Category: Tales from the Front Page 7 of 9

Neither of my kids is yet 10, but they each have this strange fascination with TV shows that can’t be found on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel.

They’re into Hoarding: Buried Alive and stranger yet, American Greed!

Hoarding isn’t too bad. Pack rats don’t typically exhibit violent or salacious behavior. Plus, it teaches the kids the value of picking up their rooms.

American Greed, on the other hand, has gone from telling tales of pyramid schemes to unlicensed plastic surgery.

A couple nights ago as bedtime approached, the kids finished their showers and rushed down to the family room to kick it with me. They found me watching the introduction to an episode of American Greed that chronicled the rise and fall of a pair of illegal butt enhancement operations. When I grabbed the remote to change the channel, they begged me to let them keep watching. I was flabbergasted! Am I raising a couple of investigative journalists?

While I try to be vigilant about what I expose the kids to on TV, I don’t want to be overprotective nor do I want to frustrate their curiosity. We watched American Greed together. Thank God the remote control has pause, fast forward and mute buttons!

The kids draped themselves over me and, within minutes, were totally enthralled with the program. It seems some transgender guy in Florida set up shop in a motel room where he regularly injected industrial silicone into the buttocks of wannabe models and other vain women. The transgender then passed his trade secrets down to a female friend who opened up her own shop.

To my chagrin, the kids heard the word “transgender” and immediately peppered me with questions about its meaning. Of course, I dodged the queries like Barry Sanders did linebackers, but OMG! Then, out of nowhere, my daughter, the human dictionary, told my son that a transgender person is someone who has undergone gender reassignment surgery. He, in turn, asked me what gender reassignment surgery was!

“Can’t explain that now, baby boy. We don’t wanna miss the show.”

As for the show, as any reasonable person might expect, the injection of industrial silicone by amateurs into the buttocks of ignorant women willing to blow a month’s salary and risk their health did not have many happy endings, pardon the pun. Some women were horribly disfigured, others died.

Pause. Fast forward. Mute.

“Daddy! Why did you skip that part?” I heard.

“Umm, it was inappropriate for you guys.”

“Really? What were they doing?” Follow up questions, even?

“Stuff that you guys aren’t ready to see,” I said.

“When will be able to see?” they wanted to know.

“When you’re older.” Like in grad school.

The new direction American Greed seems to be taking caught me off guard, but I learned my lesson. I mean, how many pyramid schemes can they cover before every show seems to tell the same story? But disfiguring, potentially lethal butt injections? I think we’ll switch back to Teen Titans Go before bedtime effective immediately.

If there is a bright side to my faux pas, I doubt that my baby girl will EVER consider silicone butt injections!

My maternal grandmother passed in August of last year. What a life she lived. None of her six children resides in the New York City area. That leaves the job of finalizing her affairs and closing up her home to you know who.

Her home? Thirteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms, two baths and 41 years of memories. Pictures of people long-gone line the misshapen walls. Furniture older than my children occupies space in the rooms. The faucet in the tub leaks rusted water. The cupboards hold food that no one will ever eat. My grandmother’s vacant bed lays visible from the end of the curved hallway.

The children had little interaction with their great grandmother. They have no understanding of who she was or the struggles that characterized her life. I have done my best to see to it that their childhoods are nothing like my grandmother’s, my mother’s or mine. The day will come, however, when they will need to hear uncomfortable truths in order to appreciate the gifts bestowed upon them.

For days now, I have suffered mood swings and anxiety for which I had trouble identifying the sources. The closer I come to Mother’s Day and the tasks at hand, the clearer the issues become.

I’ll drop the kids off at school Friday, then head to New York. I don’t know quite what to do as this will be the first time I close up the home of a deceased relative, but I’ll figure it out. Thank God for the internet, huh?

Happy Mother’s Day? Not necessarily, but this has to happen.

My grandmother’s name was Ruby Henrietta Russell and she was the primary maternal figure in my life. God rest her soul.

Waking up this morning was easy. Sure, it’s extremely early in the morning, but I hear Michelle Obama does this every day.

Waking up with that “fire in the belly” as they say is an indication that things are moving in the right direction. A good night’s sleep is crucial to that sense of well being and I got a great night’s sleep. I was able to relax in a way that had eluded me for several nights. What gave me that peace of mind? Two beautiful conversations that proved to be a trail of burning gasoline leading to a box of dynamite.

Yesterday, as I do at least twice a month, I hit up my folks in Texas. My stepmom picked up. We had a great talk. She told me that she and my dad are in good health, still active and generally enjoying their retirement. Toward the end of the conversation, I mentioned the work I was putting into the blog. Her response absolutely delighted me.

