instead,” you’ll say, apropos of nothing. I guess it makes sense, because whenever you propose the having of something you’re also implicitly rejecting the not-having of that thing; i.e., “I want milk instead of no milk,” or “I want milk instead of nothing.” Very philosophical of you.

January 23, 2007 (age 3)

Your mom used code words the other night so you wouldn’t understand an idea she proposed to me. She referred to me as “the paternal guardian” or some such thing. “Call him ‘Daddy,’” you told her. Ah, the power of context (though in this case, for her to refer to me in the third person, when talking to me, should have helped throw you off the scent).

April 4, 2007 (age 3-½)

You call butter “toast,” as in, “I want more toast for my bread.” You call your lacy shawl “my marriage.” You call guinea pigs “bunny pigs.”

April 7, 2008 (age 4-½)

Last night at dinner, you had a bite of your mom’s dinner roll. “I don’t like this,” you said. “It tastes like Play-Doh.” I asked you how you knew what Play-Doh tasted like. You said, quite reasonably and matter-of-factly, “Because of this [roll].” This is a nice example of the logical fallacy of “Petitio Principii,” and you delivered it expertly, even convincingly.

July 16, 2008 (age 4-¾)

I sent in proofs-of-purchase from a cereal box and ordered you and Alexa these “Mommy and me” matching wristwatches (big and small). To my surprise, both you and Alexa wanted the black Hot Wheels watches instead of the pink Barbie ones. They arrived yesterday. They feel like they’re made of rubber. They’re black, with a tire tread texture. I asked if you liked them (and may have asked how you would rate them vs. the Barbie version, I can’t recall). You said, “These are cool. Cool is better than beautiful, because beautiful is just paint.”

August 25, 2008 (age almost-5)

You and Alexa were awake, first thing in the morning, and stayed in your beds, talking. I sneaked the door open, and silently peered in. Alexa asked you, “Lindsay, who’s your favorite person in the whole world?” You replied, “That Otto kid at Dandelion [preschool].” Alexa didn’t like this answer at all; as became evident, she wanted you to say that she was your favorite. She told you you’d hurt her feelings, and lectured you on how family is supposed to be more important than mere friends, but you wouldn’t back down. This discussion repeated itself a week or two later, and this time, though he was still your favorite, you couldn’t even remember Otto’s name. (I reminded you, but you seemed unsure that you’d had this right to begin with.)

December 18, 2008 (age 5)

We bought a new[er] car. I had cautioned you and Alexa to behave during our visit to the dealer, and you and Alexa really did. I had also said, almost as an aside, that it would be better if you didn’t appear too excited about the car, since it wouldn’t help our negotiating leverage for the dealer to know we were in love with it. I was a bit concerned about how excited you and Alexa would be about the built-in booster seats (which really are cool). Not surprisingly, that was the first thing the dealer brought to your and Alexa’s attention. I’m sure he recognized that if he could get you girls jazzed on that feature, we’d have a hard time walking away if he didn’t meet our price—sort of the “threat of tantrum” technique that grocery stores use, stocking every aisle with crappy toys and hoping parents will just bite the bullet and buy them, to lubricate the grocery shopping process.

Well, we all piled in for a test drive, and within minutes you said loudly, “I don’t like this booster!” I asked why not. You replied, again loudly, “It doesn’t have any armrests!” This was going well. The dealer’s implicit “You wouldn’t deprive these delightful children of their beloved built-in boosters, would you?” was being answered with an implicit, “Try me. Your boosters are overrated.” I decided to take a gamble and pretend to try to resolve your misgivings, figuring that you’ve never yet accepted a token bone thrown your way: “But Lindsay, if I weren’t sitting in the middle seat, we could fold down the middle armrest and you’d have that!” You replied, with an irritated don’t-you-patronize-me tone, “I want two armrests! I have two arms, so I want two armrests! I don’t want this booster!” So the booster seats were effectively neutralized as a bargaining tool. Yesssss!

July 22, 2010 (age 6-¾)

Alexa finished a meal recently and instead of taking her plate to the counter, she took it into the dining room. “Alexa, I know you’re licking your plate. Stop that and bring it in here,” I told her. She commented that if nobody sees her, it shouldn’t matter. “God can see you,” I said, just to see what my daughters’ reactions would be. You replied, “Does he care?” This was a departure: at other times, you’d referred to God as a she. I asked, “So God is a he, huh?” You replied, “Yes, God is a he and Goddess is a she.” I asked you who is in charge. You paused for a moment, reflecting, and then said, “They fight a lot.”

June 6, 2011 (age 7-½)

You read more and more picture books by yourself, but with chapter books you still prefer being read to. Right now I’m reading aloud Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now. Every so often I pause and ask you questions to see if you’re catching all the details and subtexts. Yesterday I asked, “Do you think Clarice should have told Betty that she had tickets to the ‘Ruby Redfort’ movie premier, to cheer her up?” You replied, “No, that would make it worse because Betty wouldn’t be able to go—her family is moving away, but she hasn’t told Clarice that yet.” I said, “That’s right, we know something that Clarice doesn’t. And what is that an example of?” Without missing a beat, you replied, “Dramatic irony.” That’s my girl!

July 31, 2011 (age 7-¾)

You and Alexa were complaining about not having enough little Lego dudes to play with. Your mom suggested you make your own little Lego guys out of Lego bricks. Alexa complained, “That’ll never work!” Your mom replied, “Then the Lego set has failed the whole family and we’ll never buy them again.” This infuriated Alexa, who cried, “That’s not funny in the least! We don’t have the right kind of bricks for that!” Always acting in solidarity with your sister, you wailed, in an equally affronted tone, “It’s like trying to do a math problem but you don’t even have a brain!”

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How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. Watch on your phone, tablet, or laptop, or plug your device into the TV or (ideally) a Jumbotron.

Introduction

First it was climate change. Then it was gun violence. Now it’s an honest-to-God pandemic that has wormed its way into our communities and our psyches— leaving us stuttering, babbling, and mumbling, yet again, trying for the right words to explain this terrible thing to our cats.

