Top 10 Things I'm Thankful For

I’ve realized that my blog entries have become ridiculously long of late—less blog, than novella. So, since I’m sure you have lots of cooking, eating, and groaning to do this Thanksgiving, I’m going to try to make this one relatively short. (I put the caveat “relatively” in there, because, let’s be honest, I’m incapable of writing a truly short blog entry.) Behold, here are the top ten things I am thankful for this Thanksgiving:

1) My Wife…who somehow still loves me despite my constant barrage of horrible puns, bizarre non-sequitors, and weird facial expressions. She is well within her rights to slap me upside the head for any of these things, yet she does not.

2) My kids…who are smart, funny, and still both young enough to be considered cute. While they try my patience at times, they are an endless source of entertainment, and I don’t think it’s scientifically possible to love them more than I do.

3) The rest of my family…who, although I see in person only rarely, I see in framed pictures on my walls every day. I would not be who I am today without my family. (Don’t roll your eyes, I mean that in a positive way.)

4) My friends…who I don’t see as much as I used to, but know much more about than I ever have, due to the miracle of Facebook. I would not be who I am today without my friends. (Hey, wait…that sounds familiar.)

5) My job…which is just the right combination of rewarding and challenging. Working for a nonprofit, I won’t become a millionaire, but at least I wake up every morning knowing I’m helping make the world a better place. That’s more than the inventor of the vuvuzela can say. (Sorry for the four year old pop culture reference.)

6) Pizza…which, when done correctly, is the most perfect food on the planet. Unfortunately, most places do not do it correctly. Fortunately, I know the exact address and operating hours of every place that does it correctly within a 20 mile radius.

7) Instant streaming video…which brings my ADD-addled brain endless entertainment…instantly.

8) Dark chocolate…which, through a variety of pseudo-scientific articles that have come out over the past decade, I can now construe as a health food.

9) Hammers…which are the perfect tools for killing scorpions. (And when I hold one and tape the cover of last week’s People magazine to my face, my wife can make believe I’m Thor.)

10) This blog…which gives me an outlet for my stupidity and allows me to make believe I’m a writer again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have I Accidentally Become an Arizona Cardinals Fan?

I have been a fan of the Dallas Cowboys since birth. Indeed, I think my first words were “Tom” and “Landry” in that order. Growing up in New York in the 1970s, being a Dallas Cowboys fan was not that uncommon. They were known as “America’s Team” and went to five Super Bowls during that decade, winning two of them. In fact, in those ten years they amassed more regular season wins than any other team – 105. By contrast the two New York teams—the Giants and the Jets—combined for 103 wins during the same span. So it’s easy to see how a young, impressionable lad, just learning about football, would cast off the hometown teams in favor of a more winning prospect. The “America’s Team” tag even let you rationalize that you really were rooting for the home team—just one that was national in scope.

The 1980s were not as kind to Cowboys fans. They saw their team have a few good seasons early in the decade, but never make it to a Super Bowl. Then, in 1989, the unthinkable happened—a 1-15 season. America’s Team had hit rock bottom. While I was still loyal to my team, I was also disgusted. I was in my junior year of college, so I stopped paying so much attention to football and turned my attention to what was really important to me at the time—rock music and beer.

Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, the Cowboys got good again. They were dominant in the mid-90s and it was in the midst of their dominance that I moved from New York to Arizona. (My move had nothing to do with the Dallas Cowboys’ dominance, so hopefully you didn’t accidentally infer that from the preceding sentence. If so, I apologize for any confusion or mental distress this may have caused.)

I moved to Arizona in July of 1995, and on Christmas night of that year I had a “bucket list” type of experience. I got to go to a Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Arizona Cardinals. It was the last game of the regular season and not only did I get to see the Cowboys win 37 – 13, but I also got to see Emmitt Smith break the record for rushing touchdowns in a single season, when he scored his 25^th of the year in the fourth quarter. (FYI- his record has since been broken.)

That night was a Cowboys fan’s dream. And I was certainly not the only Cowboys fan who got to experience that live at Sun Devil Stadium. I would estimate that Cowboys fans outnumbered Cardinals fans on a scale of 8 to 1 at that game. My section was particularly blue. In fact there was only one (not exaggerating) person in the entire section wearing Cardinals red. He was sitting about ten rows in front of me and after the Cowboys scored their first touchdown and the crowd erupted, he turned around and looked at the sea of blue behind him and sadly shook his head like a little boy who lost his puppy. It wasn’t a Cowboys home game, but it sure felt that way.

About a month later the Cowboys were back at Sun Devil Stadium where they won their third Super Bowl in a span of four years. That 27 – 17 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers was the last great moment for the Cowboys, with lots of mediocrity and occasional okay-ness ever since.

