Who Is the One?

 

I've been writing posts for this blog for almost four years now. With nearly 70,000 page views, I've tried to keep it lighthearted, staying clear of any topic that might get me banned from the planet. Today, it's important to agree with the mob otherwise the social media universe will call you out, and you'll be fired from your job. Lucky for me I don't have an actual job.

I've written a few screenplays. I read somewhere that the screenplay is the middle aged guy's mixtape. Everyone who writes a script is certain that it will be on fire once Hollywood gets ahold of their gem. Tinseltown needs me; after all movies like The Odd Life of Timothy Green get made all the time and those movies stink, and not just because Jennifer Garner got cast as the mom. To date, I've garnished fifteen placements in seven different screenplay contests with three different scripts.

One script was a top fifty semifinalist in the Academy Nicholls Fellowship in Screenwriting, arguable the most prestigious screenplay competition in the world. Last year, another script came in second place in the New York Metropolitan Screenwriting Competition. After becoming a finalist in the Big Apple Screenplay Contest this past summer, my wife, Christine, and I attended a public reading of excerpts from the winning scripts. While the contest placements have been exciting, and I've enjoyed sitting back on my laurels, I've always wanted to write a comedy.

Comedies are the hardest genres by far. Anyone can write a drama. Just dream up a few characters, one being a priest, another being an attractive women. Make some people good and others bad, then kill off a good one now and again. In the third act, set fire to a barn, and there you have it. You got a drama. It worked for Thorn Birds. Comedies are hard because while anyone can write a tragedy, very few of us can make people laugh. Even if you dream up a few zingers, you still have to do so for 90 pages. I hate it when you watch a comedy in which the five best gags are in the trailer. You think you already saw the film. My goal is to write a script so funny that the viewing audience will collectively piss themselves. While this means the film will go straight to DVD as no theatre will carry it primarily due to the mess, writing a comedy requires a skill set I knew at the time I didn't yet have.

Most people hate to write and are amazed that some people manage to make a living by doing so. I have a friend who is always going on about being a novelist. The reason she wants to be an author is so when she goes to the doctor's office and fills out the paperwork, she can write "novelist" for occupation. I always advise her to write it in script. Recently, I told her that she shouldn't let the worldwide ban on paper and pencils keep her from realizing her dream. I suspect that the hard part about being a novelist is the novel part. Everything else is probably pretty easy.

Hollywood is flooded with terrible screenplays, so much that professional readers assume yours stinks before they even read the title. Tinseltown is full of people trying to make it big in whatever lane they've chosen. People spend all day managing clout, that is, convincing others that they are the go to person for the next big project. I once read an article written by a professional script reader who described the three piles of scripts he had to read. The first pile was the scripts his boss gave him. The second was made up of material from his friends and family. The last pile, the one he never gets to, was the contest winners. It's sobering that a nobody like me is beat out by the dude's second cousin. I once asked a friend of mine, who wrote for years in the film industry, why she thought screenplay competitions don't discover the best scripts. I never forgot her response. She said,

"Nothing of value is given away for free in Hollywood."

Writers have always been struggling for recognition in the movie industry. There are plenty of crummy jobs fixing the dialog in some equally crummy scripts. These so called "uncredited" writing tasks are partial payment of your dues to make it in Hollywood. I read a blog written by a writer who was hired by a big production company to work on a script about a Catholic priest who was a vampire forced to choose between the zombie he loved or his faith. He stated that a good writer can fix any story, even a stinker like that one. I imagine so, but why would you want to?

So like most lost writers, I found my marble coming to rest in a remote corner of the internet. I've was writing emails to my sister, Jeannine, for years. She would respond by telling me how she laughed, then always sign off with,

"You should blog that."


My Sister and Me

So I started sending her emails entitled "Blog of One." For several years, she had her own private blog in which she was the only reader. Having only one subscriber who's your sister gives you a lot of freedom as a writer. It's pretty hard to offend my sis. So I figured I would take her advice and write a humor blog for a year to hone my skills, then attempt to write a feature length comedy.

 

My promise was to posts every Tuesday and Thursday, no ads ever, and this was as indulgent as I would ever get. There also wouldn't be any frigging poetry either. I completed the Year of the Blog, then continued to post now and again, eventually settling on every Tuesday.

