The Suburban You (12 page)

Tonight, you vow to yourself on the drive over—while squeezing between an oncoming SUV, whose driver's eyes you avoid, and a parked German luxury car—that you will get whatever is on that little piece of paper that your wife has handed to you and will be back home in five minutes, so that, unlike other movie evenings, this one will be a success, for your wife, anyway.

You park the car, enter the store, and pull the little piece of paper out of your pocket.
Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
, it says. Oh great, you think. You wait for the Blockbuster clerk to complete ringing up the customer standing in front of you, whom the clerk refers to as François—a high-school-aged, athletic-looking kid wearing a golf shirt, whose extended right hand is disappearing and reappearing as it gracefully slides back and forth in the lower center region of the buttocks of the woman standing really close to him, who, although she bears no resemblance, is old enough to be his mother. When the transaction is completed, François turns to the woman, without losing his hand placement or interrupting its rhythmic movement, and says, “Come on, Christine, let's go.” They do.

You ask the clerk, as quietly as possible, where
Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
is while looking at the paper your wife handed you, so that he, and anyone else listening, knows that this is not your selection but your wife's.

He smiles, because he is familiar with this scene, as he points to the Drama section. It's over in the Drama section, under
S
, about three-quarters of the way down that aisle. You head over that way. You arrive at the section and there are eight boxes of this movie, but, to your surprise, they all seem to be checked out. You now have to go through the embarrassment of going back to the clerk, waiting for him to finish with the customers who are waiting in line ahead of you, and asking him if there are any available copies of this movie elsewhere in the store. You wait in line impatiently.

Finally it is your turn. He looks up and recognizes you. “Find it?” he asks, smiling, to which you respond that all the copies were checked out. He bangs on his keyboard, hits return a few times, looks up at you, and says, louder than you wished, “Sorry, all copies of
Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
are checked out.” This is the best news that you have received all day long and you want to tip this Blockbuster clerk, but you don't.

You rushed out of the house and forgot your phone, so, oh well, you cannot call your wife to ask her for another one of her selections. The ball is in your court now. You fall back into your old habits and begin with
A
s in the New Release section. You look at every film that looks remotely appealing and read each description. You make mental notes of the ones that sound good to return to after you have done your tour of duty. As you make your rounds, you know that your fallback is
Day of the Jackal
; you recently read the book and loved it.

A half hour slips by, and you are suddenly cognizant of the time. You ask the clerk, with more confidence and volume in your voice than before, where you would find
Day of the Jackal
, and he looks at you approvingly, as if he notices that you had just found the penis that you lost when you first arrived at the store. He tells you to look over in Suspense, under
D.
This is a movie that you convince yourself your wife will love and think is a great substitute for
Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
. You know that it will also make her happy knowing that you are watching something that you find enjoyable.

You find the movie and it hasn't been checked out. You wait in line for the three people in front of you to check out, a process that takes five minutes per person, then you check out and go home.

You arrive excitedly opening the back door and your wife is at the kitchen table with a bunch of papers strewn about her. “Hi, honey,” you say. “Where were you? Why did you take so long?” she asks accusingly. “Well,
Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
was completely checked out and I had to select another movie. I got
Day of the Jackal
. You will love this movie,” you add.

You know instantly by your wife's reaction that
Day of the Jackal
is not on her must-see list and that she is disappointed. “Why didn't you call me for another movie suggestion?” she asks. You tell her that you forgot your phone and she looks at you suspiciously. “Did you remember to get the milk?” she asks. You did not. She tells you to go down and put the movie on and that she will be down in a minute.

You go downstairs, to the basement, where you have put the TV in your house so that it is inconvenient for your kids to watch it, and you insert the DVD into your new piece of hardware. The movie comes on and you realize, ten minutes into it, that it is looking familiar. You realize that this is not because you have just read the book. You assume that you saw it on a plane on one of your business trips, because if your wife had seen it she would have been so kind as to tell you the minute that you excitedly told her of your selection, the one that you chose with her in mind.

You are a half hour into the movie and your wife still has not arrived. You pause the film and go up to the kitchen. She is gone. You realize that she went up to bed.

You finish watching the movie, all alone, knowing everything that has happened. You go to bed and your wife is sleeping. You do not have sex that night, like you may have if you had brought home a movie that was on Robin's list.

Draft a Little League Baseball Team

More than anything, you love doing things with your kids, especially playing sports. You played sports growing up and you have always been OK. Not great, but not so bad, either. But now it is a whole different story. There is nothing like playing a sport with a group of eight-year-olds to make you feel more athletic than you have ever felt in your life. You are in your athletic prime.

Your suburb takes its baseball seriously. You assembled a team of first-graders last year in a coaches-pitch baseball league. The team consisted of your kid and his friends, and because you knew where and how to pitch to each kid on your team, they were all hitters. You attempt to import your last year's team into the second-grade league, and after trying everything you can think of you cannot do it. You look upon yourself as someone who can convince anyone to do anything, a skill that you have perfected as a corporate executive, but is useless in this Little League.