Whether you consider yourself a “pet owner,” a “human guardian,” or a “cat custodian,” you may feel unsure of how much to say about COVID-19 to your furry, feckless friend. This post gives you guidance all the way through the process.

Remain calm

Though cats often seem to ignore humans entirely, they are actually quite sensitive and perceptive. They can detect our anxiety, and this affects them more than you might realize. For example, if you suddenly shout, “I CAN’T TAKE ANOTHER MINUTE IN THIS COFFIN-LIKE BAY AREA DOLLHOUSE!” you shouldn’t be surprised if little Snowflake runs under the couch to hide.

It’s also important not to let your mood become your kitty’s problem. As annoying as it is to see your darling (but shedding) little friend napping  for six hours straight on your cream-colored sofa, it’s never appropriate to yell, “How can you lounge around like this when the WHOLE WORLD IS MELTING THE FUCK DOWN?!”

Here’s an analogy. Say you’re on an airplane and, after severe turbulence, it pitches nose-down and begins falling to earth. The last thing you’d want in this situation is for your flight attendant to forget your ginger ale. Your cat is the same way. She doesn’t care how anxious you may feel about complete respiratory failure. She wants her dinner. On time. Actually, right now.

Be patient

These are difficult times for all of us, even pets. Well, most pets. Goldfish are probably oblivious, frankly. But your cat surely realizes something is up, and may act out in frustrating ways. She might sharpen her claws on your beautiful cream-colored sofa. Or maybe she is suddenly missing the litter box by six feet or more. Or she’s walking on your face at 4:00 a.m., or shooting heroin. Yes, it may be she has always done these things, but her behavior might also be a cry for help. What are you to do?

First of all, forgive her. That cream-colored sofa probably wasn’t the wisest choice to begin with, and it’s not like your children haven’t spilled tea on it anyway. Drape a colorful tapestry over the back, and your guests will think you were just going for a splash of color. And when Fluffy disrupts your hard-won sleep—waking you up fifteen minutes after you spent three hours tossing and turning and trying not to think—well, you just have to chuckle and grind your teeth some more. It’s not appropriate to berate your pet in these situations. She won’t understand.

Second, try to alleviate her anxiety. Remind her that cats can’t get COVID-19, so far as we know, and that the worst thing that could happen to her is that her entire family could die and nobody would be around to feed her. Point out that eventually somebody would come around and bust the door in, and until then, she can feast on the corpses.

Share with your cat how you deal with your own stress so that he can learn from you how to cope. You might ground yourself by connecting more with family members. Maybe you take advantage of the “new, shitty normal” by wearing pajamas 24x7. Perhaps you split two bottles of wine with your husband, even if he only has a glass or two. Or you might stare at a TV or laptop screen continuously while twirling your hair or chewing your nails and occasionally sharing the latest bad news with anyone in earshot. You may even hurl profanities at the answering machine when a Robocaller leaves a seemingly endless message. All these behaviors are signs of an impending mental breakdown, and they’re perfectly normal. Your cat will watch, and wait, and wonder when it’s mealtime.

Sometimes we count on our cats to help us feel better. Isn’t this what pets are for, after all? After a stressful workday, when your employer is in the throes of a downturn, and your stressed-out boss takes it out on you, it could be that closing the lid on your laptop and taking to the La-Z-Boy armchair with a magazine and your furry friend is the perfect way to unwind—if only Stripe would actually stay put, tuck in his paws, and purr. You know, do his fucking job. But instead he forsakes you and bails from your lap. Don’t be mad! Your cat is social-distancing!

Be honest and forthright

Provide information that is honest and tailored to your cat’s age and developmental level. While cats are quite smart, they probably won’t understand the finer points of lengthy editorials, like “How is this a novel coronavirus? It’s getting so fucking old already!” You need to keep the message simple, but don’t sugarcoat it by pretending COVID-19 isn’t a big deal. Just about any cat, and even some Republicans, naturally recognize that this virus is real and that it could infect any of us.

It’s useful to find out what your cat already knows. It’s okay to ask. You might inquire, “What are you hearing? Did you ever eat a bat? Does my skin feel oddly warm to you? Did it seem like mama had an awfully dry cough last night? Who are you working for?” Granted, you may not get many answers. Your cat may just stare at you. But if she does that thing where she closes her eyes very slowly, seeming to regard you contemptuously through slitted eyelids, she knows something. You can tell.

You can be reassuring and candid at the same time. There really are lots of reasons to be hopeful. For example, when the current trend—denial—gives way to the next one—abject panic—people will finally start wearing masks and staying away from each other. And one day there will be a vaccine, so we can turn our rage away from this invisible virus and turn it on the medical industry bureaucrats who can’t or won’t deliver the vaccine at scale. You know … the devil we know.

Help your cat feel “in control”

Give your cat specific things she can do to feel “in control.” Getting lots of sleep and washing are both great ways to stay healthy, and your cat is already doing them! Praise your cat whenever you see these behaviors. “Oh, you’re such a fooly-foo!” you might tell him. “Who’s a little fur-face? Who’s a little fluffernutter? What a galoo-foo!” All of this will reinforce your cat’s good behavior.

Speaking of behavior, actions speak louder than words. So telling your cat how to stay safe, or even encouraging him verbally when he assiduously scrubs his butthole with his tongue, is well and good, but sometimes it’s even better to just go over and bury your face in his fur and make murmuring sounds. Just don’t let him lick you.

Another way to empower your cat and give her a sense of control is to actually relent and feed her at 3 a.m. when she walks on your face, instead of banishing her to the garage. And when she walks across your desk, knocking your coffee over on your keyboard causing you to forget yourself and cuss up a blue streak during a videoconference with your boss, just let her. In times like these, your family needs to come before your career.

