The Dulles airport of all

Sometimes, when I’m wandering around airports, I get the sinking feeling that no matter how much good I’m able to do in my life, or at least the parts of my life that are left over after running over pedestrians and extorting shop owners in Grand Theft Auto IV on the PlayStation 3, I will never even come close to matching the accomplishments of the person who first thought to take a piece of luggage and attach little wheels to it. I hope that person got a big raise, along with the people who invented EZ-Pass and pepperoni, respectively.

I had plenty of time to think about these kinds of things in my hotel room during my short, accidental vacation last week to Washington, D.C, Home of the Connection That Doesn’t Connect, And Also Several Phallic Monuments. After foolishly booking a connection on the last flight of the day to Raleigh-Durham through D.C., I found myself stranded at Dulles Airport, the most beautiful and state-of-the-art airport within a 500-yard radius of itself.

As the man at the ticket counter mashed buttons on what looked to be a keyboard with no corresponding screen, I wondered if he was going to force me to be Mr. Irate Customer Man. I hate being Mr. Irate Customer Man. When the occasion calls for it, my wife Kara makes a terrific Mrs. Irate Customer Woman, getting all sorts of discounts and refunds that we never would have received if she wasn’t willing to hulk out every now and again. But this time I was on my own, alone in a long line of distressed travelers for whom a connecting flight had been the most recent broken promise to come out of our nation’s capital.

As the ticket agent’s fingers continued tapping, a printer under the counter shot out a couple of “Get Out of the Airport Free” cards. The tapping continued with one hand as the man wordlessly slid vouchers for a free hotel and shuttle across the counter, and with a wave of his finger he performed the trick of making me disappear. Without Kara there to negotiate, turn green and fling trash cans around the terminal, I figured I’d be lucky to walk away with a voucher for a free frosty at Wendy’s. Hulk happy.

There’s a certain freedom that comes with staying in a hotel room while your luggage remains stranded in the nether regions of the transportation system. Brush your teeth? Can’t. What to wear tomorrow? Exactly the same thing as today. It’s like being eleven again.

Back at the airport with the same clothes and much different breath the next day, I noticed for the first time that the security lines asked you to pick a category that best described you: casual traveler or expert. While I usually arrive at my destination at the same time as everyone else on the plane, I wasn’t sure whether that qualified me for the black diamond security trail. How do you gain the confidence to label yourself an expert traveler? I guess, to practice at home, you could wedge yourself between the toilet and the tub and have someone jam a serving tray into your knees.

I decided not to hot dog and stepped into the novice line. As it turned out, both lines ended up at the same place, though there were a couple of people in the expert line who looked intermediate at best.

When I got to the front of the line, the security attendant informed me that my airline, possibly because of my hygienic state, had chosen me for extra security screening. That sounded scary at first, evoking images of windowless rooms and latex gloves. But really, the only difference is that you get your own private escort through the X-Ray machine and then they give you a little massage afterwards as a reward. If you ever get a chance to take the extra screening, you should treat yourself. Just book the last flight out of D.C. and you’ll be on your way. Sort of.

You can request an aisle seat at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Free fallin’ in Philly

When I was twelve years old, some family friends (the Nevilles, to give credit where it’s due) gave me a tape for Christmas that contained the first music that ever really spoke to me, and when it spoke, it said, “This is what you’re going to listen to from here on out. You can throw away your Milli Vanilli tapes now.”

The tape was Tom Petty’s “Full Moon Fever,” and while it might be too much to label its acquisition as a life-changing event, getting that tape did enable me for the first time to have my own decent music without raiding my older sister Amy’s tape collection. Amy had a big-time salary from scooping ice cream at Friendly’s, so she could afford to fill her wall-mounted tape organizer, which would probably today qualify as an exhibit at the Smithsonian, with all the John Cougar Mellencamp and Beastie Boys albums she could get her sprinkle-covered (or jimmy-covered, if you must) hands on. Up until the Nevilles passed “Full Moon Fever” on to me, I had been a musical tapeworm, waiting for my host to try something new so that I could grab a little piece of it for myself.

So when my friends announced that they’d gotten extra tickets to the Tom Petty show at the Wachovia Center a couple weeks ago, my wife Kara and I jumped at the chance to go, even though the tickets cost enough that we could have purchased two barrels of oil or Bear Stearns instead.

