I am eating a cheeseburger, sipping beer, looking at a restaurant full of families and kids.
There is a band playing. They couldn’t be any worse if they detuned their instruments and started making bodily noises over the microphone.
But the children are loving the music. Some are dancing. Others are screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
“That’s all my kids know how to say,” says one of my exasperated friends. “‘Daddy, Daddy.’ Like a warped record.”
I love kids. I have always wondered how people with children enjoy their lives. I look around at a table of my middle-aged friends and I am thinking of this very thing.
These young parents seem to have more responsibility than the rest of us civilians. In fact, they’re so responsible that they can’t even focus on a conversation for more than one-point-nine seconds.
They are always too busy looking from the corners of their eyes, waiting for an impending catastrophe caused by a screaming toddler.
My friend Billy, for instance, is trying to tell a story, but his sentences are incoherent because he
keeps diverting his eyes toward his kids. “Hey,” he begins. “You remember when we were fifteen…”
Billy turns his head.
“...And there was that water tower….”
Another head turn.
“...With the Hallelujah Chorus and..”
Then he jerks his head and shouts, “PUT YOUR SISTER DOWN, RIGHT NOW! RIGHT NOW, I SAID! DON’T MAKE ME COME OVER THERE! I SWEAR, I WILL WHIP YOUR LITTLE…!”
My friend Nathan tells me about being a dad:
“The thing about kids is, they say ‘Daddy’ about fifteen hundred times per day. It’s enough to make you nuts. You get so sick of hearing that word. ‘Daddy, daddy.’”
“Yeah,” another friend says. “For once, I wish my kids would just let me pee without having nervous breakdowns outside the door.”
Meantime, my friends’ wives sit at the other side of the table, rocking babies, talking.…