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This morning I was called a fascist twice while I was still in my pajamas—once time before I even had had my first cup of coffee. I don’t know about you, but personally I think it is physically impossible to be a fascist before your first cup of coffee. I mean, even Mussolini wasn’t a fascist before his first espresso—he was just grumpy, like the rest of us. Anyway, after being called a fascist for the second time (act of fascism number two: asking Clementine to hang up her towel), I decided to call her out on it: did she really know what that word meant, or, like Orwell once said, was she just using it as a synonym for “bully?”

As it turns out, she did know what that word meant (thanks for nothing, stupid schools). And so then my next question for her was whether or not the fact that I insisted on the towels being placed neatly back on the rack after use qualified me as a fascist, or if rather I was really just a “control freak” (her second choice epithet). She said it did; I insisted it didn’t. Being civilized human beings (albeit ones with way too much time on our hands), we decided to let wikipedia settle it. Here’s what we found.

It turns out that one of the basic tenets of fascism is Social Interventionism—the willingness to influence Society in order to promote the state’s interests. Since I, as the State, have a vested financial interest in not scooping up wet, mildewy towels off of the bathroom floor every morning, and am willing to intervene in other people’s socializing in order to accomplish this (“Get off Facebook right now and come out her and pick up your towel”), this would seem to support Clementine’s argument. Score so far? Clementine 1, Mom 0.

Next comes Authoritarianism, the idea that outside of the State no human or spiritual values can exist. Clementine points out that, in the course of my argument, I did tell her that it doesn’t matter how they hang up at their towels at other people’s houses—this is how we’re going to do it here. So okay: Clementine 2, Mom 0.

Then it’s on to Nationalism—the notion that the state is a single organic entity bound together by ancestry. Uh-oh. I guess I did follow up the above statement with, “And besides, you don’t belong to that family—you belong to this one.” Sigh. Clementine 3, Mom 0.

But what about Imperialism, the drive by the State to expand its borders? I’ve never done that. Except, of course, for the fact that we did add another bathroom on to our house a few years back, thereby doubling the number of towels racks—and towels. Damn. Clementine 4, Mom 0.

Next comes Indoctrination, the idea that school is simply a tool to train children in the values of the State. Surely I can’t be accused of—what? Okay, so one time I said, “My God, I thought you were studying geometry—I can’t believe you don’t even know how to fold a towel.” Really? That’s all it takes? Alright, alright: Clementine 5, Mom 0.

The final tenet we come to is Social Darwinism, the belief that the State must purge itself of all undesirables. Well, I guess I did threaten to make her go live with her father. But come on—she knew that was an empty threat: her father and I are still married to (and live in the same house with) each other. Really? Okay. Fine.

So there it is: in the “Is My Mom a Fascist?” argument, it looks like it’s Clementine 6, Mom 0.

I guess from now on you can just call me Il Duce. As long as you pick your towel up from off of the floor, that is.

When I was a freshman in high school, a friend of mine inadvertently let slip a secret about a book I was reading. Even though now I can hardly remember what the big plot secret was (I think it had something to do with the fact that Merlin was actually Arthur’s second cousin, or something like that), at the time I was pretty upset. So upset that when later that year I got the chance to ruin “The Return of the Jedi,” for her, I didn’t hesitate—as soon as I got home from the movie theater I sprinted over to the phone, called her house, and, when her answering machine clicked on, gleefully chortled out: “Leia is Luke’s SISTER!”

Unfortunately for me, however, (or rather, fortunately for her), it’s somewhat impossible to enunciate clearly while “chortling,” and so my triumph (and my message) was somewhat muted. Or nonexistent, actually: she told me that her entire family—including her cute older brother—had gathered around the answering machine to try and decipher my garbled message. They’d only given up when it had become time for them to leave for—you guessed it—“The Return of the Jedi.” By the way, she added, exactly what had I been trying to tell her, anyway?

Nothing.

Still, even though my “big reveal” didn’t work out very well that time, it did give me a taste for the potential of the whole thing. In fact, the experience of almost getting to be the person who broke a big piece of news was so exhilarating that I vowed that next time around I would be the person to do it. I would be the detective who called the entire dinner party together and then screamed “It was Leia’s butler’s second cousin that did it!” (Or something like that.)

