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A bean in his ear
So there I was, minutes before I had to go onstage to host a
candidates’ forum last week, trying to suck a bean out of my son’s ear
with a turkey baster.
You can’t make this kind of stuff up. Someone, for whatever reason,
had strewn a bunch of Tic-Tac-sized beans or seeds of some kind
around our first-grader’s elementary school playground. Andy, because
he is that kind of a kid, picked one up and concluded immediately that
the best, most logical thing to do with the bean was to insert it into his
left ear.
First, we got out the tweezers. But because the bean was about the
same size as his ear canal, there was no getting around it to grab on.
Then, while Jen ran down to Google “stuff stuck in your kid’s ear,” I had
the bright idea to put a tiny drop of super glue on the end of a Q-tip,
then try to attach it to the bean. That didn’t work, either, and I know
what you’re thinking and will respond: I did not succeed in gluing the
bean in tighter, even though my wife tried to hang such a rap on me.
Water was applied (yes, let’s make the bean swell), as was something
called an “ear candle” acquired from the local head shop. Andy was
intrigued by the flames and smoke dancing so close to his head, but
budge the bean it did not.
As I trotted up the stairs with a stick of gum (don’t ask) and the
Mountain Family/Alex Miller 2
turkey baster, I had to laugh because I know that there are two kinds
of kids in the world: those who stick things in their ears and up their
noses … and those who do not. My wife is one of the latter, while I
must confess that I was the kid who stuck the rubber tire off a
Matchbox car up my nose when I was about Andy’s age.
“Why?” my wife wanted to know. “I don’t get it.”
I told her I understood it, but couldn’t explain it. Maybe it’s curiosity
of the “I wonder what’ll happen if …” variety. This gives cause for
concern, because this is the basis for the actions depicted in the
annual Darwin Awards. I’m not sure there’s always a correlation,
though. Just because you stuck an AquaDot up your nose at age 6
doesn’t mean you’re going to try to get the lid off a pickle jar with a
12-gauge as an adult. But still …
Interestingly enough, the more people I told about Andy’s bean, the
more people revealed similar stories, either autobiographical or
anecdotal. And it wasn’t just a boy thing, either. Men and women alike
told me of rubber bands up noses, a rock and a quarter ingested, a Tic
Tac in the ear, etc. It reminded me of how everyone has an outrageous
barfing story; once you trot one of these gems out, everyone in the
room has another to share.
But back to the object at hand: Our local doctor couldn’t budge the
bean, and Andy’s howls convinced him to send us to an ear, nose and
throat specialist. The super hero in this case turned out to be Dr. Casey
Strahan in Edwards, who had Andy lie down on a table, looked in his
ear with a fancy-looking microscope thingy and swiftly removed the
bean with some kind of probe.
We cheered the kind of cheer generally reserved for a happy
outcome in a 72-hour labor. Andy assured us that he has, indeed,
learned a valuable lesson, and life resumed as usual with the addition
of a few more gray hairs for Jen and me.
And now I can’t help but ask readers: Please, if you have a good story
along these lines, send it along and I’ll include it in a future column. If
nothing else, it will help convince parents everywhere that we are not
alone. …
When parents go away
It doesn’t happen often, but I was out of town for nine days last week
– a week in D.C. for a job thing and then three days at my folks’ home
in Nevada. The experience is enough to make me thank my lucky stars
that I don’t have a job that often requires travel because, in short, the
family doesn’t do well without all cylinders clicking.
Which isn’t to say that they can’t get along without me, but for our
youngest, his is a life of predictable routines with the key players in
place at the expected times. I’m the morning guy, the one who gets
our kindergartner up, fed, dressed, brushed and out to the school bus
on time. It can sometimes in itself be a monumental achievement,
especially on those mornings when, for one reason or another, his
normally frenetic pace is slowed to glacial speeds.
Since Jen is the night owl, having me gone is viewed as, well …
something other than a welcome opportunity for early rising and a
truly full day.
Andy has told me in no uncertain terms that my absence displeased
him, and that he would much prefer I don’t ever go away again. Fair
enough. Kids his age have that dog-like sense of time: Any wait is a
never-ending one, and the current state – be it joy, misery or
something in between – will remain in place indefinitely. So, while I
have a pretty good idea of when my return is, to Andy it might as well
be sometime in 2010.
Looking at absence a little more globally, Andy has nothing to
complain about compared to kids whose moms or dads have routine
travel as part of their regular job, with the ultimate case being military
folks who are away for a year or more. I know from experience (my
sister’s husband was a Navy pilot for 20 years) that it’s a rotten
situation; one not to be sought by anyone and often regretted by those
who sign on. Still, sometimes you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.
It’s a positive thing, no doubt, that kids in families today (or, at least,
those that don’t suffer divorce) enjoy much greater access to both
parents than they ever did in the past. Dads are typically much more
involved from the start, and the burden of constant attention that used
to rest almost solely on Mom’s shoulders has been shifted to more of a
shared project. This may not resemble the historical Western family
composition very much at all, but it certainly seems to be a better
arrangement from the perspective of all involved. Some men don’t
make the adjustment as well – unable or unwilling to forgo the tee
times and ski times they grew accustomed to as bachelors – and it’s
likely they’ll be the ones in for a bumpy ride.
So, I came home to a very fine piece of artwork: a picture of me and
Andy hugging and the words “I mist you” at the top. The signature
rainbow was there, and I was back in place to read the latest
installment of “Goosebumps” at bedtime. The way it ought to be.

And for all the training I received – however valuable – I couldn’t help
but be struck by the realization that, at the end of the day, everything I
need to learn is pretty much right here at home.

Buy first, explain it later
My mother was surprised, to say the least, when she discovered my
father had purchased an ultralight aircraft without taking that little
step of mentioning it beforehand.
This was 15 or 20 years ago, when my Dad was going through what
one might call a post-retirement phase of discovery. He assumed,
correctly, that if he’d told my mom about the plane, she’d have nixed
the idea – or, at the very least, hassled him a good deal about it. After
all, there’s probably not a woman on earth who can’t think of
something else to spend $20,000 on than a dangerous toy. New
cabinets, perhaps, or flooring; drapes and valences, a cruise.
Nope, Dad figured, better to beg for forgiveness after the fact than
risk being thwarted from the purchase.
But while the scale of this particular “non-consultative spousal
acquisition” was much greater than anything that came before it, my
Mom was certainly guilty over the years of buying things my Dad didn’t
– and never would – know about. Mom knew that things Dad thought
frivolous – ranging from a church donation to kitchen curtains or
handouts to us kids – would elicit howls she didn’t want to hear. And so
she created a kind of shadow economy – a miniature version of her
normal operating budget that she set aside for the non-consultative
acquisitions and offspring grants and loans.
This sort of arrangement was, I suspect, quite common in the

previous generations, where Dad worked and Mom ran the house. In
our case, it was a cash economy, and Mom received X-amount each
week with which to buy groceries and other things. It was a lot easier
that way to squirrel a 10 or a 20 away in the vast recesses of Mom’s
handbag – no pesky debit-card-based checkbook with an online
component that can be checked at any time.
It doesn’t take long after a wedding for men and women to discover
that vast differences can exist between what the respective spouses
value. I could hang, say, burlap over the windows and get used to it in
a day or two. I also think cheap laundry detergent does the same job
as the expensive Tide my wife buys. And even if it didn’t, I’d live with
the slightly less-great smell and reduced cleaning power. After all, we
live in a snowy place and all attend school or do office jobs; we are not
oil riggers or diesel mechanics. How dirty can our clothes get?
And yes, I occasionally come across mysterious items that have been
acquired without any input from me. “When did we get this?” I’ll ask,
holding up a box with some random toy or exercise device. Jen will
usually tell me said items was purchased some years ago and cost a
nickel – even it was acquired last week and cost a C-note. For this is
the first rule of the non-consultative spousal acquisition: Exaggerate
greatly how little it cost and put the purchase date so long in the past
that there can be no question of returns.
Some point soon, it being nearly spring, we will go through our

garage, many storage closets and rooms, crawl spaces and attics and
get rid of much of this stuff through channels like consignment shops,
thrift stores and younger siblings and relatives. It is part of the natural
consumer order of things, and a process I don’t have much to do with.
Because I’m the guy with the annoying question:
“Why did we ever get this in the first place?”

Kids just have no sense of nostalgia
Last Friday night, during our family birthday party for Max, I couldn’t
help indulging in that most saccharine of parental activities: the day-
you-were-born lookback. With Max shrinking in his seat, half-smile
frozen on his face, I told him about the drive down to Denver with his
mom, the decision to induce labor, the long wait, the epidural and, my
favorite part — the way he wrapped his fist around my pinky when he
came out.
“I know it’s a cliché to say this,” I told him. “But it just doesn’t seem
possible that was 14 years ago!”
Max shrugged, his shoulders saying, “Look, this is how old I am. Deal
with it. Sheesh!”
I also told Max that I wrote a number of newspaper columns about
him when he was first born, no doubt strongly believing that what was
so interesting to me at the time must’ve been interesting to readers.
Nevertheless, I do have a fairly decent written log of what I was feeling
as I became a dad for the first time: Would he like to see the columns?
Again, some movement with shoulders. A quiet kid, Max
communicates mostly with shrugs, and I’ve learned to interpret them
over the years. This time, he was saying something like “I’m not ready
to look at this material just yet, Dad. Perhaps when I’m older. Although
it’s hard to imagine caring even then.”
Well, they’re in the archives, if he ever wants to look.

I still have friends who, upon seeing Andy, our kindergartner, say
“Oh, is that Max?” When I tell them no, that Max is now 14, they are
stunned. That’s because there’s almost no more stark gauge for how
old you’re getting than when you observe the children of your friends
and family. The kid comes out, he or she is a cute baby for a while,
then maybe you don’t see the family for a while and the next time you
bump into them the kid has a goatee, an attitude and a year or two of
college under his belt.
How could that possibly be?
Jen and I routinely remind all our kids about different times in their
lives. Photos pop up constantly on the laptop screensaver that’s
usually perched next to Jen’s spot on the couch, and she’ll call out an
interesting shot for all to view. There’s Austin, in his diapers, with wild
hair holding his little sister’s hand. So cute! Meanwhile, the 2008
Austin is standing there, face a-bristle with his proto beard, pants
sagging around his ankles, looking about as much like the kid in the
photo as tadpole to frog.
These later birthdays are bittersweet. We cheer the progress toward
the next stage while, as parents, we contemplate the inevitable place
this is all going: children leaving the home. When the older ones muse
aloud about how great it’ll be to be off to college or whatever, it’s hard
not to feel a little wounded. Sure, we know they’re going, but they
shouldn’t be too eager, we think. Silly, of course, but perhaps not an

uncommon feeling for parents of teens.
A few years ago, my mother sent me some pages from my “baby
book,” in which she’d recorded some observations from me from birth
up to about age 10. Since I was the last of four, she confessed, my
book was a little thinner than the earlier kids, but it was still interesting
to read about myself as a young child. Part of the reason I write this
column is that it’s my version of the “baby book,” and I’d be surprised
if, some day, the kids (or their children) don’t find it interesting.
In the present, though, they appear to be more content to live their
lives sans commentary.

The family that’s weird together …
It was just a little over a month ago, Halloween night, when the 4-
year-old and I were engaged in a particularly odd occupation: creating
“mummy boogers” by skewering raisins on toothpicks and toasting
them over the flame of a jack-o-lantern. Andy took it as gospel that this
was how mummy boogers were created, and it made no difference to
him that I had just invented the whole thing between the kitchen and
the living room.
Things were getting weird, but as we say in my house, it was “good
weird,” not “weird weird” — like when someone follows you home from
school wearing a Dick Cheney mask, mumbling in Basque.
“Weirdo” is the most common soft epithet hurled in our family, and
it’s used in the most loving way. With many decades of silliness under
my belt (I routinely spoke backwards as a kid and made up words like
“bongalafucci”), I’ve determined that the family that’s silly together —
or weird, or fun or whatever you want to call it — is a lot less likely to
need therapy, serotonin uptake inhibitors or separate living quarters.
Plus, family is a place where you can be yourself. I’m a juggernaut in
the morning, usually having been up for several hours by the time the
teens and tweens stumble into the kitchen to forage for cereal. I might
sing a little song of welcome, speak in odd, faux-Victorian sentences or
suggest something outrageous – like they should empty the
dishwasher. They usually respond by calling me a weirdo, which is fine.

The respect is still there, cleverly concealed behind a smile and
whatever modicum of teen cool they’re feeling that morning.
I was never really able to tease my father, whose Zeus-like
countenance relaxed only when he was skiing or camping. But he did
like a good water fight, and there was also something called “Wild
Bull” when we were younger. This involved Dad getting down on all
fours and bucking like mad to throw us off. It ended when one of our
craniums made contact with a hard, immovable object. We loved it – at
least those of us who didn’t have to be triaged by Mom.
My version of “Wild Bull” is, I suppose, kinda wimpy by comparison.
Called, simply, “Horsey,” it involves Andy riding atop while the 14-
year-old plays the part of a malevolent jaguar trying to steal Horsey’s
shoes (aka my slippers). Horsey occasionally dies, but he is revived by
a handful of magic alfalfa pellets administered lovingly by Andy – who
then demands the freshly resurrected steed get up and get moving.
“Horsey” is often followed by “The Flying Burrito,” which is a game I
wish I’d never invented because it involves the expenditure of an awful
lot of energy, usually in the evening when I’d prefer to be supine on
the couch. Andy lies on the edge of a blanket, is coated with toppings
(cheese, olives, sour cream, etc., all with accompanying sound effects)
and rolled up. I then grab both ends, spin him around a few times
saying “who wants a flying burrito?” (Andy: “I do! I do!”) and then
launch him into the couch. I then grab hold of the blanket and quickly
unfurl the contents of the giggling burrito onto the couch.
Then he asks that I do it 10 more times. We negotiate it down to five;
I give him seven. We go to bed after singing the toothbrush song.
I remember, as a single guy, seeing men surrounded by children and
actually feeling sorry for them. Now, it’s the other way around. Every
night is a party in my house, every morning an impromptu floor show.
Occasionally I long for the single days, when I could watch whatever I
wanted on TV or read a book in silence.
Mostly, though, I revel in it all and relish the fact that I’ve got at least
14 more years of kids in the house.
And then there’s always grandchildren to teach the ways of
weirdness …
Be a better man this year
Last week I wrote of ways to work on a better family in this New Year.
In this column, I wanted to share some information and thoughts on
how to be a better father and husband – a better man.
It’s something we all want, but it’s not always clear how to go about
it. Men aren’t like women, who share their feelings more readily with
other women, blast out a few tears and feel better. Men keep it bottled
up to “be strong,” then release it in not-so-helpful ways. One look at a
police log from a Saturday night – with its litany of drunken acts of
violence, verbal abuse or drug and alcohol stupidity – is enough to see
that, when it comes to acting out, men win the prize.
That snapshot is of the extreme edge, of course, but it plays itself out
in “normal” homes as well. A tired dad home from work roars at the
kids over some slight, and if he keeps it up, a pattern of dreading the
old man’s return at night can develop pretty quickly. We can become
too comfortable in our marriages to where we’re not enjoying the part
of the union that caused us to get together in the first place.
I was fortunate enough to be part of a men’s group when I lived in
California earlier in the decade. There, I met a guy named Wayne
Levine, who runs something called the West Coast Men’s Center and
later went on to write a book about how guys can improve their lives
and relationship by remembering a few key things. I helped him edit it,
so I’m very familiar with the material. I have no problem plugging

“Hold On To Your N.U.T.s” here because I truly believe any man who
brings some of this into his life will be better for it.
The title, while an obvious wink about where a man’s power
metaphorically lies, refers to “non-negotiable, unalterable terms” — a
fancy way of saying stay true to what’s important to you. Wayne
believes when men get married, they often give up the things they
really value – be it golf, church, skiing or certain beliefs or ways of
living – because they feel pressured to align with their wife at all times.
Then, we get resentful and fight or brood over little things when what’s
really bugging us is something bigger. Figure out your N.U.T.s, Wayne
says, hang onto them and that little stuff will take care of itself.
Also in the book are eight tools for being a better man. Here they are:
1. Silence the little boy
2. Express but don’t defend your feelings
3. Cooperate without compromising your N.U.T.s
4. Run the sex and romance departments
5. Be the rock
6. Don’t argue
7. Listen
8. Develop trusting relationships with men
I don’t have the space here to go into all of these in detail (the book
does that), but they should all make sense on the surface. My
favorites are No. 1 and No. 6 because they represent obvious traps
men fall into often without realizing it. How often do you sound like a
5-year-old stamping his feet because you didn’t get your way? Cut
that crap out!
Some men think it’s impossible to stop arguing with their wife (or
anyone) since that’s how things get done. They’re wrong. Give it a try
and, while you’re at it, remember to listen. It’s an attribute women
often put at the top of the list of things they like to see in men.
For 2008, if you can embrace just one of these tools along with the
notion of hanging on to those things that make you feel good, you’ll
be in a better spot. And if you want help along the way, turn to the
men in your life. It may take some work to get them back in, but men
need other men to work these things out.

Colorado Day a time for change
Usually for people trying to make changes or resolutions in their lives,
the date they fix upon is January 1. Many a diet has been launched on
that day, and many a half-full pack of cigarettes thrown away.
For me, though, it’s always been August 1 – Colorado Day. Officially,
the first day of August commemorates the day in 1876 when Colorado
joined the Union (hence its moniker of the “Centennial State.”)
It was 10 years ago this July that I had the wonderful opportunity to
travel to Europe with some folks from the Breckenridge Backstage
Theatre, where we performed as part of an international festival and
took the stage in a 14th Century Swiss castle. At the time, I was a single
dad with a 4-year-old son. I was also still a smoker, and Max was
getting to the age where it was getting harder to hide my evil habit
from him. As a relatively new parent, it gradually became clear to me
that sneaking around was no way to model good behavior for Max, and
so I resolved to quite.
On Colorado Day – right after I got back from Europe, world capital of
smoking.
As I mark a decade of freedom from the world’s dumbest pastime, I
also can reflect on other ways being a parent has changed me. Most
parents acknowledge that anything resembling selfishness goes out
the window when babies start showing up, and one’s view of the world
is radically altered as you realize, “Hey, it really isn’t all about me!”
Talking to friends who don’t yet have kids, they shake their heads
when I tell them about some of the things that change when you
become a parent. To them, they hear only “sacrifice.”
But it’s more than that, of course. When you’re 25 and single, a
Saturday night out on the town may seem like an imperative. At that
age, one craves the scene, the action, the possibilities of mingling with
the other sex. When that’s replaced with a quiet night at home on the
couch with spouse and kids, you don’t really miss it. It’s become rather
meaningless, in fact. Although that’s not to say that making time for
dates with your better half isn’t critical.
And that may be one of the things parents struggle with most.
Finding a night away from the kids has always been a challenge for my
wife and I. Making time for oneself is also important, and something we
don’t do often enough. The theatre I used to love so much has mostly
vanished from my life, although I do hope to pick it up when our
youngest gets a little older. I wouldn’t trade being a dad for anything,
but there’s no doubt these middle years are tough on the self.
So, as Colorado Day arrives tomorrow, I’ve got a new project I’m
going to resume work on, another habit to kick and some pounds to
lose. Technically, I suppose it’s silly to have a special day to focus on
for personal improvement – what’s wrong with May 23 or Sept. 27? But
I do know that, 10 years ago, setting a firm date and sticking to it was
what worked for stopping something. Any self-help book worth its salt
will tell you to do what works for you, so pick a date if you’ve got
something you want to tweak and stick to it.
And if you’re a parent, take a hard look at things you miss from your
pre-baby days and ask if there’s a way to fit that back into your life.
Your kids may even thank you for it.

A dozen cousins, spread about
Between my siblings and myself, we have 13 children, which means
that each one of them has a dozen cousins. They don’t get to see one
another all that much, unfortunately, since, like most American
families, we’re spread around a bit.
Last weekend, I took two of the boys to see my sister in Winter Park.
She lives in Boulder but also has a condo at the base of the mountain.
With her oldest already in college at the Naval Academy, it’s not often
they have all four of their kids in one place – and this was one of those
occasions. We didn’t do much; just sat around and talked while the
kids alternated between video games and some reality show about dog
grooming (who knew?). And even though my 6-year-old devoted most
of his time to their two German shepherds, I know the boys love seeing
their cousins; I know I always did.
My cousin base is a lot smaller. Dad was an only child and Mom had
only one brother. When he brought his three kids to visit from
Scottsdale once a year or so, it was like festival time. Kids seem to
intuitively get the unique relationship they have with cousins. They’re
like special friends – even if you’ve just met, the bond is already there
somehow. And all this when I’m convinced the littlest ones still don’t
understand that the cousins are Daddy’s sister’s children. Daddy has a
sister?
Volumes are filled nowadays with woeful accounts of how fractured

our families are. Jobs, sprawl, wanderlust etc. take us far from where
we grew up, and the village concept — where men help each other fix
cars and build homes and women help watch each other’s kids —
seems a quaint notion that’s impossible to realize. Somehow, we’ve
convinced ourselves we don’t need much beyond our immediate
family, and even taking time to see siblings, in-laws, cousins and
grandparents can seem an inconvenience.
How did we get so busy, so entrenched in this fortress-like mentality?
Cars and interstates bear part of the blame. With roads connecting
every corner of the country and gas, until recently, pretty affordable,
the urge to move around was greater than the natural state of staying
close to home. It’ll be interesting to see how much the changing
landscape of transportation will affect society. Will we find that village
again, especially when we can no longer afford to drive our SUVs any
further than the local Safeway? Or will alternate energy technologies
come along soon enough to perpetuate our itinerant nature?
For cousins, though, I think the time they get to spend together has
just shifted from childhood to young adulthood. Once they’re all off in
the world, going to college, working, whatever, I think there’s enough
of them that they’ll catch up with each other on their own once in a
while. The bond is already there, the proximity will happen along and
our kids will maintain – however loosely – the links that hold our family
together among the other 300 million folks kicking around the country.
For now, though, I try to make the trek down to Winter Park or
Boulder when I can. But it’s not easy given the schedules of two large,
busy families. Even friends who live across town present tremendous
logistic challenges for get-togethers, which makes Boulder seem as
convenient as Kuala Lumpur.
As for my own cousins now? I have one e-mail address, but I don’t
even know where the other two live. I should check on that; I really
should.
Teens behind the wheel – oh my!
When my son Max was born 14 years ago, I held him up in his blanket
to my father and said “Isn’t he cute?”, to which my father replied,
“Wait’ll he steals a car.”
We laughed at what was mostly (I think) a joke. More accurately, if
my father wanted to give me a warning about the travails of parenting,
he might have said, “Wait’ll he wants you to teach him how to drive.”
Max isn’t of age yet, but I’ve already taught his older sister (now 23)
and am working on Austin (16) and Kaylie (15). So far, the three have
contributed 10 percent, 43 percent and 5 percent to my gray hair
totals, respectively. The stakes of driving instruction are pretty high
and, as it is with just about anything you try to teach, some people get
it faster than others. There’s always the kid who simply has a knack
for, say, drawing and another, equally smart kid who can’t get past a
stick figure. Aptitude runs in all kinds of crazy directions: At 44 I can do
all kinds of stuff, but I can still get lost driving around the block in my
own neighborhood.
Brittany, our oldest, had the challenge of learning to drive in
Southern California. Since I usually drive a stick, she started out having
to do the herky-jerky in my Subaru, and more or less had it down by
the time I traded it in for an automatic. Brittany was always the kind of
kid straining at the yoke to do the next thing in the evolution of
childhood, so she seemed pretty well prepared for the driving thing,
even if she did give me a few instances of heart failure along the way.
Austin is a fine example of how sometimes you can be too smart for
your own good. He can ace complicated math tests, perform on stage,
write pretty good essays and short stories but, when it comes to
shifting my Civic from first to second, it’s like I asked him to quickly
learn to play the cello. He over-analyzes the whole thing, and
proficiency is slow coming. In the meantime, my spinal column is
suffering as he yet again lets up too quickly on the clutch and we buck
and jerk to an ignominious stall. The motor races, the tires squeal and
the sudden enormity of how many things he has to do at once
overwhelms him. As we sit there in silence, dashboard lights blinking,
tachometer at zero, all I can say is “Let’s try it again.”
I still remember my early forays into shifting a five speed. My Dad
had an old Volvo P1800, and as early as age 6 or 7 he would let me
shift from the passenger seat as he worked the clutch. By the time I
was ready to learn to drive in my Mom’s 1978 Accord, I was already
halfway there. Even so, I know I gave my folks a few frights, especially
during my early snow-driving lessons.
The basic instinct for parents, of course, is to have kids remain home
at all times. From the time they’re about 18 months old, though, we
have to start relaxing the ties that bind; and when they finally solo in
the family car or their own junker, well, it’s a scary moment. Even if
the last thing we feel like doing after work is go get whiplash at the
hands of our teens, we know the more they hear from us the better –
hopefully – they’ll be when they’re finally on their own.
And may they drive more prudently than I did at their age ….
End of the Chuck E. Cheese years?
Saturday, we spent a good chunk of the day amid the whirring,
beeping, screaming, crying cacophony that is Chuck E. Cheese. Our
youngest turned 7, and the trek to Denver for the Chuck E. Cheese
thing has come to be an annual event since he was 3 or so.
We were wondering if this would be the last. When he turns 8, will his
interest lie elsewhere? A pool party, perhaps, or a laser tag thing?
While Jen and I discussed this alarming possibility, though, I watched
the other four kids tooling around what is essentially a kids’ casino,
pumping tokens into the machines, delighting at the tickets that get
spit out (for later redemption on plastic junk) and generally having a
pretty good time of it. I found a Star Wars game I liked while Jen was
taking all comers on the air hockey table.
When it comes to family fun, it seems, letting your inner nerd shine
forth is a pretty good strategy. Or maybe it’s more of a “When in Rome
…” kind of thing. Either way, I think Andy knows that when he asks for
Chuck E. Cheese, he gets the whole family in one place, and that, more
than anything, makes him very happy.
Having achieved the relatively mature age of 7, and he being our
youngest, it’s somewhat sobering to contemplate the end of certain
things. I’m not sure Chuck E. Cheese is completely out of the picture,
but the baby rides at Elitch’s are a thing of the past, as are a variety of
things from diapers and binkies to daytime naps, Blues Clues (mostly)
and even most of our animated film collection. With our other kids at
14, 15, 17 and 23 now, the need for higher-maintenance parenting is
markedly decreased.
Jen is already looking forward to grandchildren, needless to say. I
figure I’m good for another decade.
We may still have another 11 years or so before we’re empty nesters,
but with three ready to tromp off to college in quick succession starting
in two years, the notion that the minivan is going to be mostly empty is
hard to take. Sometimes, magic happens in that van when, again, we
release our inner nerd. Jen had the kids singing along to Abba songs
not too long ago, while I had them all stumbling through the words to
Weezer’s “Pork and Beans” on a recent trip back from the movies. It’s
all stuff that gets filed away, like my own childhood memories of
massive water fights with our dad in the backyard. But like most
memories, it can’t be recreated – only cherished.
Or can’t it? Not having experience grandfather-dom yet, I don’t know
if doing that stuff with my children’s children will be the same. But I’m
guessing it’s pretty darned close. And with Jen and I working full-time
jobs now, it’s tempting to think that, by the time grandkids come
along, we’ll have a little more time to play. Again, though, I can wait a
little while for that.
As we head into another family tradition – the trip to the big balloon
festival in Colorado Springs for Labor Day – it seems we freight them

with greater expectations as they grow in our family lore. But kids get
older, they want to bring friends or boyfriends, and things that used to
fascinate them become less enchanting. There’s a progression to all
this that makes sense, but it’s never easy for the parents – we who
remember that smart-ass teenager when he was crying in the face of
the shopping-mall Santa.
So will next year herald another trip down the hill to Chuck E.
Cheese? I don’t know, but I will say this: I’ll still be up for it.
Visiting our far-flung families
One thing you’ve got to appreciate (if not always love) about family is
how they can push you outside your comfort zone. It could be
something as mundane as changing a diaper for the first time to
traveling great distances for a wedding or a funeral.
Over the past month, I’ve traveled over 5,000 miles in what you
might call the “service of family.” I found myself preparing a vat of
cream of asparagus soup for 125 members of the Pahrump, Nevada
Elks Lodge, and I watched my father-in-law clean four wild turkeys
brought down by Uncle Floyd in Coatopa, Alabama. I shopped for prom
dresses for our daughter in Joplin, Missouri and I skied with my brother
(a Stowe, Vt. local) at Beaver Creek.
Somewhere in between all that, we maintained all the regular
business of jobs, bills and school. And man, am I glad to be home!
Even so, the experience of getting to see where my wife grew up in
rural Alabama was truly memorable. Her dad’s home has evolved into
a compound, with various family members inhabiting trailers (or, as we
were instructed to call them, “double wides”) around the property. An
enormous workshop contained the collected artifacts of a generation or
more, and a golf cart and ATV provided endless amusement for the
kids.
As a Yankee, a suburb-slicker who grew up on Long Island, seeing a
place like this – complete with a front-end loader in the driveway – was
extraordinary. In the three days we were there, there wasn’t nearly
enough time to explore this whole world, but we did our best. Max, my
father-in-law, is a man of few words, but he’d occasionally say “Come
look at this” and I’d follow. One time it was a 5,000-pound safe in his
closet, which he told me he bought locked for $50. A career welder,
he’d cut it open, re-jiggered the combination and welded it back
together. The next day, he suggested I join him to clean the turkeys his
brother had shot.
If this was a test, I passed it by not shrieking and running away when
he sliced into the birds. I’m no hunter, but I’m not a vegetarian, either,
so I figured a little butchering lesson couldn’t hurt.
Only a week before, I watched my dad be installed as “Exalted Ruler”
at the Elks Lodge in Pahrump – a funky little town about an hour west
of Vegas. Since my older brother is a chef, he was ordered to prepare
the meal and I served as apprentice – something I hadn’t done with Pat
since I was a teenager and spent summers with him in Vermont. It’s
hard to think of a less likely place for either of us to have been without
the connection to our dad. But it’s the kind of thing you do for family –
and dad was in his glory.
It’s not news that families are mostly comprised of insane people,
some of whom are impossible to get along with. That’s why we try to
limit the exposure: Two or three days is plenty of time to pay a visit,
get an idea of what’s going on and move along before anything

untoward happens. A shorter visit also has the beneficial effect of
exposing the good stuff while deferring the rest; or, at least, allocating
it to those closer family members who must deal with the madness on
a regular basis.
Mostly, though, it’s all good. And while there was a time not too long
ago that I wouldn’t have had any idea how to handle a dead wild
turkey, I now feel I know enough about the process to skip it all and
head to the grocery store. But it’s the experience that matters – and
that’s something I couldn’t have gotten any other place outside my
family.
The high cost of High Country living
Saying it’s expensive to live up here is kind of like complaining of the
heat in Scottsdale. Those of us running families know all too well that,
in addition to the high cost of housing, everything up here simply costs
more. From a box of cereal to a visit to the doctor, it sometimes seems
like a vast conspiracy to overcharge mountain dwellers for anything
and everything exists around every corner.
I don’t mean that literally, but the end result is the same as a
conspiracy. High rents drive up the cost of everything locally, and
that’s on top of all those national trends pushing up the price tag on
gas, milk, corn and, more than anything, health care. We love our
mountain lifestyle, but scenery doesn’t pay the rent.
That the middle class is under enormous strain financially is not an
unobserved phenomenon. One interesting new book comes from Nan
Mooney, and it’s called “Not Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline
of the Professional Middle Class.” It’s always good to put some
numbers to econo-whining, so here’s a few from the book:
• Ninety percent of those filing for bankruptcy today are middle class.
• Average college loan debt is nearly $20,000; average graduate
school loan debt is $46,000.
• Credit card debt has risen 31 percent in the past five years; middle-
and low-income households owe an average of $8,650; a third owe
over $10,000.
• Health care premiums have increased at five times the rate of
inflation since 2000.
• Mortgages have now reached 96 percent of disposable income.
• Twenty-three percent of public college graduates and 38 percent of
private college graduates would have an unmanageable level of debt if
they were to live on a teacher’s starting salary.
Does that make you feel any better? Didn’t think so. Needless to say,
when people like Mooney write these books, they don’t even get into
what it’s like for middle-class folks trying to make it in a place with an
extra-inflated cost of living. Locally, we’re starting to wake up to the
reality of what it might look like around here if the middle class is,
literally, driven out of the valley. It’s why our county commissioners,
town council and other leaders are pushing for things like a more
comprehensive affordable housing program, more help with early
childhood education and other social services – as well as anything
else we can do to ease the burden on those who make the county run.
It’s easy for some to criticize families for, well, being families with
kids — expensive kids. I love the argument that those who can’t afford
it should leave – or that they should never have come in the first place;
or that they shouldn’t have kids if they “can’t afford them.” Pretty
much a non-starter of an observation if we begin from a place that
says community begins with people, which, at some point, means
babies.
Sadly enough, plenty of middle-class families do make the decision to
leave because they can’t make it in the High Country. We all may have
different ideas of what, exactly, is meant by “making it,” but for most it
means being able to afford a decent home, paying the bills and having
some left over for recreation, vacation, savings, retirement and the
like. Many of those benchmarks are simply more attainable on the
Front Range — or “back home” in Iowa, Pennsylvania, etc.
No solutions here today; just a few statements to maybe help us
realize we’re not alone – and that keeping our heads above water is a
very real problem for mountain families.

