In 2006 this 19-year-old Israeli boy-soldier gets abducted by the Palestinian Hamas movement. He’s held in isolation and mystery for more than five years while his parents fight tirelessly for his release. Protests, demonstrations, and mentions of his captivity happened all over the world. Finally, in October of this year he’s released. Parents rejoice. Events are held. The press swarms.

Heartwarming. Yes.

But I can’t help the feeling that the difficulties of his life may be yet to come.

He lived in captivity, which I can’t even imagine. He was literally off the map for half a decade and he’ll never get those years back. But on the other hand there was a singularity of purpose in that time. Survive. Live to be released. His parents were living in a similar world of singular focus and laser guided love for their son.

But what now? Real life will have to invade for him and his parents. He’ll need a job and they will need something new to do with any free moment. And all the while I wonder about the elephant in the room:

He wasn’t just released, he was traded. Israel got one twenty-five year old, normal and unremarkable young man by giving up more than 1,000 prisoners of all kinds.

Elsewhere in the world more than 1,000 families celebrated the return of loved ones they thought they’d never see again. New lives were started. Old lives were returned. Because of one kid.

Gilad Shalit is worth 1,027 people. He can quantify his worth in human lives. His life for more than 1,000 others. And I’m left wondering if there’s anyone in the modern time who can say anything like that? Is there anyone else alive who will have to endure that reality?

Is there anyone on the planet who is worth 1,000 lives? Would 1,000 people give up their lives so Steve Jobs could have lived longer? What about Christ? He’s worth more than 1,000 lives and he did the opposite… He gave up His life so we could all live.

Gilad didn’t give up his life, he gained life in exchange for 1,000 others. He didn’t do anything but play bargaining chip for 1,000 other people. If Gilad had died so 1,000 people could live he’d be a hero. Instead he’s just going back to try and live like a normal guy. Years of political posturing and the result is Palestine going… “Okay, for 1,000 people… we’ll give you one guy.”

Now if Gilad goes on to cure cancer, or raise up Israel to newfound glory, or disciple thousands to be better than they were before… what a story that would be. But it’s more likely that he’ll just get an unremarkable job, get married, start a family, find himself out of shape and overweight and pissed at his kids about something. Just another guy.

What if some of those 1,027 released decide to cause more damage? I have no interest in getting into a Palestine vs. Israel discussion, I’m just acknowledging reports that some of those released were in prison for murder and/or terror attacks.

Yet I never saw this question in the Press. No one seemed to ask “Wait a minute…is this kid worth 1,000 lives?”. Does the family have a counselor prepared to talk to Gilad when the weight of this comes crashing down on him… cause I bet it will.

I’m reminded of the film “Saving Private Ryan” where Matt Damon is finally rescued but the entire squad that went to get him has now been killed. Tom Hanks, the last of the squad, is dying and he looks up at the kid and says “Earn this…”.  Then we return to present day and the kid is now an average grandfather who turns to his wife and says “Tell me I’m a good man….”. Cause how do you do enough to make your life worth the life of someone else?

As a father I ponder “Is my son worth 1,000 people?”. I don’t mean emotionally, as I’m sure Gilad’s parents would have (and did) anything to get him home. I mean intellectually, realistically. In one room, 1,000 people. In the other, my son. What’s the better call?

God chose the room full of people. Gilad’s parents chose their son.

What am I worth? What are you worth? And I’m not looking for a Sunday School answer here. If you were going to be traded for 1,027 other people… hell, 27 other people… would you feel worth the cost? Could I do anything over the course of my life to be worth 1 person? Or 27? Or 1,027?

Gilad Shalit will have to live with that question, and I bet it will be far harder than his time in isolation.

So what’s my problem? Am I just old before my time and wishing for the days of snail mail and the rotary telephone? Not at all. My issue is the feeling that facebook isn’t actually connecting us as much as it’s feeding our vanity and laziness.

