skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I love The Moth. It's a nonprofit that features people telling true stories, live, on stage, without notes. There's a podcast, the Moth radio hour on some public radio stations and both main stage events and "story slams". A story slam is open mic format with a theme. Any number of people sign up, and they pull ten names at random to tell stories. Volunteer judges then score the stories. The winner participates in a "grand slam" competition of all the story slam winners for the past year. In Pittsburgh, about 300 people attend the story slam; I don't know how many people put their names in, but I'd estimate it at 20-30. It can be a torturous setup. Knowing that you might get to tell a story (that's supposed to hold the audience's interest and that will be judged) means that you have to prepare. For me, that means writing the story out and trying to memorize it well enough to be able to tell it under the bright lights. But it's like if you had a to cram for a final knowing that you then stand a 60% chance of not having to take it. I've prepared before and not had my name called. It can be an unpleasant emotional roller coaster.
My name got called last night, though. It was my second time in 4 or 5 tries. The theme was "wanderlust". The story I told was a repackaged version of this post from August 2009. Read on for a trip down CP memory lane.
I don’t call myself a stay-at-home dad. It’s more accurate, but more complicated, to say that I work part time and have primary parenting responsibility. Almost as complicated as it is to work part time and have primary parenting responsibility. I cut down from full-time at my job when my son Charlie was 6 and my son Teddy was 2. The following summer I figured out that with my Monday, Tuesday, Thursday schedule, I could leave on Tuesday for a 5-day trip while using only one vacation day. My parents have a summer place in Maine. When I grew up, we’d go there for 2 or 3 weeks every summer. Making a run for the coast seemed like the perfect use of my new schedule flexibility. The fact that my wife would have to stay in Pittsburgh to work and that this would be a solo parenting adventure in the month that my boys turned 7 and 3? I was up for that; it seemed like a neat reversal of the '60s era "mom takes the kids to the Hamptons while Dad stays in Manhattan" family arrangement. It would be a downmarket version, taking a 12-year-old Honda Accord to a 6-room bungalow in a honky tonk Maine beach town, but I liked the parallels.
To be honest, I wanted to prove to myself, to my wife and to the world – which couldn’t care less – that I could take two boys 1400 miles round trip by myself. To not burden my wife, I packed everything we’d need by myself on Monday night. Clothes, beach gear, stuff to keep them entertained in the car, diapers and pullups for Teddy who was not quite potty trained. He was on that cusp between being a toddler and a pre-schooler, but he really leaned more toddler.
After work on Tuesday afternoon, I grabbed Charlie from the summer nanny, got Teddy from day care, and we set off east. About 75 miles down the turnpike, I realized I’d packed the brand new portable DVD player. and NO DVDs. [Forehead slap]. It would be a harder evening drive than I thought to my sister’s place in Queens.
We hummed across PA as you do and then confronted New York with printed google map directions, no smart phone, no GPS. These facts became important when I missed the Van Wyck expressway in Queens at 11 pm, 375 miles into the trip. My dad of the year nomination probably went out the window when I woke my three-year-old by yelling FUCK as I saw the exit ramp go by. I bungled my way around 1-3 New York boroughs acknowledging how nice it is to have a navigator - like, say, my wife - in the passenger seat in New York City. I eventually got to my sister's 1-bedroom, non-air-conditioned apartment in the throes of a heat wave. The air was thick and motionless. She slept on the floor in the living room while the boys and I sweated a lot and slept a little in her bed. Charlie concluded from overhearing me tell his mom on the phone that I'd "f-bombed my way across Queens" that "to f-bomb" means "to drive really fast".
On Wednesday, we met up with my brother and his kids in Boston and caravanned up to my parents’ place. I have some great pictures of Charlie and Teddy dead asleep on the beach. After the road trip and the stifling night in Queens, they were not raring to splash in the icy ocean. But we did have fun the next couple of days on the windy Maine beach that I grew up visiting as a kid. I savored sharing that place with my boys, my brother, my nieces and my parents. We got to have a joint birthday party for the boys with the extended family at the cottage. It was nice.
On Saturday, we drove down to my brother’s place outside Boston and spent the night there to get us that much closer to home for Sunday’s drive. We got up and out early Sunday aiming to being home in time for dinner. We made great time from Boston down through Rhode Island and Connecticut and across the Tappan Zee Bridge. Then we crossed into New Jersey, over three and a half hours without a stop. With kids that age, this was an amazing feat. I’d put Teddy in a pullup for the ride home to cut down on urgent bathroom stops, and he slept all the way from Boston to New Jersey. It was golden. I was pretty proud of myself. He woke up in the Garden State and soon after, I heard baffling splattering sounds from the back seat. Teddy was reminding me in the most graphic way that sometimes, he gets carsick. He threw up all over himself and his carseat. And some luggage. And his brother's video game. I pulled over on the side of I-287 and field-stripped him in the breakdown lane as traffic whipped by. I changed his pullup and his entire outfit. I scraped vomit off the upholstery with a plastic knife and sopped up what I could with leftover rest area napkins.Nonetheless, it smelled horrible in the car, and we had 300 miles to go.
