Death by 1000 Cut-up Hot Dogs

I slice up their hot dogs, steaming from the boil water, and plastic-plate them with a squirt of ketchup, trying like hell to avoid as much as touching the juice, which I’m certain contains Zika. Just like grown-ups at a ball game or the county fair, my kids enjoy hot dogs most when their brains are completely shut off. And they don’t even know the horrible truth about hot dogs, you know, the Zika.

“Hey, daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I really like Curious George so I might read it again, alright?”

Archie chews his hot dog while he talks, head down, mumbling, mouth full, almost incomprehensible. He thinks he’s winning, setting me up so that he can keep reading his book while he eats, but he doesn’t know that I’ve already won because he’s eating a hot dog and doesn’t even know it.

In the thrill of my victory over Archie, I let my guard down and Augie Jedi-mind-tricks me into letting him out of his high chair after only a few bites. He goes in his room and comes out with three shirts around his neck, looking like a baby Necklush model (http://shop.necklush.com/ free shout-outs! message me). He “dresses” himself now.

“Hey, daddy.”

“Yes?”

“I think I getting a lil bit scay-ed because thinking about No-noggin so I think I need you to come keep an eye on me while I read this book in the bed, alright?”

“Alright”

But I’m reading about Muhammad Ali and not paying attention so he starts to get out of his chair before I see he still has a pile of cut-up hot dog pieces. I negotiate with him from my usual position of weakness (Trump will fix this for me) and get him to choke down one more piece before being all done. Then I take his pieces and Augie’s pieces and put them in a little baggie in the fridge. I’ll nuke and serve the same pieces later, but when they don’t eat them again, I’ll throw them away, which I hate doing, but how many lives does a piece of cut-up hot dog have?

What I won’t do ever is eat them, even though I kind of want to.

After days of boiling, slicing, serving, saving, nuking, and throwing away, I reach breaking point where I’m going to have to eat one. But not one of theirs, nasty Zika-filled things. I’m talking one off the grill. Fortunately it’s Memorial Day–a solemn day of remembrance when all factory-farming, Monsanto-spewing, waist-busting, artery-clogging, 35%-of-American-men-are-obese-ing bets are off. (Relax. I know my timeline is jacked with the Ali reference. This is all fiction.)

I fire one up until it starts to split, turning it carefully, lovingly, no black on the skin, just pure slightly crispy brown with juice bubbling off the seams. Burger King can’t touch this. I pull it off  smoking hot and put a fork right to it. They don’t make buns good enough for this masterpiece. Hot juice shoots out five feet in the air.

“Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!”

I yell not because the scalding-hot juice hits my face, but rather from sheer joy.

“Everything okay out there? I think the kids are hungry.”

No they’re not.

“All good. Let’s eat!”

 

 

 

The Long National Nightmare Known as Breakfast . . .

. . .  ended in a draw. The decisive battle in the war involved possession of a strategic stool. In the end the carnage included half a slice of toast with jelly, or was it jam?, and many tears. Neither side was satisfied with the terms of cessation, which was basically me grabbing the stool, throwing it the next room, and shutting the door.

Things calmed. As I cleaned up, Archie pretended to be a kitty cat, sitting on the floor singing “Oh, Christmas Tree” in meows. Augie rolled around on the bed and screamed, short high-pitched bursts, insanity in his face, clenching a shaker egg and an toy excavator. Soon they were playing together again, much to my horror, as I scrambled to get our junk together and get us out the door. The timebomb ticked.

“Look, Daddy, your little kitties are playing in a tent. It’s okay, meow, it’s fun any way you do it.”

Then it went off. Archie wailed his monotone, extended-day cry that howls along at a certain pitch straight to a pain receptor in my brain.

“Nooooooooo! Augie’s messing up the tent! Aggghhhhhhhhh! Whhaaaaaaa!

Archie’s low level cry is deadly, insidious. It winds and whines and digs in.

