Hunky Daddy

The end of this blog...sort of

2013-01-04T21:18:00.003-08:00

This post is just a quick note to the folks that have been following Hunky Daddy. As of today, I will be ceasing activity on Blogger. I have found it to be unsuitable for my current needs and have chosen to switch to A new platform.The good news ( depending on one's perspective) is that all existing content has been uploaded to the new site:

www.hunkydaddy.com.

I have put a brand new post there and will continue to update content on a more regular basis. Thanks for reading!

-Hunky Daddy

A Farewell to Authenticity

2012-09-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yale, with its hallowed history and occult secret societies, is located in a decaying slum. New Haven's town/gown dichotomy is that of Bloods and Crips versus Bluebloods and Preps. A couple hours down the road, here in Providence, the Brown University campus police have a full-time job covering up burglaries and muggings so the city cops won't get involved. The administration wouldn't tolerate crime stats reflecting what actually happens on the city's East Side. After all, nobody wants their kid going to a school where smash-and-grabs are commonplace on the leafy streets adjacent to the campus.

Street crime: what are its causes, its solutions? If I had an answer to that I'd be making millions as a public safety consultant instead of pecking away with daddy musings, hoping to scratch a few dozen dollars together through Adsense. What I DO know first hand is the psychic state that comes from living among the ruins. Blighted and crime-ridden neighborhoods can harden the heart. How many of us, seeking authenticity, have gone to dwell among The People only to have our misanthropy forged and galvanized? Britpop band Pulp summed this sentiment and experience up pretty expertly in their tune "Mile End".

"Your basic human being," to borrow a line from comedian Ben Stein "is not such a hot item." Throw in generations of poverty, drug addiction, a shattered urban infrastructure, and an overall absence of good manners, and that not-so-hot-item becomes a downright lousy neighbor. Don't misunderstand me, dear reader. The average resident of a downtrodden neighborhood is decent and law-abiding. The bad apples, however, spoil the bunch. The 5% of indecent sods can really take the zest out of life. For every hundred hard working sanitation workers and nurse's assistants, the spattering of thugs on the corner or hillbilly lunatics cooking up bathtubs of meth drag the whole thing into the muck.

It recently occurred to me how much of a buzz kill it must be for a high-flying freshman at UPenn to avert his bright-eyed gaze from the lowlives hanging around the University City SEPTA station. Sobering, no doubt, but quickly eclipsed by bigger concerns when he graduates to the ruling of global financial and political systems. I have no doubt that the Occupy types out there find this irony delicious indeed: the Ivy League rich have their ivory towers bespoiled by the untidy surroundings of the marginalized.

I mused on these thoughts last weekend while wheeling Baby Vee dreamily through the one place that is the exception to this phenomenon: Princeton. If it has ghettos or a disenfranchised underclass they are exceptionally well hidden. All I saw were stately brick buildings and shady walkways like a Hollywood set for some film based in OxBridge. At any second I expected Jeremy Irons to appear, tweed-clad and serious. My Better Half was presenting a paper and so for three days I was on around-the-clock child care. That meant a lot of exploring with Vee. Princeton was everything my ten year old self would have expected it to be. The architecture was true to its posh English roots. Students and professors drifted along, immersed in genteel discourse about Big Ideas. Or maybe they were just talking about the Jets and Snookie's new baby. Either way their conversations were quiet and peppered with a lot less F-bombs than one hears around the trailer court dumpster. Well-heeled dads with Clark Kent jaws and yogic wives were trailed by mopheaded pre-teens, whole families dressed in the colors of an Easter basket.

Isn't a place like Princeton boring? Sure, but so is poverty. A lifetime of dusty apartment foyers collecting mail for tenants who have long since moved out; furniture upholstery worn shiny like the suit of a senile vaudevillian; neighbors screaming about the same thing in the same 300 word vocabulary for the third time in a month: that is a cycle I am happy to have left behind. I'll take the tedium of privilege over the drudgery of dispossession any day. At present I can comfortably admit that awakening to the sepulchral bass of an unregistered Maxima at two AM does not make me more spiritually advanced than peacefully slumbering in a tidy house on a quiet, tree lined street.

Wheeling Vee around the town really brought home this point for me: I am no longer concerned with coolness, street cred, or the inverse cachet of the masses if ever, in fact, I was. I am instead preoccupied with more essential things. I am a caveman dragging carcasses back to the family abode. Awkward, surely inaccurate image, but you get the point. In this degraded age what cries security more than a place like Princeton? It is a citadel of refinement and good manners; in a word, civilization. Einstein is its most celebrated denizen. John Witherspoon - the university's most famous president - taught James Madison AND has his likeness immortalized in stained glass along with Erasmus, Aquinas, and St. Francis at the Princeton Chapel. Talk about gravitas! Somehow, it strikes me as more impressive than a mural of Biggie and Tupac on the side of a barber shop. Do I sound like a snob? Finally! What a relief! I have a family counting on me to be a grown up. I don't need to be aauthentic. I don't need to be hip or with it. I don't need to be groovy, far out, or really boss. It's OK for me to be a real square, a stick in the mud, a total downer. My daughter is going to think I'm hopelessly lame no matter what I do, so I may as well embrace it. When parents are too cool something is wrong. It's like a Twilight Zone episode or the beginning of a cautionary tale. My plan now is to be stable, secure, reliable. After all, kids need something to rebel against, right?

Public Health

2012-09-03T12:08:00.003-07:00

I.

In one corner of the room an orange cat dressed in a bow tie is licking cream lasciviously, in slow motion, from a bowl. He appears to be talking to some other anthropomorphic animals, though I can't be sure because no sound comes out of his yapping maw. At my feet, a whirling, swirling mass of colors warps in rhythm with my steps, projected from below as if by some fantastic machine in a Roald Dahl book or a Haight Ashbury technician's LSD inspired light show.

Upstairs, freakishly huge plastic fruits are arranged in a kaleidoscopic playground - the peeled banana curves down into a slide, the bunched grapes are obstacles for climbing. Over all of this madness a benevolent idol presides, a giant potato with the hat and mustache of a comedian from the silent film era.

No, I am not describing the drugged visions of a San Francisco acid test, nor the ghoulish hallucinations of a Saturday night in Tower Two at Buffalo State College. I refer instead to the delights that abound in the waiting rooms of Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, RI. I was there this past Sunday with Baby Vee and her alarmed, exhausted, worst-case-scenario-expecting mother. The baby was running a fever, hadn't crapped her diaper in four or five days, and sported a facial rash somewhere between Poison Oak and the Ebola virus. The nurse practitioner at the urgent care center insisted in hushed, ominous tones that we report to the children's hospital ER and we complied. At the time, sitting in the grim, fluorescent lit room of the walk-in center, the baby really had seemed ill. She lay listlessly in her mother's arms, feebly mouthing a breast, gazing up pathetically with glassy, red-rimmed eyes.

Now, an hour later, her demeanor has done a hundred eighty degree turn for the better. The flatscreen TV on one wall mutedly showing the Disney film The Aristocats has Vee mesmerized. She watches with fascination, totally unaware of how annoying her father finds it to endure soundless television. As for the trippy, interactive images projected on the floor, she doesn't quite know what to make of them, though she enjoys toddling after other, older kids across the shifting surface. This whole thing is so far out of her normal range of experience that it seems to have baffled her momentarily into forgetting that she is sick.

