Monthly Archives: November 2011

When my son, Clyde, was little, we used to think that he was going to grow up to be some sort of a puppeteer, because any object that found its way into his hands immediately took on a life and a personality all its own.

“How are you, Mr. Fork?” the spoon would say at the dinner table, and the fork would reply with a polite, “I’m good, Mr. Spoon; how are you?”

It was cute. It was sweet. And then, when I started paying a little bit more attention, it was disturbing, because I soon realized that not only did inanimate objects all have personalities when they were around Clyde, they all had the same personality: sociopath. Take the above Mr. Fork/Mr. Spoon exchange. Sounds pleasant enough, right? And it was—at the time. But if you had followed Mr. Fork and Mr. Spoon as they continued their conversation on Clyde’s lap, you would have seen that it ended up like this:

Mr. Fork: Would you like to go for a walk with me, Mr. Spoon?

Mr. Spoon: No, I don’t think so, Mr. Fork; the last time we went on a walk together you tried to stab me with your head.

Mr. Fork: Oh, that. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.

Mr. Spoon: Really?

Mr. Fork: Really. I promise.

Mr. Spoon: Well, okay then. If you promise.

And away the two of them would go, under the table, at which point you’d hear Mr. Fork shout out a triumphant, “Ha ha! I kill you!” and Mr. Spoon reply with a terrified, “No, no, please, no!”

Like I said: a little bit disturbing. But then I started thinking about it from Clyde’s point of view, and I realized that I, too, had always been curious about who would win a fight between a fork and a spoon, and that Clyde’s version of events—the gullible empty-headed spoon versus the born-to-be-vicious fork—made sense. (Let’s not even bring the knife into this—what’s the point? And the spork? Please. That hispter wanna-be couldn’t even win a fight with a pair of asparagus tongs.)

I could also understood Clyde’s desire to see who would win the battle of the frig magnets. (The heavy “Scenes of the Southwest” magnets had size and strength on their side, but in the end they were helpless against the horde of magnetic poetry words. It was kind of like watching Imperial Walkers being taken down by the rebel forces on Hoth.) And I even came to appreciate the subtleties involved in the battle between the plastic jellyfish and the army men in the bath tub. (Although the army men had superior numbers, the jelly fish was in its element. Plus, the rest of the family tended to angrily throw the poky army men into the trash can every time one of them got underfoot during a shower, thereby significantly reducing their numbers over time.)

In the end I simply accepted that my house was always going be ground zero. In fact, on a recent visit to Chicago I even made sure to pick up a die cast model of the Sear’s Tower—just to see what Clyde’s Eiffel Tower model would make of it. Of course, it goes without saying that they fought. And who won? Well, I won’t deny that there were some tense moments, but in the end brute American strength won out over French cunning. Yeah, it turns out that We’re Still Number One.

At least in Clyde’s world, anyway. And really, what other world matters?

When my son, Clyde, was little, we used to think that he was going to grow up to be some sort of a puppeteer, because any object that found its way into his hands immediately took on a life and a personality all its own.

“How are you, Mr. Fork?” the spoon would say at the dinner table, and the fork would reply with a polite, “I’m good, Mr. Spoon; how are you?”

It was cute. It was sweet. And then, when I started paying a little bit more attention, it was disturbing, because I soon realized that not only did inanimate objects all have personalities when they were around Clyde, they all had the same personality: sociopath. Take the above Mr. Fork/Mr. Spoon exchange. Sounds pleasant enough, right? And it was—at the time. But if you had followed Mr. Fork and Mr. Spoon as they continued their conversation on Clyde’s lap, you would have seen that it ended up like this:

Mr. Fork: Would you like to go for a walk with me, Mr. Spoon?

Mr. Spoon: No, I don’t think so, Mr. Fork; the last time we went on a walk together you tried to stab me with your head.

Mr. Fork: Oh, that. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.

Mr. Spoon: Really?

Mr. Fork: Really. I promise.

Mr. Spoon: Well, okay then. If you promise.

And away the two of them would go, under the table, at which point you’d hear Mr. Fork shout out a triumphant, “Ha ha! I kill you!” and Mr. Spoon reply with a terrified, “No, no, please, no!”

Like I said: a little bit disturbing. But then I started thinking about it from Clyde’s point of view, and I realized that I, too, had always been curious about who would win a fight between a fork and a spoon, and that Clyde’s version of events—the gullible empty-headed spoon versus the born-to-be-vicious fork—made sense. (Let’s not even bring the knife into this—what’s the point? And the spork? Please. That hispter wanna-be couldn’t even win a fight with a pair of asparagus tongs.)

