DADWAGON

Our friend Brian over at RebelDad.com is always complaining—entertainingly, of course!—about the way ads and press releases tend to exclude dads from parenting entirely. Well, I just received a dad-oriented press release (sent to my “real” job, not this one) and I’m not sure it’s an improvement:

June is Dad’s month. Even if he’s not a Dad, June travel stories like to focus on mancations. Wine is fine most of the time, but a B&B where the beer is near is one that will attract guys this Father’s Day. So many myths surround a B&B stay, but add beer into the picture and the men will be the ones booking the vacations versus the women who typically do.

From Bavaria to Brattleboro, B&Bs are stirring the hops in hopes of attracting Dads and the Moms who like to travel with them. Read on for a nice list of Beer Loving Mancations from BedandBreakfast.com if you want all the details, or simply go to www.BedandBreakfast.com and click on the beer steins on the home page for the complete list!

“Mancations”? Really? I mean, it’s nice that marketers are trying to appeal to us dads (and, apparently, the moms who like to travel with us), but getting stereotyped as a beer-swilling mancationer isn’t exactly my idea of a step forward.

Well, that’s how I would feel were it not for the beer. Because I like beer. I even like to drink it. Because I am a man. And when I go on vacation, I want to drink beer. Because I am a man.

Yes, I haven’t been around much this week (or last) on DadWagon. I would fear that my co-bloggers might dock my pay, if indeed there were any pay here at all.

It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about kids; in fact, my kids have been very heavy on the mind as I’m traveling through Russia and Germany for work. So much so that I’m now one of those people who smiles a little too much at the cuteness of other people’s children. They can’t see that I’m a father who misses his babies. Instead, I am sure I come across as a strange and bleary-eyed man trying to make eye contact with their babies.

This was not so much a problem in Moscow, which, as one German I met yesterday pointed out, is “totally without babies” (I assume that those babies who are born, despite the low birth-rate, are simply kept with grandparents and out of the city center). But in Germany, where it is Spring (cold and damp, but Spring, nonetheless), babies abound, in their brightly colored Euro-onesies, and it makes me miss my own all the more.

Anyhow, I’m never quite sure what fine people there are reading this blog, but I know my kids aren’t among the readers, since the younger can hardly say Book and the older writes Dalia with a K. But anyhow, let me address my babies directly, without Skype:

Hey kids. Miss ya. Stop calling strangers you see on the street “daddy”. I’ll be home on Friday.

Christopher’s recent tirade against rude skateboarders, together with our Tantrum about fathers, sons, and sports, reminded me of a dream I’ve been harboring: to become a skateboard coach.

The phrase “skateboard coach” itself is kind of a contradiction in terms, at least for a guy like me, who skated for a decade in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when any type of organized or institutionalized learning and training was viewed with distrust/disgust. But a few years ago, while I was driving across the country, I stopped at a skate park in Indiana to fool around on my board. As I cruised around the asphalt and climbed to the deck of the small half-pipe, a kid just starting out came up to me and asked expectantly, “Are you good?”

Obviously, I’m not that good. If I were, I would have more tattoos, get paid to break my ankles, and probably wouldn’t be blogging. But I am, still, even after all this time, good enough. I can get on a board comfortably enough, and break out a few complicated tricks that went out of fashion so long ago that they now seem mysteriously new. At the Gowanus Grind last year—an event to build support and funding for a skatepark in my neighborhood—a few 11-year-old kids glommed onto me for some reason, and I found I liked the feeling of showing them what could be done on a board, and how.

And those aren’t the only young skaters around. The neighborhood is full of them, and the shop Homage runs Saturday morning skate clinics at a nearby school. I keep thinking of offering my services, but haven’t had time (travel will do that to you), and plus, what if I’m actually not quite good enough? I don’t know a damn thing about coaching, but—and I think this is the one area where I fall square in the middle of the typical father-sports spectrum—I feel like just being a father with some capability in a sport qualifies me to teach it to younger people. That’s how it works, right?

If it means that Lebron James will come to New York as a Knick, then I will make the ultimate sacrifice and let him dunk…one of my fellow Dadwagoners children.