Whenever I think of my childhood, anything that was any good always involved my sister. After ever post, I would wait for her text letting me know how I did. Her affirmation is never guaranteed. It's earned. With her encouragement as well as that from Christine, my editor, I continue to write. Now that I'm working on another script, I've been reposting earlier pieces with an occasional new one. It will likely go that way for a while, but I still promise that there won't be any frigging poetry.

My sister and I are close in age. As little kids we were sometimes mistook for twins, mostly because my mother to save money gave us the same haircut. It worked out for me, but not so much for her. I often remind my sister that she spent the first year of her life alone in a playpen. Being younger than her, I always had someone in there with me which is why I'm normal, and she's just a little bit nuts.

She's the One.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on October 5, 2016.

Insurance for the Irresponsible

 

What's going on in the Marketing Department at the headquarters of Liberty Mutual insurance? Their commercials feature young people whining about having to pay a deductible or bellyaching that they're not cut any slack for a good driving record. Liberty Mutual might as well admit that they are targeting irresponsible drivers. One commercial has a black couple telling their story with the Statue of Liberty in the distance. The woman scolds the man for ruining his perfect driving record by side swiping a food truck. She adds,

"You would think your insurance company would cut you some slack, right?"

No, I wouldn't. I would think they would invoke my policy to the letter, trying to figure out any way to get out of paying. The man adds,

"Your perfect record doesn't get you anything."

Well, it does, just not anymore. Your perfect record got you lower rates before you smashed into the Mister Softee truck. When you crash your car, you become in insurance lingo, a "liability." Too many claims, and you become a "high risk." I know young people expect something for participation, but I think it will be easier for them to understand that insurance companies are for profit businesses, not extensions of their parents. The way that guy carried on about the injustice of his rates going up for crashing his car into a vending truck, I wouldn't be surprised if he expected the food guy to run some chow by his house for the next week to help him through the trauma of the accident. There is another commercial with a smartly dressed Asian woman, holding a cup of joe with the Statue of Liberty in the distance. She expresses her dissatisfaction with the insurance deductible by saying,

"You pay your premiums like clock work...then one night, you hydroplane into a ditch. Yeah. Surprise, your insurance company tells you to pay up again. Why pay for insurance if you have to pay even more for using it?"

She rolls her eyes then storms off screen leaving Lady Liberty stoically scanning the harbor for huddled masses. Maybe if you weren't driving excessively fast while trying to surf the internet for the address to the next bar your friends are meeting up at on your bald tires your dad keeps offering to replace, you wouldn't have ended up in that ditch. Surprise!

The insurance industry requires a deductible in order to limit your use of their services. Unlike your parents who hemorrhaged big for that useless college degree you insisted on getting, Liberty Mutual expects something in return for their coverage. It's the same for copays used by the medical insurance industry which dissuade you from going to the doctor for that boil on your ass. You see, the insurance companies don't actually produce anything although the industry refers to their policies as "products." They don't purchase raw materials, they don't have a manufacturing facility, they have no need for research and development. The insurance industry makes their money by selling you a policy, then dissuading you from using it. That's their business model.

I often wonder what meetings are like in insurance companies. They can't brainstorm about innovations that would make their products superior to their competitors because they don't have any products. I figure they all trickle into the conference room ten minutes late for a 3 o'clock, holding their fourth cup of coffee for the day, which they spill on the carpet, as well as a stale donut Ted brought in to celebrate his twentieth year. As they go around the table tossing out ideas about their next big business move, a common theme emerges.

Make the customer pay more for less coverage, and oh yeah, jack up the deductible again.

They all nod in agreement. Just another day in the exciting world of insurance sales. Another Liberty Mutual commercial has a young women telling a story in the second person of "Brad" your car that was with you through three crummy jobs and two douchebag boyfriends, none of which, I'm sure, your parents approved of. You totaled Brad in a less descriptive part of the story. I surmise that it probably involved too many distractions from drunk millennials all texting each other while sitting in Brad. She sounds very upset until Liberty Mutual calls, which causes you to "break into your happy dance." My generation never had a happy dance, nor did we name our cars. My guess is when the next years premiums are cut by Liberty Mutual, and they finish factoring in the demise of Brad, there isn't going to be any happy dances for a while.

Another commercial features an African American woman lamenting that after she wrecked her brand new ride, she discovered her crappy ass discount insurance only covers three quarters of her car. She asks,

"Do they expect me to drive three quarters of a car?"