Next Augie’s head hit the ground in an audible thud and he cried. You’re probably thinking, why don’t you stop writing and go see what happened, try to help, do some parenting? Thing was, they had already ebbed back to fun. That is the pattern: a constant ebb and flow between fun and rage. Quite exhausting, and it requires calories.

In the end, just before we made it out the door. Augie ran around with the tent on his head, falling and flailing and crashing into furniture, like Thing 1 and  Thing 2.

On day two of The Summer of the Finger, we got corn dogs. I let Archie pick what he wanted from the frozen case at the grocery store, and he picked corn dogs. Don’t worry, though, they were organic tofu dogs coated in minimally processed whole grain batter made in sustainable and diverse small family factories. Just kidding! They were Winn Dixie-brand “classic”corn dogs. I resisted and ate my leafy vegetables and whole grains, a hard man with complete command, until the next day when I was hungover and crushed a corn dog with yellow mustard in about ten seconds after pulling it out of the oven.  Finger culture took that round.

The next day, The Breakfast Wars fired up again. This time it was me against the both of them, though, instead of them against each other. I stood over Archie and held a half piece of toast with blueberry jam near his face, while he sat with his head down playing with an toy alphabet-saying dachshund and taking nibbles of the toast that left little marks that looked like a gerbil had gotten ahold of it.

Meanwhile Augie smashed his half piece of toast and blueberry jam into his face first chance he had, getting it all over his face and saying, “sticky.” I put Archie’s piece down and went to tear a piece off to try to feed Augie, but Augie got angry that I tore his piece, enraged, and smushed the whole thing up in his hands, balling it up and squeezing it through his fingers. Once he was satisfied and his anger subsided, he held hands up and said “sticky” again.

“a constant ebb and flow between fun and rage.”

 

The Aquarium, Part Two–Eggs in My Head

We made it! After an incredibly long walk up the promenade, which took over a month (sorry!), Archie and I arrived at the ticket window of the Aquarium of the Americas. This beautiful aquarium is quite cleverly named: One would think that this aquarium is somehow the official aquarium of all of the Americas, North, South, and Costa Rica and whatever else is in the middle, sort of like the WWII museum is the official, national museum of that event. How did New Orleans pull this off? Some incredible NAFTA maneuver? Sister city program? Our prestigious location as the northernmost city in the Caribbean? But it seemed odd, and unlikely, that a citizen of, say, Brazil, would need to travel to New Orleans to visit his or her official, hemispheric aquarium. A quick study of the exhibit names, though, revealed that the aquarium is so named because it presents species and habitats of the various Americas, with a focus, of course, on the northern Gulf and lower Mississippi areas. You didn’t think they were miss an opportunity to put an alligator on it, did you!

It had been great having the Audubon pass over the summer. We were able to visit the zoo and the aquarium unlimited times and not have to worry about staying all day to get our money’s worth. But the membership plans were actually numerous and complicated, a fact that became apparent as the two moms in line in front of me, managing like ten kids between them, engaged in a lengthy and confusing discussion with the young clerk behind the window about just how many and who of their brood their particular plan allowed them to bring in. When they finally got that sorted out, I rolled Archie forward and handed her my card.

“Just us,” I said, hoping to cheer her up with the simplicity of our request.

“How old is he?” she asked.

Oh, no, I thought. I wasn’t sure what our plan entitled us to. And I wasn’t sure if I should lie and say that he’s one or not. He was so small, he could’ve passed for under one, that is unless they saw him doing his pull-ups.

“Um, one,” I said.

“Enjoy the aquarium,” she said and handed me my card and ID, some tickets, and some other receipt or something. Why did we need so many papers to go from that window into the aquarium, the entrance to which was like five feet away? As I was pondering this, I should’ve been paying attention to where I put the tickets because when I got to the ticket-taker, I had to rummage through every pocket I had before finding them stuffed into the diaper bag. Why the heck did I do that? Because I was too busy wondering why we needed tickets at all to pay attention to where I was putting them.

