Q: When I came here last time, there was this great post about how someone had made to you a couple of wildly inappropriate, anti-gay comments. In the post of which I speak, you dissected those comments in such a brilliant, witty and hilarious fashion, I simultaneously was doubled over with laughter and achieved enlightenment. I came back here so that I could get the link and send it to all my friends and family (especially the homophobic ones), but I can’t find it. Where’d it go?*

A: A byproduct of the post to which you are referring is that it cast a particularly unflattering light on the person who made the wildly inappropriate, anti-gay comments … not only because it exposed what I think is a despicable prejudice that this person has, but also because I used my scathing wit to verbally flog the offender with his own offensive remarks.

The person in question—who, by the way, I am fairly certain could not care less what I, or anyone else, for that matter, thinks about his viewpoints—resides on a semi-distant branch of the Scratches Family Tree, and, in the day or so after I published the post in question, it occurred to me of my own accord that, though I took care to maintain that person’s anonymity, his identity would likely be obvious to some other members of the Scratches Family Tree who visit this site.

I do not truly dislike this person, nor do I think he is a bad person. I do, however, think he has some really offensive views. Be that as it may, I found myself feeling surprisingly uncomfortable about essentially hammering this person behind his back, and about the familial discord and controversy that my post had the potential to create. Thus, I yanked it.

Lest anyone think I’m a big pussy who caved in to some external pressure, I assure you that at no time did anyone who read the post of which you have so unfortunately been robbed say to me anything uncomplimentary about it or suggest in any way that I remove it. I have an internal compass, and, every once in a while, I follow it.

*No one asked me this question; I made it up. I thought that was obvious, but a certain someone has indicated to me that, apparently, it isn’t.

Me to Wonder Woman after running outside and catching her before she backs out of the driveway so that I can hand to her the cellphone she left on the kitchen counter—the one that I can never reach her on:

“Please keep this on you.”

“I do.”

“Apparently not.”

“Yes, I do. That’s why it was inside.”

“Huh?”

“I said I do keep it on me; that’s why it was inside.”

“Wait: ‘Please keep your cellphone on you,’ ‘I do; that’s why it
wasn’t on me’ …?”

“Yep.” [pleasant smile]

“… wha …?”

“I kept it on me when I came inside earlier instead of leaving it in the car. That’s why it was in the kitchen.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you: how can you argue with that logic? And, speaking as someone who has been married to her for 10 wonderful years, allow me to answer for you: you can’t.

Second children really get the shaft. I mean, the week before last, it was “All Zan, All the Time,” in recognition of his first day of kindergarten.

And Jayna’s first day of preschool? Well, that was yesterday … and, while it was definitely an exciting and monumental occasion, it was not unprecedented; she was going off to the same preschool that Zan had attended the previous two school years, and we—and she—already knew the teachers, already knew the building, and already knew the drop-off and pick-up routine, so there really wasn’t the same sense of releasing her into the wild that came with Zan’s first day.

As we were driving to the school, Wonder Woman asked Zan if, as an alumni, he had any advice for his sister.

“Yes. Jayna, if you cry and scream when Mommy leaves you at the door, the teachers will have to pull you in, so you don’t want to do that,” he said as happily as if he was telling her that a litter of cute little puppies with candy dangling from their collars would be waiting to greet her.

This, of course, speaks to the other reason things are less harrowing with Jayna: she is, quite simply, lower maintenance than her big brother. Sending her off for her first day of preschool didn’t bring with it the same fear of the universe imploding that came with leaving Zan there for the first time.

She was a little shy when she first arrived at the school, but once she saw some of the other kids playing with toys, she dropped her backpack and dove right in. And, as shown in the picture above, she came out looking like she was Queen for a Day.

Still, while the preschool routine was familiar, leaving our baby girl at school, on her own, without us hovering nearby to make sure the forces of evil couldn’t get within 50 feet of her, was a very new experience. Both of our kids are officially in school now, and that is an odd sensation indeed.

It seemed like a simple enough thing: because he’s growing so fast, Zan’s fire-engine bed was well on its way to becoming Zan’s mini-barstool, so we needed to get him an actual twin bed. There were some constraints, however—the first of which was that it needed to be physically low enough to fit into the corner of his room, and the second of which was that it needed to be financially low enough to fit into our meager budget.

Enter Ikea. Wonder Woman scoured their site and found a bed that satisfied both requirements. However, when we got to the online checkout, we discovered that the cost of having the bed shipped to our home was roughly equal to the actual cost of the bed itself (seriously)—which, at the time, seemed like an expense we couldn’t really justify, because there is an Ikea store in our state, but it happens to be about 40 miles away, and I don’t like buying anything that requires me to actually leave the house. Hmmm. What to do, what to do … ?

Ah-ha! The Ikea store is located along a highway that my pickup-truck-driving father takes when he travels to and from his place on Cape Cod! I could ask him to pop in there and pick it up for us on his way by!

He agreed to this, and we arranged a date on which he was able to grab the bed for us. However, on that date, I checked the availability of the bed we wanted, and discovered that it was sold out.

OK, no problem, he could get it on his next trip back from the Cape the following week. In the days leading up to this second attempt, I checked the stock repeatedly, and saw that, yes, the bed was in stock … until the actual day arrived, at which point it again was sold out.

So this goes on for three or four weeks, until, finally, last Friday, my dad called and said he could get the bed, and I saw that, miracle of miracles, it was in stock. I text messaged him the exact item number, product name and color. He phoned me after leaving the store to say he had it, but it sounded to me like he was also implying that some confusion took place.

And in that moment, I already knew where this was going to end up, because he’s my dad, and I have known him for, like, my whole life. And because I love him, and because there is a very remote chance that he might actually read this (his interest in my blogging is less than fervent), let’s just leave it at that.

He arrived at the house, and the little flicker of hope inside of me, the one that long ago should have extinguished itself, momentarily managed to burn brightly enough that it blinded the knowing, pragmatic part of my mind and forced it to become preoccupied with shielding its eyes instead of saying what it wanted to say, which was: “Just leave the boxes in the truck so that we don’t have to go through the charade of lugging them into the house and up the stairs for no reason, please and thank you.” Thus, several minutes later, my dad and I were standing sweat-drenched amidst the boxes in Zan’s bedroom.

Zan was with us, and was demonstrably excited about the arrival of his new bed. No longer blinded by the aforementioned flashpoint of hope, the pragmatic part of my brain, upon realizing that there was no way Zan was going to agree to go down for the night unless his new bed was assembled first, decided to end this little farce.

Because the problem was, the birch-veneer bed that we wanted? The one that matches the birch-veneer dresser in Zan’s room? I knew that bed was still sitting on the shelf at the Ikea store. And the boxes in Zan’s room? I was quite certain they did not contain a birch-veneer bed. And I was right: they contained an ink-black bed.

So, instead of eating my dinner, taking a shower and settling down on the couch for the night, relieved and thankful that the weekend was upon us, and that the bed had finally arrived, I had to load the boxes back into the pickup truck, which I then borrowed from my father for the journey back to the Ikea store.

The store closes at 9 p.m., so, at around 8:35 p.m., after driving for what seemed like way too long, I phoned my father and asked, “You said the road that the Ikea store is on is right off of Interstate 95, right?”

“Yeah, you go down 95, and then you go past where 95 veers off to the right—”

“Wait wait wait: I go past where 95 veers off to the right? I thought you said the road I want is right off of 95, so I stayed on 95.”

“Yeah, well, it’s off of 128. 128, 95, same thing.”

Yes, they’re the same thing—until they’re not, and they split, and the point at which they diverge is several miles prior to the road off of which the Ikea store is located.

So now I had to turn around and buzz back up the interstate, and the clock was ticking, and it was quarter of nine, and if I got to this fucking place and they told me it was too late, they were closed, I couldn’t come in, well, Sept. 5, 2008 was going to be remembered as the day of the Great Ikea Massacre.

Finally, I got to 1 Ikea Way and quickly saw why the place has its own special address, because it’s not a furniture store; it’s the Death Star … and not the first Death Star, no no no, this is the second Death Star, the one from “Return of the Jedi,” the huge one that they never finished building because Lando Calrissean blew it up (I’m letting my geek flag fly, people). But he didn’t blow this one up, and they finished building it, and it’s even bigger and more intimidating when, instead of watching it on a movie screen, you’re inside of it looking for furniture.

Eventually, after an extensive search, I found the birch-veneer bed, disabled the tractor beam, fought my way past a throng of stormtroopers, escaped into the night, and made the pilgrimage back to my house with the correct bed in tow.

And next time, I’ll fork over the shipping cost with a smile on my face.

Over the weekend, we attended a party thrown by my aunt and uncle, who have a lovely little cottage on Cape Ann, high atop a hill, with a terrific view of the ocean.

It was from that charming vantage point that I succumbed to the evils of the wicked elixir known as Corona—which, for me, when attending a family function, is kind of like drinking spring water with a hint of lime. They went down fast, and they went down easy.

This would have been well and good, except that, a few beers in, the little cerveza-soaked devil on my shoulder actually convinced me that it would be a good idea to ask my mother if she had watched Barack Obama’s speech a couple of nights earlier.

Oops.

Soon, I was engaged in the intellectual equivalent of a “Matrix”-like shootout, during which I had to dodge verbal bullets that had been loaded into the mouths of several family members by any number of right-wing, talk-radio, Fox News-spewing fuckheads.