The facebook “news” feed provides a platform for all kinds of inane blather. We see photos of people’s dinner, hear their plans for the next few hours, scroll past their political views, and anything else a person deems so riveting that the internet needs a record of its happening. I imagine some sociologist of the distant future uncovering the code from a day of facebook postings and concluding “no wonder their civilization collapsed, no one actually did anything but yet they considered everything important. “. If you have a facebook account, and you’ve ever posted a status, you are saying “this is important enough that everyone should know.” Sheer vanity, fed by the relentless content black hole that is the internet… a beast in need of constant feeding. So we update again. And God help us if someone actually likes what you post.

Which brings us to the lazy part of the equation, spearheaded by the “like” button. Someone else posts something for all the world to see, you read it and conclude that you are so impressed you must: call them, write something back, smile and pass it on to others… no, none of those. Instead you show your appreciation for their “news” by a single mouse click, less energy than it actually takes to scratch your own nose. Now the world knows we are a supportive audience of someone else’s vain chatter but we literally barely lifted a finger. We’re a part of the conversation! Yeah, us! Vanity and inaction in one little click.

Birthdays encourage similar lazy interaction in the supposed name of connection. As we scroll through Facebook everyday it automatically provides us with mass lists of birthdays without a need to actually keep track of important dates in the lives of others. And so our birthday passes and dozens, hundreds, thousands of people comment on our wall with some generic “have a great day” which they’ve probably copy/pasted on every birthday wall of every friend for the past year. I find it an interesting litmus test for my own quality of friendship. When a birthday reminder strikes me, I write my friends a private email. Or call them. Something where they can hear from me directly and the rest of the world has no idea. Sure, I appreciate the reminder from the facebook overlords… but if I can’t take the time to step out to personally and privately connect with that friend, then how important do I really count their friendship? And similarly, I seem to receive more facebook birthday wishes from acquaintances than folks I call real friends.

So here we are, not closer at all but on our own stage with our own megaphone screaming “look at me, I’m the greatest thing ever”. Meanwhile, all around us everyone else is doing the same thing and raising the inconsequential moments of our lives into an overwhelming din of point and click vanity.

I long for those moments of one on one time with the handful of people who know me, sharing things they wouldn’t dare put on facebook. Struggles, private victories, or even a shared experience, allowed to land with the private resonance of real connection.

But the facebook experience has grown to a strange blending of Cyberdine and big brother. We can’t unplug the beast, it knows all our secrets and has begun to shape the very culture which gave it life. We even continue to feed it with special shout outs to other members @WhoeverTheyAre. The same members who probably don’t have a picture from the last decade, or show anything but their children, or give us any real pertinent information about their lives, their truth, and their day to day. We know what TV shows they like. Where they grew up. And what day to post an ingenuine birthday wish on the home of their digital avatar. Yet we call them friends.

We’ve all been assimilated. The Matrix is real, and I’d like to unplug.

But for now you’ll have to excuse me, I need to go update my status with something car related… and I should probably tweet some inane moment of driving I just saw.

And one of you people will probably click “Like”.

As a seventeen year old senior, I remember thinking that I’d be thirty-seven at my twenty year reunion, and that was really old. There were two large errors in that assumption. First off, thirty-seven is far from old. And secondly, there’s no twenty-year high-school reunion on the horizon. Which brings me nicely to my point.

My High School experience was a lie. The perspectives it gave me on the world. The things it taught me. The people I spent time with. Ultimately, they were all proven irrelevant for my adult life. I realize that High School is a rite of passage and a necessary evil, but I experienced it at a fever pitch of breathless importance and it was wasted anxiety and breath.

I went to a small private school, and even in this secluded world our class was singled out as special and uniquely important. Teachers, Parents, and eventually other students talked about how close we all were. We were the class with no cliques. Real friendship and love for each other. I remember looking around at the time and thinking “Really? Cause I can tell you who the popular kids are and they aren’t looking for new members.” Now I look back and see how it was completely untrue. Other classes have stayed in touch. Had reunions. Kept up to date. We’ve never had so much as a dinner in twenty years. By the time I left college even the people I was good friends with in my HS class had dropped completely off my radar.

