The first time, he was looking at a laminated piece of orange construction paper Sadie brought home on the last day at her old day care before she started preschool this fall. Her handprint was pressed onto the page with purple paint, and one of her teachers had written something on it about how fast she was growing up and how much she learned at school. She brought home lots of “arts and crafts” like that where the kids smeared some paint around and the teachers dressed it up into a keepsake. Debbie asked him why he was crying and he said, “I just remember all the good times when we played together after we picked her up from school.”

Carter came with us only about once out of every five times we picked up Sadie from day care, but he’s right. He did have fun horsing around with the little kids when he came along. We told him that he didn’t have to be sad because we’d have a lot more good times, and he cheered up. “I’m not crying because I’m sad, it’s because I’m happy,” he said.

About a week later he and I were sitting on the couch together before dinner. We have an Apple TV hooked up to our TV, and I set it up to show a slideshow of family pictures when it’s not playing videos or music. I was reading something on my phone, and then I looked over and saw him crying again. He said it was because he was looking at all the pictures on the TV from when he was little: snapshots of us at the park, going to ballgames, vacations at the beach. Again, he insisted that he was crying “happy tears,” but I reached over and hugged him and didn’t want to let go.

I’m not surprised he’s developing a sentimental streak. He gets it directly from me, just as I inherited mine directly from my dad. The longer I sit and watch those pictures float by on the TV screen, the more likely I am to choke up too. Carter has been playing with my old baseball cards lately, pulling out old Fleer and Score sets from 1989 and sorting them into teams on the floor of his bedroom. It’s enough nostalgia to make me lightheaded and have to sit down every time I walk by and see him clutching a stack of Terry Pendletons and Pedro Guerreros. And while the inscription on Sadie’s poster was cheesy in a Hallmark card kind of way, when presented on a milestone day with her little handprint in the middle, it got to me too. I’d be worried about my qualifications as a parent if I didn’t get choked up at the sight of my three-year-old’s palm preserved for posterity. But I’m surprised that Carter is feeling it so acutely already.

Most of those pictures he saw on the TV that night were from before he started school, back when I was still at home with him full-time, hanging out at the park all day, going to lunch at Manny’s and visiting Shedd Aquarium once a week. It was quite the life. Now that I’m back at work at and he’s in first grade, with homework and a little sister who knows how to push his buttons, life is more complicated for both of us.

I can see why he would look back get a little nostalgic. I miss those days when it felt like we had all the time in the world too. But it’s greatly oversimplifying the matter to say that it was easy and carefree back then. That time had its own set of frustrations that I’d rather not revisit, like changing diapers and waking up three times a night, to name a few. Nostalgia is tricky like that. We don’t take pictures of all the temper tantrums and food-stained clothes and put them into slideshows.

He probably doesn’t understand why he was crying, but I worry about what’s going on in his head. Is he just experiencing a normal emotion that runs in the family, or is he truly unhappy when he compares his life now to what it used to be? The rational part of me knows that it’s the former, but if there’s one thing parenting is good at, it’s making sure you feel like you’re doing it all wrong. It’s dangerous to try to make sense of the emotions of a six-year-old, but I worry that somewhere among all the work, errands, chores, and maybe trying to squeeze in a little time for myself, I’m screwing it up for the kids.

Last week I saw Jonathan Franzen speak at a panel for the Chicago Humanities Festival. During a question and answer period at the end of the talk, someone asked him about if the ending of his last novel, Freedom, was supposed to be happy or sad. “Things don’t turn out the way we want them to, he said. “I would prefer to complicate the question.”

One of the great accomplishments of Freedom is that it resists that kind of categorization into happy or sad. It’s complicated, with an ambiguous ending and ambiguous characters who muddle through it every day, like we all do. Walter and Patty Berglund are both heroic and loathsome. They make mistakes. They hurt the people around them, but they show an immense capability for compassion and humanity too. Books like that don’t make sense until long after you put them down and think about them, if they ever do.

Though he doesn’t know it yet, I hope Carter is learning the same thing about life. Sometimes it’s happy. Sometimes it’s sad. Sometimes it’s a little of both. It probably won’t ever really make sense until it’s too late, and in that way, it’s like reading a good book. It’s complicated.

For such a big city full of huge appetites (and huge bellies), the deli lineup in Chicago is surprisingly thin. The classic Jewish delis are either take-out style groceries like Ashkenaz or antiseptic, yuppie facsimiles like Eleven City Diner or Max & Benny’s. But what we lack in good places for lox and schmear, we make up for in one magnificent sandwich: the corned beef at Manny’s.

Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen in the South Loop on Jefferson near Roosevelt doesn’t qualify strictly as a deli. The “cafeteria” part of its name is more apt. They serve everything from short ribs to spaghetti and meatballs, and while you can get smoked fish and chopped liver, it’s not why you go there. Manny’s is best known for its heaping corned beef sandwiches, a pile of sliced meat so huge that the bread is a mere afterthought, something placed on top not out of necessity but mere custom, like a paper umbrella in a tropical drink. Throw in a potato pancake the size of your hand and a couple dill pickle spears, and two adults could split the plate and still leave fully sated.

The corned beef at Manny’s is so epic that I feel the need to offer this guide to ordering it properly. If you just want a sandwich, go to Jimmy John’s or *shudder* a Subway. Don’t waste your time at Manny’s, for this is the corned beef of statesmen. Mayor Daley was a regular there, hosting his “corned beef and a handshake” fundraisers. Our current honey badger of a mayor Rahm Emanuel frequents the place, and President Obama himself gets the corned beef and cherry pie to go when he’s in town. No, you don’t just saunter into Manny’s and ask for a sandwich. You conduct yourself with the gravitas it deserves, nay, demands.

