"Maybe she is trying to tell you something." Was the most popular comment of the night.
Just to be safe, I smelled both the pipe case and my arm pits and neither warranted deodorant.
She was already asleep when I got home and I had to go to work shortly after, so it wouldn't be until sometime the following evening when I got to ask her why she had done it. I figured something hilarious would leap off her tongue and I thought about it most of the night at work.
Daddy:"Izzy, why did you put Mummy's deodorant in my pipecase?"
Izzy: (with an inflection in her voice that says you stupid, stupid man.) "Because I'm weird."
Izzy, the Boy and I were hanging around the house doing the Boy's homework- spelling (none of that pesky math crap for me) and the Boy asked me about prefixes and suffixes. After I answered the question, he asked "How do you know all this stuff?"
"Because I'm cool." I said jokingly (apathy is still cool, right?)
"No you're not. You probably used to be but you are definitely not cool now."
Now I left home to join a band. I gave up everything to follow my dreams to their fruition, for good or for ill and I actually got to do it for a living. I oozed cool. Greasy pompadoured hair and tattoos and pimp clothes...Hot damn, I personified cool. But somewhere along the line my coolness disappeared. It must have somehow ended up in the laundry and shrunk right up. You know how delicate cool can be.
The Boy's words echoed in my ears for a couple of days and really got under my skin... "You probably used to be but you are definitely not cool now." I started to think of my own parents. I remember seeing pictures of them in their teenage years. They looked cool but by the time I came along all evidence of that had long since vanished...
I started to examine things around me and put two and two together. I came to the realization that the little gutter-snipes had ruined me. I had gone from rampaging rock god to beaten down, grey haired and mumbling to himself Dad in a hail of spit up and shitty diapers.
From the Boy's stark announcement to Izzy's confidence crushing "Oh, Daddy you're funny." at picture's of me on tour, I have become that guy...that Dad. I knew things would change after the birth of my daughter but I had no idea what effect it would have on me...on my social persona.
I was at a piping competition over the summer and one of the kids in the band had a bloody nose. Like the gunfighter of old my hand moved on it's own, without any conscious thought from me, toward the young pipers nose. Clutched in my hand was a MacDonald's napkin. I have no idea where it came from nor how it ended up in my hand or even why my brain thought it would be appropriate to jam a serviette into the face of a virtual stranger. The weird part is that none of the other parents even looked at me twice. Apparently parent is another name for universal caregiver. I find myself putting things in my car that I would never, in a million years, need to put in there. A steady supply of
wet naps and dry napkins, books, toys of various sizes, at least one bottle of water, one car seat and car chargers for the various video games that they are both playing now. Thank god they both have decent taste in music. If I had to have a kiddie music preset on the car radio(no joke, such stations exist) I would be forced to pluck out my eyes with a blue spork and mash them into my ears.And it will happen to you...you will be cool one minute and in a heartbeat (your first child's first heartbeat to be precise) your cool points will get together like dozens of little Fonzies and get in line to start jumping tiny little sharks. This phenomenon doesn't seem to effect women in the same way. Maybe because children always side with their mothers anyway...cool or not.
Here is a frightening example of what has happened to me (and all fathers before me I'm certain). I was on my way to work on a cold night when an attractive young girl walked in front of my car to cross the street. In the normal run of things I would have thought she was cute or hot or any number of cliche's but the first thing that ran through my mind was "She should be wearing a hat."
We live in the country and so we are occasional hosts to wildlife. We have seen our share of bats and stray cats and squirrels and those bastard box elder bugs. There were literally millions of them covering our garage this past summer and now we get the odd one crawling around the house now that the cold is here. Everyone is so immune and apathetic to their presence now, even Izzy will pick them up and throw them in the toilet. The first time I did this she asked why I did it.
"I was giving him a burial at sea. Like in the navy." I said.
" I want to tell mummy we have a sea in the toilet." she said.
We have had raccoons trying to be inconspicuous while rummaging through the garbage and skunks spraying the cat (which I secretly found hysterical and fitting) I've seen hawks in the backyard, dead turkeys by the side of the road and I have even seen a coyote running through a field not a half mile from here. But the worst of all these...the scourge of our house is the GOD-DAMNED mouse that has been running around here for the last month.
I normally wouldn't care about this sort of thing but for the Hansel and Gretel trail of mouse turds that run though the basement and the cat smacking at the basement door at all hours of the night. I made an informed decision that the mouse had to go and set about to dispose of it.
I don't like glue traps, I find them cruel and messy and they get stuck in your pocket too often (don't ask). No for my money I want death to come on swift wings and the scent of peanut butter. I laid out two traps in the basement and waited. I went down the next day to nothing. No dead mouse and no trap. The trap was gone...vanished. I felt myself channeling Quint from jaws..."Y'all know me. You know how I earn a libbin'. I'll catch this mouse for you but it won't be easy."
"Daddy, who are you talking to?" Izzy asked.
"Sorry Pick, nobody. I'm trying to find the trap I set for the mouse."
"The trap is gone?" she asked.
"Yep," I said. "Completely vanished."
"Wow," she said. "I don't want to be down here with a mouse."
I had visions of the mouse sitting in his living room with his T.V. on the trap.
"Better mousetrap." I said out loud to no-one. And so I bought a gruesome high-tec looking beast that actually has a part called a killing bar. Sadly however, salad bar would be a more appropriate name for it as this thing was little more than a feeding station for our new mouse pet.
Several days and eight pounds of peanut butter laden mouse shit later, I had come downstairs to find a medium sized brown field mouse going to town on a leftover piece of pizza that had been left on the kitchen counter. My opportunity had come at last and I went to find a shoe box. Apartment living has got to be wearing on him now. If I can convince him that condo living is the way to go-it's into the shoe box and out the door. (That's how it went down in my head anyway)
So the mouse has taken up residence behind the stove now where there is a steady supply of mousey sized food stuffs that would please even the most discerning rodent palate.Three hots and a cot...nothing but the best for our mouse. Izzy asked me today if she could see the dead mouse from the other night.
"There is no dead mouse." I said.
"Did he get away?" she asked
"Yes honey, the mouse got away behind the stove."
"Daddy," she asked. "Why didn't you just kill him? We'll never get him out from the stove."
I guess because I'm weird too...
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