Stepping out

I'll be crisscrossing the country over the next three weeks - from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to Yellowstone National Park, Montana to San Francisco, California. See you back here in mid-September.

Water Play II

This past weekend, I took Conor and a friend back to Cub Run, the new indoor swimming pool in my neighborhood with its tall twisty water slides. It was a really hot day and, odd as it sounds, it seemed like a good idea to swim indoors in the air-conditioning. (Don’t want to overheat while swimming, you know?)

The place was packed. Lots of people had the same idea for escaping the heat. It was so crowded that the line for the water slides was most of the way down the stairs. It didn’t bother Conor or his friend, but I opted out, choosing, instead, to swim in the big pool (which had a lot less kids) and was considerably quieter.

Something new this time around: a mandatory break for kids sixteen and under. Now, every 45 minutes all kids need to get out of the pool and rest. There was a sign in the locker room explaining the new policy. How shall I say this decorously? The new policy was necessary because of the increased frequency with which fecal matter was being discovered in the pool. (Yeah, well, how do you think I felt when I saw that sign? Was this a swimming pool or a petri dish?) The logic behind this policy was laughable. Presumably, during the fifteen minute break, the little tikes responsible for dropping the Baby Ruth bars into the public pool might think to go to the bathroom somewhere more appropriate!

Okay, moving right along. The lifeguards blew their whistles for the first break and all the kids got out of the pool. I looked up and there was almost no one in line for the slides. My chance, at last! If you recall from my previous story about this place, I went down the really tall slide only one time. It’s an enclosed, opaque tube that whips you around, at high speeds, in the dark, and then unceremoniously dumps you into a shallow plunge pool. A true nightmare for a claustrophobe like me.

So, as I started toward the steps, I figured I’d go down the easier of the two slides, the one where I can actually look around and see where I’m going.

I didn’t get very far before I heard my son’s voice calling to me. “Dad.” I looked down and there he was, standing before me with a towel wrapped around him. “Which one are you going on?” he asked. I told him just what I told you.

“Ah, come on. Why don’t you go down the big one?” he implored.

"Because it freaks me out,” I said. “I’m really not up for it.”

Conor gave me a serious look. “If you don’t go on the big one, I don’t know how you can continue to be the World’s #1 Dad. You’ll be demoted.”

Huh? When did this ten year old of mine learn the fine art of psychological manipulation? Besides, I thought I was in the black when it came to Dad cred. A couple of years ago, I was in New Zealand at the height of the Lord of the Rings craze. At the end of my business trip, I took a tour of the filming locations for the movies. I even sneaked home a fern from the forest around the set of Rivendell. Conor, who is a big fan, was quite impressed. I figured I was good as gold to him for at least a few more years.

As I walked up the stairs to the slides, I turned to my son and said, "I'll decide when I get up there." I started thinking: if heaving myself into a narrow enclosed tube was all I needed to do to impress my son, what the hell, I'd do it. It won't be long before it will take considerably more than that (say, the keys to a new car).

So I went sliding down "the dark tunnel of death." This time I splayed my arms and legs to the sides of the tube, in an attempt to slow myself down. I kept my head up, too. There wasn't much light, but this posture helped to gather what little sensory information there was and send it to my brain. All in all, the ride went much easier this time. And when I came tumbling out the mouth of the tube into the plunge pool, Conor was standing there waiting for me. Except he was looking over at the plunge pool for the wimpy slide. "Hey," I said. "I'm over here." He turned around, surprised to see me there. I smiled, went back up the stairs and slid down the same slide one more time. Not only had I won back my Top Dad ranking, but I had conquered my claustrophobia - at least for the day.

When break was over, the kids all jumped back in and swam around for a good long time until we heard the whistles blowing again. It was way too soon for break. This time the whistles were meant to covey a different message. We watched as the lifeguards stood around pointing at something near the edge of the pool. Something gross, judging from their facial expressions. The head lifeguard was called over. He looked down and grimaced. He conferred with the other lifeguards for a moment and then made this announcement to the crowd: "Pool closed!"

Cow tippin'

The other day my son asked me, “Dad, is there an urban myth called cow tipping?” I had to stop and think about that. I have known conceptually about cow tipping since I was a teenager. But is it an urban myth? Or does it really happen?

I grew up in a moderately-sized, factory town in Pennsylvania, midway between the cabs of New York city to the east and the dairy farms to the west. I didn’t have a lot of firsthand experience with cows, except for seeing them munching on grass as my family blew by on weekend drives into the country. I did, however, have a pretty strong bias about country folk with their thick necks and lack of anything else to do but mend fences and ride around on tractors. It seemed to make sense to me that teenaged country boys would sneak out after dark, get drunk, flirt with the farmer’s daughter at the ice cream parlor and end the evening tipping a cow or two.

Honestly, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought back then and none since. So, I had to tell my son that I didn’t really know. “Cow tipping seems preposterous,” I told him, “but, you know, just maybe…”

Do you know the answer? Without question or doubt? Think about it for a minute. Think it through. Then go here for the answer and a hilarious discussion on the matter.

Insert head in vise, tighten

There are times when I laugh out loud as I am writing. I love those moments. But there are also moments when I am ready to scream in frustration, usually because I just can't find the "key" that unlocks a particular story I am trying to write.

My short story Overflow Parking finally came out this week in the premier issue of Mangrove Online. I say finally because the story was accepted for publication back in March. Technical difficulties have kept the web site offline until this week. Writing Overflow Parking was one of the most maddening (creative) experiences of my life.

Some background. Neil de la Flor, from the University of Miami, approached me to write a story for Mangrove Online, the web site he was developing which was to be the sister publication to Mangrove literary journal. "Sure," I said, "my pleasure." The Overflow Parking concept immediately came to mind as a story possibility for a lit publication like Mangrove. The core of that story had been in the back of my mind for over two years. Basically, I had this idea of someone driving back to the overflow parking lot of a major airport only to find a world of people who just hang out there. I really didn't know why they would be there or what my protagonist would do when he discovered them. I just knew I loved this idea.

So I tapped and I paced and I twiddled and I swiveled, all the usual nervous habits that help to jumpstart the creative process. I wrote a few quickie drafts and threw them away. I started to panic. I hadn't written under a deadline like this in a while, and I didn't like it one bit. But things weren't too bad yet. I hadn't come close to hitting rock bottom. That came on a Saturday a few weeks later. I had cleared my plate and dedicated the entire day to writing this story (I had promised it to Neil the following weekend). I had a pretty good idea where I wanted the story to go at this point. On that Saturday, I wrote for over six straight hours, stopping only to pee. At the end of the day, there was this horrifying realization. It wasn't working. I had written myself into a corner and there was no way out. I would have to scrap everything and start over. I lost an entire day of my life. And for what? I considered giving up. Screw it. Why bother?

But that night, as I was lying in bed trying to push thoughts of this awful day out of my mind, it hit me. The key to the story. The metaphorical light bulb. Finally, I had a workable idea. I can't begin to tell you how excited I was. So, now I went from not being able to sleep because of defeat to not being able to sleep because of the impatience of wanting to get started all over. On Sunday, I wrote all day again. This time, though, at the end of the day, I had my story. Well, a damn reasonable draft, anyway. I played with it, like a cat with a mouse between its paws, for the rest of the week, and turned it in on time.

Is Overflow Parking any good? I hope so. Could it be better? Sure. Would I write it differently if I was starting all over again? Don't make me cry.

Conor asks...

"Too much bling?"

Barber shop

This weekend I took my son to get his haircut at the barber shop. It’s a pretty large place, eight barber chairs, and they were all occupied on this particular morning. I had never seen all of the chairs taken before, and there were a half a dozen customers waiting as well. I considered leaving and coming back another time, but it was a hot summer day and I really didn’t want to come back another time. As luck would have it, just after we arrived half of the chairs opened up, and the wait was suddenly negligible. When it was Conor’s turn, I gave some instructions to the haircutter (because my son is still young enough to let me do that) and I sat back down in the waiting area. There was a dad sitting next to me who arrived just after we did. He had two small boys with him, aged about three and two. The dad sat and read the newspaper while he waited. The boys played with some trucks in their tight little corner of the floor. The waiting area was crowded again. There wasn’t a chair to be had. But all was right within this barber shop tableau: the sound of electric trimmers buzzed; scissors scissored; children played; Dads turned the pages of newspapers; the haircutters chatted amongst themselves. Until…

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the guy next to me, the guy with the two young boys, gasped. There’s no other word for it. He gasped loudly. Then he screamed, “Oh, my God.” A second later he was on his feet and out the door of the barber shop. The buzzing and the scissoring came to an abrupt stop. Eight barbers suddenly stopped barbering. The silence only served to punctuate the uncertainty of what was going on. Four or five steps out of the shop, the father turned and stuck his head back inside the door. His two boys were still sitting on the floor. “I’ll be right back,” he said, clearly panicked. And then he was gone from sight.