When you first enter Manny’s, you’re confronted with a large menu board listing the selections for the day. You can disregard this sign for now. While the other food at Manny’s is delicious too—I personally recommend the beef stew and a knish with gravy—you can branch out later once you’ve mastered the corned beef.

Pick up your tray and utensils, and slide them down the aluminum railing in front of the steam table with the various hot entrees and sides. A man with a mustache will greet you and ask you what you would like. He might be black, he might be white, he might be Hispanic, but he will have a mustache. This is a recurring theme at Manny’s. Tell the man with the mustache no thank you, you’re here for the corned beef, and keep sliding your tray down the line.

At the middle of the line, another man with a mustache standing by a meat slicer will greet you. Take a moment to watch him work, moving the steaming slabs of corned beef and pastrami back and forth across the spinning blade, collecting the glistening, scarlet morsels for each meal with a fork. This isn’t mere food service, it’s craftsmanship. Look the man with the mustache in the eye and tell him you’d like a corned beef sandwich. Be assertive. He will then ask what kind of bread you want: rye or an onion roll. Personally I prefer rye, but it doesn’t really matter because the bread is secondary once you start eating.

At this point you should also ask for a potato pancake. Pickles come standard, and requests for additional spears are welcome, especially if you’re dining with children. The man with the mustache will also be happy to give you an extra plate if you’re sharing with others, just don’t ask him to split the sandwich for you. He’s standing next to a razor-sharp spinning blade, slicing the corned beef of presidents. Hasn’t he done enough for you already?

Once you’ve collected your offering, keep walking down the line toward the cold sides and desserts. What you choose here is up to you, but keep in mind the sheer quantity of meat you’re about to consume. Barack Obama might order the cherry pie, but I bet Michelle doesn’t let him eat the whole thing at once when he brings it home. The point here is to enjoy a meal, not rupture your colon.

Next come the drinks. You’ll see different types of Coca Cola products, lemonade, etc, but the only acceptable thing to get is a can Dr. Brown’s cherry soda. True, most of the time the can isn’t very cold, but you can get a cup of ice if you’re going to be picky. Besides, you’re missing the point if you get stuck on this.

Turn the corner, and at the end of the line a woman in a hairnet (and possibly a mustache) will tally up your order and hand you a receipt. Do not attempt to pay the woman in the hairnet, and don’t lose this receipt. You’ll need it to pay at the cash register by the door as you leave. I like to think the woman in the hairnet is there to judge your food selections. If you’ve done it right, she’ll hand you the receipt and give you what we’ll call “the Chicago nod.”

Eating the corned beef at Manny’s could take up another 1,000 words of instructions, so I won’t go into details now. What I can say is that there’s no wrong way to do it. You’ll quickly realize that you need to eat at least half the corned beef with a fork before you can attempt to pick it up like a proper sandwich. Yellow mustard is supposedly the standard condiment, but I prefer the horseradish or brown mustard for a little kick. Take your time. Enjoy your meal. No one is rushing you. They even have Wifi at Manny’s now if you want to post a snapshot of your meal on some trendy social network.

When you’re finished, leave your tray and another man with a mustache will bus the table for you. Pay your tab at the cashier, leave a big tip, and grab a pack of gum or some Mentos for the road. Walk out onto Jefferson Street and listen to the throb and hum of your city. You’ve just eaten the best sandwich of your life.

Watch me read this piece at Tuesday Funk, a monthly reading series at the Hopleaf in Chicago

I.

My son Carter is reading Harry Potter at six years old. I’m not saying that to brag (okay, maybe a little), but it’s important to the story. He made his way through the first three books pretty well, but I know that each book in the series is progressively longer and more complex, especially for a six-year-old, and as I expected he started to slow down by The Goblet of Fire. He finished it with an assist from me, reading together each night before bed, and insisted on starting The Order of the Phoenix right away. After a few weeks though, he had stopped reading it on his own and started asking me to read other books with him at night. I asked him about it, and he admitted it was too hard. We still read it together at night but he spends most of his time now doing other six-year-old boy things like building Legos and driving his little sister crazy.

II.

My personal theory of parenting centers around the idea that if you want your kids to behave a certain way, you should lead by example. If you want them to be polite and gracious, let them hear you thanking the waitress and witness you holding the door open for little old ladies. If you want them to read, let them see you with a book in your hand, lost in its pages, and show them how important reading is in your life.

Educators and bookish folks are worried enough about getting boys to read that they have a special name for them: “reluctant readers.” In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Lipsyte wrote that a big part of the problem in getting boys to read is finding books they can connect with, that speak to their emotions instead of just pandering to their base instincts. “Boys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships,” he wrote. “The kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives.” I read this and thought about what happened with Carter and Harry Potter. My theory of leading by example has worked. He clearly enjoys reading, but I’m afraid that by letting him find his own way and pick out a book that was too hard, he’ll be discouraged from reading more. I managed to turn a willing reader into a reluctant one.

III.