***

When I first moved to Arizona, I hated the Cardinals. I didn’t hate them as much as I hated the Giants, Redskins, Eagles, Steelers, or 49ers, but I hated them nonetheless. This irrational animosity was borne of the fact that at that time, in 1995, the Cardinals and the Cowboys were in the same division, and diehard football fans are conditioned to hate their team’s division rivals. (Side note: Whenever I say I hate a particular sports team, my eight-year-old son says, “Dad, you shouldn’t hate them. They’re just doing their job.” Rational little bugger.)

Then, in 2002, the NFL realigned the league and the Cardinals and the Cowboys were no longer in the same division. I didn’t have a specific reason to hate the Cardinals anymore, but I still did so out of habit. Mostly I just ignored them, though, since they were just as irrelevant as the Cowboys during that timeframe.

Four years later a sequence of events began that would cause my fan loyalties to evolve in unexpected and unsettling ways. Late in 2006 my wife and I became parents. While the arrival of a child is a major life change, it brings with it a thousand different smaller life changes. One seemingly innocuous, but ultimately crucial, thing that changed was how I occupied my time during my daily commute.

For several years prior to the birth of our son, my wife and I carpooled to work every day. While driving we would either talk or listen to music on the radio. But a few months after our son was born, my wife and I figured out a way to work it out so she could be a stay-at-home mom and I was now driving to work alone. This meant: 1) I could no longer use the carpool lane, which practically drove me to tears as I watched the carpoolers whizzing past in the diamond lane while I sat in gridlock traffic; and 2) I could listen to whatever ever I wanted to on the radio.

After years of listening to the same two or three music stations, I started to turn the dial. I still listened to music, but sometimes I would listen to NPR instead. Soon enough, I started to prefer listening to talk radio instead of music in the mornings. Then one day NPR had a pledge drive. As those of you who listen to NPR know, their pledge drives, while well-intentioned, are about as exciting as listening to paint dry. And listening to paint dry is infinitely less exciting than watching paint dry. So I started to turn the dial again and I soon stumbled upon a sports show called the Doug & Wolf show.

Up until that moment I had never listened to sports radio. Even though I am an avid sports fan, I always wrote off sports radio as nothing more than mindless jocks shilling for the hometown teams. But somehow the gravelly voice of Ron Wolfley (a former Pro Bowl fullback for the Cardinals) quickly wormed its way into my consciousness and I couldn’t seem to turn the dial. The banter seemed more intelligent than I would have expected and they were talking about a topic I enjoyed, so I kept on listening. The only problem was 90% of their chatter was about Arizona sports teams, which I didn’t have a specific interest in at the time.

Once I stumbled across Doug & Wolf I began to listen to them occasionally, when I had my fill of NPR in the morning. During football season I would chuckle to myself while they talked about the woes of the Cardinals and hope they would mention the Cowboys, which they would from time to time. Then, in 2008, the Cardinals got good enough to win their division and shockingly, win all their playoff games to make it to the Super Bowl. I started to listen to Doug & Wolf much more frequently during that season and soon knew way more about the Cardinals than I did about the Cowboys. When the Cardinals made it to the Super Bowl I didn’t know how to feel or who to root for. I intrinsically hated them, but they were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers who I intrinsically hated even more. So I ended up rooting for the Cardinals, and was genuinely upset when the Steelers took the lead and won in the final minute of the game.

With that Super Bowl I let my hatred for the Cardinals fade away. I found it easier than I imagined to root for them, especially with the exceedingly likeable Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner leading the way. I was still a Cowboys fan first and foremost, but I didn’t mind if the Cardinals did well. And I started listening to Doug & Wolf more regularly and learned more and more about the hometown football team.

In the meantime, the Cowboys have been mediocrity personified. Prior to this year they went 8 – 8 for three straight seasons and bungled their chances to make the playoffs in the final game of the season each of those years. I’ve still rooted for them, but they certainly haven’t made it easy or particularly fun. That is until this year.

This year has seriously tested my loyalties. Both the Cowboys and Cardinals have been very good and in Week 9, they faced off. My son asked me who I was rooting for and I said the Cowboys, but as I watched the game I wasn’t even sure myself. Instead of cheering for either team, I found myself staring at the screen blankly, feeling lost and confused. Who did I really want to win? It was tough to say. But at the end of the game I found myself both upset that the Cowboys lost and pleased that the Cardinals won. That sort of made my head hurt.

A few days later my friend Mike contacted me and said he had an extra ticket to the Cardinals – Rams game if I wanted to go with him. I gladly took him up on it. So last Sunday I found myself at the first regular season football game I’ve been to since Christmas Night 1995. And things had changed a bit over the course of 19 years. No longer were Cardinals fans in the minority. Indeed, the place was a sea of red. Every time the Cardinals scored, the place exploded, and I was right in the thick of it, screaming myself hoarse by the end of the game.