Once we were finally back underway, Charlie said "now we're really going to have to f-bomb across Pennsylvania to make it home in time for dinner."
We bid farewell to a fine piece of reasonable transportation today. In 2004, as a three-person family, we upgraded from the 1990 Honda Accord we'd been driving (the Golden Dragon) to a 1997 Honda Accord that we bought at Frenchy's Auto. Frenchy's sign bore the slogan "Home of Reasonable Transportation". Frenchy and his friendly Russian henchmen salesmen didn't give us a very clear explanation for why they were selling a 7-year-old car with 62,000 miles on it for under Blue Book, but once our mechanic checked the car out, we didn't worry much about the "why".
The car came with the mag wheels and chrome trim strips you see pictured. It really was reasonable transportation. We loved getting 30 miles to the gallon. We loved the dependability of a Honda. We loved driving a sedan when lots of people seem to purchase an eight-seat behemoth when their first child is born. Our first child thought this car was very cool. Not quite two years old when we bought it, he used to call it the Boo Tashz (blue car), so that's the only name we've ever given it. My wife's grandfather had a standard stable of names he'd apply to cars (blue goose, green hornet, midnight marauder). We named the Golden Dragon in honor of his tradition and in honor of our second apartment, which had - for no apparent reason - golden dragons carved over the front door. But I digress. We commuted in the car and flogged it on road trips. We toted luggage and groceries and Christmas trees in its trunk.
Over the last few months, we had had repeated overheating problems. Our family could tolerate running the heat even when it was warm out in order to keep the temperature needle steady. Chauffeuring others got embarrassing, though. After several bottles of coolant and some attempted fixes, our mechanic finally determined that the head gasket was leaking and that the coolant was mixing with the oil. This is, like, bad.
So we replaced the Boo Tashz with a Mazda 5, which I'll review in this space very soon. We'd wrenched so much value out of the car, but the needed repairs would have cost more than the current Blue Book price. Without the entrepreneurial savvy of Frenchy's, we decided the best path was to sell the car for parts. At least one of the parts - a side mirror - came from the parts dealer to whom we sold the car. It was originally on a 1996 Accord. It's a real circle of life kind of thing. So, the nice tow guy came and hauled it away.
For some reason, two memories stick out with this car, both featuring Teddy.
The first one shows the kind of sticky situations I get myself into all the time. We'd gotten three tickets to a Pitt football game a few years back, and the boys and I were running late on game day. We hoped to meet up with some friends who were tailgating and walk in with them. I was thrilled to get a pretty cheap parking space without too much searching. In my excitement, I popped the trunk, got out, hustled the boys out, paid the attendant, reflexively locked the doors and then realized that the engine was still running. Oops. Thank goodness I'd popped the trunk, and thank goodness Teddy was a slender but smart three-year-old. The Honda featured a pass-through door from the back seat into the trunk. It's narrower than the arm rest, like a little doggy door. I think most people use this aperture for skis. I reached in the trunk and found that the pass-through was blessedly unlocked from that side. I explained Teddy's mission to him: slide through there and unlock a door. He gamely climbed in the trunk, snaked through, unlocked a rear passenger door and saved the day. We didn't tell mommy about that one for a long time afterward.
The second memory came on a long road trip. The first summer after I'd gone part time, I did the math and realized that because I work Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, I could leave on a trip with the boys on Tuesday night and come back Sunday night having burned only one vacation day. Paige was busy with her job, so I planned a father and sons road trip to Maine to see their grandparents at their cottage. We were to stop in Queens and stay with my sister and brother-in-law in their one-bedroom apartment. Piloting the car alone, I did fine across Pennsylvania and New Jersey but missed an exit or two in New York. We got more and more out of our way. Exhausted from a workday and then a 250 mile drive, I woke up the sleeping boys by yelling curse words. (This ended my 2009 father-of-the-year bid.) Paige called just before she went to bed around 11:00, and I told her that I'd just F-bombed my way across Queens.
We made it, though, through a sweltering night in an apartment where the air refused to move and then on up to some freezing beach days in Maine. We enjoyed good family time, and I proved to myself that I could keep the boys alive (if not simultaneously keeping myself in control) as a very temporary single parent. On the way back, we stayed with my brother and his family in Massachusetts. Setting off pretty early for the long pull back to Pittsburgh, I was thrilled that we'd made it all the way into New Jersey by about 9:30 am. It was three and a half hours without stopping because the boys had fallen asleep. We found it difficult to pile up chunks of drive time like that because one of the kids usually had to eat or pee. Anyway, we're rolling up a long hill on I-287 and Teddy without warning manifests motion sickness. He manifested it all over his clothes and car seat and a little on his brother's car seat and on his brother's backpack. I pulled off onto the shoulder 300 miles from home with a back seat full of vomit. I did what had to be done, pulling both seats out, scraping clean what I could, stripping Teddy naked on the shoulder and changing his clothes. I used every wet wipe we had. We reassembled back in the blue car and set off for home. Knowing the delay had eaten up all of the gains of the early morning departure, I worried about the length of the rest of the journey home. Charlie piped up from the back seat "Boy, now we're really going to have to F-bomb it across Pennsylvania to make it home."