The incredible $7 cantaloupe
The other night at dinner, I asked our two teenagers how much they
thought we spent monthly on food.
“$300?” offered one?
I shook my head. The other took a shot.
“$200?”
Even my wife guessed low.
“$750?”
The correct answer is between $900 and $1,200 — a staggering sum
when I reflect on the fact that I’m always agonizing over the shelves of
Safeway, making skinflint decisions on what we need versus what we
want and can afford. Jen loves cantaloupe, but the one I bought the
other day turned out to be nearly $7.
When I saw it rung up at the check-out, I wanted to scream out: “Are
you friggin’ kidding me!?? Seven friggin bucks for a $@$%
cantaloupe!”
I kept silent, but when I got home I told Jen to be very cautious with
this melon. We’ve been known to not getting around to cutting them
up, then realized they rotted on the counter right under our noses.
Fresh food, it turns out, is a lot more expensive than stuff in cans and
boxes. We tend to buy a lot of the cheap crap at Wal-Mart – the cereal,
the cans of peas and boxes of Cheez-Its – because it’s almost always
less expensive than at Safeway or City Market. But we don’t think

much of the meat or produce at Wal-Mart, so we go to the traditional
grocery stores for that stuff.
It’s kind of like shopping for jewelry or electronics. Eyeing a piece of
meat labeled at, say, $18, you don’t want to see the slightest blemish
or hint of flaw. As Bill Cosby once said of a high-priced hotel room-
service egg, “This thing better have an act.”
As gas zips merrily along toward $5 a gallon, it’s almost getting ready
to catch up with milk. We decided one thing we would buy organic
would be milk, since, we read somewhere, the regular stuff is laced
with steroids and radioactive POISON!! Or something. So a gallon of
organic milk costs like 6 or 7 bucks a gallon, and the 6-year-old spills it
on the floor and wonders why Daddy is trying to get it back into the jug
with a squeegee and an eye-dropper. I watch one of the teenagers
make a bowl of cereal and dump out the remaining milk and hear
myself saying “What the hell are you doing! Don’t you know this stuff
is GOLD … liquid gold!?”
One thing I find amusing is to go by the fish counter at the super
market and look at the stuff lying there on the ice that’s $15 or $20 a
pound.
“Who buys this stuff?” I wonder, as I try to get close enough to see if
anything’s on sale – but not so close that the guy behind the counter
asks me if I’d like some help. The only thing remotely affordable is a
box of fish sticks, but ever since one of the kids found a tiny piece of
scale in one a couple of years ago, they are treated as poison in our
household.
I read somewhere the other day that the first batch of Chinook
salmon from the Copper River in Alaska are starting to hit the market.
This is some tasty fish, but don’t get too excited because due to the
salmon shortage (who knew?), it’s $40 a pound.
I’ll just have the tuna sandwich on rye, please.
Families now have to choose between buying fresh food, packaged
bad-for-you crap or gas for the SUV that seemed so cool and roomy
when it was first purchased.
Tough times, these, when we have to think of the super market as a
“food museum” — you can only look at a lot of the stuff, while the
things you can afford are like the cheap postcard you get at the gift
shop.
To highlight to the kids the value of food nowadays, I fashioned a
cantaloupe pedestal from a paper-towel roll, a Funyon and cash-
register tape from the grocery store encircling it mummy-fashion.
I think I need to let my wife start doing the shopping. It’s better that I
don’t know ….
Teenagers think they’re so cool
Last week’s column about the game Guitar Hero III got me thinking
even more about how kids learn, what they learn, and whether their
experiences are fundamentally any different from what my generation
experienced as kids.
For the most part, they’re not. Sure, in 1980, a cell phone was
recognizable only as a fantasy accouterment in the form of the
communicators on Star Trek, and the most advanced video game was
Pac-Man. But we had fun with our games involving mud and sticks, and
even without cell phones, it wasn’t that much trouble to communicate.
We did, after all, have rudimentary telephone technology and the
ability to converse face-to-face and through something else called “the
handwritten note” — which is much like a text message only cheaper.
Mostly I despise walking through shopping malls, but on a trip to
Denver last weekend, I was reminded of how interesting it is to watch
the teenagers — especially the non-mountain variety — on parade at
the mall. Many of them had haircuts similar to mine at that age, and
my wife pointed out a few examples of a possible resurgence in the old
preppy-raised-collar look. The droopy drawers thing still mystifies me,
but in practice the look isn’t too much more ridiculous-looking than
colossal bell bottoms or Sassoon jeans.
And despite the cell phones and texting and iPods and all that extra
connectivity and hardware teens pack today, at the end of the day the
most important things are the same: They want to look good (at least
relative to the pack), smell good (or at least not too badly) and stand
out from the crowd commensurate with their comfort level. Few have
the intestinal fortitude to be a class clown or pack leader, but no one
wants to be ignored either. It’s a bell curve, with the below-the-radar
kids on one end, the over-achievers and obnoxious ones on the other,
and the bulk stacked in the middle trying to keep abreast of the wave
that propels high school society.
It’s a frightfully old cliché that teenagers cannot for a moment believe
their parents have the slightest idea what they’re feeling and
experiencing – but it’s as true as ever. Every once in a while, though,
we’re able to say something that breaks through the clouds and makes
them think, if only for a moment, that we are of the same species.
When our 14-year-old went to the Pink Floyd laser light show up at
Beaver Creek last week, I told her I’d seen such a thing myself many
moons ago. I went on to describe some of experiences seeing a few
dozen Grateful Dead shows and got a little bit more reaction – a look
that seemed to say: “I can’t believe you could’ve done anything
remotely similar to what I like to do. Who are you?”
For readers who haven’t hit the teen years yet with their kids, get
used to it. Sometime, the best we can do is find those occasional
intersections of interest and milk them for all they’re worth.

The long and winding collarbone
Writing today from the trenches of the American health care
“system,” where I’m trying to match up all the EOBs (that’s an
“explanation of benefits,” in insurance-speak) with all the various bills
from the doctors, labs and dentists we’ve obtained services with over
the last year.
We are, for the most part, a healthy family. But kids need shots and
glasses and checkups and the occasional strep-throat test while we
parents also need an occasional look under the hood. Multiply that by
six and you can have a genuine headache on your hands as you try to
figure out how much of each bill the insurance paid, how much we’re
supposed to pay and if there’s anything that’s fallen through the
cracks.
It may be a cliche to say it’s all rather Kafka-esque, except Kafka’s
characters never had to parse EOBs as part of their punishment; nor
did they have to endure 43 minutes of the Muzak versions of “Jump”
and “Helter Skelter” only to be told that the wrong form was filled out,
or that the original claim was mistakenly filed with the wrong
something-or-other and has to be refiled.
That particular story goes back almost 12 months ago, when our son
Austin, after waiting all year for his buddy to come out skiing with him,
broke his collarbone on Christmas day. On the first run. It was painful,
ruined his Christmas break and was somewhat embarrassing since the
injury occurred on a cat track. But, being 15 at the time, he healed
almost immediately and promptly forgot all about it.
Dad, though, still had miles to go before any such resolution. The
clinic at Copper Mountain is part of some bigger hospital system, which
turned out to be “outside our network.” But no one realized that at
first, so the claim got paid and I got the EOB saying I owed about $120
of it. After I paid that, I optimistically paper-clipped the ream of paper
on the matter together and filed it away.
Then, sometime last summer, I start getting bills again. Then a phone
call. Turns out our insurance made a mistake: They shouldn’t have
paid what they did, so the hospital was tearing up the check they’d
received and the process had to start all over again.
“You’re not going to cash the check they sent you to pay this
because of some paperwork thing?” I asked the woman incredulously.
Every day you hear about doctors and hospitals going bananas trying
to get people to pay for service in something resembling a timely
fashion, and here’s a woman, check in hand, saying thanks but no
thanks, let’s try again.
So the claim gets resubmitted and a check comes to me, which I
dutifully turned around and sent to the hospital. This, combined with
what I’d already sent them should certainly have resolved the
situation, and so once again I clipped everything together and filed it
away.
Then I get a letter from a collection agency saying I still owe $57 for
work on Austin’s collarbone (which, by the way, amounted to an X-ray,
a sling and a bottle of painkillers). As the one-year anniversary of the
Collarbone Incident approaches, I’m still trying to figure out if I really
owe this last bit, and I figure I better work fast before Moose and Rocko
show up at my door with baseball bats.
In the meantime, we still exhort the kids to be careful and not hurt
themselves whenever they leave the house. And if they’re curious
about the extra level of concern on my face, they only need to know
that, in addition to my wish that no harm befall them, I also don’t want
to get spun into the existential hell of a hospital insurance claim once
again.
I could counter the horror by enrolling in a yoga class or something,
but I’m not sure how much of that is covered by my out-of-pocket co-
pay deductible flex rider hoo-ha.

Just the right number of kids
In last week’s column, I touched on the ballooning world population
and how those numbers affect the number of people clogging the
grocery store aisles during busy season in the mountains. That got me
thinking about another population number: the size of the families we
create.
It’s a big question, contemplating how many children we wish to
have. Agreement is not always a given, and I think it’s fair to say that a
woman who wants two married to a man who wants five is going to
ultimately be part of a four-person household. (There’s just a certain
amount of leverage when you’re packing womb.) For many families,
though, the number is a moving target. There could be a monkey
wrench somewhere that prohibits conception, or a wildly successful
pairing of parts that defies all known forms of contraception.
Oftentimes, babies seem to come more if and when they feel like it
than due to any supremely well-thought-out strategies devised by
those wielding the twin wild cards of egg and sperm.
I don’t recall where this quote came from, but it was from a mother
with a dozen or so kids who said “I wouldn’t trade any of my kids for a
million bucks – but I wouldn’t give a nickel for another one.”
And so some potential people never make it. The metaphor I like to
think of is some sort of ether in the Earth’s vicinity, where the souls of
would-be children are floating around, waiting to be plucked for

terrestrial duty. One of them is the little girl my wife and I talk about
now and again. We wonder what she would be like, how she’d fit in
with the rest of the family, how tightly she’d have me wrapped around
her little finger. Since there’s little and ever-dwindling chance of us
summoning her here, we’ll never know. We can only imagine.
Again, though, what is the right number of kids? We have five, with
one out of the house and one part-timer, who splits his time between
our house and that of his mother in Littleton. Jen says five is perfect,
but also allows that four is an excellent number if you’re at a theme
park (this is also true on the ski hill, for the most part). If I were
planning a family from scratch, I’d have lobbied for three as just the
right number. Two can get on each others’ nerves and play off one
another, and an only child is necessarily robbed of the benefit of
having siblings.
And what about zero? I have a number of friends who’ve chosen this
route (or who, possibly, were fated not to have kids). I may envy their
freedom: They can sit down on the couch and read a book without
being climbed upon, and they can plan trips without having to multiply
all expenses by six or seven. I don’t envy the quiet that pervades their
homes, however. The bustle of family life is what keeps me happy, and
when, on the rare occasion, I’m home alone for more than a couple of
hours, I start making calls to find out when everyone’s going to be
back.
I think a family is like a lake full of water: it seeks its own level and
somehow gets comfortable there. If that level is just two people happy
at that level, so be it. Ten years ago, I had no intention of being in such
a full lake myself. But then there was a flood, I guess, and here I am
floating happily in our little crowded, slightly battered and patched-up
boat.
It may look crazy to some people, but for us it’s just about perfect.
This dad will always be a rocker
Parenting is, if nothing else, a long-term series of benchmarks,
milestones and notable moments. They range from first smile, first
steps and potty-trained up to training bras, first shave and, my
favorite, first live rock concert.
Dude, I was a total rocker as a kid. I had the extreme good fortune to
grow up within biking distance of Nassau Coliseum (home of the
Islanduhs) in New York. Pretty much every band that played Madison
Square Garden played Nassau, and it was there in 1978 that I saw my
first concert: Kansas. I saw Queen there, Pink Floyd, Rush, Yes, Charlie
Daniels … and a dozen or so Dead shows. Back then, tickets were eight
or 10 bucks, and you could buy your T-shirt (de rigueur for next day at
school) from black-market guys in the parking lot for another 10 bucks.
After moving to Colorado in 1980, I had wonderful venues like Red
Rocks, Rainbow Music Hall and the old McNichol’s Arena to catch a
bunch more Dead shows and everyone from The Cars and Lou Reed to
Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Clash, The Blues Brothers, The Who, The
Stone and Peter Tosh. I was a concert warrior, totally had it down and
knew how to navigate crowds, find tickets, dance like a Dead Head and
always know who was coming to town and when (and all this before
the internet!).
As with many things, jobs, family and other time-consuming
trappings of adult life cut into my concert-going quite severely over the
past 10 years. This summer, an old friend from high school and I went
to Red Rocks to see John Prine – and it was the first time I’d been there
since the mid-90s. Happily, the place looked more or less the same,
with a marked improvement in the overall sanitation in the men’s
rooms. I’d caught Beck in Denver in 2000, saw a few Elvis Costello
shows in L.A. when we lived out there and got “treated” to Yanni and
Josh Groban shows by my wife.
But there was one band that I really wanted to see live, and that was
Weezer. A powerful but nerdy four-piece out of L.A. that I’ve loved
since they came out in the 1990s, Weezer also became a favorite of all
of my kids. So when I heard Weezer was coming to Colorado, I got
three tickets and told the boys they were going to their first “real” rock
concert.
As it turned out, only our older boy Austin could go. The show was at
the relatively new Broomfield Event Center in, well, Broomfield, and we
had floor tickets. It was a kick to watch Austin’s reaction when the
warm-up band (Angels & Airwaves) kicked things off and we felt that
blast of amplified power from the bass and drums that’s always been
tonic for my soul. And after years of enjoying Weezer’s music in
recorded format, I felt that old rush of adrenaline when the band took
the stage – and I knew Austin was feeling the excitement as well.
Granted, nothing compares in my mind to the thrill of watching Jerry
Garcia walk on stage, but the guys in Weezer definitely had cooler
outfits.
Some things have definitely changed. The tickets were $65, a T-shirt
was a shameful $35. In the age of people downloading music for free, I
don’t mind paying a band to show up and play live – but $35 for a T-
shirt?
As we talked afterwards about how he enjoyed his first concert, it
dawned on me that I was marking 30 years since my first one. Rather
than having that make me feel old, though, I focused on something I
know in my heart: I will never be too old to have my eardrums
pounded by a live rock ‘n’ roll band. If the kids want to tag along,
they’re welcome to. And when the time comes, their kids can tell their
friends: “Yeah, my grandpa is a rocker.”

Meet the laptop family
When school districts put their hand out for money (an almost annual
occurrence, it seems), one of the things on the wish list is often dollars
for “more computers” or “technology improvements” or a “computer
lab.”
We send our kids off to school in the hopes they’ll get a break from
computers. Unless they’re actually learning programming or web
design or something useful, I’d just as soon their academic experience
relied on good, old-fashioned human interaction and work with papers
and pens and pencils and the like. Because over the past few years, we
have somehow evolved into the Laptop Family.
Jen and I both have laptops for our work, and they double as personal
computers that tend to consume a lot of our eye-time. Austin bought
his own Mac a year ago with lawn-mowing money; Kaylie got a hand-
me-down Dell laptop from Jen; Andy and Max share my old Mac
Powerbook. Six people with five laptops and one wireless network adds
up to more computing power in our home today than the Federal
Government had 20 years ago.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then familiarity is the father
of need: The more we use these things, the less we can perceive life
without them. Jen can no longer watch a film without IMDB’ing every
actor and actress on the screen and singing out details of their career
as we unsuccessfully try to shush her. Being grounded from the

computer is our biggest behavioral bargaining chip we have with the
kindergartner, fascinated as he is by online games on sites like
neopets.com and nick.com. We try to limit him to an hour a day, but he
has a way of silently moving into position in front of the keyboard, halo
firmly affixed, and tapping away like mad. This is a kid who, at 3, was
already a whiz at using a trackpad and knew how to find his own set of
bookmarked sites.
The thing that fascinates me most about how our three teens use this
technology is with the whole myspace.com thing. Kaylie is what I’d
guess you call a myspace power user, changing the look and sounds of
her site almost daily and working in her spare time to create new
photographs, photo illustrations and other graphic treatments to
customize her page. As boyfriends soar to the top of the charts then
plummet into nothingness, their presence in her life is reflected on her
myspace page. And her circle of girl friends, from what I’ve seen,
spend a fair amount of time photographing themselves and one
another, posting them online and then complimenting themselves on
how they look. It’s kind of like an online beauty pageant where the
judges are your best friends.
For all the doomsaying about the influence of computers and online
temptations on kids, as parents we think this is the world now, and
they should learn about it. We monitor what they play and for how long
and make sure the myspace pages are “invite only” to keep away
creeps. Sometimes we wonder about the time spent peering into the
screen, but then we look at the wonderful Photoshop work Kaylie has
done to enhance her myspace page, the fiction projects Austin and
Max have both undertaken using their Macs and some of the cool,
quasi-educational games Andy comes across online. In a world where
any professional job and a good many others will contain heavy
computer use, it seems logical for kids to be getting comfortable with
them.
Even so, sometimes edicts must be issued to get the damn things
turned off on a bright fall day. Regardless of the laptop’s appeal, it’s
doubtful anyone will ever say they’d wished they’d spent more time on
the computer when the paths and trails of autumn beckon from
outside.
Down-time and the modern parent
There’s this tableau I have in mind, that some day I will be at the pool
or the park and relaxing on a bench reading a book while the kids play.
This, after all, is the image most commonly proffered in various media
– that of the disengaged-yet-nearby parent ready to leap into any
emergency but not necessarily part of the fun.
It’s fair to say that most parents today don’t subscribe to the notion
that we should remain on the sidelines. The message we receive – and
that’s reinforced through other parents, parenting magazines and the
lecture-circuit experts and shrinks – is that we need to be “interactive,”
constant companions to our children at all stages. And that ranges
from rolling in the grass with our toddlers all the way up to consulting
with our teens on STDs and contraception.
Mostly this is a good thing. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to
the days of the fully disengage parenting model that included wet
nurses, nannies, private tutors and boarding school. What’s the point
in having kids if all those barriers are put in place between you and
your children? Maybe back then it was all about needing a few names
for the will or hands for the field, but nowadays people mostly have
kids because they’ve decided they want them. And that includes
wanting them around.
I can’t say that my style of parenting came from any great strategic
plan I put together on Powerpoint to go over with my wife. Since my
own father was a kind of scary, mostly remote figure who only
occasionally played with us, I did have it in mind to be more accessible
to my own kids. As it turned out, kids seem to really go for that – at
least up until a certain age — and we therefore consigned ourselves to
being extra full-time parents, especially with our youngest.
So, when my wife took three of the kids to visit her mother last
weekend and left me and the 16-year-old to fend for ourselves, we got
a small taste of what it would be like to be sort of kid-free. I actually
sat and read a book in the middle of the day and didn’t have to get up
every 3.5 minutes to fill up a juice cup, tend to a boo-boo or help with
a puzzle. I didn’t have anyone tap-dancing on my head or falling off the
couch or asking to go outside. And we watched “Kill Bill 1&2” back to
back without interruption or having to worry about the 6-year-old
seeing any bad stuff.
The older kids tell my wife and I that we’ve spoiled our youngest, and
I suppose that’s true to an extent. The youngest is always going to get
away with more than the older ones. But I don’t recognize being on-call
whenever Andy is awake as spoiling him. With older kids – one of
whom has already left home – we know how short these years are, and
we do our best to savor them. At the same time, “over-parenting” can
wear one’s batteries down pretty quickly. Somewhere, we’re still
looking for that happy median between the disassociated parent of

yesteryear and the 24/7 parent of today.
Part of that, I think, is letting go of the guilt we feel when we plop a
kid in front of the TV for an hour or let them play on the computer
while we nap, read or work. When the call comes later to go build a
snowman, play Candyland or whatever, I’ll be ready.
Just give me a minute, OK? Or make it 30.
Jimmy Neutron vs. Godzilla
The 5-year-old wrinkled his nose at the TV commercial and stated
simply: “That’s a lie.”
We were watching a commercial for some kind of “carpet of flowers”
that you’re supposed to roll down, water, then watch amazed as a
bounty of blooms appears overnight. Andy had a similar reaction to
another ad promoting a cake-decorating kit. The many features of the
$29.99 wonder were nothing short of dazzling, and I half-expected him
to suggest we purchase it. Somehow, though, he was able to quickly
sort it into the “media lies” pile and focus his avarice on the RC
helicopter promoted in the commercial that followed.
I shouldn’t be, but I’m still amazed when kids this young can parse
the incoming media stream so effectively. The reality, of course, is that
they simply have to learn these skills early on in our wired (and
wireless) world. Where I had 13 channels of TV and a pile of Hardy
Boys books as a kid, our children command enough broadband and

computing power to set up their own space center.
Parents of a certain age no doubt remember sitting absorbed in front
of shows like “Gilligan’s Island,” “Land of the Lost” or “The Six Million
Dollar Man.” I can even remember being transfixed by all the old
Japanese monster movies shown non-stop on Channel 11. My friends
and I knew all the monsters’ various attributes, good- or bad-guy
status and overall story line, and it never occurred to us to giggle over
the fact that it was a guy in a suit stomping on a bunch of models.
(Most of our mirth centered on the appalling vocal dubbing.)
Comparing, say, an episode of “Jimmy Neutron” to a film like
“Godzilla vs. Mothra,” presents a good example for the generational
difference in media options. To get to the big scene where the two
monsters meet, we had to endure a good hour of setup, including
Japanese military officials meeting around a large table and the
inexplicable appearance of Mothra’s proxies: two tiny fairies who spoke
for the monster. In the 1970s, we didn’t realize how badly the special
effects sucked, nor did we spend much time wondering why a country
that had recently had two of its major cities nuked kept producing films
depicting Japan being destroyed anew.
For “Jimmy Neutron” fans like our youngest son, the formula satisfies
by delivering problem, plan and resolution in rapid-fire plot points that
are long on faux-tech and short on logic (as well as adult input). For
the defeat of Mothra, one must have a logical plan developed by adults
that ultimately makes some kind of sense. And we were willing to
spend 90 minutes to see that develop.
If today’s short-attention-span theater is preparing kids for the “real
world,” where e-mail can follow you to the ends of the Earth and one’s
brain must filter 1,700 ad impressions per second (or whatever), what,
then, to make of parents who don’t let their children watch any TV at
all? I’ve met these people and their children; all seem perfectly normal.
But when the kids go off to college and are suddenly bombarded with
the media from which they’ve been carefully sheltered, will their brains
explode?
Hard to say. As Jen and I watch Andy skillfully work the trackpad on
the laptop to navigate through games on nick.com, we worry if he has
too much plugged-in time. But then we’ll spend an hour hiking to look
for snakes or canvassing the neighborhood for interesting rocks. I can’t
help but think that, even as we wring our hands over media saturation,
to the kid it’s all just multi-flavored diversions. A snake in the grass is
fundamentally no different than a dinosaur on a Web game: It’s just
the delivery method that’s different.

Metallica plays kindergarten
Like most people in their dotage, the halcyon days of childhood exist
but sporadically in the memory. Most of the first five years are gone
(except for the time my mom grilled my hand by accident), and I’m not
sure I even remember going to grades K-4. I do remember, though, a
record album called “Bobby and Betty Go to the Moon,” which I
listened to endlessly for a couple of months. It had scary, sci-fi music,
and some ridiculous story about, well, kids going to the moon.
So, in addition to whatever my mother was listening to on the AM
radio in her Dodge Dart, that’s where I was musically around age 6.
Fast-forward to 2008 and our own kindergartener’s weekly show-and-
tell. Last week, it was “bring in music you like” day, and Jen prepared a
CD of some of Andy’s favorite songs.
It must be noted that Andy and I both are the youngest in the family,
with significantly older siblings still in the house who exposed us to
their music. Compared to an oldest child, who has mostly only his
parents and teachers as early influencers, the family caboose gets an
earful from the older kids – not just in music, but in language
(sometimes leading to grounding), movies, books, etc. But while Andy
is soaking up modern bands and, at the ripe-old age of 6, shunning
things like “Barney” and “Sesame Street” as “too baby,” I was listening
to my little moon record.
The conclusion is either Andy is much more sophisticated than I was

at that age, or something culturally has shifted, enabling kids younger
and younger to dip their toes in the broader stream of culture at a
younger age. I’m willing to accept both of those, in fact. Much has
been written, many hands have been wrung, over the supposed
negative effects of media and culture on our youngest citizens. I have
one friend who doesn’t allow his children to ever watch television;
others who let the kids watch all day and all night. Parents can choose
as they deem best, of course, but the proper thing seems to strike a
balance between those two extremes. Young children shouldn’t be
treated to a non-stop smorgasbord of adult-level entertainment, nor
should they be kept in the media closet for years so that they emerge
as teens, blinking in the bright light of a multi-media world, wondering
what hit them.
Sometimes, what’s normal in one home looks very odd in another
setting. As I’ve noted before in this column, we like to play Guitar Hero
once in a while, and Andy has decided his favorite song to play is
“One,” by Metallica.
“It’s scary,” he said, as he wiggled to the notes on the screen.
So, of course, when it came time for kindergarten show-and-tell
music day, Andy had Jen put “One” on a CD for him. While the other
kids trotted out their Raffi and Barney or whatever, there’s our
Andyman, cranking Metallica.
I wish I could have been there to see the look on the teacher’s face.
Thankfully, though, no note of admonition accompanied Andy home
and, upon a review of the lyrics, I found no bad words. And although
the singer’s urgent wish for death is not exactly the rainbows-and-
unicorns message most kindergarteners are used to, James Hetfield’s
shrieking makes them largely incoherent.
Even so, it was one of those “Are we bad parents?” moments. In the
daily chaos of family life, can we be forgiven occasionally lapses in
judgment and rest assured that the child is not permanently scarred?
It seems so. So far as Andy is concerned, it’s just a song.

When kindergartners play Foghat
When it first arrived on Christmas Day, I looked at it skeptically and
sat back to watch as the two teenage boys started “playing” songs on
it. The idea behind Guitar Hero III – a game available for things like
Playstation and X-Box – is simple: It’s karaoke for guitar, where each
song comes out you like a road, with the notes being color-coded
mileposts you have to hit as you go.
Never mind the fact that suddenly my wife and I were hearing our
house filled with dinosaurs-of-rock songs like Foghat’s “Slow Ride,”
Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”
The even odder thing was that those who would normally disdain such
antediluvian fare were embracing it as something new, cool and
exciting.
About a week into the era of Guitar Hero III in our living room, I finally
said, “Give me that thing!” I strapped on the tiny red guitar and took a
crack (on “Easy”) at Heart’s bitchy anthem “Barracuda.”
What I love about the game is the environment built around it. The
creators have taken every rock stereotype imaginable (minus,
thankfully, drinking and drugging) and rolled it into the characters and
sets. My favorite guitar hero is a guy in a leopard-skin one-piece with
high boots, a shaggy blond mane, headband and animal tooth around
his neck. In between songs, helpful “tips” come up, like “Yes, the stage
monitors are, in fact, diving boards.” I also appreciate how some of the
classic rock songs are presented as precious relics to be cherished,
relived, trotted out anew to be enjoyed by a new generation.
But — and this is a big “but” — I can’t help but wonder as I watch the
kids play whether I’m witnessing the demise of the real guitar hero. If
today’s teenagers are spending hours mastering old rock songs on this
game, who’s out in the garage learning on an actual guitar? Our oldest
son at least plays piano, but now he seems to spend more time on
Guitar Hero. We must now distinguish between “real” instruments and
the fake instruments of the Wii and X-Box world. What, we may well
ask, is the world coming to?
Since Guitar Hero came into our home, I’ve asked around and found
that almost everyone I know either has one, has played one or has
heard of it and wants to try it. This is not just our kids. I find it’s a great
stress-reliever, and when I get 92 percent playing Black Sabbath’s
“Paranoid” on “medium,” I get a charge out of it (although the only
ones applauding are the fake audience members inside the game). The
other thing that’s cool about it is that now, everyone in the family
except Mom plays it. We found a “cheat” for the 6-year-old so that he
can play without getting failed if he only hits 1 percent of the notes.
What kills me is how quickly he’s picked up the guitar-hero moves:
twisting his body, bending his knees, hopping around and even raising
the guitar over his head á la Jimi Hendrix. And yes, his favorite is “Slow
Ride” by Foghat – one of those songs I thought I’d go the rest of my life
without ever hearing again.
I’d be curious to hear from more real musicians what they think of
this trend, since Guitar Hero most certainly won’t be the last of the
fake instrument game (there’s another called “Rock Band” already,
where singing and drumming are also part of the mix). Does the future
look like one where people playing real instruments are replaced by
those only playing fake versions of songs written and performed in the
past? Or does something like Guitar Hero inspire kids to pick up the
real thing?
Time will tell. But for now, I’m going to go try “Welcome to the
Jungle” on “hard.” It’ll help me forget about the status of the family
checkbook.
Baby steps in high altitude gardening
So we named the tree “Treedy.”
Like many kids his age, our 6-year-old is fascinated by things that
grow. We’d tried a couple of small plants indoors over the winter, all of
which promptly died due to a combination of over- and under-watering.
Then we found some silly thing at Bed, Bath & Beyond in Dillon that
was a little glass jar with a brown, dirt sack of a head made to look like
a fireman. Extending from the sack was a wick, which, when in contact
with water, purported to have grass-like “hair” sprout from the thing’s
head.
My wife told me I was crazy for spending $10 on the thing, but Andy
wanted it more than life itself, so I caved.
The thing sprouted, to his delight (and my relief), and continues to
sport a thick head of grass hair several months after initial
germination. Compared to the piles of plastic junk (a.k.a. “toys”) for
which we are merely a stop between China and the landfill, the grass-
head fireman turned out to be a pretty decent deal. That is, if you
weigh the cost of something against how much time the child actually
pays attention to it. (By this measure, the highest return on investment
is in a large cardboard box, which is free and provides hours of
entertainment.)
After the success of the fireman, it seemed logical to look at the next
step up in gardening. After hearing in kindergarten that trees are good
for the environment, Andy said he wanted to plant a tree “to save the
Earth.”
How do you argue with that? Even though we’re just renting our
place, the $4.96 dwarf pine we found at Wal-Mart seemed like a pretty
reasonable investment. When I pulled the 18-inch-tall pine from the
trunk, Andy was delighted. Next, we had the most excellent
opportunity to dig a good-sized hole in the corner of the lawn. Since I’d
been out there a week earlier exhorting Andy not to dig holes after
getting hits with his metal detector, this was a pretty big deal.
And the hits kept coming: We found several large, wriggling worms in
the hole, which Andy was happy to hold in his hand until the time came
to reunite them with the earth and its new inhabitant – Treedy.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own experience with plants as
a kid. My father had a tremendous garden in our backyard, and it
made perfect sense to him that our part of the deal was to weed the
damn thing. An even more hated task than cleaning the basement,
weeding the garden was seen by me and my sister as some sort of
monstrous punishment for a crime we hadn’t committed. And god
forbid we step on anything critical we didn’t know about. My dad once
hurled a large zucchini at me for stepping on some pea plants
(fortunately he had horrible aim, but the image still haunts me).
Weeding later gave way to harvesting, as well as canning many

