The other day, my wife L shared with me an interesting article about raising children without formal religion (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0115-zuckerman-secular-parenting-20150115-story.html#page=1).  In the article, the author, Phil Zuckerman, suggests that children who grow up in secular households usually turn out to be quite good people.  They typically have close ties to their families, have strong moral values, are very self-confident, exhibit less racism, and are even less likely to commit crimes.   

Those are some pretty big claims, Mr. Zuckerman.  I won’t be standing anywhere near you in the next thunderstorm.

The article was of particular interest to me and L, as we have started to talk about whether and how we might incorporate religion and spirituality into our children’s lives.  Conversations like these, though, usually occur after they have finally been put to bed at night, when the dishes are still piled up in the kitchen sink like an automotive junkyard, the lunches for the next day still have not made themselves, and Scandal is about to come on. 

In other words, we’ve made very little progress.

When I think about this topic, I recall my experience as a church-going little boy in the 1980s.  Our own experience, after all, would seem to be a logical starting point in the Analysis.  I grew up in a Catholic family, and went to a church called The Holy Name of Mary in Valley Stream, a suburb of New York City just east of the Queens border.  We were strict observers of the rules and the Faith.  We went to Mass every Sunday and every Holy Day of Obligation, even those that nobody else seemed to know existed.  We never ate anything within an hour before Mass, just like you’re supposed to do when you go swimming (and just as intuitively sensible).  My brother and I weren’t allowed rub the ashes off our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, even if the sweat from recess or gym class would make it get into our eyes and sting.  We memorized prayers and gave up things for Lent and didn’t eat meat on Fridays and went to Confession at regular intervals and always before major holidays.  The only thing we didn’t do was go to Catholic School, which we made up for by going to religious education classes on weeknights as a condition to our receipt of the Sacraments.  While we might not have gotten the Whole Nine Yards, I think we came pretty close, maybe eight and a half.

I was for the most part an obedient little Catholic boy.  I dutifully went to church and followed the rules, not only because I didn’t have a choice, but because at some point I truly believed it was all important, vital even, to being a Good Person.  But like a lot of other kids, I didn’t really understand the overarching ideas and concepts.  Things like Mercy and Grace and Salvation were far too abstract for me to fully grasp.  And I often didn’t understand the rules I was trying to adhere to or how they should be applied, which at times produced a great deal of confusion and anxiety.  My (attempted) First Holy Communion was a good example of this.

The weather could not have been better on that sunny Sunday morning in the spring of 1988.  All the trees and the shrubs around our church were in full bloom, and the lawn was as green as a lawn could be (and if you have not been to Long Island and think you’ve seen a green lawn, you haven’t.  Some of our lawns actually glow in the dark). Sunlight flooded the main chapel, streaming in though the stained glass windows and the skylights above the altar in the high, pitched roof.  Like the other Communion-receiving boys, I wore a white dress shirt and a clip-on tie under a black polyester-blended suit.  The girls wore white dresses with white patent leather shoes and white tiaras and sometimes white gloves.  We all wore white ribbons on our right arms, and to remember this very special day, our parents took pictures of us with these large, clumsy looking things called “cameras” that used this funny thing called “film” that you had to take to a store to get “developed.”  There was nothing “insta” about our “grams” back then.

I went into the big day thinking I knew all the rules and what everything meant.  First, we would all wait in line, in the main aisle between all the pews, one hand in the other.  When it was our turn to receive, we would step up to the Priest and put our hands out, left over right.  The Priest would say “the Body of Christ”, we would say “Amen”,  and the Priest would give us the Body, putting it into our left hand.  We would then take it with our right hand, consume it, make the Sign of the Cross, return to our pews and say a post-Communion prayer, a rough version of which I had even pre-prepared.  There were a few other Important Things to Remember:

• We were not to visibly chew the Body after we received it, like in the manner of a cow or something.
• In fact, we were not supposed to make any movements with our jaw at all; to the outside observer, it shouldn’t appear that we were eating anything.
• Finally, we were not supposed to say the Communion prayer until we had fully consumed – and thus fully Received – His Body.

Check, check and check.  I had it all down.  I was ready to receive Him!

Then came the wafer – the Bread itself.

For Catholics, at Communion, wafers are the Body, transformed as such at the consecration by the Priest.  In our church, the wafers were circular, about the size of a poker chip, but much thinner.  They didn’t really taste like anything.  Above all, they were dry.  Like, really dry.  Indeed, if I were to select the one edible substance that is perhaps the most difficult thing to consume while making it seem as though you are not consuming anything, I would pick the Communion Wafer.

