Sketchy Samaritan

Yesterday afternoon, I was walking my dog and he pooped for a second time-- but I did not have a second bag-- and so I sheepishly left the poop where it lay, but I am a responsible dog-owner and I hate it when other people don't clean up after their dogs, so I made note of where I was: Third Avenue across from a brick building, I walked the dog home, and then I got on my bike (armed with a plastic poop bag) and rode my bike back to the scene of the misdemeanor . . . but there's a lot of brick buildings on Third Avenue and I didn't take exact note of the cross street nor did I register exactly where he pooped . . . so I parked my bike against a tree and began my quest for poop . . . and while I knew I was doing the right thing, and I knew I was being a good person, I certainly don't think it appeared that way to the people walking and driving past . . . in fact, I think I looked downright weird, plastic bag open, searching the ground from corner to corner . . . and so from here on in, I'm always going to carry two bags when I walk the dog (a lesson I should have learned long ago).

Our Dog is Not a Lion Killer

When we went to the shelter to adopt our dog Lola, the caretaker claimed she was a Rhodesian Ridgeback mix . . . and this sounded awesome to me, as they are athletic dogs that were used to track lions-- but now that I've seen a few real Rhodesian Ridgebacks (and had a Ridgeback owner tell me that Lola is "zero percent" Rhodesian) and studied photos of other dogs, I'm fairly certainly that she's a Pit Bull Lab mix-- which is a good thing to be-- and she might even have a bit of Mexican Street Dog in her (a very very coveted and prestigious breed of dog).

My Son Ian Makes A Short Film

I had an English department meeting after school on Monday, and so it was my younger son Ian's responsibility to hustle home from school and let our dog out. She's only a year-and-a-half and it's a long day for her. Ian is in middle school (8th Grade) and his school lets out at 2:50 PM. I would be stuck in the meeting until 3:30 PM and then have to drive home

As the meeting was nearing its conclusion, I texted Ian to make sure he had gone straight home and let Lola out to do her business. I received this short video (without any textual explanation) as a reply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh0RKxu1hoI&feature=youtu.be

Ian's terse video reply to my text

The synopsis: a view of a ladder from above, the camera pulls back to show an open window, and then the camera pans around and there's an ominous shot of an empty room . . . no dog, nothing.

I interpreted this video in the worst possible way. In my mind's eye, Ian came home from school and saw a ladder next to the house. The window above the ladder was open, indicating something nefarious, and when he went inside, he found that the dog was missing, along with all our most valuable possessions.

I called him, frantic.

"Ian, are you okay? Did we get robbed? Is Lola gone?"

"Hey Dad. Everything is fine. I forgot my key and the secret key wasn't out back, so I found a ladder in the backyard, threw it over the fence, and broke in through the bathroom window so I could let Lola out."

"Wow . . . okay, awesome. Great. I'll talk to you when I get home."

EXT: Ladder Below Small Window

When I got home, I commended Ian for his ingenuity, agility and strength. The ladder was wedged alongside our deck and it's heavy. I'm was impressed that he could lift it and toss it over the fence. And he really had to squeeze through that tiny window, headfirst. He said he grabbed the sink and then leaped onto the toilet. It was something only a wiry 13 year old could pull off.

Then I criticized his filmmaking, particularly his shot selection.

"Ian, the end of that movie doesn't indicate that YOU broke in the house. You needed to show the dog . . . or you smiling . . . or something to indicate a happy ending. Not a weird desolate shot of an empty room! That says something bad happened!"

"Dad, I would have called the police if something bad happened."

While I was impressed with Ian's grace under pressure, I was not impressed with his ladder safety. As you can see from the photo below, he did fully extend nor did he lock the ladder's spreaders. The American Ladder Institute would not approve.

Yikes

I hope this won't happen again. We put a key back into the secret location in the yard (which I obviously can't reveal here on the internet . . . though if anyone tried to break into our house, Lola would definitely lick them to death) and I'm going to be especially didactic about shot sequences and visual resolutions the next time Ian and and I watch a movie.

My Dog is in the Doghouse (and a Raccoon is in MY House)

We take good care of our dog, and he has an excellent life: plenty of walks, the occasional backwoods vacation, and lots of love . . . but apparently he doesn't appreciate this, because he has one responsibility-- protect the house!-- and in this regard, he has failed us . . . last week, the insulation guy was finishing up the job, running the cellulose hose into the attic, but he had to beat a hasty retreat from the attic when a mother raccoon, who was protecting a litter of raccoon kits, hissed at him-- kits which are feeding and shitting and urinating right above our bed; I am tempted to toss the dog through the attic access hole, but I know he'd get his ass kicked, so he's lying in a sunbeam now, letting any kind of vermin onto our property and into our attic, pretending not to understand all the grief I've been giving him (and, to add insult to injury, because of the dog's negligence we had to get a "raccoon guy" to spray some male scent up there to encourage the mom to relocate, and apparently-- as I haven't met him-- my wife thinks he's hot . . . so I'm sure she's going to be hearing raccoon all over the place so she can invite him back to "spray his scent" . . . and, honestly, if the scent gets rid of the raccoon, then I'll gladly let my wife flirt with him . . . or whatever it takes-- she did manage to get a "cash" discount from him and I'm inquiring as to how-- because the raccoon are still up there and neither my method-- blasting a radio at them-- nor my son Ian's method-- blasting his trombone at the ceiling-- have had any effect on them . . . the above photo was taken by the raccoon guy and this is the actual raccoon in our attic).

O Lord, Dad Needs a Dog

I've been through the valley of the shadow of death and all I can say is that it was no fun-- but I'm starting to get over the loss of our family dog Sirius (and if anyone else is grieving over the loss of a pet, this movie will be more helpful than this awful poem . . . I can see why the author would want to remain anonymous) and I'm starting to recognize that I need a new loyal canine companion, so I don't drive my family batshit; case in point, when we were on vacation in Vermont last week, after we had gotten home from lunch-- which was a twenty minute car ride-- I unilaterally encouraged my family to take a constitutional stroll up the road to the waterfall, and I met some resistance from my two sons, but I told them this wasn't a choice-- everyone in the family was going for a walk and-- more important-- they were going to like it . . . Catherine gave me a look that said, "You are insane," but-- and I really respect her for this-- she didn't undermine my plan and she told the kids to listen to their father and get walking and then I reminded the little ingrates that taking a walk with the family was not a punishment and they'd better not refer to it as such and they should take pride and joy in the fact that they had ambulatory parents that could still hike up a mountain road and they were lucky we weren't crippled and in an old age home and then we took our walk-- Alex came around and enjoyed himself, but Ian shuffled sullenly sixty yards behind us the entire way (and never got to see the waterfall) and the consensus after this forced march was: Dad needs a dog . . . so we are browsing the rescue sites and maybe soon enough I'll have someone in the house that appreciates a communal stroll or a quick bike ride around the park, someone who doesn't mind going for a short car ride to run an errand, someone loyal and happy who might be a pain-in-the-ass to take care of but will earn it back with good attitude (we're thinking maybe a German shorthaired pointer . . . I don't want a dog that looks like Sirius because that would freak me out).

Weird Spring Break

I am on Spring Break this week, but my wife and kids have school (they don't have Spring Break until next week) and we still have tennis practice and matches, so I can't do anything major; once everyone clears out, it's just me and the dog at home during the day-- I took her to the dog park in the morning and chatted with the morning dog park crowd, then I went to the gym, and then I screwed around, did the Quordle and the Wordle and all that, did the dishes and the laundry, recorded some music, took a nap, but then I had to run tennis practice because our match got canceled (but we have three more matches this week) and so I watched a bunch of tennis videos to prepare for that (we played some really fun mini-games) and now I'm back home, enjoying a beer and cooking dinner, with very little stress because I don't have work tomorrow but it is odd to be the only one in the house-- besides the dog-- that isn't worried about work (and I did have some added stress when I listened to Joe Rogan interviewing David Mamet . . . while I love Glengarry Glenross, that guy is very angry for a well-to-do old man).

Good (Dog Defecation) Deed

Today at the dog park, when this older guy's dog Max pooped in the far corner, I went and picked it up and disposed of it-- and I didn't even mention this to the dog's owner, a nice older gent named George, so this was a true altruistic act, a true good deed for which I received no credit . . . so it is now likely that upon my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness (or some such comparable benediction).

Dave Receives a Compliment Meant For His Wife

My wife has been multitasking like a madwoman lately-- work craziness, packing for our son's school camping trip, making lunches for everyone, cooking all the meals (because I'm coaching all the time) and participating in various community stuff (ice cream socials and School Board election events, etc etc) so I decided to get her some flowers and write her a note to her reminding her how much the family appreciates all she does for us; I called the florist and then got Ian and the dog ready to walk over there, but then we decided it would be more fun to bike over, so I attached the dog to my bike and we cycled over to Main Street, picked up the flowers, and headed home -- and I felt a little overwhelmed, as I was:

1) trying to hold the wildflower bouquet;

2) trying to prevent the dog from wrapping the bungee cord around any trees, bushes, or humans;

3) trying to keep an eye on Ian, since we were crossing some busy roads and navigating some areas where there was no sidewalk--

and I must have looked pretty absurd: biking with the dog, trying to hold the flowers, my son trailing behind me, because a mom pushing a jogging stroller took a look at me, made some inferences, and said "You're a good husband!" and I said, "I think I bit off more than I can chew here" and then she yelled-- because I was flying past her at this point: "You're teaching your son a great lesson! How to multitask!" and when I got home, I realized the irony . . . I was trying to thank my wife for multi-tasking with some flowers, but instead I got complimented for my multi-tasking (by a fairly cute jogger mom, I might add) even though I'm a horrible multi-tasker (and not even very adept at doing one thing at a time).

Country Living Lesson #1

After a violent bout of freezing rain last night, we are enjoying some unseasonably warm Vermont weather today; Catherine and I took the dog on a hike down the dirt road, and we met the neighbors . . . and Sirius met the neighbor's dog-- and everyone was friendly and social and having a good time, until Sirius attempted to eat the neighbor's chickens, which I found embarrassing at first, until the neighbor-lady told us that her dog had actually eaten one of her mother's chickens . . . so now I know that my dog, if given the chance, will eat a chicken, and if he's in the vicinity of a chicken coop, he needs to be monitored carefully to avoid this pastoral faux pas (this information is going to come in handy when I buy a farm).

Three For Three at 3 AM

This past weekend, I was up at 3 AM three nights in a row. Each night was a different adventure. While it makes for good content, this is not a streak I want to continue.

3 am Adventure #1 -- Friday Night

Friday night, my son Alex was over on Busch Campus at Rutgers with his fellow members of the Highland Park Rocket Propulsion Lab. They got some kind of a grant and use the Rutgers facilities: the 3-D printer and the modeling software and the soldering equipment. These are really smart kids (who also play tennis-- that's how Alex met them). And something went wrong with Arduino mini (a piece of electronic equipment). The wires weren't grounded and they fried the circuit board.

So when Catherine and I got home from dinner with friends at 11 PM, Alex wasn't home yet. We texted and he said that they were trying to fix the circuit board and needed to stay later.

I reminded him that he had Model UN at 8 am at Franklin High School. He had to be up at 7 am. Then I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up at 2:30 am. Alex had not come in. I texted him. Things were not going well. He said they might not get done until 4 or 5 in the morning.

This was absurd. I told him he needed some sleep before his Model UN event and drove over to Busch Campus to find him. It wasn't easy. He had to run down the road to flag down the van. And-- though we didn't know it at the time-- we were near the spot where a Rutgers employee had been bitten by a coyote! Just one night previous (at 4 am).

I was so sleepy I missed the exit for Highland Park. Alex managed to get up and put on his coat and tie for Model UN the next morning. Impressive.

3 am Adventure #2 -- Saturday Night

Saturday afternoon, I attended the Rutgers/Ohio State game with my buddy Alec. We drank some beer before the game and then we drank some beer during the game. Then when I got home from the game I ate some of my wife's delicious Thai coconut curry chicken soup (and drank another beer). A little bit later I made a rash decision and decided to have ice cream, with a healthy dollop of whipped cream on top. This is not a combination of food my stomach can handle.

So this one was my fault. I was up at 3 am Saturday night with gas. I fell back to sleep, but couldn't really sleep late because of my son's Model UN event.

3 am Adventure 3# -- Sunday Night

Sunday afternoon, I took my son Alex to the Edison skate park. I brought the dog, so I could walk her while Alex skated. The adjacent fields were covered with goose poop and Lola ingested some. Yuck.

At three in the morning Sunday night (Monday morning?) we heard that distinctive retching sound of a vomiting dog. Lola was puking on the landing at the top of the stairs. Pretty minimal. Probably because of the goose poop. I got her outside and Catherine cleaned up the mess. We put down a towel in case she threw up again.

Thirty minutes later, she did just that. It was just a tiny bit, and she did it on the towel. I waited for a moment, to see if she was going to throw up more (since she was doing it on the towel). Catherine rushed by me, her thought being "get the dog outside." In her mad rush in the darkness, she flung her arm at my face. Her fingernail cut the inside of my nostril. Ouch! She drew blood!

Ian and Alex slept through all of this.

The next morning, I tried to find the spot where Lola defecated in the yard at 3 am. I hate leaving dog poop in the yard, because it always comes back to haunt you. I couldn't find the poop-- because I had stepped in it. I took off my clogs and left them outside.

Then, on the way back from walking her to the park, I tried to find the remainder of the poop and I stepped in it again. Luckily, we got some rain so it was easy to wipe my shoes clean on the wet grass.

During the school day, I learned that a cut inside your nostril really hurts. It hurts when you sniffle, it hurts when you rub your nose, and it especially hurts when you eat spicy food (like the leftover Thai coconut chicken soup that I had for lunch).

Anyway, I am hoping to end this streak tonight. Wish me luck.

How Did This Happen?

I am an introverted person who enjoys being alone for long stretches of time-- I like to read and play the guitar and write sentences and listen to music-- and I have trouble thinking about more than one thing at a time, but somehow I've gotten myself into the absurd position where I have to: 1) be the boss of over a hundred kids during the school day . . . I constantly compel them do things that they would never do on their own: read Shakespeare, write essays, perform skits, and draw horses (I especially love compelling kids to draw horses, because if you can't draw-- and the bulk of the population in America can't draw-- then drawing a horse is especially comical) and then 2) after school I have to lord over my own children, and compel them to do homework and clean-up their shit and eat their dinner and brush their teeth and stop fighting, and now 3) we've added a dog to the equation, and I've never had a dog, but everything I've read explains that you have to establish yourself as the alpha and show the dog who's boss and my friend John gave me this advice: "Dog training is easy, you just need to establish that you are the master," and that makes sense, of course, but I often wonder: How did this happen? because I would be perfectly content being The Boss of No One and The Master of Nothing.

My Dog is Panting

We are past the "dog days" of summer-- those occur in late July, when the dog star Sirius appears to rise alongside the sun-- but it still feels like the dog days (and I'm ready for some other kind of day, where you need to wear a sweatshirt).

That's Really Incredible!

Last Monday, while eating a delicious slice of porcetta (a meal that a friend of ours only prepares on Martin Luther King Day, because she has to buy the meat on Sunday and it takes a day to prepare) I reminisced with the hostess about watching classic reality TV, namely Real People and That's Incredible! . . .  and we are both dog owners, and so we were remembering the incredible tales of lost dogs who travelled cross-country to find their families and other such epic canine heroics . . . and now I have my own story to add to these fantastic tales; my dog has never touched a book and our house is full of books -- he chews on shoes and shin-guards and mittens -- but never literature, yet the other day, when I arrived home, I found one book in the middle of the room, completely eaten and destroyed, and he selected this book from a pile of books, but for some strange and incredible and miraculous reason, he selected a very particular book (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk) and the salient point about this book is it is the first book I've ever checked out from my school library -- my friend Kevin got them to order some new books that we wanted to read, and when we went down to check them out, the librarians were so happy to see us . . . they told us we didn't visit them often enough, were hoping that this was the start of a long-lasting relationship -- and my dog must have gotten some strange scent from this book from a new place, and so he selected it from among other library books, books we own, magazines, borrowed books, and used books, and tore it up; now I have to go back to the library with my tail between my legs, and use the lamest excuse in the world: my dog ate my book . . . and I know I'll put this off until the end of the year, but if I don't clear my library account, then I don't get my year end paycheck, so I'll keep you all posted on what happens.

No Good Deed Goes Unpoopished

When I walk my dog, I carry extra poop-bags in case I find some stray poop, which I bag and toss-- dog poop contains lots of gross bacteria and it contaminates the watershed-- and this is an easy-to-execute good deed, as it doesn't involve old people, children, or hospitals . . . but when I told my class about this altruistic habit of mine, they were appalled:

"You shouldn't touch random poop!"

"You don't know where that poop is from!"

"That could be human poop!"

and though the last admonition did make me second guess my behavior, I told them that despite this, I would continue to bag random poop-- because I was skilled at turning the bag inside out and grabbing the poop and there was no way that I was going to get any of it on my hands . . . two days later, I was walking Sirius on the tow road, the path between the Raritan River and the canal (which is a major watershed) and I came across a pile of random poop, and I had just bagged my own dog's poop so I was already in possession of one bag of (warm) poop-- which I placed on the ground, still open, and I bagged the random poop-- which certainly could have been human poop, I'm no scatologist-- and then I decided that I should put the random poop into the bag with my dog's poop, to consolidate the poop, and things got messy and I got some of the random poop on my hand and finger-- yuck!-- and I could hear those cautionary high school voices ringing in my ears while I washed my hands in the freezing cold water that runs over a rock spillway, from the canal to the river . . . but despite this disgustingly ironic turn of events, I vow to continue bagging poop wherever I find it, especially when it's near a watershed or a place where children play (though I will be more careful and never try consolidate bags of poop again).

Forces (and Dog Vomit) Conspire Against Me

In philosophy class, we're discussing free will and determinism . . . I like to do this unit right after the New Year so we can discuss the futility of making a New Year's Resolution in a deterministic universe (I recently saw a meme that said "My New Year's Resolution last year was to lose ten pounds . . . only fifteen to go!") but while many profound thinkers believe we are not in control of our fate, they also believe that it's mentally healthy to believe we are in control of our fate, and so-- as usual-- I resolved to start the year eating healthy, drinking less, and-- most importantly-- avoiding sugar and sweets . . . which had been difficult because my son Alex won a five pound bag of Haribo gummy bears in a steal-a-gift and Haribo brand gummy products are hard to ignore but I was giving it the college try, walking past that brightly colored bag on the counter and not reaching in and grabbing any gummy bears, until last night, when the universe conspired against me, abrogating any free will that I might have thought I possessed; it went down like this: first, I let the dog out into the yard and then I busied myself doing the dishes and forgot that I had let him out (he usually goes out for a minute or two, especially when it's cold and then quickly shows up at the glass sliding door and barks until we let him in) and fifteen minutes later I realized that I had never let him back in the house, but just as I realized this he appeared at the sliding door and barked, so I let him in and thought nothing of it, then I went upstairs to put away some laundry and I heard my son Alex downstairs expressing extreme disgust and my wife was in the shower, so I ran down the stairs to see what Alex was yelling about and there was a large pile of chunky dog vomit on the throw carpet and the floor and half on the floor, the contents of the chunky pile were undigested and probably fecal in origin (although there may have been some rotting squirrel carcass in there as well) and I nearly puked while I was sopping it up with a multitude of paper towels . . . I took Sirius outside with the first batch of befouled paper towels, in case he had to vomit again, and I noticed that the back gate was open-- Sirius is a good dog and he never runs away, but he will go on an adventure if the back gate is open and we're quite close to the park and so I figured that's where he went and that's why he was gone for so long, and he obviously found some disgusting pile of feces and animal flesh and chowed it down and then came home and upchucked it all over the carpet . . . once I was done cleaning up I took him for a short walk but I couldn't get the awful smell out of my nose from the chunky undigested vomit, and the only recourse-- despite my best intentions . . . and I'm sure you'll agree that there was no amount of free will that could have circumvented these circumstances-- the sole solution was to feast on the only thing in the house that would definitely remove the stench from my throat and nose: a big colorful chewy handful of Haribo gummy bears.

Dog Food Foibles Redux

My son Alex's penultimate attempt to feed the dog was ugly. He mangled a can. The twisted metal monstrosity that he created was sharp and dangerous.

His last feeding foray was also a debacle, but less perilous and more annoying. His task was to pour the dry food into the bin. While he did get all the grain-free nuggets into the container-- and I commended him for this-- I did have to ask him one simple question.

Where is the scooper? You know, the plastic scooper that is used to measure and pour the dog food into the bowl?

I present the bin and the food. No scooper to be found.

He buried it, of course, poured a mountain of dried dog food right on top of it. This situation is less dangerous than a razor-sharp can in the fridge, but it still smacks of rash incompetence. Alex did have a snappy comeback to my assessment. He said: "It's like when there's a prize at the bottom of the cereal box and you have to eat all the cereal before you get the prize!"

Meet The Neighbors . . . Yikes.

Hurricane Sandy inspired much communal sentiment in our neighborhood -- we live in a small town and so we are already friendly with the majority of our neighbors -- but folks really came out of their shell in the aftermath of the hurricane . . . and so when I rounded the corner with my dog and walked past the grouchy old man's house with the immaculate lawn and giant RV, I wasn't particularly surprised when he walked out of his garage and spoke to me -- though he had never gave me the time of day before this -- and I took him up on his offer to "give my dog a biscuit," which he pulled out of a bin in his incredibly crowded but organized garage, which was full of ham radio equipment, tools, and miscellaneous unidentifiable clutter; it turns out that he is a Lab lover and recognized that my dog was part Lab, and so these biscuits in his garage were reserved only for folks with a Lab (he had no dog of his own, and in retrospect, this strikes me as odd that he had a large container of MilkBones at the ready) and then he lured us into his backyard -- he said, "You want to see something?" and, of course I did, and he showed us a raccoon he had recently trapped, which was in a cage and had one weirdly cataracted blue eye and he said as soon as gas was available, that he was going to drive the raccoon out into the country and release him, and then he told me that he had trapped "at least five hundred possum" over the years and that he had taken on a mission to "keep the borough clean," and that meant trapping squirrels, possum, skunks, raccoons, and other wildlife and then driving this captured wildlife far away -- even to different states! -- in his RV and releasing the wildlife back into the wild . . . and about this time I was beginning to feel like that raccoon in the cage, and I was wondering if the old man was going to trap me and drive me far away in his RV, but while we were talking the power, which had returned for twenty minutes, went out again, and so we had to talk about that, and then he started confiding in me about his neighbors, who were maliciously channeling their gutter spigots at his property, in order to wash away his yard, and then he showed me the retaining wall he was building to thwart their evil plan, and then-- finally!-- I was able to make my escape . . . and I'll be glad when this catastrophe is over and people go back to their normal, misanthropic ways.

Hey Jazz Dogs! It's The War and Peace of Dope War Books!

Once again, while my family was enjoying the sun and sand, I read about drug wars and torture: The Cartel is part two of Don Winslow's magnum opus on the Mexican drug trade; when I reviewed The Power of the Dog (part one), I described Winslow's writing as "Ellroy-esque," and now, on the back cover, Ellroy himself pays Winslow the highest of compliments . . . he calls the novel "The War and Peace of dope-war books" and then he goes on to say, "it's got the jazz dog feel of a shot of pure meth!" and while that quotation is certainly Ellroy-esque . . . and I'm not sure what a "jazz dog" is, I highly recommend this book (though you should read Power of the Dog first) and while I admit that it's an undertaking, it is worth it-- there's plenty of action and there's even a map, so that finally --after reading five or six books about the Mexican drug wars-- I am starting to understand the how the cartography and the politics fit together . . . and at least it's a real map of actual Mexican states, not a fictional map, like at the start of Lord of the Rings . . . so that when reality mirrors fiction and the real person after whom Adan Barrerra is modeled: "El Chapo" Guzman, escapes once again, you know where he is headed to hide-out (Sinaloa) and while I am always suspect of fiction that requires a map, Game of Thrones has made me change my tune on this rule of thumb, and I am always grateful when non-fiction includes a map because I am spatially challenged.

All Downhill From Here?

Congratulations are in order because I've survived the longest week of the school year: a full five days of coaching and teaching (right in the thick of allergy season) plus an extra miniature workday on Thursday night . . . something in the biz that we refer to as B2SN.

And-- heroically-- after Back to School Night, I made it to Pub Night, where my so-called friends enacted a musical vengeance on me that I will detail in a future post.

Despite the unseasonable heat, school (and Back to School Night) went smoothly, but I can't say the same for coaching JV soccer.

Wednesday, one of my players got a red card for saying something profane to an opposing player, in earshot of the refs and the parents. He did not realize the repercussions of a red card: that I could not sub someone in for him and that we had to play with ten men. Now he knows.

Luckily, we held our lead, and-- even more fortunate-- the refs gave my player a stern talking to after the game and then said they weren't going to report the red card (which would have resulted in a two-game suspension). We need this kid on defense, even if he is a little green at soccer. He's big and fast and wins balls in the air.

This particular player was absent from practice on Thursday, which didn't make me happy, after the incident on Wednesday. As I was loading the equipment into my van, I happened to see his mom jogging in the park. I asked her where her son was-- why he wasn't at practice.

She said, "He wasn't with you?"

"Nope."

"Then I'm sure he was doing something he's not supposed to be doing."

On the bus Friday, I asked this player why he missed practice Thursday. He paused for a moment, and then said, "I . . . I had to help my mom out with a family thing."

"No you didn't," I said and told him when and where I had run into his mom. The perks of coaching in a small town.

So our center back started the game on the bench. I didn't want to punish the team all that much, so I planned on putting him in later in the first half. That's not how it went down.

We were playing on a narrow, bumpy, grass pitch in Middlesex against a scrappy, mainly Hispanic team who knew just how to play the bounces. And there was one ref. Nice guy, but he wasn't moving and he wasn't calling anything. It was schoolyard soccer.

The ball went out of bounds on the far sideline-- well out of bounds near the fence-- and our player stooped to pick it up and throw it in. But the ref wasn't paying attention, he never blew the whistle, and the opposing player dribbled the ball around our stooping player and then crossed it into the box. One of their players tried to knock it into the goal, but the ball bounced crazily, and one of my players grabbed it out of the air, tucked it under his arm, and starting walking toward the ref-- all the while yelling that the ball was clearly out of bounds and it was a Highland Park throw and some other things not fit to print.

