DADWAGON

I can’t get this out of my head. You go to the zoo on a summer afternoon. With your wife and 6-month-old daughter. They stop on the path so you can snap a picture, and a moment later your baby is dead and your wife is permanently hurt.

The aftermath is predictable, this being the litigious, finger-pointing society that it is. There’ll be a lot of trying to blame people who work for the Park or for the zoo, for letting maintenance slide or some such, and whether that’s appropriate or not, we’ll know soon enough. But in any case, outlandish and horrible things like this happen—rarely, but they happen. Bad things. My own family made the same trip to the Central Park Zoo, a month ago, and paused at that same spot (I am fairly sure, from the photos) to admire some tulips and take a picture of our own. [UPDATE: More distressing details in the expanded Times story, here.]

Do you think about such horrible possibilities? I do, probably more than I should. I am a catastrophist by nature (my officemates know this; I often find myself assigned stories about things like earthquakes and gonorrhea-infected waterways). I linger over the feelings inspired by such a monstrous day; what our daily existence would be like afterwards; whether I’d ever be able to live some version of my life again. (Off-the-cuff answers: a whole new kind of horror; a whole new kind of darkness; I’m really not sure, but maybe eventually.) I tell myself I’m bracing for the worst, but really, it’s just introspection, because I really doubt anything prepares a person for that.

Do you think this way? Comments invited.

I understand the evolutionary imperative that babies have to coo and smile and goo-goo-ga-ga their parents until those parents forget that they are no longer sleeping, having sex, or rock-n-rolling on any level. It’s a way to ensure that babies don’t get purposefully thrown out with, as they say, the bathwater.

But what has evolution wrought with the toddler, who remains incontinent and therefore, in my mind, should continue to be grateful to have a roof over his head? Instead of ramping up his charm offensive in the interest of self-preservation, our 2-year-old is heading in the other direction. He is beating us down, trying his best to dry the vast oceans of love we have for him, and he’s doing it through repetition. A sample conversation:

• “That way!”
• “We can’t walk that way. We are going to the park.”
• “That way!”
• “We’ll go that way later.”
• “That way!”
• “We are going to the park. To play. Most toddlers like to play.”
• “That way!” (now whining)
• “Look, Nico, a squirrel!!”
• “That way! That way!” (now moaning)
• “Argh. Hush up.”
• “That way!” (now screaming)
• *sullen silence*

Thus has he chopped away, with his “that way” axe, at the sacred child-parent bond. Thus has he made us feel like angry children ourselves. Thus has he once again proven that, even on the second child, we sometimes have no clue how to keep him or ourselves happy.

I know readers could point out some developmental reasons why a child may ask “why?” or “who dat?” to the point of physical nausea. Repetition clearly has some benefit for the young, squishy mind. But in the end, the father still has some power in this relationship. I feed him, clean him, make sure he sleeps on time. Is it too much to ask that evolution just give me a break from time to time?

There’s something I don’t understand about the local paper’s Sunday article about cyber-bullying and how schools are dealing with it. It’s actually quite a good story, and shows, without much exaggeration, how texting and Facebook are making the already uncomfortable experience of middle school even more unbearable.

But what struck me was the opening anecdote, in which the parents of a sixth-grade girl discover their daughter has received “a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats” from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Immediately, they bring the problem to the principal of the kids’ New Jersey high school:

Punish him, insisted the parents.

“I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”

Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.

Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

Wait, wait, wait! What? I can understand the kids being too young and frightened to deal with this on their own. But the parents are supposed to be adults. The fathers even seem to have some kind of social relationship, but they consider it “too awkward” to discuss this serious problem?

What am I missing here? Is it because I don’t care about sports that I don’t understand why “coaching sports together” is a reason NOT to deal with this outside the school (and legal) system? Or is it because my daughter is too young for me ever to have had to deal with any kind of between-kids issue with another parent? I mean, I know that’s coming one day—we live in a small building with two other kids Sasha’s age, and surely one day one of them will do something to Sasha that I’ll have to talk to their dads about. Or vice-versa. But that will, I hope, be the advantage of having relatively close relations with kids’ parents—we know each other, and can deal with these problems much more easily.

Am I totally out of my mind here? Or are these cyber-bullied parents just pussies?

This one, from Texas congressman Louis Gohmert (no relation to Gomer Pyle) needs little context since it’s so laudably insane. Seems that terrorist cells abroad are “gaming” the American immigration system by inseminating terrorist-moms with terror-babies bent on “destroying our way of life.”

That’s good stuff.