Once inside, we rolled through an aquarium tunnel, where schools of fish and stingrays swim above your head through shimmering light. It was a wonderful sight that we paused to behold, but we were standing between a group and their camera-person. So we moved down a few feet to get out of their way, but then another group came through moving the opposite direction. We crossed to the other side to get out of their way, but a group was standing at the glass there. To get out of the aisle, we moved a few feet down from them, but by that point, we had exited the tunnel. It was a site to behold, just don’t stop to behold it.

Next up was another giant tank, this one featuring large fish, turtles, even sharks swimming laps around what looked like the undersea portion of an offshore oil rig. Some people might find it strange that the pilings of an oil rig are presented as the fish’s natural habitat, and that the exhibit is sponsored by Shell, when public perception is that oil production has degraded and damaged the natural environs of these magnificent creatures. But I saw the exhibit more symbolically: the oil rig is a prison, like Alcatraz, in which we are all trapped, the circling sharks a reminder of the unseen dangers of oil production. Or perhaps, the sharks serve as agents of Shell, preventing us from jumping ship. More literally, though, the rig is a terrifying place, continually surrounded by swarms of hungry sharks, and it’s the workers of south Louisiana who are literally trapped there, unable to escape.

More prescient to my current situation was my own little shark, trapped in his stroller. I rolled him up to the glass, imagining many minutes of calm wonder. Instead he strained against his stroller straps, squirming and torquing. He had been in the stroller since we got off the streetcar, and he was done. What the heck? I popped the straps and let him out. Uninterested in the giant, awe-inspiring tank, he immediately ran toward a seated area, where patrons could observe the theater-like tank from cubed, carpeted bleachers in the dark. He flung his belly against the seat, between two people, and began his belly climb onto it. Soon he was onto that seat level and attempting to climb onto the next level, through, over, and between the legs of more seated patrons. He could fit between them, but I couldn’t. I had to halt his progress. I grabbed him by the waist and lifted him off the bleachers. His legs kicked and arms flailed like a stunned octopus, or maybe a quadrapus. He threw is head back and let out a scream. The patrons thrilled to the up-close and personal wildlife show.

He wasn’t going back into the stroller. I needed to find an area with more space, and less climb-y things. We took an elevator to the second floor. Then we took it back to the first floor. Then to the second again, and back to the first. Each time, he reached to touch the button and cried, “buh-n, buh-n.” I’d lift him and he’d press it. Then when the silver doors opened, he said, “oooh.” He’d made it happen. He’d walk through the doors like he was entering Oz, then turn and watch the silver doors close behind him. When we reached the first floor for the third time, other people waited to get on, so I had to put a stop to the elevator game. Instead we took the stairs. Then we took the stairs back down.  Then back up again.

Once firmly on the second floor, we found a sea horse exhibit– several tall, round sea horse tanks that extended almost to the floor, a perfect height for him to pound on the glass and scream at the sea horses. “Gentle,” I said, trying to at least get him to touch instead of bang. But he could see them, swimming inside amongst the reedy grasses, which made him shriek with delight and point at them and look at me, making sure I saw them too. I did see them, and I’m pretty sure they saw him as well, a giant, screaming, curly-headed baby, pounding on their world.

I tried to lead him gently away from the glass, but the sea horses had sent him into a frenzy. He jerked my hand away, and when I re-took his hand, he went limp and collapsed to the floor in passive resistance. He understood my options instinctively: I could drag my one-year-old across the floor by one arm, or I could let go. When I let go, he got up and ran, a stumbling, head-forward fast-walk, hands up and bouncing in the air, between patrons, into the dark, toward . . . what . . . I didn’t know . . . penguins maybe . . . or frogs. I moved to catch him, but not before hearing a clip from a sea horse movie that played on a nearby screen. “The female sea horse implants the fertilized egg into an area near the head of the male,” it said. “And it is the male sea horse that gives birth.” Across the long, dark, aquarium corridor, I could see Archie, banging on the glass where a frenzied penguin pecked at his hand.