Upstairs, a bubbly pediatric nurse provides distraction with a tiny calculator on a key ring while expertly probing each vital infant sign. A smiling doctor offers the bribe of a glimmering red popsicle that Vee greedily sucks and then promptly drops on the linoleum. Easy come, easy go. When all the procedures are done we are given the kind of vague, general answer I expected from the beginning : this is probably viral. That can cause a rash too, you know. Keep her hydrated. Use a syringe to the back of the throat if necessary. Make her guzzle prune and apple juice for the constipation. The subtext: don't be such hypochondriacs, you first-child ninnies. Don't run her down to the ER for every little thing.

I'm no dummy. I can read between the lines.

Did we overreact? Hard to say. The local news, after all, has been alarming us with a barrage of stories about West Nile outbreaks. Vee has never been truly sick before this, and when she ceases to be a tornado of clumsy, exuberant destruction, something is amiss. Listless flailing is just not her way.

The takeaway? Everything is out of my control. I can't do anything, really, to help my daughter. What I am best at is being stressed out. I count myself among the arrogant fools who deride Western medicine for its short-sightedness, its reckless casting aside of the old ways. That is alarmingly easy to do from the perspective of the unafflicted. Throw one wrench in the gears, though, and suddenly I'm thanking my lucky stars that a world class pediatric hospital is a stone's throw away. I'm such a know-it-all, until the moments that show I know nothing.

A day after our trip to the psychedelic playland, Vee's fever broke. She started drinking her prune juice. She did not starve or die of dehydration. She is safe. She is happy. She is well. I am already back to doubting the doctors. I never learn.

II.

Approximately three people die of rabies in the United States each year. For a little while there last week, My Better Half and I were convinced our little family had a chance of occupying that dubious demographic for 2012. It started with an errant bat. When we returned from a weekend out of town, we found its droppings on a windowsill in the living room. The creature was nowhere visible and it was my husbandly duty to look high and low. Tasks like that are the worst. Needle in a haystack. Where does one even begin searching when the vermin in question has a tiny, collapsible skeleton and is known for hanging in dark recesses?

A few days went by and we Googled bat information obsessively. The facts are pretty spooky, at least in relation to rabies. The experts say that most or many people (depending on the source this varies) are unaware that they've been bitten when it happens at night. I find this a bit far fetched, since I'm pretty sure I would know if a bird-sized critter alight on leathery wings swept down upon me in the depths of slumber. Still, I concede to the pros.

When we contacted the health department and answered a questionnaire, their advice was to go to the ER and get shots immediately. It seemed a bit drastic. Really, what were the odds? My dad-mind, racing in typical frenzied fashion, went to worst case scenarios. What if the baby had been bitten while momentarily toddling unattended and had no way of telling us? What if her cries of terror had been misinterpreted as frustrated wailing because her mother had just walked out of the room? What if the virus was already moving through her bloodstream, insidiously making its way toward her central nervous system with the cold, alien machinations of all things viral?

Risk assessment has been taken to whole new levels of weird these days. Rabies, for instance, has no cure. Once it's gone past a certain point there is no House, M.D. swooping in to make cynical comments while secretly caring. You go straight to Purgatory. I pondered this for two days and two nights, calling United Healthcare in the meantime to see if they would cover rabies shots. Being on the phone with the company was like the experience of the character K in Kafka's The Castle: barely audible and sinister voices whispered, laughed, were buried by feedback on the other end of the line. Useless, in other words. I was left with more questions than answers.

On the third day I came home from work to find My Better Half on the porch, white as the GOP. "OhmyGodIcaughtthebatandtrappeditintheofficeI'mtotallyfreakingout!" she gasped in a single breath. Turns out she had been diligently studying when a soft thump alerted her attention to the floor. A mere foot away lay the elusive creature, just staring. One minute she was reading Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and the next she was faced with a potential rabies situation. Yikes. She had the presence of mind to slowly crawl over the top of the desk, grab a wastebasket, and trap the bat underneath. She then promptly ran out of the house screaming.

I transferred it to a jar and called the Environmental Police. Hours later an officer came by to collect the specimen. He told us the Health Department would test the animal for rabies and get back to us within a few days. Much to My Better Half's dismay, we found out the only way to conclusively know involved killing the animal and testing multiple parts of its brain. In a matter of hours, my wife went from being horrified of the potential for rabies to having a PETA level concern for the poor thing's welfare. She found herself bound in a minor ethical dilemma that I chalked up to advanced procrastination techniques (if you're reading this, love: only joking!). What if it DIDN'T have rabies???

The next day I got a call confirming the test was negative. Alas, the bat had been put down. It was in the interest of public safety. In a society that has mastered minorly invasive robotic surgery, the cloning of mammals, and is well on its way to mapping the human genome, it seems like a more humane way has to be possible. It was nice to confirm that none of us has rabies, though. Hell, I don't even have a life insurance policy.

If I allow myself to go down the rickety staircase of neurosis into the dark sub-basement of parental panic, I can conjure all kinds of nasty scenarios. Rabid animals are just the tip of the iceberg. Let us not forget careless drivers, collapsing bookshelves, burning buildings, obscure allergies, earthbound meteors, venomous snakes, the natural cruelty of children, existential loneliness, entropy, carcinogens, the decaying effects of television. The three inch binder of local sex offenders found at any police station is enough to make anyone want to give up on humanity.

For today, though, my little family is secure and rabies free. Our house is newly bat-proof. Our bellies are full and sunlight streaks through the windows, illuminating Vee's cherubic face as she blows kisses and does her trademark double-eyed wink. She wobbles over and I pull her into my arms. Momentarily, we are both caught up in the illusion that I can keep her safe.

Walk, don't run.

2012-08-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

Watching a 10 month old do a full-on face plant into sand is a funny thing. Not funny ha ha – that would just be sick – but funny odd. For one thing, you think of the surface in question as being soft, as in Let her walk over here, on the sand, in case she falls. Sand is an element of carefree play: beaches on which to bat around a multi-colored ball, boxes in which to dig toward China with plastic shovels, blissfully ignorant of geography or the time-space continuum. If we break it down for a moment, though, the thought occurs that silica is the product of rocks being shattered by violent geological processes over the course of millions and billions of years, settling finally in this seemingly innocuous form. Further still, send the mind to ponder thus: these fine particles are later sorted in highly specialized equipment and burned at thousands of degrees in order to manufacture glass. This glass, in turn, is fashioned into windshields, windows, and jars. Bodies fly through these windshields in car wrecks, workers have arteries and jugulars sliced as they plunge several stories through skylights waiting below, and rows of mason jars cascade down upon old ladies in their cellars, doing them in through a tragic trifecta of head trauma, suffocation and blood loss. OK, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch. Still, I make my point clearly enough: seen through the distorted prism of a paranoid dad-mind, sand isn’t so safe after all. Why is it, then, that we are surprised when a newly-walking infant goes down hard in the sand and comes up screaming like a banshee? That red face, so perfectly melding pain, bewilderment, and rage, rises from the playground and shrieks soundlessly for several seconds before letting out a howl so primal and sad that it goes right to the core of even the most macho dad. We run to swoop up our injured tot, overtaken by simultaneous surges of concern and guilt, and in the moment we bring her up to face level, receive the sucker punch of seeing those abrasive particles clinging to her face – her whole face, cherubic cheeks and rosebud lips and double chin – and cringe as if we had just watched a video of ourselves taking the brutal header in question.