And the thing is, frequently, I am. My kids learned early on not to bother me with trivial information like who got the high sore on the spelling test—they know that I want to know the dirt: who got sent to the principal’s office, who threw up in the middle of art class, who brought nothing but a can of beans for lunch (oh wait—that was my kid). Anyway, they know that I want to know the Big Secrets, so that later, when I’m talking to the appropriate mothers, I can make the Big Reveal.

Which makes it even odder that they, who know me the best, now accuse me of being the opposite of the Big Revealer: they accuse me of being the Secret Keeper. It’s true: lately they’ve been acting like I’m some sort of mid-level Freemason, waiting for the rest of them to learn the secret handshake and the contents of the twelve rooms of Ishtar before I can share the temple wisdom. Of course, they don’t come right out and say all of that; instead, they sit in the living room and complain.

“A bass lesson? Today? Why didn’t you tell me—I would have practiced.”

Or “Why didn’t you tell me my Science Project was due this week? Now it’s going to be late.”

Obviously the real problem is that my family has not yet discovered the mystical source of all my power, the all-seeing, all-knowing oracle that I consult on a daily basis to find out what lies ahead. I’m not sure what other people call it, but my people (mothers, that is), call it a calendar (KAL-en-dur).

Yep: who knew that all I needed to become the Ultimate Big Revealer of All time was a calendar? Because when you have a calendar, all secrets are revealed. Well, maybe not all secrets. You do know that you have a dentist appointment—you just don’t know that the dentist is actually Princess Leia’s second cousin. For that, you still have to see the movie.

I love words. I love how you can get into serious internet debates over their proper spelling (“rigamarole” or “rigmarole”?) I love how there is a word for almost everything, and I love how when you discover just what that word is you suddenly realize that you can’t possibly be the first person to feel the way that you do, which sometimes can be very comforting. (Take schadenfreude, for example. The fact that there is already a word for “unholy glee felt at another’s misfortune” makes me feel somewhat like less of a jerk when I chortle gleefully at the sight of shivering Phoenicians wearing nothing but shorts, sandals, and shocked expressions. Somewhat.)

Sometimes, though, the opposite happens: words fail me, and it seems that there really isn’t the right word for what I’m going through; this, in turn, makes me feel terribly alone in the world. At least, it does until the right word reveals itself once more. That’s what happened to me recently, when I was desperate to find a word that describes a person who is constantly losing their shoes.

Luckily, just that day my absolute favorite word website, AWAD (A Word A Day), featured the word “discalced,” which means “to go barefoot.” A ha! I thought. If the word for going without shoes is discalced, then the word for having lost your shoes must be “miscalced.” And therefore, it only follows that the word for someone who constantly loses their shoes must be . . . Clementine.

She has always been like this—her nickname as a baby was “Shoeless Joe.” You know that Hemingway short short story—“For sale: baby shoes. Never used.”? Change “shoes” to “shoe” and that story could have been written about her—we had such a large collection of single baby shoes at our house that people always seemed surprised to find out that we didn’t have a one-legged baby to go with them. If anything, as she has gotten older her propensity to miscalce every pair of shoes she owns has just gotten worse—in fact, losing shoes has become such an accepted part of her daily routine that she doesn’t even bother to look for the missing pairs any more; she just accepts it as the “will of the Universe.”

I, on the other hand—the person who is tasked with buying all of these shoes—have not.
For example, the other day she lost a pair of dress shoes while they were still in the box. When I insisted that she go back into her room and look for them a little bit harder, she responded with “What’s the point? They’re gone.”

“Gone?” I replied, aghast. “What do you mean gone? I just bought them yesterday.”

“I dunno,” she replied.

“Well, did you wear them anywhere?”

“No.”

“Did you take them out of the box?”

“No.”

“Did you put them away?” (Here her reply was unintelligible, thanks to the whoops of laughter coming from my husband and myself at the thought of Clementine ever putting anything away.) After I wiped my streaming eyes I asked her again. “No, seriously, did you put them—snort, giggle—away?”

