Let The Bambini Strike Out: It’s good for him!

Seemingly from nowhere JP discovered baseball about three weeks ago, when he demanded a glove and bat, started watching games with me before bed, made serial inquiries as to when we might attend a game, and also wanted to know when he could participate in his own “big game” (his phrase).

I was a little unprepared for this, as he hadn’t shown any interest in baseball to that point, and he was also already enrolled in two other athletic activities, hockey and swimming, which take up the better part of our weekends.

Hockey, which is dead cute when done by four-year-olds, ended a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to see if I could sign JP up for baseball. According to the website of the local organization that runs kid baseball in my neighborhood, JP, who just turned five, was too old for T-Ball, and would be placed in “Pee Wee”. Fine.

I should explain that all of JP’s activities come only after prolonged and Kafkaesque negotiations between his mother and me. The reason for this is that, generally speaking, his extracurriculars fall into the nebulous black hole known as “our time”. That is, we switch off weekends with JP, and if baseball is on Saturday, for example, then one week I bring him to the game and the next one his mother would. Her time and my time. Which means we have to cooperate, which is never easy for either of us.

JP’s mother was only moderately enthusiastic about baseball. Her biggest concern was she didn’t think JP was ready for Pee Wee. Given that she has never played even a second of baseball in her life, I’m not sure how she made this determination, but there it is. When I told her that he had already aged out of T-ball she suggested I call the league and see if I could plead with them. I didn’t want to do this.

Don’t get me wrong: JP is only an average athlete (he has my genes), and at this stage, he can’t hit, run, throw, or catch. Which is only to be expected, particularly as he has never really played before. I knew that most of the kids in the league would have learned the basics the year before in T-ball, and it might be hard for JP at first, but I figured he would pick things up. Meanwhile, I didn’t see any reason to stick him with the little kids just because baseball was a new interest.

This gets at a fairly common mother-father interaction, in which mom wants to protect the body and self-esteem of the offspring, while dad wants said child to “suck it up” and be thrown headfirst into the pool. In a divorce, the instincts of each parent aren’t fettered by having to live with the other person. There’s a tendency, then, to go further in the direction of your natural inclination than you might otherwise. In my case, my inclination isn’t necessarily to push JP: it’s to believe that I’m always right. I never asked to see if he could be placed in T-ball.

Ultimately, it made no difference. I had missed the deadline to sign him up, so young Casey will have to wait ’til next spring to strike out. Meanwhile, JP and I have been going to the park and learning the fundamentals as best I can teach them, including having him hit off a tee.

He’s getting pretty good.

Things My Dad Didn’t Tell Me, But That I’ll Tell My Kids: Perspiration Edition

Antiperspirant doesn’t work. Man, when I think of all about how many pit-stained white shirts I’ve had to dispose of, I regret ever having believed that little word “antiperspirant” printed on the labels of all those canisters of Degree and Right Guard and whatever. Shit just doesn’t work; for decades I put it on, and still I sweated. Had I only known!

Now it’s just deodorant, and who knows if that’s just a lie, too.

Anyway, I don’t know if this is going to matter to Sasha—she may have that reduced-perspiration Asian gene—but I’ll let her know, just to be safe.

Life Goes On, I Remain A Dick

Let’s face it: kids are dicks. I was once a kid, therefore I was a dick. This passes for logic here at DadWagon. I mention this not just because our readers already know this, but more specifically, as the context of a story I want to share.

I played on the soccer team back in high school, which didn’t by definition make me a dick, except in this case it did. You know how before a sporting game the team will gather in a circle and put their hands in the center and shout something together? Well, on our team, for reasons that escape me, we didn’t shout “Team!” or “Win!” or “Fight!” We shouted “Corky!” Corky, of course, being the character with Down Syndrome played by the actor Chris Burke on the 1980s TV show “Life Goes On.” Shouting the name of an actor with a disability because it’s funny? Dick.

Fast-forward to my adulthood, in which I make some attempts not to be a dick. As it happens, the office of my former employer is in the same building as the National Down Syndrome Society, “the national advocate for the value, acceptance, and inclusion of people with Down’s Syndrome.” Not surprisingly, the NDSS employees a number of people with Down Syndrome, whom I would often share an elevator with if we happened to arrive at the same time.

