I was sitting in a small, cramped Tampa theater, listening to a tone-deaf little girl belt out “Beauty and the Beast,” when it happened. It washed over me like a wave, like an electric shock. A chill. A flush. A fever. An epiphany. A jolt. A surge. Just like that, it happened — the rest of my life flashed before my eyes. “This is the future,” I thought to myself as the song dragged on, “and it’s out of key.”
How Do Those Yankees Stand the Cold?
For three generations I’ve had a family member call the Sunshine State home. Some member of my clan has sat beneath a palm tree here, sweaty and happy, laughing at the rest of the world. The farthest north anyone has ever lived is Kentucky, where my dad is from. In fact, I like to say I’m more Southern than most southerners since my grandmother came to Florida from Cuba. Top that! Growing up as a boy in Tampa, Jacksonville was considered up north for me (I thought it was a suburb of Boston), and when I moved to St. Augustine in 1991 to go to school, it was as if I had moved to Alaska by the way the temperature would drop. You even have to wear coats up here and once in a while you might see frost, like this past week. In Tampa, you’re lucky if your ice pop doesn’t melt in February. But as I spent the week hunkered down in the worst cold we’ve seen all year, trying to convince my boss that I DID have a doctor’s note prescribing hibernation for the rest of the season, I watched bone-chilling clips of all those crazy lunatics living up in that frozen tundra called the Northeast.
Is This the End of Non-Iron?
Is nothing sacred anymore? Is nothing safe? Is this world so dangerous that everything we eat, wear, touch and spend any quality time with is carcinogenic? And most importantly, am I going to have to start ironing again? Say it ain’t so. I read an article the other day that has the potential to impact my life in the most dreadful way. It talked about a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientific review panel labeling a chemical used to manufacture Teflon as “likely” carcinogenic.
Waiting on the Baby Time Bomb
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick … Waiting for the baby time bomb to go off. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick … That seems to be the story for the first couple of months of a baby’s life. That’s what I’m understanding, especially when you go out. My wife and I just recently got up the nerve to start venturing out of our cave with our new 5-week-old girl, Amelie. You get a bright shiny new sports car with leather seats and no teeth, and you want to show it off — the happy face, the good moods, the pretty girl, the adorable outfits. That’s natural. But it’s the Tyrannosaurus Rex that she sometimes becomes that gets me worried.
Human Beings the Great Garbage Collectors
What is it about the human species that we feel the need to collect garbage? I was thinking about this while running the other night. I had passed a house with the garage door open and what looked like a vast mountain range of cardboard boxes that rivaled the Rockies. While it was pretty dark, I could clearly see that this concentration of “stuff” was causing a sink hole to develop beneath it.
The Talking Sewer Line
Stupid talking sewer line. That’s what I have. A chatty one with an upset stomach. It started with nothing — a little burp once in a while the washing machine was draining. Gurgle. Glug, glug. Ffffft. Nothing too bad. Barely noticeable. When my wife mentioned it, I shrugged my shoulders and waved it off. “Probably, the line had a little Mexican food and is sleeping it off. No worries.”
A Baby is Born … And We Got Through It
What is it about a refrigerator door loaded with junk — inundated with old pictures, to-do lists, magnets, bits of Thanksgiving dinner leftovers and random tidbits of life — that something meaningful occasionally cuts through the clutter while you reach for the water pitcher and gives you a boost. I read the saying, almost crowded out by a Key West chicken magnet and a New Yorker cartoon, and laughed.
New Baby Means Goodbye to Normal
So, this is fatherhood. Not so bad. Not so different. Normal life, I have been told, is over. Now the search begins for a new kind of normal. For a routine. For just a little bit of sleep. (In 22 years, I’m told, I’ll get some.) It’s been two weeks since my daughter, Amelie, was born, and already I have changed 32,000 diapers. Having never done so before this experience, I think I’m adjusting quite well.