Until Facebook, of course, which ultimately closed the importance of High School with the smack of a pine-coffin lid. Because the only reason I can think of to reunite with people you haven’t seen since High School graduation is to see who got bald, who got fat, who succeeded and who failed. Morbid? Sure. But I’m yet to meet a single person who hasn’t obsessed over their weight, their outfit, or their story for an upcoming walk down the memory lane of High School. And wasting so much effort to impress those people is just High School all over again. Facebook nicely removes the hassle and expense of traveling to the event and the awkwardness of standing around trying to find something to say to someone you haven’t seen in two decades. Yet you can still tell the folks who bettered themselves, and those who are looking back on High School as the best time of their lives.

Seeing High School as a season, and not a milestone, is the main thing I’m pondering in all this. I know people who look back on it fondly. I know folks who hated it and look back with disdain. Obviously, I’m on the board of directors for the second group. But either way it’s four years which are given huge importance by our culture and then fueled to greater heights by the hormone addled, selfish teenagers who fill the hallways. I spent a year in Norway as part of the popular athlete crowd. I spent three years in Houston as part of the lower-society weird folk. And neither one of them offered any satisfaction or clear picture of the person I would become.

My son is too young for school, and still young enough to not really have friends or play-dates to give him social pressures. And if I can only offer him one thing as he marches into and through his school years, I hope I can help him find perspective. He won’t listen most of the time, I realize, but if I can just get through now and then maybe he’ll realize that who you are in school doesn’t dictate who you can become.

My accomplishments, struggles, and daily life are nothing like I imagined or believed they would be when I was seventeen. I’ve seen and done things which would probably seem impressive to that acne-plagued version of myself, but they would also sound like the life of someone else. High School was a bubble with poor ventilation. Real life and fresh air came later.

Am I a good man? Am I a success? These are questions other people will have to say. I’m happy. I’m blessed. I’m very different than High School suggested, and far better. Maybe everyone feels that way, but I suspect they don’t.

Life isn’t perfect, of course. There are things I’d change. Struggles I face that would have made my high school head explode. But I’ve lived more than twice as long as that kid in High School, and it’s the perspective that makes all the difference. I hope and strive to revel in the highs of my daily life. They are there, even when I ignore them to obsess over something that seems important but is actually irrelevant.

Like High School.

We’re thrilled that our son is so fascinated by books, and he often grabs them and sits, happily flipping through each page and speaking in gibberish. He understands the concept, he just has no vocabulary or actual retention. Supposedly this is a good sign at this age… as opposed to doing it later in life when it involves help from people in lab coats.

All of this mock-reading has exposed me to all kinds of children’s books. And as a writer I’ve been struck by the fact that writing for children is mostly inane and completely lacking in an actual writing talent. Suddenly I understand why random celebrities become moms and then make the talk show circuit as a “new children’s author”. It’s like getting your driver’s license and then going around calling yourself a race driver… operating at the lowest level doesn’t make you an expert.

Don’t believe me? Let’s break down the basic tenants of literature available for the under 3 reader. Pages as thick as a laptop. Bright colors. A story which can be broken into simple sentences and mentions the following: Animals. Colors. Body parts. Basic social concepts. Textures. Shapes. And possibly family. And the real award winning kid-lit does something amazing… it combines things from the list!

Plus, if laid out in simple sentences, the average book could go out as a Tweet. 300 words is the equivalent of War and Peace among children’s books.

Some of you might be saying “I think it’s a lot harder than it looks…”. But I just can’t shake the fact that some actresses who can’t put a thought together without a script in front of them start breeding and decide “I’m the Hemmingway for toddlers.”. These are the same folks who can’t tell you how to get from Hollywood to Disneyland without a GPS.

So, I’m thinking of becoming a children’s author, and I present to you my first work, “Something on your finger”. But without the proper pictograms and industrial cardboard pages you’ll be able to read it quite rapidly.

Something on your finger, Yellow, Green, & Sticky

Touch it. Squeeze it. But it’s awfully Icky.