This player was my older son Alex.

The ref, correctly, called a PK for a deliberate handball and pulled out his red card. We talked him down to a yellow-- I think he realized he had botched the play as well-- but I told him he was totally in the right to call the PK and card our player. You've got to play the whistle.

The ref also found it amusing when I told him the player in question was my son.

I gave my son (and the other players on the bench) some sage words of advice: when you realize there are no rules, you have to play the game that way. This Friday afternoon, on the pitch, there were no hard and fast rules, and so we had to adjust accordingly. I may have also called my son an idiot.

Our keeper made a great save on the PK, but the other team knocked in the rebound. We ended up losing 3 to 2, all junky goals, but I am proud to say that we adjusted to the mayhem and certainly made the game interesting. The varsity team-- who have been playing magically-- lost as well. Same kind of game. This was their first loss of the season.

Our striker Ben got hit in the eye with the ball, and when my wife went to get him an icepack from our car, she locked her keys inside. And I don't carry the key to her car, because I like to keep things simple. Streamlined. So much for that. Catherine got to ride home on the bus with the coaches and all the sweaty sad players.

Once we arrived home, after the whole nine yards, I told my wife that the rest of the school year would be "all downhill from here" and I meant it in a positive way. She disagreed, but for stylistic reasons. She didn't think I could use "downhill" with a positive connotation in that context. She heard "downhill" and thought the rest of the year was going to get worse and worse. Spiral out of control and decay. But I countered, you don't want to fight an uphill battle the rest of the year. You want to coast. Downhill, preferably.

We've had this linguistic debate before and I'm sure we'll never get to the bottom of it, but I did write a song.

To celebrate the long week, we went to the beach on Saturday. It was crazy hot and the water was warm. The kids surfed, I swam, we all played spike-ball, and the dog drove my wife crazy. We weren't even supposed to have her on the beach, you're not supposed to have dogs on the beach until October-- but I figured: who goes to the beach in September?

Apparently, everyone.

The shore was packed. No parking, festivals everywhere, and the sand was jammed with bodies. Like August. Weird. But kind of fun (aside from the fact that the changing rooms were locked and we had to keep Lola on her leash).

We finally took some heat for having the dog on the beach, but it was just as we were packing up to leave and the cop was really nice about it. I told him we tried to get to the dog beach in Asbury, but the Dave Matthews Band totally screwed us. Then, we ate lunch at 10th Avenue Burrito Co, which is always dog friendly.

It should be smooth sailing from here on out.

The Kindness of an Old Lady in a House Robe

Unlike Blanche DuBois, it's not often that I've depended upon the kindness of strangers-- and we all know, from the murder of Kitty Genovese and the so-called "bystander effect," that if you are in trouble and there's a group of strangers nearby, you certainly can't rely on them to help you-- but all bets are off if there's only one person observing your predicament, there is a much greater chance that a single observer will come to your aid, and I got to experience this firsthand on Saturday morning: my dog escaped out the back gate and took off down the street, he made it a couple of blocks before I finally caught up with him, and he was scared shitless because he knew he had really screwed up and so he rolled onto his back and did his best imitation of Jello and when I pulled at his collar to get him up, this scared him even more and, of course, in my mad dash to catch him before he got hit by a car, I forgot to grab the leash so I was essentially going to have to drag him two blocks to my house or carry him, but luckily, an old lady in an old lady house-robe, walking her old dog, came to my aid-- she brought her dog over so Sirius could sniff him, which made him stand up and relax, and then she gave me the cloth belt of her robe to use as a leash and this worked wonderfully and I was able to walk Sirius home and then return her belt to her, and the only thing that would have made the story better is if she wasn't an old lady in an old lady house-robe, but instead the woman in the photo above . . . she is the first image that pops up on Google, if you type in "house robe," which is both an absurd and wonderful thing about the internet.