There are tryouts in this league, which are called “evaluations,” coupled with a draft. The reason for this is to assure that the teams are evenly balanced, although you know that some of the other coaches have figured out the loopholes so that they could stack their teams. You have not made the effort to investigate any loopholes in the system because your only motivation is to try to keep friends together. You show up for the draft. The setting is this: there is one manager and three coaches for each of the twenty-four teams in the league—ninety-six dads who sit in prearranged seating in a gym set back along the first- and third-base lines of a painted baseball diamond. Each coach is given a clipboard and evaluation forms to assess the performance of each of the 336 second-grade kids who signed up for baseball that year. You are given a pencil to record your comments and your scores, which are to be tallied after the evaluations so that you can rank each of these 336 second-graders, in order of best to worst (from 1 to 336). Each kid gets to come into this lair of coaches, alone, with an identifying number pinned to the back of his shirt, and shows the ninety-six coaches and managers how he hits, throws, catches, and runs.

One by one, each kid enters the coaches' lair and tries his best, for the most part. Except for the six kids who wish they were anywhere but here. Those six kids are on each of the ninety-six coaches' and managers' special list of kids not to choose for their team, no matter what.

After this fun-filled activity, you lag behind with your coach friends and rank each of the kids and assemble your strategy for the draft. The other managers and coaches do the same.

On Tuesday evening, you and the other ninety-six managers and coaches show up at a recreation-center meeting room to select your teams. This is the draft. You have your preranked list and so have they. The manager for each team then selects a number out of a hat, to determine their order in the draft.

The draft commences and each team selects one player per turn, moving down their list of ranked players. The players are identified only by the numbers that were pinned to their backs during the “evaluation.” When a player is selected, you and all the other managers cross the player off your lists. Throughout this process, you are surprised by the consistency with which the players have been ranked by all the managers and coaches.

This process is moving along with a high degree of predictability, with one exception. You notice your friend Stephen, a manager for a competing team, is making draft selections that are entirely inconsistent with the way in which you and every other manager and coach in the room has ranked the players. For instance, for his first pick he selects the player that you ranked number 94 on your list. His next selection was some kid who was number 114 on your list, and his third draft pick was number 67 on your list. Each and every one of his subsequent selections seems equally illogical. Each time Stephen makes a selection, the other managers and coaches in the room laugh. You do not, because you know three things about Stephen:

1. He has older sons and has been through this before.

2. He is funny.

3. He is smart.

The draft concludes and you have assembled a respectable team. You do not get a chance to talk with Stephen before he leaves to see what he was doing. However, you get a much better idea of Stephen's draft strategy when you arrive for your first game against his team. On his sidelines spectating the game are fourteen of the most attractive moms, excluding your kids' mom, who reside in your suburb. Many you have seen before with glowing hair at the black-light bowling alley. Stephen, having been a coach for one of his older sons a few years ago, knows that with three practices and two games a week the fans are an important part of assembling a team. You win the game 14–1. Stephen's team becomes each manager's and player's favorite opposing team.

Listen to a Guy Tell You How Great His Kids Are

You live in a suburb where all of the kids are active and involved in many activities from a very young age. They all play many sports, they all have academic interests, they all can navigate a computer more capably than most of the adults that live in your suburb, and they are all exposed to movies and a wide range of cultural events.

Because of the broad exposure that all of these fortunate kids experience, parents have generally learned not to be obnoxious in talking with their friends about how wonderful their kids are or how many character-building activities their kids are involved in. They have learned this because they realize that everyone's kids are in overdrive with these activities and that almost nothing is unique and that people just don't want to hear about it.

It is nine o'clock on a Saturday morning and you are at your daughter's preschool's open house. You enter the school and the first thing that you do is sit down at a preschool-size round table in a chair whose seat is as high as the midpoint between your ankle and your knee. You sit down there with your daughter at this small table in the hallway, outside of her classroom. You are eating this wonderful coffee cake that your daughter has been telling you that she and her classmates made yesterday; it is coffee cake without coffee, she has told you three times that morning, and you are raving about it to her. You tell her that it is the best coffee cake that you have ever eaten, and you are probably fairly accurate, because coffee cake has never been high on your list of favorite foods.

You are enjoying your coffee cake with your daughter while seated in the world's smallest chair at the world's lowest table. In the middle of her wonderfully expressive coffee-cake story, another dad, whom you have never met, joins you with his daughter, a girl that your daughter does not know. As he sits down, and before he says hello to you or your daughter, he says, while interrupting your daughter's coffee-cake story, that, while it is only 9:15
A
.
M
. on this Saturday, he has already been to a basketball game for one of his sons and a swim meet for his daughter. Here is your interpretation of what was really said and the conversation that his comment prompted.