This is an elaborate way on my part of announcing that Veronica has begun to walk. She started a couple weeks ago, wobbly baby steps at first, teetering between parents in brief displays of barely organized chaos. In terms of muscle and nerve she was clearly ready, but psychologically she needed the boost of clinging to a single adult finger, like Chaplin’s reliance on pancake make-up and toothbrush mustache. She really came through for everyone and graduated to toddling in time for my brother Josh’s wedding, becoming the star of the show for a brief instant (Notice I said BRIEF instant, Jenna – you were the true star of the show, beautiful bride!) as one of the flower girls, waddling down the aisle while holding hands with two older children to the delight of the wedding-softened crowd. She has been moving upright ever since, with mixed results. This includes countless playground excursions, including the one memorialized in the opening sentences of this blog. She was overtired and unsure on her feet, her father was negligent, and before we both knew it she was falling flat on her face in sand. All’s well that ends well, as the man says, and this was no exception. Inside of two minutes, Baby Vee was smiling her Sponge Bob smile and chipping away at her dad’s black wall of neurosis by pecking at his cheek with her wet and generous kisses. Bottom line, the important thing is that she can walk in less than a year’s time, scoring high marks on the existential report card and perpetuating her parents’ absurd sense of cosmetic competitiveness. All boasting and bragging aside, we truly DON’T take any credit OR ourselves too seriously, dear reader, and neither should you. We are positive that the next baby will be a tiny, frail, timid boy who does everything six months after it is predicted in the baby books.

Learning to speak Ewokese

2012-07-25T13:54:00.002-07:00

It seems like no time at all since the little wrinkled changeling with an upturned nose and black monkey-hair came home wrapped in a pink blanket. I remember gingerly putting her car seat in the back of the Subaru and, like Seth Rogen's character in Knocked Up, driving about ten miles an hour all the way home. It was a pitch perfect September morning and people were everywhere, oblivious and happy. On the lawns of Brown University, undergrads lounged blissfully. They seemed happily ignorant of the fact that while they were at peak fertility, actual child bearing and rearing was a good decade or more off for most of them. As for me, my prolonged youth had finally come to an end. Good riddance.
If memory serves, My Better Half and I took Veronica directly to bed and lay with her for hours. When a woman gives birth at the end of a long, hot summer - two weeks past her due date - one can imagine the discomfort of those final months. Lack of sleep is presumably the unpleasant icing on a pretty sh***y cake. Since Vee had kicked and punched her way through most nights while in utero, it had been quite a while since My Better Half settled in for forty winks of solid R.E.M. slumber. Little has changed in that department over the last ten months. Plenty of other things have, though.

   Starting at the top, the dark monkey fur has long since fallen out to make way for a coppery mop of wavy-verging-on-curly human hair. Her eyes are a mesmerizing mocha, adorned with what we've gotten to calling "girl fox eyelashes" in reference to some half-remembered Disney cartoon or other from our childhoods. Vee nearly always has a smile on her face, which is used to showcase her eight teeth (or, as we call them, "teefs"). They are not mere ordinary teefs but bonified Sponge Bob Squarepants teefs; she has inherited her father's generous gaps. Next come a set of barelly ribs and the pot belly of an AARP member. She has thunder thighs and square little Simpsons feet. The sum of her parts, in other words, is perfection. Aside from being adorable looking, she has personality in spades. Veronica is an outgoing, curious, and strong-willed little person. I can't count the number of times a stranger in the store or park has commented, "That baby doesn't miss a thing!" She stares intently at everything around her, with a special focus on other babies, dogs, big trucks, a framed picture of an owl next to the linen closet, and anything food related. She can pull herself up and stand without assistance, and she has graduated from a tactical army creep to a full-fledged, butt-in-the-air, high speed crawl.

One area in which she has yet to prove herself a prodigy is spoken communication. While she does plenty of uttering, she is not yet into real human words. At least not in any language I'm familiar with. However, she speaks so emphatically and with such purpose that it's difficult not to take her seriously. Her "speech" carries the same cadences and intonation of a grown-up but has none of the phonemic recognition. We have begun likening it to the chattering of a Jim Hensonesque marionette in a dippy kid's film. She speaks something like a Mogwai or an Ewok. We have tried at length to decipher this language and match her words up with anything resembling our own. So far we have failed. The da da's and ma ma's that so warmed our hearts months ago have proven to be mere flukes. She is just as likely refering to the cat when she says da da a hundred times in a row as she is referring to me. I try not to take it personally. After all, the only real communication or affirmation I need is when she stares into my eyes with her chocolatey brown ones, opens her mouth wide to bare that hilarious set of teefs, and dive bombs in for a drooly, unself-conscious kiss with a little bite thrown in for good measure.

Living in the Eye of the Toynado

2012-06-21T14:29:00.001-07:00

Is there a name for awkward combinations of words thrown together by the media like Taxmageddon, or, worse yet, the myriad lunkheaded "-gate" suffix phrases bandied about for anything with even the slightest whiff of political scandal? Clintongate, Twittergate, Weinergate, Nannygate. As a society we become a little dumber with each subsequent one we read. And don't get me started on the ostensibly clever name of the upscale toy shop around the corner, "CreaTOYvity". I see red every time I look at the sign. Still, at the risk of being hypocritical, I'd like to coin my own pun: "Toynado". I am doing it only because it is such a perfect description of our apartment now that Vee is old enough to play. Granted, in her case this can only be applied in the loosest sense, as "playing" consists mainly of pulling things out of baskets and flinging them on the floor. Also, shoving them in her mouth, drooling on them, then flinging them on the floor. Alternately, pulling things out of baskets, getting frustrated at the very sight of them, shrieking her mightiest dinobaby howl of fury, drooling on them, and then flinging them on the floor. The bottom line is that a lot of things end up on the floor. Everyday. Big things, like her dingy Cabbage Patch Kid Davey, staring up at us with a hopeful yet ultimately defeated look in his watery blue eyes. Little things, like the 26 tiny cardboard books each describing words from a different letter of the alphabet. Blankets, blocks, rattles, mirrors, balls, beanbags. A sea of DCMIC - Disposable Crap Made in China - covers virtually every inch of the place. It looks like a scene out of Hoarders, despite every attempt to pick up in Vee's wake of destruction. We are failures. Still, on some level we are forced to admire her boundless energy and sheer aptitude for creating chaos. How does she do it, this little person of approximately two feet in length who cannot even execute a true crawl? Instead she drags herself around in what we've termed the "army crawl", with her right leg doing all the work and her left lying limp and lifeless in a truly convincing pantomime of a wounded soldier.

We are living in the eye of the toynado. I shudder to think of what the place will look like when Vee can actually walk. I assume it will be reduced to a ruin, a pile of rubble, a wasteland of toys.