Carter spends a week with my parents at the end of each summer, in the gap between the end of camp and the start of school. They live in the Indianapolis area now, so this year we met them halfway at a Chili’s in Lafayette, Indiana to make the exchange. I’ve learned to expect him to be ornery when he’s excited about something big like a holiday or a trip, but this time he was so bad that when we pulled into the parking lot I made my parents wait outside the car while I let him have it. The problem was that we were 100 miles from home and he was about to spend a week with his grandparents. I couldn’t deploy my best weapons like taking away toys or cutting off TV and the computer, so I spluttered like Yosemite Sam in impotent rage.

Disciplining my kids like that always sets off a cycle of guilt and self-doubt. Later in the restaurant, I sat there eating a Flintstone-sized slab of ribs wondering if it had done any good, feeling bad for sending him off for the week on such a bad note. For all its rewards, raising children does a number on your self-confidence. What possible lesson could Carter take away from that outburst in the parking lot of a chain restaurant on a freeway interchange? That he should shout and issue empty threats when he doesn’t get his way?

The problem with my method of parenting by example is that I don’t always set the best example myself. It’s getting harder the older he gets, now that we’re past “share with your friends” and “don’t throw sand.” Things like empathy and patience are difficult to teach when I struggle with them myself. That’s why I want him to read, to experience the inner lives of characters who celebrate and suffer, succeed and fail in their own ways so he can learn from their examples too. Books can teach him how to live when I can’t show the way.

IV.

I started a new job recently, a new career in fact. I took three weeks off between jobs and spent a lot of time with Carter. We had fun together hanging out, playing catch at the park and hitting up the 7-Eleven for daily Slurpees, but he understood that I was excited to get started. The night before my first day at the new job we were reading Harry Potter again. I finished a chapter, put the book down, and unprompted, he said, “Good luck on your first day at work tomorrow.” I don’t know if he learned to thoughtful like that from me, his mother or a book. I’m happy with any of the three.

I.

You can see the moon at night from my parents’ house in Poseyville, Indiana. That’s not unusual. You can see the moon from where I live in Chicago too, but here it’s more of an afterthought, a blip in the ambient light of the city competing with the street lamps and headlights of cars that pass by no matter the hour. In Poseyville the moon is the main event, lighting up the whole town and surrounding countryside. On a clear night you can drive without headlights, it’s so bright. I know this because I’ve actually tried.

Poseyville is a farming community of 1,200 in the southwestern corner of the state. My parents built their one-story, three bedroom ranch house with a two-car garage in 1973 for $33,000. It’s the house where I grew up, the only place I lived until I went away to college. I know living in the same house that long is nothing unique either, but after moving four times in the 12 years since I moved to Chicago, it feels like an accomplishment. For me, the concepts of childhood and home have always meant that one place on Cale Street with the big backyard and a basketball hoop in the driveway.

My parents retired last year, and they’ve decided to sell the house and move north to a suburb of Indianapolis. It makes complete sense. They’re both from the Indianapolis area originally, and except for me and some cousins in Seattle, the rest of my extended family lives there too. It will make visiting them easier, turning a six-hour drive through the bleak countryside of central Illinois into a three-hour drive through the slightly less bleak countryside of northern Indiana. We could make a day trip out of it if we wanted to, and it certainly makes a weekend visit more practical. In addition to the logistical advantages it makes life easier for my parents. Poseyville isn’t exactly a commercial hub (the nearest McDonald’s is at a highway interchange 10 miles away), and their new home will be within a few minute’s drive of every restaurant chain and big box store. As my mom pointed out morbidly, “What happens if one of us dies before the other? We don’t want to be stuck here with nothing to do. At least now there’s a Kroger five minutes away.”

II.

A few weeks ago I took my son Carter to Poseyville for one last visit before my parents move for good. He’s always enjoyed his time there so much. The big backyard where he can run in the sprinkler and the quiet streets where he can ride his bike on his own are such a treat for a kid born and raised in the city. My parents held back a stash of my old toys, Hot Wheels and Transformers that they had the good sense to save for the day they had a grandson, and he’s been very worried that they won’t make the move to their new house. For my part, I felt like I needed to see the house one last time before they go (and to reclaim the boxes of baseball cards in my old bedroom that my mom demanded I finally take with me before she threw them away). Once they leave Poseyville, I don’t know when I’ll ever go back. Sure, I’ll go back for a high school reunion someday, but one weekend every five or 10 years is a lot different than regular visits with the family.

On the last night in Poseyville I hung out with my friend Clint, who I’ve known since preschool. He and his wife just had their third baby, and I went to visit them at thier new house in a town called Blairsville about eight miles away. He picked me up at my parents’ house, and on the way out he drove me around town, pointing out where people we knew from school now lived. Nothing much has changed about the town since I left besides the shuffling of names on the mailboxes. As Clint said, “I wouldn’t say it’s dead, but it’s not really doing anything either.” He and I laughed about stories from the good old days and griped about how routine and predictable our lives had become, the kind of things old friends talk about when they realize they’ve become adults with responsibilities.

Clint will never move away from the area like I did. He doesn’t want to, nor does he need to. His entire family is there. He works for his family business running a general store in Poseyville. Just like it makes sense for my parents to move back to where they came from now that they’re retired, it makes sense for Clint to stay there. I made the right decision to move away and start a life in Chicago, but at least when my parents lived in Poseyville I could feel like it was still a little part of my life too. Now that they’re leaving that connection is gone.

III.