Don’t wipe on your sister, that’s not where it goes.

Wipe it in a Kleenex, that’s where you put stuff from you nose.

See? Body parts, colors, textures, family, social lessons, and even brand awareness. I forgot shapes, I suppose, but I’ll include that in the sequel “Something in your Closet” – It’s a toddler-horror and it’s gonna be the Twilight series for the under 2 reader.

Watch for me on the talk show circuit.

It’s difficult for me to remember the last time I saw something completely new. I mean something so decidedly different that it left me without a similar experience to draw upon and compare. Yet everything in our lives was once as mind-freezing as an alien encounter. This is the constant experience of a toddler.

The strange side-effect of witnessing this, is the way it cuts loose the bonds of cynicism and allows an adult the chance to live on two planes at once. In one universe you know all about the crazy new discovery made by your little person, but in the other universe you’re able to look at it and marvel along with them without excuse.

We adults have to have an excuse. We need a reason to get excited. We can’t stop in the Starbucks line and poke the saran-wrapped sandwiches just to watch the dressing bulge. People would stare. Someone would sigh or yell at us to get moving, and after enough time people with either badges or white coats would come and take us away. Yet stand in the same line with a toddler and the whole world lets you poke and prod and marvel at the squishy goodness of it all.

I’ve been having this experience with animals. At this point in life I’ve seen a good example of just about every creature, so I find them fun to watch, but never shocking. Meanwhile my son has gained an obsession with elephants. We watch countless elephants go by on video and in books and he’ll raise one arm and make a weak and warped elephant noise over and over. (The truth is it looks like he’s doing a child’s version of the Hitler salute, but we know what he means and just try to keep our little Aryan masterpiece from doing this in public.) He can’t say elephant, but it fascinates him beyond all other creatures. To my son, Elephants are like Justin Bieber with better hair.

What I’m most enjoying about this elephant-a-palooza is the chance to notice the following:

Elephants are freaky and fascinating. I mean, really… legs like trees but they can’t run well. Ears like satellite dishes but they aren’t known for their hearing. (By the way, why do we associate elephants with great memories? They seem to get stuck in the same mudhole every year without remembering it happened before). And of course, the strange fact that an elephant’s most dexterous limb… isn’t a limb at all. Try grabbing your next meal with your nose.

And don’t even get me started on giraffes. Longest necks in the world, but no voicebox. What’s going on there?

I guess it just proves that even God gets bored. After making every possible permutation of quadrupeds, riffing on the basic ideas of cat, dog, and horse until he was pulling out his beard…

“Hey Gabriel… come look at this one. It’s nose is it’s arm… “
“That’s awesomely strange and wonderful, your Almighty-ness.”
“Yes. I know.”

And He went off to make a platypus and follow up with an ostrich.

So now here I am like a strange guide into an alien safari. It’s all new stuff, and it’s all cool enough to get stared at, touched, turned over, and maybe even chewed on. And really, how much can you say you know about something if you’ve never put a handful of it in your mouth? Or at the very least, paused and marveled.

Poor kid got cynical me as a father. Which leaves me scrambling to find the wonder in everything… and pass it on.

The Octopus, for example. Eight legs and no bones. Did God skip a step? Was there a bet in Heaven? Was this the result of a creation themed game of ad-libs? Forget area 51… aliens are already here.

And my son hasn’t even seen one yet.

I don’t remember learning English. I’m sure I was full of questions about it, but I truly have no memories of asking about a word or learning a new phrase. For me, vocabulary exercises are linked to those specially hellish memories of classes which couldn’t end fast enough. Yet, now that we’re spending time parroting things for my son I’ve gained a new perspective on the enormous mountain of learning associated with English. In fact, maybe I need to learn something else because the scale can’t be larger than the jumbled mess of rules and exceptions which make up my native tongue.

The depth of English struck me today in two separate moments of vocabulary. In one, I joked with a co-worker and my little throw-away quip fell flat because of my word choice. I didn’t miss-speak or accidentally offend, but I used a word which required a split second of “wait, what does that mean?”. Jokes that miss large sections of your audience are only funny if you’re Eddie Izzard. I. Am. Not. So this turned into a brief conversation about the differences in our vocabularies. Of course, this was also comic gold.