To make a long story a bit less long, let’s just say that, being the strict follower of the rules that I was, I never did say that First Communion prayer, even though I kneeled in the pew and pretended to do so.  Instead, I managed to get the Body of Our Lord so well stuck in the roof of my mouth that It stayed there not only for the remainder of the Mass, but also through all the final picture taking, the whole car-ride home, and even the first three attempts I made at washing It down with tap water from the bathroom sink, until I finally relented and loosened It up with a toothbrush (making any contact with the Body after consumption was a complete and total No-No).  After all the suffering Jesus had endured for us, I found a way to inflict still more.  I felt terrible.

I kept this all firmly to myself, both during the ordeal and thereafter, until my next Confession, when I told the Priest what had happened.  He told me that I shouldn’t worry too much about it, and that I needn’t take the rules so literally.  I thus became the first eight-year old boy in the history of the Roman Catholic Church who was ever told by a Priest to lighten up.

As I got older, I would come to understand the rules and the concepts a little better – though to this day I try my best to keep the chewing to an absolute minimum.  What will we end up doing with our kids, in terms of religion?  Not sure.  At some point, L and I will actually have that conversation we’ve been meaning to have, and we’ll talk about the Zuckerman article and how she grew up and how I grew up and the things that we think are Important and a bunch of other stuff.  I don’t know where that conversation will lead us, but regardless of where it does, we’ll try to help them not get lost in all the rules, and lose sight of the big picture.

Here is a Bulletin of today’s Top Stories from around the world in Parenting.  These briefings have all been fact-checked by our Fact-Checking Department, thus ensuring that they have been fact-checked by our Fact-Checking Department.

• In a shocking report released by the national activist Parenting group Get Real, over 90% of the members of the American Academy of Pediatrics do not follow the organization’s guidelines regarding television watching and other forms of screen time when it comes to their own kids.  “Two hours a day?  That’s ridiculous”, one nationally acclaimed pediatrician is quoted as saying.  “We only say that about your kids because we don’t have to deal with them after their check-up.”  Another doctor, and father of twin infant boys, allegedly admitted that the only time he can ever shower is when he sticks them in a Pack N’ Play in front of re-runs of Dukes of Hazard.  “No TV before age 2?  What a bunch of jerks we are.  And, by the way, how awesome was Dukes of Hazard?”  The president of the AAP, Dr. Richard Sans Kids, has thus far not commented on the report.
• This morning, an area man resolved that his 5-year old daughter will not, after all, become the Next Mozart.  “About six months ago, she started banging the keys of our piano, and we really thought we heard something, something really special, like we found a talent lying deep inside her”, said the disappointed dad.  “But the piano classes just haven’t worked out.  After six months, she still has trouble sitting through the hour-long lesson, and can’t play even half of a Concerto.”  When he explained to the young girl her total failure, she simply said “OK”, and walked off to her play room, like nothing happened.  “It’ll take some time for her to process this”, said the father, as he picked up the scattered pieces of his broken dreams.
• Earlier today, police apprehended a group of 13-year old boys in a local park after receiving calls from concerned residents that they were playing a so-called “pick-up” game of basketball without any adults present.  “I have never seen anything like it”, said one of the residents, describing a chaotic, totally unsupervised scene.  “The kids were running into each other and setting picks and boxing each other out and fighting for rebounds, all without uniforms or coaches.  They were even arguing about whether someone’s foot stepped out of bounds.  It’s almost like they were keeping score.”  Police confirmed that no adults were anywhere in sight, and that one of the teams even claimed to have “won” the game.  Complicating matters even further, when the police eventually returned the suspects to their homes, one of the parents allegedly confessed that her boy was instructed to walk home, even though it clearly had begun to get dark, thinking that was somehow an acceptable way to Parent.  The case remains under investigation.
• In anticipation of a possible major snow storm, a local school district in Southeastern Pennsylvania has taken the extraordinary step of not only closing all schools tomorrow, before the arrival of the very first flurry, but also for the remainder of this Winter and the entire Winter of the 2015/2016 school year.  At a press conference this afternoon, the District Superintendent defended the measure.  Speaking in front of the township’s only snowplow, he said, “As we have seen time and again here in the Philadelphia area, it may snow at some point during the Winter, and we owe it to our students and their Parents to take the guesswork out of determining when school will be cancelled.”  When a taxpayer asked if he should expect a partial refund on his school taxes for the cancelled portion of the school year, Superintendent Hasty demurred, stating that the cost savings would be re-invested in an additional plow.  “If we can get that number up to maybe like four”, he said, “then I think we can get our kids back to school in the Winter, and get our Parents back to being gainfully employed.”