Be sensitive

It’s natural to forget your cat altogether when you’re focused on trying to figure out how you could possibly survive this pandemic when your teenagers wear their masks around their necks and seem congenitally incapable of washing their hands, and when their version of “six feet away” doesn’t preclude actual physical contact. In the context of your darling children suddenly being recast as oblivious, unstoppable killing machines, a pet can seem pretty insignificant. But cats are people too, and need to be reassured during these dangerous times, even if they seem like asocial predators with no ambition other than to kill, eat, and sleep.

In light of this, keep an eye out for “reassurance seeking.” This may look like a cat saying the same thing, such as “meow,” over and over again while staring up at you or threading his way around your feet, practically tripping you, as you carry a giant platter of food. This ceaseless repetition of “meow, meow, meow, meow, meow” ad infinitum might actually annoy you, but remember, little Whiskers could be suffering severe anxiety. If this continues or is pronounced, you might consider asking your cat’s veterinarian about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, otherwise known as CBT (not to be confused with CBD—a mistake many humans make to their own great detriment).

You should also watch for signs of declining mental health. If your cat sleeps more than 18 hours a day, she might be depressed (though this can also be a symptom of being a cat). Or, if she’s listless, refusing to play with her cat toys, a ball of yarn, or even a roll of toilet paper, she might be having some kind of emotional crisis (though it may be a sign that she’s no longer a kitten).

Take care of yourself!

It’s hard to model calm behavior and “be there” for your cat if you let yourself fall apart. Ironically, one way around this is to invert the natural order and look to your cat as a role model. Does she get enough sleep? Check. Does she know when to turn off the news and put away the smartphone? Clearly. Does she practice mindfulness? Probably—it’s not clear what else could be happening inside that tiny skull. And does she do yoga? Well, yeah! Hell, cats practically invented yoga!

But don’t take it too far … remember, you’re not a cat. You may have your own way of coping. You might distract yourself with books or videos. You might stockpile toilet paper. Maybe you gorge yourself on animal flesh while you still can, while the stockyards and meatpacking plants are still operational. Maybe you binge shop online for clothes that probably won’t fit and that you may never have the opportunity to wear. Or you might relax your body and mind with a miracle elixir like Drake’s Denogginizer Double IPA. All of these are perfectly valid ways of coping, so long as you remember to also clean out the litter box from time to time.

More reading on the pandemic

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
• The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum
• More COVID Chronicles – Baking in Place
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

Other reading on cats

• Adopting a Kitten in the Modern Era
• Ode to Cat

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From the Archives - Cleaning the Preschool Yard

Introduction

I have a difficult relationship with volunteer work.  On the one hand, of course I want to be a helpful person.  On the other hand, when I do volunteer my time to an organization, I don’t always perceive that they make the best use of me.  After all, if they don’t, it’s not like they’re wasting their money.  Maybe my help was really needed, maybe it wasn’t—it’s all the same to them.  (My other altruistic behavior, donating blood, entails no such misgivings, since a unit of blood is worth about $5,000.)

When I wrote the story below, about cleaning up the playground at my kid’s co-op preschool, I was a bit bitter because our daughter’s application for the next year had been turned down.  The school was oversubscribed, with a long wait list, etc., and technically my daughter’s birthday was just outside their (seemingly arbitrary) cutoff.  That story has a happy ending—the school ended up bending the rules and accepting my daughter for the next year—but I didn’t know this at the time.  So I wrote this tale while in a cranky mood, which probably improved it.  (The tale, not the mood.)

Cleaning the Preschool Yard – April 23, 2008

Last Saturday we had to clean up the preschool yard again.  I was feeling incredibly fatigued to start with, unnaturally so.  I even passed out for ten minutes in the car when we got to the preschool, from this crushing fatigue just sopping the life out of me, and then when I joined my wife in the yard she’d snagged the push-broom.  Dang it!  That’s supposed to be my job!

Using that broom is the only thing I feel qualified to do at that playground:  sweeping sand back into the giant ground-level sandboxes.  The yard looks really nice when the sand is all flush with that spongy ground surface, but I wish they’d install a lip there to keep the non-sandbox areas from being invaded by great dunes between clean-ups. 

I guess there’s technically one more job I feel qualified to do, which is extracting dead leaves from the sandboxes, but I hate that job.  The scritch-scritch of the rake is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. And it’s a fool’s errand, trying to get the leaves out, because most of them are these tiny things like the crispy onions that lousy restaurants put on salads, and there are thousands of them, podlike, floating continually down from the trees, making me want to not only cut down the trees, but to fund the design of a sophisticated herbicide that could eradicate that species of tree from the planet.

So I wandered over to the water play station, which is this crazy tri-sink apparatus.  Surveying it, I was reminded how much I like this preschool, even though it’s expensive and they rejected my daughter for next year.  Some part of me can’t shake the thought that they’d have bent the rules for Lindsay if they liked her more.  This is irrational, but there it is.

So, yeah, this playground sink thing is a tribute to the school, having obviously been built by a very, very smart parent, not just a skilled plumber but somebody who understands how to educate a child.  A physics professor couldn’t have devised a better way to demonstrate the water table effect to children.  There are all kinds of valves to open and close, and sprayers, and tubes that feed water, via gravity, to other sinks, and it’s just a masterpiece except that it’s in this play yard with all this sand, and the less sophisticated students (probably the boys, frankly) evidently think there’s nothing more fun to do with this engineering marvel than to fill it full of sand. 

What is it with boys and sand?  When at a playground, my daughters play sophisticated games of psychological and social intrigue, their favorite being Incarceration, where they pretend they’re in a prison  and have to orchestrate daring escapes.  And what do little boys do?  Dump sand all over the slide, in the sinks, in the playhouse, everywhere, ad infinitum.  I’ve watched this play out at playground after playground.  It doesn’t usually bother me, except when it’s here, because every time I clean this sink, I am removing massive amounts of sand from it.