“No,” she said coldly.

And that was that. They were gone. For now, at least. Because that’s the thing with her missing shoes—I’ve realized that they have a tendency to show up just when she outgrows them.

And then we give them to Clyde.

Somehow, just picturing the look on Clementine’s face as she watches her little brother walk around in her missing high heel lace-up Oxfords is all the schadenfreude I need.

A school holiday, followed by four snow days, then the weekend, and then a two hour delay? And then a four day week of early release followed by yet another snow day? There can only be one explanation for this: obviously, the gods to whom our children are praying are much more powerful than the ones the rest of us are worshipping.

I know; it’s hard to believe. In fact, I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t just witnessed it firsthand. I, too, openly scoffed as my daughter, Clementine, went around the house conducting all of her voodoo “snow day” rituals: the three ice cubes in each toilet, turning her pajamas inside out. Scoffed at her until they started working, that is.

By the third day I had started following around behind her, trying to undo everything she did. I couldn’t do anything about the pj’s (for one thing, she’s not that light of a sleeper; for another, she goes to bed later than I do), but as for the ice cubes—no, I didn’t scoop them out by hand. I added hot water instead, trying to melt them. Well, not exactly hot—more like warm. Or at least body temperature. Hey, I had to go anyway, okay? All that hot chocolate has to go somewhere.

Still, all of my attempts to undo her voodoo tricks were, in the end, no match for her super voodoo powers. Steinbeck once said, “Ah, the prayers of millions; how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God,” and I’m sure that, for him, that was true; however, I’m thinking that mothers and children don’t even pray to the same deity. I doubt our patron saints would even consent to be seen with each other in public—in fact, they probably wouldn’t sit in the same row at the movie theater even if they only had one bag of popcorn.

At one point in my life I would have been upset that my deity appeared to be so much weaker than Clementine’s—I mean, really, four snow days in a row? Put our two gods in the ring and it would have been a TKO for Clementine’s by day two. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that different gods have their different specialities. It’s not that Clementine’s god (who I think, judging from the blood-stained shrine in the corner of her room, is Cthulu, Devourer of Souls) is better than mine—he’s not—it’s just that he is better at creating chaos. Like four snow days in a row.

And like I said, that’s okay—for a child. As you get older you realize that, while worshipping the gods of chaos might be more fun (the parties are certainly better), it’s a lot more work than worshipping the more mundane household gods of order. And not nearly as useful.

Take the goddess of lost car keys. (Frequently worshipped by making a pilgrimage from the car, to the bedroom, to the kitchen, to the living, to the bathroom—repeat as necessary.) Or the god of keeping crappy cars alive for one more day (Mantra: “Come on baby, come on, you can do it, just start, just start. Oh, you piece of—thank you! Thank you!”). Or, my favorite, the Guardian Angel of Lost Files. (To contact this deity, make a sincere and repentant prayer to St. Norton, offer up a blood sacrifice—bitten off fingernails will do— and promise to save more often. It must be noted, however, that this is a god I’ve prayed to less and less since I converted to Macism.)

So, in the end, I have to remember that it’s not that Clementine’s snow day gods are more powerful than mine—it’s just that they’re worshipped more diligently. But I’m still going to melt all of her ice cubes. Just in case.

Last month I took one of my children to see “The Princess and the Frog,” the latest offering from Disney (coming soon to a Happy Meal near you). And no, I can’t tell you which child I took—he made me swear that I would never reveal the fact that not only did he voluntarily watch one of the princess movies, but that he actually liked it. (Oops. Sorry, Clyde.)

Really, though, an appreciation for the Disney princess movies is nothing to be ashamed of, especially in recent years when they have gone out of their way to portray the “princesses” as strong, independent women. (Think about Mulan, Pocahontas, and Belle.) So no, I don’t have a problem with Clyde enjoying the princess movies—or even with him using the princesses as role models. I might have a problem, though, if he starts modeling his behavior not on the princesses, but on the villains.

And not because Disney villains are so, well, villainous. No, the reason I don’t want Clyde using Disney villains as role models is because, frankly, they have got to be the world’s biggest collection of drag queens I have ever seen.

