DADWAGON

Not that I really have much experience in these things, but if you want to witness a toddler’s full emotional spectrum, Halloween is a pretty damn good time to do so. I mean, if you’d seen Sasha yesterday—running along the bumpy sidewalks of Brooklyn in her Old Navy bumblebee costume, jazzed on candied sucrose, warbling “trick or treat?” to no one in particular, grabbing the attention of old folks at the Cobble Hill Halloween Parade (“so cute!”)—you’d have thought her the happiest child in America.

But the tides of a toddler’s temper can turn in an instant, and the high-gravity object to blame was the lollipop, Sasha’s all-time favorite treat. I don’t remember when she had her first one, but it’s gotten to the point where we can’t take her out around the neighborhood without her whispering “Lollipop?” every time she passes by a shop where she’s gotten one previously. The butchers behind the counter at Los Paesanos are so sweet when they offer her candy, but I have to say no. She doesn’t need one.

Now, though, on Halloween, lollipops were everywhere. Dum-dums and Tootsie pops and blow pops and nameless swirls of red and green and white. She couldn’t let them rest in her orange plastic pumpkin basket, had to hold them in her hands. And when I kept telling her to wait till after dinner, she started tearing off their wrappers with her teeth. At one house, I glared skeptically at the lollipop the host gave us.

“Oh, doesn’t she like lollipops?” said the host.

“She likes them too much.”

“She can have two, then!”

By the time we got home, she’d eaten two already, and when it came time for dinner, we had to pry a third from her hands. And that’s when the serious crying began. A shriek, a wail, a keening that welled up from unspeakable depths. Snot and saliva flowed. Arms thrashed. This wasn’t even a temper tantrum, where the frustration’s source remains unknown. No, Sasha knew, we all knew why she cried. The fucking lollipops.

What did Jean and I do? We laughed. We couldn’t help ourselves. Sasha sat strapped into her high chair, throwing the worst fit of her short life, and all we could do was chuckle, take pictures, and look forward to next year.

[Editor’s note: We’re happy to have Todd Pruzan do some guest blogging here on DadWagon. He’s kicking things off with a series of 13 Ways of Looking at New Jersey—extra points if you get the literary reference!—because New Jersey is where he lives, for some reason. Read more about Todd and other DadWagon writers here.]

Where I’m Calling From. Not long after we moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, in summer 2009, my wife discovered a wry wooden sign in a charming local knickknackerie. There’s our former life, summed up in four words of Copperplate Bold, on black and weathered gray: PARK SLOPE 17 MILES. Is that all? Just 17 miles between us and our former homeland?

We bought the sign, of course, but we keep it with the arrow pointing in the wrong direction: out west, toward Scotch Plains, maybe, or Long Valley, or…oh, c’mon. Let’s get real. I don’t have any more of a clue where the arrow’s pointing than you do. I haven’t learned my New Jersey geography yet.

But I’m getting to know Maplewood. Towns like Maplewood are both overwrought, overfarmed land and terra incognita. And that name! What could be a tidier, more gently satirical moniker for a New Jersey suburb? I’d have sent the name straight back to the branding department: “Let’s not be so obvious.” Maybe I’m being too strict, though. In his imbecilic 1998 satire Happiness, Todd Solondz even chose the name “Dr. Maplewood” for a suburban New Jersey pederast meant to represent the director’s oh-so-shocking indictment of white-bread conformity. Actually, Maplewood’s a varied little town, at least on paper: Much like Evanston, Illinois, another of old hometown of mine, Maplewood gets high marks from sociologists for its high standards of diversity.

Of course—as I recently told a pregnant young couple on a fact-finding mission, sitting in an idling car with New York tags—Maplewood’s no Fort Greene. That was my first Brooklyn neighborhood, in 1998, an era when couples would pause after I told them this, and then glance at each other with condescending good intention. “Honey… we should go to Brooklyn.” (“Honey… we should go to Nairobi.”) I’d smile and nod, and I’d think: Sure, enjoy, whatever, who cares. I’m not going to pat you on the back for taking the subway into the 718 for brunch.

Now, only the most aristocratic tourist would leave Brooklyn off the itinerary. It’s been years since Brooklyn was Beyond—that edge of the map off the continent of Manhattan, where grinning sea serpents frolicked in the towering East River waves. Today, Here Be Monsters means the Hudson. The land beyond that is an unknowable mass of asphalt, shopping malls, diners, headache-free parking, good public schools.

I’m genuinely surprised to say I love it here. Surprised, because does anyone really grow up dreaming of becoming a New Jersey dad? I used to really pine for Brooklyn, but I recall an essay Martin Amis wrote about how differently he felt before and after having children, when his New York morphed from Carnaval to creep-show. Now, finally, I understand. And as my daughter, Nora, closes in the Big 4, the look on her face as she learns to navigate the world in a classroom and on a cedar-chip playground, roaming down the street on a plastic scooter or on training wheels—even trick-or-treating with the delight of discovery (Whoa! People do this!)—it all makes Brooklyn feel a few years away.

DadWagon is a year old today, and you’ll see much more about that in the posts above and below. But first, a note about the news that Team Dadwagon announced here a couple of hours ago.

The millions of you who visit DadWagon regularly may have noticed that I’ve been posting less frequently of late. My day job has grown more demanding in the past few months, and I’m also writing a heavily researched book nights and weekends. (Self-promotion sidebar: It’s a cultural history of Polaroid, out from Princeton Architectural Press in 2012.) Plus there’s that whole raising-a-kid thing. A ten-month-old is exhausting in many ways, but there were long stretches when he was breastfeeding or otherwise motionless, and they lend themselves to blog-post-writing. A twenty-month-old, most of you know, is all energy all the time. High-speed baby plus paying job plus book plus blog: It’s a whole lot to handle, and something has had to give. The first three are non-negotiable; the fourth has, unfortunately, become so.

What this means is that, with serious regrets, I am going to be stepping off the DadWagon indefinitely. It has been an amazing and educational year for me. Learning to blog has been fascinating. I was used to writing fairly deliberately, and without a thought to the basic currency of online publishing (creating linkbait, sure, but even simpler things, like how to write a Web headline, took adjustment).  This built an entirely different set of skills, ones that I suspect have already come in handy as my day job begins to incorporate bloggy work. And, more important, watching my three colleagues here has been illuminating. I have worked for my employer for a very long time–when I began there, I did not have a computer on my desk–and have come to see journalism very specifically through The Way We Do Things There. It has been a huge pleasure watching Nathan, Theodore, and Matt come at stories and ideas differently, and collaborating with them has done wonders for me.

I should also add that I’ve really liked the DadWagon audience. One might instinctively guess, based on a lot of other parenting stuff on the Web, that we too might draw a sleepy crowd–one that read us but didn’t really engage with our ideas. One would be extremely wrong about that, and both our comment threads and readers’ off-site discussion have made that clear. Your reader comments are often noticeably better than a lot of full-time bloggers’ posts.

And what have I learned? Lots of things, not least that I am apparently the only white guy in New York whose spouse/babymama is not Asian (judging strictly by the DadWagon staff, anyway). Among the highlights: Designer disposable diapers are an actual thing that now exists. I alone among the DW crowd think that nothing says “I love you” like document security.  When you write about Japanese meme boy, your blog blows up in Japan. And, of course, getting drunk with your kid gets you all sorts of attention.

Matt, Nathan, and Theodore will fill you in about their plans for the open chair soon enough. I also hope not to disappear entirely: I plan to become a regular reader (and commenter) myself, and if the other guys will have me, it’s just possible that I’ll drop in as a guest when one of the regulars goes on vacation. Thanks to all.