Froggy Fugue

A toad lived under our patio for a few summers when I was a kid. I didn’t feed him or take care of his needs in any way, but I nevertheless thought of him as my pet. I named him Thumper. On random nights I’d be parked on the patio, reading or drawing, and Thumper would emerge from his shallow burrow and tentatively hop around the yard. This was before I had my first dog, and so I came to consider Thumper as another kid my age might consider her cocker spaniel: He was part of my family, and as a result I felt a little bit responsible for him. I also felt a certain kinship: In my early teens, I, too, thought of myself as taking a few tentative hops outside my own cozy burrow. The summer I was 14, my father was hospitalized with a lung cancer that […]

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Looking for Eddie Field

Eddie Field had ears that stuck out like mug handles from either side of his head and a face that was a constellation of freckles. He wore his hair in a Boy’s Regular barber cut, cropped close to his head, which only served to emphasize both the freckles and the unfortunate angle of his ears. Eddie and I were in the same grade at school, and our parents belonged to the same summer swim club. I saw a lot of him as a result, but he wasn’t a friend, exactly. The club was a sort of working-class version of a Country Club—no tennis courts, no rolling golf green. It did have shuffleboard courts, though, and one or two of the courts were actually playable, if you avoided hitting the weeds forcing through the cracks in the cement. There was a musty-smelling piano in the clubhouse that retained most of its

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Summer on the Coast of Maine, Doggy-Style

I’m spending this week on the coast of southern Maine. If I had a choice, I’d spend most of the week as I am right now: in a low-slung beach chair, toes buried in the warm sand, and book propped open on my lap, pages ruffled by the strong wind off the water. Every few minutes I look up to inventory the surf, scanning for two heads—one belonging to my dark-haired daughter and the other her blond-haired friend—who are bobbing in the waves ahead of me. I have to squint hard to keep sight of them, in part because the sun is glaring, and in part because the tide is so low they seem a football field away. The girls appear as tiny figures, no bigger than lawn jockeys. The seagull stalking crabs a few yards in front of me seems as large as they are, as if this were

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I Suspect Everyone Else Is Smarter, Better-Looking, Taller, Cooler, Cuter, Has Newer and Shinier Objects than I Do (and Is More Modest)

When you are prone to measuring yourself against others, like I am, and when you both work and live out chunks of your life online, as I do, the Internet can be a bitch. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring your impact online, and to suspect that your own self-worth is tied to it. It’s easy, for example, to measure your popularity and self-esteem in terms of the number of “friends” you have on Facebook, the number of followers on Twitter, the extent of your professional contacts on LinkedIn, your cache of Feedburner subscribers, your Web site’s Google PageRank, tags on Flickr, comments, links, visits, clicks, referrals, Karma on Plurk, and—worst of all!—your Technorati degree of “Authority,” which implies a sort of collected clout and power that, for most of us, doesn’t really exist outside of the unblinking screen that is our dashboard to the world. Those of

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Beta Before Alpha

My friend Rachel emailed me an article the other day from Yankelovich, a market research company. The article, produced just after Mother’s Day, heralded the arrival of “Beta Moms” and their “newfound acceptance that being a ‘just good enough for my family’ mother… speaks to a more forgiving, laid-back approach to parenting.” Unlike “Alpha Moms” (or, as they are sometimes called, “Extreme Moms”—those “ultra-organized overachievers who approach parenting with the same intensity and quest for perfection that they take with them into the boardroom or the gym, treating parenthood as if it were an Olympic competition”), Beta Moms (or “Slacker Moms”) are more relaxed. They are less anxious, less prone to perfection, and less perturbed in general. And they don’t feel guilty about being that way. The article mentions two book releases as bellwethers of the Beta Mom Age: Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box and Let Them

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Off-Color Commentary

Last week I was in my vet’s lobby with one of my dogs, waiting to check out, when I overhead a conversation behind me. “Of course you don’t like it here, but stop your complaining! We need to stay put for now.” An older woman, maybe in her mid-70s, was talking to her cat, which was meowing loudly from inside its plastic carrier. Hanging from the side of the carrier was an IV bag, and its tube snaked through a side vent into the carrier—and, presumably, the cat. Sprinkles, it turns out, was a well-fed orange tabby who had lived almost all of her 18 years indoors. She’d been healthy her whole life but a few weeks ago started with a cough that sounded like a bark. Of course, I only knew this because the woman shared it freely with the handful of people—including me—in the waiting room. At that

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American Idolatry

Last week I signed on for the Comcast triple play, which brought our triumvirate of phone-internet-TV under Comcast’s wing. It also simultaneously catapulted us back to the Land of DVRs (Digital Video Recorders), a place from which we had reluctantly decamped after our last TiVo box died months ago. With DVRs, we’ve learned to start the recorder, then begin watching shows 10 or 15 minutes after they actually begin. The practice allows us to blissfully sail straight through commercials on a kind of joyride. Fast-forwarding makes me feel giddy and anarchic, like I am engaging in something revolutionary—albeit a lame sort of Digital Age revolution, its rebels armed with thumb-controlled remotes, asses planted firmly on the couch. So last night the kids and I were parked for the season finale of “American Idol,” a program that we love to both deride and debate about… but never miss. For us, the

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A Retro Road Trip in a New World

When you’re from New England, the whole concept of taking a “Road Trip” means driving an hour to the beach. So when my friend Beccy suggested we take a road trip to Niagara Falls during our kids’ spring break, I mentally padded the usual duration with an extra hour or two and impetuously answered Yes. As I’ve established, I’m notoriously terrible with directions. I should have paused before answering. I should have considered that Beccy is from the Midwest, where folks will drive for two hours on a Sunday morning just to worship at church. She comes from a place where people traverse vast distances over flat earth to get almost anywhere. Or, nowhere: When my friend Jen was growing up in Nebraska, her parents routinely piled six kids into their Country Squire just to head out for a drive. So this is how I found myself, last week, journeying

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Korean Otters

My friend Maryse called me the other day with a question, she said, about her daughter Laurie-Maude, who is in the same grade as my daughter Caroline. It was Korea Day at school, she said, and Laurie-Maude wanted to dress as an Otter. “How do Otter’s dress?” Maryse wanted to know. At least, that’s what I thought she said. Maryse is French Canadian, from Montreal, and it’s sometimes hard to understand certain words she says, particularly over the telephone. Nevertheless, that’s what I encoded: “Laurie-Maude wants to dress as an Otter for Korea Day.” And as one part of my brain was struggling to decipher what else she might have meant, another part set to work trying to recall an otter: What does an otter look like? Is that the one with a flat tail? Or tiny front paws? Like a meerkat? Like a beaver?

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