To me, the coolest thing about a Tom Petty concert is the mix of people who show up; high school kids are represented in equal numbers with folks who can pull money out of their 401(k)s without penalty. Tom Petty himself will start collecting Social Security soon. I hope he buys himself something nice. In any event, it’s great to see a man who’s been cranking out albums for longer than Microsoft has been cranking out blue screens of death attracting a crowd full of kids who look like they should probably be home trading Pokémon cards.

The younger people in the crowd at the Wachovia Center could have learned a lot about concert-going by paying attention to the older folks, the seasoned veterans of getting the highest level of enjoyment out of such an event. For instance, a man in his fifties in the row directly behind me taught those around him an important lesson about how not to have your concert experience cut down in its prime. When a security guard confronts you during the show, shining a flashlight in your face and telling you to come with him, do NOT, under any circumstances, stop playing air guitar. I watched this guy repel security guards by wailing away on his invisible guitar for a solid fifteen minutes. It took them that long to figure out how to penetrate his force field of sheer awesomeness.

The younger folks also had a few tricks in their pockets. Did you know that etiquette now calls for holding up a lighted cell phone instead of a lighter when requesting an encore? Then if the request is denied, everyone can just listen to whoever has the best ringtone.

As always, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put in a solid performance for the screaming audience, playing songs old and new to a crowd that seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t yet the weekend. And while many of his songs are older than the fans who love them, somehow, the aging process doesn’t appear to be affecting Tom Petty at all. He looks exactly the same now as he did fifteen years ago. At least from a hundred and fifty yards, he does. Meanwhile, Keith Richards looks like he’s been through whatever process they use on beef jerky.

You can send your email into the great wide open at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Moving couches, stealing babies

When you have kids, besides signing up for a lifetime of being a caregiver, mentor and science-fair-project-completer, you also, as a reward for surviving their teens, get to carry their couches every year from one apartment to another. Your kids won’t have their own couches, though, so you’ll actually just be picking up the couches that used to be yours and lugging them to an apartment where the shower rod falls down when you turn on the fan.

My parents probably thought they’d gotten out of the business of moving my stuff around the country many years ago, but last weekend they started the enterprise up again, driving nearly four hours each way to deliver their pre-owned couches to our house. They did this because, besides being exceptionally generous people who pass along only the finest of furniture and genes, they saw the state of our previous couch, which was of course also their previous couch, and which had served for many years as a ferret burrow for our late varmint Chopper, making it rattier than a scratching post and holier than the Pope.

So when my folks ordered their own new couches, they volunteered to rent a trailer and bring their old couches up to us. Incidentally, did you know that U-Haul won’t let you hitch one of their trailers to a Ford Explorer? You’ll probably never need to know that, but you also don’t need to know what Tom Cruise’s baby’s name is, which makes it even worse that little Suri Cruise now occupies the shelf space in your brain where the quadratic equation used to be.

My wife Kara recently became a bit of an expert on hauling things herself. Before going to her cousin’s wedding a couple of weeks ago, Kara decided that we should go purse shopping, which is my favorite thing to do when I can’t find a grease trap to clean out.

“Ooh, what do you think about this one?” Kara said, holding up a large black bag with buckles or something on it. I can’t really say for sure what it looked like because I was staring off over the racks, wondering which video games my single friends were playing. There’s only so much purse shopping a man can be expected to handle. It’s like looking through someone’s photo album when you know there aren’t any pictures of you. One can only stay engaged for so long.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“Oh, no. It looks like it could hold stuff,” I said.

She ended up purchasing a purse so big that our friend Anna dubbed it a “baby-stealing bag.” The theory was that Kara could put her wedding flip-flops in the purse to carry around until the reception. Apparently, the shoes that women wear to wedding services are just the starting pitchers. They have a whole lineup of middle relief that they call in after the reception begins.

As we drove to the wedding with Kara’s family, she set her new purse in her lap.

