DADWAGON

Just moments after I snapped this picture of all the ice-frivolity at Rockefeller Center yesterday, my wallet fell out of my pocket and onto 49th Street. It was a sweet little tan leather tri-fold with an embossed pickup truck that I bought from an aging cordwainer at the Virginia Highlands Festival in Abingdon a few years back.

I didn’t notice that it had fallen. That’s because I had decided to take both kids by myself to Rockefeller Center without a stroller or any other kind of conveyance (“bold move,” said the wife, by which she meant “dumbass”). Since Dalia reacts to the suggestion of walking a whole block as if I was trying to march her out of Bataan, I was carrying both kids away from the rink, the wallet fell, and I only realized it 10 minutes later. When I went back, it was gone.

It was also raining, and, being a super dad, I had no umbrella, no food, and no money for the subway. It was lunchtime. I envisioned an afternoon of panhandling with my children, followed by a week of canceling credit cards and waiting at the DMV.

Except that something extremely bizarre happened: someone turned the wallet in to the security guards at 30 Rock.

Seriously. It was all there: $123 in cash, 3 credit cards, 2 forms of ID, 8 business cards. All there.

Even before I lost my wallet, I suspected there were a lot of visitors from the Upper Midwest at Rockefeller Center that day, because they were a little heavy-set and very good at ice-skating. Now I know. Because only a Michigander would take a full, fat wallet and just turn it over to the authorities.

I think the cabbie summed it up best after I told him the story on the way back uptown:

“That’s not how you do it,” he said happily, as if pointing out a procedural error. “No, no, no. First you take the cash out, then call a friend to give him the credit card numbers to see if he can use them, and then you throw the wallet in a trash can.”

Yes, cabbie, that is exactly how it’s done.

Thank you, dear tourist, for not knowing a thing about how we do it here in New York City.

This post from over at Dadcentric.com both cracked me up and made me jealous. Why?

Title: “I can see your uterus.”
Reason for jealousy: That is a better Hed than “Vaginas: The Mystery!” (although I love headlines with exclamation points! In fact, I just love exclamation points in general! Really! No kidding!).

Premise: No idea, but with lines like:

Men have a very special relationship with their penis.  They name them, have conversations with them, and, to quote Seinfeld, treat them like an amusement park.  They’re your partner, your buddy, and in many cases your drunk roommate whom you inexplicably follow out on the town.

who cares what he’s writing about. That’s just the sort of silly that I need to avoid working.

Jealousy: The fact that the author of this post resisted the urge to write this: “I’m treating my penis as an amusement park as I write this,” which is what I would have done. Discipline!

Jargon: referring, without discomfort, to the notion that his daughter likes to sleep naked as “going commando.”

Jealousy: None really. That’s just kinda weird.

Description:

Despite my protests, the kid insists on going commando at bed time.  She also has a number of nightgowns she likes to wear, which means that for an hour or so every morning and evening there’s a high probability that we’ll have front row seats at the Vagina Monologues.  As told by Carrot Top.  Naked.

And let me be clear: this isn’t about Basic Instinct leg-uncrossings.  She stands on her head.  She sticks her ass in the air.  She touches her knees to her ears.  She’s like a Cirque de Soleil performer at a proctologist appointment.

Jealousy: Not exactly high-style, but funny as hell.

Conclusion: “Kids can teach you a lot.”

Jealousy: I thought I had the market cornered on wacky.

Ah, what frivolous creatures we were early in the week, before the Gonave Microplate and the Caribbean Plate slipped against each other, sending Port-Au-Prince into the the third ring of Hell.

We thought we had problems: Nathan actually complained about NOT living in Brooklyn, and about getting lots of web traffic, albeit from horny teenagers. Matt obsessed about a Vespa rocking horse while Christopher nitpicked the Post, of all publications, because they still use the term Love Child (though it did give us the opportunity to run some bitching Supremes album art). Theodore got snarky about the “hipster scum” at McSweeney’s.

Even our Tantrum was superficial: should parents let little boys wear their hair long? Nathan (who, incidentally, rocked The Crying Indian look for most of the 90’s) said no, Christopher said sure, but let’s shame them for doing so, and Matt sort of avoided answering the question (you readers at least faced the question: over 60%, at last count, voted for long hair in our First Ever DadWagon Poll)

We also talked about our junk: getting it snipped and the fear of being caught using it.

Yes, those were heady days. We even got a little pickup from The Week magazine, which is lovely publication that is too cheap to pay for its own content, so they linked to an old post of ours about Autism Clusters.

Even before we started talking about Haiti, though, the earthquake darkened our thoughts. Christopher worried about fans and digital amputation, while Theodore wrote a post in which he talked about prison and called it the Hooscow, proving once again that he is managing to blog as if it were 1908.

The DadWagon finally broke down and directly addressed the calamity: Matt with a nightmare vision and Nathan with a bit of a guilt trip. Perhaps the weekend will give them time to tire of actual calamity and return the kind of solipsistic navel-gazing you have come to expect from the Wagon.

See you Monday.

Seventeen years after she moved to this country from a mountainous little island in the South China Sea—it’s called Taiwan—my wife is now, as of this morning, officially and, I hope, irrevocably, a U.S. citizen.

Leaving aside all the reasons it took so long for this momentous event to occur—“You mean you don’t automatically become a citizen on getting married?!?”—I just want to say that I’m happy. Now, no matter how unfit a mother Jean proves herself to be, whether she leaves the baby in the stroller on the sidewalk while getting a perm at the salon or feeds the kid nothing but Count Chocula and American Spirits, the government can’t deport her. It can lock her up, sure, and fine her and draft her and make her sit on a goddamn jury, but she’s pledged her allegiance—she knew what she was getting into.

If only I’d known…