pounds of tomatoes that we enjoyed (I guess) throughout the winter.
We also had to contribute to and tolerate the smell of a compost barrel
in our kitchen.
Now, of course, I wish I could grow a garden like that. I know some
high-altitude gardeners have some success with things other than
rhubarb, but I don’t have the time or the land to do it.
So, Treedy is our one little project. We gave it some fertilizer, water it
regularly and scan it for signs of growth. It may be doomed come
winter, but for now, it seems to be thriving. And, so far as I can tell, no
weeding is required.
Moving around the mountains
Most families, at some point, have to make big decisions about
moving. Once kids get past elementary school, their viewpoints can
become part of that decision, and they will usually set up a stiff
opposition to moves that take them away from friends, routines and
settings they know.
For mountain families struggling to make sense of our high cost of
living, moves can be as simple as a 10-mile shift to a larger home
that’s a little farther from the resort. For our family, we rolled the dice
in 2000 and made a big move to L.A., then returned to the mountains
three years later, effectively cured of city dwelling. Upon returning to
Summit County, I counted up the number of times I’d done so: once
upon graduating college, once after spending one fall in
Massachusetts, once after a three-year stint in New York City and
again after trying my hand in Hollywood.
Seems I just can’t quit mountain living. On Monday, though, I’ll have
my easiest move yet when I return to my old job as editor of the
Summit Daily News. Since I already live in Frisco and commute over
Vail Pass every day, the prospect of being able to bike or even walk to
work is very appealing. Don Rogers, the Vail Daily’s former editor, is
returning home as well – a decision in no small way driven by family
considerations as much as professional.
When people asked me how I “liked” my commute, I’d usually say it

was “only 33 minutes” and not that bad for much of the year. Last
winter changed my thinking on that to some degree, when the time it
would take me to get back to Frisco from Eagle-Vail would stretch up to
an hour or more. I think the record was about two hours and 45
minutes – not counting the nights I couldn’t get home at all. The wife
and family seem to like to have me around, and Vail Pass was, quite
simply, something that cut into our time together.
Of course, many people working in the resort counties commute even
greater distances for jobs. It’s an odd thing about our economy that
people will commute up to and over 100 miles a day to clean hotel
rooms or drive buses because they can’t afford to live in the
community where said job is. They will drive through blizzards, over
treacherous passes and icy roads just to make a buck. They will leave
for work before their kids are awake and, if they’re lucky, arrive home
in time for an hour or two of family time before it’s time for bed.
I often wish the folks who sit in their comfy homes in Vail or
Singletree or Aspen or Breckenridge could live that life for a day.
Maybe then they wouldn’t complain that government sponsored
affordable housing is a misuse of taxpayer dollars. At some point,
many of these families will make that tough decision to quit the
mountains altogether, and then we’ll wonder where all the workers
went. We’ll clamor for more “H2-B” visas to get foreign workers in their
place rather than make the tough decisions to improve conditions for
the worker and middle class so they can afford to live here.
But even if a move is what makes the most sense, a strong family
can deal with just about anything. When I look back at some of the
crap we’ve had handed us over the past decade, it amazes me how
resilient we’ve been. Contemplating my easy move back to a job in my
home town, maybe it’s a little bit of karmic reward for three winters on
Vail Pass. Or maybe it’s just fate with a touch of luck thrown in. Either
way, I hope to live long enough to see most mountain families be able
to have mom and/or dad being able to work in the communities they
live in.
Off to school with ye!
With a mixture of funereal doom (the teenagers), unbridled
excitement (the kindergartner) and unmitigated relief (the parents),
school started up again this week. As usual, in terms of all the things
we wanted to do — climbing Fourteeners, rafting rivers, traveling the
state — the summer shot by in a nanosecond while its less-desirable
elements — bored kids, persistently empty refrigerator and endless
chauffer requests — seemed to drag on interminably.
If there’s one thing kids hate, it’s parents expressing any joy that
school is back in session. As a former kid myself, I know the feeling:
The folks should want me around at all times, constantly reveling in my
wit, my intelligence, my charm – my mere presence. How dare they
suggest having to tromp off to the penal colony once again is a good
thing?!
But hey, even the closest relationships benefit from a little time off,
and education is really super incredibly important, right?
Right. So, off they go, like it or not.
And they mostly like it. Sure, they gritch about having to get up early,
to shuffle from Point A to Point B to Point C on a regimented schedule
and having to endure certain Evil Teachers Who Obviously Don’t Like
Me and Pick on Me More than the Other Kids. There’s the crappy food,
the unholy smells of the cafeterias and locker rooms, the eardrum-
splitting bells and mind-numbing announcements, rules and

proclamations. And, depending on your status, there’s the risk of being
persecuted, ridiculed, talked about or, worse yet, ignored.
Mostly, though, I believe that deep down even teenagers believe and
understand that these are the good times. They don’t have to work for
food, they’re surrounded by their own kind, can pretty much dress as
they like and can inhabit certain spheres of influence and prestige
where they can feel like they’re on top of their game. And that can be
anywhere from the football field to the rarified world of the kid who
gets 105 on every test to the corner by the cafeteria where that one
kid holds forth on the mysteries and minutiae of sex or Pokemon or
Star Wars or Polly Pockets or … whatever.
When I hear my kids complain about school, I can only think how
much I’d like to return there myself. If I lived in a city that offered such
things, I’d love to spend my spare time pursuing a master’s in
something fabulously superfluous, like comparative literature or
Egyptology. I think it’d be fun to have a nice, crisp new textbook and
an entirely new set of knowledge to master – or at least familiarize
oneself with. The fact that our kids get all this mostly free (except half
of kindergarten – damn you, Colorado!) makes it all the more
appealing — and me all the less tolerant of any whining.
We’re fortunate in that we haven’t had too much in the way of
extracurricular problems with our kids. Mostly, they seem to respond to
school with a positive attitude, but there are occasions when it’s clear
the one-size-fits-all approach to public education doesn’t work for
everyone. Too, our kids seem more critical of their teachers and the
school administration than I ever was – at least until I was a junior in
high school. I’m sure they’d love to fill out 360-style review of their
teachers, just to let the world know all those perceived deficiencies.
(Me, my main problem was with a vice-principal with the most
excellent vice-principal name of all time: Mr. Gunkel.)
Summer may be mostly over, but with school days also come one of
the most blissful months of the year: the tourist-free, crystal-clear days
of September. Nearly perfect – if it weren’t for the trigonometry
homework.
Quiet or chaos: What’s your pleasure?
The 16-year-old paid us what looked like a compliment the other
night when he referred to a recent dinner at his girlfriend’s home. As
an only child in a well-to-do mountain realtor family, her house is big
and fancy … but quiet. Compared to the raucous goings-on in our
home, he said, the atmosphere at the girlfriend’s home is nearly
stifling.
Occasionally, we pop into open houses or do one of the local home
tours, where we fantasize about owning a big house and pick out which
room would be who’s. We moon over the home theaters, the giant
closets, the lavishly appointed bathrooms and kitchens. Personally, I
get all choked up at the three-bedroom garages with pristine floors,
empty walls and enough room for a small aircraft inside. Our two-car
garage is so full of crap you couldn’t fit a moped in there.
But then we come down off the hill and come home to our rented
duplex and all its flaws and I can only think that, were we to have one
of those 5,000-square-foot places, we’d never see each other. When
each bedroom is its own universe – with bathroom, TV, adjacent rec
room, whatever – what inspiration will the kids have for ever coming
out? As it is, the two older teens “cave up” in their rooms more than
we’d like, but they still emerge often enough that we recall the basic
features of their faces, vocal patterns and rough history.
I’m a fairly ordered, organized person, and I think one of the things I
love most about my family is the unpredictability of it all. We’re a
crazed constellation of different stars, all with varied ideas about
everything from how to make a sandwich to what “late” or “clean”
means to what constitutes good music or cinema. Chaos theory is in
full flower on our family Tilt-a-Whirl, and the best Jen and I can hope for
sometimes is that everyone is strapped in for the ride.
And we do dinner, almost every night. There have been some recent
studies done about the value of families having dinner together and,
like many studies, this one told us something we already knew: It’s
good to spend time with your family, and dinner nightly is a good way
to do it.
It doesn’t matter much how big your house is or how much money
you’ve got if your family members don’t see each other much – or if
there are bigger cracks or holes in the basic infrastructure. You won’t
see a divorced dad – a person now spending time with his kids through
court-ordered “visitation” — find much solace in his monster home or
his Audi S8. The lowliest plate of Hamburger Helper is a feast when it’s
shared with a table full of laughing, bickering, joking family members.
Yep, they say that money can’t buy you happiness, and that seems
especially true when viewed through the prism of family life.
Even so, with this gang of ours, would it be too much to ask for
another bedroom?
The myth of Super Sleeping Suzie
In the range of annoying things other parents might say about their
kids, there may be nothing that cuts to the quick so much as “Oh,
Suzie’s a great sleeper!”
While I don’t doubt that Super Sleeping Suzies do exist, most parents
I talk to are usually obsessed with one thing: sleeping, and how their
little one ain’t cuttin’ it.
This can range from the kid who simply won’t go to bed without all-
out war and/or bribery, to the ones who want to get up at the crack of
dawn and play. On the younger end, there’s the ones who wake up in
the middle of the night for one reason or another – although babies are
exempt from criticism of this. (Because babies are exempt from all
rules or expectations.)
So, we have this ideal, that our 6-year-old will happily trot up to bed
every night at 8:30. After a few stories, he will coo his love for us and
fall dreamily into the Land of Nod. At that point, Jen and I will do some
sort of grown-up activity, like watch a movie or TV show – even though
we both know damn well yours truly will fall asleep in the middle of it.
But dad-sleep is another column.
In the real world we live in, Andy is firm in his conviction that sleeping
is a serious impediment to his agenda, and he has become absolutely
masterful at delaying the inevitable. Like most kids, he does this in 5-
minute increments: just 5 more minutes on the video game, 5 more

minutes of art, 5 more minutes tormenting his older siblings. When we
finally do get him to the “night-night snack” phase, he can attenuate
the consumption of an apple or container of pudding to about 20
minutes. When we think he’s finally done and ready to go upstairs, he
will remind us that he has to feed his fish (and we can’t argue because
he has been told in no uncertain terms that the $#@% fish are his
responsibility). Lastly, if he’s feeling particularly glacial, he will literally
crawl up the stairs, adding another 3.5 minutes to this phase.
Going potty, brushing teeth and getting into pajamas can take
anywhere from 5 minutes (if a bribe is offered) to another 20 minutes.
Now that he’s learning to read, we initiated a new tradition of him
reading a book to us, so on top of the book Jen reads and the one I
read to him, story time has stretched out to another half hour.
It is now almost midnight, and Andy is doing somersaults on the bed,
putting pillowcases on his head and other things to suggest that sleep
is the last thing on his mind. After he and mom say prayers, it’s time,
and the question of whether he’s going to “keep mommy’s pillow
warm” or go to bed in the boys’ room comes up. Andy hates going to
bed by himself, since his older brothers stay up much later.
Now, I know the issue of “co-sleeping” is one that has filled many a
parenting manual. We’ve always erred on the side of a full family bed,
if for no other reason than it makes him fall asleep instantly as
opposed to creating another process an hour or more long where he

tosses and turns, pops out of bed, gets in trouble, sulks, goes back to
bed, whines for water, etc. And since Jen works into the wee hours, I
like having a buddy.
We’ve started the process of getting him to sleep in his own bed, and
some nights it works OK. But as the last of our little ones, I’m still in no
rush. He’ll be on his own pretty soon, I’m sure. Maybe next month, or
by the end of the year.
Certainly by the time he graduates high school, for sure.
Spring is in the air (making room for
loved ones)
Some say it happens around age 8; others attest the change happens
exactly at puberty and the case can be made that it’s different for girls
and boys. But the fact remains that, for most parents and kids, the day
will come when that shining light of parental greatness and
omniscience dims precipitously. In worst-case scenarios, it goes out
completely, and those kids who fail to understand why their folks
should exist at all have, well, a difficult time of it.
There may be no greater factor in knocking parents off our (well-
earned, damnit!) pedestals than the introduction of a boyfriend or
girlfriend – what my wife calls “the loved ones.” For our
kindergartener, his infatuation with a new little girl every other week or
so is cute, and generally only mildly disruptive (like the day he
swooned from one end of the house to the other professing his love for
Chloe; next week it was Ivy). But for the older kids, things are a bit
more serious. The emotions are more long-lasting and adult-like, even
as they are exacerbated by the teen drama coefficient (which is
roughly a multiplier of 10); and the real-world consequences dictated
by birds and bees.
It can make any parent long for the halcyon days of toddlerhood,
when the biggest concern was the location of the binky and how to get
the Cheetoh marks off the wall.
I have found myself to be remarkably hypocritical when it comes to
how I deal with boyfriends versus girlfriends as they enter our lives. As
my father did before me – and as fathers going back to ancient times
did – I view boyfriends through slanted, suspicious eyes, oblivious to
the radiant nimbus of sainthood glowing above their head, which my
daughter sees so clearly and assures me is there 24/7. We dads knew
what we were like at that age, we reason, and we know this young lad
is only thinly masking his lust with the exaggerated interest in the
social studies homework.
For the boys, though, I’m mostly a cheerleader. I get angry when girls
disappoint them, give them advice on how to woo them (for all the
good it will do) and view the birds-and-the-bees issue as worthy goals
that just need to be approached with caution.

In the interest of self-preservation, I won’t say more in a public
column. Suffice to say that all parents will deal with these issues at
some point roughly 15 years after the blessed angels emerged from
the womb. Even if it is done with good communication, honesty and
real information, it won’t be easy. Often, I find myself wishing for some
kind of time machine, so I can get the boys back interested in their
Harry Potter trading cards and the girl fascinated, once again, by the
Polly Pockets.
But I’m getting better. Rather than avoid them, as I started out doing,
I’ve been inviting the loved ones over for dinner and getting to know
them better. I try hard not to say anything that would mortify Austin or
Kaylie, and leave it to Jen to remind the group that Austin was once
known as “Mr. Boggy” for his perpetually wet diaper; or that Kaylie
once thought unicorns were pretty much the coolest thing ever.
It is a long road between birth and, say, college. I laugh when people
say things like changing diapers must surely be the hardest or worst
thing about parenting. Hell, that’s the easy stuff. It’s when they start to
think for themselves that it gets hard. And when the girlfriends and
boyfriends come sniffing around, well, hold onto your hat, because you
just got stuck in the last car of the roller coaster.

A thankful nod to what looks like
summer
You know it’s really summertime in the high country when you drive
over Vail Pass and see what passes for early wildflowers: bumpers,
pieces of taillights and other automotive detritus left over from the
winter carnage. It’s enough to put a song in the heart of even the most
jaded mountain dweller, who, as early as two weeks ago, was still
thinking winter would never end.
For those of us with kids, of course, warm weather means we just
expanded the realm of where kidly energy can be expended. In March,
when the four walls of the homes bore the marks of the children
bouncing off of them, we dreamed of having one of those sitting-empty
8,000 square-foot mega-mansions on the hill. Sure, they’d cost a
fortune to heat, but at least Li’l Johnny could ride his Big Wheel around
the vast hallways – like that kid in “The Shining.”
We persevered through the many long winter months with the kids,
alternating trips to the ski hill, the rec center and City Market. Then we
mixed it up, going sledding, going to the rec center and Safeway.
Repeat, ad nauseum, for seven or eight months until the automotive
debris starts showing up on the Pass. Then, finally, at long last: Hit the
park! Go for a hike, put some shorts on, for Pete’s sake!
The best thing that’s happened for our sanity – as the parents of a
kindergartener – is that the vast chunk of ice that was welded to the
cloth of our trampoline finally melted. Far and away the best $150 we
ever spent, the tramp is an ongoing source of entertainment for the 6-
year-old as well as the three teens and their friends. It’s also a great
worry-generator for Mom, who obviously didn’t have enough things to
worry about in the pre-tramp days.
Another summer tradition is back in fashion as well: hiking up to
overlooks and feeding the chipmunks who live in the rocks. Someone
will write to tell me you’re not supposed to do this, but the batch we
feed appear to be entirely dependent on the sunflower seeds the many
humans bring to them, so ceasing this activity would be to disrupt the
natural food chains, so far as I can tell. With a strict prohibition in our
house against the introduction of any reptiles or rodents as pets, the
chipmunks make for an excellent alternative – plus Andy gets to see
them in their quasi-natural environment.
Generally a kid with his hair afire, Andy has learned to sit still and
patient as the “chick-a-munks” gather around him, their little feet
tickling his hands as they squabble among themselves for the prime
position around the feed bag. I finally learned to bring a folding chair
and a book with me, since a regular feeding takes close to two hours.
Not a bad thing on a warm day ….
Sometime in March, I was ready to call it quits and move to, say,
Death Valley. There, at least, I would not have to scrape my windshield

or be stuck behind lines of moronic truckers who didn’t want to put
their tire chains on. Yeah … Death Valley. Sounded good.
Now, with winter finally in the rear-view mirror and the full glory of a
high country summer upon us, I’m ready to give the hills another
chance. Like the woman who wants to get pregnant again because
she’s forgotten the more piercing pains of labor, we’re ready to enjoy
the bouncing baby of summer and assume that next winter won’t be
quite so bad. After all, we stayed for the summers, didn’t we?
Take our fish, please!
So, what started as a small experiment in pet ownership has now
spiraled into a full-fledged aquarium operation we don’t know how to
stop or slow.
Tropical fish, it turns out, are just about the only pet that fit the many
criteria we have regarding pets in our home. Dogs and cats aren’t
allowed in the lease, and two of us are allergic; the wife would not,
under any circumstance, share the same roof with any rodents,
serpents or lizards. And pretty much all of us fell outside the societal
subset of people who believe critters like tarantulas, scorpions and
millipedes are appropriate specimens to be caged, cared for and
admired.
(Involuntary shiver runs up spine.)
But like most kindergartners, Andy had a burning desire to be a pet
owner, to experience the thrill of animal husbandry (if that term
applies to fish) and to be smitten, as it turned out, by a plain-looking,
rather grouchy platyfish he dubbed “Liddy.”
“Liddy’s hot!” he told me one day, not referring to the settings on the
tank heater.
“Just say she’s cute, or pretty,” I advised. “Fish can’t be hot.”
“Well, she’s hot.”
Andy’s high opinion was apparently shared by Bob, the male platyfish
who met his porcelain fate just days after coming home from Wal-Mart
in Avon. We’d had expectations that Bob would sire a brood with Liddy,
but our naïve beliefs looked something like this: Three to five fry
(that’s aquarium jargon for “little baby fish”) every year or two.
We observed no unusual interaction between Liddy and Bob,
romantic or otherwise. And, to be honest, we had no idea what that
might look like and preferred it take place in the dark, behind the
plastic plants.
And then Bob died, suddenly and unexpectedly. One minute, he was
there in the tank doing almost exactly nothing (his default state), the
next he was belly-up. And that, we figured, was the end of any
amorous liaisons for Liddy.
Two weeks later, she had her first litter (or whatever). At first, we
eyed with suspicion Rocky, the tank’s catfish, yeoman sucker of
bottom skunge and ambivalent tank mate to Liddy. Could they have?
Would they have? Rocky always seemed so focused on his skunge, but
was there a sly old dog in there, we wondered, plotting ways to
procreate across species? It was in violation of what we assumed were
the natural laws of fish procreation.
A few weeks after Liddy’s first output of six fry, she plumped up again
and kicked out another 14. We peered into the tank and looked at her,
asking questions to which she offered no reply. She just gave us that
look fish give you, you know the one: “You humans have no idea …”
So we bought the little net-tank that goes in the bigger tank so the
babies could live there (Andy calls it the “baby carriage”). Then we
bought another tank to handle the fry as they grew into teenagers. We
wondered what we could do with these 20 offspring when Liddy
fattened up again and squirted out another score of little platies.
(Note: It turns out playtfish females can store male sperm for months,
impregnating themselves at will up to five times. For $2.56, it is truly
the fish that keeps on giving.)
Andy, of course, thinks this is all wonderful and won’t hear of “finding
nice homes” for some of the gang. As a foray into pet ownership has
gone, it has been more exciting than we thought, but no one’s ever
told us what to do with all these spare fish – party extras who slurp up
the flakes, shrimp pellets and blood worms (I know, I know) with great
zeal once they’ve gotten to be a day or two old.
So, take our fish, please. If anyone out there needs a couple of platies
to start their own herd, just let me know and I’ll bring you in a bagful –
no charge!
The mysterious noise in the garage
There’s a funny sound coming out of our garage these days. Even
people walking by outside, with the door closed, can hear it.
“What the hell is that noise?” they ask. Children cower in fear; pets
hide when they hear the noise.
It sounds like machinery, like some kind of manufacturing is going on
in the Miller household. Perhaps we are tuning skis day and night in
preparation for the upcoming season. Maybe we’ve started some sort
of business that involves a lathe or a grinder of some sort.
My wife is concerned about it. She believes the thing generating all
the noise will catch fire at some point. Every time we open the inside
garage door to the house, the whole main floor fills with the terrible
grinding sound. Inevitably, Jen will declare that the sound is getting
louder.
“Are you sure it’s OK? What if it catches fire?”
How should I know if it’s OK? I didn’t build the thing. And yeah, if it
catches fire, we’ll have a problem.
But I don’t think it will. The box said it takes up about the same
amount of energy as a standard light bulb, so it’s not a tremendous
greenhouse-gas producer. And really, after weeks of listening to this
thing, we really can’t stop now.
Plus, she bought it – not me.
The source of the noise is this little rock-polisher we got for our 7-
year-old son Andy. The idea is pretty simple: You put rocks in a drum
full of water with some sand-looking stuff, the drum tumbles around for
a while and then the rocks come out all pretty-like. Except when I was
putting the thing together and – wonder of wonders – actually reading
the directions, instruction No. 3 jumped out at me: “Allow rocks to
tumble for 6-8 days.”
Well, OK, I thought. Andy and I put all the crap in the drum with the
rocks and plugged it in. It was at that point that we realized this was
not necessarily an indoor thing. A closer examination of the instruction
sheet revealed this tidbit: “Place tumbler where noise will not be
bothersome.”
Like, say, Omaha.
So we took it out to the garage and plugged it in, settling in for the
next week and hoping the rocks came out looking like wonderful gems.
Then I read further into the instructions: Step 4 involved putting in a
new packet of sand for the smoothing polish, then another 12-14 days
of tumbling.
“Let’s take it back,” Jen said. “We’ll tell him it broke or something.”
But we’d come so far, it didn’t seem right. Besides, the final polish
only takes one more lousy week, after which the rocks will surely be of
museum quality.
With one kid out of the house, three kids in high school and 50
looming on the horizon, the sound of the stupid rock tumbler is a weird
sort of music to my ears. I know there will be a time in the not-too-
distant future when such things are a distant memory. We’ll no longer
be tripping over the 4,000 pairs of shoes in our hallway or stepping on
Legos (those suckers really hurt on bare feet!). We won’t find slicks of
peanut butter on the counter or our good dinner plates out in the grass
next to the trampoline.
So yeah, I can live with the rock tumbler for another week. I think I’m
as anxious as Andy to finally open it up after all this time and see what
this turbo-charged geological process has done to those humble rocks.
All I can say is it better be good.

The next generation of rockers
There’s nothing like a rock concert to make you feel young (or, at
least, teenager-y) again. The pulsing bass, the writhing bodies, the
undercurrent of excitement as you wait to hear what the band will play
next — it was all a big part of my life from the age 14 on.
I was fortunate enough to have grown up almost within walking
distance of Nassau Coliseum, home of the Islanduhs and also stopping
point for every big rock band of the ‘70s that was playing Madison
Square Garden. There, I saw bands like Queen, Yes, Pink Floyd and the
Grateful Dead, and when my family moved to Colorado in 1980, I
picked back up with Red Rocks and the old McNichol’s as well as cooler
smaller venues like the now-defunct Rainbow Music Hall in Denver and,
yes, Dobson ice arena in Vail.
Returning to Dobson last week for the Ziggy Marley show, I tried to
remember the last time I’d been there for a concert. Probably George
Clinton and P-Funk a decade ago, although my favorite Dobson
memory is of Bobby & the Midnites – a Dead offshoot band that
featured guitarist Bob Weir. Back then, for me there was a mandate to
see as many Dead and Dead-related shows a possible. I loved the
music, loved the scene and my parents were mystified by it all.
Perfect.
So last week I garnered a good many Cool Dad points by taking my
14-year-old daughter and her friend to see Ziggy. Of the many curious
and endearing things I love about Kaylie, it’s that she embraces old
school rock and values the language of peace.
If a rock show can remind you of younger days, bringing your
teenage daughter to one can definitely make you feel a bit fossilized.
After exhorting them to politely decline any burning offerings heading
their way, I left the two girls on the floor in front of the stage and found
a seat off to the side.
Ziggy put on a good show, although he’s no Peter Tosh – a reggae
artist who still occupies one of the slots in the top-five best shows I’ve
ever seen. Hearing him sing some of his father’s greatest hits, which
harkened back to the days when I was most active on the concert
scene, the music put me in a pleasantly nostalgic mood. And rather
than sit there feeling like the oldster on the sidelines, I enjoyed the
show and took satisfaction in being able to provide an experience for
our daughter. I was there to oversee, but she was left free to dance in
the crowd knowing that I trusted her to behave.
Afterwards, the two girls were just as thrilled as they could be and
talking non-stop about the show. My presence is often a conversation
stopper with my daughter and her friends, so it was refreshing to have
something in common to share and talk about — and a good lesson for
us to find more things like that in the dwindling years she’ll be at
home.
I didn’t realize it so much at the time, but my passion for live music in
my teens and 20s had a purpose beyond just seeing a band perform.
They were mini adventures I had with my friends, and even if we didn’t
always have our halos on straight, I remember many of them fondly.
I’d been avoiding live shows in the past few years, thinking I wouldn’t
enjoy them as much. But seeing Ziggy the other night reminded me
that leaving behind your fun things as you get older is a bad idea.
And seeing the excitement on my daughter’s face was one of those
great moments in parenting – the ones where your kids are helping
open your eyes to something you either didn’t know or forgot along the
way.
A little Vail Pass perspective
The closure of Vail Pass last Thursday night was a family story in that
all of those moms and dads stranded on the wrong side of the pass
were temporarily cut out of the picture. I was fortunate enough to
have a colleague with a spare room put me up – as he has two other
times in the past three years. The experience gave me some additional
insight into what a family means, how similar we moms and dads are
despite the little differences, and, perhaps first and foremost, the
beauty of having a wife who thinks to pack me an overnight bag for
just such occasions.
With our youngest now in kindergarten, we’re out of the diapers n’
drooling years of our family (or what my brother-in-law calls the
“orifice management” phase), so it was interesting to see Matt and
Judy deep in those very youngest of times. Like most parents, they are
ideally suited to the job of managing their two little ones – a task that,
to an outsider, would appear all but impossible. Sometimes the
headlines tell us otherwise, but it never ceases to amaze me how well
people adapt to what is the most difficult job on the planet. Usually
there’s little or no training involved, and by the time they come home
from the hospital, you’ve all but forgotten all that prenatal reading you
did, anyway.
Holding a baby when you know you’re done with them yourself is to
see the road of life laid bare. We will never travel down the baby
highway again, except as grandparents, and it’s a sobering thought to
recognize that closed chapter. At the same time, it’s intriguing to see
newer parents and the constant wonder at the shared experience
they’re having. As Matt says, there’s a lot of goo – an aspect of child-
rearing that causes the young and single to recoil in horror. But moms
and dads know the goo, while not a pleasant thing to be sought out, is
merely a footnote on a story that’s got a lot more pages to it.
Being stuck on the other side of the pass made me again realize how
enamored I am with the routine of coming home to my family,
swinging into the habitual and taking satisfaction in the simple fact of
all being in the same place. I hate not being home at night to read
Andy his bedtime story – especially since I know that the years of him
needing such are quickly waning. And with the teenagers nearly on
deck for college, Jen and I both know every moment spent together is a
precious thing that cannot be gotten back. Those moments – good, bad
and neutral – cannot be purchased online, replicated on a reality show
or even fully realized from photos or video footage. They must be
experienced in real time and tucked safely away in our memories.
We’ll need them soon enough.
Watching Matt’s toddler learning words, building blocks and pushing
the boundaries of her world, I was reminded, vividly, of that time with
Andy. It didn’t seem like that long ago, but it’s now close to five years.
There’s not enough room in one’s head to encompass all the feelings
that come with seeing those tiny babies turn into people. Whether it’s
learning to walk, learning to read or learning to drive, parents will
always be the ones most amazed at their kids’ accomplishments – no
matter how predictable.
Sometimes, in a busy life, it’s not difficult to lose a little focus on just
how fleeting all this is, and how critical it is to be present every step of
the way. Getting stuck on the wrong side of the pass for a night can
bring that focus into sharper detail. Even so, would it be heretical to
suggest a week of sunny weather would be a welcome change?

The question of the sand dollar
On a recent spring break trip to Florida, one thing soon became very
apparent: If our kindergartner didn’t find a sand dollar on the beach,
the vacation – and perhaps even his entire life – would be ruined.
So it was with scanning eyes and single-minded purpose that we
scrutinized the beach and tide pools. We found many a shell, broken
pieces of shells, fractions of sand dollars (thus confirming their
existence) and even an angry crab Andy picked up by accident. By the
second day, with no intact sand dollar yet found, the prospects were
looking grim. Then, our daughter found a perfect sand dollar in the surf
– thus raising the stakes even higher. Surely, Andy reasoned, if his
sister found one, destiny dictated one should be his as well.
The sand dollar is a curious thing. A marine animal similar to a sea
urchin, it actually has a covering of spines on its surface when living.
After it dies, the spines fall off and it attains a smooth, dry finish with
some interesting, petal-like markings. As far as shell collecting goes,
the sand dollar is of pretty high value to kids (even though it’s actually
a skeleton, not a shell). So it was kind of a bummer when, upon visiting
some of the tourist traps along the strip in Destin, Fla., we discovered
they were almost literally a dime-a-dozen – available even at Wal-Mart.
Somehow, though, Andy made a clear distinction between the value
of a sand dollar purchased at a store and one found on the beach –
presumably by dint of his own hard work and perseverance (and, by

association, my hard work and perseverance). At first, this didn’t make
much sense to me, since the Wal-Mart sand dollar was fundamentally
the same as the beach-found variety. So far, China hasn’t figured out
how to create an artificial version that’s cheaper than the one Mother
Nature produces. But upon reflection, it parsed with what I know about
most little kids and Andy in particular: Although he’s a consummate
consumer, he also really values stuff we make ourselves. That’s why
the crappy robot we cobbled together out of a fallen aspen branch last
year was infinitely more valuable to him than a more functional plastic
one bought at the store.
But back to the sand dollar: When it looked increasingly unlikely that
fortune would land one in the surf for Andy to find on his own, my wife
stepped in and intervened with The Fates: She bought one and planted
it for him to find.
As a family, we were split on this decision. My teenage son and I were
opposed to it, thinking it a slightly unethical deception and not in line
with the “school of reality and hard knocks” we believe Andy must
learn to deal with. Jen and our teenage daughter were OK with it,
justifying it fairly easily by pointing out how very excited Andy was
when he found the sand dollar – and who cares where it came from
when the kid is happy?
And so the sand dollar was brought back to the mountains, dutifully
named (“Sandy”) and trotted out at the next show-and-tell. It remained

a prized possession for a few days, after which it was supplanted by
something else. In the end, I chalked it up to a parental deception of
the Santa Claus-Easter Bunny variety – probably harmless, and just
another way to brighten his little life with what is truly a minor wonder
of nature.
Even so, questions of this kind are not ones I want to confront often.
If Wal-Mart can one day supply every kid with all the curios to be found
in nature, we can say goodbye to the magic of discovery altogether.

