DADWAGON

After almost three weeks on the road—Austria, Morocco, Spain, you know, the usual—I’ve just returned to New York and my much-missed family. This morning, as I walked into Sasha’s room to get her up, I mentally prepared to be ignored. After all, while I was gone, she’d apparently taken to using the word “Daddy” to refer to my wife, a random guy on the sidewalk, and, often, racks of clothes.

Instead, her first word to me this morning was—get ready—”Owl!” In each hand, she held a small stuffed owl, her latest gifts from, I think, our ex-nanny. And Sasha was eager to discuss them: “Owl,” she said. “Owl. Owl. Owl. Owl. Owl. Owl. Owl.”

But soon, as I changed her diaper, she switched to something more affecting: “Daddy.”

Such a nice word to hear, especially when it’s directed at me. She pointed, she squeaked, she spoke—and she didn’t stop. This kid is talking, man. It’s so different from before, when it was all nonsense syllables. Now it’s word after word after word, sometimes approaching a full sentence, à la “This is food,” which she said while we were reading “Happy Hannukah, Corduroy!,” one of her favorite books. (She likes to pretend to eat the latkes, and to make me do the same thing.)

Would I have noticed this dramatic change if I’d been here the past 17 days? I don’t know. Or: Maybe it’s not actually so dramatic after all. Maybe it’s only because I was away that her development seems to have accelerated. In any case, it’s pretty exciting, but for now it’s all the excitement I can take. If all goes well, I’ll be home for the next six weeks, and can enjoy the usual slow, normal pace of her changes like any other father.

Took a day off from work, and I’m hanging out around the house with JP today. Not much planned–playground, PB&J lunch (I’m a rebel), soccer in the park in the afternoon. As I write this JP is in the other room watching Alvin and the Chipmunks, Part 2: the Squeakquel, which is every bit as bad as it sounds.

Anyway, for some reason I felt inspired to do some cleaning about the house. Alittle bathroom here, touch of sink there, spot of vacuuming as needed, Tilex, “scrubbies,” and a few chemicals that I think have been banned in the EU.

That shit is some hard work! I’m dead beat, and the house isn’t even half clean. Generally, I am a fairly clean guy by guy standards, which are not clean at all. Lately, though, even my low standards have slipped, largely because my girlfriend is a bit of, well, what’s the right word, hmmm–a total slob? Yeah, that’s the word, and I’ve adopted her habits with gusto, and, dare I say it, a healthy dollop of creativity and style.

Frankly, I don’t know how the women who stayed home in the Fifties did it. And I do mean the Fifties, by the way, as I no almost no contemporary women, stay-at-home or not, who keep house like the women of that generation.

Except, to a certain degree, JP’s mom. Very neat, very hardworking. And very angry about it. Any cleaning that she did that I didn’t participate in (and there was lots of it) was cause for a lengthy rant on my worthlessness. Over the years she hounded me away from most of the chores (except for cooking–I did all of that, and anything to do with the car, and anything heavy, and I still did the laundry…). I got sick of having her inspect my housework, reject it, redo it, and then pretend that I’d never done anything in the first place. Eventually, I just stopped doing it, which, not so nicely, made me as much of an infant around the house as JP. Oh well, hardly a new story, and we simply weren’t meant to be.

I often told her that if the house was 25 percent less clean, we’d be 50 percent more happy (excuse the grammar). I was wrong about that. The house is 40 percent less clean…and I’m 100 percent more happy.

The problem with knowledge and children is that a little bit of knowledge leads to more questions, and soon you are working your way down the ever-dimmer hallways of understanding that inevitably lead to the one thing we don’t want our 4-year-old to know: that we and everyone she will ever know and love will die, and that this blue-green wonderland she lives in will itself burn to dust, its ashes doomed to float for all eternity throughout the frozen, uncaring cosmos.

This is, inevitably, the lesson of the wonderful (and hellaciously crowded) American Museum of Natural History, which dares us to explain the concept of extinction. We try to be factual, of course, answering Dalia’s questions by telling her that people think a meteor hit the earth and that started the events that led to the extinction of all those dinosaurs she is fascinated by. But now she won’t stop talking about the meteor. How did it get here? What happened when it hit? Are there more out there? This is the intelligence of children: she may not be able to count past 12, but she immediately grasped the most existential truth about the story of extinction. Life is precarious, big rocks rain down from nowhere, and everything ends. We have assured her that no meteor is coming to Earth (not soon, at least), but I sense her mistrust of our answer.

Also true, though: as she gets older, I think she is starting to tell herself lies and believe ours, and she allows herself to be comforted by them. So now when we tell her (because she asks a lot) that we are never going to die and that neither she nor her brother will ever grow old and die either, she doesn’t follow up with skeptical questions like she used to. She stops there, as if all she needed to hear was us saying that we all live forever, whether or not she really believes it.

But back to the dinosaurs. I love that she is fascinated by them. It seems a rite of childhood passage. But do dinosaurs present an existential dilemma for all children, or just for my dark-minded daughter?

I broke my front tooth once, when I was about 8 years old. With a hammer. I’d been doing some project (building a treehouse, I think) when I tripped, dropped the hammer, and saw it bounce up off the ground, directly into my face. Chipped off a third of my top right central incisor–a brand-new permanent tooth. It was repaired several times into my teens, with increasingly high-tech materials but mixed success, and I finally went and had it porcelain-veneered a few years ago. I’m told that this fix is good for two decades, and that suggests one more repair in my fifties, plus one more in my seventies. If I’m still around twenty years after that, I’ll just stick with soft food, thanks.

Otherwise I’ve been dentally fortunate. Couple of fillings and little more. My wife, on the other hand, is spending a lot of this summer in the big vinyl chair, with multiple root-canal operations taking place. It’s gruesome, gory, painful, and expensive. (I really can’t understand the thinking of a dental insurer that does not cover a root canal–what counts, if not this?–but we’ll leave that for another discussion.) It’s awful, and I hope that our son inherits my enamel and not hers. (He’s got her face, though, so who knows whether teeth are part of that.)

I bring this up because, not long ago, I mentioned our baby son to my own dentist, who’s a thoughtful guy, and he said something remarkable. He was applying a sealant to one of my molars, which means a little bit of liquid resin that fills up the crevices to keep bacteria from getting a toehold toward decay. And here’s what he told me: “You know, your son will have this done in a few years, and that’ll be that.” As in, he’s unlikely to have a cavity, maybe ever. Sealants, my doc explained, are about 95 percent effective in forestalling decay. That, plus fluoridated water and modern oral hygiene, is turning childhood cavities into a thing of the past. “It’s going to become an antique disease, something you read about in books,” he said, smiling. “Like diptheria.”

Doesn’t that make you happy? I swear I could eat a whole box of Oreos to celebrate.