Parent Of The Year, Part 6

My youngest son's homework assignment last night was to fill in the blanks on a sheet entitled Rules For Riding on the School Bus. He doesn't ride the bus, having been a walker since '03. (We learned a lot that year, especially about crisis counseling and restraining orders.) Nevertheless, the school gave him the assignment along with the rest of his class. Anything to help him feel normal, I guess.

In any event, being a doting father, I offered to help him with it. He yelped with enthusiasm and after I chased him down and wrestled him back into the house, we settled in with a couple of pencils and our nightly snack of popcorn and bourbon. Our answers are in bold.

1. Every morning your bus runs a/an extraterrestrial route, so you must be sure that you arrive at your local haberdashery early.

2. While waiting, do not yodel in the middle of the street. You might get run over by a/an angry emu.

3. When you see the bus, wave your prehensile tail.

4. Before boarding, make sure you have all of your stolen books and your lunch meats.

5. When you board the bus, do not push or jostle any of the smaller beetles. Go to the nearest empty seat and hibernate.

6. Do not talk to the voices in your head while the bus is in motion.

7. Do not throw feces at the other students.

8. Instead of wasting time by breathing, use the trip to study your friend's exoskeleton.

9. Follow these rules and you will have a/an newsworthy ride and arrive shackled at your well-guarded school.

I found the assignment on the kitchen counter this morning after he'd left for school. He must have forgotten it. I'll bring it to him at school this afternoon so he gets full credit.

Batter Up!

It's the time of year when the annual Bake-Off spreads its metaphoric wings, the smells of victory and cinnamon mingling in the crisp, cold air. While the baking is good, imperative even, it's equally important to remember the origins of this hallowed ritual. Not the Bake-Off itself, that needs no explanation - as the Super Bowl is to football, the Bake-Off is to baking. No, I have in mind the art of baking itself. Join me in exploring the history of this glorious past-time.

Most scientists now believe that an early and statistically improbably accidental combination of water, egg, and flour led to the "Big Bake." After billions of years and lots of sciency stuff, a relatively young Earth saw the formation of a primordial batter. This in turn became the foundation for today's bread and cookies.

The Big Bake theory has led to other important discoveries as well. For example, black donut holes are now viewed as the most likely explanation for food's inability to escape Chuckles. Similarly, relativity was an offshoot of Einstein's early attempts to weigh the comparative deliciousness of German chocolate and devil's food cakes.

Baking is not just a science, of course. It is also an art. Consider Raphael's "Madonna with Lard," the Beatles "Sgt. Pretzel's Lonely Hearts Club Band," or Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Pie." The influence of baking on Western culture cannot be overstated.

There is a darker side to baking too, however. The Great Yeast War of 1906 left divisions that still reverberate through the shanty towns of Luxembourg. Vicious Somalian warlords have devastated that country's population with their efforts to monopolize the world's supply of baking powder. Cities throughout North America have seen their middle class neighborhoods destroyed by rampant muffin use.

But still, with all that, baking remains an integral part of our society. It is the tie that binds, that brings us together, black and white, rich and poor, fat and fatter. So put on your baking shoes, grab a sifter, and join the party!

Method To The Madness

I'm off to a hockey game tonight with some friends. We'll have a nice slab of barely cooked cow beforehand, maybe a martini or two to feel like big shots, then head over to the arena.

The least surprising outcome of this plan is my children's rage. One would think I was using their college funds to pay for this. I am, I suppose, although it's not as though there's much set aside for that purpose. I'll frankly be satisfied if the three of them make it to their mid-twenties without doing hard time. Anyway, it's not the adverse effect on their intellectual growth that has them upset, it's the fact that I'm doing something fun and they're not included.

As I've been frequently reminded over the last week, I've never taken them to a professional hockey game. College, yes, but not the pros. I've replied that I've never taken myself to a professional hockey game. When I've gone it's always been because someone else had tickets. The boys aren't interested in logic, however, they're interested in vengeance.

And vengeance they shall have. If unslakeable's not a word, it would be if our Anglo-Saxon forebears had met these kids. I have been treated to everything from shunning to veiled threats that the new TV's remote will be hidden when I get home tonight. My responses have ranged from "Oh no, please, not that," to "I will kill you."

Eventually this will pass, if not forgotten at least tucked away with all the other slights and hurts I have allegedly inflicted over the years. Those are kept somewhere they like to visit often, a place of endless aggrievement and faulty justice. It's a place I know well, for I visit it too, when I deal with the phone company or the cable provider or people who cut me off in traffic and are not arrested or killed for their insolence.

There's something peculiarly comforting about old complaints. They're like agates, polished from being turned over and over. I give names to mine: "Idiot Clerk;" "Professor Jerkface;" "Ungrateful Client." I compare them to current offenses and slights, try to decide if life is still hosing me as much as it used to. So far the answer appears to be "yes."

With that, I'm off to the game. My children will stew about it and tomorrow I will surely hear more complaints. I will use that as a teachable moment, an opportunity to talk with them about the importance of nursing grudges and developing a soul-crushing bitterness. They will look at me in wonder for a few moments, and then walk away confused and unsure what to say, leaving me finally, blessedly, alone.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

If you're only going to read one post this year, make it this one.