When Vinny pulls up in the Camaro
So, the question from the 14-year-old was this: It’s Valentine’s Day
and my boyfriend just got his license so can he pick me up and drive
me to dinner?
The automatic, parenting-from-the-hip response was an easy “No.”
And it didn’t matter much that Kaylie’s beau is a nice kid with good
parents who’s probably done all the due diligence associate with
driving. It’s still very early in his driving career, there’s a lot of snow
and ice on the roads, and it’s teen-boy nature to show off a little in the
car.
And then all those dreadful statistics pop into mind; the ones that say
auto accidents are the leading cause of death among adolescents. As a
parent, it wouldn’t be hard to make a cogent, logical case that
teenagers should never drive, that 25 is a better licensing age and that
boys should perhaps wait until they’re 30.
The other piece of the decision-making tree on this topic is recalling
my own experiences. In my Long Island town in the 1970s, the coolest
cars were Firebirds and Camaros – overpowered vehicles driven by
guys named Vinny and Whitey and Velani. They had custom Hurst
shifters, a roach clip dangling from the rear-view mirror, overflowing
ash trays and, likely as not, a six-pack of Bud in the back seat. Led
Zeppelin pounded from a pair of home stereo speakers jammed in the
trunk, and thrilled passengers sat pinned by the G-forces created by a

454 motor as “Immigrant Song” took years off our eardrums.
But that only happened a few times, in reality. Mostly I got rides from
my sister’s boyfriend George, who drove – and I am not making this up
– his grandmother’s black Ford Granada that had, horror of horrors,
only an AM radio. George, under penalty of death of having the car
privileges revoked (same thing, really), drove like someone with a
bomb in the trunk that would go off at the slightest bump or engine
rev.
But when my sweet little girl – who just last week, it seems, was
playing with her Polly Pockets — comes up to me with the car-
boyfriend request, it’s not Cautious George in the Granada I see. It’s
Vinny in the Camaro.
Ultimately, we revised our decision to say she could go, but only if it
wasn’t snowing, only if they drove to a restaurant within 2 miles of
home, and only if she called us every 47 seconds with an update on
where they were, what they were doing, the weather, the road
conditions and the latest on the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks (having
NPR on in the car, I figured, would be the closest thing to the anti-
aphrodisiac all parents crave).
We were heroes for a moment, until we found out the young man’s
parents had trumped our call by declaring a girlfriend-in-the-car
moratorium altogether. Not a bad choice, in my view, and they did us
the favor of moving themselves onto the teen poop list – and lord
knows we’ve been there enough lately as it is.
On the other side of the aisle is our 16-year-old boy, who seems to
regard driving as a curious, expensive thing he doesn’t want much to
do with yet. He is aided in this stance by having a driving girlfriend, as
well as my insistence that, if he wants to drive the family cars, he has
to get a job and help with the insurance costs. This is roughly the
equivalent of telling him he can only drive if he wears a chicken suit, so
disagreeable is the prospect of getting a job and “wasting” money on
insurance.
So be it. There will be plenty of years of driving in the future. In the
meantime, the buses work fine and we still grudgingly drive them
hither and yon. And, although it may not be quite the same in the
minivan, we can still play a little Led Zeppelin now and again
The rise of the student driver
As noted in previous columns, we have an up-and-coming driver in
our family. Austin went from being fairly ambivalent about driving to
deciding it was an urgent need. This was mostly prompted, I think, by
seeing his friends take to the road in all its freedom-inspiring glory.
“I’m buying this car,” he announced recently.
“Oh, really?” I said, my mind doing an instant calculation of a variety
of things, up to and including:
• Where the hell he was going to park it;
• How often I was going to be out there helping him work on the
junker;
• How insurance would be handled and how stunned we would
all be at the cost;
• The surge of horror we will feel when we watch him driving
down the road, weaving a bit, perhaps in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
“Yeah, it’s got 90,000 miles on it, and my friend only wants like
$1,000 for it.”
No more details were available, such as the make, model, year or
condition. But Austin was convinced this would be the car for him. He
also had it on good information from one of his buddies that insurance
would only run about $200 a year.
Yeah, right.
As I’ve driven around with Austin, trying to get him to understand all
the rules of the road while simultaneously piloting the vehicle – and, in
the case of my car, shifting – I have discovered that there’s a fair
amount of folk lore among teenagers about driving. Austin will recite
some preposterous rule I’d never heard of, or blurt out some other
factoid that has little resemblance to reality.
It’s all rather mysterious at this point, I can imagine. Since I grew up
around a lot more car activity than Austin, they were a much more
known entity to me by the time I started driving. I understood, for
example, how a clutch worked and how power was transferred from
the engine to the wheels. To my discredit, I have not shared much of
this information with my kids because I simply don’t work on cars the
way my Dad did. I don’t have the space, the tools or the time and, I
suspect, the sophisticated engines of today would present great
difficulty to someone who learned the basics on cars with carburetors
and breaker-point ignition.
Even so, the time is nigh when I need to show the almost-driver how
to change a tire, put in windshield wiper juice, check the oil and other
such basics. Since Austin is the kind of person who doesn’t know or
really care how an engine works, I’ll skip over the homily about internal
combustion, transfer of power from the pistons to the crankshaft to the
wheels and pretty much anything else save the workings of the stereo
and seat adjustment. Replacing a fuse, I’m guessing, would be
tantamount to changing an engine, and perhaps something best left to

the local garage.
We can get jaded about driving after doing it for so many years, but I
still remember my first “solo,” as well as my first piece-o-crap car: a
1974 Dodge Coronet, mud brown with a 318 and seats like couches. It
cost 50 bucks and, despite its disreputable appearance, was every inch
as cool as a Maserati to me at the time.
Soon, I suspect Austin will come home with something similarly
crappy, beaming with pride of ownership regardless of any obvious
shortfalls. He’ll be off to the races, I guess, and hopefully these months
of training will pay off when he’s calling all the shots.
It does, though, make me long for the days of light-saber wars and
snowball fights.
Moving teens from Point A to Point B
The history of humankind is one long story of movement. While most
of the other critters were content to stick to one place, our big brains
compelled us to always wonder what was over that next mountain
range or across that lake or ocean. The tales run from the early
wanderers who made their way across the Bering land bridge to the
Pacific islanders who inhabited one island after another using rafts
made out of toothpicks and fish heads.
As evidenced by more recent excursions – testosterone-fueled trips to
the poles, the moon, the bottom of the sea – the drive to move has
only increased. And nowhere is this more in evidence in our home than
in the incessant need to get out and about exhibited by our teens. But,
unlike me when I was that age and pretty much did as much as I could
without parental assistance, our kids are like a greedy nonprofit that
seeks the government handout instead of holding a fundraiser. They
would not find it at all unusual, inappropriate or inconvenient to have
us on-call 24/7 so that we can drop whatever we are doing and go pick
them up. We should also, I’ve learned, do as much as we can to tailor
our schedule to match theirs so as to avoid anything inconvenient –
like riding the bus or, heaven forbid, walking.
As I write, it is a powder day and, to the extent that I can get the two
boys awake, I was thinking of doing what most rational people do on a
powder day: ski, and ski early. But the girl has her gig at Taco Bell
starting at 10, and I usually drive her the approximately five blocks
between our home and the Bell. So I’m faced with the dilemma of
compromising a powder day to drive her; incurring the wrath of my
wife who will have to get up and drive her if I don’t (since she doesn’t
share my views about the benefits of walking); or somehow convincing
both teen and mom that walking a few blocks in 25-degree weather
will not be life-threatening or representative of cruel and unusual
punishment.
Just look at Ernest Shackleton, I might say, who braved years of the
Antarctic icepack before finally bringing himself and his entire crew
back alive. Or what about those Paleo-indians who came across the
Bering land bridge? And they didn’t even have the prospect of a
stuffed, double cheese Gordito Krunchwrap Supreme awaiting them.
Don’t these examples of human fortitude inspire you to stretch your
legs just a little and, well … walk?
I could also default to tales of “when I was your age …” I’m pretty
sure I was as lazy a teenager as could be found anywhere, but when it
came to making it to our hangout places, I was as motivated as Roald
Amundsen, who zipped to the South Pole on dogsleds and beat the Brit
Robert Scott by 35 days. The drive to walk, bike, hitch are bum rides
from my older brother or sister was inspired as much by my desire to
get to the hanging-out place as it was not to have my parents
“inconvenienced” — either by having to get up to drive me or by the

knowledge of where, exactly, it was that I was hanging out, with whom
and in what, er, context.
Granted, the neighborhoods of my Long Island boyhood were easier
to traverse on bike or foot than the far-flung spaces of the mountain
communities. The reality is that, on most days, our family would be
better served with a helicopter than anything else. And not just one of
those dinky news choppers; I’d want one of those big, double-rotor
troop-carrying models – something that can handle a week’s worth of
groceries, the whole family plus the inevitable supernumeraries who
cling to teens with rides like remoras on sharks.
But for now, I can at least take solace in that pat parental line
offering such rides enables: At least we know where they are.
Update: Your columnist caved, drove the girl to Taco Bell and hit the
hill a little later.

The great Chinese toy loop
So now Aquadots are evil. But we already knew this. When our son
got some of these for his 6th birthday last August, we immediately
recognized that this toy – a bunch of BB-sized plastic pellets you squirt
with water to get them to stick together into shapes – was apparently
designed by people who really want to drive parents crazy. The reason
being is that every Aquadot that doesn’t get stuck into the pattern
ends up, as a matter of course, on the floor. And even those that do
make it into the shape of a dog or a moose or whatever will be
forgotten in a drawer or a shelf for an amount of time, after which its
tenuous bonds will dissolve, putting the teeny pellets on the floor, in
the bed, down our pants, in the food chain … you get the picture.
So Aquadot is a tale of yet another evil Chinese toy manufacturer
slipping something into the American toy market that is harmful to
humans (a group that includes children, most of the time). This after
we’d already discovered all the Thomas the Train toys were painted
with arsenic, the Polly Pockets burst into flames if you rub them
together and that Elmo doll explodes on contact with fruit juice. As the
trash cans of American families filled up with all these malevolent
objects, it reminded me of my sister’s Easy-Bake oven back in the 70s.
The thing shot out a 10-foot blue flame and incinerated my mother’s
caged finches. My dad fiddled with the wiring and pronounced it fine,
and the finches were replaced with a brace of gerbils: no legal action
taken or contemplated.
Not so today. The Aquadot scare includes the story that two kids are
in a coma after ingesting them. Andy came home from kindergarten
with the knowledge that Aquadots will kill you if eaten. Then, after
being informed by his mother that the Aquadots we were throwing out
were worth about $15, he demanded an immediate trip to Wal-Mart to
have them replaced with something of equal or greater value. (This
request was denied. The lesson: Sometimes life isn’t fair, and if you
think we’re going to get reimbursed by some company in Guangdong
province, then I’ve got a sentient Transformer I want to sell you.)
As we hurtle toward Christmas and endure constant bombardment
from all media regarding new toys on the market, I’ve come to take a
dim view on toys in general. I especially dislike the cheap, plastic crap
that gets handed out at birthday parties or distributed in Happy Meals.
It’s all just bound for the landfill after a short time employed as a “toy,”
and whether it’s coated in lead or sweet-scented herbs, it’s all just
junk, with the kid exercising meaningful ownership for, perhaps, 20
minutes over the 10,000 year lifespan of the plastic “Bee Movie”
character.
So, I won’t miss Aquadots, and I’m pretty sure Andy will get over their
loss (they’d been largely forgotten by the time of the alert anyway).
With Christmas looming, I watch the toy commercials in between
episodes of “Spongebob” and “Danny Phantom” and gauge them by

how long they’ll likely be used before being consigned to the landfill.
Sadly, most of the toys don’t pass the two-week test.
Really, it’d be better to have the Chinese companies simply melt their
output prior to shipping, creating an endless loop of production and
recycling. American parents can be charged a yearly fee for not having
to house and dispose of these products, and we’ll give our kids sticks
and empty cardboard boxes to play with while diverting any money left
over to buy livestock for Third World families.
Merry Christmas!
Asphyxiated by microwave popcorn
That old thing about a man’s home being his castle may not resonate
much in today’s more egalitarian households. But that doesn’t stop us
from acting a little despotic now and again.
I learned fairly early on in my marriage that certain things are silly to
make a firm stand against. I may find it heretical to eat cold pizza for
breakfast, but any protests are largely ignored anyway. And if I push
the matter, I risk sounding like an unyielding crank, the kind of Joan
Crawford parent who blows a gasket over coat hangers or paper towel
patterns.
There is one thing I find tough to yield on, though, and that’s
microwave popcorn. It may be a gene, a chemical imbalance or a touch
of mental illness I can’t control, but I simply cannot abide the smell of
microwave popcorn. Although I haven’t banned it outright – as if that’d
be enforceable – I have made my distaste well enough known that wife
and kids rarely pop in my presence.
But if they do pop while I’m gone and I get home sooner than was
perhaps expected, they have guilty looks on their faces – like sitcom
teens caught by mom and dad with the lingering smell of marijuana in
the air.
Sometimes, though, popcorn must happen. On the all-too-rare
occasion that we all agree on a movie we’d like to watch, the rest of
the family needs the popcorn to fill out the experience. I don’t
understand it, but I see it for what it is and recognize that this odd
predilection is common in American households. (For the record, I will
note that traditionally popped movie-theatre popcorn is OK.) So when I
allow microwave pop, I steel myself for the invasive, greasy,
malodorous tsunami of olfactory horror that will soon emanate from
the kitchen and consider it taking one for the team.
And that’s family. Jen can’t tolerate the lights in the living room being
dimmed below full power, so I rarely use the dimmer switch. I like the
lower light in the early morning, though, so if I do use it and hear her
coming down the stairs, I quickly turn it up or off completely. The kids
know to do this as well.
Idiosyncrasies and pet peeves – we’ve all got them, but they get
magnified within the close confines of the family unit. What may be a
cute foible to a friend or co-worker can become a grinding, repetitive
annoyance of historic proportion within the family – if we let it.
And that’s the trick. The human mind has an extraordinary capacity
to filter out noise of all kinds – and not just the kind that comes in the
ear. I once lived in an apartment right on upper Broadway in
Manhattan, where the constant shriek of the siren and prattle of
homeless people became invisible to me after only a few weeks.
Others who’ve tried living in similar situations have given it up as
hopeless, since they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – allow themselves to
assimilate.
If that’s the case, you’ll never enjoy any time in New York City, and
perhaps family life isn’t for you, either. I’ll bet that plenty of failed
marriages and busted families can be traced, at least in part, to a
failure to assimilate and yield to the quirks and petty annoyances
being perpetrated by others. After time, you’ll find, they don’t seem
like annoyances anymore but just part of the background – like the
hum of the fridge or the murmured chatter of teens on the phone.
Get used to that, and you can really start focusing on the positives.
And yeah, sometimes, you just have to throw up your hands and smell
the microwave popcorn.

In defense of Baby Einstein
Tropical fish, they say, can have a soothing effect on the human
psyche, lowering blood pressure and contributing to an overall sense of
calm in adults.
If you don’t have a tank of fish, though, pop in one of the “Baby
Einstein” videos. These brazenly plot-less bits of entertainment for
little ones feature such rip-roaring scenes as a toy train circling around
a track; a lava lamp just, well, sitting there being a lava lamp; and
babies languidly playing with colorful balls. It’s all set to a soundtrack
of classical music’s greatest hits.
Lately, Baby Einstein is under fire because someone came out with a
study suggesting the videos are somehow bad for little kids. I don’t
know about that, not being a scientist or expert in developmental
psychology, but I would say without hesitation that they’re great for
adults. The most stressful, anxiety-ridden day at work would melt away
instantly when I nuggled up with Andy and watched Baby Einstein. Part
of me wanted to inhabit that world, where only calming music and
simple moving shapes existed, and the most complex thing one could
contemplate was wheeled penguins rolling down a little plastic slide.
Set to some Brahms or Chopin, it went right to the cerebral cortex,
replacing grown-up concerns with a delightful blankness and the
primitive desire to fill one’s diaper.
Ahhhhh.
Our youngest just turned 6, so we’re a few years past the Baby
Einstein stage. Still, I remember them well since, for a few years, they
served as a sort of backdrop to our busy household. Even the older
kids would sit and watch with Andy as wind-up toys marched
hypnotically across the floor, followed by a metronome set to “lento”
and then, in grand finale, a tiny fountain tinkling water over baby seals
while a lamb mobile whirled overhead. Or something like that.
We had another video, not of the Baby Einstein series, that consisted
solely of a beach ball bouncing and rolling to different places. It was
brilliant, sort of the diametric opposite to a grown-up film like
“Memento,” where you have to bend your brain to figure a bunch of
stuff out. It was just the ball: the ball at the beach, the ball going down
the stairs, the ball floating down a river.
Ahhhh.
And what’s so wrong with that, I wonder? How could watching such
things have any negative effect on a little kid unless, of course, that’s
all they ever did. Most parents use these videos around nap- or
bedtime, and I don’t recall seeing instructions on the box saying: “This
video is meant to replace all human interaction with your growing
child.”
Like most things in life, Baby Einstein and similar videos are meant to
be used in moderation. Some parents believe no amount of television
is good for children under a certain age, but most parents accept it as
an integral part of modern life. Kids have been and still are exposed to
much worse — cockfighting, war and famine come to mind — so it
hardly seems possible that “experts” are spending time fretting over
these innocuous videos.
But there are a great many people spending a lot of money to
unravel the mysteries of early childhood, and they will uncover just
about daily some new thing over which to be freshly concerned. As
parents, we employ many grains of salt, navigating the shoals of the
study-creating hand-wringers by simply doing what we believe is best
for our children. Some parents may well find that their tots get
agitated or glazed-over if they take in too much TV. Others know it
helps settle them down before bed.
It’s our call.

Birthday blues and brights
So, are we supposed to cheer or mourn when the oldest turns 21?
A little bit of both, I suppose.
In a moment of quintessentially parental wet-blanketism, I recently
told the soon-to-be-old-enough-to-buy-alcohol-legally daughter that
this landmark age does not signal a time to run amok but, rather, to
assess one’s place in the world, recognize one’s maturity and plan for
the future.
To which she dutifully replied something like “Sure, I understand”
while mentally marching into the local liquor store brandishing her
now-infinitely-more-valuable driver’s license. There, she will announce
to the clerk her desire to buy something spirited without having to
endure airport-level security checks.
There comes a time in every kid’s life where the safety nets fall away,
the moorings are left behind and we head out into the world to make it
or break it on our own. The ages between high school graduation and
the mid 20s or so are the toughest – the times when we proclaim our
freedom — sometimes defiantly and obnoxiously — yet swoop back
into the nest on occasion for food, money, laundry and a dose of grief
from the ‘rents wondering why we don’t stop by more.
Still, 21! The wife and I firmly recall being that age ourselves just a
couple of years ago. That’s what makes it all the more frustrating when
the Newly Emancipated One gives us those predictable lines and looks
to convince us that we couldn’t possibly have any idea what she’s
going through.
It’s nothing new, but it’s still pretty weird. And there’s nothing like
being forced to look into a mirror like that for making one feel old.
Heartache aside, it’s still a magic age if ever there was one. And it’s
not just the booze thing. Suddenly, you’re at an age where almost
nothing is barred from you on account of your number of trips around
the sun. Sure, you might have a few more years to go before you can
run for president or get cheaper rates on your car insurance, but you
can buy a beer, go to war, vote, see the filthiest movies available, rent
a car, check into a hotel by yourself, etc.
All the pitfalls of that freedom are there as well, of course, but the 21-
year-old pays as much attention to those perils as the skydiver does
about plane accident statistics. Invulnerability comes with the age, as
does the delightful knowledge that you are, indeed, the first person
EVER to experience all these wonderful things! Weeeeeeee! The debt,
the hangover, the knowledge that you’re a cog in a wheel and a drop
in the ocean will all come later.
It’s difficult, as a parent, to bite our tongues and let the mistakes
happen. At some point, it becomes obvious that nothing we say or do
will deter the Newly Emancipated One from pursuing whatever path
she chooses (or stumbles onto). Most of us have stories of how our own
parents were disappointed in the choices we made; some of us may

even have been excommunicated because of them.
But barring those who commit awful crimes or betray family trust, it
doesn’t last forever. Young adults start to come to their senses later in
the 20s, and they often even get to the point where they can have a
conversation with their parents that doesn’t involve arguing, eye-
rolling or martyr-talk. It’s a nice time when it comes, as I recall from
my experience with my own parents.
Coincidentally, my birthday, my wife’s and the eldest daughter’s all
fall in a row every January. This weekend, we’ll turn 42 as she hits 21;
we’ll pretend it didn’t happen while she goes out and celebrates.
Birthdays, like everything else, are in the eye of the beholder. Enjoy
them while they’re enjoyable, and when they get to be troublesome,
well, there’s always botox, lies and liposuction.

Bored with the whole thing
The 13-year-old girl is mortified to discover my wife and I have both
gotten myspace.com pages. This, she truly believes, is her domain,
and she acted as if we’d both showed up for tryouts for the middle
school cheerleading squad.
The reality is Jen signed up for the sole reason of being able to
monitor Kaylie’s page; I got one because some group I was interested
in had all their info on myspace.com. It’s not like I plan to spend hours
each day on there, toying with the wallpaper, uploading videos shot in
the backyard or making “e-friends” around the world.
But this, I’ve discovered, is what occupies a lot of Kaylie’s time.
Looking at her myspace.com page was to finally get the answer to my
ongoing question: “what the heck are you doing in your room all the
time with the door closed?”
I know girls have been doing this forever, and I don’t know what the
time-killer was before myspace.com, instant messaging and e-mail.
The distraction, I suppose, is irrelevant, because it all relates to the
same odd phenomenon: Teenagers, who are arguably going through
the most exciting and challenging time of their lives, are tremendously
bored by the whole thing – so bored, in fact, that they’ll spend hours
peering into a computer screen changing their desktop wallpaper from
purple flowers to red hearts to orange unicorns and back again.
When I was a kid (groan!), we had one measly TV with no remote and
no cable until the late ‘70s. In our home today, we have half a dozen
computers, three TVs, GameBoys, Playstations, a trampoline and
enough sports gear in the garage to start our own consignment shop.
Judging from the looks on the teen faces most times, though, you’d
think we were living in a cardboard box in the middle of Utah, where all
they had to play with were rocks, sticks and vinegaroons.
The L.A. Times had a great story last week documenting this
phenomenon. They did a poll of people between ages 12 and 24 and
discovered a large majority of them are simply bored with their
entertainment choices. So these are people who can e-mail a friend in
Kurdistan while they’re watching “Spiderman 2” on their iPod and
talking on a cell phone to another friend in Winnipeg while they’re
riding a chairlift in Vail. If that’s not enough excitement, what does it
take for these kids? A thousand naked MTV reality show stars jumping
from rocket ships while the Red Hot Chili Peppers play at the landing
zone and volcanoes erupt in the background as Jesus pops in for the
Second Coming? Then they wouldn’t be satisfied unless they could
download the whole episode off iTunes.
The 5-year-old is still happy playing with ants or looking under the
welcome mat for worms. These older kids, I don’t know. I guess I was
bored at times when I was a teenager, and that old adage about the
devil having work for me and my idle hands was too often true. If
claims of boredom equate to an absence of wicked behavior, perhaps

it’s a good thing. Even so, the trend looks to me like the creation of an
entire generation of media consumers who aren’t curious or passionate
enough to create their own stuff. If that’s the case, who’s going to be
creating the art of the future? And is this why so many hip-hop
“artists” spice up the same-ol’-crap by sampling better songs from the
era before iPods and cell phones?
I think there’s something to be said for making do with less-
extensive entertainment options, as the Pilgrims did. When all you’ve
got is a length of string and the leg bone of a hamster, you can get
pretty creative when there’s nothing else to do. On the other hand, if
all of the jobs of the future revolve around the electronic circulation of
the same-ol’-crap, maybe our kids are on a brilliant career path.
Only time will tell.

A brief history of (family) time
Just next to the playground at our kindergartner’s elementary school,
there’s a line of big, painted numbers 1 through 5, where the kids line
up each morning according to grade. Our little guy is still on the “K,”
and when we visited the playground on a recent Saturday, we came up
with a game we dubbed “Grade Guesser.”
One person (usually me) stands about 20 feet away, facing away
from the numbers, while the other (usually Andy) picks a place to
stand. He then calls out “Guess my grade!” And I try to do just that. It’s
basically a hearing test, and not too hard to guess if you’re not too far
away. But then Andy started standing in between, say, the 3 and the 4,
which meant the correct answer would be “summer before 4th grade.”
If he stood to the left of the “K,” that was preschool, while anything
right of the 5 was middle school.
Since Grade Guesser doesn’t require a ton of brain power (not nearly
so much as, say, “Hungry Hungry Hippos”), it didn’t take long for me to
start musing about what these numbers represented in terms of my
own family. Watching Andy grinningly standing on the 3, for instance,
reminded me that when he’s in 3rd grade, his oldest brother will be
starting college. When he’s on the 4, his sister will be off on her own,
and when he reaches the 5, another brother will be out the door.
And that’s not so far from now. Somehow, looking at those big, white
numbers painted on the ground put it into a more easily read
perspective for me, and as thunderheads massed over the mountains
and we had to curtail our game, I felt a bit of relief. After all, it’s a
mixed bag to contemplate the future with kids. It wasn’t so long ago
that the two older boys were obsessing over archery and Harry Potter
trading cards; just yesterday that our little girl was lining up her Polly
Pocket dolls for hours on end. Now, they’re cell-phone-toting teens with
attitude, plans of their own and a different view of their parents’
relative worth. We may still be high on the slopes of Mt. Olympus as far
as the kindergartner is concerned, but for the teenagers, we’ve been
stripped of our deity status and now inhabit a place that ranges
between the basement and the first-floor pantry (a position we can
achieve if we properly fulfill our driving duties.)
And that’s OK. Part of growing up is defining your own world from
that of your parents’, and there’s often a bit of pain involved on both
sides as that separation takes place. As parents, we intuit all this while
often not comprehending it, and it’s typically a difficult time to work
through. As the older kids keep several steps ahead of where they are
– thinking ahead to college, living on their own, etc. – it does little good
to remind them that, chances are, they are currently inhabiting the
best times of their lives. Their job is to keep moving, and they won’t
hear any different.
Looking at something like the Grade Guesser game — or even a

multi-year calendar— illuminates all too well the relatively short time
we have; the life broken up into a couple of different acts that tend to
play out before we’ve even realized what scene we were in. We move
through the white numbers like whippets, eager, for a time, to get on
ahead and, later, wishing we could go back.
I know I will mentally freeze Andy on that big “K” and cherish that
image for years. But I also know we have to enjoy these kids as the
moving targets that they are. Lots of love and patience helps, as does
a broader appreciation for each white number they’re standing on at a
given time.
Supporting Middle Eastern oil
monarchies
Every time I think I’ve made progress in reducing unnecessary trips in
the car, the kids come up with a good reason why we need to go burn
up some more oil. This week, it started early Monday morning, when
the 15-year-old overachiever wanted to be at school at 7 a.m. for
algebra tutoring. Next up at 7:30 was the middle schooler, who
maintains that she can’t possibly walk the 200 yards to school. At 8:30,
the preschooler gets his ride, which is at least on my way to work.
If that were all, it wouldn’t be so bad. But then there are dance
lessons, piano lessons, various meetings for the speech and debate
team, open houses, and the many trips needed to maintain a busy
social life. My favorite are the last-minute calls along the lines of “can
you come pick me up five minutes ago along with a dozen of my
friends?”
None of this is news to anyone who’s ever worn the badge of parent,
but it does still beg the question on occasion: Can’t you just stay PUT?!
Here, have the phone, the computer, the internet, the carrier pigeons,
the smoke-signal apparatus – commune with your friends this way!
Can’t we please just sit on the couch for a minute or two without some
new need arising that requires the only valuable thing we have left in
your minds – our drivers’ licenses? You older kids, you’re always saying
you want rights and freedom, well, here it is: You have the right to get
your own butt from Point A to Point B from now on. Now … go!
I jest, a little. The kids have actually gotten fairly good at negotiating
the county’s bus system while also employing my favorite mode of
transportation: OKPs, or Other Kids’ Parents. So long as Janie’s pa
doesn’t show up in a nitro-burning funny car with vodka bottles
skittering out the door, OKPs are a valuable tool in the teen
transportation quiver, and it’s a mostly equitable system. My wife and I
often play the OKP role ourselves, shuttling friends and friends of
friends from Point A to Point B – and we rarely charge for the service
(True story: On a recent trip to Denver, one OKP asked my daughter
and another friend for gas money. And here I thought I was cheap.)
The curmudgeon in me (which metastasizes eerily with each passing
year) wants to put my foot down and summon images of yesteryear,
when children rode their bicycles everywhere or walked or, heaven
forbid, stayed home and read books by candlelight. Never mind that
my yesteryear didn’t include much in the way of below-zero
temperatures, significant numbers of blizzards and other such weather
and that most of my childhood here-and-now was contained within a
roughly 5-mile radius.
But so much for the past. My belief is that today’s children will be
repaid in the future when their kids have transporter technology, which
will look like this:

MOM: Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice – and did you clean your
room like I asked?
DAUGHTER: (responds by touching a device on her bra strap that
leaves only a fizzy electrical residue in the air)
MOM: Don’t you beam out of this house on me, young lady! You come
back here this instant!
DAD: She’s gone, honey, O so gone. What’s for dinner?
In these times, parents won’t spend money on petroleum products
but, rather, sophisticated digital DNA recognition systems for tracking
their materializing and dematerializing children. They will, of course,
always be just one technological step behind the kids, who upload off
myspace.com clever new ways to make it look as if they’re in their
room when they are, in fact, at a rave on one of the moons of Saturn.
In light of all that, maybe all this driving around isn’t so bad. At least I
know where they are, and thankfully, I have a hybrid.

Roughing it in the backyard
The 12-year-old and I stood in front of the tent and tried to figure out
how to attach the fly. We weren’t getting very far, but it wasn’t exactly
a life-or-death situation: We were in the backyard.
After several failed attempts, we ascertained that the “fly” we were
trying to attach was not the fly at all, but, rather, some kind of room
divider for the interior of the tent. The fly was missing in action, which
seemed a temporary inconvenience until we realized that, were it to
rain, water would simply pour right in the screen.
It’s blasphemous to admit it around here, but I’m not much for
camping, and neither is my wife. This whole episode with the tent
further cemented my belief that I simply wasn’t cut out for this
business, much preferring a nice hotel room that’s, you know, pre-
constructed, water-tight and ready to go. If we want to rough it, we
can pick a hotel without a pool or a free continental breakfast.
But the boys were eager to spend the night in the $69 Wal-Mart tent I
picked up last summer. Well, two of them, anyway. The 4-year-old was
primed for his first tent experience, an event he was dubbing “the best
sleepover EVER!” The 12-year-old was game, but for the 14-year-old,
backyard camping is pretty low on the “cool” scale, and he was tepid
on the whole idea.
All this got me thinking and wondering about the appeal of camping.
My dad took us up to Lake George in upstate New York every summer,

where we camped on an island in big, canvas tents that weighed a ton
and reverberated like giant snare drums when it rained. We had a
picnic table, an outhouse, a fire grate and other civilized conveniences,
but it was still camping, and I remember enjoying it, for the most part.
Somehow, that didn’t translate into my adult life. Riding bicycles
around the lake the other day, I saw first-hand how other non-campers
address this situation: They buy colossal motor homes or even modest
pop-up campers, and they car-camp. Given what it must cost to buy
these things and operate them with $3 gas, I can’t help but think they
could be staying at a top hotel for less, but there they were with their
awnings, trail bikes, auxiliary vehicle towing in the back, etc.
I don’t get it. Mostly, camping for me is a heady mix of guilt,
frustration and feelings of inadequacy. The guilt comes from feeling
that I should be showing my boys how to survive in the wilderness or
something. But given that I probably wouldn’t last 12 hours myself, it
seems I can give myself a pass on this one. Frustration comes from
simply not knowing how to camp. There are a lot of details to work out,
a lot of crap to buy, and I’m just not up for it.
It’s a good lesson, really. We can’t be all things to all people, and if
I’m more adept at showing my kids how to write an essay or short
story than teaching them to make a shelter out of pine cones, well,
that’s the way of it. If they’re burning to camp, they’ll have plenty of
opportunity to do so once they’re on their own.