The morning Carter and I left, I did my usual last minute sweep of the house to make sure we packed everything. I made a point of taking one last look at my old bedroom in the back of the house, expecting to choke up as a wave of nostalgia hit me full in the face. Instead of welling up with tears though, I felt nothing. My old room isn’t the same. After I went away to college my parents replaced most of the furniture, bought a new bed, moved the bookshelf to the other side of the room, bought new blinds. They took down all the posters of baseball players and rappers I had Scotch-taped to the walls and repainted, and threw out the Nerf hoop over the closet door. The room that would have made me choke up doesn’t exist anymore, just like the town where I grew up. Clint is right that Poseyville hasn’t changed, but I don’t see it through the same lens. It’s not the same place as when we were playing army in the backyard or driving home from football practice. I’ve moved on, and now that the house where I grew up will soon belong to someone else, some other young couple starting a family just like my parents 38 years ago, it’s fixed firmly in the past.

After I left the house, Carter and I packed up the car and backed out of the driveway, the trunk loaded down with some 10,000 baseball cards. As I turned the corner away from Cale Street, I craned my neck to catch one a final glimpse before another house blocked the view. Then we drove out of town, headed for the interstate, and made our way back north, to home.

My first baseball glove sits on a bookshelf in my home office. I left it at my parents’ house when I went to college (I had been through a couple more gloves by then), but I reclaimed it when I moved out for good and left for Chicago. It’s dry and brittle, and the fingers are curved around the old ball I keep stuffed in pocket with the name of my Little League team—Poseyville I—written on it in Sharpie. The glove is a MacGregor G19T, branded all around with slogans like “Flex Action,” “Adjusta-wrist,” “Lattice Weave,” and “The Athlete’s Choice.” The lining inside is shredded from years of sweat and dirt and wear, and it’s a little small for my hand now, but it’s still serviceable. Baseball gloves are like that. The basic design and build is no different from one you could buy today, and with a little glove oil and a tug on the strings, even a 30-year-old model could be ready for a game.

I remember buying this glove with my dad, or at least I think I do. I must have been five years old because that’s when I started playing T-ball, the first games when I used it. We went to Gus Doerner’s Sports in Evansville, to the downtown location where they sold the serious equipment, not the shop in the mall where they just sold running shoes and apparel. The baseball equipment was in a basement that smelled like rawhide and fresh tennis balls. I remember looking out over rows of gloves laid out on a table and having no idea which one to pick. I didn’t even know which hand I needed. I’m sure my dad picked out my glove for me, finding one that fit my hand and his wallet. It had a Vida Blue signature stamped in the pocket. I didn’t even know who Vida Blue was, but I was fascinated that some player was famous enough to have his name inside a baseball glove.

I’ve owned four baseball gloves in my life: the Vida Blue; a Worth with no signature that replaced it when I was in Little League; a Rawlings Mark McGwire first base glove that I got when I was 13 and started to play the position exclusively; and another Rawlings McGwire model that replaced it. Of the four, I still have all of them except that first first base glove. It was also the one I used for the most significant moments of my baseball career, namely winning the sectional tournament as a high school senior, and I don’t know what possessed me to throw it out when I bought my latest one. I wish I had it back, if not for sentimental reasons then out of a sense of completeness.

I have no real attachment to the new one, a stiff burgundy mitt I bought when I started playing in a weekend league after I moved to Chicago. I used it for a season and a half of sweltering games on ill-tended fields at far-flung suburban community colleges before I decided to hang up my hardball spikes for good, and now I mainly use it in games of catch with Carter. I’ve never broken it in properly, and when I put it on my hand now I long for the fit of a well-worn glove that feels like an extension of my hand.

When Carter first started to show an interest in baseball, I gave him a red toy glove I’d gotten as a souvenir from a minor league baseball game. It was good for him getting the hang of using a glove while we tossed around tennis balls in the driveway, but this season I decided he needed a real one. He’s starting in a T-ball league playing with real hardballs this year, and I couldn’t send him out on the field with a bright red glove in good conscience.

We made our trip to the Sports Authority on LaSalle downtown, in the middle of the nest of River North tourist traps like the Hard Rock Cafe, the Rainforest Cafe, and the newly rebuilt, space age “Rock and Roll” McDonald’s next to which tour buses disgorge camera-laden families and packs of Midwestern teenagers on class trips to the big city. This particular Sports Authority store is known for the giant sign with fiberglass balls wrapped around its northeast corner, and the handprints of famous Chicago athletes like Michael Jordan and Frank Thomas pressed into cement molds along its walls. Buying Carter his first glove in the midst of all this somehow seemed less authentic. I ought to be able to take him to a musty basement full of promise like where I got my first glove, but it was the best option available.

I tried to tout this as a Big Deal for Carter and he was duly excited at first, but frankly by the time we got to the store he was more excited about lunch at McDonald’s later. When we got to the baseball department he goofed around with the catcher’s equipment and bats while I tried to interest him in the gloves. He couldn’t decide if he wanted a black or a brown one, so we settled on a Rawlings that had a little of both (but sadly, no player signature in the pocket). It cost only $15. I picked out some athletic socks for myself, paid up at the register, and the moment was over.

We had our first catch with the new glove at the park later that day. Carter insisted we play with a hardball, but I was afraid of hurting him so I couldn’t quite figure out how to throw it. The trick is putting just enough mustard on it to snap his glove without throwing a total BB that would give him a shiner if he missed and it hit him. I couldn’t figure that out that technique, and I couldn’t get the right distance holding back on a lob either. Half the throws went way over his head, and the other half short-hopped him. He spent most of the time running after the ball. I’ve had more productive games of catch with my dog.