Holding Down the Fort...One Lousy Suitor at a Time

2012-05-07T20:54:00.003-07:00

I used to joke around that if I ever had a teenage daughter I would keep potential suitors in line by cleaning my guns on the dining room table when the potential boyfriends in question came calling. I also said that I'd lock her in a tower with no staircase but wouldn't make the mistake of letting her grow her hair ala Rapunzel. The jokes became stale from all the telling. They were never all that funny in the first place. The plain fact is that to be a woman in the world is to be a potential target of so many kinds of abuse and exploitation that it boggles the male mind. Being the actual father of a daughter now has really brought the point home for me.
A few months ago, Fakhra Younus, high profile victim of an acid attack by her estranged husband in the deranged misogytopia of Pakistan, committed suicide by leaping from the 6th floor of a building. As the story goes, Ms. Younus's politically connected ex-husband snuck into a home where she was staying after she had left him in 2002. He allegedly poured acid all over her body - a routine practice in that country - leaving her horrendously disfigured. Appeals to the courts were to no avail. After all, Sharia Law is not the same thing as the Rule of Law as we know it. After years of failed reconstructive surgery attempts and a doubtless living hell, Ms. Younus gave up the ghost in Rome, where she had been living in exile for some time.

At this point the sympathetic but thoughtful reader might saying to herself, "That's horrible, but what does it have to do with Baby Vee?" Like some grizzled yet ephemeral mystic, I would answer: "Nothing. Yet Everything." Veronica is, after all, female. Even in the most liberated and "progressive" countries of the West, woman is a second class citizen to man. Sure, females retained more jobs in the Great Recession than males. Did this change each genders' ultimate relative positions, though? In the high paid upper echelons of Hollywood and the debauched, decaying record industry, the top flight female stars are expected to flaunt not only talent but to ascribe to - for lack of a better word - an Aesthetic of Whoredom. At home and in the workplace, women are expected to be not only the equals of men in aptitude and career advancement, but to bear the brunt of the domestic tasks. Even if they don't personally care for their offspring, they are meant to shoulder an equal brunt of the monetary burden required to do so. THAT equation, of course, requires hired hands to do the child rearing, and guess what gender category those workers fall under?

   For their part, what have men of the current American generation done to deserve their status as supreme masters in this colonial situation? There's certainly nothing Biblically ordained or biologically determined that says it should be thus according to the contemporary behavior of the Average American Male. Our living examples of public masculinity are the preposterous buffoons of professional sports, the vain, narcissistic charity-monsters of Hollywood, and the banal everyday chauvinists on the homefront who act at worst like cads and at best like duds. With a slouching posture and brittle, insecure psyche fractured by twenty or more years of sensitivity training, self-esteem boosting, and utterly absent values, what do these "men" have to offer women other than the bare minimum of a few tepid sperm and a command of fantasy baseball statistics? Nothing I would accept for my daughter, that's for sure! Any of the vermin that, by hook or by crook, manage to scale their way up the wall of the entranceless tower and into my munitions room are in for one hell of an interrogation. At the very least....

Child Exploitation for Fun and Profit

2012-02-24T09:31:00.000-08:00

Child exploitation. It has such an ugly ring to it. It conjures images of nefarious doings in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia by the most evil people on the planet. At the very least, it calls to mind grotesque "stage parents" such as Joe Jackson, Michael Lohan or, perhaps most infamously, Patsy Ramsay, mother of slain child beauty contestant JonBenet. I'm not even going to stoop to a reference to a certain reality train wreck that airs weekly on The Learning Channel. My point here is that the phrase "child exploitation" elicits the same response from the average person as a Klan rally at the town hall or Charles Manson's latest parole hearing.

However, all extremes aside, what if one is just exploiting one's child a teensy weensy little bit? Like, for instance, using her adorability to get out of a speeding ticket, or to finagle a discount at Whole Foods? What if - hypothetically speaking, of course! - one were to exploit their child's tender age and fragile immune system to take a slightly higher-than-normal quota of personal days for the year? What if - and this is where controversy is sure to arise - one were to try and get one's child on a diaper package or life insurance commercial in order to jump start the hypothetical college fund? Undoubtedly, this thought dawns on every pair of vain, deluded new parents after enough women in the supermarket have stopped to gasp at their infant's remarkable cuteness. I am sure that the middle-class parents to whom this thought has occurred vastly outnumber those to whom it has not. Still, SOMEBODY'S baby has to appear on these commercials, right? After all, we live in the Age of the Kardashian. Talent and even, to a degree, classical beauty are no longer requirements to procure fame and riches. Andy Warhol's "15 Minutes of Fame" has gone from being a deadpan prediction by a weird celebrity to a cultural touchstone. If Snooki gets to be famous, or so the logic could conceivably go, doesn't my baby deserve to sit inside a truck tire or atop a cloud or in a sunflower costume on national television? And shouldn't I be paid handsomely for it? Yes, we are doomed. When Veronica is an adult she will doubtlessly inherit a world resembling Mike Judge's brilliant (and terrifying) satirical film "Idiocracy". At the very least, perhaps she can have a diaper commercial or two to look back on.

She Wakes Up Screaming

2012-02-09T20:29:00.000-08:00

My Better Half recently got her hands on a title called The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night. While she was book shopping, she might as well have picked up The Field Guide to North American Unicorns, Easter Bunny Confidential:On the Trail of Christendom's Leporine Enigma, and Lessons from the Loch: My Year With Nessie. Still, despite my innate skepticism, I applaud her effort to try and sort through the rubble pile that our sleeping lives have become. Hers, I should say. For the sake of honesty in reporting, I must confess that it is she who suffers through much of the endurance sport-cum-surrealist nightmare that is bedtime with Veronica. It really is a tough job, and one more piece of evidence for the superior fortitude of the gentler sex.

It is the female segment of our little family that stays up until 2 or 3 most nights, pacing the floors and seeking every sleepy diversion under the moon. Some of that time is whiled away in the mind-numbing vortex of cable TV. Much of it is spent futilely begging Veronica to please oh please just close her eyes. It is to no avail. She is too young to be bribed or succumb to reason. She sleeps when she feels like it, on a timeline not unlike many undergraduates spending their first year in the dorms. Early on, as the reader may recall from a previous blog, I pitched in with this nocturnal routine. However, it quickly became clear that I was more of a nuisance and liability than helpful asset. My stress and frustration seemed contagious, and what Vee really responded to was the comforting bosom of Mother.

These days I am usually in bed during the struggle, though I'm woken by the occasional muffled scream from the other room. Once My Better Half has finally soothed Vee to sleep and tip-toed into bed, the fitful "rest" begins. The baby kicks, grunts, snorts, squirms, and rolls around in her sleep. If, at any point, My Better Half has rolled away, Vee manages to inch over to her comforting warmth. This is repeated ad infinitum. All of this is not to mention the screaming. Yes, she wakes up screaming. These are not whimpers or bleats. They are full-on, blood curdling, haunted house-quality shrieks. We are talking glass-shatteringly high-pitched howls that would not be out of place at midnight upon the Yorkshire Moors. She screams and cries in her sleep, squeezing hot little tears out of tightly shut eyes, convulsing in pain physical or psychic. We have been unable to pinpoint the source of this nightly torture. Needless to say, it is heartbreaking to witness. It is also sleep breaking. We are zombies, albeit loving and nurturing ones.

