Tag: Fathers

  • Playing Sports (Unedited)

    My kid is on her school’s soccer team, and she loves it. We love it too, as it is the best way for her to burn off the huge amounts of energy that she has in reserve, and it keeps her off a screen. I don’t know if she will be a life longer soccer player/fan and honestly, I don’t care. I like that she’s playing on a team, and doing something physical.

    If you are not aware, I come from a very competing family. I wasn’t blessed with the athletic gene (though I wasn’t too bad at tennis) but playing and winning at games was a big thing in my family growing up. Lots of board games and wiffleball in the back yard. With two older brother who were nine and seven years older than me, it was difficult to beat them at sports as a kid, but that didn’t stop me from trying. My oldest brother played baseball, and my other brother was all about basketball. I tried my hand at both, but didn’t have the skills. I could through a baseball well, but couldn’t hit to save my life. As for basketball, I don’t ever remember feeling that I was coordinated enough to be good at it.

    My father had a rule in our house, which was we had to play a sport up until we turned sixteen. After I washed out of Little League, and junior high basketball didn’t have a place for me, my father suggested that I take up tennis, which was a sport he played. I took lessons once a week for two years, and I got kind’a good, but not that good. But my father’s point did sink in; you have to stay active and physical, or you will just go pot.

    So, I guess I am keeping the tradition alive. Going to keep her in a sport until sixteen, when she can decide for herself if she wants to continue.

    When I turned sixteen, I stopped the tennis lessons, and committed myself to my high school’s theatre department. Which, in a round about way, is also a team sport.

  • Middle School (Unedited)

    The kid started middle school. There has been a great deal of upheaval and change in our little apartment, not to mention the world. I am happy that the kid is growing up, and she is very excited about staring middle school, and leaving elementary behind. For her, she likes a challenge, and going new places and meeting new people, and middle school is that. Her only complaint has been that she wants to get at the learning and new classes, and the first day is just dull; learning the rules, and where things are.

    I will tip my cap to my kid; she is so much braver that I was at her age.

    I was terrified to go to middle school. Everything that everyone had told me was that the 9th graders ate the seventh graders alive. There was nothing in middle school I was looking forward to. It was all awkward and mean and rough, and embarrassing, and every school nightmare I ever had wrapped up into one.

    The funny thing was that the night before middle school started, my kid had trouble sleeping. She had butterflies in her stomach. Though she was excited about starting middle school, there was still a little nervousness to it. As I was talking to her, trying to help her relax and sleep, she asked me if middle school will be the worst time of her life, because me and her mother had told her some stories of how difficult it was. That and she’s seen enough tween TV and movies that have also painted middle school as a grinder box crucible of adolescence.

    I was prepared to attempt to paint the rosiest of pictures for her that it was this fun place, and only a few bad things happened to me, but that would have been a lie. And then it struck me; there was a silver lining. I told her that middle school was where I discovered theatre and performing. It was the place that where I first started reading great books, books that open your mind, and help you start to see the world in new and fresh ways. But most importantly, middle school was where I made some of the first truly great friends of my life. People I bonded with over books and movies and music. People I that are still in my life today, who I can’t fathom not being intertwined with to this day. I told her that middle school was the start of the process that made me the adult who I am today. The person I am proud to be.

    Don’t know if it did the trick, but she eventually got to sleep.

    And maybe I’m getting old and looking for silver linings in awful memories, or maybe those sharp edges and rounding off as the years go by.

    Nope. Middle school was the worst. I just had the best friends imaginable, which is how I survived.

  • Earworm Wednesday: The Countdown was never Final

    My kid has been humming this for three days.

    THREE DAYS!!!

    And you know the part that she’s been humming.

    Totally stuck in my head…

  • ODDS and ENDS: Everything is Green, Son of a Clothes Horse, and Sick Kid on the Couch

    ODDS and ENDS: Everything is Green, Son of a Clothes Horse, and Sick Kid on the Couch

    (Who said that!? Not Me!)

    …And I hope you enjoy the weird AI image that was created for this post…

    Came out this morning to do the Alt Side Parking Dance, and discovered that our little car was covered in green. The wife had parked under a tree, and now there is a fuzzy haze of pollen all over the vehicle. Besides the fact that my allergies started weeping in despair as I felt my nose simultaneously running and clogging up, I also wondered how much pollen could this car collect? Could my car have so much pollen on it that if I drove around the City, even out in the country, it would act as a pollinator? I know the bees are dying off, but if push came to shove, couldn’t we just drive are cars around to, in a very basic rockbottom way, pollenate the world? Just an idea, cause there is a crap ton of tree pollen on my car.

