While she's at Squam... (guest hosting)

Each time Amy flirts with the subject of leaving for a trip I make it a habit to respond with a cool brand of nonchalance born from the experience that she will get distracted or indifferent and circumstance will quietly slip in and make the trip become an “almost” or a “maybe later”. So I never put much stock into a newly mentioned getaway because of the sheer outsideness of the odds it will ever actually hit my credit card. Even when she graduates to serious sounding things like booking cars and tickets the entire thing still feels more like an abstraction, at best a laboratory impression of a journey and no matter how flimsy the logic, I always end up picturing myself in the car, or on the plane because it seems so much more likely that I will be the one that leaves. While this potentiality is still floating in the air like something that may soon be, in her mind she has already jumped to the inevitable conflicts and assorted technical problems that, in her mind, are inherent in her departure. Now take just a minute and locate with a mental magic marker our two disparate dispositions and plot them if you will on an imagined map. You will notice that we couldn’t be further apart.
She is the one that is actually ticketed to a faraway paradise, but due to her death fixation and fear of flying she isn’t picturing the beach or the trees, but is actually wondering what the inside of a body bag smells like, while I, the one who has a first class seat to nowhere, am already getting mad that the lady flying next to me is taking up more than her fair share of armrest and smells like tacos.












So when it came time to drop her off at the airport and power squat her incredibly
heavy bag onto the curb (seriously, anybody less good looking than Amy would earn the undying hatred of the skycap guy and the eternal love of his chiropractor).
Friggen bag was forever heavy. But as soon as I pulled away from the curb I was genuinely shocked that she had gone anywhere, almost like she had sprung it on me in an underhanded sort of way. Let’s call it a mild panic, not at all like you feel when the bank emails you and then leaves you two voicemails later that same day, but more like riding as a passenger in the car while your mom drives and talks on the phone at the same time, you know, focused concern. So as I am driving home I am thinking of all the things I should have asked Amy long before now, like where you going again? it says here the girls finish school at 3 in the afternoon, that can’t be right… who has dance and who has soccer? As I am listing the things I didn’t remember to forget, my worries melted to the background with the abrupt recollection that I don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. Darwinian evolution solved this mess a long time ago with the sister mechanism that painted poison frogs the same color as Mc. Hammer’s pants.

















Survival instincts kick in, the amygdalae glows red with activity and the little door knob- licking kids that normally can’t figure out how to butter toast without getting it on the ceiling subconsciously remember that everything they have ever witnessed lends testimony to the fact that dad doesn’t give half a crap about the details and that if they don’t watch out and captain their own ship then they’ll be late to everything and find themselves eating cereal three meals a day. And sure enough, as soon as I got home and began interacting with the girls the whole thing went without a hitch. I just put out this kinda man-confidence vibe and acted like there couldn’t be anything more normal than having them call all the shots and take care of everything while I just sat back and stayed out of their way. I kept busy with work, making calls, reading and would occasionally ask calm questions like “who’s mess is this?”, “what are you guys going to do until bed time?” and to their credit, they all just started taking care of themselves. Smooth N Easy like a home perm.