First… Brush with Death

As a father of two children (seven and two), I often wonder how anyone lives much past the age of five these days.  So many things can go wrong and the greatest argument I can muster that there is, in fact, a God rests in the knowledge that things very rarely do.  In my forty years on the planet, for example, I can think of only one time when I actually came close to dying. 

My friend, Andi, had a share in a ski house in Vermont and she invited me to join her one weekend.  This was probably in about 1995 or so.  I don’t ski (very high center of gravity, shitty knees, a chronic dislike of the cold), but I was unattached at the time and had a sense that “ski house” was synonymous with “drunk chicks” and so I readily agreed to make the trip. 

Andi and I left from her house in Connecticut on Friday night.  The weather was just awful.  It was raining, snowing, and sleeting like mad and the conditions on the roads were rapidly deterioriating.  There were a few times when tractor-trailers would blow past us on the highway, spewing so much snow and water onto our windshield that it was virtually impossible to see.

“Jesus Christ, Andi,” I said.  “I think we should think about stopping somewhere for the night.”  (This was not a cheesy ploy to get Andi in bed; I was genuinely scared and we were just friends.)

Andi was hell-bent on getting to Vermont.  Her friends were already up there.  “Let’s keep going,” she said.  “It’s fine.”

You probably think that my near-death experience happened that night, but even Andi eventually conceded that the roads were undriveable  We stayed at a Motel 6 or something like that and finished the drive to Vermont the next morning.

It was a skier’s paradise.  All of that rain and sleet in Connecticut had been nothing but snow in Vermont.  There had to be a foot of it on the ground.  We suited up at the ski house and Andi, one of her friends, and I got into Andi’s car for the quick drive to  the slopes.

The snow from the night before had been plowed to the sides of the road, but there was so much of it that the roads were quite narrow.  We came up over a little rise and a big-ass snowplow was coming in the other direction.  Andi eased her car to the right to give the snowplow enough room to pass us, but she went a bit too far.  The car caromed off the five-foot-high snowbank along the roadside and we shot right across the road directly into the path of the snowplow.

“Oh, Andi,” her friend said in a tiny, sad little voice from the backseat.  Holy shit, I thought.  We’re going to die.

Andi tried to steer the car back into our lane, but it was too late.  The plow of the snowplow ripped into the front of Andi’s car and we went spinning around and around down the road.  I’m guessing that we spun around four or five times.

The car finally came to a stop and I realized that, no, we weren’t dead.  In fact, we weren’t even hurt.  The driver of the snowplow came running over to us.  We all got out of the car and surveyed the damage.  The front of Andi’s car was all torn up.  Pieces of her bumper lay scattered behind us on the road.  The police came and reports were filed.

Andi, God bless her, still wanted to hit the slopes, but I had lost what little “skiing mojo” I had.  I stayed in the lodge, drinking to my good fortune.  I bumped into one of Andi’s friends, who mentioned that he was going to be leaving the ski house early.  I bummed a ride from him and we made it back home without incident.

There is a wonderful line in the animated movie “Chicken Run.”  One of the chickens believes she is going to have her head cut off, but the evil farmer, Mrs. Tweedy, is merely measuring her to see how fat she is getting.  (Mrs. Tweedy wants to kill all of the chickens eventually to make chicken pot pies.  Spoiler alert!  She fails and the chickens all live happily ever after.) 

“I saw my entire life flash in front of my eyes,” the chicken says with great relief.  “It was very boring.”

First… Boner

This is the fifth in a series of postings about the many different firsts in my life.

Relax, everyone, this post is NOT about MY first boner (or “bah-ner” as little Stewie from Family Guy so hilariously pronounced it in one episode).  I would not hesitate to share the tale with you, of course, but, alas, I have no memory of it.

Instead, I will share the next best thing… the tale of my SON’S first boner (or, to be painfully accurate, the tale of the first of my son’s boners that I was around to witness).

My son, Christian, is two years old.  I was getting him out of his diaper the other morning and there it was in all its inch-and-a-quarter-if-I’m-being-generous glory.  A chip off the old block, that kid!

I pointed it out to him.  He shrieked with laughter and shouted — I swear to God – ”My penis is huge just like Daddy’s!”

I love you, too, my boy. 

First… Daddy-Daughter Dance

This is the fourth in a series of postings about the many different firsts in my life.