How is it we can grow up in the same country, with the same language, and same basic educational system, yet glean such different ways to communicate? Word choice is as unique as our fingerprints. And there’s no telling what can spark you to mine the depths of your verbal vault.

This evening my wife began reading a new book for our small group. And there on the first page was a word she hadn’t seen before. Now if we’re all honest, any book that you makes you think will probably contain a word or two you aren’t that familiar with. For my wife, it just happened to be on the first page – which means she got it out of the way, and can now go on with enjoying the read.
Anyway…

The word was: “exegeted”. Some of you are now asking google what it means, and that’s fine. Others of you may do what I did:

“Oh, from the word Exegesis,” I said, and began to offer a marginal definition.

“Exa-Jesus”, my wife says to me. As in – Used to be the Son of God and then got tired of the hassle and passed the role on to someone else. The Savior Formerly Known as Christ. (Much to my chagrin… this is not the definition)

Which made me wonder… when did I learn the word “Exegesis”? Why on earth did I retain this word? And more importantly, how could I better use the brain-space being wasted by words which will only cross my path every dusty decade or so. After all… I’ve forgotten 80% of the math I ever learned. Which really doesn’t matter because my phone can calculate the return trajectory of Apollo 13 better than a room full of 1960s rocket scientists. But, somehow my brain has decided that words need to be pulled to the core while anything dealing with numbers can be marched to the exit.

I am a superfluous confluence of vernacular.

My apologies. Apparently this line of thinking has stirred the words in my brain like kicking an ant hill.

So this is the challenge awaiting my son… learning not only enough to communicate, but also tolerate his father’s outbursts of strange syllables. He’ll have to apologize to his friends for my vocabulary tourettes. Then help me figure out how old he is by counting on my fingers.

Ultimately, I’m just marveling how we all grow into such different aptitudes. How do the same core ingredients splinter into a cornucopia of varied skills and interests? My son learned perfect rhythm months ago but can’t say Hippo. So mostly, I’m hoping that all our instant access to definitions and new information will keep my brain sharp while it hones his into a marvel. Cause I’m still learning my first language.

-Note= No thesaurus was used (or injured) in the making of this article. All these words came out of my head, but spell-check nearly exploded trying to get them right.

I’ve focused in on one trait; I’m often tripped up by my own expectations.

As a writer, life is a series of scenes and possibilities. Say one thing and a whole moment, or conversation, or evening goes a different way than it would have if you’d said the opposite. So I spend far too much time over-thinking. I don’t live in this current moment very much. While others might think “let’s go get a nice bottle of wine and enjoy ourselves…” I’m already thinking how everyone get back home. Or which members of the group will have to be chaperoned once they get tipsy. Or how those same folks will have to deal with tomorrow. Yup… I’m a buzzkill.

This future-thinking also means I’m calculating the end result and building up my expectations for that outcome. And this can create a world of no good news. When I’m expecting the worst, and it happens like I think – well, that’s hardly a victory. But when it turns out better than I expect, I’m more caught off-guard than genuinely pleased. Far worse are those times when I have high expectations, as great things can happen which still fall short of my measure and I fail to see the blessing because it missed my mark.

I look back on my accomplishments, my marriage, or some fun excursion and often see – in hindsight – that I was in an enviable position. But in the midst of those moments I was often disappointed in some way. Feeling the gap between my expectations and the often great reality. Only after the fact do I really see how wonderful things were in that moment.

I hate this about myself. And even with this realization I still find myself more likely to brood in a moment than get lost in one. So I’m trying to lose my expectations. To not think what a moment could be, or should be, but only see it for what it is – and wonder at the discovery.