Despite all of this, Vee seems perfectly happy and well rested when she rises in the... afternoon. She is all smiles when she opens her eyes, and that gummy grin is enough to banish all thoughts of the tormented night before. Well, most of them anyway.

Baby, Bath Time, and Beatles

2011-12-04T21:25:00.000-08:00

It's a little bit...I don't know, unsettling... how many pop love songs a father can sing to his infant daughter without having to change any of the words and still have them make perfect sense. Throw into the mix the fact that we're in the bathtub together when I'm singing most of these songs and it can almost get a little weird. I'm not talking about any of the dirty, booze-and-sex fueled anthems being propagated all over today's vulgar radio, but the good old-fashioned bubblegum fare of the 60's and 70's. Nevertheless, it's a little off putting to realize that one is singing songs to a 3 month old that were written for hormone-crazed adolescents necking in large American sedans. That's just the hung-up neurosis talking, though. The plain fact is that our nightly bath time ritual has become one of thehighlights of my day. Regardless of Baby Vee's mood beforehand, she is transformed into a docile cherub upon sliding down into the warm water of the bath. I sing her what fragments of the Beatles' catalogue I can cull from my ravaged brain, snatches of Hollies or Raspberries tunes, and other MOR fluff from the days when nobody had ever heard of Autotune and "R & B" meant something a lot different than Chris Brown commanding an anonymous hook-up to "reach up in that dresser where them condoms is".

In the not-too-distant future, there will undoubtedly come a time when I no longer climb into the bathtub with Veronica. At the rate she's growing, there soon won't be any room for the two of us! Still, I cherish this while it lasts. The music thing has got really me thinking, though, and I'm starting to make some resolutions. For one thing, Veronica will NOT be allowed to listen to the radio, with the exception of one station: WDAD. Secondly, she will not get to be around boys at any point. Period. That enchantress in the tale of Rapunzel had the right idea with the whole tower thing. Her fatal mistake was letting the girl's hair grow too long. Veronica will be getting haircuts every several months, just to ensure that no passing princes get any fresh ideas.

Adventures of the One Armed Man (and Sidekick)

2011-11-25T17:37:00.000-08:00

I used to snicker in private derision at the fathers I would see around town, shamelessly toting their progeny in Baby Bjorns and similarly designed front-packs. It was all part of a broader pattern of emasculation - heck, feminization even! - of the middle class American male, or so I assumed. While the working classes have mixed martial arts and drunken ATV rides amongst the power-line trails of a ruined exurbia, and the financial elites go on corporate retreats where they hunt wild boars in the nude and engage in occult rituals, what is the educated middle class guy left with? He certainly doesn't do anything particularly manly at his job - that is, if he's lucky enough to be left with one. Chances are he... oh, I can't even be bothered to think of a smarmy, dismissive example of a middle class job. If he's anything like me, he gets paid to teach elementary school students the difference between "their", "there", and "they're". Or something with computers. The point is that we are soft. Our jobs have made us this way, as have every other facet of our lives. Our sensitivity, our introspection, our availability, our awareness have all been nails in the macho coffin. I'm not knocking it. Certainly your typical middle class father today (along with plenty of blue collar and rich ones, too) is an improvement in many ways over the emotional cripples of a generation or two ago. We are

around to lend a hand with the day-to-day household chores, including childcare. This is just as it should be. Domesticity has taken on new dimensions, and it only makes sense that the perpetual adolescents and castrados who pass for fathers these days should pitch in.

The front-pack, however, is where I always figured I would personally draw the line. There is something so maternal about it, that pseudo-womb situation where the baby has easy access to mother's milk as a kind of added bonus. The sad, bespectacled dads simultaneously clinging to the fleeting remains of their coolness and their hairlines just didn't look right with the baby hanging in front, drooling on them. Full sleeve tattoos and a Misfits t-shirt still didn't counteract the dorkiness of a Baby Bjorn, I secretly scoffed. That was before Veronica came along. That was before I realized just how much she hated to be put down. Ever. It was prior to the realization that My Better Half would spend the lonely hours of so many nights up with her, followed by the entire next day carting her around while I was at work. I did not figure on the fact that I would get home each afternoon to have her foisted by my patient-yet-exhausted wife into my arms.

This was all coursework in my rapid education in the school of hard knocks. I was learning one thing, primarily: women are not only smarter than men but also harder working! After a day of physically taxless "labor" I really had no excuse not to take a turn carting around

the baby. Complaining about or balking at the concept would have been not only selfish but futile. As a prototypical middle-class male of the above description, I had long since surrendered quaint little notions like autonomy and assertiveness. And guess what? I grew to kind of, you know, love it. I carried Baby Vee with me from room to room, speaking in invented nonsense verse and espousing my cynical views on geopolitics and the state of the nation. She cooed, smiled, looked confused, farted, and, yes, drooled on me. Despite how much Vee and I started to really bond, darn if it didn't make my arms tired! I juggled her back and forth between the two sides, in the nonchalant way a guy does, hoping no one noticed. Still, when I would walk by her nursery and glance at the Bjorn hanging from the doorknob I had to avert my eyes. It was calling to me. I held out for as long as I could. Then, one day about a week ago, My Better Half took Veronica to the pediatrician for her 9 week check-up. The news was big. Literally. Vee was twenty-four inches long and weighed nearly 15 pounds! She was in the 97th percentile in terms of size for her age. The doctor was stunned by her girth and strength. He assured us, unnecessarily, that a two month old infant cannot have an eating disorder. Still, it seemed like an omen. It was time. One night, under the cover of dark, I self-consciously slipped on the Bjorn and put Veronica in. Unsurprisingly, she loved it; so did I. It was incredibly comfortable and convenient! We stealthily made our way up the street to CVS, hoping no one spotted us along the way.

Perhaps I have inadvertently stumbled on a truth about our age. Maybe this is it for the guys of my generation and social class. If one doesn't work in the building trades, or engage in recreational bodybuilding, it just might be that carting around baby is his most physically exerting task. Forget yard work: we either got conned into buying condos pre-recession, or have been priced out of homeownership by urban living and tight lending. We dwell in apartments and rented houses. We rake no leaves and shingle no roofs. We build websites, not additions. We're doomed. At least our babies are perfect. Veronica, you and your pink clad little peers own the future!

Get Your Hands Off Me! I Know My Rites!

2011-11-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

"Almighty, everlasting God, look graciously down upon this Thy servant...and drive out...all blindness of heart; break all the toils of Satan wherewith she was held that, being impressed with the sign of Thy wisdom, she may be free from the foulness of all wicked desires...I exorcise thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that thou goest out an
d depart from this servant of God, Veronica. For He commands Thee, accursed one, Who walked upon the sea, and stretched out His right hand to Peter about to sink. Therefore, accursed devil, acknowledge thy sentence, and give honor to the living and true God!"