This time was particularly bad, as the plumbing was completely clogged.  I decided to drain the standing water from the sink manually so I could sweep the bulk of the sand out before tackling the plumbing itself.  To make the sink-draining process less tedious, I tried to teach Lindsay and Alexa about siphoning.  With each unavoidable mouthful of filthy water I got starting and re-starting the siphon, I consoled myself that at least I wasn’t siphoning gasoline.  The scumbags who steal gas out of our car, right in front of our house, have that to deal with; once there was a pile of vomit next to the hose the dude left behind.  Of course, when we’re paying through the nose to live where we do, it’s not actually all that comforting to think that gas theft is going on in our community.

Anyway, my kids were reasonably attentive with the siphon lesson, until they both realized that instead of listening to me, they could dig an extensive network of canals and such to make use of the water suddenly at their disposal.  I can’t very well tell my kids not to play, because the only saving grace of this particular work detail is that we don’t have to get a sitter as long as those two stay out of our hair. 

At one point Alexa killed my siphon by lifting up the end of the hose, and the prospect of another mouthful of filthy water doubtless influenced my reaction.  Here I marveled at my own grumpiness:  I should be glad that my kid is even halfway listening, whether or not she absorbs the lesson, because most kids would be ignoring me completely, flipping me off and/or dumping more sand in my tri-sink apparatus.  Which was proving to be my Waterloo. 

I scraped most of the sand out of there, to the detriment of my already wind- and ice-water-chapped hands (girlie-hands that should take real work in stride but have been softened by office work) and then set about trying to unclog the sinks.  Between flossing the pipes with a hose and trying to build up enough pressure to blast out the sand, I got confused and turned on the wrong valve and got a full sprinkler going, right in my face, soaking half of my dry-clean-only sweater.  Did I mention that there was a cold wind howling through there?  I thought this was spring!  I thought this was California! 

Anyway, I eventually got the drains basically working, and Lindsay and Alexa complained bitterly when their water supply was finally cut off for good.  It was sort of hard to tell what Erin had been working on this whole time.  The place looked better, sure—the sand was smoother, there was a bit less of it on the non-sandbox surfaces—but it seemed like I’d been fighting with the sinks for ages; surely by now everything else should look good as new?  I’d hoped so, because my contribution would be practically invisible, and one little boy in five minutes would probably re-clog the whole sink station before any adult laid eyes on it.  But there was no metamorphosis in the yard, and—worse yet—Erin still had control of the coveted push broom.

Oh how I envied her that push broom.  I think the best thing about the push broom is that you can just stand around leaning on it, feeling like a government-employed janitor killing time until his shift is up.  Whenever I do schoolyard cleanup I fantasize about living in a socialist country, taking comfort in the idea that when that whistle blows, I’m done, whether or not I accomplished anything during my time there.

Our actual situation is quite different:  we don’t get to leave until Erin is satisfied that we’ve done a kickass job of cleaning, one that will bring glory to the Albert family within this preschool community—never mind that they’ve already rejected our daughter and by extension our whole family, so it’s too late anyway.  And never mind that most of the other volunteers probably show up, set a tipped-over pail upright, bury a few dog feces, and bail after five or ten minutes.  I looked around and made the mistake of being obviously between tasks, and Erin asked, “Are you ready for our special job?”

Man, I thought this whole thing was special.  You mean we have some extra tacked-on thing to do this time?  Yes, we do.  We have to organize the tool shed:  she’d signed us up for this.  Now, if there’s one thing I’m really uncomfortable with (actually, there are actually a great many things I’m uncomfortable with), it’s organizing some area that isn’t mine.  If somebody went and organized the tools in my garage, I’d be really annoyed.

Actually, that’s untrue.  I’d be really pleased if somebody organized my garage, but only because there is no organization there—I’ve got house tools (coarse, ugly, practically unusable) and household gewgaws (incomprehensible, crummy, made in China) all mixed up with bike tools (beautiful, perfect) and bike parts (precise, precious, expensive).  But this isn’t my garage we’re talking about.  It’s an established preschool, and if there’s one thing worse than performing manual slave labor to incrementally beautify this doomed child-ridden environment, it’s putting out similar effort to actually lower the quality of the adult-focused subset of that environment.  Somebody who actually cared about the tool shed probably spent a fair amount of time and energy figuring out how to organize it, and it’s pretty well organized.  What could I do to show that I’d put in my time, besides changing things around arbitrarily?

So I hauled everything out of there, swept, and hauled it back in.  This took a great deal of time.  Most of what I was hauling out were tricycles:  really awesome, heavy, bulletproof tricycles, the coolest I’ve ever seen.  At least a dozen of them.  Glorious, surely European-made, some with trailers, some with cargo bays, most of them swept back like choppers, with the sleek yet burly industrial look of WWII-era aircraft or Kitchen-Aid mixers.  Where did these things come from?  The newer tricycles among them—also Euro, also cool—were already wearing out.  The older ones suggested an earlier time, a golden era, when the preschool was either totally flush with cash, or had a kid whose dad was either a tycoon or just very, very fond of exquisite trikes and children.

I suppose handling this fleet of sweet trikes could have been pleasurable to me, but the sad fact is, my appreciation was lessened by the thought that Lindsay doesn’t even ride the trikes, because she’s not strong enough to pedal them.  (I’m not surmising this—she’s told me so.)  Alexa tried to ride one while we were there, but the effort of running over a hose or a tree-root-lifted concrete lump was enough to ruin both her forward movement and her resolve.

So anyway, I got everything out, sorted some rubber balls (a grown man, sorting balls!), flung some things back behind other things to create the impression of tidiness, swept a bunch of sand out of there, and then brought everything back in, and half the sand with it.  Meanwhile, another family had shown up to clean the inside of the school, and their kids ran through the puddles, joined by Lindsay and Alexa.  Those two completely forgot their very clear instructions, and tracked sand all over the play structures until they looked exactly like they did when we arrived.  I kept a close eye on the tri-sink area, ready to intervene should anyone go near it with so much as a pinch of sand.  Another gust of wind came in and broke loose a mind-boggling flurry of leaves, which settled down over the sand  like a blast of confetti in an operating room.  (Don’t over-think that metaphor.) 