What he said:
“I can't believe that it is 9:15
A
.
M
. on Saturday and I have already been to my son's basketball game and my daughter's swim meet.”

What you think he meant:
I am Super Dad, probably better than you, waking up so early on a Saturday morning to see my kids play sports, and I am grooming my kids to be great athletes. I bet you did not take any of your kids to any sporting activities this morning, like I did. My kids are better than yours, they are more active than yours, and I am an amazing dad who has an amazing wife for scheduling my kids into such wholesome activities. In fact, I am probably a better athlete than you.

What you think about what he said:
You are an asshole. Didn't you read the memo, the one that says that you should not brag about your kids and never interrupt a kid when she is excitedly expressing a constructive thought?

How you would respond if you were like him:
So, big deal, I am not impressed. My daughter swims at 10
A
.
M
., then goes to climbing class at 11. My son has a basketball game at 11, right after his swim lesson with Annika; a pinewood-derby race at 2 and tennis at 4
P
.
M
. I coach my kid's football and baseball teams and am my son's Cub Scout den leader. I spend more time with my kids and do more stuff with them than you probably ever will. And, besides, I am in my athletic prime. You are nothing special. I just know better than to brag about all this, because every kid who lives in this suburb is involved in so many things that none of it is impressive to anyone. No one really cares.

What you actually say in response:
“Come on, honey, show me your classroom now. That was the best coffee cake I have ever had.”

Total a Car

A bigger shot than you moves from the city into a house around the corner. At least, you think that he is a bigger shot than you, because he has a bright-red Ferrari. You heard that this car costs $250,000. It could be that he is not such a big deal, because instead of investing in real estate with a dad whom he met on the sidelines of his kid's soccer game, who, like you, has a vowel on the end of his last name, he bought a bright-red, $250,000 Ferrari, which you guess has been fed nothing but premium gasoline. That is what you tell yourself, anyway.

The curious thing is that the seven-figure house that this Italian sports-car aficionado has purchased has no garage. So the Ferrari gets parked on the street, which is irritating to some. It is an odd contrast to the brick street upon which it is parked and the old homes that look out over it. If it were parked on your street, your son would feel an immediate urge to play baseball with a brand-new hardball on the front lawn.

Four years before Ferrari guy moved into your neighborhood, your village redid the entire sewer system to rectify a problem. The problem then was that when it rained hard the rainwater would quickly drain into the sewer pipes that ran underneath the nice brick streets. The sewer pipes would get overfilled and the rainwater that was in the sewer pipe, which would get mixed in with toilet water, had nowhere to go except to back up into the pipes that connected the homes in your suburb to the sewer system. The overflowing water would then end up in everyone's basement. Stinky and no fun at all.

One year, the village decided to tap into some of its $60-million-a-year tax revenues and put restrictor valves on the sewer drains. Restrictor valves are like big funnels that regulate the rate at which rainwater flows into the sewer system, basically slowing it. As a result, the water no longer backs up into anyone's basement. However, the by-product of this sewer upgrade is that water stays in the streets longer. In fact, when it rains hard, as it does a few times a year, water rises to one, two, or even three feet in the low spots along your suburban streets. It may take four or five hours for the water to drain through the restrictor valves and into the sewer system to a point where the streets are puddle-free.

One evening, exactly four days after moving into his new overpriced home without a garage, your new neighbor, the trader, parked his low-slung, bright-red, $250,000, premium-gasoline-filled Ferrari in the lowest spot along the brick street in front of his charming old house. The spot that he chose is in a little valley with a slight rise in front of and to the rear of the Ferrari. To your new neighbor, it appears to be the perfect spot, as the driver's door of the car is directly adjacent to the walkway of his new home's front door. There is no better and more convenient place to park, or so he thought that evening.

That night, it rains like a mother. You wake up the next morning and are out of your house at 4:45
A
.
M
. to take a limo to pick up your friend-boss and then head to the airport. You put on a pair of boots and walk to the limo, which is parked in front of your house, which is sitting in a foot of water. You can see that the restrictor valves have done their job that night, just as they were designed to do. There is plenty of water in the street, and none in anyone's basements.

You direct the limo driver to carefully stay on flat streets that will be less flooded than the streets with bumps. You avoid any streets where there are low spots. When making a left-hand turn onto Orchard Street, you pass by Ginkgo Street and notice the red roof of what looks like your new neighbor's red Ferrari. It is. You cannot see any other part of the car, because, except for about five inches of its roof, the entire car is underwater.

That is the last time you ever see the red Ferrari. A month later, a black one shows up and it is parked on the
rise
in the street.

Bring the Kids to the Auto-Recycling Facility
with Their Friends

You are at the school benefit for your daughter's preschool, which your wife has organized. You “win” a few things at this auction. You hear people use this term “win” at this auction, but what you are really winning is the right to pay more than anyone else would possibly think of paying for an item you do not need. You call that losing, not winning.