Bookpusher

This incident happened several months ago, but was so traumatic that I’m only just now getting around to telling you all about it.

I take care of my son, Gavin, during the day and work part-time evenings and weekends. Two times a week my wife and I will trade off parenting responsibilities – she comes home from work, I give her a kiss on the cheek, hand over the kiddo, and head off to work. We’ve done this for so long, we have our routine down to the point where Gav will start waving goodbye to me while his mom is still walking through the door.

Last winter, she was on her way home through a heavy snowstorm. My wife called and said that she was going to be late since traffic was so awful. Being the good, anticipatory husband, I decided to shovel the walkway so when she does finally come in she’s not trudging through a foot of snow and ice. Gav was playing contentedly, just doing his thing, so I decided to go for it. I put on my heavy coat, grabbed my shovel, and headed outside. I kept the outside door open so I could see Gavin in case anything went wrong. Again, he was playing with his trucks, not bothered by the storm in the slightest. I went outside and started shoveling. Almost immediately, I heard a sound. I whirled around and saw that Gavin had closed the door behind me. I frantically plunged my hands in my pockets and found that I had left the house without my keys. A ripple of sheer, absolute horror came over me.

I was stuck outside in the middle of a snowstorm. I was in sub-zero temperatures and I had no means of getting back into the house, with my wife god-knows how far away from me, stuck in traffic. And my eleven-month-old kiddo is about fifteen seconds away from realizing that I’m not there.

My son, then – as now – hates being apart from people he knows. He’s cautious by nature, every so often looking around to make sure that someone familiar is within range. Back then, he would fly in rages even when we left him at his grandmother’s house for hours. Hours. My mom would just get getting him calmed down by the time we had come back from whatever it was we were doing. This time, not even my mom was there. This was infinitely worse: he was alone.

Worse for me, too, since I had a front-row seat through a large picture window to see my son go from contentedly happy to hysterically screaming within a minute. There’s a certain exestential horror in being so amazingly helpless, wanting to reach out and comfort your son but being completely unable to do so. It makes those Saw movies look like My Little Pony. I tried my best – through the window, I made faces, played peek-a-boo, smiled and danced out in the snow, but it was no use. Gav was an absolute mess. The neighbors probably thought I was waterboarding the poor kiddo. Untold minutes spooled away as I waited for my only saving grace -my wife, who drove up a few minutes later (to me – and to Gavin – it seemed like hours.)

It took about twenty full minutes to calm him down.

Now I don’t lean outside my window too far without making sure I have a set of keys in my pocket.

I had one clear, pure, crystalline thought that occured to me while I was standing out in the snow: I’m the worst father ever.

This probably won’t register as a big deal to many of you, but I had one of those “when worlds collide” moments this afternoon. I called up an old friend of mine who I recently reconnected with after about half a dozen years or so. We were making plans to get together tomorrow evening for dinner/drinks/hangout time with a third friend.

“Give me a call when we know what the plan is,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll text you.”

“Um, actually, I don’t text.”

“What do you mean you don’t text?” This was said in a serious tone of voice with a faint undercurrent of you-must-be-crazy to it, the same tone of voice one would say “what do you mean you wear your underwear on the outside of your pants.”

“I just don’t. My phone doesn’t.”

“What do you mean your phone doesn’t?” Still that mixture of serious and incredulous, as if I stated I don’t use nouns.

“I mean I don’t pay for texting – my plan doesn’t have that service.”

“Huh. Okay, then, I’ll call you.”

It was really no big deal here, except that texting is obviously a huge part of his life. He likely texts his friends, his family, his coworkers, even his pizza delivery service, all of them available through texting, and it’s just something that’s probably as second nature as breathing. I have a small circle of friends and family, all of whom I’m quite happy getting in touch with through phone or email, and haven’t the need for it. That will change eventually, and when it does, I’ll likely be calling on my friend to help get me up to speed with it.

Until then, I’ll be using the horse and buggy with the other Luddites.

31 posts for 31 days is going swimmingly, except for days like today where the kiddo had a brutal night of sleep, my wife had to work late, and I would love to talk to you about a bunch of things, but honestly I feel just like plopping down on the couch and knocking out a few races of Mariokart on the Wii before bed.