To my amazement, at this moment Erin declared we were done.  And for what?  By the time we found Lindsay’s and Alexa’s shoes, put our equipment away, and hauled ourselves out of there, the place looked like a war zone.  Two and a half hours, and the teachers will probably think we never showed.  Sweet.

Craigslist Meets the Real World

Introduction

I tried to sell a dining room table and chairs on craigslist.  I went through the annoying process of having my merchandise vetted by the kind of highly particular and discerning consumer who somehow manages to forget that he or she is paying bottom dollar.  I decided to give it another try, with a fresh ad.  This time I provided a better description of the set, and also fully disclosed the imperfect condition of the upholstery while (I hope) eliminating or at least lowering the chances of another non-productive, highly annoying e-mail exchange.  I found the end result somewhat abrasive, but so be it.  Somebody needs to burst the bubble of overoptimistic craigslist shoppers.

Because I think there are valuable lessons within this ad text, whether or not you want the dining set, I am posting this to albertnet for posterity.  I shall update this blog with the result of my second craigslist ad, if any.  (You can view the ad itself here if you’re quick about it.)

My craigslist ad

Beautiful Glass Dining Table With “Real World” Chairs

Okay, this is not the first time I’ve posted an ad for this dining room table with chairs.  I think I wasn’t clear the first time.

The table is beautiful.  And no, it’s not scratched.  This is tempered glass, half an inch thick.  You kind of have to use tempered glass for a table, or you’re one mishap away from a grisly scene like Sam Peckinpah would film.  I suppose you could scratch this table with a diamond, but we haven’t.  It is in perfect condition.  And around the edge of the glass is a nice bevel that I have enjoyed gazing upon over the years, along with my kids who by age six were using phrases like “refractive index” all because of the IQ-increasing visual effect of that beveled edge.

The workmanship on the chairs is excellent and they are free from nicks and scratches.  Is the cream-colored fabric pristine?  Honestly, it is not.  I neglected to mention this in my original ad because I actually had not noticed.  Why not?  Because the armchair I always sat in, at the head of the table, is pristine.  The rest of the chairs have always either had somebody sitting in them or were pushed in.  So really, stains on the seat are not that noticeable.

“Aha!”  you might be thinking.  “It’s a glass table!  So you’d see the stains right through it!”  False.  This was our family dining table.  Every family uses their dining table as a clearing house for books, papers, crafts, and as a general storage area for anything that needs to be handy.  If you don’t agree with this statement, you are lying to yourself.

Moreover, what do you expect for $250?  A gorgeous perfect-condition tempered glass table with six chairs all in perfect condition?  Should it come with a couple of guest passes for spa treatments at Indian Springs as well?  What about an unconditional lifetime guarantee?

I am imagining the future owners of this dining set to be a young couple, perhaps in a starter home, who are either planning to have kids or already have a baby, maybe a toddler, who will graduate from a highchair soon.  That would explain the price point.  (If you live alone or are part of a couple not intending to have children, perhaps you should just wait until you have enough money for a decent dining set that IS spotless.)  So, assuming you do intend this as a family dining table, trust me:  immaculate upholstery is the last thing you should worry about.

Why?  Because children + dining chair upholstery = lost cause.  You can go right out and buy the cleanest, nicest set you can find and your children will very quickly make it as dirty as these chairs.  Don’t kid yourself that your kids will be special.  A friend of mine bought a really beautiful dining set, and within months his toddler had tagged every single chair, writing her approximation of her name in indelible black paint on them.  “Where did she get the paint?” you ask?  That’s right … blame the victim.  Look, the source of the paint is not the point.  Where soiling furniture is concerned, children are very resourceful.  So get over it, like all parents do.  (Did my friend bawl out his daughter?  No, he just shrugged.  He is familiar with the work of the Nobel-prize winning child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, the first to discover that “children are gonna do what they’re gonna do.”  Yes, I’m paraphrasing here.  Actually, I’m only assuming Bettelheim said that, due to his Nobel prize.)

Do not even ask if I’ll sell the table without the chairs.  Someone already asked me that.  First of all, it’s an absurd notion:  what am I going to do with six chairs, five of which are stained?  Who would want them?  I guess I could lower the price by fifty bucks and put the chairs on the curb for the garbage pickup, but I’m trying to raise my kids not to be grossly wasteful like that.  Besides, where are you going to find six pristine dining chairs for fifty bucks that are going to match this table?  Moreover, I found that question insulting.  These chairs have been good enough for me for twelve years—but they’re not good enough for the person with the $250 dining set budget?

Yes, I have a right to feel insulted!  I paid $1200 for that dining set!  And I took a big risk to get that price.  The place I bought it from said it was half-price because a) they wouldn’t deliver it, b) they wouldn’t assemble it, c) there was a 50/50 chance there was no hardware with it, and d) if there ended up being no hardware and/or anything else was wrong, that was my problem because they wouldn’t let me return it.  It took some serious cojones to take that gamble and you can bet I wasn’t worrying myself over silly notions like whether cream-colored upholstery was a good idea with a baby on the way.  (In the event, the table ended up having two sets of hardware.  But you don’t need to worry about that because you’ll be getting it fully assembled!)

So go ahead, scrutinize these photos, be as critical as you want, but don’t forget that your limited budget doesn’t realistically entitle you to expect a table and chair of this high quality that has the useless short-term idiosyncrasy of unblemished upholstery.  Oh, maybe you’ll find something out there, like a waxy, silly-putty-colored table made of recycled milk jugs with chairs that either have a vomit-colored fabric that hides any stain but looks awful to begin with, or cream-colored fabric treated with some miracle coating that will look great but that, ten years from now, they’ll discover is totally toxic and has damaged your children in ways you can’t even bear to contemplate.  If the cost to you of denying the inevitability of stained fabric is that high, maybe you’re better off with a cut-rate illusion-of-quality dining set.