No, I'm not quoting from Father Damien in the The Exorcist as he attempts to drive the resident demon out of bedeviled youngster Regan MacNeil. I'm citing, believe it or not, the Rite of Baptism performed on Veronica this past weekend! That's right, it's official: she has been washed clean in the blood of the lamb and is a Catholic. Am I mixing religious metaphors? Possibly, but the earnest reader gets the point nonetheless.

We were joined by a small cadre of beaming family members for the special day, and special it certainly was! After some discussion, we had decided to request the old Latin rite. As in the 3 times-as-long, 10 times-as-spiritually-heavy rite. As in the rite they used to perform back when women were required to wear doilies on their heads when entering a church. As in the rite that was commonplace in the era when Catholics ate breaded tuna casseroles on Fridays all year long, not just during Lent! Why, you might be wondering, would two thoroughly modern individuals like My Better Half and I choose such an archaic ritual to have performed on our infant daughter? Isn't the Novus Ordo - or "New Order', for the non Latin speakers and British dance-pop nostalgicists out there - just fine? What difference does it ultimately make? This blog is not the place for in-depth exploration of such questions. If I wanted to delve into that stuff, I could start a thread on some obscure message board and have 10 pages worth of responses inside of a day! I am deliberately dodging overt religious or political topics here. Anyone who knows me personally can attest to the fact that I am a man of strong opinions. However, I prefer to be as diplomatic and universally friendly as possible in these musings. Suffice it to say that I am by no means a traditionalist hardliner. In some ways just the opposite is true. I do, on the other hand, like the idea of traditional practices being promoted from generation to generation. Such a notion is particularly relevant, I think, in this era where the closest things we have to saints are the Steve Jobs' of the world, smug technocrats who have managed to "innovate" their way to the top of the societal slop pile. Theirs is an insidious conquest, one whose only antidote just may be an atavistic adherence to the old ways. But there I go getting carried away just like I promised I wouldn't!

Getting back to Baby Veronica: she was a vision of perfection in her lacy, pearl-bedecked baptismal gown. It was the color of ivory and could have come out of a time capsule from the 1880's...or 1920's...or any era before church design took its lead from The Jetsons or the Bauhaus. She was, of course, exquisite. All the grandparents and aunties agreed. The senses were assailed by church accoutrements of sight, sound, smell. The incense lingering in my nostrils dragged me back through the millennia to the cathedral at Armagh, or some humbler, provincial parish buried deep in the Irish hills. If the candles could have held me in their hypnotic flicker for long enough I may have found myself in the eleventh century, supplicating before a thousand such illuminations upon the altar at Cologne. All pretentious references aside, the point is: this stuff was old. Vastly old. Immeasurably older and deeper than the insights of any of us 21st century multi-taskers and multi-media savants. We were immersed in this enormous, awe-striking thing, which I guess was the point precisely.

None of this is meant as a missive against the Second Vatican Council, or some form of Catholic apologetics, or anything else hitched to an agenda. It is merely an account of how, one recent Sunday in November, we set aside some of the contemporary clutter and took Veronica to a quiet, somber place. It was a place of the past, but ultimately out of time. We took her to get baptized with the spirit of a mantra that would not sound out of place in today's media soundtrack: GO BIG OR GO HOME!

Baby Vee's Enigmatic Smile

2011-10-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

According to pioneering child psychologist Aristotle, a milestone is reached in human development when, on the fortieth day of life, an infant laughs for the first time. I don't know what kind of evidence he was basing this on, but Veronica is now 7 days past the deadline and still hasn't uttered so much as a chuckle! Maybe she did it sometime last week while neither My Better Half nor I were paying attention. Doubtful. Still, it's not all doom and gloom with her. For the last several weeks we have been treated to bonified, honest-to-goodness, no-bones-about-it grins. Maybe. Probably. It's hard to say, exactly. Let me clarify: she has definitely been doing something smile-related on a regular basis. Her lips curl up to the sides and she opens her mouth wide to show off a bright pink, useless set of gums. The ambiguity, however, has to do with the transitory nature of these smiles. Like clouds rolling across the sky on a windy autumn day, or some annoying Zen haiku, her grins are there and then, just as quickly, gone. Without warning, and not in response to any obvious stimuli, they appear. With the same lack of advanced notice, they are replaced by looks of confusion, panic, or anger. Often, her face blooms into a heart-fluttering, male ego-obliterating countenance of pure infant joy only to follow with a regurgitated stream of curdled milk all over daddy's shirt. How is one to interpret such a thing?

Our pediatrician reassured us on our first visit that at around 6 weeks our baby daughter would smile at us and make all the hard work of those early days worth it. What he didn't mention was the enigmatic nature of those smiles. Doing so wouldn't have been necessary; regardless of their cryptic nature, the smiles ARE gratifying. Even if they're not exactly "responsive smiles", it's hard not to feel that we're doing something right. She hasn't, after all, starved to death (though I can't exactly take any credit for that end of things). She is warm enough and gets a clean diaper when the old one is sodden with what looks like a cheese-based Indian curry. She has off-key songs with Dada lyrics sung to her on a regular basis. She has two doting, sleep-deprived servants who want to give her the moon. So even if the smile is the mere byproduct of a long-ago

programmed biological

response, or she is actually grinning at guardian angels or

faeries unseen by parental eyes, it really doesn't matter. I'll take the inscrutable, toothless baby smile as my reward. If she is someday able to humor her old man and laugh at my jokes that will be icing on the cake.

Veronica's Place in the New World Order

2011-10-25T19:41:00.000-07:00

In the hour after Veronica was born, the nurses performed a number of standard medical procedures: snipping the umbilical cord, checking her blood sugar level, measuring her weight and length, and various other miscellanea. At one point, a nurse inserted a device known as a Vitamin K Heel Stick into the titular body part and our newborn angel howled like a banshee. I was momentarily shocked, but after recovering decided to edify the offending nurse with a bit of my trademark scathing wit:

"So, when are you guys going to insert the barcode microchip under her skin?" I asked, deadpan, looking her directly in the eye. She froze like a deer in headlights and fumbled for a response. I didn't force her to flounder too long; when I told her I was joking, she let loose with a cackle that was part relief and part unease.

That anecdote came to mind the other day when I retrieved the mail and saw the nondescript yet unmistakable royal blue font of the return address on one particular envelope: Social Security Administration. The most remarkable aspect of the envelope,

however, was the name of the addressee: Veronica Mary

- - - - -. It's official, I thought, Veronica is a United States citizen!

Upon opening the envelope, I found the document that will enable her to one day obtain employment, start a savings account, receive health care and, heaven forbid, acquire government services if she finds them necessary. For most Americans now living, a Social Security number and the accompanying card are standard aspects of life. In my case, I've been using it since the age of 11 when I first went on the books as a paper boy. Every so often over the years, when filling out paper work for a new job or other official business, I have had to produce it in order for some bureaucrat to photocopy the card and insert the smudgy black facsimile in a file. Despite the potential gravity of the document, it is hard to take too seriously a three and a half by 2 inch piece of card stock. Still, there's something fairly ominous about the words printed on the back: "This card belongs to the Social Security Administration and you must return it if we ask for it." Really? What kind of situation would dictate such an unusual request on the part of the SSA? The revocation of one's citizenship? The institution of Marshall law? The surrendering of existing Social Security cards in exchange for new ones under a One World Government??? I have never gone in for conspiracy theories, and I don't intend to start now, but the thought of a unique ID number meant to track a person through life is unsettling in its potential implications and applications. Sci-fi writers and AM radio DJs of the philosophical (and paranoid) sort have a field day with this sort of stuff.

