DADWAGON

FlightStat’s flight tracker tool (great for terrorists!) is telling me that my flight, DL2719, is currently over Rose City, Michigan on the border of the Huron National Forest. Sounds nice. There are probably snow-covered trees glinting in the dawn light and all that. But up here in the plane, it still smells like La Guardia airport–vaguely flatulent, with hints of Fritos and old gum.

It’s also early: my babies would be just waking up back in New York, coughing like seals, giving out hugs, and demanding just the right mix of Rice Krispies and Kashi.

I know, I sound a bit melancholy, but that’s always been part of travel, even before I had kids. You pack a toothbrush and some clothes and gird yourself for that rare mix of midair feelings: anticipation for what awaits you at wheels-down, a little tug from what you left behind at wheels-up.

So forget the marvels of being able to actually blog those feelings through Go-Go onboard wifi, or being able to tell you fine people my hyper-current flight location (in the time that it took me to write these two paragraphs and screw around a bit on email, I have overflown Michigan and am now above the Great Lakes). The true fascination is that these are probably the same inchoate regrets and excitements that fathers who travel have had since they were riding mastodons away from the cave (that didn’t really happen, did it?)

A word about what I’m doing, and why I’ll be somewhat scarce until later this week. Over at Time.com I’ve been weighing in on the shooting tragedy in Tucson–first by calling out the peddlers of hate speech and then by asking a simple enough question: why are the mentally ill still able to buy guns? We spend so much time beefing about the Second Amendment that the simple bureaucratic steps of keeping and sharing accurate records gets lost. But the magazine needs more than phone-reporting, so I’m headed to Tucson to see what can be seen and write what I can write. I only have a day and a half, and already I know that, thanks to the media scrum heading to Arizona and tonight’s BCS championships, there are no rental cars for hire anywhere in Phoenix. So I will be heading to Tucson by burro.

But still, it’s a good assignment. I spent a fair amount of time in Pima County last year reporting on immigration, and I’m glad to be going back. The roughest part is right now, on the plane, before I have phone calls and burro rides and all the other logistical distractions. There’s not much to do except do some research on the web and tell you all that I miss my kids already. And that I’m now 30,000 feet above the (presumably) delightful Green Bay suburb of Seymour, Wisconsin.

Teeth, teeth, teeth—teeth are on my mind these days. On Wednesday I went to the dentist and was told to, duh, floss more often. Which is fine: At least my teeth are generally in good shape. Unlike Jean’s—last year she maxed out her dental plan, a result of wisdom-teeth removal and the generally poor shape of her chompers. Not that she’s some scaggly-toothed Brit or non-brushing garbage-dweller; her teeth, for whatever reason, probably genetic, just aren’t that great.

Now that Sasha has turned 2, it’s time to get her to the dentist—again. Eagle-eyed Dadwagon readers will remember that last February, Sasha chipped one of her front teeth and was tended to by a dentist, prompting me to worry she’d inherited Jean’s dental DNA (or, through me, my father’s). Still, I thought, Sasha at least had the protection of a fluoridated water supply to keep her mouth healthy. Whoops!

Fluoride in drinking water should be reduced because the additive is damaging childrens’ teeth, the U.S. government recommended today.

So wrote Bloomberg News today. Which, well, fuck. What the hell are we supposed to do now? I mean, New York City apparently fluoridates its water at the low levels the CDC recommends, and city councilman Peter Vallone is trying to get rid of all fluoridation (“This amounts to forced medication by the government,” he said), but the whole situation just frustrates me. What next: carrots make you go blind, milk weakens your bones, kids who eat Wheaties tend to lose? Maybe it all really was a communist plot! To, uh, do what now? Thinking about this makes my teeth hurt.

It’s happened to me a couple of times now already. And it’s been weird. And, I know, it’ll happen again, and that there’s nothing I can do about it. Yes, it’s true—I’ve called my wife, Jean, by my daughter’s name.

There are, I think, reasonable psychological explanations for this embarrassing slip. Usually, it happens when I’m speaking in an instructional or explanatory tone—the voice I use when speaking to Sasha. Not that I’m talking to Jean like I would to a child… Or maybe I am?

At the same time, 2-year-old Sasha has started to occasionally refer to me and her mother as “Matt” and “Jean.” It’s very cute, even though it’s not what we wanted—it’s somehow confusing and weird. In fact, Jean and I try very hard, in Sasha’s presence, to refer to each other as Mommy and Daddy—which is also weird. I don’t even call my own mother Mommy, and now that’s what I’m calling my wife? A little too Oedipal for me, thank you very much.

What amazes me, though, is how Sasha has picked up this information. That is, when she says “Jean,” she says it exactly how I’d say it in Sasha’s presence—not a relaxed, drawn-out sound but tight and clipped and quiet, spoken so that the child in the room won’t quite catch it. But catch it she did, as she’ll continue to pick up and reinterpret all the little things that surround her, and in the end show us how silly we can sometimes be.