As we left the stadium, with the Cardinals victorious and in possession of the best record in football, I felt something that I hadn’t felt for a football team in a very long time—proud. And then I suddenly got scared, because I realized I may have become an Arizona Cardinals fan when I wasn’t looking. Sorry, Tom Landry.

Pieces Of My Past

A couple of weeks after my mom passed away three large boxes arrived at my front door. I had been expecting these boxes—two of them I’d packed myself while I was back in New York and the third was packed by my brother and sister-in-law after I’d left. When my sons saw the large boxes they thought that Chanukah and Christmas had miraculously conspired to arrive three months early, but I knew the truth—these boxes were really time capsules; windows into my former life.

In the days following my mom’s passing I spent a great deal of time cleaning out her apartment with my two brothers. Somehow it seemed her three-bedroom apartment contained six bedrooms worth of stuff. A lot of things got thrown out, a lot of things got boxed up, and a lot of things simply went untouched. Although I never lived in this particular apartment, it was on the same block as the apartment that I occupied from about ages seven through 22 in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. About a year after I moved out on my own, my mom moved two doors down and all the stuff I’d left behind moved with her. Now, two decades and 2,500 miles removed from my childhood haunts, I found myself sifting through the minutia that made me “me.”

After opening up all the boxes, my Chandler, Arizona living room was awash with paraphernalia from Brooklyn, New York. As I surveyed the items before me, I noticed that one section of the living room happened to have a particularly interesting assortment of nostalgia, which prompted me to snap the photo that you see above. Shall we take a walk down memory lane?

The oldest item in the photo is my bronzed baby shoe (circa 1969-1970). You don’t really hear about people bronzing baby shoes anymore—at least it’s not something we ever did with our kids’ shoes. In fact, when I showed the shoe to my boys and told them it was by first baby shoe, they were equal parts amused and perplexed. “How did you get it on?” “It seems like it would be really heavy for a baby to walk around in.” “That’s an ugly color for a shoe.” I had to explain the concept of bronzing to them.  Personally, I think there’s something vaguely creepy about bronzing a shoe. I grew up with the shoe in my room and while I wasn’t actively scared of it, I always looked at it a bit askance. I think in my mind shoe-bronzing is not that far removed from taxidermy, which is not one of my favorite arts.

The next oldest item in the photo is the blue baseball card album. While there are certainly cards within the album that are actually older than my bronzed baby shoe, I was actively collecting cards from about 1980 to 1986. Indeed, the vast majority of my allowance during my junior high and early high school years went to the purchase of baseball cards. The album in this photo is only one of many I used to neatly store the hundreds of 2-1/2” by 3-1/2” pieces of cardboard that I coveted. The very first card in this particular album is a 1978 Don Sutton Topps card. I was curious about how much it might be worth, so I looked it up on eBay and saw that sellers were generally asking anywhere between $1 and $20. I noticed that one seller was asking $154.99. Why the huge difference? Perhaps it was autographed (or maybe even bronzed!), but it just turns out that the seller is insane.

The next item chronologically is my Bar Mitzvah portrait from 1982. While I wasn’t raised in the most religious of families, my Bar Mitzvah was something I’d been looking forward to pretty much my whole life. It was a lavish affair with hundreds of guests all there to celebrate my becoming a man in the eyes of Judaism (although in the eyes of biology it would be almost another year before I technically became a man). The framed portrait of me that you see above is probably the most serious, somber photo of me that exists. This is quite a juxtaposition from the rest of the pictures in my Bar Mitzvah photo album, which includes shots of me dancing like Robert Hayes in Airplane!, lying across the laps of my female guests, and using a fake cigar handed to me by the photographer to strike a Groucho Marx pose. Yes, I remember my Bar Mitzvah fondly.

Moving forward two years to 1984, we have my Lafayette H.S. v-neck sweater. I was given the sweater because I was a member of my high school’s Academic Olympics team. It was the only team I ever belonged to throughout my entire scholastic career, so that sweater was the closest thing I ever had to a uniform. It made me feel like hot stuff. I thought if the school’s jocks could impress girls by scoring touchdowns and hitting homeruns, maybe I could impress girls by saying, “James Joyce” when someone asked, “Who wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?” I thought wrong.

The next item in the nostalgia parade is the Dallas Cowboys jacket (circa 1986) at the top of the photo, which I got as a present from my parents on my 17^th birthday. While the Cowboys are my favorite football team (and I can finally admit that again this year), the jacket’s real value to me is that it’s the last present my dad got me before he passed away. He actually passed away a little over a month before my birthday, but my mom had told me they had already picked it out together prior to that.  Okay, take a deep breath, wipe your eyes, and let’s move on.