[In this Series of Blog Postings, I will offer some Unsolicited Advice on various topics pertaining to Parenting.  I trust you’ll be glad you didn’t ask for it.  In this installment, we’ll talk about surviving errand-running with your children, especially when you, the Parent, are out-numbered.  Happy reading!]

Frequently on Sunday mornings, I take my kids out to run errands while my wife catches up on a few things (and if you are thinking that’s poor negotiating on my part, you would be right).  Sometimes we’ll go to the grocery store and do the weekly food shopping.  Other times, we’ll go someplace like Target or the Library.  If I am feeling really ambitious, we’ll do more than one of those things.  With three of them and only one of me, these trips can be pretty challenging.  Here are some techniques that I have found to be helpful in managing them:

1.    Don’t Use Shopping Carts That Look Fun.  For shoppers with small kids, our grocery store of choice offers shopping carts that have car-shaped compartments for them to sit in, right in front of the main shopping basket.  In theory, this is a great idea – the kids will have fun in the car while you work methodically through your list, and possibly even do some price comparisons and nutrition-label reading.  I even like the “out of sight, out of mind” theory of putting the car way in the front, which allows the Parent to not hear much of what is going on.  In practice, however, it’s a horrible idea, at least when multiple children are involved; before you know it, arms and legs and heads, if not whole bodies, are likely to be coming out of each of the passenger doors.  You can ignore that for a few minutes and get away with it, but soon other shoppers start coming dangerously close to running into and/or over those body parts, and one of the few things that can make shopping with your kids even more difficult is a trip to the Emergency Room.  We’ve tried a supposedly safer version of this “car-cart”, where the car is elevated and behind the basket (i.e. right where you are pushing), but there’s something about kids and a grocery store and a big toy-like device that inherently inspires pushing and shoving and General Conflict and Acrimony.  So, save yourself the hassle and skip the fun-looking carts.  If they are shaped like cars, tell your kids they are out of gas, or bribe them with something unhealthful.  You will thank yourself in the end.

I know, some readers out there are wondering how they should transport their children in this situation, assuming that they cannot walk, or if they can walk, that they cannot do so competently and/or without getting into Trouble.  Here are some possible solutions, all of which will need to be tailored to suit the particulars of your children, including the actual number of children involved, and all of which have side effects, as described below:

• Double-Fist It.  This method involves pushing the shopping cart with one hand and your baby-stroller with the other. The advantage of this method is that, if you’re dealing with three children (and a double stroller), they are all strapped to their seats, which is really what you want in this kind of situation.  Side effects include (a) persistent wondering about how in the hell you’ve gotten to a point in your life where you are pushing a shopping cart and a baby stroller around a crowded grocery store, and/or (b) not being able to accomplish anything at all.  
• Baby Carriers.  You can always throw one of them in the good-old Baby Carrier.  If you’ve only got two with you, you put one right in there and other in the regular cart-seat.  Then, off you go.  That’s a pretty nice solution, but note the side effects in the next bullet point. 
• Muscle It Up.  For whatever reason – I think it’s pretty much mental weakness – whenever I wear a baby in a Baby Carrier, I get nauseous.  It’s a good thing I never had to be pregnant.  I am also prone to leaving things like this at home.  For those of you out there with similar issues, you can always just carry one through the store, and put the other in the cart-seat. Side effects include bicep muscle cramping and spasming in the arm that is doing the carrying, and extreme difficulty getting your wallet out of your back pocket when it comes time to check-out. 
• Re-Consider Your Plans.  Carefully consider whether you really do in fact need to go grocery shopping.  Do you really need that milk, or will water do for the night?  Were they really going to eat the dinner you cooked anyway?  Will anyone complain if you just mail the whole thing in and order a pizza?   

