My Indian Name is 'Dances With Squirrels'

Every day my kids and I burst out the front door so I can take them to school. We do this at almost exactly the same time, and when I say burst, I mean something like explode.

Since we live in Chicago near a golf course and a forest preserve, we often see rabbits, chipmunks—even deer—grazing in the yard. We always see squirrels. Squirrels rule the street. They’re so tame they don’t even scatter when we race down the sidewalk to the car, they just sit their on their fat little haunches gnawing acorns or pine cones or crabapples and give us the hairy eyeball, as if every single squirrel immigrated from the Bronx.

Until the other day, when a squirrel and I bonded.

I always assume the squirrels don’t pay much attention to us enormous. explosive bipeds. I figure they figure us for ‘big crazy squirrels’ and ignore the screaming, the papers flying everywhere, the hip-check duels for determining who gets shotgun. But the other day, I threw the door open, raced down the steps, and skidded to a stop: One of them was staring at me.

I don’t mean staring the way a rabbit will glance at you to see if it should run, I mean a big fat tawny squirrel with an acorn in it’s grip was giving me the hairy eyeball. Like he recognized me.

I sensed a weird resonance with this tiny mammal: we were roughly the same shape, we both had a sardonic glare plastered on our mugs, we were both exquisitely browed. I was carrying a stack of books in my hands, close to my chest, worried they’d slip, just like he was carrying a giant acorn in his little fingers. I don’t know why I did this but I hunched down, like I was ducking—and the squirrel did the same thing. My son said the most remarkable, eloquent thing, practically an oration, he said “Dude.” I was inspired.

I double hunched and the squirrel double hunched. I turned my head to the right and the squirrel turned his. I ducked my head. He ducked his head. It was an interspecies tango. I said “Oh my God, my new Indian name is ‘dancing with squirrels’. My kids cracked up. My dance partner ran away.

The next day we hit the steps and pulled up short. There he was, same time, same place. My daughter immediately started in with a ‘bown-chicka-wow-wow’ and me and the squirrel ducked and bobbed until my son, though deeply impressed with the cross genus gyrations, informed us we were already late for the first bell by groaning, “Dude?” and we pulled into the car. As I checked the rearview to pull out, I saw my squirrel still staring at us, like the song was still playing but we’d jilted him and went to the bar for a drink. He looked surprised.

The next day he didn’t show. Instead of blowing the door open, we eased out onto the steps-- but no squirrel. I tried to get a rabbit to bump and grind but he just wiggled his nose, kind of a ‘you got to be kidding me,’ wiggle. The other squirrels just raced around the tree trunk and ignored me. I mean they completely ignored me, like they were saying ‘that bastard just left Franky standing there.’

As we sped through the neighborhood, suicide squirrels darted into the road, dodging my tires and leaping out of the way with hair trigger timing and steely bravado. I usually ignore this but after dancing with a squirrel for two days in a row, I had a new view. These were not simply confused rodents. They were warriors. They were testing their mettle by arcing across the path of oncoming hummers and hybrids. I imagined bristly squirrel girls hidden in the boxwoods and peonies switching their carefully groomed tails and saying ‘OMG, did you see that?!’ while their boy squirrels strut back to them across the grass having risked everything to give the tiny finger to chrome plated roaring death by squishilation.

This fantasy spun completely out of control so that every wild animal I saw seemed to have cartoon talk bubbles suspended in mid-air over their heads, filled with snappy dialogue and withering quips. The deer all talked like Frasier, rabbits were all frat boys’ the squirrels all talked like DeNiro in taxi, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and asking me ‘what, you gotta problem?’

My Son Loves to Read

This is so important to me. I think mostly because I'm a writer and it's kind of nice to see him learn this important art that's so important to my art. He's staying up late reading and twice TWICE I've caught him killing the video game and kicking back with a book. There might be a God . . .

All in all, there is a change-a-comin' for the kid. I can see it in the way he pays attention to the world, the way he's picking up on the power and grace of good rock and roll, and the way he is disappearing into books.

I can't remember when I started reading. I think I was annotating Tolstoy in the womb. I have always been reading. In fact, it is safe to say I have been reading every day since I learned how. I should get paid for it.

I'm one of those crazy (gifted) readers who needs several titles at once. Librarians either love me or hate me. The really cool ones get this look in their eyes when I walk up to the counter with 14 books. Others see me coming with an 85 pound backpack full of books and they go on break.

Worse, I have multiple libraries. The upstairs loo usually has a stack on the sink; there's always a Harpers and a book in the car; the kitchen counter usually has a cookbook on the counter; there's a stack on my bedstand; a row on my desk; a literal library along the upstairs hall; then there's the stack on the end table by my chair in the living room. I don't know if my collection of rare books in PDF form on my hard drive counts, but they're there too.

Reading is an acti of magic as powerful as writing any day of the week. More importantly, reading is seperate from writing. They are intimately related but not the same. Both are creative acts (hence, magic). A person who is reading a book is working as hard as the writer to create a world and that world is distinct from the one laid down on those pages by the author.

The art of disappearing into a book is one developed over time though the trick of it can be learned in the blink of an eye, in the turn of a phrase. It's that moment in a story when you forget that your're reading a book and become part of the story, the invisible observer, the ghost in the room. That's what we are as readers, ghosts in the stories we love.