Last night, my seven-year-old Madeleine and I attended our first-ever Daddy-Daughter Dance.  I’d never even heard of such a thing until a few years ago.  Perhaps it is a New Jersey thing, or a suburban thing, or just one of the five million things we do with our kids today that were unheard of when I was growing up.

The concept is simple and, from my perspective, a bit wierd.  Picture a prom, except the girls range in age from about six to 12 and the guys range in age from about 35 to 50.  Everyone is gussied up, the men in suits, the girls in dresses, complete with “wristlet” corsages.   

But what really got me was the music.  I can happily tolerate tunes from High School Musical and Hannah Montana, and there were plenty of those, believe me.  But they also played a bunch of songs that seemed rather inappropriate to the occasion, including one from Sean Kingston called “Beautiful Girls” that includes these snappy lyrics:

Damn all these beautiful girls
They only want to do you dirt
They’ll have you suicidal, suicidal
When they say its over.

“Do you know what ’suicidal’ is?” one of my daughter’s classmates asked her.  “It means you kill yourself!”  Hey, we’re having some fun now!

They also played “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” by Soulja Boy.  I have no idea what this song is about, and I’m guessing that I don’t really want to.  To her credit, my daughter made a respectable attempt to do the dance steps that accompanied the song, including a pretty smooth “Superman” move.  To my suprise, many of the girls knew the dance steps and lyrics by heart.   

They eventually slowed things down to play “Kiss the Girl,” which the crab sings in “The Little Mermaid.”  Here’s an excerpt:

Yes, you want her
Look at her, you know you do
Possible she wants you to
There is one way to ask her

It don’t take a word
Not a single word
Go on and kiss the girl

What the FUCK?!  As the evening wore on, one of the dads asked me, “When does this thing end?”  (There was an open bar.  All the Coke and Sprite you could drink.)

“9:30,” I said, glancing at my watch.  It was about 8:50. 

“I’m about ready to call it,” I added.

“Oh, I was ready about 45 minutes ago,” he said.

When I told a co-worker that I was going to a Daddy-Daughter Dance, he said, “Enjoy.  She’ll be 18 before you know it.” 

Even faster than that, apparently.

First… Job

This is the third in a series of postings about the many different firsts in my life.

I held a variety of jobs as a kid — paperboy, dog walker, babysitter – but my first real job was working on an assembly line at a perfume factory.  I held the job during a couple of the summers while I was in college.  The pay was good and the factory was close enough to my house that I could ride my bicycle there.  (I could not afford a car.)  

I wasn’t the only college kid at the factory.  The summer months were used to build inventory for the Christmas season, so the factory supplemented its normal workforce of about 200 or so middle-aged women (and, yes, they were all women) with about 30-40 college kids. 

The funny thing about an assembly line is that it works EXACTLY the way you think it does.  We all sat along a conveyor belt,  wearing these shitty thin white gloves to avoid getting our fingerprints on anything.  Bottles of perfume would come chugging toward us.  You’d grab one and, depending on where you sat, you’d slap a cap on the bottle or put a label on it or stick it in a carton.  You’d put it back on the belt and grab another one.  Some people worked fast, some slow, and it didn’t really seem to matter.  Ten hours later, we’d go home. 

Let me clue you in on something.  After ten hours in a perfume factory, you smell like SHIT.  Each individual perfume smelled OK, of course.  But we made about 25 different kinds of perfumes — some for old ladies, some for teenagers, even some colognes for men — and the combination was just hideous.  It would penetrate into our clothes and, worse still, into our skin.

I remember my dad picking me up at work one day.  I got into the car and his head whipped around toward me.  “Holy Christ, you stink,” he said.  Another time, I was working a late shift and needed to go right from the factory to a party.  I changed my clothes, but didn’t take a shower.  As soon as I walked into the party, my friends started busting my ass about how horribly I smelled (as if I needed help repelling the ladies).  Alas, they were right.

When I first started at the factory, everyone used Sony Walkmans and listened to their own music all day long.  (Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” was the big hit that summer.)  We took coffee breaks together and stood in line to punch our time cards together, but, for the most part, nobody said much of anything to anybody.