I could also understood Clyde’s desire to see who would win the battle of the frig magnets. (The heavy “Scenes of the Southwest” magnets had size and strength on their side, but in the end they were helpless against the horde of magnetic poetry words. It was kind of like watching Imperial Walkers being taken down by the rebel forces on Hoth.) And I even came to appreciate the subtleties involved in the battle between the plastic jellyfish and the army men in the bath tub. (Although the army men had superior numbers, the jelly fish was in its element. Plus, the rest of the family tended to angrily throw the poky army men into the trash can every time one of them got underfoot during a shower, thereby significantly reducing their numbers over time.)

In the end I simply accepted that my house was always going be ground zero. In fact, on a recent visit to Chicago I even made sure to pick up a die cast model of the Sear’s Tower—just to see what Clyde’s Eiffel Tower model would make of it. Of course, it goes without saying that they fought. And who won? Well, I won’t deny that there were some tense moments, but in the end brute American strength won out over French cunning. Yeah, it turns out that We’re Still Number One.

At least in Clyde’s world, anyway. And really, what other world matters?

There is always a scene, in the cheesier horror movies, where the the hero or heroine looks under the bed, or the porch, or the couch, or the overturned boat, and finds—well, it being a horror movie and all it kind of goes without saying, but here goes—they find something horrible. As an audience member you always want to shout out a warning to them just before they lift the bedskirt, and, in fact, in certain theaters, your fellow movie goers do. (I always wished I had a best friend as honest and obnoxious as those women who feel compelled to talk to the characters on the screen. “Uh-uh, girl, don’t even think about going in there,” is just the kind of advice I need to hear sometimes.)

Then again, it’s easy to have that kind of wisdom when it comes to somebody else: we’re all the wise one when it comes to solving somebody else’s problems. Which probably explains why, even though I’ve seen what happens in a million and one cheesy horror movies, when it comes to my own house I still make the mistake of looking to see what lies beneath.

And it is always horrible.

My husband is smarter about this, which is probably why the kids pick him when they are looking for someone to check and see if their rooms are “clean.” (I’m still not sure why it is we have to go and do this in the first place—asking someone else to see if something is “clean” is kind of like asking someone else to check if something is “dry”—the answer should be fairly obvious to the original questioner.) Anyway, when my husband is the one asked to check on the cleanliness status of their newly “cleaned” rooms, he looks around the room the way one of those loud women at the front of the theater would advise him to do: a cursory glance, and then, muttering, “Uh-uh, don’t go in there,” under his breath, he is gone.

And he is safe.

No face huggers jumping out from beneath the bed, no axe murderers lunging out of the closet. And, more importantly, no bowls of two week old cereal being discovered tangled up at the bottom of the bedsheets, for all the world like a horror movie. A 3-D one. 4-D, actually, if you count smell as a dimension. (And believe me, if you’ve ever smelled a partially decomposed bowl of cereal that has festered in the sheets for a month or so, you would agree that smell deserves its own dimension.)

In the Middle Ages they had such a terrible rat problem that they started breeding dogs to be smaller and smaller so that they could follow the rats down their rat holes and kill the whole nest. I think that we should do something similar to solve the problem of what lies beneath in our children’s rooms. Not dogs, of course, but an animal that is much more suited to rooting out filth: the pig.

It’s true that we already have pot-bellied pigs, but I’m talking about something even smaller: a miniature pig. You know, like a purse dog—but a pig. I know what you’re thinking: bringing a pig into the house won’t make it any cleaner; in fact, it’s liable to make it worse. But the truth is, pigs are very clean—much cleaner than children—and anyway, it’s not like you’d have to have a pig living in your house. Just like people in the Middle Ages only sent for the dogs once or twice a year, you would only have to call the pig man every month or so.

Or the day before your mother-in-law came to visit. Unless you were smart, and listened to the obnoxious women. “Uh-uh, girl. Don’t let her go in there!”

So far this year, the snow gods seem to have taken pity on the parents of Flagstaff by dropping the first real snow of the year on a Saturday. This means that we have all weekend long to: find our snow shovels (or give up and buy new ones); find our gloves (or give up and buy new ones); find our snow boots (or give up and buy new ones), and find our ice scrapers (or give up and—oh, you get the idea). It also means that we get a small taste of exactly what flavor of “I’m bored” snow day whining we have to look forward to, and hopefully head some of it off at the pass.

It’s funny to think about kids getting sick of snow days, too—aren’t they supposed to be the ones dropping ice cubes in the toilet to bring them about in the first place?—but if last year’s spate of four day snow weekends taught me anything, it taught me that even kids can get tired of too much of a good thing. And that snow days aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be.