On the other side are the “positive thinker” crowd. Those folks who say everything will turn out wonderfully if you just believe it will. And believe it or not I’ve tried that exact approach. I’ve gone through seasons where I focused on everything turning out wonderfully. I believed in the flowers and candy. I expected to hear “yes” more than “no”. I tried it for a while, in fact. But, that little expectation problem still gets in the way. And I discovered that the people I know who believe in positive thinking are the same people I call “lucky”.

You probably know a lucky person. I know a couple. These are the folks who stumble into good fortune. I’m not saying these people have perfect lives, everyone has struggles and failures just under the surface. No, I’m saying those people who seem to always win the free item, or go home with the pretty girl, or fall into a great opportunity… even while their lives are a mess! The lucky person gets away with a warning, the rest of us get the speeding ticket.

I’ve come to expect this too… and there I go again.

Now here we are… 2011. And as I look out over a new year I conclude I want to be surprised. I want to remove my bar of expectation and be blessed in the now. I will continue to strive for success, because it’s not in my makeup to quit. But when success comes I hope to be lifted on the joy of it like surfer on the wave. I must learn to live in the moment.

I already expect I’ll fail. Which proves just how hard this is for me…

However, I’m talking about lessons – observations, really – I would not have come to without our little guy around. So, here are my top five for year one:

1 – Cattle Roping was invented by parents

I grew up in Texas, so by default I’m supposed to know how to rope, ride, and chase critters. Or so they tell me. But I have to admit I’ve always wondered why there’s so many theatrics when it comes to roping a calf. It’s a small, dumb animal. The roping horse is like Steven Hawking by comparison. So, for the even more intelligent human to come sailing off the already superior horse, tackle a calf, and tie its legs together kinda feels like you’re picking on the little guy.

Bear roping. Now that’s a fair sport.

But now I’ve realized that some cowboy with a little one at home got an unruly calf one day and figured… “Wait, I know how to handle this”. Thus, calf roping was born.

Don’t believe me? Try putting a diaper on an infant who can crawl. They no longer want to lay on their back. To them, everything is more interesting than lying there while you, quite literally, deal with their shit. So I’ve held both wrists and ankles in one hand while I perform the world’s fastest and least graceful diaper change with the other.

I’ve also said, screw it, and diapered the little minion while he’s crawling away. Which was about the time I realized the purpose of cattle roping. In fact, I’d probably be damn good at it.

2 – Hardcovers are awesome

Somewhere in this world of valuable space, scarce finances, and ebooks I decided that hard covers are a complete waste. I realize that is supposed to be sacrilege for a writer, but I see no purpose in a brick of reading material when it’s easier in softback, ebook, or audio file.

But Hardcovers are the greatest thing to happen to infants. You become thankful that your DVD collection is in those bulky, unnecessarily-large cases. “Sure, son, beat yourself in the head with Citizen Kane. Hurts, don’t it!”.

And the books children read are as thick as Science textbooks. But, they’re only six pages long. Each page is made of an individual two-by-four with rounded edges. Why? So that papercuts are impossible, and the pages won’t fall prey to the fate of normal paper which is…

Ripping. This is the natural pastime of unreading toddlers everywhere. My son loves flip books – they have handy flaps on each page which make tearing especially easy. And Dad’s car magazines exist for the sole purpose of creating confetti balls.

Which leads me to a new measure of childhood maturity, it’s not handing them the car keys, but actually reading a magazine.

3 – You will make noises

Ever looked at a parent and wondered how they became insane enough to repeat an annoying noise over and over while they sit at a restaurant? All it takes is one child discovering their voice or timing out and you’ll turn into a master of stupid sounds from an annoying made up language.

These little ones discover noises they can make and use it like a new toy until something else gets their attention. That leaves only a frazzled parent between you and a restaurant filled with an infant’s screaming. Suddenly, the parent turns into a makeup-less clown on a no-sleep bender. Faces. Chirps. Tongue out shenanigans. Partial words said over and over associated with jerky rocking motions into the child’s face. The only other place this happens is in the nice quiet hospitals with the white coats and straight jackets.

“Honey, is that man insane?… Oh, no wait… he has an infant.”

And this ewok noise I’m making is keeping him quiet. So go back to your dinner.

