New York, the last hurrah

There is no better city in the world than New York, let’s just get that straight. I could get lost there and be happy for the rest of my life. Stick this Southern boy in a hot, airless subway and I could be perfectly content. I’ll pay ridiculous prices, and feel I’m getting a deal. I’ll get slammed hard by someone on the street, and thank them for the experience. I’ve never felt a pulse like New York. It’s as close as I’ve ever come to getting struck by lightning — a rush of energy through my body that makes me think, “I’m alive! … or fried like chicken.” That’s New York. My wife (the pregnant one) and I went to the Big Apple for a last hurrah before the baby comes, and to celebrate her birthday (won’t say how old as the Surgeon General warns against it.) The thing about life I’ve learned is this: Find a partner you can travel well with and you’ll never be unhappy. I’m very lucky, in that respect, and it holds true even when pregnant. Although, when you need a pry-bar getting in and out of a cab, it tends to slow things down a bit. But I’m proud to say she never got stuck in a revolving door or a subway turnstile, as I feared. (She’s done it even when NOT pregnant.) New York is fun with woman-carrying-child because it comes with power. You’re on a crowded subway, buried so deep from […]

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That awful scourge known as E-mail

What did we used to do in the days before E-mail, and by golly, can we please go back? Yes, I’m asking you sweet world to take this evil device for conveying messages and flush it down the great mystical commode from whence it came. You heard me correctly. Even a son of technology, a child raised on the microchip, reared on the digital, trained on the mouse, married to the great World Wide Web has said it. Take it away! I’m done with it. I’m carpal tunneled out, my poor hands crippled. Sure, E-mail can be a wonderful thing. But it’s also an undeniable scourge. A creeping virus. An addiction. The equivalent of electronic kudzu, spreading, growing, infecting, overwhelming, suffocating, driving me mad. If my office door is ever closed, it’s because I’m in there working like a fiend, typing like a mad man, trying desperately to reduce my electronic pile to something manageable. “A-Ha!” I emerge triumphantly 18 hours later, my fingers gnarled-up, twisted and twitching. “I’ve reduced my inbox from 32,000 messages to a much more manageable 31,892. I now have a date with 17 martinis.” I return and they’re back. That’s why I’m proposing an E-mail-out Day, a great blackout for E-mail when we all swear an oath — as a nation and a world — to silence the E-mail airwaves for one day. We will all recover and drink beer in harmony, and not a soul will click send. Just a little relief is all […]

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Registering for a Baby

It was bound to happen. Inevitable is the word. You can run hard from the inevitable, but it will always track you down, trip you up and laugh at your skinned knees. Why fight it? Instead, embrace it. Enjoy it. It is inevitable. And so it went this past weekend, designated officially on the calendar, in federal offices and schools, as baby registration day. Oh, not for all of you people. Simply for the Thompsons. Time for us to go into the baby stores, stare in awe and say things like, “Holy pickled peanut butter, I’ve never seen a breast pump before!” I love the audacity of some places, giving you handy little lists of things they suggest you register for. Get a day stroller, and a night stroller, and possibly a formal stroller, for when you take baby to the ball in black tie. Stock up on formula, especially if you’re going to breast feed, and buy one pacifier for each day of the baby’s life for the first 15 years, just to be sure. My wife and I are serious shoppers. We marched into stores with notebooks and baby-stuff books, dog-eared and highlighted. She quizzed store employees on merchandise with questions like, “So, you say this stroller is all-terrain, but has it ever been tested on the boulder-strewn trails of Mt. Kilimanjaro?” or “In 25 words or less, explain to me why on July 22, Cindy Shumacher was unable to release the easy-go latch while grocery shopping at […]

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