No, they expected you to read more than three quarters of your policy. The wrong time to be questioning the extent of your coverage is when you need it.

Yet another commercial has a sheepish looking kid standing next to his helicopter mom as she explains that her son got a flat in the middle of the night. His mother states that Liberty Mutual's 24 hour roadside assistance helped her clueless son change the tire "so he can get home safely." The commercial cuts to a scene in which two other equally oblivious teens struggle to change a flat tire unassisted by Liberty Mutual's roving bozo brigade. The wimpier kid on the phone with his father exclaims with some measure of irritation,

"I know what a lug wrench is!"

He then turns to his friend, Chad, who probably picked a college based on the cafeteria food, and whispers,

"Is this a lug wrench?"

Chad, doped up on Ritalin and his last weed pen answers,

"Maybe."

The commercials ends with a narrator indicating that you can leave worry behind when Liberty stands with you. What you should worry about is raising a kid so stupid that he can't follow the three pictorial steps in a car's manual illustrating how to change a flat tire. Someday, life is going to throw your kid something tough like a cruise ship taking on water in rough seas, and he's going to have to make some quick decisions to save himself. There won't be any time for phone calls to dad for advice. He can be like one of those ass hats in the Liberty Mutual commercials, or a guy like me, that is, a survivor explaining to Katie Couric on Good Morning America how he used Chad's bloated corpse as a floatation device for three days.

"On day four, I fed Chad to the sharks."

Insurance is a necessary evil that you get just in case you experience an inordinate amount of bad luck. You can hedge your bets and go commando on insurance if you feel lucky, just don't complain afterwards. That's not how insurance works.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Brad ran like shit.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on December 29, 2016.

Race to the End

My wife the other day shocked my New Balances right off my feet with a racial epithet here in our home. She asked me,

"Can you take those colored clothes out of the dryer?"

"They're clothes of color!" I scolded.

Just when you think you know someone.

I grew up in a blue collar racist New England household. Northeast racism is intimately connected to unionized factory jobs, filled by white workers who feel minorities are lazy and use the union for protection. My father worked as a silversmith for 45 years in a factory. He used to say that black people and hispanics never got along, but he used a more colorful vernacular. He often said that the hispanics were short, and when they fought, they usually pulled a knife. The rest was left for the police, the union and paramedics to sort out.

I went to college then the military which luckily purged any racist sentiments from my head. My father retired and joined a gym which he attended regularly. When I worked out with him once, I noticed that he greeted everyone, and everyone was eager to interact with him, retelling the latest joke or funny story they heard. I discovered that my father, the guy who hadn't a single friend outside of work in decades, and often harbored racist sentiments, was the gym ambassador. It didn't matter the age, the race or gender, he knew them all by name, and they often found common ground over laughter.

During the Gulf War in the early 90's, he had a running gag that he and two other older guys at the gym were going to get called up due to their past military experience. He would say that they were in "the First Infantry Canon Fodder." The others guys went right along with it. Two of his closest friends were a black man, named George and a puerto rican, named Roman. They were both retired factory workers like my father. They helped him pull off some of the best pranks the gym had ever seen. One time, on April Fool’s my father set up this kid by telling him,

"Go ask George how his sister is doing with her swim lessons. It'll be real funny."

So the kid obliged asking, "Hey George, how's your sister's swim lessons coming along?"

George, who was in on the joke, answered, "You think that's funny? My sister drowned when she was seven years old!"

George didn't have a sister that drowned. Usually, the person being set up would fumble with an apology, and forget that my father told him to do it. It was a mean joke by anybody's standards, but that's what the generation that survived the Great Depression and world wars came up with. They all got a laugh out of it, and the dude being setup was usually suitably relieved that it was just a gag.
 

There was a lot ribbing going on at the gym, some racially oriented, but they shrugged it off. When it happened near me, my laugh was the only one that was awkward. One time a middle-aged guy called my dad and George,

"Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr."

My father said, "I must be Sammy because I'm missing an eye."

George retorted, "I'm Dean because I'm taller than you."

They roared with laughter as they crossed the racial divide. George wasn't taller than my father who wasn't missing an eye. Roman would make the sign of the cross when my father and George would go at it, and say,

"Forgive them for they know not what they do."

These old guys were friends on their own terms which certainly wouldn't meet the standards of civility today, but it worked for them. They saw each other as people first, and they laughed about everything else. My father changed with the times as his experiences broadened, and he saw people as individuals, not merely as unionized, factory workers.