What does all this mean for little Veronica? Not much, as of yet. At this point she's not even capable of coordinating her fingers to pick up the thing and stick it in her mouth! It is depressing on some level, however, to think of her as a number. Her little cooing, effervescent, perfect, delightful, newly smiling, milk-loving, snuggle-crazy self has been entered into a database hundreds of millions deep. She will be tracked by those 9 digits for life. She might even have some Russian cyber-criminal impersonate her some day because of them. That's a ways off though. She may be officially enlisted in the bureaucracy, but as far as I'm concerned she's safe in her nursery. For today at least.

Soaring Highs and Crushing Lows (Part 2)

2011-10-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

What does one experience in the course of a month? Four Fridays' worth of seeing one's co-workers in jeans? Another $95 paid late to Verizon? The next page flipped on the "Loons of North America" calendar? These used to be the parameters of our lives. The paradigm has shifted. Veronica has passed her one month birthday! She also has become our alarm clock, our television, our occupation, our hobby. She has come to monopolize every conversation; it is not an exaggeration to say that these days she is virtually the only topic discussed. Other people - non-parents - must find it all so tedious and absurd. Hey, I would have derided us a mere 5 weeks ago!

It has been said by someone wiser than myself that parenthood is a cure for selfishness. The inverse is, of course, also true. Having this tiny, dependent creature counting on us for everything amplifies negative personality traits as well as positive. I speak of myself, of course. My Better Half is almost ceaselessly giving and patient. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the mere hypothetical thought of a collicy baby sends me into a black mood. "How does anyone do it?" I ponder in despair. Without the consolation of sweetness and oblivious adorability, how would a new parent deal with the screaming and fussiness? The closed feedback loop of endless nights? The inconsolable crying from morning until night (and then until morning again)? How, for instance, did cave people manage? Without the veneer of civilization, the self-sacrifice programmed into us by 6,000 years of refinement and acculturation of the West, how did primitive man (and especially woman) cope?! What kept Ug from dashing his squalling cave infant against the nearest rock on the very first night? I am sure the evolutionary biologist killjoys and religious naval gazers could give me succinct and reasonable explanations, but that would be beside the point. Luckily for us, Veronica is an easy baby. Now that the thrush and diaper rash are taken care of, she is an epicenter of total light as opposed to a black hole of suffocating need. She is all we think about, and our thoughts are glowing ones. I feel guilty about it....but not all that guilty. I am hoping this isn't looked on as hubris, or else I just may be in for the coliciest baby in history next time around.

"Oh look, Daddy! I found this cute little carrot in the vegetable patch! Can we keep it?"

Pinky's Relapse

2011-10-14T07:13:00.000-07:00

In Rotten Ralph, the 1976 psychedelic picture book by Jack Gantos, the titular bad cat makes relentless trouble around the house before being abandoned by his owners at the circus. He is subsequently humbled whilst locked in a cage and having stale peanuts thrown at him by jeering monkeys, as well as by spending a night terrorized by stray cats in a dank alley. Needless to say, he learns his lesson. In the 1978 sequel, Worse Than Rotten, Ralph, the recently tamed and humbled Ralph is tempted back to his naughty ways by the alley cats and in fact leads a feline campaign of terror through the town. What does all this have to do with Veronica? Well, nothing...directly. It really has to do with Pinky, our impossible ginger cat. The arc of RottenRalph's fall from grace is being played out by Pinky as I type this. Before we moved into our new place, Pinky lived alongside a bad feline companion: Bruce the Shark the Cat. Bruce constantly led Pinky away from the straight and narrow and into a sordid life of mischief. We were glad to have our pet free of his influence. For a few glorious months we enjoyed his lazy, unobtrusive presence in our new home. He was like a guy just out of rehab who has stopped driving around drunk and beating his woman and instead is leading a happy existence, getting fat. He lounged in patches of sun, rolling on his back as we walked past in order to suggest a gentle nuzzle. We created elaborate narratives for him (much in the way we now do for Veronica) and just generally thanked our lucky stars to have such a compliant, reformed cat. We got so accustomed to the new, post-rehab Pinky that we began to indulge his one lingering transgressive habit: dashing out open doors at every opportunity. Both My Better Half and I started to allow him to run outside and frolic in the yard. Despite the dusty fur and slight air of defiance, we found it almost endearing.

As Veronica's due date grew closer, there were signs of trouble in paradise. Pinky developed a habit of sleeping in some new places. One of them was the baby-to-be's bassinet. Another was on the changing table beside our bed. He even began napping in the small emergency suitcase My Better Half had packed and left ajar in the dining room in preparation for the hospital stay. When confronted by one of us he would glance up with a look of disdain as if to say "And what, exactly, are you going to do about it?"

When we brought Veronica home from the hospital, the decline accelerated. His jailbreaks became daily affairs, and he spent longer and longer periods of time prowling in the bushes. After a week or so of being home with the baby we found fleas. We also discovered a bolder, more aggressive cat. Several times Pinky has jumped on My Better Half's lap while she was nursing Veronica. He also has slept in the following new and inappropriate locations: the crib, the car seat, the mechanical swing, and the Pack n' Play.

Last night, in true Rotten Ralph fashion, Pinky got in a stand-off with another cat in the neighbor's yard. We heard hissing and yowling, and no amount of kissy noises or name-calling would lure him back in. He eventually had to be physically removed from the situation and hefted inside.This is totally unprecedented for him.

He is starved for affection. We understand this. At the same time, he is driving us nuts. I keep threatening to take him down the street to Happy Garden and sell him for ten dollars. He just blinks at me. I know that behind those inscrutable eyes he is planning further misadventures and displays of defiance. Rotten Ralph, meet your protege, Petulant Pinky.

Soaring Highs and Crushing Lows (Part 1)

2011-10-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

There is a funny story in my family - my family of origin, I mean. When I was a few months old, my father noticed a single silver hair on my infant head and started to worry. "What if he has Progeria?" he asked my mother in something approaching a frenzied tone. "I know it's really unlikely, but it's got to happen to someone!" Progeria, known alternately as the Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, is an extremely rare genetic condition that causes children to exhibit accelerated signs of aging. Those who suffer from it rarely live past their early teens. It is a devastatingly tragic thing (not to mention statistically almost infinitesimally unlikely) and in no way do I mean to make light of it. However, my point in bringing it up is this: white hair does not even happen to be one of the symptoms. I was in all ways a developmentally normal baby. Heck, the hair probably wasn't even white at all! My money is on a gossamer strand of flaxen blonde

My Better Half and I have been subject to the same kind of thinking, both before and since Veronica's birth. An example: during our last several ultrasounds the technicians commented on the size of her prenatal kisser. "Awwww!" they'd coo, "Look at those big, pouty lips!" To us, untrained in the interpretation of ultrasound imaging, she looked at best ambiguous and at worst kind of scary. A well meaning nurse printed out one of the pictures for us to take home. The more we looked at it, the more worried we started to get. The lips seemed too full, veering from the cute into the grotesque. In the obscure black and white image they began to take on the appearance of a pair of gag shop wax lips superimposed on the visage of a ghost.