Think about it: in the (supposedly) female department there’s Maleficent from “Sleeping Beauty,” the Wicked Queen from “Snow White”(exactly what country is she supposed to be queen of, anyway—Transgenderia?), the Wicked Step-Mother from “Cinderella,” the Queen of Hearts from “Alice in Wonderland,” Ursula the Sea Witch from “The Little Mermaid,” and Cruella De Vil from “101 Dalmations.” On the male side there’s Captain Hook from “Peter Pan” (basically a drag queen in his “everyday” clothes), Scar from “The Lion King” (Jeremy Irons plays him as the “Queen of the Beasts”), Jafar from “Aladdin” and now Dr. Facilier from “The Princess and the Frog,”—the last two maybe the least successful of the drag queen crowd, but drag queens nonetheless. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Gaston from “Beauty and the Beast.” True, he is about as far from a drag queen as you can get. Compensating, perhaps?)

Look, it’s not that I have a problem with drag queens in general, it’s just that the combination of drag queen and villain is a bit much: I’m not sure what message is Disney is trying to send with this (other than “Beware of Blue Eyeshadow”), but if they’re trying to warn kids away from that kind of lifestyle (and by that I mean a life of evil, not a life of accessorizing), I think they’re going about it the wrong way. Because, to the last man—er, woman, I mean, um, well, character—the drag queen villains are always the most interesting characters in the films. Who would you rather watch the Oscars with: Simba or Scar? (Simba: “I think Nicole Kidman looks rather elegant tonight.” Scar: “Darling, I’ve left more meat than that for the hyenas.”) Or even better: who would you rather be stuck in an elevator with: Snow White, or the Evil Queen? (Before you answer that, remember how annoying Snow White’s voice is, and how at least the Evil Queen carries snacks with her. True, they’re poisoned apples, but hey: a snack is a snack. And don’t forget: with Snow White you’d have to deal with the whole “alternative lifestyle” thing—you’d probably get out of the elevator only to be confronted by her reality show film crew. No thanks.)

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the whole “drag queen villain as role model” thing isn’t such a bad idea. At least that way I can be sure that Clyde will never end up on the “Jerry Springer Show,” explaining to a hostile studio audience why he’s okay playing the submissive role to seven creepy old men.

I’ve been thinking about the upcoming FUSD override election a lot lately, and not because the ballot just appeared in my mailbox. And also not because, even after having spent my entire life in Arizona, I still find it hard to believe that a state that has consistently ranked at or near the bottom in spending per student is going to once again slash the education budget. No, the reason I have been thinking about the override so much lately is because of all the moronic anti-override arguments I keep reading in the paper and online. I mean, some of them are so bad I wonder if the people making them have maybe been sent back in time from some dystopian future where the override didn’t pass in order to deliver a warning. (Cue somber voiceover . . . “In the future, educational opportunities in Flagstaff will be so limited that most children won’t even be able to make a rational argument . . .dum dum DUM!) No, wait a minute: skip the dum dum DUM: without the override it’s unlikely that there will be much music in Flagstaff’s future schools. Or much art. Or athletics. Or librarians. Or nurses.

Seriously though: some of the arguments these people are making are so off base they make my head hurt. Arguments like: “Maybe they could save money by replacing some of the positions with parent volunteers—you know, like the librarian.” (Because all librarians do is re-shelve books, right? That M.S. in Library Science? Nothing but two years of learning the Dewey Decimal System.)

Or how about “But what about the override money we gave you in back in 2006? And 2003?” (Spent it. And, as long as the state legislature keeps underfunding schools, we’re going to need to keep on spending it, every year.)

Then there’s “Schools need to learn to tighten their belts just like the rest of us—when I went to school we didn’t have fancy computer labs and special education classes.” I hate to be the one to tell you this, but special education classes aren’t a luxury—they’re mandated. And unlike charter schools, who can pick which students they accept, public schools MUST accept—and educate—any student within their boundaries. That’s the “public” part of “public education.” And as for the computer labs? Today’s students face an entirely different world than the students of a generation ago, and if they have any hope of succeeding in today’s workplace they need to have at least a modicum of technological training. Yes, I know that in your day they were “always hiring down at the buggy whip factory,” but times have changed—even many restaurants now require their food servers to be able to use a computer to place their orders with the kitchen.