There was a big Italian dude at the gym who exchanged "wop" jokes with my father all the time. He got busted for drug dealing and served ten months in prison. When he got out, word had spread around the gym about his felony conviction, so no one would talk to him. When my father saw him, he walked up, shook his hand, and said that he was glad that he was back, and that he missed him. The big man broke down in tears. When I asked my father what that was all about, he explained to me that the guy served his time, and that was okay with him.

Rap today comes with a whole set of confusing rules wrought with double standards. A slew of misogynistic and racial terms are used in lyrics in a far more general and derogatory manner than the comments made by my father and his friends. One time at the gym, during a cardio session, a newscaster on an overhead television reported,

"Seventy-two percent of the country's oil comes from abroad."

My father loudly exclaimed, "Really, I thought it came from overseas."

Of course, my father's friends all split a gut. Connie, a prim and proper retired executive, said with a smile,

"Oh, Raymond, you're so bad."

I couldn't help but think the gym was a place where my father was reliving his version of middle school. He was the guy who made them all laugh, sometimes uncomfortably, but no one ever felt like they didn't belong. He had changed when he got into a world in which he realized that everyone was pretty much like him. When he died, very suddenly on a Thursday morning, 19 years ago, an endless stream of people attended his wake. They all described my father as "their closest friend." That was an astonishing achievement for someone who for most of his life wasn't friends with anyone.

Would I want my sons to banter with their friends who are minorities like my father did with his friends and acquaintances? Probably not, but I would prefer that they manage it themselves in an inclusive way that works for them rather than living a standard set forth by our elected officials or community leaders. My son, Aidan, is colorblind like most of his generation. When he was in second grade, his African American teacher once stopped me to relay a funny story about him. She told me,

"I have to tell you what Aidan said. We showed his class a picture of a group of kids, telling them that one of their teachers was in the photo, and went to this school twenty years ago. We asked who they thought it was? And you know what Aidan said?"

Not a clue, I shrugged.

"He said, 'You, Miss Crawford.'"

To which I responded, "You're too young to have gone to this school twenty years ago."

She continued, "No, Robert, that's not it. There were no black people in the photo."

I smiled as I understood her amusement. I also got the sense that the last thing on the mind of my seven year old was the color of his teacher's skin. Like my once racist father, the first thought that came to my once racist head in regards to the photo was his teacher's age. I don't agree that bigots need to die out to change society. Everyone can change.

Despite all my mistakes as a parent, my sons won't have to.

Editor's Note: Today, colorblindness in terms of race is a micro aggression. Originally posted on November 8, 2016.

Trump's First Dog?

Obama Avoiding Bo

Almost all presidents pick a pet for the White House. Historically, only three didn't, Millard Fillmore, the last Whig Party president, Franklin Pierce, the first president to deliver an inaugural address entirely from memory, and Chester Allan Arthur, who took over after Garfield was assassinated. Some presidents had quite the menagerie at the White House, including horses and farm animals.


George Washington's wife, Martha, had a parrot named "Snipe." Jefferson was gifted two grizzly bear cubs which he deemed "too dangerous & troublesome for me to keep." Andrew Jackson had a foulmouthed parrot, named "Poll." Historians believe that the bird picked up the predilection for colorful language from listening to Old Hickory. The bird was present at Jackson's funeral. Just before the eulogy by Reverend William Menefee Norment, the bird got excited and started swearing so loudly that attendants removed it from the house. Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation on Oct 3, 1863 establishing the last Thursday in November as a "day of Thanksgiving and Praise." A turkey sent to the White House for Christmas dinner was named "Jack" by Lincoln's son, Tad, who adopted the bird as a pet. When Tad learned the fate of Jack, he interrupted a cabinet meeting to plead with his father to spare Jack's life. Lincoln, having a soft spot for his young son, pardoned the bird.


Roosevelt Refusing to
Shoot Mickey Mouse

Theodore Roosevelt had his own zoo at the White House with dogs, horses, snakes, guinea pigs, an owl, some lizards, five bears, a lion, a hyena and a zebra. On a hunting trip in Mississippi, Roosevelt refused to shoot an old bear that his guides tethered to a tree. Cartoons, depicting a benevolent Roosevelt refusing to cap a frightened bear cub, soon made it into the newspapers. A Brooklyn candy shop owner put two stuffed bears that his wife made in his window, calling them "Teddy's Bears."

