DADWAGON

If you live in New York City, you probably wish every day could be like yesterday: cool but warm, sunny but tinged with fall colors, decelerating as Thanksgiving approaches. For me, though, it held a bittersweet quality: I can’t imagine there will be that many more such days this year when I can bike over the Manhattan Bridge—in shirtsleeves!—to pick Sasha up from preschool.

That’s partly because, according to some local paper, there is a growing backlash against bicyclists here. “More than 250 miles of traffic lanes dedicated for bicycles have been created” in the past four years, says the story, and some people are not at all happy about it. Most of those people, strangely enough, drive cars:

“He’s taking away my rights as a driver,” Leslie Sicklick, 45, said of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Ms. Sicklick, a dog walker and substitute teacher, grew up driving with her father around the Lower East Side, where she still lives.

Sorry, I should translate for those of you unfamiliar with New York:

“He’s taking away my rights as a driver,” whined Leslie Sicklick, an entitled 45-year-old with a really crappy job who insists on owning and driving a large vehicle in one of the densest urban zones in America.

Obviously, as an official Kings County-certified hipster, I have to come down on the bike side of things. In the past several months, I’ve become addicted to tooling around my neighborhood and the city on two wheels, often with the kid riding on my handlebars. (Not literally, of course.) And at the same time, I’ve learned to rail against the many indignities visited upon us cyclists: cars parked in bike lanes! unmaintained bike lanes! people on crosswalks! inadequate bike parking!

Oddly, this parallels the feelings I have as a pedestrian—I’ll walk where I damn well please, and these cars better not fucking hit me!—and as an occasional rental-car driver: Who the fuck are these people crossing the street and whizzing at me on their Schwinns?

Which is to say: My basic rule is, Stay outta my goddamn way! Getting around New York, whether by foot, by bike, or by car, has always been an every-man-for-himself race, a form of semi-organized chaos that, every once in a while, works beautifully. Jon Stewart, I remember, once called the merging of traffic at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel a sign that human beings can function together peacefully. But not everywhere is the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. In fact, most places are like what the Wall Street Journal recently described:

Pedestrians who routinely jaywalk and stand in bike lanes; a woman pushing a man in a wheelchair down the protected bike lane on Broadway; a bike messenger racing through a red light on Sixth Avenue; cars that use bike lanes as passing lanes; wrong-way cycling along the protected lane on First Avenue.

All that said, the anti-cyclists remind me of the anti-child people in general—railing at an imposition that’s really not much of an imposition at all. And I have news for all of them: If biking becomes a big problem here, I’m going to have to take Sasha on our overburdened, overcrowded, unmaintained subway system a hell of a lot more often, and nobody will be happy. If you want peace of mind, you’ll improve the bike lanes, drive carefully, and, when you see a poorly painted Bianchi speeding through lower Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn, a toddler on its handlebars singing “Old MacDonald,” you’ll Get. Out. Of. My. Goddamn way!

Now this is all going to come across as complaining, and I’m not, really I’m not. First, Tomoko has done nearly 100 percent of the heavy lifting with young Ellie to date, at least at night. She’s breast-feeding the little dickens, and well, there isn’t much I can do to contribute on that front. So, basically, I’m getting plenty of sleep these days, and life is generally good.

And yet now I will proceed to complain with a certain annoying bitterness.

What the hell was going on in my house last night? Holy moley, it was like a construction site. A brief rundown:

1. Well past midnight and baby is crying.

2. Well past midnight and JP is suffering from a mystery cough and also complaining that he is hot in his pajamas with the feet and can he please just sleep in a short-sleeved t-shirt which has become a recent obsession and what’s with little boys being hot all the time it’s driving me fucking crazy.

3. My mother is in town to meet and greet the baby. Terrific. Now can she stop snoring like a wounded animal? I mean, I have a two-story apartment and the din still penetrates.

For those of you keeping score at home that’s three noise complaints in Brooklyn that have nothing to with traffic or aggravated assault.

Serenity now!

In a couple of weeks, Sasha will officially turn 2 years old, and when that happens, an important if annoying era will come to an end. I’m speaking, of course, of the frustratingly precise way in which we parents always answer the question, “How old is your child?”

Why is it frustrating? Because the question is most often asked by another parent who wants to compare, even if only implicitly, their kid’s development with yours. Is their 13-month-old taller than your 14-month-old? Can their 7-week-old hold her head up better than your 6-week-old?

For new or non-parents, this is how precise children’s ages are supposed to be:

• In the first 48 hours, you must say exactly how many hours old the child is.

• Days 2–10: Measure by the day.

• Day 11 through Week 13: Age is measured by the week; half-weeks are acceptable up through week 4, but after that it’s unseemly to do so.

• Week 13 through 11 months: Finally, your child is aging by the month! You may be tempted, however, to say things like “Oh, she’s 6 and a half months old,” but please don’t. No one cares.

• Month 11 through Month 13: Your child is one year old. God, isn’t that easy to say?

• Month 13 through Month 18: Count the months, but take pleasure, eventually, in saying your kid is “A year and half.” Feels nice, doesn’t it? So general, so imprecise—so grand-sounding, almost. Don’t get used to it.

• Month 18 to 2 years: This is the most frustrating time. Your kid is no longer “a year and a half,” and counting the months seems ridiculous now, an anal-retentive imposition. And yet you kind of have to; 20 months is not the same as 22. But thankfully, as you get closer to 2, you can just say (as I do), “She’s almost 2.” Who cares how close to 2? No one.

• Two years and up: At last, you can count by half years! Kids are 2 until they’re 2 and a half; then they’re 3. And so on. Around 9 or 10, if I remember correctly, even the half-years cease to matter. And then, one day in the distant future, they’re adults! And that’s when you begin counting how many years you yourself have left, making sure you take advantage of every year, month, week, day and hour. That is, if you don’t have Alzheimer’s.