Laid-Off Dad

Then and now

About a week ago, a Canadian reporter e-mailed to ask me a few questions about being a laid-off dad. I get these every so often, in spurts and drizzles, mostly because lately a lot more people have a lot more time to do things like Google "laid off dad." And I am the first thing you see when you do that. (Although I'm a little more proud of being listed as one of the things LOD stands for, right there with Large Organic Debris and Laparoscopic Ovarian Drilling.)

I don't normally answer these requests, because I think I've said all that there is to say about it. And truthfully, now that I've been working at my current job for five years (a record!), I'm not sure I remember much about the experience anymore. I mean, I wrote some of it down when I started this blog, but frankly, the memory is fleeting. Part of that stems from the last couple of years, which have taught me to keep my nose pointed forward.

Anyway, I answered this reporter because she knew all this. She'd done her research and realized I'm not laid off or married anymore. And when I left work and called her up, I ended up chatting for about 30 blocks. A very small subset of this chat appears here.

While I was talking, it hit me that my blog had turned six years old. (Well, technically it hadn't, because I hadn't written since before the birthday, June 1.) That's a long time. One blog year is like 20 dog years, so by that metric I've been writing since Reconstruction. In that time, blogs have emerged, erupted, plateaued, cratered, and been eaten by Twitter. She asked if I got to know people through my comments, and I had to admit that for the first year I didn't have any. I was just an HTML nerd hand-coding and FTPing my stuff through my dial-up ISP, while my thenwife made tallow candles by the hearth.

So anyway, now it's official. LOD is six. Cue the confetti.

All hail the TwoBert quadrennial!

It's a glorious Memorial Day here in the Double Hundy, and my sleepy neighborhood is just starting to bubble to life. For some reason I woke up this morning, unbidden, at 6:30, and when I got to my local I found a new installation by an artist named Scott Weiland. I asked the barista if it was the Scott Weiland, and she had no idea who he is.

Which gave me pause.

I mean, it's one thing if a younger person is blissfully ignorant of a band that consumed your soul as a kid (like that time someone asked me, "Wait. Sting was in a band?!?") But now I've reached the point when college kids don't know about bands that came after my Prime Influence Time. And a whole new generation younger than I is being introduced to cultural irrelevance.

You know what? I just don't mind. I'm actually feeling pretty robust lately, thanks to the 10-mile run on Friday and the 32-mile bike ride on Saturday. I suppose I could finish the weekend triathlon by jumping into the Hudson and swimming to Poughkeepsie, but I won't. Because that's what everyone would expect me to do. And last I saw, they don't sell Advil by the crate.

Weeks tend to fly by lately, in a way that makes me feel I'm trying to cross the track at the Indy 500. And somewhere in the haze and burnt rubber, TwoBert turned four. It's strange to think that the spring I spent dreading his home birth (and suppressing ignorant visions of blood-caked walls) was more than four years ago. Stranger still to think that his mother and I have been estranged for more than half his life. But that's another post.

No. Today we celebrate little TwoBert, who isn't so little anymore. He is older than Twitter, and the Kindle, and the Colbert Report. And he is forming into his own little manchild, who wants what he wants and will leave no crotch unsmacked in order to get it. He's crazy for superheroes (as Robert never was), and he likes every food Robert doesn't. When I make them dinner I'm tempted to set a family-style platter in front of them and watch them savage it, Sprat-style.

TwoBert's other quality of interest is his love for the standard past tense, in defiance of all irregularity. Sometimes he'll throw five or six of them in one sentence: "Daddy! You throwed the ball and I swinged and hitted it, and you catched it, but I runned to first before you getted me out!"

Just one of the reasons he has bringed me so much joy.

The Fourth was with us (also the Second and Third)

It blows my mind that Monday was Star Wars Day ("May the Fourth be with you!"), because I discovered this after the boys and I spent much of the weekend watching "A New Hope" two and a half times. They wanted to see it a full third time--after Robert's mudbath that some observers might call a baseball game--but I restricted the viewing to cool stuff, like droids battling and battles droiding, so we could conjure LEGO battles of droids battling and battles droiding.

The first viewing was Friday night, when the three of us settled in on drizzly, grim night. The boys sat rapt, squirt guns blasters wedged in their pajama waistbands, while Luke used the force to fell a ginormous, planet-sized space station with his two little popguns. One of the most ridiculous plot points in all of explored space, if you ask me, but still a crucial protein strand in our collective celluloid DNA.

By the second viewing, our third overall, we'd gotten pretty familiar with all the specific dialogue. So an impromptu sort of MST3K episode broke out. Witness these little gems:

• Robert, after Luke gazes off into the two setting suns of Tattooine: "Does that mean you can get two sunburns?"
• TwoBert, after our heroes plunge into the Imperial Trash Smasher: "Princess Leia should not be walking in the garbage because she is wearing a dress."
• Robert, after Obi-Wan slashes the arm off the belligerent snoutface in the Mos Eisley cantina: "OK, note to self. Don't mess with the old guy."

By viewing number three, we were playing along with our LEGO ships and drawing huge explosions and rolling around avoiding certain blasterdeath. The downstairs neighbors might have called the National Guard.

To celebrate May Fourth, I bought both remastered trilogies for $30 each on Amazon. The Force is strong with these children. Perhaps by the time he is 18, TwoBert will follow through on his promise to change his name to Darth Vader.