It was like something out of a nightmare, except in this case a nightmare mutually shared!

"What if something's wrong with her?" My Better Half anxiously wondered aloud. "Wouldn't it be horrible if her lips were so oversized that they interfered with her eating or breathing and she had to get an...OPERATION?!" I talked her down.

Another time, after an appointment with the midwives where we found that Veronica was very slightly underweight for that particular week, my mother-in-law cheerfully reminded us that Primordial dwarfism supposedly runs on their side of the family. Once again, the condition in question was exceedingly rare (and claims of its existence in their family tree were dubious at best), but the notion got the wheels of worry turning nonetheless. We started mentally preparing ourselves for the worst.

Since birth, such concerns are not unheard of around the estate. Quite the contrary. Just the other day, I returned home from work to have MBH remark, "You know, I had a really hard time getting the baby to make eye contact with me today. It took me a bunch of tries before she would do it."

"What do you mean 'a bunch of tries'? How many? Five? Ten? Did she do it eventually? Was it full eye contact?" I was full of questions. And concerns. I diagnosed probable autism, while MBH conservatively predicted a catatonically shy child. A more experienced, wiser parent friend added a third potentiality: "OR it's just a healthy baby who happens to be two weeks old." Once again, I was brought back to reality by someone who had dwelled in the same region of anxiety and mental torment years before and come through the other side with a sardonic grin and good advice.

For the last couple weeks, our distorted thinking has shifted. Now, instead of our flights of fancy reflecting worst case scenarios of genetic horror shows, they involve projections of genius and physical superiority. When Veronica practically stands up on her own two legs with a mere pair of daddy-thumbs to hold her up by the armpits, we think: Prima Ballerina in the New York City Ballet! When she vocalizes along enthusiastically to the Beach Boys or Bach we think: Contralto in the Sydney Opera House! Perhaps we need to scale our fantasizing minds to the most miraculous, brilliant, wonderful (not to mention horrifying, anxiety-producing, terrifying!) prospect of all: we have brought a wonderful, perplexing, and, ultimately, unpredictable little person into the world. Only time will tell all the rest.

The Witching Hour

2011-10-07T02:40:00.000-07:00

Life has been imitating art lately. I refer specifically to my life bearing similarities to the 2004 Christian Bale vehicle The Machinist. Have you seen it? Bale plays a man who, haunted by demons from his past, has not slept for a year. Aside from the demons (and Bale's shockingly emaciated frame), that pretty much sums up my recent existence. Combine the aforementioned film with the cult classic Eraserhead and you have a fairly accurate summary of recent life here at the estate.

Alas, Veronica has thrush! She has been a little trooper about it for the most part, soldiering on through the discomfort and entertaining company with her range of facial expressions, talking to the ceiling fan (her "happy place"), etc. However, when all the visitors have gone, and the lights have been turned down low, another side of her emerges: the inconsolable infant. The wife and I find ourselves in a closed feedback loop of fussing, shrieking, squirming, and alternating periods of listlessness. To be completely honest, I am spared the brunt of it, as the wife possesses qualities of mercy bordering on saintliness and does much of the nocturnal caregiving herself. Still, one never really sleeps in this house anymore. The discomfort is compounded by the fact that we know our tiny sweet girl is suffering and there's really nothing we can do about it until the pediatrician can see us.

I received all of the warnings in advance. Lots of "helpful" friends and co-workers said things like "I hope you're getting lots of sleep now because you sure aren't going to after the baby's born! Ha ha!" They were correct. Go figure. At the time, I suppose I arrogantly chalked their advice up to a sort of whining tendency one finds in people. I figured it was the parental advice equivalent of being warned about the Kafkaesque wait times at the DMV. I was wrong. They were right. I hate when that happens.

Veronica: Multi-Media Darling

2011-10-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

Recently, while holding the baby, the wife and I have made a game out of talking to each other about fanciful placeswhere we supposedly "discovered" the little darling, albeit in the guise of some other sort of creature. For instance:

HER: Oh, Daddy, look at the little pink pig I found! She was in the dirt, rooting for truffles

! Can we keep her?

ME: Of course! We've got that extra room at home that we can convert into a sty. Let's do it!

Or...

HER: Oh, Daddy, look at the little green bug I found, hopping on a leaf! Can we keep her?

ME: Of course! A little green bug won't take up much room in the house. Let's do it!

Or...

HER: Oh, Daddy, look at the little daredevil I found in a smashed apart barrel at the bottom of Niagara Falls! Can we keep her?

ME: Of course! We'll just have to daredevil-proof the house. Let's do it!

You get the drift. I've gotten to thinking: Why do we do this? For whose benefit? Is it the kind of incessant chatter meant to assuage the baby's mercurial moods, or perhaps merely to entertain each other. Maybe we're both just so sleep-deprived that it's the place our minds wander to in the wee hours. Whatever the source, we have decided that it would lend itself to the plot of a picture book. It has the cadence, rhythm, and repetition of all the classics. The "narrative" would fit perfectly with illustrations of little anthropomorphic pigs, bugs etc. and a 19th century daredevil in miniature. I've heard that the market for kids' books is particularly glutted. Any idiot, after

all, can write a picture book; Madonna, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jeff Foxworthy and any number of other celebrity dolts have done it. However, as new parents with the irrational belief that our child and ergo everything tangentially related to her are charmed, we have been scheming about how to translate our weird banter into a bankable idea...

A word about the title....

2011-10-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

Let me make a brief disclaimer about the blog's title. A couple nights ago, I was sitting around with my brother Josh who was in town for the weekend; he and his fiancee Jenna were here to meet Veronica for the first time. We were BSing back and forth, throwing around ideas for ways to write about new fatherhood, when he said, "What about about a 'handsome dad' theme for the blog?" I assumed he was joking and responded that I could use stock photos of male underwear models.

"No," he replied "use real pictures of yourself, but just make sure they're good ones." I bandied about some false modesty for a minute or two, but secretly thought to myself, "that really isn't the worst idea in the world...women are reputedly suckers for a young dad, and my public stroller experiences bear that out..."

Don't get me wrong: I know I'm no Adonis, but neither am I Quasimodo! The biggest thing I have going for me is how friggin' cute my daughter is! "Hunky Daddy" can be interpreted as heavily tongue-in-cheek, or even an homage to the classic Bowie album "Hunky Dory". Take it as you will. In the meantime, I am going to set to writing down some of the ways in which this 3 week old infant has been keeping the wife and I entertained...

Dawn of the Hunky Daddy

2011-10-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Here I am on an overcast Sunday afternoon, with one eye on the football game and the other on my infant daughter, Veronica. This seems a fitting setting in which to launch a blog with the absurd title and premise of "Hunky Daddy". The concept is simple, really: I am a young father with a perfect 3 week old daughter who I'd like to share with the world!