Do you see the gold pouch leaning against the MAD Magazine? (Don’t worry we’ll get to the MAD stuff in a minute.) That gold pouch was a souvenir purchased in Alaska in the summer of 1987. You probably can’t see it, but the writing says “I Struck Gold in Alaska.” Inside the pouch were a few rocks painted gold, to appear like gold nuggets. I went to Alaska with my mom, “Uncle” Murray and “Aunt” Sally. They weren’t actually my uncle and aunt, but they were my parents’ best friends so I often referred to them as such. The trip was a high school graduation gift from my mom. She had told me six months earlier that she would take me anywhere I wanted to go for my graduation. At 17 years old the prospect of traveling with my middle-aged mom and her middle-aged friends was not high on my wish list, so I told her I wanted to go to Alaska, because, although I really did want to go there, I assumed she’d have no interest and the trip wouldn’t actually happen. Well the trip did happen. The majority of the pictures from that trip show me as the quintessential brooding, dissatisfied teen, but the truth is I really did have a good time.

Okay, now to the MAD stuff. As a kid, I was an avid collector of MAD magazines, as were my brothers before me, but the two items here are from my work life at MAD. At some point I’ll write a separate piece about my time as a MAD staffer from 1990 to 1995, but for now I’ll just point out that one of the great perks of working there was all the free magazines and paraphernalia I got. (I gave my kids a couple of Spy vs. Spy pens out of one of the boxes, which they seemed to enjoy even though they were no longer working.) Not sure what year the watch is from, but it’s fun because Alfred E. Neuman is wearing a straightjacket and the hands of the watch go backwards. As for the magazine, it’s from January 1996, which was about six months after I moved to Arizona. My guess is I mailed a copy to my mom, because I had an article in there (“You Know America’s Been Nuked When…”) and I always sent her my published works. (Like how I use the phrase “my published works” as though I’m Ernest Hemingway? The most literary line I had in the aforementioned article was “You know America’s been nuked when the weatherman is drawing little cartoon mushroom clouds on the weather map.” Send me a freaking Pulitzer!)

Well, that’s pretty much it for the nostalgia tour. Although if I start taking pictures of the thousands of old photos I took from my mom’s apartment and blogging about them, the Nostalgia Tour Part 2 might be coming to a blog near you. Stay tuned!

My Mom: 1936 - 2014

My mom passed away last week at the age of 78. She was in the hospital at the time, but not for anything seemingly life-threatening, so her death came as a shock to all of us. My brothers asked me to do my mother’s eulogy, which I wrote while flying from Phoenix to New York. I was in a middle seat on the flight and I’m sure the people sitting on either side of me wanted nothing to do with the small, middle-aged man getting choked up while writing intensely in a spiral-bound notebook. Fortunately, my seatmates kept to themselves, giving me the privacy I needed to write without having to explain why I was getting emotional.

I’ve debated what to do about my blog over the past few days. As my readers know, the majority of my blog entries are of a personal nature. Given that fact, it seemed ludicrous to me for the first blog entry after my mother’s death to be about anything other than her. For that reason I have decided to reproduce the eulogy I gave. I’m hoping this doesn’t come across as tacky or gauche, but in my mind it would have been even tackier to ignore an event of this significance in my life and instead write about some trivial topic like pizza or Legos. So with that as preface, here is the eulogy:

I apologize if what I’m about to say seems long and rambling, but I wrote this on two hours of sleep while on a five-hour plane ride.
When I was trying to come up with what to say about my mom I just started jotting down a bunch of notes about the things that stood out for me about her. And I ended up taking a lot more notes than I thought I was going to.

One of the first things I thought of was her love for reading. She read pretty much everything. When I was a kid she would take me with her to the library every three weeks. I would get a Curious George book, a Dr. Seuss book, maybe a Maurice Sendak book if I was feeling ambitious. My mom would get a dozen books—each one bigger than the next:  400-page novels, 600-page biographies. We're talking large tomes. And she would read them all…in three weeks…a dozen books. And she never had to renew—not once. And this was on top of reading National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, the newspaper every day, and, of course, TV Guide. The amount of words she would digest on a daily basis was truly amazing. When I think about it now, it's sort of mind-boggling.

These days I also take my kids to the library every three weeks. They each get a few books and I get one book. Maybe two. But if I do get two books I always have to renew the second one. My mom was getting a dozen books…every three weeks.

