Cuteness to go

The road to Vick-tory

“I was going to get Evan this cute little Eagles jersey, but now I just can’t bring myself to do it,” my wife Kara said recently.

I understood why without asking. With Michael Vick now wearing the jersey that we once would have proudly purchased to begin our son’s indoctrination into liking everything that we do, starting with professional sports and leading to politics, religion and pizza toppings, we’ve been forced to think about whether a person can be both a dog lover and an Eagle lover.

“Maybe I’ll get him a Giants jersey instead,” she said.

“That’s not funny. Don’t even joke about that,” I said.

But I understand where she’s coming from. While Kara enjoys having her postseason hopes crushed annually just as much as every other Eagles fan, she’s from Binghamton, NY, a place that cares much more about Italian food than pro football, which might mean that its priorities are pretty well squared away.

While Kara could probably give up on the Eagles without surrendering too much personal investment, I’d have to give up on a lifetime of caring more about Randall Cunningham’s gold-tipped shoelaces than my own fashion sense, which is probably why it took me two years to notice that I was the only kid in middle school still wearing tie-dye.

My hero growing up was “Arkansas Fred” Barnett, who caught that impossible 95-yard touchdown pass against the Bills in 1990 almost entirely due to the sheer strength of my adoration. The biggest villain of my childhood was head coach Rich Kotite, who committed the unspeakable sin of making the Eagles boring, a problem that I might be willing to trade for today.

When I was twelve, I waited outside the Eagles’ training camp, grabbing autographs on my dad’s old football from as many players as I could accost. The only legible signature when I got home was from Izel Jenkins, the cornerback whose nickname was “Toast” because he got burned so often. I’m not sure if that made the football worth more or less, but either way I never threw it around the front yard again. Mostly because I was in the basement playing ExciteBike on the Nintendo, but still.

These days, though, I feel guilty for trying to goad Kara into still rooting for the Eagles. If we hadn’t both said the words, “I hope nobody signs Michael Vick,” the day before the Eagles signed him, I might be able to broach the subject now without reeking of rationalization.

We both expected the boos greeting Vick’s first appearance on the field to show up on a seismometer, but it seems as though the silence has been much louder. Apparently, everyone has decided that it would be much easier to stay angry at the guy if he wasn’t so danged good at football.

“How about a Jets jersey?” Kara asked. “They look a lot like Eagles jerseys if you squint.”

Maybe that will be the compromise for now. Kara will still watch Eagles games, but not with the same level of enthusiasm. And I can’t shake the feeling that the dog is shooting us sideways glances.

But while Kara might be a lost cause for now, fortunately for me, I’m very weak-willed, the kind of person who enthusiastically embraces vegetarianism between meals. Generally, I can keep a boycott going for exactly as long as it remains convenient and cost-effective for me to do so, and taking a moral stand against the Birds sure doesn’t sound like very much fun.

But if Michael Vick pulls off any impossible plays this season, it’ll be a safe bet that it was due to something other than the sheer strength of my adoration.

You can wax Mike Todd’s nostalgia at mikectodd@gmail.com.

PCBs build character

Since summer was only two weeks long this year, we didn't get out a whole lot. But we did sneak in one last pooch swim a few days back at the Mills Mansion in Staatsburg, NY. Memphis loves her some Hudson River.


Can you find the baby in this picture?

It's easier in this one:

Smells like Middle-Aged Spirit

As my father-in-law and I drove towards our house during their recent visit, a horrible thing happened. I had been absent-mindedly fiddling with the radio dial, not really paying attention to the road, when I settled on the classic rock station, its primary virtue being that it wasn’t blaring any Hyundai commercials or playing that country song that goes, “I love your love the most.”

Then all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, a Nirvana song came on. I nearly swerved off the road as I double-checked the station.

“There must be some mistake. The classic rock station is playing a song that came out while I was in high school,” I said.

My father-in-law laughed. “It only gets worse from here. Just wait until it starts showing up on the oldies station,” he said.

And I wondered if someday I might find myself sitting in my motorized recliner, eating shaved carrots with raisins mixed in, playing “Smells like Teen Spirit” for my grandkids as they fidget in their seats the way I used to do when Grandpa put on the Lawrence Welk Show.

“Everybody started wearing flannel shirts after this song came out,” I’ll tell them.

“That’s great, Grandpa,” they’ll say.

“It was back in the summer of 1994 when I saw my first mosh pit…” I’ll begin, not noticing that they’ve left the room.

My advancing age became even more apparent last weekend, as I picked up the phone to check in with my parents on Saturday night.

“They won’t be home. They have social lives,” my wife Kara said as she burped our son Evan.

Oh, the indignity of having parents who are cooler than you. It was already bad enough with my dad being a better dancer than me at weddings.

Fortunately, as we think about dipping our toes into the shallow end of middle age, Kara and I are doing so with a child who has actually started letting us sleep some at night. But we’ve found that having a good baby is a lot like having a well-trained werewolf. You still have your hands full.

Though we’re starting to become more comfortable with venturing out into the germ-addled world with Evan, for the past few months, Kara and I have basically been tag-team wrestlers, with only one of us allowed into the ring at a time (the ring being anywhere but our house). I’ll walk in the door, we’ll high-five and she’ll be off.