“Oh, can I put these in there?” her sister Jill asked, holding up her own flip flops. Her other sister Sarah and her mom looked at the bag and their eyes grew bigger. Pretty soon, every female member of Kara’s family began producing flip-flops that had been hidden in jackets and, presumably, ankle holsters and throwing them into Kara’s bag. By the time we got there, Kara looked like she had enough provisions in her bag for a through hike of the Appalachian Trail. At least she had comfy couches to rest on once we got home.

You can hitch your email to Mike Todd’s inbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Can’t teach a new dog new tricks, either

My wife Kara finally got me to go to obedience school, but fortunately while we were there most of her attention was directed towards our new puppy Memphis.

I pictured obedience school as a big Chuck E. Cheese for dogs, where pooches frolic about and someone else teaches them to behave while you sit at the table, eating pizza and dispensing tokens. In reality, the dogs weren’t allowed anywhere near each other, and Kara and I were tasked with controlling what the teacher described as our “perpetual motion machine,” an animal so excited that any number of rabid wolverines would have been easier to teach to “leave it.”

The chairs in the room had been organized into pods, with room only for one dog per pod, along with its servants. Memphis whimpered and pranced, straining at her mangled, half-eaten leash, backing up and launching herself towards every other pod in rapid succession. I quickly downgraded my definition of success from leaving with an obedient dog to leaving with more than half a leash.

The dog in the next pod over glared at Memphis under the chairs, barking and baring its teeth. This was the dog that wanted to beat the other dogs up and take all their lunch money.

“Hey! A new friend!” Memphis thought, attempting a blast-off to go say hello.

A few weeks ago, when my sister’s otherwise very sweet cat tried to attack Memphis through a sliding glass door that was, thankfully, closed, Memphis wagged her tail as the cat hissed and slashed at the glass.

Excited, Memphis looked up at me as if to say, “Hey! A new friend!”

We’d had Memphis for nearly a month before we were able to take her off of house arrest. Until the endless series of puppy shots had been pumped into her, the three of us were under vet’s orders to stay cooped up, our house serving as one large doggy crate. That’s why puppies always seem so cute: the supply of them out in the open is artificially limited. It’s the same way diamonds stay expensive.

Having a dog that you can’t take off your property is like having a computer that has no internet. You can only keep yourself occupied with Spider Solitaire for so long. With the dog bouncing off of various household surfaces, I decided to break the rules, just a little, and walk her a few houses up the street.

One hundred feet into our adventure, a little Swiffer Wet Jet of a dog bolted out of the bushes, pausing in its yapping just long enough to attempt to nip Memphis on her tail. As I shooed the dog away and lamented my lack of chemical irritants with which to spray it, I looked down at Memphis, worried that she had just been permanently emotionally scarred.

She was wagging her tail in the direction of her assailant and looking at me as if to say, “Dude, my new friend has a bit of a temper.”

She seems to carry this attitude with her everywhere she goes, including when the head obedience instructor led her to the middle of the room to demonstrate, well, I’m not sure exactly what she had intended to demonstrate, but if it was futility, she picked the right dog.

With the instructor standing on the leash and snapping her fingers to get our dog’s attention, Memphis wagged her entire body, whipping her head from side to side as she tried to decide which new friend might enjoy a frantic and slobbery visit. In some areas of the world, decades are spent mastering a state of mind that allows one to pay attention to everything at nothing at once, a goal Memphis had achieved entirely by accident. Now if we could only get our little Zen master to lie down.

You can be Mike Todd’s new friend at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The biggest sham of them all

As I recently settled down into our grizzled old recliner that has been handed down through the generations like a folk story, I grabbed a pillow and slid it behind my back. Through the first thirty years of my life, pillows had been an accessory almost exclusively employed on or about the cranium, but lately I’ve found myself putting them to more geriatric uses, uses that include propping up spinal columns.

I opened the lid on my laptop and was immediately reminded that my last session ended abruptly and without my consent; the error message asked if I’d like to restore my active desktop settings.

“Sure, whatever that means” I thought, clicking the “yes” button.

“Are you sure?” the computer asked ominously. Apparently, restoring one’s active desktop settings is not an activity to be taken lightly. Deciding to have children, choosing a career path, restoring your active desktop settings: those are the biggies.

