DADWAGON

In the Javanese city of Surabaya, I am sitting at an air-conditioned cafe with a man named Sudargo. He speaks slightly more English than I do Indonesian, but conversation is awkward. So far I’ve learned that he’s a chef/manager for this cafe chain, Ijen, and mostly travels around Indonesia setting up new franchises. That’s about it, and so I sip my coffee—pretty good stuff, actually—more and more frequently.

Then I remember what I’m supposed to say: “Do you have children?”

Instantly, he lights up, tells me he has two boys and two girls, and that they and their mother come with him when he’s sent to new locations. It sounds like a complicated life to lead, but I guess he’s happy with it. In any case, we get to stretch the conversation out for a few more minutes and pretend like we’re becoming friends.

So, yes, I love this question. “Do you have children?” is not the kind of thing I ever would’ve thought of before I had them myself, but now that I do I can ask it, coo over iPhone photos of other people’s toddlers and teens, and show my own as well. It’s a surprisingly good and direct route to connect with strangers, and makes me feel like, you know, an adult for once.

And yet I keep forgetting to do it. It’s still not the kind of question that pops into my mind at first (though maybe it will now that I’ve written this post). But man, it works damn well. So, yeah, that’s about it. You probably already know this, unless of course you don’t have kids. So, single pre-breeders! Attention! Make friends with adults by asking them about their kids. They will love you.

From the sports pages of the Dallas Observer:

In Game 2, Colby Lewis is scheduled to start after missing his last regular turn in the rotation because — I’m not making this up — his wife, Jenny, was giving birth in California. To the couple’s second child.

Don’t have kids of my own but I raised a step-son for eight years. I know all about sacrifice and love and how great children are.

But a pitcher missing one of maybe 30 starts? And it’s all kosher because of Major League Baseball’s new paternity leave rule?

Follow me this way to some confusion.

Imagine if Jason Witten missed a game to attend the birth of a child. It’s just, I dunno, weird. Wrong even.

Departures? Totally get it because at a funeral you’re saying goodbye to someone for the last time. But an arrival is merely saying hello to someone you’ll see the rest of your life.

Let me see if I understand this correctly: This fellow is upset because Major League Baseball allowed a player to miss a game to attend the birth of his child? I’m getting this right, or is there some context (other than this asshole being from Texas) that I don’t understand?

Just to attend to the logic of it for a moment: go the funeral but not the birth, because the funeral is a last chance to say goodbye, and hell, the kid’s gonna be around forever, drinking your beer, crying, and running up diaper bills (this is post-college). Only reiterating that because it’s so warped I thought I’d missed something.

Also kinda like the way he slipped in the football reference: no way would a football player miss a game, cuz that’s a man’s game.

BTW—I had no idea such a policy, which gives new fathers one to three days off to be with their newborns, existed. Seems a good thing to me, but what I do know? I’m not a sportswriter.

Okay, so it’s very hard to tell that it’s Spring when the sun blasts the same as it does every other month of the year and the only things that might bloom are cacti and those are obscured by the many, many pieces of windblown trash or old mattresses or other urban flotsam. And “Break” does not mean vacation. In Spanish, it becomes a colloquial Mexican term for “kill”. I saw the word used rather bloodlessly in a headline of yesterday’s issue of PM, the tits-and-murder tabloid newspaper owned by the very sober and serious El Diario newspaper.

So no, it’s not really Spring Break down here. Instead, it’s a deeply unnerving few days of reporting in a town where lots of people are being killed, and nobody really knows who is doing the killing or why.

But even as I’ve been chasing ambulances, or rather, coroner-vans, the past couple days, I’ve been quite aware of the fact that I’m just a spectator to this danger, just tapping on the glass of a very fucked up aquarium. The men and women who write about and photograph this orgy of violence–and have to live and raise families in the same city–are in somewhat insane amounts of danger. One photographer told of being extorted by a cartel (or gang? or military unit? who knows in this town) that threatened to cut his children’s heads off. And the sick thing is, they may well have done it, if he hadn’t fled the city with his family for a sustained period of time, and his would-be extortionists were themselves killed.

Yesterday was a day of such terrible news out of Libya for news types, but threats come in all different flavors, and in Juarez, it is intimate and too often involves family. The murder of children as a way of making a point to the parents is something so bestial that I really don’t have much to say about it. Just that I find this work this week both harder and easier than it might have been before I had kids myself. On the one hand there are the moments when I think, I should not be here, in part because my wife does not think I should be here, and she thinks that not for her sake, but for that of our kids. But on the other hand, I feel this strange empathy that makes me want to add my voice–and yes, all of this has been written about before–to the chorus of journalists who are documenting the great Northern Mexican fraticide. If I were one of the 1.5 million people with children who still live and work in Juarez I would want someone on the outside to not forget that children are being killed, that parents are being killed in front of their parents, that teens are becoming assassins and are increasingly being assassinated. I am not half the journalist that Hetherington or Hondros or those braves at El Diario are or were, but I am here.

And, by the way: it’s been a quiet few days in the murder column after all. Just one on Wednesday as of mid-afternoon, none on Tuesday. Either the killers are good Catholics taking a bank holiday for Easter Week, or the 19 murders over the weekend were enough to settle grudges for the next few days. Either way, I’m glad for the relative peace. I wish there was more of it everywhere and that it wasn’t too late for some of us.