The game ended in tears when he did miss one and the ball plunked him right between the eyes. Fortunately there was no lasting damage, but he didn’t want to play any more either. Carter’s supposedly magical day with his new baseball glove ended with me thinking I’d broken his nose.

I don’t remember anything about the rest of the day after my dad bought me my first glove either. Maybe we played catch and he gave me a black eye too, which would seem about right. Parenting has a way of throwing beanballs at your best intentions and ruining the Norman Rockwell moments.

I must have done something right with Carter though. The next day he and Sadie pounced on our bed at 6:15 a.m. like they do every day, but instead of asking me to turn on a cartoon or help him get dressed, he cut straight to the chase.

“When can we go to the park and play catch?”

Maybe dogs are destined to break my heart. I was terrified of them as a kid, for no good reason other than that we didn’t have one of our own. One day when I was eight or nine, I was riding past a neighbor’s house on my bike when their Irish setter Max was running loose outside his pen. I panicked, tore off on my Huffy screaming, and he chased me down and bit me on the thigh. The wound was nothing serious, but later Max was gone. My parents told me the neighbors sent him away to some relatives out in the country, which was entirely plausible given where we lived in a small town, but I also never knew if that was the old trick adults play on kids when a dog really goes off to the big farm in the sky.

Debbie and I got our first dog Cleo a few years after we were married. Her family always had dogs, and after her parents’ last dog Nico died, she wanted to get one of our own. Cleo was a shelter dog, an athletic shepherd-terrier-something-or-other mix. She was a four-month-old puppy when we brought her home, smart and easy to train but also headstrong. As she got older she became increasingly aggressive with other dogs. Trips to the elevator and lobby became an adventure, never knowing when we were going to run into another dog around a corner and have to break up a fight. Then she started to get aggressive with other people who came into our apartment and bit three of them, including a neighbor’s child. We tried everything to fix her, intensive training, using a muzzle in the building, taking the stairs so we wouldn’t run into anyone else, but nothing worked. Knowing that we wanted to have children someday, we decided we didn’t feel safe with her in the house, so after 18 months we gave her back to the shelter. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done voluntarily. I lost 10 pounds in the month after we gave her up, and to this day I still can’t tell the story without getting a lump in my throat.

Our current dog Bootsy (yes, named after that Bootsy) is a labradoodle, a designer mix of Labrador retriever and standard poodle. I usually shorten it to “Lab-poodle mix” when people ask because I feel stupid using the regrettably trendy name. We got him from a breeder in Indiana as a puppy about five months after we gave up Cleo. Still gun-shy from our experience with her, we wanted to make sure we knew exactly what kind of dog we were getting and we had read that labradoodles were great family dogs. This was the dog we had to trust around kids, and Bootsy, now seven, has been everything we could want in a dog, a 75-pound, black and tan, fuzzy, floppy angel. He’s never once destroyed a pair of shoes, stolen a toy, snatched food off a high chair, or snapped at a little hand pulling on his ears too long. The worst thing he does is get a little too excited to play with other dogs and do this little galloping hop and spin on his leash. As I write, he’s laying at my feet, snoring and wiggling his feet while he chases squirrels in his dreams.

When we first brought him home, Bootsy had the house to himself. We had a dog walker come every weekday at lunch and we spent hours with him at the park at the end of the day. But once we had kids he dropped in the pecking order. I couldn’t spend as much time with him at the park, or it was too hard to take him on long walks with a stroller in tow. We can’t afford the walker anymore, and now he often doesn’t get outside after the morning until we come home from work. But he’s accepted the two new screaming and squirming creatures in our house in stride. Mostly if things get too loud he just walks into another room, but he’s always there to plop his chin in my lap when things finally quiet down and let out a contented sigh while I scratch his ears. That’s the best thing about a good dog: you can always count on him to be the same. Humans have their natural ups and downs, the bad moods, the good moods, the weird quirks. All apologies to Debbie and my kids, but Bootsy is the most constant thing in my life.

A dog of his size and breed should live 12-15 years, so at seven I figured we still had a while before I had to worry about his health. I see small changes as he gets older: he tires out more easily at the park and he’s gained a little more weight than the vet would like. Sometimes he throws up if I let him run too much too soon after he’s eaten, but I think I do that too. Otherwise he’s the same dog as always, plus a few gray whiskers.

One morning this past December, I was getting Carter ready for school. Debbie had already taken Sadie to day care so it was just the two of us at home. Bootsy was in my home office on the ground floor where he usually hangs out. Carter and I went downstairs to put on our shoes and leave, and Bootsy started to get sick. I went up to the kitchen to get paper towels to clean up, then I heard Carter scream downstairs. I ran back and saw Bootsy laying on the ground having a seizure. Carter was backed up against the front door, terrified. He said Bootsy had started to follow me up the stairs and just fell over. I had never seen this happen before, and not knowing what to do I kneeled down and put my hands on him, thinking I could calm him down. This was a terrible idea, as I now know, because he snapped at me and bit my arm while he was still seizing. When it finally stopped he didn’t recognize me for a few minutes and growled at me, a sound I had never heard come out of his body. But once it was over, besides being a little thirsty, he seemed completely fine.

We spent the rest of the day at the emergency vet, only to receive an official diagnosis of “shit happens.” Absent any paralysis or alarming test results (of which he had neither) it’s hard to tell what caused a seizure, and it’s even hard to treat. He had another one about six weeks later, this time at Debbie’s parents’ house while the whole family watched. The vet did another workup this time and again said there was no way to tell definitively what was wrong. As long as he didn’t hurt himself or someone else while having a seizure, they didn’t harm him, and short of drugging him into a stupor, there’s not a lot you can do about it. It’s frightening to watch, but unless he starts having them every day, it’s just an unfortunate part of growing old. This sounds like a rational explanation. I just wasn’t ready to think about it.

After his second seizure, he went over ten weeks without having another. I found myself thinking maybe it had passed, that maybe he had some temporary imbalance and those first two knocked it out of his system. Last Wednesday I took him to the park after work, and on our way home he started to throw up on the sidewalk. I thought he had just played a little too hard, until he flopped on the ground and started seizing again. It was the first time it had happened in public, and all I could do was stand there holding his leash. A man walked by and offered to help, but I told him there was nothing we could do. A woman drove by in her car and did a double take. Another woman with her own dogs saw the aftermath and expressed her condolences. I felt helpless. I wiped the froth off his mouth with my gloves, and thought about how this was just going to keep happening. I also thought about what happens one day if he doesn’t come out of it.

He was a little slow getting home, but ten minutes later he was fine. I gave him some food, he wagged his tail and nuzzled my leg when I sank into the couch after dinner. This is our life with a dog now, the same but different. Maybe he’ll live another six or seven years and be just fine, and these seizures are just part of it. At least he’s still here. But now I can’t help thinking about the day when he isn’t.

The Academy Award-nominated film purports to be a documentary about Thierry Guetta, an affable Frenchman living in Los Angeles, who is an amateur filmmaker who later becomes a breakout artist, with an assist from Banksy himself. Guetta had a habit of filming nearly every moment of his life, and eventually started tagging along with street artists like Shepard Fairey and Space Invader, documenting their exploits as they bomb the streets of LA and Paris. He envisioned a grand project of documenting the burgeoning street art movement at its inception, which led him to Banksy, by then already famous for his graffiti stunts around the world.

Guetta is portrayed as an enthusiastic but naive dilettante, but the artists tolerate him as a useful sidekick for documenting their work. When the film he produced turned out to be a mess, Banksy decided to take control of the project, mainly to preserve the hours raw footage Guetta shot of his and the other artists’ work. Thinking he was sending Guetta off on a fool’s errand so he could secure the film, Banksy suggested that he go back to LA to create his own street art. But instead of puttering around with spray paint and stencils, Guetta decided to swing for the fences, spend his life savings on a full blown production studio, and put on a blowout art show under the name Mr. Brainwash. He turned out to be a promotional savant, and to the disbelief of Banksy and the others, the show was a huge success and Mr. Brainwash became an overnight sensation.

Some have questioned the veracity of “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” given Banksy’s reputation for pulling pranks. The film could be another one of his stunts, and Mr. Brainwash just another character in Banksy’s world created to question the commercialization of art. But hoax or not, it raises some interesting questions about the artists themselves, and who deserves to become successful.

Throughout the film, Guetta is seen as a bit of a clown, a comic foil to the serious artists working hard to create the kind of work he later co-opts for his own show. Banksy sent him off to become an artist mainly to get him out of the way, not realizing he had created a monster. When Mr. Brainwash pulled off the kind of success in a few months that it takes most artists years to attain (if ever), there’s a sense that he jumped the line, that he didn’t deserve it. But who gets to decide who deserves success and who doesn’t?

As we were watching Guetta gear up for his show, I said to Debbie, “You know they’ve made him out to be a joke, but he’s also kind of a genius.” It took a kind of organizational and business genius to pull off that kind of event (the film claims that he sold over $1 million of work after the opening), regardless of artistic chops. While his work clearly mimicked the other artists, he also knew what he was doing and managed to put together a formula that capitalized on the moment.

The other artists’ reactions to his success reminds me of the response to popular authors like James Patterson or Stephen King who sell zillions of books but whose work is often derided, with Banksy and Fairey playing the part of “serious” literary writers like Jonathan Franzen. Sure, what the mass market writers are doing is based on well-worn genre formulas, but that’s a deliberate choice that shouldn’t diminish their personal success. I don’t think a Patterson or King would ever compare his work to Faulkner or Joyce (“I’m a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can’t sell it as caviar,” King says). Critical acclaim is separate from good business sense.

In the film it’s not clear if Guetta deliberately developed his own formula to tap into a fad and dupe gullible art buyers, or if it was just dumb luck. But he certainly worked hard at it, and the implication that he didn’t deserve his success because he hadn’t put in his time seemed unfair. He knew when to take advantage of an opportunity. Does it matter then if his work was any good? If you’re judging it purely on artistic merits, for its originality and advancement of the form, then of course. But if you’re judging someone’s ability to make a living with their art, then you can’t knock the hustle.

As a Cardinals fan, I obviously have a rooting interest in seeing the best player in the game stay with my team. Albert has said repeatedly that he wants to finish his career in St. Louis, and the Cardinals clearly have it in their best interests to sign him. It’s good for baseball for its marquee player to stick with one of its proudest franchises, and if ever a player was destined to show some loyalty, it was this player and this team. But so was LeBron James to Cleveland. Ask a Cavs fan how he feels about loyalty now.

I got my taste of the bitterness of a free agent ditching my team after the 1987 season, when Jack Clark left the Cardinals for the Yankees. I was 10. He had just come off a season hitting 35 homers with 105 RBI, which at the time were massive power numbers. After growing up on Cardinal teams filled with svelte, slap-hitting speedsters like Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee, Clark might as well have been Hank Aaron. I remember seeing him at a press conference holding up his new pinstriped jersey and wondering what just happened. I knew players sometimes switched teams in trades, but leaving a team by choice? I was crushed.

Now this whole scene is routine. Players come and go all the time, and it’s actually weird that a player like Pujols has been on one team so long. You might get attached to a core group of players and be lucky enough to see them play together for a few years, but rooting for a team now is like rooting for an idea. There’s a solution to this, what the guys at Free Darko call “liberated fandom.” It’s their approach to enjoying the NBA by cheering for individual players and personalities instead of sticking with the home team. That’s actually how I watch the NBA too, ever since the great Ron Artest Malice in the Palace brawl in Detroit in 2004 soured me on my old favorite the Pacers. But I’m too far gone for the Cardinals to ever back away now.

Jerry Seinfeld had a great bit about how we don’t really root for players, we root for clothes. Carter got a new Cardinals backpack for his birthday this year: red, white, navy blue, and of course, embroidered with a big PUJOLS 5. If Albert does decide to chase the money to some other team next winter, I won’t have the heart to explain to him why his cool backpack is already outdated, or that it’s just business, or how the Cardinals could be better off in the long run by saving that money for more players. Albert Pujols was the first baseball player he knew by name. I’m not sure he’s ready to have his Jack Clark moment yet. I don’t feel like having another one either, but I’ll still root for whoever wears those clothes, Pujols or not.

1.

Carter’s birthday is this week. I say it this way because his birthday has seemed to stretch from Christmas up until this actual day this week. My sister has a saying, “Birthdays are big!” to justify throwing big parties and buying lots of presents (mostly to convince people to do that for her, I think) and Carter has inherited that tradition with no prompting. From the minute he finished doing inventory on his Christmas loot, he started planning what he wanted for his birthday.

Debbie and I try our best to strike a balance between buying our kids things and not totally spoiling them. We’ve resisted repeated demands for a Wii, Nintendo DS, giant sprawling Harry Potter Lego sets that cost hundreds of dollars, and Carter’s own personal cell phone. Each time he asks for too much, we explain that we simply can’t afford to buy him everything he wants, and that he’s lucky to have all the toys and games and gadgets he has already, half of which have been discarded and ignored anyway. If he’s too persistent we go for the kill: “You know some kids don’t have any toys at all.” Somehow we managed to instill liberal guilt into him at six years of age, and the argument usually stops there.

This is all part of parenting, of course, but what I never expected was the amount of guilt saying no to your kids generates, and how that inner conflict between wanting to be a stern disciplinarian and wanting your kids to have it all builds up over time. It’s two separate impulses: the practical one that knows I can’t afford (in many ways) to spoil my kids, and the emotional lizard-brain that wants to give in. The practical one always wins—it has to—but the lizard-brain always does its best to make a scene, stomp its feet, and pout when it doesn’t get its way.

This conflict between indulgence and restraint has made us hesitate to throw a big birthday party for either of the kids yet. Carter’s friends (or their parents, rather) have already started throwing pizza parties at bowling alleys, hiring magicians, and renting out the local Inflatable House of Rug Burns and Head Injuries, but so far we’ve only had small family affairs at our house. We’re afraid to start down the path of birthday party escalation that ends at Sweet Sixteen and Vincent Chase’s Victoria’s Secret-sponsored blowout on a cruise ship.

This year, after attending parties for what seems like every other kid in Carter’s kindergarten class, we admitted that we couldn’t hold out any longer and booked a party at the indoor soccer gym where Carter takes classes every Saturday. We still did it small: just 16 kids (only boys, at Carter’s insistence), a cake,and some snacks. If anything it would be a break while the soccer coaches lead the kids in a little coordinated horseplay for an hour. The practical brain is telling me this was a good call. But the lizard-brain says I’m a jerk for taking so long to do it.

2.

My favorite political reporter John Dickerson once wrote something on Twitter about the nearly debilitating sentimentality that comes with raising kids. I can’t find it now because it’s impossible to find a tweet more than a few days old, but he said something to the effect that his kids had turned him into such a sap that, “By the time they’re twelve I won’t be able to get out of bed.”

My sister and I used to make fun of our dad because he would mope and stall whenever we started to pack up and leave after a visit home from college. Now I know exactly what he was doing. Every birthday and milestone and visit home is another instance of letting go of a stage in your kids’ lives, or just a few more days with them sleeping under the same roof. Carter is six now, which means he’ll never be five again. He’s halfway through kindergarten, which means he’ll never have another first day of school. It’s a terribly sad and depressing way to look at things, but that’s what that emotional parenting-lizard brain does to you, sitting in the corner and moping while the practical part is saying it’s time to be proud of them for growing up and moving on. It’s no wonder my dad made us hang around while he packed one last bag of snacks for the road or made us pose for a 10th family photo. It’s the same reason I write these sappy, reflective essays about my kids after every major event. It’s my way of hanging on to a moving target as long as I can.

3.

The party yesterday was fun; great, actually. The kids had a blast, played soccer, ate cake, and jumped on the giant inflatable slide that we got for free because the party before ours rented one—and there were no major head injuries or projectile vomits to ruin the day. It’s exactly what Carter wanted.