2.     Do Not – And I Repeat, Do Not – Allow The Kids To Use The Kiddie Carts.  Some grocery stores are now offering Parents the option to allow their children to push small, mini-shopping carts around the store.  Unlike the car shopping carts, which at least theoretically have some promise, this is an awful idea, plain and simple, and whoever thought of it needs to be placed on a good, long Time-Out. What do you think is going to happen when you combine (a) young children, (b) carts with wheels that are supposed to be pushed, and (c) crowded grocery stores?  Anything good?  Come on, national grocery store conglomerates that shall remain un-named (but that sell lots of organic, locally produced products and really quite nifty frozen dinners that make for great dinner solutions when time is running out at night)!  Get with it!  If you really wanted to help us Parents out, make a part of your store a baby-sitting corner where you promise that they will be doing Productive Things while you watch them, like reading books or watching videos about the importance of supporting local farmers by shopping at stores like [insert names of said unnamed stores].  We won’t even check to see if that’s actually happening, or be bothered by the commercial propaganda you are infiltrating their minds with, as long as you can keep them in an enclosed and relatively secure environment for thirty minutes, and away from those mini-shopping carts.

3.     Make Use of Low Standards (**Applicable to Men Only).  Whenever I am out in public with my children, I get a good deal of sympathetic looks and compliments as to what a Great Job I am doing.  One time, I was in a small public library with J, G and E, returning over-due books.  I somehow thought it would be fun to browse around the Children’s Section, to see if we could find anything interesting.  In less than three minutes, J and G were fighting over trains on a toy train table, and E was pulling picture books off the previously alphabetically categorized bookshelf.  All of them were making far, far too much noise, and the whole situation deteriorated rapidly, even by our standards.  So I quickly gathered them up and made my way out the door.  Before we left, though, another library-goer called us over.  She was an older woman, maybe in her late 60s or early 70s.  She looked kindly upon the children and remarked about how cute they all were.  Then she pulled me aside and told me that I was doing a Great Job, and that, when I went home, I should go and tell that to my wife.

I certainly appreciated the sentiment, and was absolutely sure to go home and tell my wife (Footnote #1).  For men, there’s a pretty low standard for achieving “Great Job” status when it comes to the management of children.  I am pretty sure if I were a woman, I would not have gotten that compliment.  Actually, I think if I were a woman, the other library-goers would have been grumbling under their breaths as to why I couldn’t get my unruly kids under control.  Similarly, in the grocery store, other shoppers wouldn’t just expect me to make sure my kids aren’t eating raw chicken off the floor before sending me their kudos.  In short, if I was a woman, I would only be doing my Job; there would be nothing exceptional or Great about it.

What an awesome deal, right fellas?  Right now, it’s still new and trendy and Impressive to be that guy wearing the baby-filled Bjorn and shopping for chlorine-free diapers at the local Whole Foods (Footnote #2).  We get TONS of credit for doing seemingly heroic stuff like this, even though our female counterparts have been doing this since – oh, I don’t know, let’s say the beginning of Time, just to round it off.  So, get out there and collect it!  What’s that?  You think there’s some unfairness in this?  Oh, come on!  You can’t think about Justice while you’re shopping in Whole Foods with that Baby in your Bjorn (Footnote #3).  You’re a guy, remember?  Just stay in your lane, don’t forget the diapers, and don’t lose that Baby.  If you can do that, someone will doubtless tell you you’re doing Great.

So there you have it, folks – some free Parenting Advice you didn’t ask for.  Tune in next time for a justification as to why it’s OK to let’s your kids go into swimming pools without first showering, like those annoying signs always say you’re supposed to.

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Footnote #1:  Pick your favorite “unimpressed” expression; that’s the one L gave me. 

Footnote #2: I swear this is not one of the stores obliquely referenced in Bullet Point #1.

Footnote #3: Ok, fine, it was Whole Foods.  The other one was Trader Joe’s.

About a month ago, we took our son G to his first swimming lesson, at our local YMCA.  He had been to about 100 of J’s, watching with me from the pool-side bleachers.  Each time, he would ask if he could take one of his own.  We promised that once he turned three, the minimum age level, we would sign him up.  When that time came, we did.

He was so excited.  He talked about jumping in the pool, the way J always does at the end of his lessons.  He talked about all the swimming teachers he got to know so well, and wondered which one he would get.  And when we bought him a pair of his very own goggles, he put them on in the car-ride home and wore them all around the house, even though we were not going swimming.

Surely, we thought, this would be a piece of cake.