My finger trembled as it hovered over the mouse button. I clicked “yes” and winced, wondering how many launches I’d just authorized NORAD to make. Instead, the computer put the pretty wallpaper picture of a buttercup back on the screen. Why this action required more fail-safes than my credit card company puts on the personal information that it accidentally distributes once a quarter, I’m still not sure.

My wife Kara strolled into the room and said, “Hey, don’t squoosh that pillow. It’s a sham. You’re only supposed to use it for decoration.”

“I’ll say it’s a sham,” I replied, removing the ostensible pillow from behind my back. Kara likes to have stuff that we’re not allowed to use, things like shams and every single item that we received as a wedding gift. Personally, if something is going to be useless and lying around the house, I think it should be me.

Kara and I differ in opinion on some of these matters, but any issues we have stem largely from our being of different eras. Though we’re only separated in age by less than three years, the gulf between our experiences can be wide.

The other day, I pulled a kitchen chair around backwards, sat straddling the back of it and said, “Hey, hey, hey. What’s happening?”

She stared at me blankly.

“Hey, hey, hey. I’m sitting like Roger from ‘What’s Happening?’ Remember that show?” I asked.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

It wasn’t just that she’d never seen the seminal show of my childhood summer vacations; she’d never even heard of it. Dwayne accidentally spilling secrets. Dee eating peanut butter out of the jar. Rerun dancing in his red beret and getting caught taping a Doobie Brothers concert. These things never existed to Kara, but she’d seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” several times over. It’s a wonder we can even hold a conversation.

I suppose our different perspectives are occasionally helpful. If there’s one important thing I’ve learned after nearly four years of marriage, it’s that it’s okay to put utensils in the dishwasher pointy-end-down. Growing up in a pointy-end-up household, I never knew any other way. The occasional finger stabbing seemed normal. Going pointy-end-down, you could practically belly flop onto the loaded bottom rack if you wanted to, though I could think of better ways to spend an afternoon.

So I’m still not so sure about having an entire class of pillows that can’t be used for any activities that might be considered pillow-like, but there’s a chance that I’ll change my mind. Usually, over time, I come to see things Kara's way. This is due to a phenomenon known as love. Or Stockholm syndrome. Either way, pointy-end-down is definitely the way to go.

You can give Mike Todd your launch codes at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Call of nature stronger than Call of Duty

Last week, I held an empty plastic barrel above my head and said, “Finally, I did it!”

“That’s quite an accomplishment,” my wife Kara replied, and I think she might have meant it. Not everyone has what it takes to polish off an entire barrel of cheese balls without calling in for assistance. Kara had given up on the effort long ago, demonstrating her complete lack of perseverance by popping a handful into her mouth and saying, “Ew, these are stale.” Champions know that freshness is a state of mind.

I’d been working my way methodically through the thirty-five ounce container ever since our New Year’s party when we forgot to put it out on the table, which was a shame because that barrel really would have classed the place up. Thirty-five ounces might not sound like all that much, but the last time I saw a barrel that size, Donkey Kong was rolling it down a ramp.

You have to take accomplishments in life where you can get them, because most of the time, despite your best efforts, you’re going to get blown away by twelve-year-olds. My buddy Derek and I discovered this last weekend as we attempted for the first time to venture into the world of online PlayStation 3 gaming. Bolstered by our recent achievements in both cheese ball and beer consumption, and after amassing decades of life-wasting, game-playing experience between us, Derek and I confidently stretched out our button-mashing fingers as Call of Duty 4, the most popular online video game for the PlayStation 3 and opiate for countless masses of nerds, loaded.
Kara walked through the room and said, “I thought you guys were going to play multiplayer. You only have one controller.”

She can be so silly sometimes. Nobody plays video games against people in the same room anymore. You play against people in other cities and countries so that you don’t have to share your Doritos.

Eight dispiriting hours later, Derek and I had taken turns being killed in ways too numerous and horrible to describe. The game allowed players to wear headsets that broadcast their voices through their opponents’ TVs, so our deaths were usually accompanied by prepubescent cackling.

“Dude, that kid sounds like he’s twelve,” Derek said after getting knifed in the back by someone with the user name KillingUsoftly96. It occurred to us that the year 1996 was likely printed on this kid’s birth certificate just like it had been printed on our high school diplomas. Don’t these kids have better things to do than hanging around online, killing thirty-year-olds? They should be out doing normal kid stuff like I did when my games were on pause, things like catching butterflies and experimenting with fireworks.