One last thought on this topic and then I'll move on. About three years ago I joined a book club at my office—it was basically me and a few co-workers. The first book we read was a novel called "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet." It was a great book. It takes place in California during World War II. And the entire time I was reading it I kept on thinking, "My mom would love this book. My mom would love this book." So when I finished the book I spoke to my mom and I told her about it, half expecting she'd already read it since she was such a voracious reader, but to my surprise, she hadn't. But she was so intrigued by the plot that she said as soon as we got off the phone she was going to order it on amazon.com. Of course, what she really meant was as soon as we got off the phone she was going to call up her friend Grace and have her order the book for her on amazon.com, because my mom had no idea how to order anything online. So, thank you, Grace, for doing that. Anyway, about a week later she calls me up to tell me that she read the book and she absolutely loved it, and it was one of the best books she'd ever read. My first thought was, "Amazon standard shipping takes 5 to 7 business days…I spoke to my mom a week ago, so she probably got the book and read it in the same day.” That seemed about right. But my second thought was…well, frankly, I was proud of myself. My mom has read literally thousands of books—she's the world's most voracious reader—and somehow I managed to find a book for her that was now one of her favorites. It just made me happy.

My mom had a very good sense of humor. Everyone who knew my dad knows how funny he was. He was overtly funny; spontaneously funny. But my mom was creatively funny. She would come up with funny ideas and set about implementing them. The best example I can give of this was one year on January, 7^th—not quite sure of the year, but I would guess late 70s or early 80s—my mom made a very fancy dinner. She used a table cloth, our best silverware and dishes, lit candles. And when my dad got home and saw all of this he said, "What's going on? What's the occasion?" And my mom, totally deadpan, said, "Don't you know? It's January, 7th." My dad was at a loss and said, "So? What's so special about January, 7th?" And my mom said, "It's Millard Fillmore's birthday." That's right—it was the birthday of the most insignificant president in the history of the United States and my mom decided to have a dinner party in his honor. So that was my mom's unique sense of humor.

So what was my mom like as a mom? Well, let's be honest—she was overprotective. Very overprotective. And of course, as a kid, this bothered me no end. “Why can't I do this?” “Why can't I do that?” “All the other kids are doing it, why can't I?” And I swore I would never be like that when I became a parent. Well…guess what? These days they have a term for parents like me—we're called “Helicopter Parents.” We’re constantly hovering. And I try to make a conscious effort to land that helicopter on the pad. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. But my mom…well, I'm pretty sure her helicopter didn't even have landing gear.

Sometime in junior high, I think between 7th and 8th grade, some of my friends were going to the beach. I asked my mom if I could go with them and she said, "No." I asked her why not and she said, "Because there's gangs and broken glass." That's right. "Gangs and broken glass." This became a bit of a running joke with me and my brothers. "Gangs and broken glass" became a code phrase to signify extreme overprotectiveness.

As I think most of you know, I live in Arizona. There aren't any beaches there, but we live about a 5-hour drive from San Diego, so Nicole and I have taken the boys there a couple of times. The first time we took our kids to the beach, we parked the car and walked across the parking lot, and the moment we hit the sand, I paused for a split second and did a quick scan—no gangs…no broken glass…okay , let's go.

But my mom's overprotectiveness, her over concern, not only for me and my brothers and our wives and her grandkids—but really for all of her family and friends—just stemmed from the fact that she loved all of the people in her life and wanted them to be safe. It's as simple as that.

And I can tell you this because for the past eight years or so I spoke to my mom at least twice a week. When she called I would give her a quick synopsis of what was going on with us and then she would ask to speak to the boys—first AJ and then James. I'd put it on speaker phone just in case the kids didn't understand what my mom was saying or she didn't understand what they were saying, so I could interpret. And my mom was great about asking the boys questions to get them to talk. It was never just, "How was school today?" It was "What's your favorite subject?" "Did you sing any songs?" "What are your friend's names?" She genuinely wanted to know. More than once I found out something about my kids' day that I didn't even know until they told my mom about it. She was good like that.

Then, when I'd get back on the phone, my mom would give me the rundown on how all of my nephews and nieces were doing. She would go oldest to youngest in each of my brothers' families. First Steve's family—she'd tell me about Michael, then David, then John, then Robert, then Lauren. Then she'd move over to Mark's family and tell me about Alyssa and Alex. She'd tell me about all the important things going on in their lives. And it was clear how very proud she was of all of them and how much she loved them. Then she would tell me about the other family and friends who had things going on in their lives, so I would be up to speed with everything going on back on the East Coast. And it was clear that she cared about everyone she told me about.

I jotted down a lot more notes on my plane trip—about her involvement with the Cooley's Anemia Foundation, about her annual Hanukkah parties, about her love of travel—but really, the last point I made about how much she loved and cared for all of the people in her life, seems like the right place to end.

Thank you for coming out to support our family. It's much appreciated.