Well, to say it was the opposite of a piece of cake would be an understatement.  It was Meltdown City – and I mean that literally, in that it’s about 1000 degrees in the YMCA pool-house, and hotter still when you are dealing with a flailing 3-year old who absolutely doesn’t want to swim.  It had all the key elements of the Classic Failed Swimming Lesson:  immediate resistance to going in the water; body parts contorting and going limp, sometimes at the same time (I know, sounds odd, but three-year olds can do that); and screams that echoed through the pool-house like a horribly played organ in an empty church.

L said it best when she remarked that at least the car was still warm; we got back into it to go home a mere 7 minutes after we got there.

Fortunately, we had a good deal of experience with failed lessons.  We tried various kinds with J when he was G’s age, and they all ended in early exits, following performances that, more or less, resembled the above.  One time, I took him to a gymnastics class, at this place run by a former Olympic gymnast.  It was filled with cases full of championship trophies and medals and framed pictures of winning teams.  It exuded potential and promise and success.  It was the kind of place that made you day-dream about your kid someday sticking a perfect landing after a killer performance on the Rings in the Olympics, and afterward explaining to an interviewer on national television where it all started.  Well, after two minutes of complete and total resistance – and the spoiling of an otherwise perfectly fine and work-less Saturday morning – the only thing that actually started was our re-consideration of whether this would continue, with a quick conclusion as to the answer: a big, fat, definitive No, regardless of whether we would get a refund for the classes we already paid for (Footnote #1). 

We were ready to make the same assessment for G, after his big “I want to take swimming lessons…psyche!!!” fake-out.  We went back and forth on the issue the whole week (the lessons are weekly).  G was no help; one minute he wanted to go and the next minute he didn’t.  We finally decided that we’d give it one more try, and see how it went.  We would pack it in, and wait until the summer, if we had anything that looked like a repeat of Lesson One.

We predicted an unhappy result; the only question was how much pain we would endure in the process.  But Lesson Two was completely different.  Radically different.  So different, that it was actually kind of weird.   Maybe G didn’t remember Lesson One.  Maybe we prepped him better (but we prepped him for Lesson One, too, I swear we did!).  Or maybe we just hit a few less red lights on the way, and that somehow had an effect on things.  Whatever it was, when we got there, he changed into his swim trunks, walked out to the deck, put on his goggles, ditched the flip-flops, and got right into the pool, all on his own volition and without making so much as a peep.  And when it was his turn to swim, he went right with the flow, kicking his feet and blowing his bubbles and even going on his back, holding on tight to the blue foam kickboard.  In short, he swam his little butt off as much as a 3-year old that doesn’t know how to swim can, all as if Lesson One never happened.  Even the teacher and the other parents were surprised – happy and supportive, of course, but surprised.  At one point, G’s head even by accident went under the water, and I thought for sure the tears were forthcoming.  But on that peculiar Saturday morning, there would be no tears on his little round cheeks.  That morning, it was all just chlorinated water, and I Am Proud of Myself smiles.

As they say in sports, a win is a win, even if you don’t know how you won.  We took that win then, and if the gods of Parenting are so inclined, we’d be happy to take another.

(Footnote #1:  Perhaps the only victory for us that morning was with regard to the refund.  When I asked the gym’s administrative person about it, understanding that the policy was clearly “no refunds”, she gave me a full one – even for the class we attempted to attend.  I can only assume that, having watched the whole charade, she concluded that no one should have to pay to go through something like that.)

All of our kids go to school during the day, when my wife and I are at work.  Our two boys, J and G, go to one school, and our daughter E goes to another.   Each school is part of the same affiliated system, but at the moment, E is too young to attend the one that J and G attend.  If you are saying to yourself, gosh, I wonder if that is inconvenient, I can confirm that it is.  Getting three young children out the door is tricky enough, especially in the middle of winter, when they not only need to be woken up and dressed and pottied and fed, but also bundled in puffy winter jackets and stuffed into car-seats like extra clothing in an overflowing suitcase.  Having two drop-offs – and thus having to unload, then load, then unload again at least one child – is enough to make me want to start drinking heavily the moment I get to my office, assuming I make it there at all.  On these circus-like mornings, I sometimes wonder what decision making process led us to conclude that having three children with two full-time, out-of-the-home jobs and no family living within a 100-mile radius of us was a smart idea.  My mind then begins to wander.  Maybe it was the product of heady over-confidence.  At the time we decided to go for it, we were just getting the hang of being parents of multiple children.  We were going to restaurants and actually eating the food.  We took a few trips on airplanes.  We even were going on some dates (gasp!!!).   In short, we were getting into a little rhythm.  But maybe we over-interpreted that, thinking that we were somehow kicking Parenting’s ass (Footnote #1).  Maybe we were like a football team in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, marching convincingly down to the one-yard line and ready to punch it across the goal-line for the win.  All we needed to do was simply hand the ball off to our running back, who could have tripped once we gave him the ball and still scored the touchdown.  Instead, we decided to call for a passing play, thinking we were just that good, forgetting that the game still hung precariously in the balance, and that we still had less points than they did (I feel like I’ve seen this before somewhere…).

