Matt’s post yesterday laid out a nice prospect for old age, but it did get me thinking: Do you actually think you can, or will, retire? I once did, though it seemed like a stretch: I’d need a six-figure sum, and if I lived small, and compound interest did its thing, I could probably pull that off.

But adulthood brings expenses, and expensive-but-worth-it life choices. We own an apartment that carries a high mortgage and a big monthly maintenance charge. That means, though we do not live month-to-month, the amount we put away for our old age is nowhere near what it might otherwise be. Everyone in publishing knows that salary freezes and layoffs are the norm these days, and presumably that shakeout will eventually end, it’s not done by a long shot. And there will be a point, twenty years from now, when the math goes all kerflooey: our mortgage will not yet be paid off, our kid will be in college, and we will be in our mid-sixties, considering how much longer we want to (or even can) work.

The older writers and editors I know sort of ease into retirement: They drop back to working three days a week, or shift from the demands of daily deadlines to long-term stuff like books, which sounds like a pleasant late-career turn. But can I even count on that business being around in 25 years? Take it from me, because I am working on an actual book for an actual publisher: The research time alone turns your typical advance into minimum-wage work, and my advance was considerably less than typical. I sense that, for all but a lucky and hypertalented few, authorship is a tidy path to eating cat food out of a tin. (As is Dadwagon, by the way, except that it’d be dry pet food, not the fancy canned stuff.)

What I am reduced to counting on, or praying for, is some mysterious economic boom to come. We got one, out of the blue, in the Clinton years, when the Internet bubble quintupled everyone’s 401(k) accounts, and if any of you were smart enough to ride that train, then get off just as it went over the cliff, you did some serious earning. (I didn’t, not really.) It’s a hell of a thing to bet on another one of those run-ups happening between now and 2035, but you have to figure that the current doldrums are not forever, that they’ll go for two more years or four or eight, and then we’ll be in an upswing. It doesn’t have to be world-changing, like the Web-era boom; it just has to inject enough cash into the publishing business to keep me from getting laid off, and presumably anything that does that will generally lift the economy at large. When that day comes, we ride it as long as we dare, and then whatever we’ve saved goes into the least risky accounts imaginable. And we hope to God that it’s enough. (I suspect it won’t be.)

Also under consideration: A long-lost relative, some Greek third cousin I’ve never heard of, who leaves me $10 million. That would work, too.

This happened several weeks ago, and I wasn’t even around for it. Yet it’s somehow stuck with me, and I’m trying to figure out why.

My wife did the evening pickup from school and stopped at the playground. It was a warm August day, and our boy made his usual beeline for the fountains, edging right up to the spray to cool off but not quite jumping in, as is his habit. (Or was, till this weekend’s chill.) Another, older girl, maybe 3 or 4, was there, and stuck her hand over the sprayer, spattering him. My wife (nicely) asked the little girl to try not to get him wet, whereupon she turned to her nanny, who was sitting nearby on a bench. The girl was clearly unsure of herself—had she done wrong? Was she going to be scolded? Was it okay even though she’d been a little careless? It was clearly a teachable moment. And what did the nanny say to her, after a long, hanging pause? “You just keep having fun, honey.”

[Ed note: No, you can’t ever be 100 percent sure it was her nanny. But enough socioeconomic signifiers were on view that you’d have come to the same conclusion.]

I’m ready to call the game for that little girl—to see her, 25 years from now, as the young and obnoxious boss I never want to have, or the bratty entitled assistant I want even less. “You make your own monsters,” my mother is fond of saying, and to an extent I believe it. A lot of rotten people are created.

But what makes me think even more about this exchange is that it wasn’t a parent doing the enabling. It was a hired caregiver. Are the parents horrible narcissists, who would encourage such things? Are they good people who have no idea what sort of tiny-scaled rogue-nation-building is going on? Maybe they’d be horrified. Maybe they’d be proud. Either way, that nanny clearly thinks of her job not as developmental character-builder but as clock-puncher, getting her charge through the day with the minimum of effort and maximum of crowd-pleasing.  It’s a culture clash, between parents like (I daresay) most Dadwagon readers, who are likely to believe in raising good citizens, and someone who doesn’t give a damn about that.