But just remember:  I had this table for twelve years and the fabric never bothered me.  My memories will always be of the times when the table had been cleared of papers and projects and I could gaze upon its glass-topped beauty with pleasure—the kind of aesthetic experience that causes a little sigh of pure bliss.  Around this table I have entertained people who are either heads of state or deserve to be.  I have carved magnificent turkeys at this table and it did them justice.  My kids have snacked while reading library books (normally forbidden at table due to the spill risk) by holding the book with their knees under the glass—just try that with a table made of reconstituted chicken guano or whatever that horrible cheap furniture is made of.

albertnet exclusive - not published on craigslist

One more note:  just in case you’re worried about the “human” factor, fear not:  we have steam-cleaned these chairs (after I took the photos, by the way, though as I’ve said the aesthetic aspect of chair seats is irrelevant).  So you won’t be getting our cooties or anything.  And no, there are no blood stains, no red wine stains (which I’ll concede would be really squalid), no cigarette burns, and nothing that’s going to soil anybody’s pants.  It’s good, honest dirt and it’s not going anywhere.

So do yourself a favor:  step up to a level of luxury that, at this price point, is only possible in America and through my own sentimental largesse.  In the process you’ll be sheltering your children, present or future, from any unfair castigation for soiling these chairs, because that inevitable process has already been taken care of for you.

If, on the other hand, you’re a totally unrealistic person with an all-consuming fetish for blemish-free textiles, please do not respond at all.  I don’t want to be talked down on price or presented with any insane notions like splitting up the set.  Just go about your endless search for the perfect $250 dining set that looks like it was never even used.  Good luck with that.

Epilogue

A friend responded to my ad, “I see, it’s like the Nigerian Prince scam, which is purposefully unbelievable so that it filters out everyone but the extremely gullible. In this case, though, you’re filtering out those somewhat interested individuals who would just waste your time. Clever.”  Indeed, this was my intent with the ad, but my filter wasn’t selective enough.  I had three people e-mail me saying they wanted the table, but not one of them actually came through.  I made the mistake of giving the first respondent plenty of time to come pick it up, which I think poisoned the well for the other two.  I finally sold the set to a friend.  I think maybe I’m done with Craigslist.

Football With Hemingway

NOTE: this post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and thematic elements.

Introduction

I see crazy people. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. It can seem like they only see me. They probably don’t know they’re crazy.

Last week, I accompanied my daughter Alexa’s third-grade class on a big field trip to San Francisco and Oakland via mass transit. I confess I underestimated what would be required of me. I figured I’d be driving a few kids to Bart, and then simply tagging along while the kids marched along behind their teacher in two straight lines. Okay, I guess I didn’t really picture that, but I figured they’d be secured somehow, maybe all holding on to a rope, like rock climbers. Okay, I guess I didn’t really think that either. Really, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t think much about it. I certainly didn’t expect to be told, in writing, “Please remain with your group of students at all times. You are responsible for them.”

Not that this alarmed me. I’m a capable adult. I had only three kids assigned to me: my daughter and two others. Each was instructed to stay with her adult (i.e., me). Surely Alexa would help corral them. Above all, I didn’t expect a crazy person to seek me out; I mean, how often does that happen?

Alas, I actually have a track record of being singled out by crazy people. I don’t know why. I mean, we all encounter the occasional nutjob—the woman standing on a street corner holding a coffee can at her chest, pointing it at cars and shouting profanities; the guy who comes into the bike shop spouting vitriol about the inferiority of steel to “cawbun fibuh” as a bike frame material; the dude on the department store bike zigzagging wildly down Wildcat Canyon Road yelling at my bike club, “You’re all dog crap!”; the woman angrily ripping leaves off a tree and stuffing them in a trash can—but crazy people seem drawn to me and often engage me in one way or another. I suppose if I’d thought to mention this to the school, they’d have found somebody to replace me as chaperone.

In this post I’ll tell the story of the field trip in which I was targeted by a crazy Hemingway lookalike. Along the way I’ll share some tales of other strange people with whom I’ve been briefly enmeshed.

Chaperoning rigors

Serving as chaperone for three kids was much harder than I’d expected. First of all, I’d only encountered my daughter’s classmates, whom I’ll call Yuko and Anna, a handful of times, and thus couldn’t pick them out from the crowd very well. Second, I didn’t realize all of the third-grade classes would be going on the field trip, meaning our group (including adults) numbered about 120. On top of this, the kid trios really made no effort at all to stick with their chaperones, running this way and that like little puppies following scents, and in some cases running off to visit with friends from other classes.

Early on, I made note of what I figured would be easy ways to identify my kids: Yuko had a camouflage-colored vest, a pink sweatshirt, red backpack, and a green ball cap with the logo of some small grocery store, while Anna had a black Cal cap, a mauve backpack with three-inch-tall stuffed animals hanging from it, and a light blue hoodie. Easy signifiers, right?

In practice there were several problems with this strategy: throughout the day the kids would ditch their caps and their jackets; red or mauve are actually popular backpack colors; it turns lots of kids have three-inch-tall stuffed animals hanging from their backpacks; and after lunch Yuko asked me to carry her backpack and I obliged, only to have Anna follow suit, so not only was I burdened with three heavy backpacks (what do these kids carry around, anyway—bowling balls? anvils?) but had lost another shortcut in tracking my kids.

This shape-shifting ability wasn’t my only problem. These kids were fast—one second I’d have all three in my sights, and the next second one would vanish, and by the time I spotted her fifty feet away, the other two would have vanished. It was like Where’s Waldo, or being trapped in a giant pinball machine with four balls in motion at once.

My first big trial was at Bart, our subway system. It turns out it’s very difficult to keep kids away from the edge of the platform. I gave a quick and stern lecture about the danger of the electric third rail. I quizzed Alexa about what would happen if a train hit you even at just one mile per hour. (“You’d be crushed flat and killed,” she correctly replied.) But my lectures didn’t capture the kids’ imaginations; Yuko and Anna wandered off to explore the nubby safety strip with their feet as visions of the climax of Anna Karenina traipsed through my head.