She said she had missed a few days but had taken the time to catch up. Naturally, I asked what she thought. She told me that I should keep doing exactly what I’m doing. She didn’t know it, but she had laid down that trail of gasoline. At that point, my dad the Grill Master summoned her to dinner and we terminated the conversation.

Half way into Mad Max: Fury Road, my dad called. We had a great talk. He brought up The Maw and every point therein that struck a chord. We guffawed through a discussion of our common experiences. He didn’t know it, but he had dropped a match on that trail of gasoline.

Having ridden out a week of subpar moods, the lift I got from Texas got me to thinking. Since I started the blog, all the feedback I’ve received, including that from my kids, my favorite columnist, my therapist, a published author and several good friends, has been overwhelmingly positive. A seasoned editor has agreed to work on Damned Good Sense, a manuscript I’ve been working on for years. This is all a better cure for anxiety than anything GlaxoSmithKline has on the market. I fell asleep by 9:00 PM last night.

Oh, and remember that box of dynamite?

Kaboom!

This has not been my finest week with the kids. It wasn’t terrible. Just not what it should have been.

As I tell the kids, not all the time we spend together will be like a life insurance commercial, where we’re running around the backyard under a perfect sky, spraying each other with water hoses while laughing hysterically. I tell them we’re still going through transition and I am under tremendous pressure to keep things moving. Sometimes, that pressure keeps me awake at night. Other times, it’s inspiration to write. The upshot is that a bad night’s sleep affects my daytime mood, which takes away from them.

What I want them to take from these discussions is that we’re all human and subject to varying moods. These moods are affected by all manner of circumstances, but we each have a responsibility to keep them in check. I am grateful to have the self-control to speak honestly with my children about my state of mind when they behave as children do, and that no fits of temper were involved. Our bond is based on the kind of gentle honesty that I hope fosters in them the freedom to tell me what they are really thinking, even if I won’t like it. I don’t punish them for their honesty and they extend me the same courtesy.

I don’t delude myself that they never try to deceive me for whatever reasons. It’s human nature to do that from time to time. My only hope is that they keep it real when it counts. I know I will.

The thing about living on a revolving planet is that, as long as we’re healthy, every 24 hours, we get a chance to fix what we screwed up the day before. I am going to use my current 24 in service to prepare for my next visit with the kids.

One of my many blessings is a keen awareness of the brevity of life. The kids are growing up so, so fast. Every day, hour and second is precious. I need to have my head right when they’re with me because this is all the time we’ll ever have. I got no problem steppin’ up to meet that challenge and they need to see that.

Seconds after I picked them up from school Wednesday afternoon, the kids exclaimed almost in unison “Daddy, there’s a fund raiser at Barnes & Noble tomorrow night!” I thought “again?” But my frustration with the frequency of the fund raisers is trumped by my confusion as to why the funds are being raised in the first place. My God! Is someone running for office?

I have thought my way out of many corners, but when it comes to these school-related, well, things that get the kids all worked up, I’m woefully out of my league, flat-out flummoxed. Tonight, I learned that I am not alone.

I drove the kids to a space in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. Before the doors could close on the minivan, they were sprinting to the store. Once inside, almost immediately, they encountered friends and classmates. For the moment, “Daddy” became as distant a memory to them as their first pacifiers.

It was bedlam. Kids were running this way and that, heedless of the boundaries to the children’s section of the store. A glance in that direction revealed a concentration of people who occasionally burst into applause. Many held up phones aimed at a small stage. Apparently, recitals or readings of some type were taking place.

As I attend more of these things, faces are becoming familiar. In the past, I would have said nothing, but I’ve begun to chat people up. I have no choice. If I don’t start asking questions, I will spend the next ten years chucking up cash at these things simply because it seems to be what’s done around here.

I spotted one neighbor who looked at least as impatient with the whole affair as I, but a bit more certain of his role. I braced him: “What are they doing here?”

“Some kids are up there reading,” he replied.

“Your kid reading?” I asked.

“Yeah. She’s already done.”

Just then, a pair of women walked up to us, one of whom demanded of my acquaintance whether he had seen his daughter read. He replied jocularly that he had not, but he would be sure to do so at the next opportunity. His interrogator good-naturedly admonished that he would have some explaining to do later. The ladies walked off, and as they did, he said to me “they only bring me to pay for dinner, anyway. That’s what I’m good for.” I chuckled and shook my head. No mathematical equation could be a greater truth.

As my kids placed their books of choice on the checkout counter, I noticed a registration desk near the exit. It was attended by one of my son’s former teachers and some other ladies. Considering that the event was shutting down, I couldn’t work out why they were still there. After purchasing the books, was I supposed to make a donation as well? By that point, it mattered not a jot. My patience was shot and I wasn’t about to go for the okey-doke twice in the same night.

I want to congratulate the organizers of the event: They managed to raise my blood pressure in direct proportion to those daggone funds!

Get your kids the heck outta here. I mean it. Is there any better way to open young minds to global possibilities than to get them out of their regular element?

You can’t miss what you never had, the saying goes. That is until you find yourself surrounded by people who have had what you never had. Having spent much of my youth on the less cosmopolitan streets of New York City, I walked smack into that reality the day I took my first office job.

I have to accept responsibility for this rude awakening. My mother, who had lived for several years in Europe, tried her best to raise my level of consciousness. Unfortunately, she was perceived by many in our circle to be pretentious and haughty. I was already playing down my academic potential. I didn’t need our people lumping me in with her. That would have been bad for my “rep”.

Imagine already living in the gutter and trying to work your way into the sewer. That was me. But as I approached 20, I felt the pull of vague ambitions that I couldn’t reconcile with my need to be accepted around the way. I was walking a fine line. Then, I got a tip about a job in the Financial District.

Wow.

At 17, I was hired to be a messenger at an international law firm with plush offices in a skyscraper overlooking New York Harbor. Though I lived not 20 miles from my new job, I might as well have been fresh off a Greyhound from Missouri. The better office buildings in Manhattan are architectural marvels. The lobbies of these places can be tourist destinations on their own. I felt privileged to walk through the revolving door to the elevator bank. And once I stepped into an elevator, I realized I had also stepped into another world. I was to experience a culture shock that could level San Francisco.

Once broken in, I became aware of my utter insignificance to the legal staff. This was mildly humiliating, but understandable. I had been comparing the smatterings of conversation I picked up walking through the offices to what I heard in the messenger room. The legal staff were the New England Patriots and we were, at best, high school junior varsity.

The chasm between the legal staff and the messengers was not just a by-product of education, race, salary or job description, it was about the fields of vision inherent to each group. The legal staff had been groomed from childhood to have greater expectations of and for themselves. Many of them had grown up elsewhere, did not necessarily come from money and were graduates of big and/or reputable schools. Doubtless, they spent their late teens doing internships or studying abroad. They were always talking about places they had been and where they planned to go whether for vacation, education or business.

We messengers on the other hand were largely street kids with maybe GEDs, attending public college, high school drop outs or worse, burn-outs just playing out the string. The concept of recreational travel, much less for education or business, was not even a bad joke for most of us. Our conversations typically centered around our neighborhoods, crime, sports, women, sneakers, clubs and, for some, baby mama drama. Lots of laughs, not much thought.

My mother’s attempts to sophisticate me left me uniquely conscious of the vast differences in thinking and vision between the groups. I hated to admit it, but she had been right.

There we were in that messenger room. Our perception: We were slick, street smart city kids who saw school as a distraction, a day trip to Great Adventure as a dream vacation and the well-dressed men and women rustling papers in their offices as brainiac hicks faking our genuine New York funk. Our reality: We were letter jockies hustling for peanuts, most of whom had little to no knowledge of life beyond the subway lines. We were the real hicks because we blithely lived beyond invisible walls of our own construction in a city of 8,000,000 where billions of dollars change hands annually, if not monthly.

Planes, trains and automobiles, people. Get ’em out of here, where ever here might be. Get ’em thinking globally…while their young.

Hi! My name is Joscelyn and i’m 8-years old. My hobbies include talking about unicorns , talking about worms , talking about John Cena , playing with my friends , gaming, drawing, youtube, looking at emojis, punching my friend Stephen, and beating up my 9 -year old brother Julien. You know, I really should start working  on those last two. I have acomplisted many things academically, such as an award for “most vivid vocabulary”! I wanted to write on my dad’s blog to show the world what it’s like to be a secret unicorn with divorced parents.  P.S. I think Julien is a bear with  class… Anyways that was my bio. I hope you liked it! Byeeee!!!!

The outdoor public pools will be open soon. I haven’t yet learned to swim, but I love to flail around like an idiot in the shallow end on hot days. The thing is, I absolutely dread that initial shock to my nerves guaranteed to come the nanosecond I dip a toe in the water. Gotta gut it out, though; what else would I do at the pool, ogle women? I think there are laws against that. Or maybe there should be. Which reminds me…

On behalf of bewildered, overwhelmed, overworked and overcharged fathers across the state of Pennsylvania, I am dipping my toe into the very cool water of legislative reform. We dads need protection from mothers and predatory or inept attorneys who routinely steamroll us in family court. We need laws that better represent the times we live in. There are many of us that seek increased custody of our kids, who want to be more active in raising them. We don’t want to have to choose between jail and decent living arrangements due to oppressive support payments. Speaking of support, we should certainly have some say in how that money is spent considering the minor detail that we earn it. And if it takes a person as historically apolitical and ignorant of the legal process as me to galvanize men who know this struggle, then the nine months my mother carried me was time well spent.