Calvin Coolidge had a load of animals as well including a donkey, a bobcat and a pygmy hippo. He is best known for the Immigration Act of 1924 which was drafted to limit immigration to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe. The act restricted immigration from Africa, and outright banned it from Arab and Asian countries.

Nixon Explaining How
Much He Pays for
Toilet Paper 

When Nixon was selected as Dwight D. Eisenhower's running mate in 1952, he came under scrutiny for misappropriating campaign funds which threatened his place on the ticket. Nixon appeared on television giving a speech detailing his household finances. He concluded with a story about how his family received a black and white cocker spaniel as a gift which his daughter named "Checkers." He said,

"I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it."
 

Naturally, Nixon's story about the little dog resonated with the American people, and weeks later Eisenhower and Nixon were swept into office.
 

Happier Times for
Socks, Hillary and
Monica

The more recent presidents seem to opt on just cats and dogs. Clinton had "Socks" the cat while George Bush had a Springer Spaniel named "Spot." Obama took months before he selected "Bo," a Portuguese Water Dog, due to his daughter's allergies. Obama is rarely photographed playing with Bo or Sunny, the second First Dog, leading many people to believe that he doesn't actually like them. If that's true, it can't be over the odor since I'm sure the dogs don't smell as bad as cigarette smoke.

In this country, the president has to have a dog if they want to be reelected otherwise dog owners, which is everyone but me, won't vote for them. In the United States, you have to like dogs or people will assume that there is something wrong with you. We should just get on with it, and make it a law that every household has to have at least one dog. The medical brain trust is split down the middle in regards to allergies and pet ownership. Half claim early exposure to pet dander and hair provides immunity while others believe it exacerbates allergies. Hillary Clinton had a coughing fit during a campaign stump speech which she blamed on her rival by saying,

"Everytime I think about Trump I get allergic."

She also claimed that her private email server was hypoallergenic and helped with her sinusitis.

President Trump

Trump had a case of the sniffles during the first debate which he blamed on a faulty microphone. I think he suffers from allergies as well since the events were held in the middle of ragweed season. Or it could have been the excessive amount of Charlie cologne Hillary was wearing.

I've been wondering what kind of dog President Trump will pick for the White House. Perhaps a Great Dane? That would work. They only live for about eight years. Or maybe a Doberman Pincher, named "Bull." Whenever Trump is dissatisfied with someone in the Oval Office, he'll yell,

"Sic balls, Bull!"

Trump's first wife, Ivana, wrote in her tell all book that Trump hated her poodle, "Chappy," who would aggressively bark at him. When Trump is dissatisfied with someone, he often tweets that they were fired or choked "like a dog." Ivanka Trump was criticized for giving her daughter an all white dog named "Winter." Television producer, Jared Kotler, tweeted,

"...when you want to seem human and get a dog, maybe a shelter dog would show humanity. But all white and blue eyes is on brand. Fuck off."

To think poor Winter was force castrated without consent, and now people think he's a symbol of racism.

My prediction is that Trump will go against the recommendation of all his top advisors and won't get a dog for the White House. A self described germaphobe, who doesn't like to shake hands, who vetted women he wanted to date for STDs, and who likely suffers from allergies, certainly will not allow an animal into his home. Trump won't care that you won't vote for him for not having a dog. He favors his own instincts over politically correct maneuvers.

Just maybe, that's what we need right now.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on November 11, 2016. Trump is the fourth president to pass on a pet for the White House which is the real reason why Democrats are trying to impeach him.

The Birth of a Family

My wife, Christine, and I remained childless for seven years after we were married. She never spoke, even once, about children, until we nearly completed a renovation of our first home. Out of the blue, she said,

William and Aidan

"Now that we have a house with all these rooms, we should fill them up with, you know, people."

"You mean babies?" I asked.

"Of course, what did you think?" she responded.

I was relieved that she was open to the idea of children. For a moment, I thought she was talking about homeless people.
 

Now, a routine doctors visit led to a test which came back with very bad news. A condition my wife had meant that we were not likely to conceive without help. It was one of the two times in life I saw my wife cry. Even if we were not going to have children on our own, I wanted a turn at bat. Thirty days later, much to the puzzlement of the medical experts, she was pregnant.