As for our cheapie Wal-Mart tent, I’m sure we’ll haul it out again when
the urge strikes us. It may be that another year must pass before I
forget the sting of pain that accompanies interaction with it. Who
knows, by that time maybe the stupid fly will have turned up.
Cook wanted for busy family – no pay
No one would respond to an ad like this, would they? “Cook wanted.
Busy family with incredibly picky tastes. Almost impossible to please.
Voracious appetites. One half hour allowed to prepare nightly meal.
Must please everyone. No pay.”
I did, though. Among the many hats I wear, family cook is one of
them. The deal with my wife seemed fair: She’d take care of the
laundry and much of the cleaning if I did the bills, the cooking and the
car stuff.
I thought about this hand I was dealt last night as I was preparing five
salads, each one of them slightly different. Mom, extra mushrooms and
no cukes or carrots! The girl, super-plain with just lettuce and cukes.
The youngest boy, plain with cukes and a few mushrooms. Now who
was it who didn’t like chives?
Call me crazy. Maybe I should have everyone do their own, but if I
did, we’d never eat. The only thing that gets everyone in one place is
the dinner bell (in reality a stentorian yell up and down the stairs).
Talk about an amazing machine, the human brain. In addition to all
the other stuff in there, I have a file on family food preferences that
grows and morphs weekly, if not daily. Combined with the recipes and
other cooking know-how, I must have five or 10 gigabytes of
information stored by now, and thank goodness it’s not “read only.”
The teen girl seems to change her eating preferences even more
frequently than her boyfriends. And pity the cook who lets her see the
messy process of food preparation.
“Ewwwww,” she’ll say in that inimitable way teen girls have of
articulating disgust. “What’s that?”
I am, in fact, cutting fat off chicken breasts or removing a roast from
the package. Sure, raw meat is not anyone’s idea of a joy to handle,
but it’s part of the deal – unless you’re a vegetarian.
“Are you a vegetarian now?” I might ask. No? Well, this is meat, dead
animal, and I’m sorry if it looks too real, but someone’s gotta mess
with it.
Talk about being removed from the source of food: My kids think
chicken emerges from some kind of ether in fully formed McNugget
shapes. The middle boy often conflates “turkey” with “ham,” and when
I correct him, he says “What’s the difference?”
How do you answer a question like that? I know he knows turkeys and
pigs are different critters, but once it’s all killed and plucked and
deboned and cooked and sliced, it’s all academic as far as he’s
concerned. Is there any point in mounting an argument to this?
I used to think yes; now I know better. The kids have learned that the
funnest way to tease dad is with mock ignorance (and yeah,
sometimes it’s not so mock). But I do have some tools to make them
think twice about it. I do the shopping as well as the cooking, so if they
want their favorite ice cream or a beloved chicken-and couscous dish,
they need to watch their step.
I like to cook, always have. Even so, given limited time, budgets and
wide-ranging tastes and finicky palates, I sometimes long for someone
like Alice, the jovial maid from The Brady Bunch. What an
extraordinary luxury such an individual would be!
But, then, chances are even the unflappable Alice would run
screaming from our house once she realizes the need for special
software and the patience of Job to track and satisfy – or at least
placate – the multitudinous food preferences in the Miller household.
So goodbye, Alice. We hardly knew ye. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve
some potatoes to peel. Other than pizza, they’re the only thing
everyone agrees upon.

Couldn’t stand the weather
I asked the 4-year-old this morning what I should write this column
about. He didn’t hesitate: “The weather.”
It was snowing, so it was an understandable response. Still, it
underscored how even kids as young as 4 – or even 4 months – have
an interest in what the clouds are up to. It being April — with its
summer one day and winter the next schizophrenia – I think Andy was
reflecting on how the snow was going to impact his day. At preschool,
it would have a lot to do with how much time they spend outside,
clothes needed and all that.
For the ultimate illustration as to how weather can affect a kid’s day,
one need only turn to the “The Cat in the Hat.” This look at a classic
rainy day represents the extreme, but the allegory of the cat is
appropriate. Kids stuck inside – especially now during mud season with
the ski hills closed or closing – can be, um, something other than
pleasant to be around, regardless of the age. Seuss’s cat was the
embodiment of the boredom that can turn either to mischief or the
kind of plaintive whining that goes directly to the parents’ central
nervous system.
There’s a reason why our resort communities don’t market the
appeal of the latter half of April, all of May and a good chunk of June.
The weather can be glorious one day and sorta Lord-of-the-Rings-y the
next. The idyllic tableau of rain-slickered kids kicking through puddles

is one thing, but here in the High Country, you have to run ’em through
the car wash were they to engage in such endeavors.
For all its beauty when new, snow in the valley doesn’t age well, and
with one foot in the grave, this season’s snowpack is transforming the
valleys into fetid quagmires. It lures kids in and kicks them back out
coated in muck that’s equal parts dirt, water, magnesium chloride and
dog poop, with cigarette butts, old lift passes, Starbucks lids and bits of
leftover campaign signs thrown in like evil sprinkles.
If you live anywhere near the interstate, the little darlings can
emerge from the swamp toting all manner of unsavory detritus, from
trucker bombs (“Look mommy, someone threw away a bottle of
lemonade!”) and Budweiser cans to timeshare brochures and thrift-
store mannequins.
It’s not an easy time for anyone, and many a single person solves the
mud season conundrum by simply getting the heck out of Dodge. But
for families it may be tougher since spring break is over, there’s still
six or eight weeks left of school and the rec center pool starts getting
mighty old come May. Relief comes when the lower hiking trails start
to shed some snow, and there’s always quick trips to Denver or Grand
Junction to remind us that it’s summer – or at least spring –
somewhere.
The silver lining is that, with all the tourists and second-home owners
gone, we get our county back. On the nice days, the playgrounds are
all but empty, the shops and restaurants – those that remain open,
anyway – are devoid of traffic, and we can walk the streets without so
much fear of getting mowed down by an out-of-control rental SUV.
To the little ones, we offer frequent assurances that summer is just
around the corner, and that soon we’ll be able to enjoy all the things
that season embodies. In the meantime, mud season represents a
wonderful way to teach children things like patience, fortitude,
perseverance, and the value of things like coloring books, Game Boy,
Playstation and, when things get truly desperate, the stack of board
games collecting dust in the closet.
Parchesi, anyone?
Puppy eyes meet the Dog Scrooge
The puppy, my wife maintains, looked me square in the eye and
communicated this message telepathically and instantaneously:
Dear Mr. Miller,

I know you that you are the moment disinclined to purchase me or
any other puppy in this pet shop, and I understand your hesitation.
Dogs are a big commitment. We can be noisy, messy, expensive and
destructive. We dribble water on the floor, occasionally possess muddy
paws and are inveterate crotch sniffers (but please note that, since I
am a miniature Yorkshire terrier, I cannot reach such places and
therefore get one more hash mark in the “pro” column). I know you
have allergies, Mr. Miller, but studies have shown that my breed isn’t
too bad in this category, and other studies have shown that people
allergic to dogs have their symptoms decrease after prolonged
exposure. It’s like living in Greeley – you don’t notice the smell after a
while.
But those are all the negative things, and I think that, were you to
look at this objectively, you’d realized they’re all pretty unimportant
when you consider the upside. I’d like you to take a moment now, Mr.
Miller, and look at your son and wife and how their faces are lighting
up just by holding me. They are giggling, filled with what can only be
called joyous rapture. I have, by dint of my very puppy being,
transported them to a happy place that’s causing all kinds of healthy
endorphins to be released in their bodies. I ask you, Mr. Miller, short of
handing out 50s, are you capable of eliciting such reactions from your
family members like this?
I can deliver this joy on a regular basis, making your family happy at
all times. I know I seem spendy at $1,500, but if you divide that by the
number of minutes per year I will deliver happiness in your home, it

turns into just pennies a day.
Think about it.
My brain, in turn, took the message those soft, brown eyes attempted
to convey and instantly translated it into this: “Big pain in the ass.” I
looked away, eyeing a green gecko in a cage that looked at me with no
such calculations.
I grew up with dogs, usually no less than three or four in the house at
a time, and I know both their charms and their challenges better than
most. In a home with four kids, to me it would be insanity to add
another mouth to feed, a pooping-panting-peeing entity that either
can’t be left alone, eats furniture or needs $700 back surgery. No,
better to let them have the occasional fix at the Denver mall puppy
city or whatever. Once our kindergartner gets it out of his system, he
comes home and fawns over his tropical fish – the perfect pets, in my
mind.
Being a Dog Scrooge isn’t easy in the High Country, where dogs are
often afforded human status and accompany their owners wherever
they go. And while it may seem selfish to deprive my family and our
community of yet another canine, it is a choice I make easily. Families
like ours that barely scrape by up here have no business adding the
additional financial burden of a dog. On my agonizing rounds through
mountain supermarkets standing agog at the prices, at least I have the

tiny thrill of occasionally walking down the pet aisle knowing I don’t
need anything, anything at all.
I hope that little Yorkie was taken home by a nice person or family,
and that he lives a long, happy life. But he was wrong to target the Dog
Scrooge, me, and I know something he didn’t:
Our lease doesn’t allow pets anyway.

Doing it all over again
Friends and coworkers are having babies in droves. They ask me on
occasion what it’s like as they gear up for what lies ahead.
One thing I tell them is, as a parent, you get to relive great chunks of
your own childhood. Things you hadn’t thought of in years – from Elmo
to Elmer’s glue to flood pants and active loathing of vegetables – will
come swarming back into your consciousness. I’m always astounded
by how well the hard drive of the brain can store these memories from
30 or 40 years ago. Some of them, like the smell of Play-Do or the feel
of a crayon in your hand, are welcome memories; others not so happy.
The phenomenon of the mean-girls circuit visited home this past
week, when the teen girl, fed up with inexplicable harassment, fought
back and blackened the eye of her attacker at the bus stop. I couldn’t
have been more surprised than if I’d heard she’d told a teacher off or
got caught smoking: She’s just not that kind of girl (famous last words
of parents worldwide).
Girls will be girls, I suppose, and latest word is that the two are
friends again (until they aren’t). Meanwhile, I got the chance to sit in
on the 12-year-old’s after-school math club and reveled in all the
wonderful dorkiness of it all. There they were, in all their bad-hair,
crooked-teeth, flood-panted glory, my son in the middle of it all deftly
solving algebra problems that would have left me in tears.
On the high school side of things, our freshman is reveling in the

early glow of his first real girlfriend. A coup in that she’s a junior with a
car, we’re glad we like her because, unlike his sister — who changes
boyfriends as frequently as her nail polish — the teen boy strikes us as
the monogamous type, so this girl could be around for some time.
They’re cute together, even as the jaded male in me thinks to myself:
“Wait until you do something she doesn’t like and you get the dreaded
silent treatment.”
One mostly unwelcome development on the revisiting-things front is
the 5-year-old’s desire to have me read every single comic in the
Denver Post each morning over his breakfast. At first, I thought it was
a fun distraction, and it reminded me of the days when, as a kid and a
young adult, I read the comics every day for years. My belief that the
lion’s share of newspaper comics aren’t worth the 5 or 10 seconds it
takes to read them was confirmed early on, and slogging through
ancient turkeys like “Beetle Bailey,” “Blondie” and “Fred Bassett” is as
depressing as it is mind-numbing.
But Andy would be fine with having the phone book read to him, I’m
pretty sure, so I continue our morning comics ritual.
So, I might tell my new-parent friends, one of the greatest gifts of
having kids is getting that second (or third or fourth or fifth) shot at
experiencing the world through the eyes of a child. What’s even better
is that different kids have different eyes, so you gain all kinds of
curious and interesting perspective you likely didn’t have before. If, on
the surface, parenting can seem like a lot of giving and little receiving,
these types of revelations cause that model to crumble pretty quickly.
Along with their tremendous outpouring of love (expressed freely and
willingly up until age 12 or so, then resumed, if you’re lucky, in the
mid-20s), kids dispatch with any residual selfishness we may harbor
while also offering this extraordinary lens through which to re-
experience the world.
That said, I don’t think any lens can get me to enjoy or understand
the appeal of “BC” or “The Wizard of Id” ever again.

Kid transport and parental capitulation
Forget about what to do the transportation problems with I-70. How
do I convince my two middle-schoolers that they’re fully capable of
walking a couple hundred yards to school in the morning?
It’s one of those instances where I’ve found myself intoning – without
really meaning to — one of those annoying parentalisms that starts
with “when I was your age … ” and usually ends with the kids rolling
their eyes and, perhaps, barfing on the floor.
But seriously, people, when I was a kid, I walked or rode my bike
everywhere, probably within a 5-10 mile radius. Granted, a good part
of the reason for my self-locomotion (and that of my friends) was that
we didn’t want our moms to have any idea where we were going or
what we were doing. That would’ve sounded like this:
“Mom, can you give me and my friends a lift to the movie theatre?”
“Sure. What movie are you going to see?”
“No movie. Just hanging out behind the place.”
“Doing what?”
(blank look)
So we walked, or rode our bikes. And we fielded questions later with
the kind of shoulder-shrugging stonewalling technique teenagers have
had down pat since Grog tried to hide his participation in the rock fight.
But is it me, or do kids have less to hide these days? For our 12-year-
old daughter, the biggest act of rebellion lately was a tiny fib to
disguise the fact that she wasn’t at the rec center but, rather, at Target
shopping with her friends. Meanwhile, the older boys’ indiscretions
revolve around too much Playstation and over-fixation on high grades.
When I think back to the things I was doing on suburban Long Island
at age 14, I want to hand out halos to my kids. But even if they’re
being all goody two-shoes (is that still a viable expression?), I still think
they should walk whenever possible. Exercise, fresh air, a sense of
independence and all that.
Times, though, have apparently changed. I feel like a vehicular
Scrooge who’s outnumbered and overruled at every turn. If I’m foolish
enough to suggest the walking or biking option, they look at me as if I
just suggested they trap their own food for dinner. And it’s hard to hold
one’s ground when the imploring looks so firmly slide the scales of
justice over to their side (and it gets worse when the girls start wearing
eye makeup).
I know I’m not alone. I see the line of cars every morning at the
middle school, some of them from our neighborhood that is, literally,
right across the street from the school. We all have the same dumb
look on our faces, like people standing in line for lottery tickets or
queuing up for the dessert table: We know we shouldn’t be there, but
we can’t help it. Look at the little darlings! Who would want to make
them walk in these sub-freezing temperatures!
Never mind that half of them are wearing shorts in winter, jackets
unzipped, ankle socks and Vans instead of snow boots. I tell my kids
they might not mind walking so much (it’s a seven-minute trek, by my
reckoning) if they dressed properly, but then I discover that dressing
properly isn’t really so cool. And maybe it wasn’t when I was that age,
either. In high school, I think I made my way through entire Summit
County winters wearing only a denim jacket.
Duh.
But my kids have a couple of things on their side, my grousing
notwithstanding. For one, even though it’s a short ride, we usually
manage to find some things to talk about and have a few laughs. For
another, I’m a morning person, so I’ve been up for hours anyway. And
finally, since I have to drive the 4-year-old to preschool later anyway, I
have the big kids warm up and scrape the car, thus getting it all ready
for my next trip.
Maximizing the slave labor – now that’s effective parenting!

Blazing trails in electronic
depersonalization
I imagine a line of old folks in, say, the year 2077. They are queuing
up at a clinic that specializes in two main things: crossed eyes and
gnarled fingers. Yes, these oldsters, today’s teenagers, will be paying
the price for all the years they spent text-messaging one another
instead of the relatively symptom-free method of speaking to one
another directly.
They will also be mostly deaf from iPods at high volume, broke from
outsourced jobs, pointless wars and the collapse of Social Security, and
quasi-autistic from so many years of avoiding genuine human
interaction in favor of various electronic proxies. Their planet will be
flooding, burning and melting, they will all weigh 300 pounds and none
of them will be able to do simple addition or find their own state on a
map.
At least, though, they will have cheap Chinese-made robots to do
yard work and serve them hamburgers.
Sounds like a decent premise for a sci-fi novel, right? Like most
parents, I spend time on occasion wondering what our children’s world
will look like – but I’m limited by only really knowing what today is. In
1976 when I was 12, it seemed like the future was a lot of American
flags wrapped around CB radios while Peter Frampton played an

endless guitar solo and everyone wore gauchos and leisure suits.
Certainly no one then was predicting that, in 30 years, teenagers
would communicate almost exclusively with Star Trek-like devices, that
they’d all have computers and eschew Coke for caffeine- and taurine-
laden “energy drinks.”
And who knew the turntable and LP album was going to go the way of
the silent movie? My wife and I still have boxes of the damn things in
the garage, imagining a day when we’ll buy a record player and give
our E.L.O. and Partridge Family albums a final, scratchy spin before
concluding what we already know: They belong in the trash.
It’s funny, isn’t it, to talk about the days of remote-less TVs and a
cell-phone-less landscape and watch kids look at you the same way we
looked at gramps when he told us about the Depression, or street cars
or when the Lusitania was sunk. Watching our 16-year-old text his
girlfriend non-stop all day and all night, I have to be careful not to
sound too fogey-ish when I express amazement at the manner in which
they’re conducting this relationship – if that’s what you want to call it.
They even sometimes use Skype video and talk face to face. She’s
going to school in Colorado Springs, but she could — and may as well
be — in China.
There’s a study going on some where now, I imagine, that’s testing
whether this generation is developing some kind of brainwave patterns
that enable them to establish as much emotional intimacy

electronically as we used to do in person. The results will be either that
they have suffered no loss in interpersonal connections and people
skills because of this – or they have, but it’s OK because it will better
prepare them for interacting with their robot servants in the future.
It’s always tempting for parents to compare our experiences as kids
with those of our children — as our parents did before us. Some will
resist, enact bans and other sorts of artificial constructs to rein-in the
new-fangled stuff we don’t understand. Others will shrug and let the
train roll on as it will. The best bet, though, is to jump on board a bit
and try to understand it. Hop on the caboose so you’re not too much in
the way. Get a myspace page, text them with a happy note or a chore
once in a while.
And please, strike the phrase “Well, when I was a kid …” from your
lineup — and get rid of the LPs in the basement.

Where did all the photos go?
The 4-year-old is at the top of the stairs, hair askew from sleep, chin
propped in hands as he looks at us from a warm pool of sunlight
coming in through the window. It is, in fact, a Kodak Moment, so we
run for the camera.
“Hold on!” he says, running into his room for a couple of stuffed
animals. I look at him questioningly. “This way, I’ll look even cuter,” he
tells me, matter-of-factly.
Well, no one ever made much headway accusing young children of
modesty. But accustomed as we are to outrageous statements from
the mouths of babes, this was one of the most audacious ever. As I sit
her now, thought, I couldn’t say with any certainty if I’ll ever see this
particular photo. That’s because, as cameras have migrated to digital,
everything gets downloaded onto a computer and then … what
happens?
We see ads all the time advertising services for transferring digital
photos into prints, but so far we haven’t gone through the trouble of
figuring it all out or incorporating it into our non-existent photo
reproduction budget. We’ve printed them out on our inkjets and
grimaced at the quality – even though we’re told by the printer
manufacturer that it’s “photo quality.” Whatever that means.
The wife does a decent job of creating slide shows on her blog page,
but I like ’em hanging on the wall. While our home is plastered with
plenty of those already, almost all of them predate the arrival of the
digicam. I doubt we’re alone.
There are also questions of our own little digital divide. I’m all Mac,
the wife is die-hard PC, and photos tend to end up on her machine. For
me, that’s the equivalent of having them shipped to a Swiss vault, for
all the access I’ll have. If I do get a hold of the camera, I then have to
find the right cord for downloading out of about 100 or so such things
floating around our digitally demented house.
Even when I do succeed in downloading photos onto my rig, there’s a
certain amount of organization and maintenance that’s supposed to
take place, which I haven’t yet prioritized. As such, I have a bunch of
nested, numbered folders with photos mysteriously labeled things like
“IMG1005_6349.jpg.” This could be the Cutest Photo Ever Taken of the
Most Angelic Children Ever, but with a name like that, it may also
never see the light of day.
(Note: Just to prove myself wrong, I dug this one up and show it here
to illustrate the fact that digital photos can, indeed, see the light of
day. And also to show how handsome my three sons are …)
Old photos can be just as problematic. When I think of my dotage, I
think of reading Tolstoy and Pynchon and also making a final sort
through the big box of old-school print photos that now resides under
the bed. But I worry if anyone will even care, at that point.
To make matters worse, my father solved his own archiving problem

by foisting a bunch of old family photos onto me with some vague
instructions about “doing something with the damn things.” The fact
that I don’t know or recognize many of the people in these photos
makes it even more likely that I will, in fact, pass these onto my own
children some day, with a vague exhortation to “explore their roots.”
Digital cameras sure make it easy to take and share photos, but I
can’t help but miss those days when you picked up the packet from
the film counter, never knowing for sure what you were going to see.
After all, months and, in some cases, years had elapsed between when
the photos were taken and the prints developed. There are no
surprises anymore with digital cameras, but, then, there aren’t any
good blackmail photos left anymore, either. They get deleted
immediately by the embarrassed subject.
Maybe Dad had it best with the old Polaroid. You had the near-instant
gratification along with a print you could hold in your hand. Who cares
if you couldn’t e-mail it to Aunt Sally instantaneously? She forgot
Christmas anyway.
I don’t know the answers to all this. But I do need to find that USB
cord thingy – now where did it go?

Hair today, gone tomorrow
Ever given much thought to the role hair plays in family life?
Me neither, but here goes: It’s important – more so than you think.
For our preschooler, nothing calms him down faster than a whiff of his
mom’s hair. She uses some special shampoo – or maybe it’s
conditioner — the kind we have to order online for $30 a bottle or track
down in Denver at specialty shops. Whatever its hair-conditioning
properties, the 5-year-old is sold on the smell, often running across the
room for a quick sniff before zooming off again.
A houseful of kids is an idiosyncrasy factory, if nothing else.
So, I shaved my beard off this summer, just for the hell of it. Guys can
do that; dramatically alter our appearance in 10 minutes with clippers
and razor. I felt naked for a time, a hermit crab minus the shell. Our
preschooler clutched Mom’s hand when he saw me, seeking
reassurance that I wasn’t some strange doppelganger who’d taken
over his daddy’s spirit.
Now, instead of getting my attention by grabbing my beard, he likes
to run his hands over the stubble at the end of the day. He believes me
when I tell him that stubble is proto-hair, but I’m not sure he sees the
connection.
I tell him I’ll grow it back soon. Beards are in again, I hear. Not that
they’re ever out of fashion to me. Bushier eyebrows on women are the
thing this season as well, I’m led to believe. All that pain and plucking,
a thing of the past?
Somehow, I doubt it.
Kids, of course, are hairless wonders – until they are not. My wife did
a double take not too long ago when she realized the 15-year-old boy
had hair under his arms. I reminded her that he’s been sort-of shaving
for a year or more, and that these things tend to accompany one
another.
We don’t have dogs, but hair all over the place is still a problem. My
wife and daughter both have long hair, and it’s in evidence
everywhere. If I happen to leave some shaving residue in the sink and
get upbraided for it, it’s a simple defense to find one of those long,
brunette strands nearby and hold it up for inspection. She’ll argue that
“all those little hairs” are somehow worse, but I point out (to no great
purpose) that, in terms of sheer length, one strand of hers eclipses
weeks of shaving detritus on my part.
While I take the boys and myself to the barber every couple of
months for a trim, daughter mostly prefers no one cut her hair. Trims
must happen on occasion, but I’m not sure how or when. Arguments
about bangs in her eyes flare up on occasion between her and her
mother, but nothing changes. Meanwhile, my wife plans entire
mornings around the monthly ritual of dying her hair to mask the gray.
I dream of someday making enough money for her to have it done
professionally, but for now it’s Clairol all the way.

Hair comes and goes. Kids start out bald — or close to it — and return
to the look later in life. Hair falls out, turns gray, gets dyed different
colors and sometimes appears in unusual places. It can be a sign of
puberty, a distinguished mark of maturity or an annoying absentee.
Hair can be beautiful — on a blushing bride, for instance — or
disgusting, hauled out of the drain accompanied by mysterious goo.
Bad hair days can make women despondent and men baffled, as they
scan the ‘do for signs of something, anything, that looks different from
yesterday. A purple Mohawk can lose a kid his inheritance, while a
fluffy plume atop an infant’s head can prompt grandpa to open up the
checkbook.
I believe I now understand why some guys just shave their dome and
forget about it. If you can cross hair off the list of things to worry
about, think of all the time you can devote to more important things,
like the upcoming Broncos season.
Anyone up for predicting what kind of beard Jake Plummer will be
sporting this year?

Heaving down the duplex
In the days of wooden ships, nothing slowed a guy down more than
having a hull full of weeds, barnacles and worms. In dry dock, they’d
heave down the ship and scrape it all off, a much-relieved captain
sailing off later with a “clean bottom” and confident that he could get a
few more knots of out his vessel.
My family needs whatever the equivalent of a dry dock is. With spring
here (sort of), our duplex needs to be heaved down, turned out and
relieved of the weeds and barnacles that have accumulated – in this
case a landfill’s worth of old or outgrown clothes, toys, sports gear and
a potpourri of random crapola that finds its way into our garage like
stray cats to a wharf.
It’s a two-car garage, but the floor has never felt a tire tread since
we’ve lived there.
I noticed the other day that we have a large, plastic jack-o-lantern
that was never even displayed last Halloween. Ditto a large, plastic
Easter egg/bunny thing that was given to me free by a hardware store
guy the day after Easter one year. Now I know why it was free.
Children have this pesky habit of growing constantly, and it’s hard to
keep track of all the stuff and whether it fits anyone or not. We’ll come
across boxes of clothes saved for a little brother, only to find the
would-be hand-me-down recipient has already grown past the sizes.
Ski boots, ice skates, poles, skis, in-line skates and the like are
similarly accumulating, and it’s a rare event when we get the chance
to compare the gear to the people in the house to see what can go.
When we do, there’s always the discussion about what to do with it:
save it for theoretical grandchildren, donate it, trash it or have a
garage sale. This last option is something we’ve decided, after several
experiences, is never worth the time (up early, work all day, make a
hundred bucks).
There was that show, “Kung Fu,” when I was growing up. It was about
a Chinese priest who walked around the U.S. protecting little people,
and all he had were the clothes on his back and a small bag slung over
his shoulder. He had a flute he played, and, presumably, a change of
underwear and maybe a toothbrush in his bag. And that was it.
I know I could never be that guy, but I’d like to try. What if each kid
had like five toys, three sets of clothes and one mess kit they had to
clean by hand in the sink after meals? We’d have one, non-cabled TV,
share a computer, use public transportation exclusively and leave the
heat under 65 in favor of heavy sweaters (although I have to admit I
already do this).
You can’t fire a dad, but my kids could try to sue me over such
changes. A modern judge might even award them damages, perhaps
citing “parenting that denies children certain amenities consistent with
the culture they were raised in.”
Accumulating stuff is so much a part of our here-and-now that it’s

almost laughable to suggest there’s another way. The so-called
“simple” movement may be nice in theory, but have you ever seen a
woman stripped of her curling iron, or a man separated from his
remote?
Even if we got all our sofa-surfing 21-year-old’s stuff out of the
garage, all the old clothes and non-fitting gear and random junk, the
dried-up paint cans and non-functioning small appliances, would we
end up feeling empty, like we don’t have enough stuff? What if there’s
a flood, the apocalypse, anarchy – aren’t we going to need that box of
old TV cable for something?
Maybe the better answer is to go with the flow. For us, even if we
purged the most obviously purge-able, there would still be no room in
the garage for a car.
And I’ve gotten to be pretty handy with the snowbrush this season.
Homecoming blues
In theory, a high school reunion seems like an interesting idea. In
practice, though, have you ever heard anyone rave about the
wonderful time they had at their 10th, 20th, 50th? It always seems
whatever we’re looking for at a class reunion – mainly the esprit de
corps that existed when we were all seniors together – is glaringly
absent. Not only that, many of the ground rules we worked under have
been rearranged: That nerdy kid is a millionaire, the prom king is
behind the counter at the Quicky Mart and a favorite teacher has been
indicted.
Well, times change, right? In my case, this past summer represented
the ticking off of 25 years since my high school class marched (or
stumbled) out into the world. The “reunion” consisted of a few e-mail
exchanges, a half-hearted attempt at building a Yahoo! Web page and
a short gathering of four of us around my dining room table in Frisco.
Across the street, about 200 yards from where we sat wondering
where all those years went, construction crews were in the final stages
of knocking down most of what remained of our old high school (since
converted to a middle school).
Since so many mountain folk come from other places, it’s not that
typical to find someone who grew up or graduated from high school
here. Some of us will happily “out-local” anyone who wants to
challenge our knowledge of or claim to the area, while most of us have

been around long enough to know that people come and go and, well,
whatever. In the case of a high school reunion, it never surprised any
of us that we couldn’t get it together, or that our last two attempts
were pretty weak as well.
No one invited us to homecoming this year again, either. With two
high schoolers in our house gearing up for the big event, I mentioned
this oversight and they gave me the look that says I have obviously
just arrived from a galaxy unknown to them.
“Yeah,” I said. “Homecoming is supposed to be where former
students, the alumni, are invited to the game and the dance.”
More blank looks, with the unstated conclusion being that
homecoming is so obviously about US, who gives a crap about former
students?
And in a way, they’re right. Look in any “pithy quotes” website and
you’ll find thousands of references to the notion that we should be
looking at the present and the future, not looking back. These should
be read with a nod to the idea that not knowing any history is perilous
to our future as well, but the main idea not to spend too much time
reliving the past is a sound one.
I think that’s one of the challenges of parenting teens. Up until they
get to the going-out-on-their-own stage, their reality and existence is
pretty firmly linked to ours. And when we watch them putting on suits
and ties, high heels and dresses and flying out the door to
homecoming as proto-adults, we see our own high school years (which
sure as hell didn’t seem that long ago, thank you very much) hovering
over them.
They, of course, don’t see the past, don’t care about it – and we
remember when we used to feel that way. The frustration we all feel
about the passage of time is manifested most clearly at these times,
and when the realization sinks in that “our babies” are off to the races,
it makes the notion of reunions and homecomings all that more
superfluous.
You can never go back. You can only take the moments of time
pertinent to yourself and make the most of them. While you’re at it,
remember these older kids are now living in their own time, and as
parents, our take on that is increasingly, sadly irrelevant.