When the train arrived, things only got worse: it seemed impossible to shepherd my three kids into the train car in one group. What if one of them ended up on the wrong car, or worse—didn’t make it on at all? When I finally accounted for all three kids (probably only a second or two after boarding, but it felt like much longer), I got a vivid flashback of a Bart-boarding that was even more stressful.

Flashback tale #1

During my last year of college I was taking Bart from Berkeley to San Francisco to meet my then-girlfriend, Erin. As I waited on the platform for my train, a voice from behind me said, “Hey, could you help me out?” I looked over: it was a guy in a wheelchair with a giant boom box on his lap. “I just need some help getting on the train. I’m blind and they wouldn’t let me take my seeing-eye-dog into the station.” I asked him why. “Well, I don’t have the right papers,” he said. “Plus, my dog bit somebody.” I asked him where the dog was now. “I, uh, had some friends come get him,” he said. The guy was looking me over, which unnerved me because, well, he was blind. He didn’t have dark glasses or anything, but his eyes looked like Charlie X’s, from the “Star Trek” episode, when he’d acquired special powers and became evil.

I was really nervous about getting both my bike and the blind wheelchair guy on the train before the doors closed. When the train arrived, I hurriedly put the bike in, then went back for the guy. It seemed he was taking an awfully long time getting his stuff together. He’d put the boom box on the floor and now struggled to get it back on his lap. Finally, breathing a sigh of relief as we made it through the doors, I got him on the train. “Wait!” he cried. “My leg! You forgot my leg!” He pointed at the platform. Sitting there—or actually standing, I guess—was a prosthetic leg, with a sock and shoe on it.

I had to make a split-second decision: do I go after it, running the risk of not making it back on the train and having my bike whisked off without me, leaving me stranded on the platform holding some guy’s prosthetic leg? Or do I tell the guy sorry, it’s too late, you’ll have to do without it? My snap judgment was that it would be worse for this poor blind guy to lose a leg, after already losing his biting, non-registered seeing eye dog, than for me to lose my bike. I raced out there, snatched up the leg, and leaped back through the doors just as they were closing. Whew!

Cable car

At the Powell Street Station our field trip group got off the train and headed up to the street level to catch a cable car. My kids vanished instantly, briefly reappearing here and there like in that Whack-a-Mole game as I desperately tried to keep tabs on them. I tried in vain to exhort them to stay together but evidently all they heard was “blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah” (cf. Far Side cartoon about “what dogs hear”). All the kids jostled for position to be the first onboard the cable car, so as to get the best seat. This was problematic because not all the cable cars that rolled up were going to the right place. The first cable car that arrived on the right line quickly filled up with another class, and only after it left did I ascertain that none of my charges had stowed away. My greater fear was that a kid would get on the wrong line and end up lost in San Francisco. How terrifying that would be! (My nephew Jake, when he was only like three or four, got lost in a supermarket, and when he was finally reunited with his family through the help of a clerk and the PA system, he told his parents, through his tears, “I was only one guy!” There’s a deep existential undercurrent in that, I think.)

Finally a cable car arrived, on the right line, with room for all of us, and we piled on. I had several small heart attacks as my kids ran around, threading through the throng of other passengers, racing along the running board, separating, regrouping, hiding, popping up, vanishing, reappearing, jumping down and running around the back of the car, climbing back on, sitting down, standing up, relocating, removing their hats, removing their backpacks, and in every way throwing me off their scent, like fugitives. As we rolled up Powell Street, I finally made positive IDs of all three kids and was able to relax and enjoy the ride.

Flashback tale #2

When I first moved to San Francisco, right after college, I would take the bus to work from my apartment in the Lower Haight, making a slow trip down Market Street every morning. During the commute hour on that bus there was a higher than usual concentration of office types like me in a suit and tie, but you still had a wide variety of people from every walk of life. I kind of miss it, actually. One morning, this guy sitting across from me was giving me undue attention, basically staring at me as the bus rolled and lurched along. He was tall, old but robust, bearded, unremarkably dressed. Block after block he looked me over, and I supposed I’d have gotten up and moved except I was lucky to have a seat in the first place. Besides, what if I offended the guy? When I encounter a seemingly unstable person, I generally prefer not to do anything that could possibly upset him.

Finally, the man looked me right in the eye and spoke. “You have a huge schlong,” he said, very distinctly. I struggled to convince myself I’d heard him wrong … but what else could he have said? He had articulated the word quite clearly. Evidently the people around us had heard the same thing, as they were giving me vaguely panicked looks and shifting awkwardly in their seats. His remark could not have been based on any actual visual perception, as I was wearing a long trench coat. I really couldn’t say what had gotten into him.

I didn’t know how to respond. I’m pretty sure there was never a “Miss Manners” column on this. As I sat there, stunned, the man’s face gradually turned bright red, as if he’d only just realized what he said, and then he got up and walked toward the back of the bus. He stood by the door and I thought he’d get off at the next stop, but he didn’t. He just stood there, block after block, and I’d only just begun to relax again when he suddenly strode back up to the front of the bus, looked at me again, and said, “You have nice teeth, too.” This time he did leave the bus, to my very great relief.

Hyde Street Pier

The third graders and their high-strung, weary chaperones took the cable car up Powell Street past the Fairmont hotel, took a left on Jackson Street, and went west a few blocks before turning right on Hyde Street and going over Russian Hill. It was a fair morning, the breeze brisk, the sun and clouds duking it out overhead in a protracted stalemate. The cable car operator did complicated things with a long crank and a couple of antique pedals. I enjoyed watching the clockwork gears visible beneath a large rectangular hole in the car’s floor. Periodically I swung my head around to convince myself my charges were still on the car, and about half the time I could make out their heads as they weaved and bobbed like boxers. We went through my old neighborhood, past where I Fratelli, our favorite Italian joint, used to be. At the top of the hill we enjoyed a view of the bay, with Alcatraz in the background and another cable car just ahead. Much oohing and aahing as we descended the steep grade.