Everyone thought their own version of the worst, although I’m guessing that most of us had the same thought. I’m guessing that you are having the same horrible thought right now. The guy was gone maybe two minutes, not a long time, but it sure seemed that way. In the meanwhile, the barbers went back to cutting hair, but not with the same fervor as before. Nobody spoke. The two boys stayed on the floor playing, but kept looking around nervously for their dad. When he finally showed up again at the door of the barber shop, our worst fear, or at least my worst fear, was confirmed. He was carrying a baby seat. And inside that seat was a newborn baby. Maybe a month or two old. All eyes were on the father as he came back inside. He had a look of abject horror on his face. When the seat he carried spun around, I could see that the baby’s eyes were open. It was alive. We have had midday temperature around here hovering around 100 degrees all this past week. The temperature inside of a parked car can easily soar to over one hundred sixty degrees. A few minutes in a car at that temperature would kill a baby. I calculated how long this baby had been out there. About fifteen minutes. It was still early in the day. The temperature outside was not expected to get quite so hot today. Thankfully.

The dad spoke a few words to all of us in the barber shop. I am amazed he was able to speak at all. He mumbled something about how he forgot that he was supposed to watch the baby. He thought that his wife had him or her. He was so unbelievably lucky. We all were. For who could ever get over witnessing such a horrible thing?

I paid for Conor’s haircut and we walked out together into the parking lot. We got into my car. I folded up the windshield screen I had put up to keep the car a bit cooler. The sun was beating down. When I turned the key, the air conditioner started blasting straight away. The outside temperature gauge on the dash read 85 degrees. It was 10:45 am.

Got one of these?

I received this rejection note from the New Yorker back in 1991. I put it aside until it became part of a pile of papers in my inbox and then a forgotten note buried in a file box with other items that I figured I needed to keep. But why? Why did I keep it? Why didn’t I just toss it in the can with a little shot of the “right back at you” dejection that I obviously felt by getting the thing in the first place? Because it came from the New Yorker, that’s why. This wasn’t just rejection, this was rejection by the absolute best. My manuscript sat on someone’s desk at The New Yorker for at least a few hours before it was returned to me. During that time, my words took up the same space once occupied by stories and poems from some of America’s finest writers. And now these words – “We regret that we are unable to used the enclosed material…” – from the editors of the New Yorker were proof of that fact. How do you throw away a note, even a rejection note, from the New Yorker?

Well, that was then. I’m not quite so philosophical about the rejection note these days. Now that I’ve unearthed it after fourteen years, I feel the time is right to get rid of the thing once and for all. But I don’t want to just throw it away. I want to give it a proper send-off. Next month I will be in San Francisco, a great literary city. I’m thinking of taking the rejection letter with me. There’s a bar I like to visit when I’m out there called Vesuvio Café. It’s in the North Beach neighborhood. Jack Kerouac used to get falling down drunk there. I love this place.

The plan is to walk into Vesuvio café, take the rejection letter from my pocket, fold it up into a little square, and use it to shore up the leg of the wobbliest bar stool in the place. Then I’ll sit down atop that stool, order a beer and smile.

Water play

Yesterday I took my son and his friend to our county’s newest indoor pool. It has two large water slides, a lazy river, a not-so-lazy whirlpool and some fun high-pressure hydraulics that blast you when you walk under them. I went straight for the water slides. I walked up the three flights of steps and stood in line with kids less than half my height and one-fifth my age. I tried the tallest water side first. It’s thirty feet high. The tube starts inside the building at the very top of the steps, but then goes outside where it loops around and around before feeding back into the building, dumping the rider into a three foot deep plunge pool. What I didn’t know (or didn’t think about ahead of time) was that the slide was opaque. It was a relatively thin tube, completely enclosed and painted a dark green. It wasn’t until I was in the yaw of this thing and on my way down that I realized there was no light, that the ride was completely in the dark. There are some pretty basic rules of physics at play here. I was aware of them as my body twisted around the curves that I couldn’t see coming. Particularly, the law of physics pertaining to velocity and mass, the one that says “you big fat old man, you are going to travel a heck of a lot faster down this tube than the children.” My body was being thrown back and forth without warning. The adrenaline was flowing inside my body to match the roaring water in the tube. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel (literally!) just before I was thrown into the plunge tube with a tidal wave splash. I got up and collected myself. I think I even let out a loud whoop. A bunch of people stood watching. They were all smiling and laughing as I got up. People apparently like to watch the reactions of the riders, especially the first time riders, as they are spit out of the tube.

I didn’t go back on that ride again. I’m a big-time claustrophobic. I got into that tube the first time not knowing what I was in for, but you just couldn’t make me get in there again. I did, however, ride the other slide, the one you can see in the photograph, over and over again. On that one, you can at least see over your head, and down slope. I could prepare my back for what was coming next. It was a blast.

Speaking of my back, this morning I can twist and turn my body and feel every curve and drop of those water slides in my cranky old vertebrae. I feel all at once like a ten year old kid and a fifty year old man in that special head space where they happily coexist.