How to coexist with a packrat
You say tom-a-toh, I say tom-ah-to, you like to retain everything
you’ve ever acquired, I prefer to pitch anything I’m not using at the
moment and hope I never need it again.
Maybe not the most lyrical reinterpretation of the old song, but one of
the many points of diversion my wife and I must deal with is our
respective views on “stuff.” My ultimate ideal is to be like KwaiChang
Caine in the old “Kung Fu” show, where I have this one little bag that
has my flute, a toothbrush, a change of underwear and perhaps a little
trail mix. My wife would like a semi-trailer in the backyard for the many
things that fall under the category of “you never know when you might
need it.”
If you look at my car, then look at our garage, you can gain an instant
understanding of where I’m at versus my wife.
Growing up, my dad was Lord of the Garage. It wasn’t neat, but it was
his, and my mother never made any claims on that space. Somehow, I
screwed up when my marriage began and failed to pee in the proper
corners to assert this territory for myself. Our two-car garage has
never housed a vehicle, but it does have a thrift-store’s worth of
clothes none of us will ever fit in again; pieces-parts to things we’ve
long since lost or sold; items retained out of pure optimism they’ll be
used some day; and true junk that simply needs to be identified as
such and disposed of.
My car, on the other hand, contains nothing – almost. Sure, it’s got a
booster seat, and now that windshield-scraping season is back, there’s
a snowbrush. And it’s not that I’m obsessive-compulsive about
neatness or anything, it’s just that my car is the only place I’ve
established a hegemony, complete rule over a domain where I can say
“no junk, no clutter, no nothin’!”
The pack-rat personality extends to my wife’s computer, where she
struggles to cope with thousands of e-mails that have clogged her
laptop to the point where the thing can barely open a Word document
anymore. Nothing gives me greater joy on my own laptop than when I
successfully clear my inbox of everything.
And then there’s stuff that’s tangential to the packrat thing, falling, I
guess, under the “nest-feathering” urge that drives many women.
Every morning, I try to open the Denver Post on the table in front of my
Corn Flakes, but I never can quite get it because we have a
“centerpiece” on the table, which typically consists of a mat of some
sort, a couple of candles, and a dried-flower kinda thing. A man can
live to be a thousand and never understand such items in what I call
the “doily” class of stuff, but we endure them because, well, we love
our wives and comprehend, albeit vaguely, that these things are
hugely important for some unknown reason.
The oldest son dreams of having his own place some day that has
glass-and-aluminum furniture, white walls and nothing else but his Mac
laptop and maybe one magazine on the translucent coffee table.
I wonder where such an impulse has come from? And how will he do
when a doily-bearing woman enters his life? It may not be pretty.
Great age and wisdom has taught me that fighting over doilies and
the like is tantamount to arguing with a Muslim cleric over Sharia law:
you’re not going to get far with reason. No, it’s better to let it slide and
keep a hopeful eye out for signs of softening. Like once every year or
so, my wife fusses grumpily in the garage for a day and sorts,
organizes and gets ride of some stuff. A path clears through the
crapola and all is good … for now.
Just so long as I can keep her away from my car …

In the eye of the storm
Here we are, balanced in the middle of the seemingly interminable
holiday season with the end now in sight. Christmas is past, and the
evidence of our excess is visible everywhere – from the new toys we’re
tripping over to the waste bin in the garage overflowing with
packaging.
Next year, we vow, we will spend less – or at least more wisely.
There’s always at least one toy we buy where we hit ourselves on the
head and say “What were we thinking!?” You know the one: The over-
hyped product that looked so cool on the Nick Jr. commercial but that
required 47 batteries, an hour of assembly and the ultimate realization
that the end product is sort of lame.
Many of us mountain folk have to work during the holidays, when
everyone else in the world, or so it seems, is on vacation. In my case, I
always take the week off because it is one of the weeks I get with my
son Max, who lives most of the time with his mother in Littleton.
Compared to the short weekends twice a month, a week is a great gift
that enables us to tighten up our bonds, get in a lot of skiing and
imagine what it would be like if Max could be with us all the time.
There are a lot of us out there, I know. “Non-custodial” parents who
share crumbs of custody with exes during the holidays and other
times. Other than staying together, of course, there is no perfect
solution, and someone – usually the dad – ends up with the short end
of the “visitation” stick. It can mean holidays are spent waiting,
traveling and sometimes arguing and renegotiating. Yep, if there’s one
truly great way to add stress to the holiday season, it’s to split
parenting time with someone towards whom you may have, let’s say,
less-than-warm feelings.
I’ve been doing this for a while now; about seven years. At the same
time I don’t want to see Max grow up too fast, I find myself counting
the years until his mother is out of the picture (or my picture, at least)
and he can come up here when he wants to, driving himself. Our
current agreement stipulates that I have Max at the McDonald’s in
Idaho Springs at 6 p.m. on Sunday, every other weekend. No local in
his right mind gets on I-70 and heads east at 5 o’clock on Sunday, but I
do. And I bet there are plenty of other mountain dads whose exes
opted for the Front Range after the breakup. I’m not sure who they are,
but I imagine I see them sitting in the parking lot next to me, eyes
searching for our kid’s arrival so we can get the hell back home. And
we could probably tell CDOT a thing or two about when that tunnel
traffic really is bad.
But it’s nothing compared to the three years I lived in L.A. and spent
most of Christmas and New Year’s day in the air or in airports.
Inconvenient though all that was, and still is, it’s a doable and
necessary thing if you want to maintain your relationship with a child
who doesn’t live with you full time. I don’t know how some parents
allow themselves to drop out of the picture completely, but I do
understand the temptation. This is hard stuff. While some parents are
able to enjoy civil, even warm relationships with each other post-
divorce, it seems like most of us do not. Given the power to control the
board, all too often the custodial parent exercises it to the pain of the
other.
But, as they say, this too shall pass. Keeping that in perspective is
what keeps me sane.

Logic need not apply here
Those of us with children in the preschool range know that trying to
apply logic and reason often results in stick-your-head-through-the-wall
frustration. As the kids get older, they mostly grow out of the super-
illogical – even though traces of it can still be found in tweens, teens,
young adults, middle agers and even nonagenarians.
The trouble period is when the kids get to be 4 or 5, and they act
reasonably most of the time. This makes their instances of logical
lapses harder to deal with, since we’re not coping with them on a
regular basis, as we were when they were 2. That’s the age when
illogic and conniptions are rampant, and you find yourself explaining
things like why they can’t pet the gold fish or open the car door while
driving down the highway.
I hit a logic bump the other day with our 4-year-old, who caught me
in the kind of trap I thought I was too experienced a parent to fall for. It
was one of those mornings when he was moving at the speed of mud,
taking about half-an-hour to eat a small bowl of cereal. A sloth eating a
goat could’ve beaten him, and gone back for seconds.
Hovering over him, anxious to get to work, I whisked the bowl away
as soon as the last Froot Loop (or whatever) disappeared past his
angelic lips. I made sure to ask if he was done, since he occasionally
likes to slurp the remaining milk.
He assured me he was. I dumped the milk. As it flowed down the

drain, he changed his mind.
Now, there’s no real way to reproduce the flavor you have in the milk
left in the bowl after you’ve finished cereal. It has a special cache; it’s
your milk from your cereal, and I figured there’d be no way Andy was
going to go for my hastily splashed replacement milk straight out of
the jug into the bowl.
For a nanosecond, I toyed with the idea of putting some cereal in the
milk, then straining it out to proffer at least a facsimile of leftover-
cereal milk. But it turned out he was more concerned that I hadn’t
replaced the milk with the exact amount that had been there just
previously.
“Was it more or less?” I asked, my voice even and calm, even though
I was just this side of a frustration so intense that I was eyeing a spot
on the kitchen wall for head insertion.
He wasn’t sure. I dumped a little out. He screeched. I added a little
more. He screeched louder. I dumped all of it out again, scooped him
up and said something like “enough of this nonsense, you’re going to
school!”
I then had the unenviable task of brushing the teeth of a child in the
midst of a meltdown.
I know what they say in the parenting books about this sort of thing. I
shouldn’t have gotten into it in the first place. His first decision, the
conclusion that he was done, should have been the end of it. I went for
placation and got on the fast train to frustration. Silly me.
In an interesting coda to this story, that same night, Andy spilled his
milk and, while he didn’t cry, he did ask a pointed question or two
about whether my post mop-up replacement fill was of an identical
quantity.
I should give this child a beaker, or a graduated cylinder to drink from
in the future. Maybe this isn’t an attempt to drive his parents batty but,
rather, an early indication that his interests will lie in chemistry or
biology, thus helping to reverse the precipitous decline of U.S. students
entering the math and science fields.
First, though, he’s going to have to work on this logic thing. I think
you need it for trigonometry and the like.

Lost in space, lost in sleep
Talk to new parents and one of the first things you ask is how the
baby is sleeping. From the answer, you can make a general inference
as to the relative quality of life these parents are enjoying – or
suffering through.
“Oh, she’s a good sleeper,” one happy couple might say, while
another might just give you that baggy-eyed look, and that’s all you
need to know.
Many parents think any sleeping problems they’re experiencing with
babies will magically disappear with age. In our house, of the six of us,
only one appears to have little to no problems with sleep. I fall asleep
at 9 and wake up at 3; my wife falls asleep at 3 and wakes up at 9; the
preschooler, given his druthers, would go to bed at midnight and wake
up at 5; and the teen girl, well, I’m not sure exactly when she goes to
sleep (the door is barricaded), but she requires air-raid sirens, cattle
prods and buckets of ice water to wake up. Nothing new there, given
the age, but still …
According to statistics I probably read somewhere, insomnia cost us
$270 billion a year in lost this-and-that, plus another $42 billion in
medical costs and a zillion bucks invested in nightcaps and Ambien.
We could really use a vacation, but instead of a beach or a cruise I
think I’d settle for 10 days in some kind of cryogenic freeze.
I was thinking of that film “Lost in Space,” where the dad, played by
William Hurt, gets to pack the family up in sleep chambers, punch a
few buttons and put them all in deep slumber for what is supposed to
be years (an evil robot wakes them up prematurely, but that’s another
story). For all the parents out there who’ve ever wished they could flip
a switch on a hyperkinetic toddler or somehow engage cruise control
to sneak in a few extra hours in the morning, the William Hurt machine
sounds enticing, doesn’t it?
There are a lot of factors that go into running a family, but sleep –
and lack thereof – has to be near the top of things that can be tough to
manage. A non-sleeping baby, for one, can be the first thing that clues
people into the fact that parenting can be one hell of a tough job, as
well as an exercise in supreme frustration. And it’s hard to project
forward 12 or 14 years and imagine that you may still be grappling
with same child’s non-conformist sleep patterns. Our teen daughter
can sleep through literally hours of her alarm squawking in her ear,
and only when I bang on the door, turn on the light and yell “Time to
get up!” does she notice it’s been going off. And if I’m not watchful,
she’ll wait till I’m gone, then roll over and go back to sleep.
I’m not a jealous person by nature, but when it comes to watching
our kids sleep until noon on a Sunday, it makes me positively green –
at the same time I’m happy to note that I had five or six hours of
productive or leisure time while they just … slept. Later, they enjoy
making fun of me as I nod off on the couch during a movie – at 8:30 or

some ridiculous hour. The word “pathetic” comes to mind, but I can’t
help it.
I used to think that I’d catch up on my sleep after all the kids were
gone, a fantasy that would see me at age 55 or so sleeping in every
weekend until 10 or noon. I can hear my wife laughing at the notion
that her early-bird husband, who hasn’t missed a sunrise in years,
could ever do such a thing.
But I dream of being a millionaire some day, too. You just never know
…
Make a better family this year
With a fresh set of months on the calendar, it’s a time of year when
most people look inward and take stock of who they are, where they’ve
been and where they’d like to go. Alas, many of those thoughts don’t
extend past the first week of January, and we lapse into our same old
habits and laugh with our friends about the difficulty of change.
Parents, though, have it a little different. Well, a lot different, really.
Because everything we do has consequences for our children –
whether we realize it or not. Kids have been the inspiration for many of
us to improve ourselves, whether it’s quitting smoking because we
didn’t want to set that bad example, or taking up a sport or hobby
because we wanted to share something new with our children.
Moms and dads all have things we’d like to improve about that
parenting side of ourselves. It could be something as simple as
listening more closely or showing more patience, or it could be a
bigger issue like sex, drugs, bullying or depression we know we have to
confront head-on. It’s relatively easy to not rock the boat and let things
continue on a rudderless course. The result, though, is often
misunderstanding, miscommunication and hurt feelings or absentia
that undermine the family.
One need not be a trained therapist to have a pretty good idea of
what our family needs. Looking into the New Year, I’ve got a few of my
own things I want to work on, and I’ll list them here in the hopes they
inspire other mountain parents to step up their game.
1. Listen more to the kindergartner. Sometimes the rapid-fire
discourses wash over me, and I don’t appreciate or understand
everything he’s saying. Some of it may be incomprehensible to
anyone but himself, but I’m sure there are some pearls in there as
well. He’s the last of our bunch, so I want to hear it all and cherish
it as we go.
2. Same for the three teens, although listening with them often
means watching and trying to pick up on other cues. They can be
masters of withheld information, so spending more time with
them and letting it come out organically (versus “20 questions”) is
the way to go.
3. Find more shared interests. I do pretty well with the three boys,
whether it’s skiing together, playing video games or even the
occasional match of Scrabble or chess. But where do I find that
with a 14-year-old girl? She sure as hell doesn’t want me looking
over her shoulder as she works her myspace page. Doesn’t ski or
board. It may be that a weekly visit to Starbucks together is all we
need.
4. More patience, more respect. In a busy family with two working
parents trying to keep it all together, the individual concerns of
the kids can seem petty. But they’re not, not to them. Having the
patience to listen to what’s going on with them and respecting

their concerns is perhaps the greatest gift any parent can give.
5. Leave work at work. This is difficult for me, as a daily newspaper
editor, since the e-mail and Web site follow me everywhere and
never sleep. But I can partition it better, work in the early morning
and close the laptop when the family scene starts heating up.
None of these things are difficult, but they do take time and
commitment – and prioritization. We get these wonderful children for
such a short amount of time, the commitment to be present for every
phase and as many hours as possible is a goal worthy of this or any
other year.
Men and the doily dividend
It’s April, and our Christmas wreath still hangs from our front door.
This may seem odd to most, but in our family, we recognize that we
have in our midst a certified Christmas nut in the form of my wife.
She’s a Yulemaniac, a Noelaholic – and an unapologetic one at that.
She thinks it’s the greatest season, the most fun time of year, and she
sees no reason not to start early and run late with the trimmings.
If it were up to her, the tree would still be up, Christmas music would
be blaring from outside speakers with an animatronic manger scene at
work in the front yard.
I mention this because, in a family, where a healthy relationship
between mom and dad is critical to success, men need to recognize
the doily dividend. This is the realization – often a long time coming –
that women and men have different quirks and needs, and that
identifying and accepting them is imperative. For men, this means
accepting things like the presence of doilies, Christmas wreaths in April
and other things we simply don’t understand – like potpourri or those
plug-in scent things that are like having a car air freshener duct-taped
to your face.
In the High Country, it may not be doilies but your wife’s need to
have her ski boots next to the bed (because she likes them warm) or
the kayak hanging from pulleys in the living room (someone could
steal it were it left outside). The point is, men, that there are things in
every marriage that will land in the doily realm, and if you want to
remain happily married, you’d better learn to live with them.
Wayne Levine, a friend of mine, who runs a men’s center in
California, actually wrote a book about this. There are other lessons in
it as well, but the gist of it is that men in successful marriages will find
their “terms” and stick to them. In other words, find what’s important
to you and make it clear to your wife what those things are. Don’t go to
war over your wife’s need to have ballerina figurines on the mantle –
what’s it really matter? What’s more important to you as an individual
are things like your Saturday mornings skiing with the boys, or your
presence in church or temple … or whatever it is that makes you feel
complete.
Wayne calls them “N.U.T.s,” which stands for “non-negotiable,
unalterable terms,” and he argues that men need to find and hang
onto them if they want to be better men and husbands. Compromise
on those things and men find themselves fighting pitched battles over
who makes the bed, who washed the dog last or why the Christmas
wreath is still hanging on the door. Is that really how we want to spend
our time?
My own father understood the doily dividend quite well. He might
grumble, but he was as adept at hanging curtains and putting up
shelves for my mom as he was at swapping the clutch in the car. Like
most husbands of the previous generation, Dad mostly ceded the

interior of the house to Mom and made the garage his domain. He
shrugged at the bunches of dried flowers, ceramic statuary and other
essentially useless items with the recognition that they were important
to Mom — and there wasn’t anything he could do about it anyway.
Where men get hung up on the doily dividend is when they expect
fair trade in return. It doesn’t always work that way. What’s more
important than the scales of justice being balanced in our mind is that
we husbands make the effort without expecting something
immediately in return. Women have much more advanced tracking
systems than we men do, and believe me, your doily dividend will be
realized soon enough.
So take your time, shrug lovingly at the wreaths, kayaks and
centerpieces and know that your ambivalence is for the greater good
of your marriage.
For more information on “N.U.T.s” and Wayne Levine’s upcoming
book, check out westcoastmenscenter.com.

A little more conversation
In the future, families will be connected by Star Trek-like devices that
let us know where everyone is at all times and allow instantaneous
communication. Imagine Mom asking Dad where Little Johnny is, and
Dad, who for years has claimed ignorance on such matters, whips out
some kind of Blackberry thing and knows instantly.
“He’s at 457 Maple Street.”
“Where’s that?”
Dad punches a button.
“Joe’s Tattoos ‘n Piercings.”
A finger points to the door and Dad is dispatched on a rescue
mission. Because even though Little Johnny has a Nokia 5000X
Communicat’r that cost the Smiths $300 plus an extra $30/month in
service fees, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wearing the damn
thing. It is, in fact, inside his locker at school, the frantic ringing of
which is heard only by a lonely janitor pushing a broom past.
Oftentimes, the greatest technology is simply trumped by user error
or inattention.
I’m sure many people share my love-hate relationship with the cell
phones that bind us. Sure, they’re handy when you’re at Safeway and
someone calls to remind you to get milk; or if you’re broken down on
the side of the road and need a tow truck. I believe 93.4 percent of all
cell-phone calls are superfluous, yet we still pay $90 a month for the
privilege.
Now, three of the four kids are lobbying hard for their own plan-based
cell phones. Two of them have pay-as-you-go models, with minutes
handed out in lieu of allowance. But what sounds like good parenting in
theory breaks down when you measure it against all the whining that
takes place over inadequate minutes, not to mention the utter
uselessness of the whole thing when you can’t get a hold of anyone
because they’re “out of minutes” or the phone is not in the same place
they are.
As I contemplate adding three more phones to our plan and all the
extra cost that involves, all I can think of is that, a decade ago, no one
had or thought they needed these things. Now, they’re life-depends-
on-it accessories we believe we couldn’t possibly do without.
I don’t know — what we really need in our house is some kind of
intercom. It’s a three-level place, and with Teen Daughter cloistered in
her room most of the time listening to reggae and blow-drying her hair,
she may as well be in Rangoon. Come to think of it, she probably
wouldn’t hear an intercom either.
So we use the old-fashioned method: bellowing at the top of our
lungs down the stairs, then tromping down to bang on her door. After
she’s unbolted the door and slid the dresser and filing cabinet out of
the way (the girl likes her privacy), we might ask a dumb question or
two, such as: “Didn’t you hear me yelling for you?” or “What are you
doing in here, anyway?” The answers to which will surely be “No” and
“Nothing,” respectively.
Oftentimes, parents of teens find themselves in the curious place
where, even in the same room only a few feet apart, communication is
impossible. I know they can see my mouth moving and sound coming
out, but while I believe I’m making critical, cogent points that will help
guide them in their young lives, they are hearing something else – like
whale song or Apache chanting.
It’s amazing to me that a teen girl who sums up her entire day in one
syllable then clams up completely would be interested in a
communication device of any kind. But, then, the boyfriends
apparently speak in whale song she understands – although what they
must be talking about I’ll never know.
My guess is, though, that they spend a lot of time talking about the
features they either have or want on their cell phones, interspersed
with giggles and utterances of how cool and wonderful each other is.
Surely that’s worth paying an extra $15 to Verizon every month for,
isn’t it?
Home stretch to the holiday consumer
binge
Many people heard “boo!” the other night on Halloween. What I
heard was the sound of a starting pistol to another holiday season.
When I start hearing the word “Christmas,” I don’t get all Norman
Rockwell, breaking out the reindeer sweater as I go through several
miles of light strings with a continuity tester. No, I hear “ka-ching!” and
think of all the stuff we and other American families will feel compelled
to buy that, chances are, we can’t afford.
Like the political election season, holiday season has experienced a
good deal of “creep” over the years, meaning it’s just as likely you’ll be
seeing Christmas decorations in Wal-Mart even before Halloween is
over. In fact, I think I saw a plastic crèche and a blow-up Santa
competing for shelf space with the sun block and Styrofoam beer
coolers as far away as August.
What’s the point in having a special, holiday season if that season is
extended to six months of exposure? It reminds me of the film “The
Incredibles,” where the villain plans to make super-hero accessories
available to everyone, so no one will be special anymore. The giant
retailers and the Great American Marketing Machine is so taken by the
cash to be made during Christmastide that it’s no wonder they want to
prolong the joy – even if it means diluting and degrading the whole
experience.
I’m no Scrooge; I like many of the trappings of Christmas and am far
from immune to the charm of enraptured children on the big morning.
But as America more and more becomes a nation determined to wring
every last penny and drop of meaning out of everything we do – from
the Super Bowl to the political conventions to the Presidents’ Day
“Sale-a-Brations” — is it possible, just maybe, that we cheapen it all in
the process?
CHORUS OF MILLIONS: Yes!!!
My family, like many in Colorado and around the nation, simply
doesn’t have it this year. Blame it on the price of energy, groceries,
rent, insurance, child care, doctor visits or whatever else, the fact is
the price of living has gotten so high the notion of a big gift splash at
Christmas seems less like a welcome inevitability and more like an
unaffordable luxury.
And, so, we will feel bad and guilty about this for quite some time —
or we will go into debt to make it happen anyway. The reason being
that the notion of buying a bunch of stuff is so ingrained in our psyche
that to do otherwise would seem tantamount to depriving ourselves of
food and shelter. This is the point at which Christmas becomes much
less a joy and more an ongoing source of anxiety. If you fret for months
beforehand, then whip out the plastic and have to sweat the payments
for another six months or more, the Christmas agony can be stretched
out over an entire year — or longer.
Happy Holidays? Long after the plastic junk manufactured in China
has made its way to the landfill, Chase and CitiCorp will remember well
how much you spent and affix ongoing interest to your payments. It’s a
terrible trap, one with the unfortunate effect of making what should be
a happy time of year one fraught with a long shadow of angst.
So, what to do? In this stretch from Halloween through Thanksgiving
and into the Christmas season, we can take a deep breath, look at
what we and the kids really need, set a realistic budget and do the
best we can.
Letting ourselves be swept along in a buying frenzy we can ill afford
may assuage our guilt, but it replaces it with the embarrassment that,
once again, we jumped off the bridge just because all the other kids
were doing it.

How mountain kids are different
With the white stuff falling fast and furious from the sky this week, I
was led to thinking about what kind of effect growing up in the
mountains has on kids.
The simple answer is “not much.” Kids are kids whether they’re
growing up in Vail or Valparaiso, right? Well, probably, but there are
some variations – some not so subtle. A lot of it has to do with whether
the snow and cold is embraced or rebuffed. In our house, we have one
hold-out, a 13-year-old female who’s a snow heretic unafraid of saying
she hates the stuff and wishes it would all go away.
Growing up in a place where you hate the weather (or any other
aspect) can’t be a good thing, so I offer helpful comments to help
change her mind. When she says “Yuck! I hate the cold and snow!” I
say, “No, you don’t.”
I mean, how could you hate snow? It’s the coolest stuff, literally and
figuratively. It can change the entire appearance of the landscape in a
matter of minutes. You can ski and board on it, sled on it, eat it, turn it
yellow and hammer your little brother in the face with it. Our mountain
economy depends on it. And yes, I’ve tried that line, too.
“Kaylie, our mountain economy depends on snow,” I say. “No snow,
no tourists, no tourists no businesses buying ads in the newspapers
and no job for Dad and no roof over Kaylie’s head. Get it?”
Blank look, but that’s OK. I know deep down she understands snow is
good for a number of reasons. She’s just being rebellious. Some day,
I’m sure, she’ll embrace it … or lobby hard to go to Pepperdine or
Miami for college.
The boys are another story. Just as I did growing up in Silverthorne,
they cheer the arrival of new snow, and the two old enough to ski
understand immediately what kind of positive impacts the snow will
have on their here-and-now. That doesn’t mean reason and logic have
settled in completely, though. As I watched the teen boy tromp off to
school this morning through six inches of powder wearing sneakers
and shorts, I almost despaired of our youth — until I remembered my
friend Jonathan at Summit High all those years ago. Contemptuous of
anything so pedestrian as snow boots, Jonathan wore topsiders with no
socks all year round; his only nod to the weather a denim jacket he
wore inside and out. And he’s a pretty successful Boston architect
these days, so maybe it was OK.
I do think there is a definite mountain attitude you get when you
grow up here in the hills. Most kids are blasé about things like cold,
snow and ice, and as parents we might have to occasionally remind
them to take a look at the soaring peaks swathed in clouds – sights
that many people travel thousands of miles and spend wads of dough
to regard. Mountain kids also grow up not knowing much about people
who aren’t white, overweight folks, smokers and bowling. They will one
day be amazed to discover that not everyone skis or snowboards; that

Subarus are not the national car; and that, for many people, exercise is
limited to hobbling the distance between their Crown Vic and the
nacho cheese pump at the 7-Eleven.
Mostly, our kids understand that living in a tourist area has its
challenges. You can’t go to Safeway on a Saturday afternoon during ski
season and expect to emerge sane. Tourist are often in the way,
whether it’s creeping along at .05 mph or clustered in doorways for
whatever reason, and we know to politely go around them. Even so,
it’s alarming to hear from our kids the occasional disdain for the folks
who butter our bread.
“Dad, why do the gapers go so slow all the time?”
This was from the 5-year-old, piping up from the back of the car and
obviously channeling his older brother.
I wasn’t sure if “gaper” fit into the bad-word category enough to
warrant a sermon, so I just sighed.
“I don’t know, Andy. I just don’t know.”

The ABC’s of M-O-N-E-Y
“May I please have some money?”
Most parents are used to hearing pleas for cash, many not phrased
quite so politely as this, which I heard from our 4-year-old recently. But
when those first glimmers of cash-consciousness come, as it were,
from the mouths of babes, it can be alarming – like the first time you
notice bad breath on the little angel in the morning.
Money awareness can come as early as age 2, but usually by the
time kids are 3 or 4, they’ve discovered the power of money as well as
its effects on their lives. Our preschooler is still struggling with the
concept of paper money (he’ll take five singles over a twenty any day),
but he’s aware that, for the most part, coins tend to increase in value
with size – and he’s no longer appeased by a couple of pennies.
As a family not unlike the Weasleys in Harry Potter – full of love and
fun but always struggling to make ends meet – financial issues take
center-stage on a daily basis. Can we go to the movies, have a cell
phone, go visit our friends in L.A. or have a Starbucks? With four “no”
answers ringing in their heads, it’s not surprising that our kids –
despite living in one of the world’s coolest places – feel like they’re
preparing for roles in a film about the Depression.
It’s impossible to convince children – especially teens – that there’s a
location benefit they’re perhaps unaware of. Sure, we could move to
Indiana and live in a palace with new cars and the walls lined with
plasma TVs. But we’d be in, y’know, Indiana. A perfectly nice place, I’m
sure, but not exactly the Rocky Mountain West.
The tough thing for mountain parents is that we live in a place where
the have-lots (those people in the log mansions on the hill) are so
visible to the children of us poor schlubs in the valley. It’s one thing to
see the rich brats living it up in those WB shows on TV, but quite
another to be in the real presence of Big Money and have to explain it
Junior and Missy, dressed as they are in rags (i.e., “last year’s ski
jacket”).
It’s all relative. The kids up on the hill are probably giving their old
man a hard time because he hasn’t yet replaced the ancient ’05 Lexus
in the garage (even though they only use it two weeks a year). Things
are tough all over, especially if you’re a kid wallowing in the wake of
your parents’ often-inadequate income.
I can’t help but think it’d be nice to have a second home (or
mansion), because this would ostensibly mean that concerns about
having enough to put food on the table are non-existent. Potential trips
to the doctor — or, heaven forbid, the emergency room — wouldn’t
seem more painful than the ailment itself, and taking a “real” vacation
(one with airplanes) could be something one did on occasion rather
than just read about in magazines.
Still, one has to wonder what kids who grow up with “everything”
make of the world. I know our kids have a built-in notion to make more
than we do when they grow up, and they know what privation
(however specious) feels like. Is it hard, then, for kids with silver spoon
syndrome to work up the chutzpah to make their own stack?
I wish it was a problem I had to worry about. Money may not buy you
love or happiness, but I could really use a new pair of ski pants. I’d love
to set up college funds for the kids, put up a giant play fort in the
backyard, buy my wife a gold watch and take a family trip to New
Zealand.
Sigh. Maybe in another life. Have another corndog, kids.

New Year
No doubt you’ve noticed that the changing of the last digit of the
date has had little bearing on anything other than, perhaps, your
waistline. But then again, no doubt everyone’s already hard at it on the
ski hill, the exercise machines and the calorie-burning activities of
everyday life. Somehow, that accumulation from weeks of Christmas
cookies, eggnog chugging and buttery sauce consumption will start to
come off.
This New Year’s, I was right back at my slimming devices, flinging the
4-year-old onto the couch inside a blanket (the “Flying Burrito”),
chasing the older boys down bump runs, shoveling snow (or at least
directing the 14-year-old in the proper technique, which can be
tiresome) and negotiating transactions at the returns counter at Wal-
Mart (undue frustration, scientists tell us, can burn up to 247 calories
per hour).
I took it upon myself to consult with some of the older kids about
resolutions. The 11-year-old hadn’t heard of such things, and seemed
at a loss as to how he could possibly improve on himself or his
situation. I offered suggestions, he shrugged his shoulders, I resolved
to try again next year.
The 12-year-old seemed more intrigued by the notion. She suggested
she could try harder in her dance classes, work to become better at
snowboarding and strive for world peace by aiding in the negotiation of

international treaties of cooperation (OK, I added that last bit).
Although they’re often joked about, I still believe resolutions are
helpful if done realistically. I also think the notion of suggesting to
children that they think about their lives and lots with an eye on how to
make things better is good practice for the years ahead. The 4-year-
old’s response was to fling a rubber lizard at the ceiling, but for those
at or beyond the age of introspection (which my own informal survey
now places at 12), it’s not a bad idea at all to acquaint them with the
idea of self-improvement.
So accustomed are kids to being measured against the standards of
others (from their parents and teachers to their peers and even testing
boards) that there has to be power and value in wondering how they
might improve themselves. I can’t recall ever doing much of this as a
child, but it seems to me that, as a parent, how am I going to fuss at
them later about their poor life decisions if I can’t point to having
urged them to be proactive about it now?
Actually, I find it fascinating to talk to kids about their futures. Our
14-year-old in particular has some interesting ideas about where he’d
like to be — even if he’s somewhat vague about how he’ll get there. He
envisions a day when he’s 26 (his “magic” age), still single, far enough
out of school (Oxford, no less) to be gainfully employed (at what we
don’t know) and flush with cash. His place will be a Spartan dwelling
with lots of modern furniture and brushed aluminum; the focal point of
the whole thing will be the entertainment system. A Ferrari (or similarly
overpriced vehicle) sits in the garage.
I don’t know if he’ll ever get to this place, but I cheer him for trying –
and for having something resembling vision. It’s a form of resolution-
making, and one I can’t recall having much to do with when I was a
teenager. I more or less thought the world would catch me up in its
current and I’d get to where I needed to be. While that may be close to
what happened, there’s a lot to be said for shipping a rudder earlier in
the voyage.
As for my own ’06 resolutions, I resolve to inventory them just as
soon as I can clear my ’05 to-do list.