At the bottom of the hill we climbed off the cable car and the kids ran a few laps around it just to keep us grown-ups on our toes. Here is Alexa, having been one of the first off the car, blithely walking in front of it as though it couldn’t possibly begin rolling again.

The group assembled for a photo and then we made our way down toward the Hyde Street pier, where a small triangle of beach faced the old sailing ships, the Balclutha and the CA Thayer. For a minute or two I could relax, as two of my three kids joined several others in trying to drag an anchor out of the sand by a rope. (I figured the mostly-buried anchor was probably six feet across and they could spend the rest of their lives in this vain struggle.) Then a teacher directed me to the water’s edge to prevent kids from getting wet. Several kids helped me by drawing a line in the sand with their feet.

Suddenly, a loud adult voice called out, “Hey, white guy!” I looked across the beach to the near edge of the pier where a tall, bearded man was standing, looking in our direction. He was wearing what looked like pajama bottoms—neither baggy nor particularly tight—and no shirt. His belly hung down over the waistband. His hair and beard were mostly white. He looked a lot like Ernest Hemingway in his later years; I could easily picture him in boxing gloves. Instead, he held a football. “White guy!” he repeated, staring right at me.

This dumbfounded me: if I had been the only white guy on the beach, or perhaps if this guy were black, his salutation might have made some sense. But there were various other adults in our group, including several other white guys (our group overall was the ethnic mix you might see in a prospectus photo of a company’s board of directors). “White guy”? I tried to convince myself he was addressing somebody else, but it was hopeless. I’d been singled out once again.

Flashback tale #3

I was playing basketball at an outdoor public court in my neighborhood with a friend from out of town. We were both playing terribly: not because we were having an off day, but because we’re both terrible at basketball. A spectator appeared. He was a large, stocky black man, probably in his early twenties, wearing a dark grey overcoat despite the warm day. I couldn’t imagine what he was getting out of watching us flail around and repeatedly miss shots, but hey, free country. He silently watched us for several minutes. Then the ball hit my foot or something and went bouncing off in his direction. Instead of throwing it back to us, he joined our game. I figured I’d let him take a shot or two, and then I’d catch a rebound and resume the game, and perhaps then he’d move on. But instead of driving toward the basket, he drove toward me.

He stood before me, dribbling clumsily, and then tried some fancy move and lost control of the ball. I started to run after it, but the guy stepped toward me and, to my shock, caught me in a bear hug. Most disturbingly, he didn’t have booze on his breath. That would have explained not only his strange behavior but his sudden loss of motor control, and of strength: for, though he had started out in wrestling mode, he now slumped on me as if needing my support.

I was immediately reminded of a boxer who, late in a match he’s losing, has a crisis of resolve. His lizard brain takes over, and all he wants to do is hug the other boxer, to keep from getting hit any more. I always despise the heartless referee in this situation, who comes over and pushes the two boxers apart so the loser can be punched in the face some more. It’s particularly touching when both boxers are in the same boat, and mutually seek the hug. It’s like some kind of sudden unspoken truce there in the ring. At such times only the barbaric rules of boxing keep the fight going, with the referee doing more work than either fighter. But I digress.

The basketball long forgotten, I tried to stand the crazy guy up, but he was really heavy. My friend looked on aghast, not knowing what to do. I didn’t either. I tried to maneuver us toward the edge of the court, still holding the guy up. We did a sad, slow dance. Finally, like a wobbling bowling pin, the guy righted himself, sighed, and shuffled off.

Football with Hemingway

Back to the ordeal at the pier: I’d just about convinced myself that the Hemingway-looking guy wasn’t yelling “Hey white guy!” at me, when he threw his football to me. (Ask not for whom the ball is thrown … it is thrown for thee!) Dude had a real arm on him, too—he fricking drilled that ball right to me, a perfect spiral pass, over a distance of about fifty feet. I suppose I could have decided to have nothing with this whacko, which would have meant stepping aside and refusing to catch the ball. But remember, I was surrounded my small children. If I didn’t catch the football, it might have nailed one of the kids, after I’d have seemed to dodge it. Wouldn’t look good. So I caught it.

The most disturbing thing of all about this strange episode was that the ball was flat. It didn’t even have enough air in it to hold its shape. What kind of weird old man goes around shirtless on a cool morning carrying a flat football? Suddenly this guy went from possibly being somebody’s grandfather to possibly being homeless and/or insane. Looking down at this flat, misshapen football, I wanted nothing to do with it. But I couldn’t just toss it aside, because then the crazy man would probably come after it, carving a swath right through our group of kids. I couldn’t have that on my conscience. What could I do? I threw it back.

Of course this was a mistake. Before, the guy had only hoped to get my attention and begin a game of catch. Now the game was in full swing. I felt the teachers’ eyes on me now as the guy threw the ball again. This time the throw was not so good, and the ball ricocheted off my hand and went right into the ocean. It started on its way out to sea and I was seized with the fear that the crazy guy would come after me to avenge its loss. I exhorted myself to have grace under pressure (wasn’t that a major theme in The Sun Also Rises?). The ball came back in with the tide and I scampered after it, managing to retrieve it without getting my shoes wet. Of course I realized that by running out there I’d just done what we’d spent our whole beach visit exhorting the kids not to do. More nonplussed looks from the teachers. Hey, I thought, I don’t remember any mention of this scenario on the handout!

My next throw (no, I had no plan) was even worse than his last one. It fell far short of reaching the guy, and I watched with a strange mixture of panic and relief as several third-grade boys ran after it. One threw it to the guy but also fell short. “Oh, come on!” the guy yelled. “That kid”—pointing at some other boy—“could throw better than you!” At this moment Alexa approached me asking where she could wash her hands, which were up to the elbows in that oddly sticky, salty sand you find at the beach. Without another look at the crazy Hemingway guy, or any of the teachers, I marched my daughter off to the public restroom, to wash my own hands of this football business. When we returned to the group, Hemingway was gone. Whew!

After much reflection, I’ve decided that next time I’m asked to chaperone school kids, I’ll politely decline.

dana albert blog