Worst of all, though, are the arguments that are just plain factually wrong. Arguments like: “But we just can’t keep raising taxes every year.” That’s true—we can’t. And we don’t: in sixteen of the last twenty-two years the state actually voted to lower taxes, to the point where we paid 24% less in property tax in 2008 than we did in 2006. Or, “I’m all for education, but the district wastes too much money on administrative costs.” (FUSD now actually spends less than the state average on administrative costs, something that is remarkable considering both the size of the district and the fact that until recently positions like nurses and librarians were mistakenly counted as administrators.)

But finally, there’s my all time favorite: “We can’t solve everything by throwing more money at it.” How do you know we can’t? So far, we’ve never tried, and, at an average cost of six dollars per household per month, we’re not exactly going to be trying now. But that is something to think about—in the future.

There are international symbols for just about everything. There is one for “fragile,” one for “handicapped,” one for “danger ahead” and even one for “loose rocks on cliff face.” (I love that symbol of the guy falling off of a cliff. Even though the person-shaped symbol has no facial features whatsoever, it still manages to convey an attitude of “Oh, @#$!” ) One symbol, however, that I have yet to find in all of my years (well, okay—more like all of my minutes) of searching is the international symbol for motherhood. (Although, thanks to a recent campaign by “Mothering” magazine, we’ve finally gotten an international symbol for “Breastfeeding Mothers Welcome Here.” Why anyone would need a symbol for that, though, is beyond me: breastfeeding is such a completely normal activity that you would think that the symbol for “Breastfeeding Not Welcome Here” would have come first.)

Anyway, the new breastfeeding symbol notwithstanding, my search for the international symbol for motherhood remained fruitless. (No, the little martini glass symbol doesn’t count—that’s the international symbol for a bar.) And then, just last week, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening, I finally found it. THE symbol. The one I’ve been looking for. Are you ready? Okay, here goes. It turns out that the international symbol for motherhood is . . . a pizza crust. Or maybe a partially eaten chicken drumstick. Or perhaps the crust from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or a few pieces of mac’n’cheese stuck to the side of a bowl, although that one might be a bit difficult to convey in symbols.

The thing is, the actual food scrap itself doesn’t matter so much, as long as it manages to convey something that is both fattening and unsatisfying. That’s because what really matters is what the food scrap represents: sacrifice.

When I was in labor with my second child, to get things to progress my midwife suggested that I drink a cup of castor oil. I did, and it worked, but I never got over the fact that I had just consumed over two-hundred grams of fat without even slightly enjoying it. Little did I know it, but that was just the beginning.

Here’s the main problem: I’m cheap. Way cheap. Super cheap. Much too cheap to actually throw out perfectly good food. (Or even imperfectly good food, for that matter. “Just cut the bad part off” could be my motto.) And so, what happens is, because of my cheapness, I end up finishing my kids’ meals instead of eating my own.

This is okay when it comes to my daughter, Clementine. Her palate has finally advanced to the point that cleaning up after her usually amounts to finishing her hummus, or salad, or maybe, at the worst, her yogurt. The boy, on the other hand, is a whole other story.

Being eight, and, as I believe I mentioned before, being a boy, my son Clyde is pretty much entirely made up of junk food. In fact, you could probably argue that he is nothing but Whopper Jr.s and Cold Stone waffle cones held together by pants and a t-shirt. Which means that his food scraps are likely to be things like hamburgers, pizza, chili, and fries. Not the best bits, mind you—just the leavings. When we go out for pizza, Clyde eats four slices, and I eat four crusts. When we go out for burgers, he gets four double cheeseburgers, and I get the pickles, and maybe a bun.

To make matters worse, being a boy (and eight), the more he eats, the taller he gets. While I only get wider. Sigh. Maybe the international symbol for motherhood should be a great big butt. Falling off of a diet. As with the cliff face one, the @#$! would just be implied.