With a baby on the way, I started reading articles about how it's normal for some men to take a few months to love their newborns. We don't carry them so their birth is a step change for us. I remember thinking,

Aidan

"Who is this stranger coming to invade my life with my wife?"

Three weeks ahead of schedule, I was painting the oil tank when Christine went into labor. We had gone through several false labors including one trip to the hospital, all resulting in a gentle pat on the head as we were sent home. Now, I was covered in a thick mess of black, tarry paint. We had a routine appointment scheduled for the next day so I said with a certain conviction,

"I'm going to clean up, and we're all going to bed. We're gonna ignore this, and we'll deal with it in the morning."

Even though I hadn't a clue what I was talking about, it worked. The labor pains vanished. All three of us went to sleep. The next morning, just before we left for her appointment her water broke. Now, for those of you in the medical profession, mid wives, and with a stitch of common sense, you all know when the flood gates open, where do you go? To the hospital, dumb ass. We had this appointment in our heads so that's where we went. When we arrived, we were early so we sat in the waiting room. I looked to Christine and said,

"I think we can go right up there because, you know, you're in labor."

Seemed logical to Christine so she did that pregnant walk up to the counter, then stated,

"I'm in labor."

The nurse receptionist person who was wearing that odd mix of goofy medical person clothes said,

"Sure, you are, honey. Go sit down. We'll call you in a minute."

She sat back down next to me.

"What did they say?" I asked.

"They told me to sit down."

Now, I'm not a doctor, but I've watched a lot of medical shows on TV so I was pretty sure we should just go right in. I went up to the counter and said,

"My wife's in labor, and her water broke."

So they reluctantly agreed to take her in right away. The nurse person in her mismatched outfit of scrubs and flower patterns escorted us into the examination room very slowly and casually, but things changed once she examined Christine.

"Oh my God! You are in labor and your water broke. You have to get out of here!" exclaimed nurse person.

Nurse person looked directly at me and scolded, "Why didn't you take her straight to the hospital dumb ass?"

I don't think she said "dumb ass," but that's what I heard. She did have a valid question and getting more valid by the minute. I wasn't going to go over the earlier, multiple labor scares that were dismissed on the phone. Sure, it made sense now that nurse person was giving me the stink eye, but I didn't have time to discuss all that. I was collecting up my wife to drive carefully to the hospital. On the way out of the office, nurse receptionist person hit me up for a copay. In the medical business nothing is ever so urgent that we all can't stop, calm down, pull out a valid credit card and pay up. Turned out Christine had another twenty hours of labor to go. We watched the finale to Survivor, Pearl Island, Season 7, and Home Alone through it all. It was a long day and a longer night.

When Aidan finally arrived, I held him as I sat in a rocker and told him about all sorts of things we would do, the color of his room, the big tractor we had, the horses in the fields surrounding our house. Christine needed minor surgery six weeks later to correct that condition and that was that.

When Aidan was an infant, daycare wasn't for us. The idea of someone else comforting our child didn't work for my wife. I never expressed my view because she was having no part of it, and that was that too. We had picked up a lot of relevant education the seven years we were childless, and it worked out for both of us. She became a top person at a Fortune 500 company, and I had a good job in the software industry. When it came time to decide who would leave their job, the choice was obvious. My paycheck looked like a banking error compared to hers. So I left my exciting career as a software engineer for a minimum wage job, that is, nothing per hour.

If this was my life now, I was going to learn how to be the best at it. I got me a subscription to Parenting magazine. There was a wealth of information in that periodical on how to get stains out of things. There was also tips on how to get your kids to say "please" and "thank you." There was an article about "Toddler Tantrum Tactics." There were other pieces about recovering from pregnancy, what to do about postpartum syndrome, and taking the all important "me time." It didn't take me long to figure out that Parenting magazine was focused on moms. Just the moms. They didn't even hide it. Many of the articles were entitled "What Moms Do About..." or "Moms Speak Openly About..." They might as well write an article entitled, "Dads, Who Gives a Shit?"

I read a piece about my post pregnancy body, how it has changed, and how my spouse should accept me the way I am. I looked in the mirror. Looked the same to me. I wasn't into warm baths with candles and chamomile tea to steady my nerves either. My "me time" usually involved some ongoing house renovation replete with multiple trips to the hardware store. Apart from getting a stain out of the carpet, I didn't find the magazine all that useful.