(Note: The photo at the top is my mom on her wedding day in 1956. The photo at the bottom is my mom on my wedding day in 2000.)

The Lego Movie: Now Playing at a Living Room Near Me

Both of my sons are obsessed with Legos—they have been for the past three years or so. Whatever time they’re not spending in school, eating, sleeping, or pummeling each other with sofa cushions, is generally spent playing with the colorful interlocking blocks. On a typical Saturday they will spend several hours building elaborate ships and/or structures, and then several more hours having their Lego Minifigures interact among the various ships and/or structures they just built. Usually the many hours of Lego play ends when one of the boys whips a sofa cushion out of nowhere and starts pummeling his brother. Welcome to my weekend.

Given my kids’ love of everything Lego it was no surprise that when The Lego Movie came out last February they were extremely anxious to see it. As soon as we saw it, it became their favorite movie. They talked about it constantly in the weeks after seeing it, so I took them to see it in the theater a second time, which is something I’d never done with them before.

In the months following our second viewing of the movie, my boys intermittently reminded me that as soon as The Lego Movie was available on DVD, we needed to purchase it. I assured them that we would. As it turns out, the movie was released on DVD while we were away on vacation in Utah in June. Strategically, my wife and I decided that we would purchase the DVD the day we were driving back to Arizona so the boys could watch it on the car DVD player during the long ride home. This proved to be a sage decision. The movie kept them occupied on the entire drive as they watched it three times back to back. They thought they were getting away with something every time they pressed play again when the movie ended, but the truth is my wife and I were basking in the glorious silence coming from the back of the minivan as the boys watched the movie with their headphones on for six straight hours.

When we got back from our Utah trip the boys had a month-and-a-half before school would start up again. That means they had lots of free time on their hands. Yes, they played, but they also watched The Lego Movie…a lot. But as the summer wore on an interesting dynamic evolved—my 7-year-old began to grow a bit weary of The Lego Movie and my 5-year-old couldn’t get enough of it. On Saturdays my younger son would bounce out of bed and immediately ask, “Can we watch The Lego Movie?” This would cause my older son to roll his eyes and counter with, “Can’t we watch something else already?”

I was definitely on my older son’s side on this one. Although The Lego Movie is very entertaining, and I certainly didn’t watch it with my kids every time it was playing, it was clearly becoming a bit too pervasive in our lives. I found myself driving home from work humming the song “Everything is Awesome” a bit too frequently. Something had to give, so about two weeks ago I put my foot down.

“Can we watch The Lego Movie?” my little one asked within minutes of getting out of bed.

“No, we watch it all the time. Let’s watch something else,” I said.

“You mean we can never watch it again?” he cried, his eyes filling up with tears.

“No, I didn’t say that. We’re just not going to watch it today. We’ll watch it again some other time.”

“When?” he asked, with a desperation usually only heard from addicts going through withdrawal symptoms.

“Um, I don’t know,” I said, which prompted my son to have an uncontrollable sobbing fit.

With my younger son reduced to tears and my older son nonchalantly browsing through our DVD collection, I contemplated my next move. Suddenly I had one of those rare parental eureka moments.

“What if I wrote on the calendar the days we’ll watch The Lego Movie?” I said.

“What?” my son asked, looking up with wet cheeks.

“Well if I write on the calendar the days that we’ll watch The Lego Movie, you’ll know for sure when you’re going to see it next,” I said. He seemed cautiously intrigued.

I walked over to the family calendar where we mark down the various important things going on in our lives—karate classes, birthday parties, date nights, etc.—and wrote The Lego Movie in at approximately two week intervals over the next two months. My son watched as his sobs slowly subsided.

“Is that okay?” I asked. He nodded hesitantly, as he closely eyeballed the calendar.

That day we watched something else—probably Curious George or Clifford, although I would have personally preferred The Godfather or The Shining. But happily, my youngest never once asked about The Lego Movie the rest of the day.

The following Saturday, after not having put on The Lego Movie for the longest period of time since we purchased it two months earlier, I pointed to the writing on the calendar and my son practically jumped out of his pajamas with excitement as he shouted, “Yes!” loud enough to register on the Richter scale. I watched the movie with my two sons and thoroughly enjoyed it—in large part because I knew it would be a couple of weeks before I’d have to watch it again.

And now we’re on a regular schedule and everybody’s happy. Indeed, when I flipped the calendar page from August to September, the first thing my youngest did was review it for showings of The Lego Movie. The family wall calendar has become his personal Moviefone and he can tell you without even looking that showings of his favorite film will be held on the morning of September 13^th and the evening of September 25^th. So for now, at least, our family can avoid The Lego Movie overload…until May 26, 2017 when The Lego Movie 2 comes out.