Scrolling through the channels recently, I noticed that the latest thing in the reality show craze is filth: people can’t seem to get enough of shows about other peoples’ filthy houses. There’s How Clean Is Your House (with the two annoying British women), Clean House (with the annoying American woman), Clean Sweep (having never watched it, I’m not sure exactly how they maintain their annoyance dynamic), and then, of course, there’s the newest entry, Hoarders. Hoarders caught my eye a few weeks back because it featured a woman in Georgia whose house, when it was finally excavated of all its trash, revealed an ancient dead cat mashed flat by the sheer weight of all the junk on top of it. (It was never established whether or not the cat died first, and was then squished, or whether it was the squishing that killed it. I’m guessing that the show’s budget doesn’t extend into pet post mortems.)

Anyway, the flat cat episode started me thinking about my own mortality. Specifically, it started me thinking about how much I do not want to be featured mummified and flattened on the preview of some new reality show. And, also, about how it sometimes seems as if there is no way I will be able to prevent it. That’s because I live with a group of people whose condition, while perhaps not as dangerous as that of the hoarders, is nevertheless just as certifiable.

I live with pilers.

Pilers are people whose answer to everything is to pile it. Not sure what to do with the mail? Just put it in a pile, and then place it on top of that pile of dirty dishes from breakfast, which, in turn, are resting on that pile of the morning papers, which is on top of the pile of the schoolwork that came out of the kids’ backpacks last night. Which is on top of the dead cat.

Okay—there’s no dead cat. Yet. But there could be, if they could just find a way to fold one neatly. That’s the thing about pilers—they think they’re being tidy. They mistakingly think that just because they line up the corners on their piles they are any less filthy than that woman in Georgia.

They say that people hoard for all sorts of reasons, but one of the main reasons is because they are afraid that if they throw anything out the day will come when they will one day want it again. Pilers, on the other hand (at least the ones in my house) say that they pile because they are afraid that if they throw anything out the day will come when I will one day want it again. “Every time I throw something away you yell at me about it the next week,” is the complaint I hear. And it’s true—I do get frustrated when things like permission slips and tax bills wind up in the trash. How that relates to the need to keep expired coupons for tanning salons and notifications about cheerleading tryouts, I have yet to figure out.

Sometimes I think that it’s all just a ruse, and that the final, sinister purpose of it all is to create a setting wherein they can hide my body. Of course, that might be ascribing more organization to them than they deserve. As well as being incredibly paranoid. But what other logical explanation could there be? Why else would two ostensibly sane people (and Clementine) stack clean laundry on top of freshly buttered toast?

As far as I’m concerned, it has to be a trap, and all I know is that if one day I walk into the kitchen and see a humongous pile of paper leaning precariously over the top of a Belgian candy bar and a nude picture of Alan Rickman, I’m not going in after it.

The other morning as I was drinking a cup of coffee my son, Clyde, came into the kitchen and said, “I just had a poop so hard it bruised my butthole.”

Not quite sure what to do with this information, I took another sip and said, “Maybe you should try drinking more water.”

Clyde scratched his belly and seemed to seriously consider what I had just said for a second or two before finally replying, “I dunno. Last week I drank water all day long at school, and then the poop just shot out of my butt.”

“Hmm,” I said, momentarily stymied. “Well then, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“That’s okay,” he said, smiling as he left the kitchen. “I just wanted to let you know.”

Umm . . . thanks?

Without a doubt, my son Clyde is the King of TMI—Too Much Information. You might think that this was impossible. That someone as young as Clyde—possessing neither a cell phone nor his own reality show—could not even be in the running for such a title, but you would be wrong. Because even though Clyde’s opportunities to overshare might be a little more limited than some, he easily overcomes this slight disadvantage by telling absolutely everything to everyone.

I know that this is probably a trait I should try and discourage. The thing is, though, that after spending my day trying to pry the tiniest little bit of information out of his teenage sister, Clementine, Clyde’s tendency to overshare can be rather nice. While I might get too much out of Clyde, it helps make up for the fact that I get absolutely nothing out of Clementine.

Talking to Clementine is like talking to the chief PR flack of an oil company that has just managed to drop a fully loaded tanker smack in the middle of the rain forest. They know they have to say something, but they’ll be damned if they’re going to give out any more information than necessary. And any information they do release is run through so many internal monitors that what comes out can hardly qualify as English.