One day, a guy from the factory’s insurance company showed up unannounced and mandated that we immediately stop using our Walkmans.  If there was a fire, he said, no one would be able to hear the alarm in time to run for our lives.  (Perfume contains a lot of alcohol and is, therefore, unbelievably flammable.) 

From that point on, deprived of the solitude of our Sony’s, we started talking to each other — and that’s when the job started to get interesting.  The middle-aged factory ladies took a liking to me (aw, who can blame them, really).  At some point, I let it slip that I was going to Yale and I think they collectively decided to teach me a little something about LIFE before I scurried back to New Haven.  They told me stories about what it’s like to be married, to get divorced, to have kids, to live paycheck to paycheck, to have the shit beaten out of you by your boyfriend, to go through menopause.  I was in shock and awe.

One of the college kids at the factory was studying to be a priest.  We called him “Father Mike” and he told very dumb (and very funny) jokes all day long.  He met a girl at some point one summer and he came to work one day with a stupid little grin on his face.  “Just call me Mike from now on,” he said and that was the end of that. 

Another kid had facial hair that grew incredibly quickly.  Every morning, he would go to the Schick “shaving lab” (proudly located in my hometown of Milford, CT) and they’d shave him with their latest razor.  He’d go back in the evening and they’d measure how much of his facial hair had grown back.  Anything for a buck, I guess.

We all decided to go out for a drink after work one night.  (It was understood by everyone that we would meet only after first going home to shower and put on fresh clothes.)  I had never been drunk before in my life, but I got pretty toasty that night.  It was strange to see everyone in a social setting.  One of my female co-workers said to me, “Wow, you’re wearing pants that fit!”  (I wore the same pair of ratty old jeans to work the entire summer.)  At a certain point in the evening, I rushed out onto the dance floor, completely alone, to do the Pee Wee Herman dance to the song “Tequila.”  That earned me a free margarita, which only led to further silliness.

When we go back to Milford to visit my parents these days, we drive right by where the perfume factory used to be.  It’s closed now, like so many other factories in America.  I learned a lot there, about myself and about others.  Ultimately, though, I think what I learned most of all is that I didn’t want to grow up and work in a factory.  

Cue the Springsteen…     

First… Friend

This is the second in a series of postings about the many different firsts in my life.

My family moved from Queens, NY, to Milford, CT, when I was seven years old and right in the middle of the school year.  I was in first grade and the transition was tough.  Lots of tears, lots of confusion.  I remember clutching Sister Beatrice (it was a Catholic school) and just crying and crying.  Everyone seemed to have friends, except me.

One day, a red-headed kid named Timmy came up to me and told me not to worry… he would be my friend.  I have no idea what prompted him to reach out to me, but I didn’t really care.  I had a friend!

Timmy and I remained friends all the way through grammar school and we went to the same high school together, too.  One of the things we shared in common was a complete lack of athletic ability.  The two of us would always get picked last, or close to last, for just about everything.  I remember one time in high school when the gym teacher held some sort of wrestling tournament.  You could pick the person you wanted to wrestle, so, of course, Timmy and I picked each other.  I think I pinned him, but it could have just as easily gone the other way.  We had an unspoken understanding that we would make a decent show of it, but not really try very hard.  In the next round of the tournament, I was pinned in about five seconds by David Snell, whose parents were famous locally for taking in foster kids.  I believe he was one of 18 children at the time, which apparently provides excellent training for rolling around on a mat.

I recently found my high school yearbook and there’s a picture of Timmy and me, sitting together at lunch.  I’m laughing at something he said and he’s got this deadpan look on his face.  He was perhaps the world’s youngest curmudgeon.

We parted ways in college, but always kept in touch.  I was a groomsman at his wedding in the early 1990s and he returned the favor for me when I tied the knot a few years later.  Tim (as I now call him) got up and spoke at our rehearsal dinner and it was very cool to think that we had known each other for well over 20 years at that point.

I talked to Tim just yesterday.  I sent him the link to my blog and he called to tell me that he liked it and to encourage me to keep at it.  He asked me about my recent “First… Kiss” posting.

“Who was the Bryan in the car with you?” he asked, and I told him Bryan’s last name. 

“That guy was no Rico Suave, either,” Tim said.

“Well, he was more ’suave’ than me,” I said.

“Evidently,” Tim said in that deadpan style of his and we both cracked up.