From time to time, I would get on the elevator with a fellow with Down Syndrome who looked an awful lot like Chris Burke. This caused me a few problems. First, it reminded me of a moment in my life that I wasn’t proud of and would rather have forgotten. Second, it forced me to realize that I was still a dick. I think that everyone person I see with Down Syndrome is Corky! What is wrong with me? Bad, bad, bad!

This went on for several years of me seeing this guy and feeling bad and still thinking he looks like Corky and feeling worse. Eventually, I got into a conversation with the receptionist at my office, who like all receptionists worldwide, knew everything about everything (and because it was Harper’s, also happened to be a talented film director). Somehow the conversation turned to the NDSS, and I tell him what I dick I am because I think everyone with Down Syndrome looks like Corky. He looked puzzled and said, “Don’t you know? Corky, or the guy who played Corky, works for the NDSS.”

Yes, indeed, he does. As a Goodwill Ambassador. So I should feel better, right? Corky was Corky, so I’m not a dick. Nah. Still a dick.

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: Airplane Movies

It should surprise no one that on my flight back from Greece last week I watched a couple of movies that almost made me cry. That’s just how it goes in Matt World. For the record, the one that came closest to squeezing tears from my ducts was Where the Wild Things Are, the Dave Eggers–Spike Jonze adaptation of the beloved Maurice Sendak book.

Beloved by most people, that is. I remember reading it when I was little, but I don’t know that I loved it, not the way I grew attached to Sendak’s “Chicken Soup With Rice” series. Anyway, the film version adds a bit of backstory to Max, the rampaging child who flees home and discovers a land of friendly monsters and wild rumpuses; now he’s got no dad and a struggling mom and a big sister who’s more interested in hanging out with older boys than digging igloos with her kid brother. Apart from the kind of amazing special effects, the movie isn’t really all that great, meandering at times dully as Max learns that managing the social relations among the Wild Things is no fun.

But what the film gets right is Max. That is, he feels properly like a kid, thanks I guess to the script but also to actor Max Records, who’s got that volatile mix of unbridled imagination, vulnerability, explosive anger, and bravado that I remember feeling myself when I was 6 or 7. When a bunch of older kids accidentally crush his igloo, or when he goes to sleep under a pile of furry Wild Things, the sadness and delight he conveys is, well, authentic. It was almost enough to make me cry—almost.

The other movie didn’t come close to making me cry, but it did have something else in common with Where the Wild Things Are. The movie was Going the Distance—yes, the Drew Barrymore–Justin Long vehicle about a mid-20s couple trying to make a bicoastal long-distance relationship work. Maybe I connected with the movie because my wife and I have spent so much time and effort making our own long-distance relationship work, but what struck me more than that was the way the characters (she a struggling journalist, he a struggling A&R guy) spoke. It’s a small thing, but they sounded like us—sounded like me, Jean, and many other people of our age and social circle.

Or maybe that’s no small thing. For other recent and upcoming movies have the same thing going on. Bridesmaids, the new Kristen Wiig movie, features plenty of mid-30s characters who sound, you know, like urban people in their mid-30s: jokey, confused, ironic, sarcastic, fragmented, and often terrified of saying exactly what they mean or how they feel. In fact, this is probably the most salient trait of the whole Judd Apatow film world: you find it in Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and a bit in Date Night.

Moreover, it feels like there’s a whole slew of movies directed at the DadWagon audience these days. At Bridesmaids, we saw a preview for The Change-up, in which harried father-of-twins Jason Bateman and pussyhound Ryan Reynolds magically switch places, Freaky Friday-style. And director Alexander Payne has a new movie coming, The Descendants, in which George Clooney plays a nice dad who learns that his newly dead wife had been cheating on him. Expect the usual Payne mix of quirky humor and melancholy.

So, here’s my question: Is this a new thing? Two decades ago I don’t remember such movies being targeted at this mid-30s parental demographic. The closest thing to that was Parenthood, but that was definitely Boomer-oriented, and while it was funny back then, I don’t think its voice broke any new ground. It still sounded like old, big-money Hollywood. So is this new wave a conscious decision by filmmakers (and studios), or a natural consequence of my generation’s inevitable ascendancy?

Oh, and here’s the Descendants trailer: