You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About

by Barry, Dave

  Sophie and Stella spent the entire concert clutching their envelopes, vibrating and shrieking and watching the Bieber/dancer clot prance back and forth. But they couldn’t get near the stage because the crowd was too thick. Finally, as Justin Bieber went into his last song, they realized that their opportunity was slipping away. They shouted something to my wife and me—I couldn’t hear a word—then they turned and plunged into the crowd, lost from our view. A minute later, the dancer clot came prancing back in our direction. The mob of shrieking fans surged forward, and for just an instant, through an opening in the mass of heads in front of me, I got a clear view of Justin Bieber. In that same instant, I saw two large square white envelopes arc through the air and into the spotlight, then flutter to the stage near his feet.

  Guess what happened next.

  If you guessed that, against all odds, Justin Bieber glanced down and, somehow, amid all the dancing and shrieking, noticed these two adorable purple-tutu-clad girls in the crowd, then suddenly stopped—that’s right, stopped, right in the middle of the song—and then, with a winning smile and a wink to Sophie and Stella that was easily the greatest thrill of their young lives, reached down, picked up the bat mitzvah invitations and stuck them into his pocket, then you are (and I say this respectfully) an idiot. Rock-star pants don’t even have working pockets. Bieber and the clot pranced right on past, leaving the envelopes lying on the stage.

  I assume Bieber never saw the invitations. I know he didn’t come to Sophie’s bat mitzvah party. Which was his loss because it was a fine event, except for a terrifying few seconds when I was hoisted into the air on a chair being thrust wildly up and down* by a group of men who had consumed so much tequila that they could easily have launched me out a window without noticing it until they put the chair down empty. (“Hey! Where’s Dave?” “Dave who?”)

  But other than that, the party was wonderful. The best part, for me, was the last dance of the night, the Father-Daughter Dance. That’s when I got to hold Sophie in my arms, gaze into her smiling face and marvel at the fact that my daughter—who five minutes ago was a little red poop factory I carried around like a football—had somehow transformed into this radiant, beautiful, poised young woman, getting ready to go out in the world and break many hearts.

  She’ll probably have her own heart broken a few times, too. But she’ll do just fine out there in the world, Sophie will, I’m sure of that, because she’s a strong, sensible and self-confident person. Also, if any man even starts to treat her wrong, I will summon my inner Liam Neeson and wreak vengeance upon that man, even if I am eighty-six years old and have to use a weaponized walker. Because she’s a special girl.

  And Justin, if you’re reading this: You had your chance.

  Postscript

  Since I wrote this essay, things have changed between Sophie and Justin. She no longer thinks he’s the perfectest person on the planet. In fact, she now thinks he’s kind of a jerk, and she has uninstalled the Corner of Appreciation. I’d be thrilled about this, except that the place in Sophie’s heart formerly occupied by Justin has been taken over by a boy band called One Direction. There are five of them.

  We live in ridiculously convenient times. Think about it: Whenever you need any kind of information, about anything, day or night, no matter where you are, you can just tap your finger on your “smart” phone and within seconds an answer will appear, as if by magic, on the screen. Granted, this answer will be wrong because it comes from the Internet, which is infested with teenagers, lunatics and Anthony Weiner. But it’s convenient.

  Today everything is convenient. You cook your meals by pushing a microwave button. Your car shifts itself, and your GPS tells you where to go. If you go to a men’s public restroom, you don’t even have to flush the urinal! This tedious chore is a thing of the past because the urinal now has a small electronic “eye” connected to the Central Restroom Command Post, located deep underground somewhere near Omaha, Nebraska, where highly trained workers watch you on high-definition TV screens and make the flush decision for you. (“I say we push the button.” “Not yet! He’s still shaking it!” “He should have those red spots looked at.”)

  And then there’s travel. A century ago, it took a week to get from New York to California; today you can board a plane at LaGuardia and six hours later—think about that: six hours later!—you will, as if by magic, still be sitting in the plane at LaGuardia because “LaGuardia” is Italian for “You will never actually take off.” But during those six hours you can be highly productive by using your “smart” phone to get on the Internet.

  So we have it pretty easy. But we have paid a price for all this convenience: We don’t know how to do anything anymore. We’re helpless without our technology. Have you ever been standing in line to pay a cashier when something went wrong with the electronic cash register? Suddenly your safe, comfortable, modern world crumbles and you are plunged into a terrifying nightmare postapocalyptic hell where people might have to do math USING ONLY THEIR BRAINS.

  Regular adult Americans are no more capable of doing math than they are of photosynthesis. If you hand a cashier a twenty-dollar bill for an item costing $13.47, both you and the cashier are going to look at the cash register to see how much you get back and both of you will unquestioningly accept the cash register’s decision. It may say $6.53; it may say $5.89; it may be in a generous mood and say $8.41. But whatever it says, that’s how much change you will get because both you and the cashier know the machine is WAY smarter than you.

  A while back, my daughter asked me to help her with her math homework, which involved doing long division without a calculator. There was a time, somewhere around 1963, when I definitely knew how to do long division; I figured this knowledge was still lying around in my brain somewhere. I mean, I can remember many other things from 1963. That was the year when the Beach Boys came out with their album Surfer Girl, and I can recall every word from every track on it, including an obscure and genuinely idiotic song called “Our Car Club,” which contains, among other lyrics, these:

  We’ll get the roughest and the toughest initiation we can find

  And if you want to try to get in, we’ll really put you through the grind

  ’Cause THIS club’s the VERY BEST!

  I haven’t heard “Car Club” for decades, but I typed those lyrics without looking them up. My brain stashed them away in a safe place, in case I would need them someday in a lyrics-related emergency. My brain did not, however, elect to save the instructions for doing long division. So when I tried to help my daughter, I was useless. I had a vague recollection that you start by dividing the littler number (or maybe just part of the littler number) into just the first part of the bigger number, then you multiply something and then you put the result down below. But I wasn’t sure where down below, exactly, you put the result, and I had no idea what you did with it after that. ’Cause THIS club’s the VERY BEST!

  I tried for several painful minutes to show my daughter how to do long division, at which point she gently told me I should go back to watching Storage Wars and she would figure out long division on her own. And she did. I don’t know where she got the information. Probably from the Internet. Possibly even from Anthony Weiner.

  But it’s not my inability to do long division that really bothers me. What really bothers me is that, like many modern American men, I don’t know how to do anything manly anymore. And by “manly,” I do not mean “physical.” A lot of us do physical things, but these are yuppie fitness things like “spinning,” and “crunches,” and working on our “core,” and running half marathons and then putting “13.1” stickers on our hybrid cars so everybody will know what total cardiovascular badasses we are.

  That’s not manly. I’ll tell you who was manly: the early American pioneers. Those guys didn’t even know they had cores. But they definitely had large manhoods. They set out into the vast untracked wilderness with nothing but a musket and a sac
k of hardtack and hominy, and they had to survive out there for months, even years, completely on their own, sleeping on the ground in bear-infested forests. That’s why they brought the hardtack: to throw at the bears. They had no idea why they brought hominy. Like you, they had no idea what “hominy” means. It sounds like some kind of disease.

  Patient: What is it, doc?

  Doctor: I’m afraid you have the hominy.

  Patient: Not the hominy!

  But the point is, these pioneering men did not do “crunches.” These men crunched the damn continent—blazing trails, fording rivers, crossing mountain ranges, building log cabins, forging things with forges, etc. We modern men can’t do any of those things. We don’t have the vaguest idea how to ford a river. We’d check our phones to see if we had a fording app and, if not, we’d give up, go back home and work on our cores.

  What happened? How did American men get transformed from masculine, self-reliant doers into Teletubbies with abs? I think we can place the blame for this—as well as almost every other bad thing, including disco, “light” beer and Donald Trump—on the Baby Boomers. We grew up soft. Our parents had the Great Depression; we had Captain Kangaroo. They were the Greatest Generation; we are Generation Wuss.

  I know for a fact that my father was way manlier than I am. He was not a particularly large, muscular, hairy or masculine-looking individual; he was a bald, nearsighted, mild-mannered Presbyterian minister. But here’s one thing he did, and I am not making this up: He built our house. Yes. He couldn’t afford to hire a builder, so he did it himself. He cleared the land by hand, dug the footings with a pick and shovel, poured the foundation, framed the house, nailed the roof on, installed the plumbing and electrical wiring, hung the Sheetrock, installed the windows, doors and floors, and so on. My earliest childhood memories are of my dad working on our house evenings and weekends, wearing a diaper tied around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. It took him years to finish. But when he was done, guess what? We had a pretty crappy house.

  No, that’s harsh. Our house did have problems, though. It was drafty and it leaked, and often the only way to get the plumbing to work (this became one of my chores) was to go outside and climb down into the “pump house”—a dank, dark hole that was home to seventy-eight percent of the Earth’s spider population—and prime the pump by manually blowing air into a disgusting, slime-covered thing until Mom yelled from the kitchen that the water was back on.

  So it was not a perfect house. But it was a house, and my father, who had no training in construction, built it pretty much single-handedly. It was not until years later, when I became a homeowner capable of causing several thousand dollars’ worth of damage by attempting a simple toilet repair, that I really appreciated the magnitude of my father’s achievement. There’s no way I could do anything that remotely approached it. My father had a utility room filled with serious tools—winches, axes, sledgehammers, a variety of drills and power saws, even an adze, which is a very manly tool, although it, too, sounds like a disease. (“If we don’t treat that hominy, it could develop into full-blown adze.”)

  Here’s what my homeowner tool collection consists of: duct tape, a smallish hammer and 283,000 tiny random pieces of hardware for hanging pictures. Hanging pictures is my only real manual skill. If we have a global nuclear war and civilization is wiped out and I happen to be one of the small band of surviving humans, I will not be a big help.

  First Survivor: I’ll forage for edible roots.

  Second Survivor: I’ll look for water.

  Third Survivor: I’ll build a shelter from fallen trees.

  Me: And I’ll hang pictures!

  First Survivor: We’ll eat him first.

  The scary thing is, the wussification of American men is getting worse. Pathetic as we Boomer males are, we’re Daniel Boone compared with the generations that have come after us. Forget about fording rivers; these kids today can’t move out of their parents’ houses! They’re twenty-eight years old and their mom is still doing their laundry! And this “rap” music they listen to! You call that music? I call that shouting! Why, back in my day, we had real musicians, bands like the Beach Boys, who . . . Wait a minute! Who pooped in my drawers?

 

  But getting back to the issue at hand: We American men have lost our national manhood and I say it’s time we got it back. We need to learn to do the kinds of manly things our forefathers knew how to do. To get us started, I’ve created a list of some basic skills that every man should have, along with instructions. You may rest assured that these instructions are correct. I got them from the Internet.

  THINGS A MAN SHOULD KNOW HOW TO DO

  How to Cook a Steak on the Grill

  1.Make sure you choose a good steak. The main “cuts” of steak are the Brisket, the Loin, the Round, the Chuck, the Rump, the Groin, the Niblick, the Flanker, the Grommet, the Cosine and the Stirrup. They are all basically the same because they all come from the inside of a cow. You should select a manly looking steak that is approximately the size and density of a standard manhole cover and does not have too many visible fly eggs.

  2.Many people like to enhance the flavor of the steak by soaking it ahead of time in marinade or rubbing it with a blend of herbs and spices.

  3.These people are pansies.

  4.Place the steak horizontally on the grill oriented along an east-west axis.

  5.Drink a timing beer. (VERY IMPORTANT: Not a “light” beer.)

  6.When the beer is done, check the steak by prodding it firmly yet gently with your right forefinger. If it feels cold, you need to light the grill. (This should have been Step 1.)

  7.Drink another timing beer.

  8.Turn the steak over, using barbecue tongs or a No. 2 profilated Phillips screwdriver with a ten-inch titanium-coated shank.

  9.Drink another timing beer.

  10.Check the steak to determine how done it is, using this chart:

  Doneness of Steak

  Color of Steak

  Rare

  Brown

  Medium Rare

  Brown

  Medium

  Brown

  Medium Well

  Brown

  Well

  Brown

  11.If the steak is covered with molten or flaming plastic, you failed to remove it from the packaging. (This should also have been Step 1.)

  12.Spray the steak with a fire extinguisher if necessary and serve it outdoors in a dark area.

  13.This might be a good time to switch to tequila.

  How to Survive If You Are Lost in a Forest and Night Is Falling

  1.Always remember that the most important rule of wilderness survival is: Do not panic.

  2.Granted, there are probably dangerous wild carnivorous animals lurking nearby.

  3.Wolverines, for example.

  4.According to Wikipedia, “The wolverine has a reputation for ferocity and strength out of proportion to its size, with the documented ability to kill prey many times larger than itself.”

  5.And do not get Wikipedia started on the question of venomous snakes.

  6.But you must not panic.

  7.FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF.

  8.Gather flammable wood to make a fire. The best kind of wood in this situation is the “fire log,” which is easy to identify because it comes in a box of six.

  9.Check your pockets to see if you have matches or a cigarette lighter, which of course you will not. You would not dream of smoking cigarettes because you are a modern, crunch-doing, health-conscious, risk-averse individual.

 
10.A fat lot of good that’s doing you now with the wolverines closing in.

  11.Fortunately, there are other ways to start a fire. Position yourself over your fire log and, with a quick motion of your wrist, strike a piece of flint against a piece of steel to make a spark.

  12.Just kidding! If you had flint and steel, you would not be the kind of nimrod who gets lost in the forest in the first place.

  13.An old Indian trick is to rub two sticks together rapidly to create friction.

  14.This method has never once, in human history, resulted in an actual fire.

  15.It’s just one of those things that Indians enjoy tricking white people into doing.

  16.Other examples are canoeing, face painting and “hominy.”

  17.Since there will be no fire, your only hope of surviving is to stay up all night making noises that will keep animals away. Most leading wilderness survival experts recommend that you sing the “Macarena,” which goes as follows:

  Something something something something something something something something,

  Something something something something something something something something,

  Something something something something something something something something,

  Hey Macarena!

  18.You should also do the hand motions because carnivorous animals can see in the dark. You may feel silly, but consider: Not one single person has been killed in the wilderness by animals while doing the “Macarena” since the National Forest Service began keeping records on this in 1902.

  19.If you are still alive in the morning, carefully note the direction in which the sun rises. This will be either east or west, depending on what hemisphere you are in. Using this information, you can determine which way north and south are and, from there, you can calculate the time of day to within roughly two hours.