I’ll remember this birthday week from what he and I did on Friday night though. I got tickets to the Bulls game against Orlando from a friend at the last minute, and I kept them as a surprise for Carter. We live just a few blocks away from the United Center, so he and I walked to the stadium and stopped for cheeseburgers at the Billy Goat Tavern on the way. He was ecstatic.

Carter is a big sports fan, but a lot of times when we watch games, I feel like he just gets excited when I do, or cheers in response to the other fans. That night as Derrick Rose and Luol Deng fought off a 40-point effort by the Magic’s Dwight Howard to win 99-90, he cheered for each Bulls basket, screaming and pumping his fist without an elbow from me to prompt him. For the first time I felt like he understood the game on his own. He knew when to cheer and he recognized the good plays without checking with me first. He didn’t need my help. He’s six.

1.

Carter has three baseball hats that he wears on a regular basis: a crimson Indiana University hat with the Hoosiers’ white pitchfork I crossed with a U logo; a navy blue St. Louis Cardinals road hat; and a Chicago White Sox hat that is so sweat-stained it’s turned from black to brown. Each of them is there for a reason. Debbie and I met when we were in school at Indiana, and I’ve followed the Hoosiers ever since I could sit in front of a TV to watch Bobby Knight menace referees on the basketball court. The Cardinals have been my favorite baseball team my whole life, and the White Sox are my adopted hometown team now that I live in Chicago, mainly because they aren’t the Cubs.

One morning last summer I was helping Carter get dressed for his day camp and I asked him which hat he wanted to wear. He picked the Sox hat again, as he had every day that summer.

“Why don’t you ever want to wear your Cardinals hat?” I asked. He would say the Cardinals were his favorite team if you asked him directly, but I always suspected he did so because of me.

“Well, people will think I’m from St. Louis if I wear it,” he said, summing up the life of an out of town sports fan in the frank way that only a kindergartener can.

2.

Rooting for out of town teams is a lonely way to follow sports. One of the best things about watching athletics is the camaraderie with fellow fans, the high fives after a home run, or the way one comment to a stranger on the bus about last night’s game can lead to an instant friendship.

I cheer for out of town teams because I moved to Chicago long after I had established my loyalties, but aside from the annoyances of living amidst a bunch of Cubs fans, it’s easier than ever now to follow whatever team you want. With enough persistence and the right cable channels and internet subscriptions, you can follow along with every game whether you’re five or 5000 miles away. Just like the internet has allowed us to separate large parts of our social life from our physical location, the modern sports broadcasting industrial complex lets us assemble a fan experience that isn’t determined by physical proximity to stadiums. But the local loyalty and social aspect of fandom pretty much guarantee that most people will end up cheering for the home team, simply because it’s more fun to root for the same guys as all your friends.

Since my loyalties are scattered across the Midwest, I’ve given Carter the impression that you choose the teams you like on a whim. He understands that I like the Colts in football because they were the team from my home state, or that I like Indiana basketball because that’s where everyone in my family went to college. But that’s an abstract concept for a six-year-old to grasp, one step removed from saying, “I like the Chicago White Sox, the team that plays eight train stops from my house.” Every time we watch a random football game on Sunday he asks me which team I want to win, and he never accepts my explanation that I only really care about the Colts (and whoever is playing the Patriots). To him it’s always a matter of immediate choice, not preferences set in stone years ago.

3.

This fall before school started, Debbie’s mom wanted to buy Carter a new lunchbox. She thought he might like one with a team logo on it and let him pick it out online. Inexplicably he chose the Green Bay Packers, passing over both the Colts and the Bears when my mother-in-law suggested them first. Somehow he had latched onto the Packers during one of those random Sunday decisions, and now every day he walks to school in downtown Chicago carrying a bright green and gold emblem of the home team’s fiercest rival.

I’ve always been hesitant to push Carter to like the same teams I do, because I want him to be able to enjoy that shared experience of rooting for a team with his friends like I did when I grew up. It’s great if he decides he likes the Cardinals or the Colts or the Hoosiers, but I won’t protest if he’d rather watch the local teams (okay, I admit I’ve purposely steered him away from the Cubs, I can’t help it). I want him to be able to see his favorite teams play in person, and have those imaginary games on the playground where he and his friends argue over who gets to be Devin Hester or Brian Urlacher. Rooting for the home team is about more than picking the most convenient option, it’s about growing into a shared community. I doubt anyone would be a sports fan if we had to watch all the games from a distance in isolation. It’s okay for me to do this as an adult because I’ve established an identity, but I worry about my son enjoying the social aspect of sports fandom.

4.

Carter is particularly worried about today’s game between the Packers and the Bears. He says it’s because he’s afraid there won’t be any Packers fans to cheer for them at Soldier Field, but I think the real problem is that he’s starting to feel the heat from his friends. Earlier this week he came home and said, “My friend Evan says only Bears fans can come over to his house to play.” I tried to tell him that his friend didn’t really mean it and that people say a lot of dumb things about sports, but it didn’t help.

I have no idea if he’ll stick with the Packers thing, but he could do worse than being a Packers fan in Chicago. There are probably more Packers fans here than in Green Bay itself anyway. But he’s starting to learn the biggest problem with not rooting for the home team, especially if you like their archival instead. It’s not a big deal for me to put up with the ribbing and the bad jokes when I wear a Cardinals hat or my Peyton Manning jersey, but it’s a different thing for a kid who for some reason decided he likes the Packers the year they stood between the Bears and the Super Bowl.