Maybe that's a great Halloween concept, something to scare you and make you worry a little. Think about the powerful sense that these characters in your favorite stories are alive. When you're reading it, you don't question it at all. They breathe, they love, they kill, they worry, weep, and waylay. And it doesn't end when you put the book down. You can return it to the library and forget about the thing, the sheaf of leaves you were studying so long, you can pretend it wasn't a talisman that evoked these characters into your head where they now live. You can believe they are all just a trick. But they're still there in your head.

What if the book doesn't evoke the characters out of the page, like a zip file, but instead invokes you into their world? What if we're the book?

Happy halloween.

Proper Potty Training for People with Penises

For sending parents into drooling catatonia, nothing compares to potty training. It's first of the classic thresholds of child development and the first time you and your spawn have a shared weird experience. Trust me, there will be more.

All parents will have to teach their kids this simple skill. Every "What to expect when you're Expectorating" book out there has a chapter devoted to the minutiae of merde and most of them try to convince you that potty training is an intricate, delicate, and difficult period, requiring endless couch-time for the parents and their progeny. Most guides imply that improper potty training can lead to lifelong neuroses and Emo music.

My kids were so easy it was almost spontaneous. I sat the boy down on his little chair at exactly the right moment and the resulting efficacy of exporting his effluence sans diaper made an instant impression on him.

My great neglect at that moment was a lack of follow-through. I should have explained immediately that the chamber of reflection has a dual purpose, that one can use it for sitting or for standing. I figured it would come up in the very near future and shelved the whole idea and went back to doing laundry.

[My Attorney] was on deck for the next Number 1 and wasted no time in teaching the boy proper penis procedure: sit, release, wipe.

She told me she was teaching the boy how to pee in the bowl and I didn't think twice about it. I just crossed it off my to-do list. Only later did I wonder about the obvious mechanics and thought to myself, how does she know what to do?

"You taught him to shake, right?"

"What?"

"You know--shake."

"Shake what?"

"His thing."

"Why!?"

"Guys shake."

"Before or after?"

"What did you teach him to do when he's done?"

"Use a tissue, duh."

"Oh my god. Babe, how exactly did you teach my son to pee?"

"I don't know, like everyone pees: you sit down---"

"@#!^%$ ^$##@!"

I want all the new moms and moms to be to please listen up and listen up good: leave proper penile procedural to the papas.

When it comes to penis training, the dad has the upper hand because the dad, presumably, is furnished with the same equipment as the son. He has, in fact, been training his entire life in peni practicalia, and, again, presumably, knows things that, as a mom, you don't know.

Specifically, and this is paramount penis procedure, are two habits unique to the water closet ways of woman-kind: tissues and sitting.

Pay very close attention: men don't sit down to pee. Pay even more attention: when we're done, we S H A K E. We don't W I P E.

I realized [My Attorney] had been teaching the toddler to touch up his tallywacker with a tissue for two weeks before I found out. Then I realize that it is too late--TOO LATE--to change. He's been trained.

Then it really hit me: my son pees like a girl!

His life as a man was finished. Now when other boys make jokes about writing their name in the snow, the Roon will have to ask them what they're talking about. I had a vision of him walking into the urinal bay at school and wondering out loud,  "Dude, where are the wipes?"

He would be an urinary outcast; a pee pariah.

I acted fast. I called him over.

You know you're supposed to pee standing up.

Gross!

And you don't wipe.

What? Well . . .  well . . .what do you do?

You shake.

Shake what?

What do you think?

Oh my god! Dad, that's gross! Gross! It'll go everywhere!

I was too late.

I went out to the garage. I dipped my hands into a bucket of crude oil, lit a cigar, and thought about guns. I had to protect my manhood and for some reason I thought it was at stake. I thought maybe the boy's manhood was at stake too. I remembered great pee moments from my childhood:

• Peeing into the wind off the back of a moving pick-up truck;


• Peeing onto an electric fence;


• Writing my name in the sand at the beach then drinking three whole cokes because my name is 22 letters long and I was trying to write in cursive and I ran out at christopher pa--


• Peeing off the side of a boat


• Peeing off the top of a building under construction


• Peeing into the campfire


• Peeing into the bait-well in our boat


• Peeing on a cow


• Starting a forest fire . . .

Those are cherished memories, the very building blocks of a boy's life. How was my son supposed to ---

Hey dad, you're right. It totally works. I can pee standing up.

Awesome. You made it into the toilet?

Toilet?

Possible Books for Precocious Children

I'm always trying to come up with new things to procrastinate over. Today, my writer's bug got to me and I decided I needed to write some children's books for the precocious set. Here's a list of potential titles:

Alphabet Cassulet:

A is for acidophilus
B is for bactracious
C is for contrapuntal
D is for dipsomaniac
E is for existentialism

•    My Pet Giant African Land Snail
•    Everybody Poops: Academic Review of Fecal Humor in Early Educational Literature.
•    Goodnight Bassoon
•    Where the Wild Things Are: Statistical Analysis For Establishing Social Boundaries
•    Why Are You My Mommy?
•    Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jungian Archetypes and the Loss of Urban Micro Social Cultures
•    Spurious George
•    Schrödinger’s Cat in the Hat
•    Green Eggs & Ham: Sustainable Agriculture and Carbon Footprint Reduction in Breakfast Food Production Techniques
•    My Two Mommies: An Argument for Human Egg Cloning