    First of all, let me start by saying this very loaded statement; I love my wife very much. And as such, we tease each other often, as is our want. There are many things she makes fun of me over, but one of the most recurrent jokes of her’s is to call me a “clothes horse.” Going on twenty years, she’s called me this. Until I had met my wife, I had never heard this term before. A clothes horse is a folding frame used inside someone’s house to hang laundry on while it dries, or a fashionable person who thinks too much about their clothes. (I bet you can guess which definition my wife uses for me.) Most specifically, she will uses this term towards me on days when I have a sitting around the home outfit, a running errands in the neighborhood outfit, and then a third running around town outfit. Not that I do this all the time, but it does happen; I have been known to wear three different outfits in one day. So, I was home visiting my dad the other week, and I witnessed my father doing the same thing; over the course of the day, he had three different outfits he would put on. I had never noticed that, nor thought about it, as that’s just who my father is. Now, I clearly see the depths of the influence this man has had on my life, for I am the Son of a Clothes Horse.

    The kid was sick the other night. Like very sick, and throwing up. She was weak, and needed to be comforted, which I was more than happy to do. As she gets older, the opportunity for a snuggle starts to decrease, you know. But I noticed something as we were on the couch at 2am, hoping that she would be able to keep crackers down; That when she’s sick and on the couch in the daytime, I watch whatever she wants to watch – But at night, I make the kid watch what I want to watch. Nothing inappropriate, but it’s my choice. So, the other night, at 2am, I made my kid watch the MST3k episode “Cave Dwellers.” It’s one of my favorites, and to be honest, I wasn’t too concerned with what the kid thought, as she was nauseous and going in and out of sleep. The next morning, she was feeling better, still a little under the weather, but better. And to my surprise, she was making Cave Dweller jokes – like, “I fell on my eight sided dice,” “Gotta a Minute!” and “The tapes not queued up!” I couldn’t have be prouder to be her father!

  • Short Story Review: “Five Bridges” by Colm Tóibín

    (The short story “Five Bridges” by Colm Tóibín appeared in the March 10th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Todd Hido for The New Yorker

    Sometimes when I start reading a short story, in the back of my mind, I start rooting for it. You know, cheering it on, hoping that the story succeeds. Like wishing that your favorite ballplayer hits a homerun when they’re at the plate. So you see, I found myself really pulling for Colm Tóibín’s “Five Bridges” to do well, and accomplish its goals.

    Here’s an overly simplified synopsis: Paul, an Irish guy who has been living in the United States illegally for over thirty years, has decided to move back to Ireland, but in so doing, that will mean he will have to leave his daughter, whom he fathered with woman he never married. But before he leaves, his daughter wants Paul, the mother and the mother’s husband, to all hike Mount Tam which is outside of San Francisco.

    It all starts well. The first section is about Paul hiking with his daughter, Geraldine, and then she tells him her idea about everyone hiking together to Mount Tam. Then at a very leisurely pace, we learn about the strained relationship Paul has with Geraldine’s mother, Sandra. We learn about Paul’s profession as an unlicensed plumber, his socks filled with cash, and his recovery over his alcoholism. Then the story takes a rather hard right turn with the introduction of Paul’s friend Kirwan, another Irishman, and the semi support group Kirwan creates for other single Irishmen living in the Bay Area. Then the story shifts back to Paul, Geraldine, Sandra and her husband, Stan, as the hike up the mount. I’ll leave it there as to not ruin the ending.

    As you can see, Tóibín layers his story, and generally it all works together smoothly, with the exception of that hard-right turn with Kirwan. Also, several themes play under the surface here; fathers and daughters, blended families, immigration, culture clashes, redemption, penance… And as the story went on, and I got closer and closer to the final page, that’s when I started hoping and rooting for this story to all pull together.

    I was enjoying what I was reading, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing was getting it’s full due time to resolve itself. When I encounter stories that feel like this, it’s hard for me to shake the feeling that the piece needs a larger format (a novel) to explore the characters, motivations and themes. I wouldn’t go as far to say I was disappointed with the story; more like I was pulling for it, and wanted to it work.