DADWAGON

So, I’m one of the 3,000 cyclists who each day ride back and forth over the Manhattan Bridge, crossing onto the island to pick my kid up from day care, returning to my office in Dumbo, and screaming in Chinese at the clueless pedestrians who endanger everyone by walking two abreast in the bike lane.

But, apparently, it turns out those pedestrians weren’t clueless—they were prescient! Because starting today, the bike lane is now the pedestrian lane, and the pedestrian lane, on the south side of the bridge, is now the bike lane. And to get there, we have to walk up STAIRS! Says Gothamist:

[T]his is being done for that Manhattan Bridge rehabilitation work we warned you about last year. Workers are replacing all the bridge suspenders and repairing all the cables. Now that they’ve started on the north side, the bike path will be covered with protective sheds under any active construction. But because the sheds are only three feet wide, they’re too narrow to accommodate the 3,000 cyclists a day who pedal over the bridge.

My god. This is awful. How ever will we survive? And what do we say now to the idiot pedestrians who are walking on what was once the right side but is now the wrong side?

There is, however, a bright side to this: I’m on vacation in Cape Cod, and won’t have to deal with the inevitable horror show until next Monday. Whew. Yeah, really dodged a bullet there. Till then, I’ll just have to content myself with whatever snark Bike Snob has to offer.

Yesterday I wrote about how we got our daughter to swim by telling her that she couldn’t.

I want to just add, briefly, that it is not always a good thing, this humiliating your child with various burning words.

Case in point: on return from that same gloriously flamingo’d state where Dalia learned to swim, we had a layover in Tampa. And we sat here, we sat there. Our Continental was delayed two hours, so we sat somewhere else. And in the last place that we, as a family, sat, we were seated directly behind some kind of grandmother from hell, and her two tortured grandchildren.

These kids were older. Maybe 7 and 9? The younger a boy, the older a girl. They were by far not the worst kids I’ve seen in an airport environment. But there had been some running. Maybe some bickering. Apparently the boy burped. I know this because the grandmother started talking on her cell phone, and talking about the burp and other transgressions, with someone whom she apparently felt bore responsibility for these uncouths.

I should say, at this point, that this grandmother was Asian: perhaps Filipino. Her grandkids were mixed. Not that it has anything to do with the matter at hand: this was no Tiger Mom. It was Batshit Mom.

“I don’t know what to do with these children,” she said loudly.

“They have no class.”

“They are just burping. And they are farting. They are making me look bad.”

“I think you have to come and pick them up. I don’t want anything to do with them, ever. They are so disgusting.”

Of course, this was inside security at an airport; there would be no picking the kids up. But she didn’t want to have the kids picked up. She probably wasn’t even talking to a live person on the other end of her phone call. Her audience was seated right next to her–the kids. And–bravo!–her little monologue had its intended effect: the kids, those sinful creatures, started crying.

But it was not enough for grandma.

“They are just terrible. I knew they would be. And now they make so much noise, everybody looking at them, thinking what bad kids they are.” And so on and so on.

I had that same urge that I have when some mother, say, smacks her kid in public, which is to butt in, and interrupt, and correct and scold the adult. And I did what I always do in those situations as well, which is: nothing. It’s not just my bystanderish nature; it’s perhaps even a good idea. Humiliating a humiliator could just worsen whatever treatment the children get, even as it pushes it out of eyesight. But that could be a self-justification for inaction. I don’t know.

My own dilemma, pathetic as it was, was ended by our flight boarding. The kids, however, were stuck there with this woman, this crone, this abuser of children. And worse, she is their blood.

Usually, I’m not a proponent of this theory: generally, any individual who needs five years to learn to wipe his own butt, as has been the case with JP, doesn’t rate too high on the intellectual scale. But this little boy’s analysis and internalization of the modern dynamics of marriage is incisive. And he plays ping-pong, which is cool.