I would like to add a quick addendum to the restaurant review from yesterday – I talked up Adam’s Rib, but there’s place I like on Overland Park almost as much that’s right off 83rd and Metcalf, next to Mr. Gyros. Tienda Casa Paloma is a tiny Mexican joint in a nondescript strip mall that is easy to overlook, but the food more than makes up for it. Laid-back, inviting atmosphere with an open dining area (I hate feeling like I’m crammed cheek-to-jowl like a tin of sardines like in other Mexican restaurants, and yes, Salty Iguana, I’m looking at you.) Reasonable prices, too, plus they offer huevos rancheros all day, which is wonderful if you’re a breakfast-all-day kind of person like myself.

I offer it my full recommendation with a caveat – I haven’t gone to it recently, and rumor has it that the quality has fallen off a bit, but it’s certainly worth your while to stop in and check it out.

I don’t normally use this space to pimp out local eating establishments – there are other blogs around if you’re interested in local restaurant reviews – but for those who live and work in the Overland Park area, if you’re looking for some good local barbeque, you owe it to yourself to check out Adam’s Rib.

It’s only been open for a few months or so and occupies the space of one of those nondescript local bars that would periodically go out of business every other month. I live nearby and drive by it several times a week, so when the new sign went up I thought nothing much of it, until I saw a review of it over at KC Confidential and then ran into their booth at the local farmer’s market.

Again, I’m not much of a food critic, but I have lived in KC all my life, and I’ve sampled most of the ‘que joints the city has to offer, which gives me a leg or two on most average folks out there. I’ve got to say – Adam’s Rib is one of the best I’ve ever had. Equal to Jack Stack, at a more reasonable price, and a smaller, friendlier atmosphere. (Kiddo friendly, too, as Gavin cheerfully played with a toy that came with the kid’s meal that itself was big enough for an average-sized adult.)

The sauce is spicy with just the right amount of sweetness. The meat is tender and never dry. The beans are to die for. The slaw is merely pretty good, but the finisher is the sweet cornbread, which is so good I would cheerfully run over my own grandmother for seconds. Seriously. Try the Triple Stack or the Pacific Island Ribs and your life will not be the same again.

Growing up, my mom was an amazing cook. Her mom, my grandmother, once owned and operated a small diner and specialized in Southern cooking. I did not think I inhereted their passion or talent for cooking until just recently.

I ate some amazing food growing up – the sort of Chicken-Fried-Everything, bad-for-you-but-oh-so-good kinds of food, but our selections were usually quite limited. Not much by way of variety, essentially the same sorts of things over and over. I didn’t mind much – food was food, and it was some damn good food at that – and growing up that way I really never knew much better.

Then I got married. My wife loves nothing more than variety and being adventurous with foods, so I started eating all sorts of things I never got at home – vegetarian, Greek, Thai, sushi, you name it. The only thing my wife dislikes is the same thing over and over, which was exactly what I was used to. Once I got over this little bit of culture shock, I grew to love it and embraced foods and cooking in a way I never did before.

Not that I’m any sort of experienced foodie, by any mean. I consider myself strictly an amtaeur who likes to try new things. There is one catch, however – I absolutely, positively, need a recipe. There are people out there – my grandmother, my mom, and my wife among them – who see cooking as alchemy. A dash of this, a dash of that, hey what’s that over there, who cares, we’ll add it, boom, it’ll taste good. I can’t operate that way. I need structure. I need to follow the recipe, exactly, every time. I measure out 1/4 teaspoon instead of grabbing a pinch and throwing it in the pot. I look up cooking terms – what is blanching, anyway? – to see how they do it properly.

Cooking is one of the few parts of my life where I’m a J instead of a P. If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, you’ll know that part of the classification divides those who are Ps, who procrastinate, dither, and do things when the mood strikes them, from Js, who are listmakers and organizers. I trend P while my wife is a J. (Or son, Gavin, is a hardcore J. If my socks or my bookbag is on the floor where it shouldn’t be, he’ll let me know about it. Loudly.)

Tomorrow will be the 4th of July. A great, time-honored Kansas City tradition is to light things on fire and blow stuff up. I got over the “blowing stuff up is cool” phase when I was about eighteen, but I completely understand the appeal and wish all those little teenage arsonists well, as long as they stay away from my house and my material possessions. My comic book collection may not be worth much, but I don’t want it and my house to go up in flames because  some kid decided to see if the roof shingles on my house were fire-resistant.

I have no funny stories about the Fourth, except for the innocent ritual of my parents driving me to the big tent on the street corner to by fireworks.  I was able to browse the aisles and buy what I wished – within reason – while my dad would always chat up the guy behind the makeshift counter, trying to get him to show us the “really good stuff” he presumed they hid in a trailer out back somewhere. My dad was more excited about blowing stuff up than I was, and the bigger and more obnoxious the explosion the fireworks produced, the better.

