DADWAGON

I know that our dear readers have been waiting to hear DadWagon’s reaction to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gush, so here it is:

I’m for it.

Okay, not really, of course. I’ve had the good fortune to visit Plaquemines Parish and the marshes of the Lousiana bootheel after Katrina, when it was principally a nature-on-nature crime. This atrocity of neglect that the “green” energy company BP has visited on that wilderness is a scandal. But I speak now as a dad and out of supreme self-interest (nothing new there). That’s because this spill gush, as perverse as its consequences will be for Louisiana, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle, may save the islands I grew up on—the islands that I desperately want to be a large part of my children’s lives—the Florida Keys.

President Obama, whether through some backroom deal for finance reform or just a general Democratic fecklessness, was in the process of putting his seal of approval on huge new swaths of offshore drilling from the Florida Keys on up. There were going to be rigs as close as three miles offshore, and as we’ve seen this week, this would put one of the great aquatic ecosystems of the country—the Florida Keys coral reefs—in tremendous danger.

A phone consult with my Keys-based energy policy expert (a.k.a. my mother) confirmed what I thought might be the case: people in Key West are worried that BP’s toxic effluvia may indeed drift down their way after a while. But she also saw a silver lining, a possible reversal in an anti-drilling battle that was all but lost.

So my only hope for all the roughnecks who lost their lives, and all the seabirds and Cajuns who will be whumped by the environmental disaster that followed, is that their sacrifice will at least mean that a rollback of the “Drill, baby, drill!” mindset, and that this blood-and-oil stain, as deep as it is, will be the last we’ll need to clean from the Gulf.

That, of course, would require some buy-in from Fidel Castro, too. And it would require people like this asshole to get serious about his priorities for our nation.

Sasha has entered that wonderful phase where she’s learning new words at an impressive rate. Over the weekend, she started saying “Please!” and accompanying the word with the ASL sign as well. She knows where her head, eyes, nose, mouth, feet and belly are—in both English and Chinese. She can tell apples from oranges, most of the time.

But in the last few days I’ve been trying to teach her some of the less-important body parts, like the knees, elbows and butt. And I’ve been failing. Granted, I haven’t made a very concerted effort here, but when I see how quickly she picks up other things (she learned “Please!” from the Baby Signing Time videos), it drives home the failure that much harder.

Plus, I realized, a lot of the words she already knows she learned from other people, and not just my wife and our former nannies. She’s learning things … at school! Which is supposed to be good, right? And it is good, but it’s hard to let go of being her prime source of knowledge about the world.

That said, I know there are things I’m teaching her, whether intentionally or by accident, that she definitely won’t get in school. If she thinks of her toes as “piggies,” it’s because of me. If her idea of comedy is to put unusual objects on her head, I’m responsible.

But of course, I can’t just let this all happen naturally. I want to game the system, and focus my efforts on teaching her things the schools never will. Like science, and history, and math. Okay, that’ll come later, but right now there have got to be words and concepts she’ll never be exposed to at the bilingual Preschool of America. But what the hell are they?

I went out to dinner with JP, my father, and my father’s wife this past Friday. It was sweltering that night, so the streets were filled with people out on the town.

Walking home from the restaurant I got a phone call from JP’s mother, asking to talk to him before he went to bed. This is a regular occurrence for both of us, as we both feel that it’s important that even if JP doesn’t see us every day, he should at least have an opportunity to hear his parents’ voices. Anyway, I passed JP my cellphone, which he took with the air of an old professional—a cross between a young man and a real estate agent who does all his business by phone.

As he was talking a man passed us coming from the other direction. Now, file this under consider the source—the man was muscle-bound, shirtless, and walking with a low-rider bicycle—but this guy gets on look at JP conducting a million-dollar cellphone transaction, and his jaw dropped.

Oh, no, he said. He is not! He elbowed his equally shirtless, muscular companion. Will you look at that, honey? That is just plain wrong.

JP, for his part, ignored the whole thing—the world, as it does with most 3-year-olds, already revolves around him. Another streetside commentator is nothing new. I was caught somewhere between wanting to explain, laughing my ass off, and getting into an altercation (with my shirt on, thank you).

This led to one of those tireless conversations parents get to have with other people these days: Should kids have cellphones? Is it obnoxious? Is it safe? Is it a sign of the decline of Western Civilization as seen through the advent of full-blown consumerism foisted onto the young by vapid parents who need to justify their place in the world by buying things? Is it cute? Is it sensible?

Meh.

New York—where hell is other people, and so are you.

A DadWagon proclamation: Fatherhood means learning to live with repulsion. From the moment our children emerge frog-like and slime-coated from the birth canal, we suffer and, silently, retch. But we put up with it all—through months and years of filthy diapers and ass-backwards temperature readings, on for even more years of crusty noses and spontaneous vomitings, only to wind up with teenagers for whom an hour-long argument about the merits of various human secretions counts as highbrow debate.

Still, though, repulsion is a difficult thing to get a handle on, to conquer and control. But this week, we tried, often valiantly.

Nathan was his customarily morbid self, pondering dead children, abandoned children, and Republican children. We expect him home soon from the Arizona borderlands, his eyes glazed over with saguaro fog.

Christopher’s preferred mode of repulsion, however, took a wry, understated form, as when he dismissed cutting-edge fatherhood research with a devastating “Okay, well, thanks.” Ouch! His pondering of the future of digital memory neatly sidestepped the horror he no doubt feels at seeing his beloved Polaroid camera replaced with Ashton Kutcher’s Nikon Coolpix.

Theodore… Well, his instinctive gut-quake was particularly (and oddly) joyous, as he introduced us to steroid boy and the fattest girl in the world, and contemplated an unavoidable encounter with his ex-wife. Attempts to be the Buddha’s beach ball and to poetaste were unsuccessful. The streets of Brooklyn still run with his bile.

Meanwhile, Matt: When he wasn’t shitting on sentimental fathers, excoriating pedophilophobic San Franciscans and contemplating the almost-tearful abandonment of his family, he was offering step-by-step instructions on how to screw up your children. And then there was this. Clearly, while the other ‘wagoneers are trying to come to terms with repulsion, the Lush-raiser has decided to embrace—nay, embody—the principle.

Have a nice weekend, and we’ll be back to horrify and amuse on Monday.