4 – Born to Dance

What makes us human and above lower forms of life? Complex thought? Tool building? Or maybe our construction of huge systems and cities?

I’ve come up with one. Rhythm. Not just the sense and awareness of the beat, but the uncontrollable urge to shake your ass. A part of me always thought you learned to really hear and appreciate music. But my son has been bobbing in time with sound since he could sit up. Give him a tune and he’ll shake and flail with abandon, a trait we all lose at some point when we get self-conscious. But for now, he’s a sucker for a good beat, and he was born that way. I lost it. I hope he never does.

5 – The Matrix exists.

No, I don’t mean we’re all living in a huge constructed program being used for batteries. I’m talking specifically about the “download” in the Matrix where a person doesn’t know how to fight one minute and then a moment later has all the knowledge to take down an army of Bruce Lees.

I’ve watched my son learn in this way. I don’t know where the huge brain needle is when this happens, but one minute he can’t do something and the next it just… clicks.

Clapping was this way. No idea. Can’t get it. No awareness. Then, literally, he woke up one morning going “Hey guys, look what I can do… applause.” I didn’t upload the program. And my wife wants to kill every nurse that approaches him with a needle, so I don’t think she did it either.

The most impressive one has been climbing the stairs, cause unlike clapping you can get injured if you do it wrong. The first few attempts were more like lucky falling and fumbling, finding himself atop a stair, maybe two, before getting bored of the whole enterprise. Then a few months ago, my wife looked around to discover our little guy had vanished. Where was he? Completely upstairs and still on the move.**

But going down the stairs eluded our little guy for quite some time. We tried to help. We moved him through the motion. We sat by him and let him try different things. However, as you may have noticed, there are a lot of limbs and coordination involved when you’re crawling down something. Then, a few days ago as I watched… he simply did it… no explanation or trial runs, he just coordinated all his limbs and climbed down the stairs.

So I began to wonder where this chair is he gets strapped into for a download. There’s a few things I would like to learn this way and save all the pesky practice and failure. After much thought, I think the key is naps.

**(As a side note, she told me this story with fear for his safety and concern that her moment of looking away was proof of terrible mothering – and my gut reaction was… “Awesome… good for him”. – which encapsulated the difference between men and women. I suppose it also labels me as one of those “hard knock” parents – “Yeah, let him stick his finger in the socket, he’ll only do that once!”. Thankfully he does have his mother.)

I have no doubt there will be many more revelations of the world through my son’s discoveries. But for now the little guy needs to be roped, and then he’s going to chew on a hardcover book. Eventually, he’ll go down for a nap while we make a series of strange noises, at which point I intend to sleep as well because I’m hoping to wake up speaking French.

“Oh, that’s such a great age….”

This declaration brings me to one of two possibilities; the person speaking either has no recollection of a child this age, or they are being factious.

Imagine for a moment you have a long-term houseguest. They don’t speak a word of English, so your communication consists of guesswork based on their emotional responses. Laughing? They like what’s happening. Shrieking? Try something different. This may seem black and white on first glance, but if an activity has many variables then you’re left to guess which one is the offending party with only these on-off / happy-sad responses to lead you. This is the vocabulary of a one-year old.

Many well meaning people attempt to mask the fact that there is no telling what’s wrong with your screaming child by informing you that they are either a) tired, or b) hungry. Except when you look at the life of these one-year-olds you’ll find that 14 hours of the day is spent sleeping and two or so is spent eating. For you math prodigies out there, that leaves eight hours when the only think they definitely don’t need is a nap or something to eat!

But it’s a great age.

Honestly, I wonder how the human race has survived this long. My dog was born knowing how to walk, eat and even designate a place to crap all by herself. Yet, little humans are born only knowing how to wail and sleep. Even the laughing comes later. And while animals understand grooming without reading fashion magazines or looking in a mirror, my son lets snot roll down his face in pencil thick lines and then freaks out when anyone attempts to wipe them clean.