We also took care of some business.  I recently asked Tim to be the executor of my will and we talked that through, especially who would take care of my kids in the event that both my wife and I meet an untimely end.  That’s a strange conversation to have, to be sure, but it was less strange, somehow, having it with Tim, my first friend and someone I know will be my friend forever.

“Promise me I won’t need to do this,” he said toward the end of our conversation.

We can’t make promises like that, of course, but I know what he meant.  Tim, I will do my best.

First… Kiss

This will be the first in a series of postings about the many different firsts in my life.

I did not kiss a girl until my senior year in high school, as embarassing as that is to admit.  My parents were very conservative people.  We did not talk about sex in any way, shape, or form around the house.  Dating was seen as something that would distract my older sister and me from the task at hand — excelling at academics and participating in a handful of non-athletic extracurricular activities.  Both my sister and I went to single-sex, Catholic high schools just to further ensure that we were completely inept when it came to interacting with the opposite sex.

One of my extracurricular activities was performing in plays and musicals.  (When I performed in my first-ever show, “Ten Little Indians,” sporting a British accent, my father and sister nearly had to leave the theatre because they were laughing so hard.  But I digress…)  Being in shows may sound gay, but it was actually a fantastic way to meet girls.  And that’s how I met Beth Siebold, the first girl I ever kissed. 

It was my senior year (she was a senior, too) and we were both performing in a play, the name of which now escapes me.  She wasn’t very pretty, to be honest, but she was very nice and laughed at my jokes and seemed to think I was a reasonably cool guy.  Trouble was, I had no idea — literally, no idea — about how to go about telling a girl that I liked her.  I had never tried it before and I was terrified that I would screw it up somehow.  Beth knew I liked her and I knew she liked me, but, being the guy, it was up to me to make the first move and I… just… couldn’t. 

We were at a New Year’s Eve party together — ringing in 1986 — and I vowed that I would make my move that night.  Sure, I’d dawdled for about three months, but what could be more romantic than a kiss at midnight?  With a few Bartles & James wine coolers coursing through my system, I looked for Beth as 12:00 drew near.  She was nowhere to be found.  At about 12:01, I caught sight of her — holding hands with Gary Morrisey. 

“We’re together,” they announced to all of us.  I tried my best to smile.  Happy fucking new year.  I wasn’t mad at her, or at Gary, either.  I was mad at myself.  I’d waited and waited and now I’d blown it.

Beth and Gary broke up a few weeks later.  I took a deep breath, picked up the phone, and called her.  “I blew it once,” I said.  “If you give me a chance, I won’t blow it again.” 

It worked.  We became boyfriend and girlfriend.  But we still hadn’t kissed.  After a while, it was painfully obvious — to us and all of our friends — that we hadn’t kissed. 

“Do you WANT to kiss her?” my friend Bryan asked me one day as we were driving home from school.

“Yes,” I said.  “Of course.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

That weekend, Beth and I were double-dating one night with Bryan and his girlfriend, Mary, who happened to be Beth’s best friend.  Beth and I were in the back seat of Bryan’s car.  I think we were heading to Friendly’s or Denny’s, which were our two big haunts back then.

“Let’s play a game,” Bryan said, looking at us in his rear view mirror.  “If we see a car with a headlight that’s out, that’s called a ‘pediddle.’” (I’m not sure about the spelling here.)

A peddidle, he explained, meant that you had to kiss for five seconds. 

“If we see a car with a tailight out, that’s a ‘fediddle.’” (I’m even less sure about the spelling on this one.)

A feddidle meant that you had to kiss for TEN seconds.

You know, you never realize how many cars on the road have busted headlights and tailights until you’re a scared shitless dork sitting in the back seat of your friend’s car with your girlfriend playing pediddle/fediddle.  It took all of about ten seconds before a car went by us with one headlight out. 

And so I kissed Beth Siebold. 

It probably wasn’t the best kiss she’d ever had.  Hope to God, it wasn’t the worst.  As far as I was concerned, though, this was a true watershed moment in my life.  I had kissed a girl.  I hadn’t been struck by lightning.  The car didn’t plummet off an embankment.  My mother hadn’t emerged from the trunk with a baseball bat.  I’d done it!

Beth dumped me on my ass a few months later, just days before I was to take her to my senior prom.  But, hey, I’d kissed her.