“We’re like the people in Ladyhawke,” I said recently.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“This dude and Michele Pfeiffer were in love, but he turned into a wolf at night and she turned into a hawk during the day so they could never be together. Matthew Broderick was in it. It’s a movie from when we were kids,” I said.

“Maybe from when you were a kid. I’m not sure I was born yet,” Kara replied, noting for the first time (that day) that she is two-and-a-half years my junior, and reveling in the last few months of her twenties.

The point here is that more people should catch Ladyhawke references, if only because it is one of the top three Rutger Hauer movies of all time, right up there with Omega Doom and Hostile Waters, two movies that I’ve never heard of, either.

While there’s not much point in worrying about getting old, I’ve found that it is a pursuit that can keep you entertained pretty much as long as you’d like.

In any event, when your wife turns thirty, aren’t you supposed to try to get a younger one then? Or was it forty? I have to check our vows to see if we said anything about that.

You can push Mike Todd into the mosh pit at mikectodd@gmail.com.

"Freebird! Woooo!! FREEEE-BIIIRD!"

Walkway over the Hudson

Nine years ago (God I'm old), my roommate and I got chased off by the cops when we tried to get onto the old railroad bridge that crosses the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie (I had an old guidebook that said you were allowed on it, which was apparently a few decades out of date.)

Since then, the Walkway Over the Hudson organization has been doing this:


And this:


And this:


And this:


So that the bridge would look like this:

(All pictures above stolen borrowed from walkway.org.)

This weekend, that ratty old railroad bridge is turning into the longest elevated pedestrian walkway in the world. The frickin' world! What's up now, places that aren't Poughkeepsie?

I've been reading the Poughkeepsie Journal articles on the bridge for years, and I'm really effing stoked that it's opening up. The bridge is 1.25 miles long and stands 212 feet over the water, which I'm guessing would make it really fun to pee off of.

Here's our little family out by the bridge a couple of weekends ago:

And here's a better shot I stole stole from the Poughkeepsie Journal:

I think we'll probably stay home this weekend and wait for things to settle down -- they're talking about shuttle buses (public transportation is fantastic for other people) because there won't be a single parking space anywhere near Poughkeepsie for the grand opening, maybe not even at the Ames that's been closed for ten years.

But this is a freakin' excellent development, and the people who made this happen deserve some serious karma coming their way. Living in Greater Poughkeepsie (a phrase that Google just informed me I did not invent) is about to get a whole lot cooler.

Land of the Lost Sanity

With nowhere left to look, I started rummaging through my son’s things in the nursery.

“Do you really think you left the good headphones in his dresser drawer?” my wife Kara asked as I turned to face her, elbow-deep in a formerly neat stack of jumpsuits.

“There’s nowhere left in the world to look,” I replied. I’d already checked the trunk of the Civic three times. The refrigerator. Under the couch. I’d searched every nook and cranny of the house, and I didn’t even think our house had any crannies.

One would have expected the search to go fairly quickly. With a baby in the house, Kara and I have pretty much been staying put. I’ve only been like three places in the last year. But somehow, the only pair of headphones in the house with the advanced feature of functioning in both the left and the right ear had managed to evade capture since the last time I’d mowed half the lawn.

Stringing together forty-five minutes to mow the whole lawn in one shot has become nearly impossible. As the days grow shorter and the baby grows longer, the mower will often sit for days in the middle of the yard like a rusted-out Trans Am, right at the border between the cut grass and the grass in which one could easily lose a golden retriever.

The thought of mowing the lawn iPodless was almost too much to bear. You might think that a new father would appreciate the time to be left alone with his thoughts, but when I’m mowing the lawn, the sum total of my cognitive achievements is usually singing “Barbara Ann” in my head for the better part of an hour, and I only know the part that goes, “Bah bah bah, bah Barbara Ann. (Barbara Aaah-aaah-aaaan).”

“Hey, careful. You’re getting his clothes all wrinkly!” Kara said.

“He’s three months old! He doesn’t have any job interviews coming up,” I replied.

It’s tough not to get snippy when things are lost that shouldn’t be. I recalled putting the headphones somewhere I’d remember, so I was angered on the very principal that my own brain had fooled me. To make matters worse, Kara had recently decided that we weren’t allowed to swear around the baby anymore, which, while a wise policy, made it very difficult for me to properly celebrate Swear Like a Pirate Day, a holiday I very much felt like inventing right then.

You have to start behaving like a parent at some point, though, so it’s just as well that we can’t swear anymore. The thing is, once you have an infant in the house, there’s so much more to cuss about. Unless you live in a fraternity house, there’s a good chance that, as long as you don’t have a child around, nobody is going to projectile vomit on you today. Parents don’t have that sort of assurance.

Speaking of which, I’ve heard the term “projectile vomit” many times before, but it’s a term that is very difficult to fully appreciate until someone does it on you.

The first time it happened, I was unable to speak for the first few seconds, experiencing the kind of mild shock you get after jumping into cold water, except that I was actually swimming in Kara’s breast milk. It looked like I’d been trying to defuse a cow when it exploded in my face.

Our son Evan was equally drenched, though he actually seemed to be enjoying himself. As I held him up by his armpits, he looked at me as if to say, “Dude, it’s the weirdest thing. I’m hungry again.”

“Here, here, I’ll get you a towel out of the diaper bag,” Kara said, rummaging through the giant purse. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot I put your headphones in here.”

You can wash Mike Todd’s mouth out with soap at mikectodd@gmail.com.