Youth Is Wasted On The Young

I used to work with someone who was in the movie "Rock 'n' Roll High School." It was a bit part, but it still made him one the coolest guy in whatever room he was in.

One of my kids and I watched the movie again the other day. Most parenting guides focus on teaching children to submit to authority. I hope mine learn to rebel a little too.

Snag In Love

The long Thanksgiving weekend passed as well as could be expected, with a great deal of food and relatively little bloodshed. We had almost fifty people through the house over the course of the weekend, first for Thanksgiving, then a Friday night dinner party, and finally Saturday's end of season celebration for our father/son fantasy baseball league. The winners (there was a tie) split the pot, although were required to accept their shares while wearing a tiara, pink boa, and waving a wand bearing a likeness of Daunte Culpepper. It was worth losing just to see that.

Continuing my tradition of bad parenting choices, I also took my middle school son to see "No Country for Old Men." Based on a Cormac McCarthy book, the film is set in the part of Texas I called home for two glorious years of military service and the cinematography well captures the desolation I remember. The movie is a classic of the Coens' form, dark, bloody, savage, and funny. My son is a fan of the their work, as am I, and we both thoroughly enjoyed the movie and discussing it on the way home.

Cormac McCarthy's an author with whom I still wrestle. His prose is often florid, but I like it fine and I recommend him to others. The only person I know who truly regretted trying him was my oldest child, and that was likely circumstantial. I gave him a copy of "All the Pretty Horses" for his seventh-grade literature class and it wasn't until afterward he told me that particular assignment involved rewriting the selected book as a children's story. Unless you're Maurice Sendak, it's hard to work with something like this:

His grandfather was the oldest of eight boys and the only one to live past the age of twenty-five. They were drowned, shot, kicked by horses. They perished in fires. They seemed to fear only dying in bed. The last two were killed in Puerto Rico in eighteen ninety-eight and in that year he married and brought his bride home to the ranch and he must have walked out and stood looking at his holdings and reflected long upon the ways of God and the laws of primogeniture. Twelve years later when his wife was carried off in the influenza epidemic they still had no children. A year later he married his dead wife's older sister and a year after this the boy's mother was born and that was all the borning that there was. The Grady name was buried with that old man the day the norther blew the lawnchairs over the dead cemetery grass. The boy's name was Cole. John Grady Cole.

My son did not appreciate the challenge and still uses it as an example of my failings.

Most important, though, I bought myself a big screen television on Saturday. It is the most beautiful creation I have ever seen and I already love it more than pretty much anything, as I pointed out to my children when warning them of the consequences of breaking it. At the baseball party, the other fathers made appropriate cooing noises and displayed the sort of TV envy I pretend I'm too good a person to enjoy.

Sunday was therefore dedicated to football. To tell the truth, I'm only a casual fan of the sport, but I thought it would be nice to spend the afternoon with my boys watching our spiffy new television. Which it would have been, had my youngest's logorrhea not been acting up. When he wasn't providing color commentary on the game we were in the room watching with him, he was singing a peculiar medley of Christmas carols, the Vengaboys' "We Like to Party," and obscure basketball cheers he picked up somewhere. All punctuated with regular descriptions of the neglect he's forced to endure in the form of being denied his own cell phone.

Finally I told him he had to shut up or he'd be banished from the family room permanently, which unfortunately simply prompted a long argument over why our dog isn't allowed downstairs. An excerpt from that conversation:

"Because I want one damned room in the house that's not covered in fur."

"You hate Katie. You're always mean to her."

"I am not. I pay for her food and she eats like a horse."

"See, you want her to starve."

"For God's sake, that's not what I said."

"That's what you meant. Just wait until you're old, we're not going to feed you."

"Good. I can't wait. Starving to death will be less painful than listening to you yap all the time."

I was comforted only by the fact it was better than last week's dinner at the local pizzeria, where my son's best friend was told by his father, more loudly than was intended, "Close your piehole or I swear to God I'm going to stab you in the lung with a fork." I've never seen a restaurant get so quiet so fast. Except for my son and his friend, neither of whom were fazed by yet another in a long list of empty threats and who merrily kept chattering away like the human magpies they are.

Perhaps there's no real way to get my boy to be quiet. At any rate, if there is, I haven't yet found it. What I do know, however, is that my new television can drown him out. For now, that's good enough.

My Kid Is Funnier Than I Am (For What That's Worth)

These are the things for which my middle son and I are thankful:

1. Meat. Without meat, we wouldn't have ham cake.

2. Signatures. Signatures protect our precious bodily fluids.

3. Children. A reason to drink.

4. The Sword of Gondor. For smiting my enemies.

5. Katie, my black lab. A living food shelf.

6. Paper clips. For all your organizational and piercing needs.

7. Socks. For want of a sock, a battle was lost. Or something like that.

8. Plasma TVs. We're buying one. Booya!

9. The Trilateral Commission. Your neighborhood source for world domination.

10. Sweet Sugar Kane.



Happy Thanksgiving all!