And I tried, oh, really, I swear, I tried to disengage, to call a truce, to go back to talking about something, anything other than politics, a conversational third rail that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections taught me I should stay away from at all costs when around my family, for no good can come of it.

But they insisted that I listen to their (woefully misguided) opinions, and there is something hardwired into my DNA that makes it almost impossible for me to hear struggling middle-class citizens espouse the virtues of the very same political party that is standing on their throats without slipping into full-on “You Are So Unbelievably Wrong And I Must Now Verbally Bludgeon You With My Anti-Karl Rove-ian Neo-Con Whack-Job Baseball Bat” mode.

Eventually, they tired of poking me with their pundit sticks, and I managed to clamp my hand over the mouth of the devil on my shoulder … though, when the sun went down, and a chill began to set in, he managed to dress me in a long-sleeve “Obama ‘08″ t-shirt. Hey, I was just trying to stay warm.

He can’t wait to go back tomorrow. Seriously, that’s what he said.

Zan is a sensitive little guy, and, as I’ve mentioned in the past, he has a history of not being able to easily separate from us when it comes time for him to participate in a group activity. There was a time when it would have been easier for his mother to chew off her own leg with him still clinging to it than to convince him to jump in and join the other kids during [insert group activity here].

Many were the mornings when she had to leave a crying Zan inside the doorway of his preschool as he pleaded with her not to go. (I am not ashamed to say that I totally wimped out, turned the car around with him in it and drove home when he started melting down on me during one of the rare Daddy-drop-off days.)

That was our frame of reference as we braced ourselves for Zan’s first day of kindergarten. He had, for many days, been saying how excited he was to go, which was a great sign, truly great, but saying he was excited while in the comfort of his own home and in the ongoing presence of his parents is one thing; remaining excited when it came time to bid us adieu and walk into the gaping jaws of the unknown, we feared, might turn out to be quite another.

First potential disaster: he dressed himself this morning … in a pair of cut-off, gray sweatpants and sorely mismatched shirt. He wanted to accent this ensemble by wearing a fluorescent orange wristband on one wrist, and a fluorescent blue one on the other.

Wonder Woman asked me how concerned I thought we should be about what he wore to school. I said I thought it made sense to encourage him to change, but that if it became a stand-off, fuck it, let him wear a clown suit if that’s what it takes to get him in the door. (In the end, it was a compromise; he wore some kooky, dinosaur-and-dirt-bike-rider shirt, along with a relatively nice pair of shorts and sneakers … and, yeah, I’m mostly of the “Who gives a shit what he wears?” mindset, except that we were sending him into his first-ever full-on “Lord of the Flies” environment; one wrong move and he could end up spending the next dozen years sitting by himself at lunch while the other kids snicker about that outcast known only as “Wristband Kid.” Little bastards.)

When the time came to load into the car and head to school, he was still excited. Holy cow. Get this vehicle moving, woman, before he changes his mind and goes thermonuclear.

As Wonder Woman guided the car into a parking spot outside the school, he did a little headfake to make us think things were about to go off the rails.

“My stomach hurts,” he said. Uh oh.

His Academy Award-winning parents broke into a jaunty, light-hearted, fun-filled performance about “butterflies,” and how incredibly normal it is to feel that sensation, and, hey, remember when we were watching the Olympics, and there was that one commercial where they showed a gymnast getting ready to do her routine, and they made it look like there were butterflies flying around outside of her tummy? Wasn’t that cool? So, you see, basically, what we’re saying is, your tummy is totally supposed to hurt, in fact, it is so awesome that it hurts, the more the better, and so let’s get out of the car, quick, before this whole shooting match goes south.

And that was it. He held our hands as we walked him to the door, and we spent a few minutes milling around with the other parents, and he jumped right in and hung out with a couple of kids he knew, and then it was time for him to leave us. He gave us each a hug (including Jayna, so he was really putting the love out there, people), turned and walked his big-boy, backpack-wearing self right through the door and into the classroom.

Turns out he wasn’t the one who got tearful at the moment of separation; his mom and I were, thanks to the bittersweet combination of relief and happiness from seeing that he is so much more well-adjusted now than we once feared he might be, and profound sorrow about seeing him slip one step further away from us, and further into a world that is filled with lots of people, some good, some bad, but none of whom love and cherish him as much as we do, or want to protect him from the hard-knock lessons that life has to dish out as much as we do.

But, for now, it’s just a few hours a day, right down the street, with us bringing him to the door when it’s time to go in, and meeting him at it when it’s time to come out, and, wow, I always thought of kindergarten as a training ground where kids become acclimated to being in school, which it is, but what I didn’t realize until today is that it is at least as much of a training ground for parents who have to become acclimated to letting their children go.

The good news is that he did great, we did reasonably well, and he can’t wait to go back tomorrow. Somewhere in all of that, there’s something that says we’re doing a good job, and that he’s going to be just fine.

Nice job, Buddy Boy.