Back on defense we went.

The two drop-off thing will change in about a month or two, when E will be old enough to join J and G at their school.  Words like Hallelujah and visions of white sanded beaches on tropical islands immediately come to mind as I type these words (Footnote #2).  As welcome of a change as this will be (we hope), I got to thinking this morning about how J and G have always been at their current school, having started when they were old enough to go.  That makes E’s school the first that we, as parents, will say good-bye to.

The school is a converted split-level house, off a local side road near Route 30, the main thoroughfare that runs through all the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia.  The top half of the sandstone brick exterior is covered with grey vinyl siding, and the square or near square windows are lined on each side by light orange shutters.  In front of the school there is a low-scale playground enclosed by a split rail fence, where two large trees, a maple and a magnolia, stand on each side of a Little Tikes-like clubhouse with a small green slide.  In the back of the school, there is a higher-grade playground that has a blue, truck shaped jungle-gym and a wooden swing set and a few other things for the older children to play on.  Along the side of the school, a brown deck leads to a garden area toward the back corner of the lot, where well-maintained plants and pruned shrubbery provide a partial buffer against the adjacent parking lot, and allow the children to explore a very small part of the natural world.

The inside of the school has two levels.  About two-thirds of the top level is devoted to the toddler class, for children ranging in age from eighteen months to three years.  The other third, separated by a tall book case and a small baby gate, is for the babies, which, of course, is where E goes, or is supposed to go (lately, I am told, she has been clamoring to join the older gang, a chance she will soon get).  It’s a relatively small space, but perfect for keeping track of babies and emerging toddlers, of which there are no more than four or five at any given time.  There are a few toys and puzzles and block-sets for them to manipulate, all neatly organized on low wooden bookshelves.  Toward the back of the area, there is a separate room, darkened by heavy curtains and filled with cribs, which is used for naps.

When arrive in the morning, I see other parents on the same schedule, pulling their children out of car-seats and remembering to grab their various bags, some filled with nap-sheets and blankets, others with ice-packs and sippy cups of milk.  We do our best to exchange appropriate good-morning greetings while managing all of this.  When I get E in, I take off her puffy winter jacket and put it in her cubby.  I write in a small spiral notebook, where the teachers and I exchange notes as to wake-up times and food consumption and nap-lengths.  I chit-chat with the teacher who typically covers the early mornings, a twenty-something in graduate school at West Chester.  By the time that is all finished, E has settled in; long gone are the days when she had trouble being dropped off.  After making a few rounds about the room, she toddles over to the wooden, baby-sized high-chairs.  Then she lifts up the tray and sits herself down and looks around at us.  It’s time for breakfast.  It’s also time for me to go.

And soon it will be time for E to go, to move on from the “baby school”, as I (wrongly, but for convenience) refer to it to J and G.  Soon, there will another baby that will take her place, who will give her parents difficulty at first, but then settle right in, just like E did.  Soon, her laminated name tag will come off her cubby, and I’ll take her spiral notebook home, and not bring it back.  Maybe we’ll come back and visit, to say hello to the teachers and show them how big she’s gotten and how spunky she still is, and everybody will smile and marvel at it all.  But regardless of whether we do that or not, she’ll be, and we’ll all be, somewhere else.   There is something about a school – or, more accurately, leaving a school you or your child once attended – that has a strangely powerful way of demonstrating this fact of life.

We’ve got about a month left before we move on.  In the remaining mornings, I am sure that J will not want to eat whatever I suggest for breakfast, G will yell at J for not letting him finish his sentence, and E will pour her milk all over her high-chair tray and smile at me while she’s doing it.  I am sure that I will ask what led us to throw a pass when we were on the 1-yard line.  And I am sure that I will find consolation, however small, in the upcoming consolidation of the drop-offs.  But I will also try and remember that a good-bye is looming, and that it will soon need to be said.