This Cookie Happened

On a recent trip to the grocery store I was pushing my shopping cart about when I noticed a woman handing out cookie samples on the far end of the produce aisle.  Ignoring the bananas, apples, broccoli, carrots, and other various forms of healthy fare, I made a beeline for the processed sweets.  When I got to the sample table I saw what, at first glance, looked like a bunch of ordinary Chips Ahoy! cookies.  I don’t mean to disparage Chips Ahoy!—quite the contrary, those and Oreos were my main source of sustenance throughout my grade school years—but when I see samples, I generally expect that it will be something a bit out of the ordinary.

Upon noticing me looking at the cookies the woman behind the table asked if I wanted to try one and pointed out that they were different flavors.  Ahhhh…these weren’t just ordinary Chips Ahoy! cookies after all.

“What flavors are there?” I asked, thinking there’s not really any way to improve upon Chips Ahoy! anyway.

“Well, the first one is birthday cake flavored, the next one is Oreo cream filled, the next one is…”  And honestly, I have no idea what the next one was; it could have contained jalapenos and nacho cheese for all I knew, because the moment she said that somewhere on our planet—indeed, directly in front of me—there existed a Chips Ahoy! cookie with Oreo cream filling, time stood still.  I stood transfixed, looking at the second cookie in the line.  At some point she stopped talking.

“I’m sorry, did you say that Chips Ahoy! cookie has Oreo cream inside it?” I asked, pointing incredulously at the cookie in question.

“Yes, would you like to try it?” she asked.

“Yes I would!” I said in a voice that was probably way too loud for that particular social interaction.

I picked up the cookie and took a bite.  When the morsels hit my taste buds the whole of the universe flashed before my eyes in an instant, as though I were Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “My god, it’s full of cream!” I thought to myself.

“Would you like to try another sample?” the saleslady asked, rousing me from my euphoric trance.

“No thanks, but can you tell me where I can find a box of those?” I asked, trying not to go into a frenzy in front of the onion bin.

“It’s in the regular cookie aisle,” she said; and as soon as the words were out of her mouth I screamed, “Thank you!” and set off in that direction.

As I sped past the other shoppers on my way to meet my sweet-toothed destiny, I wondered what mad genius had come up with this idea.  Somewhere at Nabisco’s headquarters in East Hanover, New Jersey there must be an employee who makes Albert Einstein look like Curly Howard.  I wish I were a fly on the wall when this idea was first pitched at a product development meeting.

Head of Product Development: Okay everyone, Oreos and Chips Ahoy! are our two top sellers, but we need to come up with some new flavors to keep it interesting.

Worker #1: What about birthday cake flavored Chips Ahoy!?

Head of Product Development: Good one. Everything’s birthday cake flavored these days; might as well add one of our cookies to the mix.

Worker #2: What about watermelon Oreos?

Head of Product Development: Sounds disgusting, but hey, people try all kinds of weird stuff once, right? Let’s give it a go. What else we got?

Worker #3: What if we combine our two top sellers?

Head of Product Development: Huh? What?

Worker #3: What if we made a Chips Ahoy! cookie with Oreo cream filling on the inside?

POP!  BAM!  THWAP!  Three people sitting around the conference table have their heads simultaneously explode.  Two more have massive coronaries. The other six fall to the ground and genuflect.  Moments later the Head of Product Development resigns and gives Worker #3 his job. 

At least this is how I assume it all went down given the enormity of this invention, which in my mind rivals the light bulb, the airplane, and indoor plumbing. Certainly this invention is better than the cellphone. Think about it—what would you rather have in your hand right now, a cellphone or a Chips Ahoreo! cookie? (Note: The product is not actually called Chips Ahoreo! It’s called “Chips Ahoy! Oreo Crème filled.” I just came up with Chips Ahoreo! and it’s clearly a much better name. Nabisco, you can make the royalty checks out to “Andrew J. Schwartzberg.”)

In the days since purchasing this miracle of modern food science I’ve only eaten three of them. I know that’s hard to believe, but I’m pacing myself. You don’t climb Mt. Everest in one day and you don’t eat an entire box of the world’s most incredible cookie in one sitting. I am savoring them, delighting in them, and getting to know each cookie on an individual basis. I highly recommend that you do the same. But whatever you do, don’t purchase them from the Fry’s on the corner of Dobson and Ray. Those boxes are all mine.

The Middle-aged Man vs. the Water Slide

This past weekend some good friends from California unexpectedly came to Arizona for a visit.  They gave us a call and invited us and our two boys to the swanky resort they were staying at to hang out at the pool. 

The pool was quite impressive—one of those large, meandering pools with different sections, structured in such a way as to make it impossible to see the whole pool from any one vantage point.  For the first 20 minutes or so we all just splashed about in the shallow end of one of the larger sections of the pool, and then my friend suggested we try out the water slide.  I was initially dubious, but my two boys were champing at the bit to try it out, so in an effort not to suck the fun out of the day, I relented.