Resetting the family odometer
Some of my children are capable of reaching speeds close to Mach 1,
on certain occasions. The 4-year-old, for example, can attain extremely
high velocities when he’s orbiting the couch or being chased by one of
his older brothers.
This same individual, on a Monday morning, can demonstrate all the
pep of a glacier or a Game Boy that’s been left out overnight in the
minivan. On one recent morning, I was convinced that his socks were
having some kind of Velcro relationship with the carpet, so sluggardly
was he in getting out the door to preschool.
I have the interesting vantage point of living in a household with a
preschooler as well as a trio of teens and tweens. It’s no revelation to
observe that people at the age of 13 or 14 are nearly comatose first
thing in the morning. The older boy eats his cereal with all the
mechanical enjoyment of a cattle cropping grass. It’s enough to make
me think I could get away buying things like All-Bran or Grape Nuts –
would they even notice? Are their brain synapses capable of firing
rapidly enough to discern that I’ve swapped the Reese’s Puffs for a
lowly form of generic Wheaties or Cheerios?
But these same teens — whose pre-noon life-sign readings parallel
those of the cryogenically frozen — can move at near light speed when
the phone rings and a member of the opposite sex is suspected. So,
too, does the presence of crinkling bags of Taco Bell cause them to
accelerate like nitro-burning funny cars.
So, it seems obvious that nature is part of the equation, but
motivation is a big factor as well. The problem comes when their need
for fast action bumps up against my own natural rhythms. I’m a lark,
which is to say a morning person, which is to say that if you ask me to
drive you to a far-away place — that is, beyond our driveway — to see
your friends after dinner, your chances are nil. About the only thing I’ll
leave the house for on a weeknight is a trip to the emergency room for
stitches or the setting of a broken bone.
My kids also find it annoying that I don’t respond with requisite
alacrity when they’ve got a burning academic need. Usually this takes
the form of a big project due yesterday or some kind of activity that
requires multiple signatures, a check for $17 and a car ride to Durango
like, NOW!
At times like these, I am fully capable of moving into “Full Sloth”
mode. As they fidget at my side, nearly late for class, I’ll have a slow,
careful look at this permission form, this medical waiver, this liability
release. I’ll study this project they’re about to turn in and find multiple
typos or something horribly wrong with the cover page (and don’t they
wish they had a dad who isn’t a newspaper editor).
As I hand over the completed documents, I’ll remind them, once
again, of an old adage I found on a poster in, I think, a tire shop
somewhere: “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an

emergency on mine.” If I’m really feeling annoying, I’ll launch into a
moldy parental spiel concerning planning, the lack thereof and its
inherent wickedness, and the need to understand that these sorts of
things would never be tolerated in the working world (even if I know
damn well that they are, in spades, each and every day).
I suppose it all offsets somehow, this speedometer of life. Episodes of
tremendous sloth are counterbalanced by frenetic activity, and periods
of medium speeds fill much of the intervening moments. Some day,
when the phrase “empty-nester” is attached to our names, my wife
and I will recall the light-speed moments with distorted fondness while
ruing the fact that, even as time slows down, that odometer has been
all-too-swiftly clicking forward.

Reinterpreting the parental warning cry
The kids call it “pre-yelling,” while we think of it as “advanced
warning.”
I’m talking about those parental admonitions that accompany things
like teen outings, borrowed equipment or, well, just about anything
beyond sitting in the living room in our presence, halo or nimbus
intact.
Example: Junior wants to borrow a pair of binoculars. We say yes,
then list 17 different things he should be sure to do to ensure safety of
said binoculars. Often, these begin with the word “don’t” or the phrase
“be careful not to …” – language by its very nature destined to go
largely unheard, unheeded and quickly forgotten. Since our kids are,
for the most part, a fairly responsible and intelligent lot, no doubt
they’re well aware of the parental purgatory in which they’ll be placed
if they come home with two telescopes instead of a pair of binoculars.
Even so, we can’t resist. These things must be said – or so some
doofus parental instinct tells us. We’re so sure that our kids will be
lured into folly unless they get a dose of the “be carefuls” on the way
out the door that we happily set aside years of parenting experience to
do so. This is the experience that tells us that no amount of
exhortations and warnings, no matter how well articulated or
emphasized, will make the slightest bit of difference in the actions of
our children.
This doesn’t include the truly useful advice that we are obligated to
impart to our offspring as soon as they appear to understand English.
“Don’t talk to strangers” and “keep your legs out of the wood chipper”
are things children need to hear and understand for their safety. What
I’m talking about here is the largely senseless repetition of things they
already know.
Parents say these things mostly for themselves, of course. There’s an
insurance policy element involved, to the extent that infractions
incurred that had been “pre-yelled” about put us safely into the “told-
ya-so” realm, if need be. Also, there’s a bit of comfort in issuing the
warnings, since it makes us feel like we’re doing something
constructive although we are, in fact, mostly powerless. Once kids
reach the age that they’re allowed out of the house unsupervised, the
only thing we can do to satisfy our natural instinct to keep them locked
in their rooms is tell them, ad nauseum, to be careful out there — for
the love of cryin’ out loud!
Instinctively, kids know this. Behind the rolled eyes and over-the-
shoulder utterances of “Yes, Mom, I heard you the first nine times” is
the recognition that being pre-yelled at is better than nothing at all.
Perhaps they intuit, at a deeply subconscious level, that if they didn’t
hear these things on a regular basis, they’d be on the road to ruin.
Maybe the halls of San Quentin and Super Max are filled with people
who weren’t told by their parents to look both ways before crossing the
street – or at the very least, keep the safety on your gun, Johnny, and
stick to low-tar cigarettes.
Somewhere between subjecting the kids to a PowerPoint presentation
on traffic safety and letting them run out the door with Molotov
cocktails is that middle ground good parents try hard to achieve. The
trinity of safety, freedom and trust must coexist if our kids have any
hope of growing up somewhat normal. And if parents err by over-
emphasizing safety and skimping a bit on the trust at times, healthy
kids have a built-in deflector shield to parse the more extreme
messages into something usable.
If they didn’t have such a trusty device for translating the pre-yell
into a message of love, they’d never make it to voting age.

What the robots will never replace
Sometimes I think about how, when robots are more advanced and
commonplace in our world, what things they’ll be able to do and what
tasks will be beyond even the most advanced microprocessors.
Already, we have the “Roomba,” which is a robot vacuum cleaner you
can now pick up for a couple hundred bucks. While I’m sure it’s a
wonderful thing for, say, a childless single or couple with pristine floors
and hallways, I just laugh when I think about such a device trying to
navigate the treacherous shoals of our house.
The four flights of stairs aside, the Roomba would have to have some
kind of Mars rover-like claw and advanced jumping action to work its
way around the multitudinous toys, backpacks, remote controls,
GameBoy cartridges, errant socks, tossed-aside jackets and all the
other familial detritus that comprises the topography of our living
space.
Roomba, you’ll have to wait until we’re empty nesters – or until you
have a companion named Pickerupperbot, which has the ability to
trundle through the house collecting things that don’t belong where
they lay. I envision the Pickerupperbot as a smaller version of those
Imperial Walkers in “Star Wars,” combining the ability to relocate
things as well as a low-power laser to zap things like saltine shards,
wads of gum, holy socks and the like.
One thing I know robots will never replace is me in my role as the

person who fills the fridge and pantry. I used to think I was a simple
man with limited brainpower – that is, until I discovered my frontal
lobe’s ability to construct complex algorithms concerning the vast
array of comestible preferences contained in the brains of other family
members. In City Market, Safeway and Wal-Mart, I deploy all this
knowledge I’ve acquired – meaningless to anyone else – and weigh
BBQ vs. ranch-flavor chips, creamy vs. chunky peanut butter, Special K
with Red Berries vs. Cinnamon Life and white vs. wheat.
All of that information must then be compared to the sales flyer, the
time of the month relative to the next pay day, checkbook balance,
available free time to actually cook, etc. etc. Shopperbot might be able
to record all those preferences, but could it also make impulse buys,
like Sobe bottles for the kids or a “ladies’ magazine” for my wife?
One android we’d all like to see is Pottybot, which would possess the
ability to go in daily and scour the tub, toilet and sink. Even if it
occasionally sucked up a perfume bottle or twisted a shower curtain
into a Gordian knot, it’d be worth it. If it could knock out the kitchen
floor as well, we’d pay a couple months’ salary for it.
I know my kids would like very much to hand off the duty of emptying
the dishwasher to someone or something else. It’s such a terrible flaw
in an otherwise useful machine: The damn thing just always stands
around waiting for us to empty it. That’s a daily event in our house,
and on weekends it’s often run twice a day. If someone were to come
up with some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption to move the plates,
glasses and flatware to the drawers and cabinets, I think the kids
would come up with the money to buy it.
Robots, yeah, they’re coming. But will they really make life any
easier? I can hear my kids arguing now over whose turn it is to hose
down Bathroombot, or how so-and-so forgot to program the
dishwasher droid to run twice that day. We’d have to employ a
Bitchbot just to keep up with all the extra slackers in the house.
Hmmmm … maybe that’s not such a bad idea?

Romeo, Juliet and the urge to text
Romeo and Juliet may be a romantic pair, but a modern update could
do another take on the story solely on what a pain in the ass they were
to their parents.
The balcony scene would be replaced with multiple instances of the
lovers texting each other on their cell phones, followed by an outraged
Lord Capulet waving the Verizon bill at Juliet while Romeo works
doubles at Chili’s to pay his own texting fees. All the mooning, wailing
and pouting would take place online, with Juliet fulminating to her
friends on her myspace page about her dumb parents and Romeo
zapping pictures of Juliet to his buddies via iPhone.
The bottom line here is that, oftentimes, kids get a lot less fun when
they start dating. In our family, we have one daughter who’s just
broken off a long-term, live-in relationship; a son whose on-again, off-
again girlfriend attends school on the opposite end of the world (the
Front Range); another daughter who spends a lot of time frustrated at
guys too timid to ask her out; and a son who wants to ask out a special
girl but can’t work up the nerve. For the kindergartner, girls are a
passing distraction that sometimes get his attention (although I keep
telling him he can’t say his fellow 6-year-olds are “hot”) but usually
don’t rise above the interest level commanded by his oft-dying tropical
fish.
I sympathize with Lords Montague and Capulet, and I appreciate
greatly the attempts made in earlier generations to control mating
behavior amongst the offspring. In the case of our 16-year-old with the
long-distance thing going on, it looks like someone repeatedly driving a
car into a wall; back up, do it again, repeat, moan, pine, moon,
languish ... and text, text, text. We’d love to issue a cease-and-desist
command, but we’d run the risk of A) being laughed at and B)
compelling him to increase the speed at which he propels
aforementioned Love Bug into the wall. The best we can do is take the
cell phone when his lovelorn-induced surliness reaches crescendo.
This electronic grounding, of course, is sort of a “nuclear option” for a
teenager – the equivalent of removing the trellis from Juliet’s balcony
while taping Romeo’s mouth shut and leaving him trussed up in the
corner. If you think your teen was a problem when he was focusing all
— and I do mean all — attention on the 4-inch piece of plastic and
electronics, just wait to see what he’s like when you take it away for a
day or two. Images of hungry sharks attacking a bloody goat tossed in
the water come to mind. And when you hand it back, use an oven mitt
to avoid being wounded by eagerly clutching fingers.
Yes, puberty and all the dating stuff takes the kids out of our realm
and into another, more complicated place that’s rarely as fun as
endless rounds of Playstation games or lining up Matchbox cars or

Polly Pockets. There are moments, it seems, when a positive dating
experience occurs, but all too often they seem immediately followed
by something terrible, traumatic and earth-rending. This is the way it
was, is and always will be, and who knows why. And we know that no
amount of comfort, consultation, exhortation or expressed frustration
will sway these Romeos and Juliets from their assigned paths:
Run car into wall, back up, repeat. Moan, moon, pine, ache and text,
text, text. Regardless of the time and technology, some day something
good may yet emerge from the wreckage.

The safest children in the world
As I sit across the desk from a man whose wife is pregnant with their
first child, I think about the changes in store emotionally and
financially , the joy and pain — not to mention the dreaded notion of
having to “baby-proof” one’s home.
Actually, a more accurate term is “toddler- and preschooler-proof,”
since babies mostly lie about, for the most part staying out of trouble
until they master crawling then “scooting,” walking, running, springing,
climbing, curtain-crawling and furniture base-jumping.
And that’s all before they turn 3.
I have in front of me today a review copy of a new book called “The
Safe Baby — A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Home Safety,” which is one of
roughly 7.9 billion books written in the last decade alone on keeping
kids safe. The author, Debra Smiley Holtzman, has done a fine job of
categorizing every conceivable horror that can visit baby, along with
steps for preventing all or most of them.
From tick bites to babysitter problems to environmental hazards to
creating a safe nursery, it’s all here for the nervous parents. Read it
cover to cover and you can only arrive at the conclusion that the only
proper way to raise children is to have them perpetually suspended in
padded vats of Jell-O, wearing full body armor, helmets and surrounded
by a cloaking device to hide them from anyone and everyone who
might bump into them, say a cuss word or toss a careless banana peel.
As the former editor of a parenting magazine whose seen about 7.8
billion of the baby-safety books out there, I can only say that
Holtzman’s book looks quite thorough, full of legitimate advice but
skirting the main point: If you’re smart and/or concerned enough to
read all or part of this book, you probably already possess the primary
tool in kid safety, which is common sense.
Following from that, here’s Job 1: Keep little kids away from stuff that
can hurt them. Adapt as necessary.
There, I just save you $14.95 – the price of “The Safe Baby.”
But there will always be a market for this stuff, because people
confuse buying a book with action. Since I have the distinct pleasure of
being the dad to a 4-year-old (with a few siblings before him), I can say
with some certainty that, aforementioned Jell-o vats aside, no amount
of fussing and book-learnin’ can keep kids safe all the time.
That’s not to say we don’t all try, but more experienced parents have
learned to relax about the little stuff. From half a mile away, I can rank
the injury by the pitch of the cry, octaves and pauses correlating to
everything from Band-Aids and ice packs to triage or an ER visit.
But we’re now part of the Safer Generation. With our helmets, knee
pads, air bags, switchplate covers, baby fences and oven guards, we’re
justifiably determined to make it a safer world for our kids. Perhaps it’s
a reaction to our own memories of bouncing around the back of the
station wagon, the seatbelts long having disappeared beneath the seat
cushions as the folks smoked butts up front.
If it sometimes seems like overkill, I suppose it’s better than the
alternative. Even so, today’s kid safety books read like a testament to
our anxious times, where fun is measured in ergs of caution and
danger lurks at every turn. Every swimming pool is a death trap, every
sunbeam represents a potential carcinogen and pets are lethal
depositories of rabies, salmonella or toxoplasmosis.
Good grief. If my short version of the book is “keep kids away from
stuff that can hurt them,” then here’s the quick-take epilogue: “Be
safe, but have some fun in life, kids!”

The tale of Mr. Saggy Pants
When I was 12 or 13, I purchased some patches at the speedway
where our dad took us to see car races in summertime. I thought they
were cool, but my mother found the one for “Hooker Headers”
offensive. The patch was a simple heart with the name “Hooker”
emblazoned across it, so unless you happened to be one of the
relatively small number of people who knew that Hooker was a brand
of custom exhaust components, you might think this clueless kid was
endorsing the world’s oldest profession.
Suffice to say the patch was never sewn on my denim jacket, but no
worry: I had plenty of other tricks up my sleeve for looking stupid —
from wearing 20 Grateful Dead buttons on my jacket to wearing my
parted and blow-dried hair down to my shoulders to sporting only
concert tees.
Maybe I looked silly, but I blended in, for the most part.
Of course, this is nothing new. Ever since Um-Blort the Caveteen
wore his loincloth backwards just to annoy his parents, “young people
today” have gone out of their way to differentiate themselves from the
folks. In the process, they do a great job of annoying us — a two-fer
which, for the kid, reinforces the beauty of whatever form of loincloth
repurposing is taking place.
In the past couple of years, a trend that started in prison and moved
to the hip-hop culture and into black youth has surged into the
mainstream. It’s such an annoying trend that some communities in
Louisiana and Connecticut (and, I’m sure, others to follow) have
enacted laws prohibiting it. Mountain parents who see their little
darlings sporting the latest prison fashion are mortified, and I’ve no
doubt some local teens have been subject to grounding, cell-phone
confiscation and other horrors if they’re caught exhibiting the latest
example of loincloth backwards.
I’m talking about Saggy Pants, of course. Also known as Droopy
Drawers, The Great Boxer Reveal … or How to Drive Your Mother
Insane With One Simple Tug. Our 16-year-old – who’s about as black
and hip-hoppy as Ryan Seacrest – has taken up this trend and is simply
incredulous when we don’t endorse it. We express amazement right
back, wondering how he could A) Think this looks cool; B) Find it
comfortable; C) Attract females of the species looking, as he does, like
a kindergartner with his shoes untied and on the wrong feet; and D)
Not bow to our wishes and dress like a human being for god’s sake.
We’ve not gone as far as an outright ban on Mr. Saggy Pants, since
we believe teens with straight-A averages have earned a few scraps of
First Amendment protection. On the other hand, if the high school
banned the practice, I doubt I’d show up with torch and pitchfork in
protest. But we do make our displeasure clear, and Mom has been
unequivocal in her condemnation of the Droopy Drawers practice.
Underwear, by its very nature and definition, goes inside the pants, not
outside. Plus, those jeans we spent Good Money on are being torn up
at the bottom as the waistline has been hitched south.
I’m still torn. I think the Saggy Pants look is absurd and, in some
cases, downright offensive (as in “Dude, back off or turn around
because I do NOT want to see your skivvies.”) But I also understand
the desire to look different from the folks while running with the herd
at high school. My only disappointment comes when I see a kid who’s
generally not afraid to swim against the tide endorse such a ridiculous
example of Groupthink. But, then, I must remind myself that it’s not
silly to him and, in high school, Groupthink is a tool for survival.
That said, I am working on an invention I plan to sell to millions of
parents. It’s a sort of rubber-band-action bazooka that shoots Velcro-
tipped denim at high velocity. The Boxer Cannon can cover a set of
Droopy Drawers in seconds from as far away as 100 meters.
It’s $39.95; check the Web site.

Shirt circles and the sea otter effect
We’ve all heard of crop circles — well, I’ve got shirt circles. They’re
mysterious rings that appear on my shirts that have my wife and I
utterly mystified as to their origin. It looks like someone has been using
the area around my sternum as a coaster.
I’ve looked at places where I sit, places where I might be leaning
forward into a counter or desk. I’ve tried to think about times when I
might have fallen asleep with a glass on top of me, or if the 4-year-old
has been playing practical jokes on me with a sippy cup or a toy squid
tentacle.
But while the shirt circles are inexplicable, the phenomenon behind
them is not. Married men – especially ones with small children – don’t
have the same ability to be immaculately groomed as when we were
single. And even if most of us weren’t immaculately groomed then, we
at least knew we had to look somewhat presentable were we ever to
have a chance at getting married. That way, we could then have kids
and thus an excuse for not looking so presentable and having shirt
circles or baby barf on our pants.
I remember looking at my own father, who used to lie on the coach
with a pile of nuts or candy on his voluminous belly, looking for all the
world like one of those sea otters that float on their back and use their
bellies as a table to eat shellfish. Would that one day be me, I
wondered? Would I ever be so unconcerned with my appearance that

I’d wear burgundy sweat suits or Dockers shorts with dark socks and
mustard-colored K-Swiss sneakers?
I’m not there yet, but I’m eyeing the curve that starts on one end
with me actually ironing my shirts once a week and some time in the
future, where my wardrobe – at least at home – is reduced to one-
piece, zip-up suits: flannel in winter, cotton for summer.
I’ve been double-plaiding this winter already, so I feel like I’m halfway
there. This occurs when I come home from work and pull on a pair of
“happy pants” (our family’s name for those flannel sleep pants),
forgetting or not caring that the plaid happy pants are clashing — with
all the force and cacophony of a middle-school brass band —with the
plaid shirt I had on all day.
The 13-year-old girl will grimace and make a vague hand gesture,
which I interpret as a yellow penalty flag directed at the plaid foul. I
feel her pain, but I’m already downstairs, far from the sartorial
cornucopia that is my closet. I can’t even remember the last time I
bought myself a new shirt — and I remember the days when I used to
have a Brooks Brothers charge card. If it wasn’t for my wife
remembering such things at Christmas time, I’d be fashioning new
boxers from those ubiquitous canvas tote bags that seem to
accumulate in the house like school papers.
So, no, I’m no longer a fashion plate. I can clean up OK if need be,
and somehow, on the rare occasions that I need to, I can remember
how to tie a tie. I’m a lucky man in that my wife thinks I look fine no
matter what — double plaid, shirt circles and all. Since she’s the only
woman whose opinion counts, it takes a lot of the burden off —
especially since getting colors to coordinate is not my strong suit.
I am worried about my influence on the children, though. The 14-
year-old went off this morning in shorts with black shoes and socks,
and the girl is perhaps at risk for social death if her friends see me
looking like Forrest Gump. But that’s for them to figure out.
As for these shirt circles, I’m leaning towards the “aliens-are-
removing-DNA-from-my-body-at-night” theory. In their stealth, they
forget that their DNA sucker leaves marks on cotton.
My wife says Tide with bleach will take them out.

Slaves to the dishwasher
The old Kenmore, the needy beast, hums and throbs nearly
constantly during the summer. With the kids home all day forever
snacking, eating meals and drinking, it’s not unusual for us to run the
thing three times a day.
And here I thought I’d be saving money on the utilities bill once the
warm weather arrived.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the
dishwasher. As a single adult, I eschewed its charms – such as they are
– and washed my meager output by hand. In many places I lived, it
wasn’t an option in the first place, since said appliance wasn’t
furnished with the rental.
This sort of monkish asceticism astounds my children, who would no
sooner wash a spoon or plate in the sink than they would wash their
own clothes with a scrub board, or chop wood to boil water.
Yes, they love the dishwasher, investing it with powers far beyond its
actual ability then looking at amazement on the other side when things
don’t come out spotless. I’m not sure what they think goes on in there
– small organisms, like those “Scrubbing Bubbles” on the TV ads,
maybe. Oh, how they wish. I try to explain it’s just high-pressure water
squirting around, and that baked-on beans aren’t going to come off no
matter how wishful the thinking.
Deaf ears, deaf ears. But at least they’re learning things about
covalent bonds and the transmogrification of food matter into powerful
adhesives through the cycles of a dishwasher.
And while they happily load the thing — as willy-nilly and haphazardly
as they can in violation of all parentally handed-down exhortations
regarding the proper placement of glasses, dishes and silverware —
when it comes time to emptying it, you’d think we’d just suggested
putting them on trial for war crimes. The hew-and-cry has lessened as
the inevitability of the hated task has sunk in over the years, but they’ll
still rarely do it without being asked or told. The atmosphere in the
room quickly turns chilly, and we’re made to understand – albeit
silently – that they resent greatly this intrusion on their time and
energy and would much prefer we, the parents, handle this odious
task.
I know all this is true because it’s the exact same way I felt as a kid.
As an adult, I don’t enjoy emptying the dishwasher, but it’s something I
can deal with. When I was 12, though, it was hard to imagine a more
loathsome chore, made all the more so because of how frequently it
needed to be done.
I’m not sure why this is. Logically, objectively, it is the simple
relocation of a series of items from point A to points B, C, D and
sometimes F. The objects in question are clean, more or less, and the
task itself takes only a few minutes – less if evil parents have enjoined
a sibling to help.
Laws of motion probably have more to do with this than anything.
With apologies to Newton, children at rest prefer to remain at rest
unless acted upon by an outside force (a parent, phone call from a
friend or something that interests them more than emptying a
dishwasher, which encompasses 99.999 percent of all known
activities).
What never fails to amuse me is the trail of shame that accompanies
dishwasher-related things. If they encounter something slightly odd
that doesn’t go in the normal places – a funnel or garlic press, say –
said object can land anywhere from the breadbox to a shelf in the
garage. That’s because once the hated task is at hand, it needs to be
done with all expediency.
Another source of mirth is the stack of dishes that accumulates while
the dishwasher is waiting to be unloaded. It never occurs to them to
put these in after they’ve emptied, even if some of them are items
they left there only moments ago and clearly subject to the rule of
leaving no things in the sink. Somehow, they feel “grandfathered-in”
by the fact that the dishwasher was unavailable when they had to deal
with the plate, and since washing by hand is not an option, it goes in
the sink.
Whatever. The bottom line is we don’t have a maid, so the kids
empty the dishwasher. There is one small solace for them, though:
With the 4-year-old able to help by doing the silverware now, they can
share the misery. When I hear them cracking the whip to get him on
task, it sounds awfully familiar.
In fact, they sound like my wife and I. And thus does the dishwasher
slavery get handed down, in the natural order of things, to the next
generation.
My 3 sons and the nickel package
We used to love Friday nights at the race track, my siblings and I. The
track was in a town called Islip (which was fun to say), the evening’s
events usually concluded with a crack-up derby, and afterwards Dad
took us to a place called Danny’s Pizza. This being Long Island, the
pizza was heavenly – good enough to endure a couple hours of
watching cars go round and round to no readily apparent purpose.
Once, our Dad took us to a Mets game. He was a NYC firefighter, and
it was free day at Shea for the guys who wielded hoses. I watched an
inning or two and then fell asleep for the remainder. It would be 20
years before I saw another baseball game (Rockies first season at the
old Mile High), but my interest level in the sport hadn’t changed much.
With the Rockies making it to the World Series this year, my interest
piqued slightly. It went from, say, my level of concern for the standings
in the South Korea Women’s Mah-Jongg Championship to that of the
South Texas Good Times Shuffleboard League (at least I can
understand what the South Texans are saying). A big fan of Colorado,
the state, I wished the Rockies all the best but didn’t watch a single
game. And when I told some guys around the lunch table at the Vail
Daily that I couldn’t name a single player on the championship team, I
got that look – the same kind of look guys might give you when you
reveal that your role in the high school play was that of a dancing
unicorn.
The old nature-nurture question comes into play when talking sports,
although I suspect the latter has more to do with it than anything. If
your father is planted in the easy chair every Sunday watching every
NFL game he can, you’ll likely grow up to do the same thing yourself.
At the very least, you will likely gain some knowledge always helpful
around the nacho bowl – like the difference between a strong safety
and a free safety, or what it means when they say players are lined up
in a “nickel package.”
Illiterate about sports as I am, I nonetheless do enjoy watching the
Broncos – especially if I think they have a slight chance of winning. I
have learned a few things over the years about the rules, although I
still don’t know what a “nickel package” is and, at this point, I don’t
really care. I was curious, though, to see what kind of Broncos fans my
three boys might turn out to be. Perhaps I would do a dissertation for
the University of Who Gives a Crap.
The 6-year-old wishes the Broncos would be abducted by aliens, the
whole team. That’s because when the game is on, I am not giving him
100 percent undivided attention. The 13-year-old will sit and watch the
game with me if he’s around, but he’ll also wander off and come back
later to ask the final score. He’s happy if the Broncos prevail, but that’s
about the extent of his “sports mania.” The 16-year-old doesn’t give a
damn about the Broncos or other sports teams. Come to think of it, he
doesn’t care about much these days other than his long-distance
girlfriend.
Mostly we reap the parental seeds we sow. I’ve spent a lot more time
in dark theaters acting and directing than I have on the sports field,
and that influence seems to be rubbing off. Fine with me: Concussions
and career-ending fracture are rare on stage. Plus, there are lots more
women in theater, most of whom will never ask my sons to explain the
nickel package.
Starving on the scenery
Oftentimes, when I tell people my wife and I have five children, their
shock is followed by a simple, understandable question: How do you
afford it, especially up here?
The simple answer is “not easily.” The more complex response ends
with a conclusion that looks something like “we can’t.” Perusing the
personal finance columns in the Sunday paper, I often chuckle at all
the advice about how you should have 10 grand set aside for
emergencies, put 10-20 percent of your income into savings or fret
about which annuity to buy or how to manage the tax questions
surrounding your vacation home.
If, by the measures set out by the financial experts, we are not doing
these things or anything like them, it starts to look like raising a family
in the mountains is, from a financial perspective, utter lunacy.
Paycheck to paycheck, nothing in savings, no college funds begun, no
home to call our own, vacations nonexistent – I doubt our situation is
unusual for working parents in the High Country. Surrounded by
second homes and other trappings of great wealth, our very backyards
can take on the sheen of a tremendous insult, as ownership of the
place we call home is gradually shifted to people from other places
who make more – lots more – than we do.
Boo-hoo, right? Well, there is a certain measure of self-pity among
locals who look around and determine that they can’t really afford to
live in the place they’ve chosen to raise their families. A lot of times, it
seems as if the cards are simply stacked against us. Just today, I
received the new tuition rate sheet from our son’s preschool, showing
that the already outrageous amount we now pay has gone up 10
percent ($786 per month to $863). If we were really poor, we could get
tuition assistance. But, dang it, we’re just not broke enough to qualify.
It’s like we can almost hear a voice in the background intoning “Go
away!”
Believe me, we think about it all the time. But it’s not easy to leave
the place you consider home. My wife is a relative newcomer, but I
graduated from high school up here, and though I’ve lived in places
like L.A, New York, Massachusetts and New Mexico, our Colorado
mountain town is home – the kind of place where the guy at the
hardware store asks me about my parents as he offers advice on a
project; the kind of place where my kids can chuckle at the Class of
1982 composite still hanging in the high school, with dad in his groovy
haircut and funky glasses.
But one not need to have grown up here to have it feel like home or
to entertain the insane desire to stay. These mountains grow on you,
they do. For some, the lure is so strong that all the cons are beaten
down by the pros, and we muddle along despite all the good, sensible
reasons to beat it for a more sensible place to live.
Many of us, anyway. It’s hard to get exact figures, but my sense is
there’s a growing trend by locals with kids – or about to have them – to
seriously rethink what it means to be a mountain family. Sure, it’s
great up here, but if you can get twice as much house for half or a
third the money somewhere else — be it Lakewood, Des Moines or
Boseman – do you owe it to your family to try? I know plenty who’ve
answered “yes” to that, many of them long-time High Country dwellers
who simply said enough is enough.
There’s an old adage about living up here that suggests one cannot
eat the scenery, and it’s true. You might be able to feed the soul on it
for a time, but at times, mountain living as reflected in one’s non-
existent portfolio makes it seem like some kind of fool’s game.
And who knows – perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, all
that’ll be left are a bunch of aging, part-time residents served by a
migrant, commuting workforce. Those will be sad days indeed.