“How was school?” I might ask.

“F-n-mmm.”

“Anything interesting happen?”

“Mm-mm-mo.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Mm-mo.”

“A no?

“Mm.”

“Just tell me this: is there anyone I need to call up and apologize to on behalf of our family?”

Ask Clyde, on the other hand, how his day went, and I’ll get a twenty minute description of what happened before the first bell even rang. What’s more, if I show the slightest interest, I’ll get pictures, and sometimes even a map. “Okay, see, this one guy—you know, the guy whose mom we saw at the store? He looks like this. Anyway, he went here, and then this other guy came up here . . .” The end result of his story usually turns out to be something like, “Well, anyway, they almost ran right into each other, but didn’t. And then I pooped. A lot. ”

Meanwhile, I find out later that Clementine’s “Mm” actually translated into “Two girls got into a fight in the cafeteria, and one of them broke the other one’s collar bone, and then the cops came and we had to spend the rest of the day in an assembly talking about non-violence.”

Surely there must be something other than the King of TMI and the Queen of Obscurantism.
Unfortunately, just like in a deck of cards, I think that that thing must be the Joker. And if that’s the case, then I’m sure that—as usual—the joke’s on me.

Recently, I needed to sit down with my son, Clyde, so that I could ask him a few serious questions about his juice box consumption. Clyde, I said, once you start drinking juice boxes, do you find it difficult to stop? Are you consuming more than seven juice boxes a week? Are more than fifty percent of your friends also juice box drinkers? Do you find yourself worrying about the next juice box, even while you’re still drinking one? Do you try to hide how many juice boxes you have drunk? And finally, as the result of excessive juice box drinking, have you ever wet the bed?

His answer to all of these questions was the same: one long, drawn out slurp on his straw. It didn’t matter, though—I already knew all of the answers myself. And so I just sighed, pulled the sheets off of the bed, and started to plot how best to remove juice boxes from Clyde’s life.

The best thing to do, of course, would be to keep him away from places were juice boxes were likely to be found. The “lead me not into temptation” route. Unfortunately, some of the most tempting places include soccer, friends’ houses, and, of course, school. The only way he could be more surrounded by juice boxes would be if he worked at the juice box factory.

One place I do try to keep juice-box free is my own house. But this isn’t so much because the juice boxes are a temptation to him, but rather because they are a torment. It’s like cocaine: I have always heard that the basic problem with cocaine is that there is never enough of it—no amount is ever sufficient. (Think about Al Pacino in “Scarface;” obviously, he had lots of the stuff, and yet he was still pretty funny about people taking it.)

In my house, it’s exactly the same—but with juice boxes. As far as Clyde is concerned, there are just not enough juice boxes in the world for him to have to share. It doesn’t matter how many we have, a bag full, or a truckload, it always ends the same: with Clyde up all night, grinding his teeth in worry, ever alert for the soft susurration of straw piercing foil. It means that he will come sliding into the kitchen every time the sink drains, thinking that the last gurgle is the sound of one of his precious juice boxes being slurped dry. It means that whenever I retrieve anything from anywhere on the shelf where the juice box is kept, Clyde will be at my elbow.

“Whatcha’ doin’? Can I have a juice box?”

On those rare occasions when juice boxes have made it past my perimeter defense and into the house, I know I should probably just sit Clyde down at the table with the whole case and say, “Here you go—knock yourself out,” but I can’t. It’s not that I have a problem with him drinking a gallon of juice—it’s just that I have a problem with him carving out his own corner in the landfill while doing it. I feel the same way about individually wrapped cheese sticks and cookies—they’re great for things like road trips and classrooms, but here, at home, where we all share the same germs anyway, can’t the cookies all touch each other in the bag? And can’t the juice all slosh around together in one big bottle?

Apparently not, because Clyde—who will not eat a piece of fruit unless it is rolled in bacon grease—will not drink juice out of the bottle.

Sometimes, it’s enough to make me wonder what’s really inside of those juice boxes. Who knows? Maybe they have more in common with “Scarface” than I thought.