The water slide was not connected to the larger pool structure, but was rather adjacent to its east end.  From the top of the slide you could not see the bottom of the slide or, for that matter, what it emptied into.  The slide was serpentine, and there was no way to know before the first time you went down what kind of twists and turns awaited you, or for that matter, if you would end up landing in a large, lush pool or a two-foot wide bucket meant for circus monkeys.   Frankly, it was a thing of mystery and I was more than a little surprised that my boys were willing to try it out, because they are usually skittish on anything but the most mundane of playground slides.  But hey, if they were suddenly feeling adventurous, I was willing to come along for the ride.

My Californian friend went first—a rock climber, snowboarder and general seeker of thrills, I’m sure the waterslide had a fear factor for him akin to my fear of getting a haircut—that is to say, pretty minimal.  My friend sat down and pushed himself forward at the top of the slide and didn’t go very far, so he did it again…and still didn’t go very far.  By the time he pushed himself a third time he was out of view due to the curvature of the slide. 

Waiting at the top, my boys and I expected to hear some sort of splash indicating that our friend had reached the bottom, but it never came.  Eventually, a hotel worker who was seated high enough above the slide to have a view of the bottom gave us the okay for the next person to go.  My five-year-old was next and he went through the same slow mechanics of pushing himself down the slide.  I was nervous for him, because I assumed at some point the slide would get steep enough to take him down quickly.  I dreaded hearing his tortured screams as he succumbed to gravity, but they never came.  Soon the hotel worker gave us the signal and my seven-year-old went next.  Starting from a sitting position he did the same slow push-crawl until he was out of view. 

No screams.  No splash.  No ominous music.  The only sound was the cascading water rushing down the labyrinthine slide.  I wondered if when I got to the bottom I would see three mangled bodies adrift in the water.

The hotel worker gave me the thumbs up and I sat down at the top of the slide.  I was anxious and sweating.  (Of course it was well over 100-degrees outside, so I would have been sweating regardless of the anxiousness.)  I started to push myself in the same manner as the three brave men who went before me.  I went around that first curve not sure of what I would see and what I saw was simply more of the curving slide.  So I kept on pushing myself expecting that at any moment the rushing water would take control of my body and propel me forward.  It did not.  I kept on sitting and pushing myself down the curving slide as water rushed under my body.  Eventually I reached the bottom and saw my predecessors calmly waiting for me (and not in the least bit mangled) in a medium-sized round pool about three feet deep.  It was anticlimactic…and everyone wanted to do it again.  We all felt we must have been doing something wrong and that there must be a way to go faster.

When it was next my turn I wondered if it would make a difference if I put myself in a lying rather than sitting position.  I asked the hotel worker about this and he just shrugged.  “Everybody does it different,” he said.

Determined to go a touch faster than a common garden snail, I put myself flat on my back and started scooting myself to see if the rushing water would whisk me away.  For the first five feet or so nothing happened and I was just about to give up hope, when suddenly I hit the first turn and my body was jettisoned forward by the cascading stream.  Like a dead pet hamster flushed down the toilet and torpedoing its way through the pipes, I was flung mercilessly down the winding slide and hurtled into the pool below.  Wow what an adrenaline rush! And wow did my spine connect with the slide hard!

Everyone wanted to do it again…and again…and again.  By the time we were done we all went down five or six times.  Each time was equal parts excitement, terror, joy, and pain.  My kids wanted to keep on going, but a little voice in the back of my head was quickly computing chiropractic and orthopedic bills, and the numbers had too many digits, so I directed us all back to the main pool.  Once there I noticed two large abrasions on my right arm from where I had apparently been strafed by the slide.  A few minutes later my wife said, “Whoa, you’ve got a big red mark on your back.”  This did not surprise me, seeing as how my back and the slide had become sparring partners for a good 15 minutes.

“Yeah, I’m going to feel this tomorrow morning,“ I said.  And as it turns out, I was wrong.  It did not take until the next morning for me to feel it.  About 10:30 that night I suddenly started to become aware of a dull ache in every muscle in my back (as well as several in my arms, legs, and chest).  By the next morning the ache was anything but dull.  Today, two days later, I’m still popping Tylenol like Tic-Tacs. 

I imagine I’ll still be feeling the pain for a few more days, but that’s okay.  Despite the beating my 44-year-old body took, going down that water slide was the most exhilarating experience I’ve had in decades.  For now though, I’ll stick to the excitement I get from playing Scrabble and watching reruns of “Taxi.”  Maybe when I’m 64 I’ll try bungee jumping.