The lost art of summer nothing
“So, what’s the plan today?” the oldest boy asks.
The implication is that I have some kind of grand itinerary lined up for
this Saturday in summer. Horseback riding, perhaps, followed by lunch
at the Ritz and an afternoon whitewater rafting, after which we’re off to
Denver for a show.
“What plan?” I respond, usually accompanied by references to
cleaning the garage as a perfectly acceptable summertime activity. If
he hasn’t wisely retreated yet, I’ll wheel out something about “when I
was a kid.” How, on summer days, my siblings and I got up early and
got the hell out of the house if my dad was home. The man worked two
jobs, but his inability to relax meant that, even when he was off, he
was tackling all manner of domestic tasks – from doing a brake job on
the Oldsmobile to painting the house to, yes, cleaning the garage or
basement.
Once free, though, we certainly didn’t look to our parents for
entertainment. Even if they had something fun to do, the chance that
they might come up with some post-fun work was too great a risk to
allow us to stick around. Nope, when I was a kid, the neighborhood was
one vast playground, and the notion of structured activities like “fun
clubs” or soccer camps and the like was largely alien.
I can’t recall being bored, although I’m sure it happened. But I also
think we had a higher tolerance for low levels of activity back then in
the pre-Nintendo era. Kids today may have indolence down as well as
we did, but they seem to lack the ability to make a little something out
of nothing. In my Long Island neighborhood, we could spend hours
digging in dirt in the backyard, or exploring caterpillar nests behind the
grammar school. Often, our forays took us to the forbidden “sump” – a
storm runoff facility best described as a waterless pond.
Surrounded by forbidding fence topped with barbed wire, the sump
had several access points created by kids; bowed-in sections where
those in the under-100-pound set could slither through. Once inside,
there wasn’t much to do and no danger to speak of, but the fact that
we were in forbidden territory was apparently thrill enough.
Something else we did back then was simply pop by friends’ houses.
That doesn’t seem to happen today, as everything needs to be
prearranged with play dates and parental meet-ups to address our
anxieties about what kind of homes our children might be visiting. For
all my parents knew, my friend John Scarola’s house had a munitions
dump in the basement. Mostly, though, we just watched old Japanese
monster movies on Channel 11 while drinking fruit punch.
At the risk of sounding like a coot in training, kids today just seem to
be less self-sufficient in the entertaining-themselves realm – and this is
no more apparent than in summer, when free time abounds. Or is it we
parents who have robbed them of their natural inclination to roam at
will with our hand-wringing, helmet-wearing culture? It’s hard not to

think we’re raising a generation of incurious, apprehensive
homebodies afraid to venture past the cyber worlds of the Playstation
or their iTunes collection.
Summer moms used to shoo the kids out the door in the morning and
see them only at lunch and dinner. Dirty, tired and hungry, we’d
shuffle home at dusk and give the universal response to parental
inquiries of our doings: “Nothing.”
Somehow, it was a glorious thing, all that freedom and unstructured
time. With cycles being what they are, maybe our kids will lighten up
and our grandchildren will have a crack at it. One can only hope.
Summer: Time to turn the brain off
School’s out, so it must be time for the kids to reach inside and flip
off the big switch that says “learning.”
Or is it? Like tourists coming through the Eisenhower Tunnel, putting
the brain on “idle” is a simple thing; requires no thought at all, really.
Sure, some kids may have summer school or camps that require some
modicum of cerebral activity, but there’s something about warm
weather that tempers learning as surely as a PS2 game or a
myspace.com marathon.
My own father couldn’t abide physical idleness, and in summer we
learned early on to keep any outward manifestations of sloth carefully
hidden. That meant either flopping on the couches at the homes of
friends or, at the very least, staying out of sight when he came home
from work lest he put us to work cleaning the garage (that most
dreaded of tasks). I’ve carried some of that over, but mostly its
intellectual inertia that bothers me.
As I’m learning, though, it’s not easy to countermand – especially
since I lack the dictatorial approach my dad used. When I suggested to
the 13-year-old that we come up with some kind of project for her to
work on over the summer, she looked at me as if I’d just asked her to
surrender her curling iron.
“Why?” she asked, at which point I launched into the kind of
annoying parental homily that she could later recount to friends with
mirthful indignation. It had something to do with keeping one’s brain
engaged, how learning was a 12-month pursuit and may even have
contained the phrase “…if you’re ever going to get anywhere in life
….”
The two older boys are working on longer works of fiction this
summer, which tickles me at the same time I hope they keep it as a
hobby and get JDs or MDs for their day jobs. The 4-year-old is going to
work on shapes, the alphabet, numbers and techniques for sitting still
(a consummate wiggler, this child can rub paint and stain right off
chairs). To inspire them with solidarity, I’ve pledged to finish a stage
play I’ve been working on, and in my mind the household will be a
beehive this summer of intellectual activity.
Even if the reality falls somewhat short of that, I’ve been guiltily
reassessing my own level of engagement with our kids’ educations. I
can’t say I’m thrilled with the curriculum the local schools offer, and
when I ask them questions about what, exactly, it is they’re learning,
their shrugs and vacant expressions make me wonder what the hell is
going on at school all day long.
And these are kids who get grades ranging from good to excellent.
But can they find Turkmenistan on a map or identify the secretary of
state? Does that matter? Should we start home-schooling them? When
would we do that? While they’re playing Tony Hawk III, are their future
jobs already being purloined by people in Bangalore? Why are they

learning French instead of Mandarin? How can I interest a teenage girl
in exploring Stalin’s purges or Cubism if she has five friends online
IM’ing each other about a new top one of them found on sale at Old
Navy?
Hard to say. Summer brain slump is nothing new, of course, but I
could make a case that intellectual curiosity among “kids today” is on
life support. If anyone has any suggestions on at-home jump-start
programs for keeping kids’ minds in gear during summer, I’d love to
hear them.
In the meantime, fallow brains make for perfect slaves, and we’ve got
a raft of dandelions in the lawn that need picking.

Taming the little purity-freak
In the long list of potential parental sins, I inflicted Numero Uno on
the 4-year-old the other morning: I gave him a dirty spoon.
It was one of those pieces of flatware that had a small – maybe 2
millimeters square – piece of lettuce stuck to it and dried on by the
dishwasher. In Japan, they call this “nori” and happily eat it with raw
fish. To a Colorado preschooler shoveling Lucky Charms in his mouth,
though, the offensive matter represented nothing short of culinary
heresy.
At first, I thought his cries had to do with a stubbed toe, or perhaps
milk spilled on his jammies (yes, he does indeed cry over such things).
Then, the crescendo of wailing made me think it was more serious:
Was this an “ER cry” that might necessitate a visit to the medical
center?
Nope, wasn’t that. I know all of Andy’s cries pretty well, and this
wasn’t any of them. It had an odd, warbling lilt to it, as if he were
freezing and crying at the same time. He was so upset, in fact, that it
took some moments before I could identify the source of the problem.
Then, he held up The Spoon. Guilt struck like one of Zeus’s
thunderbolts: How could I have failed to notice the horrible thing?
Through his whimpers and wails, I came to understand that the foul
was two-fold: Not only had I given him a dirty spoon, but he’d eaten
half a bowl of cereal with it before identifying its evil nature. It

reminded me of the time long ago, when one of my sisters bit into a
sandwich, swallowed, then noticed the still-wriggling half-a-bee poking
out of the bologna.
Horror, indeed.
In almost every way, Andy is all-boy. He doesn’t care if he gets
coated head-to-toe with dirt, muck, algae, paint or jam, and he’ll
handle the nastiest-looking insect with nary a second thought. But
somehow, he’s acquired an over-developed sense of purity about
certain things, most notably how fresh his drink is (“Is this new apple
juice?” … he asks several times daily) and the “taint factor” of his
eating implements. If he has a bowl of fruit and a plate of something
else, he darn well insists on two separate forks, and there’s hell to pay
if cross-contamination occurs.
A friend of mine once characterized his mother’s purity code thusly:
“If she dropped a pat of butter, she threw out all the butter in the
house.” Andy’s seems to be forming along these lines, and it was only
with a great deal of persuasive argument that we convinced him that a
new spoon had remedied the problem, and that we didn’t have to
throw out all the Lucky Charms in the bowl – or in the house.
Where he gets this from is no great mystery. My wife has a list of
what I call “New Wives’ Tales” a mile long, mostly garnered from years
of reading her “ladies’ magazines.” Many of them have to do with
purity issues, and almost all of those are of the “throw it out first, ask
questions later” variety. As the main food-buyer, this drives me nuts as
I see perfectly good food committed to the trash long before its time.
Leftovers have taken on an almost pariah-like status among Jen and
the kids, to wit: If I don’t foist it upon them, they won’t touch it.
And no, I don’t want to poison my family or make them eat
something yucky. I just want full value out of the 47 metric tons of food
I have to buy every month for the family.
As for Andy and his spoon, hey, at least I didn’t insist he eat the
lettuce.
The most excellent bike in the world
Running a family of six, we divert a good portion of our paycheck to
the local Wal-Mart. There, I race through as fast as I can grabbing
bread, cereal, milk, tortillas and apple juice like a person who’s won a
5-minute shopping spree. I get in and get out as quickly as possible not
so much due to my dislike of many of Wal-Mart corporate policies, but
because I know the longer I stay, the more I spend.
I try to avoid the place, but it is like a vortex for parents trying to feed
a family in the High Country while diverting half their income to rents
or mortgages. But on a recent afternoon, I ducked out of work for a few
minutes to visit the Walton Family’s Super Center in Avon. There, I
found exactly what I was looking for: A 16-inch boy’s bicycle that I
knew would fit Andy perfectly. It was red, it had shiny stickers on it and
some kind of roll-bar pad thing. Best of all, it was $34.99, an almost
impossible price for an item as complex as a bicycle, and made so by
an unseen army of industrial serfs in far-off China. I know I should have
stopped to fret and hand-wring a bit more over working conditions in
Tianjin, but I also knew I was filling a critical link in the global supply
chain. Somehow, I was probably also helping to fight terrorism.
Plus, as I was soon to discover, I was rolling down the aisle a bicycle
that was soon to be anointed with the title of “Greatest Bike in the
World.”
The unseen Chinese workers had assembled for me a critical bit of

machinery that plays a huge role in most children’s lives between the
ages of 4 and 6. Andy was ready for training wheels off, and he’d been
bumbling around the cul-de-sac in his old 12-incher, which was just too
small for him anymore. I could have gone to a local bike shop and
spent $100 or more on a snazzy new bike, but knowing that he’ll
outgrow his latest ride over the coming long winter, I went for cheap.
The new bike came with a picture of a rocket ship on it, and Andy
promptly dubbed his new ride “The Rocket 3000.” He took to it like a
fish to water, quickly circumnavigating the cul-de-sac without incident
and eager to get on the bike path to try a longer ride. In short order,
we added a kick-stand (why they don’t put those on bikes anymore I’ll
never know) and a handlebar bag. There, he keeps water and juice and
an ample supply of Band-Aids and Neosporin. So accustomed is he now
to the skinned knees and hands that accompany cycling that he’s
gotten to where he whips out the bandages himself and applies them
on the spot.
It is an age of superlatives. I am “The Best Dad Ever” for getting him
the bike, and he unabashedly describes himself in Lance Armstrong
terms: “I’m great at this biking now, aren’t I?” Even as he then spins
into a one-bike collision and I have to extricate him from the pedals, I
assure him that he is, indeed, great at cycling.
Now, if only Wal-Mart would come out with a $34.99 car for the 16-
year-old.
The sad tale of our carpet
The carpet in our duplex originally came from another land, another
time, where it was the ceremonial floor covering for a grand hall
frequented by everything from orcs and goblins to muleskinners,
chimney sweeps and members of the International Brotherhood of the
Filthy Feet.
Through the years, our carpet suffered many other indignities as it
went down the ladder of prestige. From the grand hall, it was relegated
to an Elk’s Lodge in Dubuque, where it had approximately 64 gallons of
beer spilled on it in increments averaging 6.7 ounces, over a period of
47 years. At one point, it was ripped out and left in a field, where a
neighboring kennel of dachshunds and weimaraners peed on it, ritually
and frequently. At one point, the carpet was a resting place for an
itinerant herd of llamas.
Years passed, and then our carpet was stolen by jawas and sold on
the black market to a carpet dealer in Dotsero named Mudd. More
years passed, the carpet languished in the back room as Mudd’s
business slowly failed. At his going-out-of-business sale, the last item
he had to get rid of was our carpet. In fact, he was on the verge of
tossing it in the trash and closing the shop for good when the people
who own our duplex drove up and bought it.
“Good enough for renters,” was their presumed assessment. And so
that’s the carpet we have in our house.

Perhaps I exaggerate some. And it may have less to do with a
dubious history than the fact that they did, in fact, choose a cheap, off-
white carpet that was apparently installed by lemurs. It is impossible to
keep clean, despite our having a strict – though largely ineffectual and
slightly ridiculous – shoes-off policy for anyone entering our home. Oh,
and having five kids and their friends moving over the carpet at all
times doesn’t help.
I love the way things just appear on the carpet. Once, we found an
entire grape (of course) ice pop in the corner that had just melted
unseen. Even after professional cleaning, the palimpsest of the pop still
persists – a lingering memory to a summer day long ago, some
airheaded teenager perpetrating the crime against carpet and moving
on to his or her next activity.
Our kindergartner, though, is the prime culprit in wreaking havoc on
the poor carpet. When he eats, matter flies from his mouth area in an
arc spanning at least 6 feet. He’s like one of those food processors set
to “high” without the cover firmly in place. Andy plus one saltine can
create enough crumbs to cover the surface of Mile High Stadium. I
know that, from a physics standpoint, this is impossible, which is why
we’re entertaining thoughts of hiring Andy out to the World Food Bank.
If he can do this kind of “loaves-and-fishes” trick on a larger scale, it
could solve world hunger. As it is now, a Sudanese family of four could
exist for a week off what falls on our carpet around Andy’s chair daily.
Vacuuming helps, but nothing short of monthly professional cleaning
would likely make much difference – and at $300 a pop, that’s not too
likely. What we’ve had to do is adjust downward our expectations of
what our carpet should look like, focusing instead on the more
controllable areas at eye level. We dream of having our own home
some day, of course, and in that home the carpet is a mottled, multi-
colored thing that can visually absorb any insult.
Don’t even ask about the linoleum in the kitchen.

Relativity and the yardsticks of time
Nothing is more frustrating than time in the human experience. You
can’t change it, speed it up, slow it down or go back and do it over.
How we experience time and the whole process of aging is something
for which family provides an excellent framework. After all, no one
knows better than a mom or a dad about each second of the lives we
care for, from the first breath, first steps and words to the goodbyes as
kids go off to college, careers or an 8-10 year stretch in the Big House.
Interestingly enough, though, it’s other people’s kids (OPKs) who
often serve as the best yardstick for the passage of time. Under the
watchful gaze of parents, kids grow at a predictable pace. Granted, it
can seem meteoric at times, but like watched kettles, we have to step
back and really think about where Junior was six months ago for true
perspective.
OPK’s, on the other hand, grow in quantum leaps. And here I’m
talking about OPKs who live elsewhere; the children of old friends who
live in another state who visit every couple of years – or relatives we
see only at weddings, funerals and the like. There’s almost nothing
that makes me feel so acutely the passing of time than being in the
presence of a person who didn’t exist when I best knew his mom or
dad, and who is now walking, talking, barfing, opining or burning up
the Playstation.
Where, we wonder, did the time go? And there’s our buddy, the last
image of whom was smiling tipsily at the wedding, mopping up blech
and running for more diapers. Yes, kids happen, then they grow and
the lives of others continue apace with our own. Still, it’s amazing –
and comforting, in a way – to recognize that all our old acquaintances
are doing as much hand-wringing and racing around as we are.
As a parent, I’m always fascinated by how differently my wife and I
experience time and age from our kids. The 4-year-old turned 5 this
week, and repeatedly exclaimed that this was, in fact, “the best
birthday ever!” on “the best day ever” all taking place within the
framework of “the best family ever!” And while Andy trumpets the
miracle of five trips around the sun and I contemplate the fact that I
have T-shirts older than him, Jen and I fruitlessly wish we could stop
further birthdays for ourselves (without the dying part, of course).
For our three middle kids, summer shot by in a nanosecond, while a
trip to Denver can take an eternity for the 5-year-old. When I think
back to that hot August day in 2001 when Andy was born, I can’t
decide whether it seems like just yesterday or a million years ago. In
many ways, it seems he’s always been here; and it seems like that for
all of our kids. When I think back to the days before I was anyone’s
dad, it seems like a parallel life of some sort, lived by another version
of myself who’s long gone.
I’ve met people who moon over the “old days,” lamenting the
perceived loss of freedom and fun that becoming a parent brings. I also
know people who’ve chosen not to have kids or spouses, who think
themselves better off for it. Statistically, they’ll die sooner, but at least
things will have stayed where they put them.
I don’t worry too much about the old days anymore. More interesting
to me by far is the present and what lies ahead. Realistically, I could
become a grandfather before I’m 45, although I’m hoping for another
decade to think about it. When it comes, though, that special variety of
OPK is going to be the thing that makes time slow down once again.
Bring it on ….
The false lure of the theme park
Like a film comedy that promises to make us laugh, theme parks hold
out the idea that every second spent there will be fun, fun, fun.
This is not always the case. In my experience, it’s pretty much never
the case. Having spent nearly four years in self-imposed exile in
Southern California, my family has a lot of big theme park experience,
and while the kids may have slightly more favorable impressions, I
think we’re agreed on the point that parks get might old mighty quick.
For parents, a lot of this has to do with the basics of getting there and
paying for it all. Since I worked for a parenting magazine in California, I
got to bring the whole gang for free every time they had a new
something-or-other they wanted us to see or check out. Even so,
dropping $50 for a pizza lunch at DisneyLand was as painful as paying
taxes or coughing up 20 bucks to park.
Back to the film comparison, I believe theme parks have a preview’s
worth of great stuff – a few truly fun rides or attractions, just like the
funniest bits of the film we see advertised on TV. After that, it can be a
real hell-ride. At DisneyLand, for example, all the cool stuff can be
immediately offset by blistering SoCal temperatures that can make
what’s supposed to be the time of your life into a plaintive longing for a
quiet room with an over-performing air conditioner.
So, weather and dollars aside, what’s left? By my estimate, there are
about two or three good hours to be had at any theme park. You hit
the best rides, take in the overall vibe, maybe see a passably cheesy
show and get the obligatory picture to immortalize the occasion.
Everything after that is a dispirited denouement of tired kids, empty
wallets and a lower GI crying out from all the overpriced crapola
consumed.
It’s hard not to walk out of these places feeling slightly ashamed and
desperate for something wholesome and clean. At the very least, they
should provide showers, financial counseling and colon hydrotherapy
just outside the exit turnstile.
Despite all this, we still hit the occasional theme park – like Elitch’s in
Denver, which opened last week for the season. After all, there are
precious few commercial establishments aimed at entertaining the
whole family. For every 10 golf courses in our state, there might be
one amusement park or “fun center.” In the mountains, there’s almost
none of this, and once the ski areas close and the snow melts away,
the recreation options literally dry up almost completely.
One of the reasons theme parks can be such a disappointment is that
we put too much faith in the promise held out by the marketing
departments of Disney, Six Flags or whomever. It’s their job to make
these places look like the greatest thing going, and woe to those who
believe it all. At best, they can only make a happy family slightly
entertained for a few hours. For the dysfunctional, it will likely just
exacerbate the problems, and it’s not unusual to see parent-child

conflict in all its stark horror on parade at these places.
Icky, overt displays of teen love also abound at Elitch’s, but that’s
another story.
On the bright side, most parents probably realize that artificial
constructs such as theme parks are only temporary diversions. The
best ride in the world — at least for the under-8 set — is probably dad
tossing them on the bed, or mom offering a piggy-back ride down the
stairs.
No amount of hydraulics and machinery painted to look like Daffy
Duck or whatever can ever compete with that.

Thinning the herd
When we lived in L.A. for a few years in the first part of the new
millennium, the wife and I often made the observation that California
would be a heck of a nice place if it only had about half as many
people. We were part of the problem, of course, but none-the-less ….
Earlier this week on an outing to Safeway for groceries, I thought
twice about whether I should risk it. It was about 5:30 p.m. on a
Saturday, and my instinct told me this was still prime time for the
condo and second-home dwellers who come out not just to purchase
food, but to loudly plan their meals while standing in large groups in
front of the display cases.
But the phrase “beef stroganoff” was stuck in my head for some
reason and I needed the ingredients. Inside the store, a choir of angels
greeted us in the form of well-stocked shelves being perused by a
modest population of locals mixed with, I believe, a few early leaf-
peepers.
It made me think of those poor schmucks in California, who never get
a time of year when significantly fewer people in the area translates
into a respite at the grocery store – or anywhere else. It also reminded
me of this piece I read on Slate.com about something called “the
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.” The idea behind it is that
there are simply too many people on this relatively tiny planet, and if
everyone would simply stop having babies, we’d shed billions of people
in just a few generations and everything would be hunky-dory – a
gloval version of High-Country supermarket aisles in September.
As a species, we may argue about how we got here, but the baseline
“why” has always been pretty clear: We’re here to reproduce. At a mall
in Colorado Springs recently, I was watching our 6-year-old crawl
around on one of those mall play areas with about 700 other children,
mostly under age 5. I turned to the 16-year-old and said: “You see?
That’s what you get when you have sex.” He nodded, and I saw in his
eyes something like comprehension. I mean, of course he knows the
basics, but seeing so many crawling, squalling, snot-nosed kids in one
place may have been the picture worth a thousand parental
exhortations about abstinence.
Although I recognize his point, I’m afraid Les U. Knight, the guy
promoting Voluntary Human Extinction, has a bit of an uphill battle.
Even in the U.S., where the number of families with three or more kids
has declined in past decades, big families are coming back into vogue.
One need only visit one of the many home tours or home “parades”
going on in the mountains right now to realize most new homes are
being built to accommodate Brady Bunch-like populations. Those
timber mansions are going to see empty and downright cavernous if
you don’t fill them up with a few curtain crawlers.
Funny thing is, of course, that’s not really true. The reason they have
5,000 square feet of space, six bedrooms, two dishwashers and two
laundry rooms isn’t to accommodate a family like mine. I believe it has
something to do with the reason behind why people buy 8-passenger
SUVs knowing they will likely never have more than four people in the
car: because they can afford it, because they can. But watching these
big homes sit empty on the hill most of the year is nothing short of
painful for mountain communities full of local families who could really
make use of all that space.
But, hey, that’s America, right? If we tolerate outsiders decimating
the home market for locals, it’s only because we believe in our hearts
that some day we, too, will have that two-dishwasher home. And who
knows, if the housing market really does go south and all the trees fall
down because of the beetles, we’ll be moving into those homes – if
only for a few months before realizing all the jobs went bye-bye with
the second-home owners.
In the meantime, we’ll take this temporary voluntary extinction of
tourists from now until Thanksgiving or so. Let’s celebrate by waltzing
in the cereal aisles.

Kids, media and a dose of skepticism
My friends don’t let their 2-year-old watch television. ANY television.
He doesn’t know or care who Barney or Elmo is, doesn’t know Noggin
from Nickelodeon and probably isn’t even up on the latest breakfast
cereals and instantly disposable plastic toys (with life-like plastic
action!).
My older kids asked a few questions to confirm this amazing reality,
but they thankfully restrained from offering an opinion. I could see it in
their eyes, though: “How can you deny your children the basic human
right of TV viewing?!”
There are no absolutes when it comes to raising kids. Other than the
obvious things, like you can’t hang a whiny kid from a peg on the wall
or administer scotch to colicky babies, pretty much parents have to
find their own moral compass, so if one couple thinks the solution to a
better kid is no TV, well, I’m not going to say anything (plus, there’s no
surer way to stir the pot of friendship than by bringing up religion,
politics or child-raising opinions – unless you’re pretty sure you’re on
the same page).
Opinions vary widely as to how much TV, video game or computer
use is good, bad or not so good or so bad for kids. Like most parents, I
imagine, we call a halt when it seems like the privilege is being
misused, and we’re also guilty of over-indulgence when it gives a
moment’s peace. Leaving out the computer and video games, it’s not
too much different from how I grew up: We watched TV a fair amount,
but did other stuff as well: played board games, knocked over garbage
cans in the neighborhood, etc. My wife, raised in the rural South, had
only a couple of channels as a kid – one about pigs and goats and the
other, apparently, showing only the “Partridge Family” 24/7.
When we tell our kids about the dark days of only a few channels, no
remote and no cable, they can scarcely believe it. How did we ever
survive? On top of all that, no iPods, no computers, no Playstations …
(but at least we got to ride around on woolly mammoths, I tell them).
Like many thing, TV taken in moderation is only as bad as we allow it
to be. We have the power to flip from “Fear Factor” to a History
Channel documentary (even if we rarely do). We also have the ability,
the obligation, really, to teach our kids to be skeptical of almost
everything that comes at them via the media. Educating them to be
critical media consumers is as vital a skill as learning to read –
especially with 500 channels of crapola on all day, all night.
Ever since the thing was invented and available to the masses, TV
has been vilified as the killer of all things sacred to American family life
– while simultaneously embraced by the great majority of the
population – kids especially – as something as necessary as air.
Viewership in our neck of the woods is probably below average,
because we think of things to do outside during the day, but in these
dark nights of winter, might yet another round of Parchesi grow thin if
we didn’t have “The Bachelor” to look forward to and ridicule?
Oftentimes, TV is so bad it’s good. The notion of the innocent child is
charming, sure, but I’d prefer my kids be a little more battle-hardened
by the time they leave the house. Watching a dreadful show and
pointing out the absurdities is just one way to let them know that some
media is best consumed holding one’s nose.

A mighty effort at couch potato-dom
The archetypal image of the modern dad in relaxation mode is one of
a man ensconced in a Barcalounger, beer and remote in hand and no
force on earth powerful enough to dislodge him from his throne.
I was trying to conjure that up Monday night while trying to watch the
Broncos and the Ravens play in a cold Denver rain. I missed the kickoff
due to a meeting, but had the handy DVR record the first hour – which
is good, because it meant I could skip through the commercials and all
the standing-around that gets done on the field between plays.
Because I pride myself on being the kind of dad who’s available
rather than one who is not, I am usually at the beck-and-call of the 5-
year-old, whose many needs keep me, my wife and the other kids busy
almost 24/7. Like many small children, Andy has an uncanny ability to
time his demands for the exact moment that the fabric of my pants are
making contact with that of the sofa.
“Dad!”
“What!?”
“Come … help … me!”
We’re none of us what you’d call “big TV people,” but we do have
certain shows we like to watch that aren’t appropriate for a 5-year-old.
In these instances, heaven forgive me, I’ll set Andy up on my computer
so he can play a game. Invariably, he gets stuck and needs help.
So I tromp downstairs, get him out of the Excel spreadsheet detailing

medieval grain production that he somehow clicked on, then try to get
back to the game.
Thank you, Tivo!
Only it’s not a Tivo. It’s the cheap DVR Comcast gives you, and the
damn thing is about as easy to use as a Geiger counter and as reliable
as one of those Eastern Block automobiles. Still, so far, so good: It’s
recorded the game so far – one of those “defensive struggles” that’s as
compelling as a documentary about grout. Still, it’s the Broncos,
Plummer has just taken the snap and …
“Dad!”
After he’s got his apple juice and I’ve closed the window for the Web
site advertising male performance enhancers, I’ve got another
challenge waiting: “Studio 60,” my new favorite show (it’s “The West
Wing” only set in Hollywood) is coming on, and I need to make sure it’s
being recorded at the same time I’m closing in on the recorded portion
of the Broncos game. With a few deft pushes of the buttons, I move
into live territory on the game as I record the show for later viewing.
Nothing happens.
The 15-year-old wanders in and looks at me like I’m trying to plug a
blender into a kumquat. Never mind that I was figuring out DOS
commands when he was still in diapers; he still likes to fancy me the
Luddite and he the high-tech wizard.
“Give me that.”
“No. I’ll figure it out myself, thank you.”
He gives me one of those “beyond hope” looks and drifts away.
My dilemma has something to do with not being able to record two
programs at once on this thing, and it’s saving dual copies of “The
Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” for some unknown reason. But
the Broncos are now up by 6, so I risk it, flipping between channels
while making mental notes to look into buying a real Tivo.
By the time the game ends and I watch the fragments of “Studio 60” I
was able to save, I’m exhausted. It’s 10 p.m. but Andy is still racing
around like his hair is on fire, “bedtime” being a dirty word to him.
Sigh. For the next game, I’m going to figure out how to save it and
transfer the file to my laptop, then watch it in the closet. I can already
hear the knob rattling, the pounding of little fists.
“Dad! Dad! Come … out … of … there!”

Attack of the pirate ship
At first glance, it looked impossible. For the 6-year-old’s birthday,
Mom bought a model of a wooden boat that contained 170 pieces. All
of them had to be painstakingly numbered according to the complex
diagram, then punched out and fitted together with nothing but a
picture of the finished product to go by.
Having just arrived home from a trying day at work, my desire to
launch into such a project was limited, at best. But no amount of
procrastination or excuse would be tolerated by Andy, who had
determined before I’d arrived home that this wooden ship had to be
assembled as soon as humanly possible.
It was a beautiful evening outside, the sun hovering over the
mountains against a perfect blue sky, the rec paths beckoning to the
stable of bicycles poised in the garage. The wooden ship, on the other
hand, was clearly a rainy-day sort of activity, the kind of thing you turn
to when all movies have been watched, all puzzle books filled in and
every last Pez has been ejected and consumed.
All of which is not to say I was philosophically opposed to the ship
model. I’d done my share of model-building as a kid myself, from a
whole series of Star Trek ships and vehicles to a Spanish galleon to an
endless supply of funny cars based on dubious American classics like
the AMC Gremlin and Ford Pinto. Plus, Mom had done her due diligence
before purchasing the wooden ship, checking with me first to ascertain

whether it was within my acceptable parameters of skill and tolerance.
I assured her it was. I just didn’t think it was going to rocket to the
top of the to-do list – and on such a fine evening.
It was clear from the outset that the makers of this “Pirateology”
wooden ship puzzle were sadists – dad-hating tormentors who’d been
abandoned at a nunnery as young children and who had dedicated the
rest of their lives to creating things that would make fathers the world
over completely insane. The aforementioned 170 pieces were all
arranged on sheets of balsa wood, and once they were numbered and
popped out, we were left with a pile of perfectly good tinder which,
nonetheless, had to be assembled into a ship.
Andy got bored with the whole thing about 17 seconds into the
popping-the-pieces-out-of-the-sheets phase, and retreated to the living
room for the less-challenging activity of watching Spongebob. That left
me and Max, the 13-year-old, to contemplate the tinder to see if we
could make sense of it all. Before long, Max was lapping me in the
assembly department, doggedly figuring out what went where and
translating the pile of balsa wood into a pirate ship in no time. It was
one of those moments when a number of elements conspired to add
up to something wonderful.
For starters, it’s always amazing to realize when kids step up their
game. It may have seemed like only yesterday that Max couldn’t tie his
own shoes, but here he was, putting this thing together in record time.
For another, the notion of having a family comprised of various
members growing up with different sets of skills to add to the team is
incredibly gratifying and fun to watch. And finally, for a dad, it’s an
honor little ones bestow on us when they simply assume we can do
anything – be it assemble (or at least oversee assembly of) an
impossible wooden model or, build a robot out of a downed aspen tree
(another recent project) or, I dunno, build a perpetual motion machine
to launch at Jupiter.
I held the same assumptions about my own father’s abilities, and still
do in many ways. Somehow, I think that’s the way it ought to be.

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A bean in his ear

So there I was, minutes before I had to go onstage to host a

with a turkey baster.

had strewn a bunch of Tic-Tac-sized beans or seeds of some kind

around our first-grader’s elementary school playground. Andy, because

he is that kind of a kid, picked one up and concluded immediately that

budge the bean it did not.

Matchbox car up my nose when I was about Andy’s age.

“Why?” my wife wanted to know. “I don’t get it.”

of the “I wonder what’ll happen if …” variety. This gives cause for

annual Darwin Awards. I’m not sure there’s always a correlation,

though. Just because you stuck an AquaDot up your nose at age 6

12-gauge as an adult. But still …

more people revealed similar stories, either autobiographical or

told me of rubber bands up noses, a rock and a quarter ingested, a Tic

Tac in the ear, etc. It reminded me of how everyone has an outrageous

room has another to share.

ear with a fancy-looking microscope thingy and swiftly removed the

bean with some kind of probe.

We cheered the kind of cheer generally reserved for a happy

outcome in a 72-hour labor. Andy assured us that he has, indeed,

of a few more gray hairs for Jen and me.

When parents go away

in Nevada. The experience is enough to make me thank my lucky stars

family doesn’t do well without all cylinders clicking.

youngest, his is a life of predictable routines with the key players in

on time. It can sometimes in itself be a monumental achievement,

especially on those mornings when, for one reason or another, his

normally frenetic pace is slowed to glacial speeds.

something other than a welcome opportunity for early rising and a

truly full day.

Andy has told me in no uncertain terms that my absence displeased

never-ending one, and the current state – be it joy, misery or

something in between – will remain in place indefinitely. So, while I

Looking at absence a little more globally, Andy has nothing to

complain about compared to kids whose moms or dads have routine

situation; one not to be sought by anyone and often regretted by those

to rest almost solely on Mom’s shoulders has been shifted to more of a

composition very much at all, but it certainly seems to be a better

arrangement from the perspective of all involved. Some men don’t

make the adjustment as well – unable or unwilling to forgo the tee

likely they’ll be the ones in for a bumpy ride.

So, I came home to a very fine piece of artwork: a picture of me and

installment of “Goosebumps” at bedtime. The way it ought to be.

need to learn is pretty much right here at home.

Buy first, explain it later

My mother was surprised, to say the least, when she discovered my

father had purchased an ultralight aircraft without taking that little

step of mentioning it beforehand.

one might call a post-retirement phase of discovery. He assumed,

all, there’s probably not a woman on earth who can’t think of

something else to spend $20,000 on than a dangerous toy. New

cabinets, perhaps, or flooring; drapes and valences, a cruise.

risk being thwarted from the purchase.

But while the scale of this particular “non-consultative spousal

frivolous – ranging from a church donation to kitchen curtains or

she created a kind of shadow economy – a miniature version of her

acquisitions and offspring grants and loans.

This sort of arrangement was, I suspect, quite common in the

that way to squirrel a 10 or a 20 away in the vast recesses of Mom’s

handbag – no pesky debit-card-based checkbook with an online

component that can be checked at any time.

the first rule of the non-consultative spousal acquisition: Exaggerate

that there can be no question of returns.

Mountain Family's Greatest Hits

Mountain Family's Greatest Hits