Now back to dipping that toe: Once I realized I was going to be a crusader, it occurred to me that I had to actually launch the crusade. And who am I to do such a thing? To paraphrase Francis Dolarhyde, the family exterminating antagonist of Thomas Harris’s classic novel Red Dragon, I am an ant in society’s after-birth. I am a barely middle class, middle aged Bronxite who eeked out an undergrad degree at 32. I have backed into what appear to be my twin callings in life, writing and fatherhood, and I have married them in the aftermath of my divorce.

How does a guy like that go about changing laws? I did a little homework and to my surprise, all I need to do is contact my local member of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives. His name is Steve Samuelson. I’ll drop his office an email with my agenda tomorrow. Nothing might happen, but then again, everything might happen. The water’s feeling a little warmer now.

Through development of this blog, the fog that obscures the path to change is lifting…and just in time for pool season.

Think about it, man; kids need to stay busy. Busy kids don’t watch much TV, kids who don’t watch much TV don’t see commercials, kids who don’t see commercials don’t ask for every dadgum thing they see in the stores and kids who don’t ask for every dadgum thing they see in the stores save you money!

Ahh, but you ain’t out of the woods yet, Charlie. Depending on your kid’s activity of choice, the money you save from keeping her/him in the dark about Hasbro’s latest shakedown will go right to Dick’s, Guitar Center, Michael’s or any place else that knows they have you on the hook like a bigmouth bass. Dads, as I once heard in a movie, you can pay through the nose or bleed through it — if you’re not creative like your boy here.

Ahh, but you ain’t out of the woods yet, Charlie. Depending on your kid’s activity of choice, the money you save from keeping her/him in the dark about Hasbro’s latest shakedown will go right to Dick’s, Guitar Center, Michael’s or any place else that knows they have you on the hook like a bigmouth bass. Dads, as I once heard in a movie, you can pay through the nose or bleed through it — if you’re not creative like your boy here.

Hip hop taught me when I was young that the past is often the greatest inspiration for the future. James Brown was known as the hardest working man in show business, but the money he made from hip hop artists sampling his work was his real pay day. Ten years after his death and perhaps 40 years after his hey day, discerning ears recognize his unmistakeable influence on modern pop music.

My thinking is why limit proven logic to music? Why not put it to the test with child rearing? Before Xbox and little league and permission slips, how did people on the American frontier keep kids occupied? They put ’em to work, that’s how! Up to the middle of the 20th century, kids in the U.S. worked as hard as any day laborers to be corralled at a shape-up. Rather than siphoning off a majority of their household’s incomes, kids of that era augmented them. Imagine that! So, rather than coddling my kids and paying dearly for the privilege, I’m putting their narrow behinds to work!

Why, even now, they’re fixing their own brunch as I lie on the living room carpet banging out this post. After brunch, they’re going to clean up after themselves, then I’m renting them out to a local dairy farmer for the rest of the day while I watch ID Discovery.

Objectives achieved:

• The kids learn self-sufficiency and the value of a day’s work;
• I get to look down from my ivory tower on strangers who screw up badly enough to wind up on TV; and
• There’s a little extra money coming in.

If things stay this way through their puberties, they’ll be too busy — or tired — to do anything I will regret. Now THAT’S kickin’ it old school.

Thankfully, aviation disasters are relatively uncommon. When they do happen, domestically or abroad, if American interests are involved, the National Transportation Safety Board (“NTSB”) is consulted by the administrative arm of the U.S. government.

While the NTSB is itself a government entity, the Independent Safety Board Act of 1974 gives license to board appointees to act autonomously of any sitting administration. This is of little concern because the NTSB’s operation has proven so tight, if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could have called them up after Humpty Dumpty’s fall, he might have lived to change history.

Newly divorced dads are faced with a challenge similar to that of the NTSB. We need to shut down our emotions, scour the impact site for evidence and infinitesimal pieces of wreckage, gather them in our mental hangars, then reassemble the aircraft and determine what caused the disaster.

In neither the case of disaster analysis or relationship forensics should rehashing the past be the primary objective. The goal must always be education: Figuring out what went wrong in order to eliminate the perpetuation of critical errors. More than this, careful review of working systems is likely to stimulate ideas for further improvement.

The single barrier to expedient application of this logic to human endeavor is EMOTION! Whether discussing investigation by professionals of the mass casualty of strangers or the dissolution of a nuclear family, only androids or sociopaths can emerge from such undertakings emotionally unscathed. Yet the work must be done. Aviation can be made safer and divorced dads can be made better parents — maybe even better men — as a result.