(Footnote #1:  To be clear, we were not kicking anyone’s or anything’s ass.)

(Footnote #2: If not abundantly clear at this point, our perspective has been pretty badly distorted since we’ve become parents, perhaps unalterably so.)

When we were kids, it was my father’s job to bring me and my brothers to the barbershop for haircuts.  We always went on Saturday mornings.  Sometimes we’d go to this place on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens. I forget the name of it, but it had lots of wood paneling and smelled like a combination of Old Spice and Clubman Talc. Below the large mirrors were shelves scattered with clippers and wires and numbered bladeguards and narrow glass jars filled with Barbercide and used combs and scissors. The walls had pictures of the barbers and some of their customers and their kids, and a few others of presumably famous people who got their haircut there and left commemorative autographs (I think Keith Hernandez of the Mets might have been one of them; in the 1980s, believe it or not, it was much better to be cheering for the Mets than the Yankees). There were sinks in the back, but you never got your hair washed here, or anywhere else we ever went; after your haircut, you just walked around the rest of the day with an itchy neck and a good deal of clippings on your collar. Around the holiday season, they’d put out bottles of hard liquor for men to drink while they waited for the next open chair; and unlike some other places I’d go to later in life, they were not simply for show, even for the Saturday morning crowd.

Eventually, we found a place that we’d more consistently go to in Malvern, closer to our house in Valley Stream. This one was much more bare-bones and far more suburban, located as it was in a shopping center with a King Kullen and a bunch of other random stores and a large parking lot that accommodated all of that. The walls were simply white and the ceilings were high, creating, well, lots of white. There wasn’t much hanging on those walls other than each barber’s New York State Haircutting License, and they all wore untucked light blue button-up shirts that made them look like members of a bowling team. They also didn’t do the drinks thing during the holidays.

My father would eventually make us wait for this one guy named Paul, after a few let’s just say uneven cuts. He was less aggressive with the clipper, if only by a small margin. Like nearly all of the barbers we went to, Paul was Italian and had little hair to speak of himself. He knew only a small amount of English, so our conversations were pretty limited. We’d sit in the chair and he’d look at us and say “Short?”, and we’d just shake our heads yes because what else were we supposed to do?

I thought about all of this when I took my son G for his First Haircut a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sure where to take him, so I used the sophisticated method of driving around to find a shop that didn’t look too crowded. We eventually found a shop off Route 30, at the end of small, dense shopping center with a RadioShack (which, I was sad to learn the other day, has filed for bankruptcy protection).

This place was more like the place in Malvern than the one in Queens. It was scarcely decorated, even a little stale in all of it greyness. It felt strangely like the customer service office of a cable company, or maybe the DMV. In the waiting area, in addition to the newspapers and the outdated magazines strewn along the short coffee table, there was a flat-screened TV for the customers to watch.  So, we watched a little CNN while we waited.

The barbers here used the same unwritten etiquette that’s developed in every barbershop (at least all the ones I’ve been too) to determine who’s next. The first barber to finish settles up with his customer, and then he looks around at everyone in the waiting area and asks, simply, who’s next? We all look at each other and give a head nod or a “you up?” regarding who got there first. Inevitably, somebody says they’re waiting for someone in particular, a request I’ve never seen not honored, even if it means you have a few barbers not doing anything while a long wait develops for the popular one. The whole thing sorts itself out almost invariably without issue or dispute, and rarely are more than two or three one-syllable words exchanged to sort the whole thing out.

When it was G’s turn, I stood next to him the whole time, but I didn’t have to. The barber, K, remarked that he was the best behaved 3-year old whose hair he ever cut. I watched as he tucked a white towel in the back of G’s shirt and draped on the long black covering, pretending it was a cape. He worked methodically through G’s hair, holding it in bunches with two fingers, sometimes with the comb, and trimmed away, making pleasant small talk with us the whole time. Then he cleaned up the sides and back, and gave the ticklish boy a good laugh when he put the powder on his neck. When it was all finished, and he looked all neat and clean and handsome, I asked G if he felt like a new man, the way all of us do after a good cut. He said yes, with a smile that always makes his big, deep eyes nearly close. I wonder if he really felt that way, or was just going along with it. He can, at times, be so endlessly agreeable.

We settled things up. I left a tip for Jim, and he left G with two Dum-Dums, one for him and one for J. We then went on our way, onto the rest of Saturday, just like my father and brothers and I used to do. Some things, I guess, never change.