I discovered that most of what you need to know about keeping a child warm, fed and secure is already prewired. It was actually pretty easy and a lot of fun. Much easier and way more rewarding than nodding off in some status meeting listening to Ted explain why he's six weeks behind an eight week project that he's been "working his ass off" on. Or sitting in a cube farm near the men's room and mentally noting that half your male colleagues don't use the sink after you hear the toilet flush. When my little boy was sleeping, I spent my time thinking. Taking care of a baby is a lot like being on sabbatical. You have no deadlines, no pending presentations, no projects to complete. It was very freeing. Leaving work offered the opportunity to freely think like I did when I was a kid. I still had some demands on my time, but holding that boy, making him laugh, feeding him, pushing him on a swing, even changing his diaper, never seemed like work to me.

And so I freed my head which started me thinking about recursion, a computer science concept in algorithms. I would do my heavy thinking while mowing the lawn. This led to a paper and a presentation at a prestigious software conference. My wife flew out to meet me in California after a well received presentation. As the saying goes "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Now, at the time we were in our 40's, and it didn't look like anymore children were likely. You can plan your life, but you can't plan your family. Sometimes, it just works out the way it does. Many women lose babies, and when you're an older parent, you just don't have time to try again. I'm fond of saying that I'm glad my wife and I listened to the doctors when they said we couldn't have anymore children. No more worrying about birth control. But life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, maybe even dangerously. Life finds a way. There it is.

On that trip to California after a successful presentation in which I published the concepts surrounding my now world famous algorithm, Christine, against all the odds, biology and the cosmos, became pregnant once more. I guess when you think about it, your body doesn't know how many times it's been around the sun. So many people were simultaneously dumbfounded and happy for us. They all figured we went to a fertility specialist due to our forty something age. One friend said,

"We know how much hard earned money you invested in this, the sacrifices. We're so happy for you."

She actually used that term, "sacrifices." Christine was patient zero at her OBGYN. She was the first patient they had seen when they opened their office twenty five years ago when they were all fresh out of medical school. When she called to tell them she was pregnant, the nurse receptionist person put her on hold, then went to find her doctor. He took over the call,

"Are you sure?" her doctor asked.

"I'm sure of it," Christine announced.

Incredulous, her doctor yelled into the office, "Hey Ted! You'll never guess who's pregnant?"

"Margret Thatcher," Ted summoned.

"No, Christine Languedoc!" he exclaimed.

No pregnancy since Jesus elicited so much joy from so many people than our small, random miracle that was on his way. I used to ask Christine what she was going to do with all that frankincense and myrrh? She warned me not to tempt fate, but I knew we were already past that. Christine became the poster mom for women trying to have babies in their 40's.

I said to a friend once that kids are great because they ensure you won't be alone when you're old.

"There's no guarantee they'll come back," he schooled.

In our case, they wouldn't have left yet.

This time around, I was very concerned that I couldn't love a second child as much as the first. It just didn't seem possible. I wondered,


William

"Who was this stranger coming to invade my life with my wife and son?"

My friend, Bill, and his wife, Julia, have two girls, Caitlin and Allison. When I discussed my concern with Bill, he told me,

"Julia and I can't imagine life without Ally. You'll find you have an infinite capacity to love."

Bill was right. The moment William was born, I was in love again. It was like William was always with us. He was just waiting for his time to come.

William and I are renovation buddies. He's always up for a trip to the hardware store, and he's quick to help with any home repair project. He's also intrinsically funny and enjoys a good belly laugh. Once, I was exiting the bathroom, William asked,

"Did you go poopies, Daddy?"

"Yes," I answered. To which, William exclaimed,

"Way to go, Daddy! Good job."

Recently, I was reading William a bedtime story when he announced,

"I have to go to the bathroom," then he asked, "Can you pause that?"

We both laughed heartily. A lot of kids William's age are very stoic. They're quiet, shy, on the other side of a shell. I often think stoicism is an inability to make someone laugh. There's none of that in my house.

I think of the circuitous route that led us to where we are now. A long courtship, a marriage, education, a first born, a job, time to think, a white paper, a conference, another child, wise friends, laughter. They seem all disconnected, but they're not. They're blazes on the trail, marking even the path least taken. I believe now, more than ever that these events are all connected. Some more obviously than others. I'm not sure of all that much, but I am of this. Life is not meant to be abided.

It's to be journeyed.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on October 18, 2016.