After Derek left, our puppy Memphis came and sat beside me as I played one last game. She looked at me and then to the door. Then back to me.

“Memphis, can you make it for another three minutes? This game doesn’t have a pause button,” I explained, rationally. Memphis’ housebreaking had finally started to take; she had gone four days without an accident, a streak that in our household could be described as nothing less than Ripkenesque.

She looked at me with eyes that I interpreted to say, “You go ahead and have fun. I’ll just patiently sit here and hold it.”

“Good puppy,” I said.

As the timer counted down to less than a minute, I stood up to let Memphis know that I meant business. I began to scooch slowly towards the door as my fingers continued pounding the buttons in a futile attempt to avoid the adolescent killer angels. I congratulated myself on my multitasking abilities, simultaneously providing both exemplary pet care and valuable target practice to the next generation. But Memphis had been busy doing some multitasking of her own, both snapping her streak and teaching her owner a thing or two about priorities.

You can drum Mike Todd out of your platoon at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Where the dogs and the antelope play

*This is my last puppy column for at least a week, I promise.*

When my parents came to visit last weekend to meet Memphis, the floppy-eared, multibreed puppy that has recently taken residence in our home, they brought with them a squeaky rubber chicken that has not stopped squeaking since they left. When people call the house now, it must sound like a nervous clown is pacing in the background.

My folks hit it off swimmingly with their new granddog, but during their visit I got the feeling that, in the space of just one generation, dog ownership has become an entirely different animal.

“How did you housebreak Ginger?” I asked them, referring to the golden retriever that they’d picked up as a puppy nearly thirty years ago.

Mom and Dad looked at each other and shrugged. “You know, I don’t really remember. We sure didn’t get up in the middle of the night, though,” Mom said.

It wasn’t that they couldn’t remember it in the way people can’t remember car crashes, which is about the only hope I’d ever have of forgetting the past month of playing personal assistant to a bladder with a carrying capacity that could easily be put to shame by your average tablespoon, it was that the whole thing was such a non-event that it didn’t even register for them anymore. Crate training might be the more effective way to housebreak a dog, but anyone who has gone through the experience is more likely to forget their first kiss or their last oil bill.

As we headed out onto the deck last weekend, I pulled Memphis aside so the humans could go first. When Dad looked at me, I explained, “The dominant dogs always go first. If you let your dog go out the door first, it thinks it’s the pack leader.”

He smiled and nodded, pretending that what I’d just said made perfect sense, even though a month ago I would have thought the notion pretty ridiculous as well. I imagine that when I turned back towards Memphis, he probably exchanged a glance with Mom that roughly equaled taking a finger and circling it around your temple.

When I was a kid, if a dog slobbered on you when you came home, didn’t destroy things with too much regularity and seemed vaguely aware that it had a name, you had yourself a good dog. People didn’t worry about being pack leaders or following their dogs around with plastic baggies. Growing up, I didn’t know many of my neighbors very well, but I knew all their dogs. Electric fences were for prisons and pastures, and Ginger and her compatriots roamed the countryside like four-legged Jack Kerouacs.

Mom and Dad raised a perfectly sweet and loving dog in Ginger without the benefit of the recent boom in the Dog Whisperer brand of pooch psychology that says humans must eat first, go up the stairs first, walk in front of the dog on the leash and win all staring contests, lest the dog think it is the one bringing home the Beggin’ Strips. A dog will also think it’s the boss if you don’t constantly maintain a calm and patient demeanor, communicating through your posture and body language that you are the lead dog, ignoring the common sense that might otherwise suggest that the lead dog rarely has to pry open clamped jaws to rescue its snowman-festooned underwear.

Kara and I are a bit skeptical as well, but we’re not willing to take any chances. It would be disastrous if a dog became the pack leader of our household. A canine couldn’t possibly know how to do the important pack-leading activities that Kara and I perform on a daily basis, like reading novels with bare-chested Scotsmen on the covers and becoming gunnery sergeants in Call of Duty 4, respectively.

You can crank up the voltage on Mike Todd’s collar at mikectodd@gmail.com.