I am no better. I have an early memory of my mom saying to me “Don’t you feel the snot when it rolls out of your nose?” Apparently I didn’t, because this happened more than once. Obviously I was older than one at the time, since she knew I understood and was expecting an answer.

You wanna know a great age? Twenty-five. Or how about Thirty! We can walk, talk, eat, crap and drive all by ourselves. Theoretically we can carry on intelligent conversations, deal in complex problem solving, and maybe even keep the snot off our faces.

I realize people think fondly of the infant phase because of little shoes, little hugs, and little laughter. But those in no way counter-act little productivity, little quiet, and little sleep.

My wife recently heard the first two years of a kid’s life described as the “Dead Zone”. That’s the first real description I’ve heard, as it encapsulates the walking-dead, what-day-is-it, cloud of early parenting. Of course… this will be followed by the terrible twos, which obviously won’t get grouped into the “great age” camp any time soon.

In fact, the mid-thirties is a great age… except my wife and I have jumped right past it into some time a decade from now. We had seemed frozen in time for much of our marriage, only looking fractionally older than the day we married. Yet, parenthood has brought the time machine along with it and overshot us past our real age to something needing black arm bands and over-the-hill joke balloons.

I’d like to think things will settle out at some point, but by then our little guy will probably be packing for college. At least he’ll be able to tell us what’s going on in his head by then, and hopefully he’ll keep the snot off his face.

For now, though… we’re in the dead zone. And when the next person tells me it’s a great age I may sit down suddenly, cry inexplicably, and blow snot bubbles. Meanwhile, my dog just borrowed the car keys.

I simply love driving. I didn’t even like it this much when I was 16.

Last month we took a family roadtrip to LA. Between the trip itself, two days on a racetrack, a half day in the Malibu canyon roads, and full days evaluating the new Cadillac CTS coupe, I logged more than 2000 miles behind the wheel in that week. And I didn’t even drive every day. In fact, I would have happily driven more.

Somewhere in the midst of this marathon of wheel-time I realized something quite odd. I’m not a sports fan, and I’ve known for quite some time that the sports which interest me (Climbing, Cycling, Skiing, etc) are all sports of individual achievement. I’ve somehow avoided the typical interest in sports with “ball” at the end of the title. However, my driving obsession closely resembles something else I’ve always blown off: Golf.

For years I’ve listened to golfers go starry-eyed while they talk about their perfect round. I shake my head because I simply don’t get it and don’t care to find it. Yet, now I must admit that the similarities are quite glaring:

Golfer’s always talk about how much they enjoy being in the outdoors and interacting with nature. While I find walking on the manicured lawns of a manmade creation to be a pretty anteceptic way to enjoy nature, I have to admit that I’m not exactly a mountain man as I race down a ribbon of asphalt cut into a mountain as the air-conditioner keeps things perfect.

Then there’s the maddening exactness, where golfers keep returning to their hobby in the hopes of achieving fractions of improvement. I know I can infuriate or mind-numb just as easily as I go in search of the perfect corner exit or a lap time two-tenths lower than my personal best. “Yes, I realize this is my thirty-fifth lap of the same two mile course, but this time I think I’ve really figured out the apex of corner five.”

See… you’re asleep already. Now start talking about your new putter or nearly getting under par, and I’ll wish for a coma.

Then there’s the social aspect of golf, where grown men stand around talking about nothing while wearing terrible clothes and looking jealously at the guy with the newest piece of gear.

Again, I’m without a leg to stand on, as car guys stand around wearing clothes with more logos and badges than the cars they own and talk about the best synthetic oil until someone pulls in with that exotic which got released last week.

Truth be told… I find this to be just as mind-numbing as the golfer’s discussion, but the concept is at least the same.

My conclusion? Well, I guess I’m just as boring as every other adult male. And I’ve finally found a common understanding with the avid golfers I know.

Except I could die in a spectacular crash next weekend… you don’t find that in golf. Maybe that’s what it needs.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve finally figured out the perfect line for that chicane I did this morning.

Sorry… it’s like a Par 5 with a water hazard. That help?