For one thing, there’s the problem of all that snow on the ground. I mean, think about it from a kid’s point of view: from inside the house it looks like fun, but then you actually go out in it and it’s all cold and wet. At first it’s okay: you pull out the sleds, have snowball fights, maybe even build an obscene snowman. But then you realize that your snow pants are too small, your boots from last year still have that hole in the side that lets in water every time you step in a puddle, and that the only kid on your block who is willing to have a snowball fight cries when he gets hit in the face with an iceball—every single time. “Don’t aim for his face then,” your mother tells you. As if there is anyplace else to aim when you’re having a snowball fight. (It’s a snowball fight, for crying out loud. Nobody ever stopped an enemy assault by hitting the enemy’s kneecaps.)

True, there’s always inside things to do, of course, but believe it or not even video games will lose their appeal eventually. My son, Clyde, found that out the hard way during our last run of snow days, when the time finally came when he had killed off every enemy in the video world, and had no choice but to turn on potential friends.

“Hey,” I said, after I had walked into the room and found him listlessly shooting a bunch of friendly looking big-headed blue guys. “What are you doing? Those guys look like they might actually be kind of fun to hang out with.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said as he shot another one of them in the head.

I watched two of the blue guys try and surrender to Clyde, with no luck: two shots, two less blue guys in the gaming world. “So, ah, what’s this game called, anyway?” I asked.

“’First Contact’.”

“Oh. Do you have to shoot them?”

“I guess.”

And then he listlessly shot another one.

The sad part was that I couldn’t really blame him. After all, by the fourth snow day in a row the thought of shooting an unarmed blue guy in the head was starting to sound appealing to me, too.

But not this year. This year, thanks to our first, early warning of a snow, we’ll all be prepared for the snow days to come. Won’t we?

Oh, who am I trying to kid? Those blue guys probably had it coming.
.

The other night I was watching a TV show in which the opening scene consisted of a teenage boy tormenting his father by crawling out of a second floor window in order to maintain the fiction that the lock was broken on their bathroom door—again. The scene went on to show the boy calmly sitting at the breakfast table while the father comically—and ineffectually—blustered and screamed in the same manner employed by all sitcom fathers since Jackie Gleason.

The point of the whole scene, it seemed, was this: don’t annoy your children.

Sounds almost counterintuitive, doesn’t it? I mean, I always thought that the whole raison d’etre for being a parent in the first place was to annoy our children: think how annoying we must have been when they were toddlers, always after them to stay out of the street, to stop sticking screwdrivers into power outlets, and to chew up their food before they swallowed it.

Ditto about when they were in grade school and we annoyed them by insisting that they put their clothes not next to the hamper, not on top of the hamper, and not even (curiously) underneath the hamper, but rather inside of it. Or when we made them bring a coat to school when it was twenty below (even though absolutely none of their friends had to wear coats, and besides, according to the calendar it was Spring already).

But now that at least one of my kids is in high school the rules have changed somewhat, and the stakes have been raised much, much higher. Case in point: the above bathroom story. True, that was fiction (supposedly), but I’ve heard (and participated in) other stories far worse than that. Take the example of this one boy I heard about recently (who shall, for obvious reasons, remain nameless). It seems that each night, as this boy set the dinner table, he would carefully and methodically rub his stepfather’s fork on the dog’s butt. (And not the furry part.) Or another kid I used to know who would regularly siphon the gas out of his father’s car and put it in his own car instead. (The poor guy must’ve taken his car in to the mechanic a dozen times that year, making me wonder if maybe the mechanic wasn’t in on it, too).

The point is that teenagers, while they still might not yet be quite as clever as we are, clearly have the advantage over us when it comes to both deviousness and time. (This could be because they spend every day figuring out how to either get away with or avoid doing stuff.) They really are kind of in the same position as the wait staff is in a restaurant: while in theory your waiter or waitress is on the lowest rung on the restaurant ladder (even a busboy or dishwasher can, with enough benign neglect, make their lives miserable) and the customer is at the top (after all, they’re the ones who pay the bills, right?), in reality, however, everyone knows (or should know) that this is not the case. The truth is, there is a lot of stuff that can happen to your food on its way from the kitchen to the table. A LOT.

And there’s a lot of stuff that a teenager can mess with in the comfort of your (their) own home.

I’m not saying we should live in fear of the teenagers in our homes: like I said, as devious as they are, they still aren’t quite up to speed when it comes to really, really making someone’s life miserable—you need to need married for a few years to get that down. I’m just saying that, maybe, as they get older, we should apply a little caution.

Or, at the very least, start carrying our own silverware around.