It makes me grateful for at least one aspect of a day-care-classroom environment: checks and balances. It’s a lot harder to brush off larger responsibilities when there are other teachers, supervisors, a roomful of children, and a couple of dozen parents involved, any of whom could, in theory, stop by any moment. I’m sure our school has its own failings, its own weak spots, its own moments that would make me cringe if I were present, but I bet that sort of lazy approach to child-rearing is kept out of the place by the group dynamic.

I know, I know, this moment probably added up to absolutely nothing, in the end. But it still bothers me, weeks later.

Not Super… Just Mom tipped us (via this heartfelt if rambly post) to People magazine’s profile of Mark McGrath, lead singer of the band Sugar Ray. He and his fiancée, Carin, have just had twins, and we are informed that they went the IVF route after “Herculean efforts” of more conventional babymaking techniques. Let’s set aside that Hercules’ most significant labor was cleaning out the manure-filled Augean stables, which somehow doesn’t conjure up images of a rock star screwing his wife to the point of mutual exhaustion. But never mind that. The thing that leapt out of the story was this quote:

Hartley is a calm and happy baby — always smiling. She sleeps through anything, and melts my heart when she smiles from her soul. Lydon, on the other hand, is a bit more fussy. He needs to be constantly entertained. And if he doesn’t get what he wants he belts out these heavy metal screams (Adam Lambert, eat your heart out!). We had to let him cry it out the other night and poor Carin was crying too … in another room. As for me, I just put on my headphones and let little Ly learn one of life’s great lessons. I think the Stones said it best: ”You can’t always get, whatcha want…”

He put on his headphones to block out the noise of his wife and child crying themselves silly?! Who does this? (Judging by the smirk on his face in the photos, a douchebag, that’s who.) I’m certainly not going to wade into the cry-it-out wars, but there’s something I’d like to note here. We often forget a key piece of information when attempting to manage baby behavior. A 4-month-old is learning a lot of things, but the cause-effect connection is simply not there yet, except in the barest simplest ways: Hungry = cry. Bright light = eyes snap shut. You cannot—cannot—somehow say that you’re “teaching” a 4-month-old a lesson. He can’t suddenly say, “Oh! I didn’t realize that if I just go to sleep, it’ll all be fine.” Baby brains do not yet work that way.

It is as if someone walked up to you on the street and said a nonsense word, like “Bleem.” Then repeated it: “Bleem. Bleem. Bleem.” Then more insistently: “Bleem!” Then urgently, with panic: “BLEEM! BLEEEEEEEM!” If he says it louder, does it make it clearer what that person wants from you? Of course not. It just starts to freak you the hell out. That, I think, is a baby’s-eye view of the world.

In short: Take your damn headphones off and give your kid a hug. And save one of those embraces for your sobbing ladyfriend, too, bud. If the babies keep you awake, well, welcome to daddyhood. You’ll sleep when you’re old, the way the rest of us will.

I had no idea that Kim Jong-Il and I had so much in common! We love our sons, and wish for them to have excellent futures. As the Times reported yesterday, Kim has begun to make arrangements (somewhat hastily, since his health is failing) for his youngest boy to take over the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, outgunning his older sons and his daughter. The middle son had no shot, being that—how to put this?—he has a sex life somewhat different from that of his dad.

But back to Kim and me. Consider the following:

• Kim is 68; his son is reported to be “in his late twenties.” My son was born when I was 40.

• Kim and son like crisply tailored military uniforms. I recently bought my son a shirt (size 2T) at the same haberdasher’s sample sale where I get my clothes.

• Kim has ordered built a spectacular subway system in Pyongyang, despite intermittent electric power and no jobs to which people might commute. I like trains.

• Every now and then, Kim comes to the U.N. and rails about the United States. During those weeks, traffic is tied up throughout my East Side neighborhood, and I rail about the U.N.

I guess the only difference is … well, there are a lot of them, actually. Mostly I wouldn’t wish the writer’s life (or a writer’s income) on my kid unless he wants it really, really bad. But other than that: same exact plan.