I was naturally a bit less adventurous – not only did my mom breed in me a healthy fear of dying by misadventure, but the one time I did try to live on the edge, I immediately screwed it up. My friends and I one year were lighting firecrackers, and instead of the traditional method of setting them down, lighting them, and running away, somebody was bold enough to light them in their hand and throw them, greatly impressing the rest of the group. I tried this a few times and started to get more confident with it until I got one with a short fuse that exploded a few inches from my hand. I can still remember the pain I felt, and I think about it whenever I see the local police using illegal fireworks to blow up department-store mannequins during their annual scared-straight bits on local tv year after year.

I’ll go ahead and state right right off the bat that I’m a huge fan. I own more books by Connelly – thirteen, with eight of them in hardcover – than by any other single author. His novels are the wonderful and rare matchup of being well-written along with having widespread popularity. When I’m doing Reader’s Advisory with a patron and they mention they would like to read a good mystery or thriller, his books are always one of the first ones I reach for.

Connelly began his career as a journalist, and it comes through in his style of writing – he writes procedurals with a heavy dose of old-school Los Angeles noir. He’s mostly known for his novels featuring detective Harry Bosch, but will occasionally do a stand-alone or branch off with other characters, such as lawyer Mickey Haller, which I particularly like. The Scarecrow features one of Connelly’s regulars, reporter Jack McEvoy. McEvoy’s just been given fourteen days’ notice at his job at the L.A. Times in the latest round of layoffs and wants to write that One Last Great Story before his career is done. What seems to be a routine gangland killing quickly is revealed to be the work of a serial killer, and McEvoy pulls in another Connelly regular, FBI profiler Rachel Walling, to track him (or them) down.

It’s all excellent stuff, reads like gangbusters, and perfect for a beach or poolside read. However, The Scarecrow didn’t push all my buttons that way Connelly’s stuff usually does. The problem for me was the main character – Jack McEvoy is the least interesting of Connelly’s heroes, probably because he’s what Connelly himself once was – a journalist. McEvoy is, to be quite honest, a bit dull. Working at the tail end of a mid-level career, with an ex-wife and a half-finished novel gathering dust in the drawer – none of the noir pathos sings to me like it should, or like it does in his other novels.

Also, Connelly has a point to make here, contrasting McEvoy’s old-school shoe-leather journalism versus the serial killer, who stalks his victims over the net and is a hacker extraordinaire. It’s a bit obvious and Connelly, the old-school journo himself, can’t resist making it.

If it sounds like I’m trashing the novel, I’m not. For one of my favorite novelists to come out with a B minus book when most of his stuff is at the top of the class – well, I might be a bit disappointed, but I’m still a fan and absolutely locked in on his next novel.

(Which is a Harry Bosch one, by the way. Just sayin’.)

Gavin and I still haven’t found a playgroup to roll with, so we spend a good chunk of our time during the day finding stuff to do outside, away from the house. We’re lucky to have access to an indoor pool right up the street, plus there’s Goose Poop Park within easy wagon distance. But the same thing gets stale after a while, so we have a rotation of parks and playgrounds and the like we visit.

We always meet kids at those places. That isn’t unsusal. What is unusual is that many of those kids will seem to be by themselves, or with an uninterested grandparent or babysitter sitting on a bench nearby. They will see me with Gav and will come up to me and ask if I would push them on the swing, or watch them as they do a cartwheel, or play catch with them, hungry for any sort of adult attention. This isn’t routine playground interaction with strangers – they aggressively ask for it, sometimes boxing Gavin out of their way. The neediness of these kids radiates off of them in almost visible waves as they ask me to do daddy-type of things for them. I assume the adults they’re with aren’t interested in them, or they don’t have a dad at home, or whatever, but I always wonder if parks and playgrounds are just places for parents to dump their children – to get them off their hands for an hour or two – for them to run around and expend energy. Expending your child’s energy isn’t the point of parenthood, but for some it might just be. Lord knows I sometimes need a break from my child (there are some days where I look forward to my afternoon-coffee-and-Facebook-update breaks like a prisoner looks forward to their parole hearings) but this need for adult interaction that I get from these kids hints at something more.

If the situation wasn’t so heartbreaking, I wonder if I shouldn’t open a Rent-A-Dad service where adults pay a fee and I would meet their kids at the park and do dad-like things, giving them dad-like attention,  for a fixed period of time. Of course, I have my own kiddo who needs my full attention.