Welcome to the inaugural installment of “Dad, Interrupted: I Finally Get My Say.”
“Dad, Interrupted” is a weekly newsletter where I describe, in lighthearted, modestly embroidered stories, my family-man misadventures with my wife, my kids, my friends, my in-laws and assorted chuckleheads I bump into.
This week, I’m taking a trip down memory lane. Our kids are pretty much grown now, and I find that every now and then a memory of them when they were NOT so grown just pops into my head. Usually there’s a trigger — a word, a picture, a smell or some other small thing that wings me back to the past. That’s what happened one evening in January when we were at our daughter Clara’s place.
We were there for dinner. At one point early on Clara said, “Pops, do you want a beer or some wine or seltzer or something?” The word that did it was “seltzer.” Suddenly, I was back in the 1990s, when the Spice Girls were taking England by storm, two unknown guys launched a company with the weird name of Google, and scrunchies were the hottest women’s hair accessory around. As for our kids, they were cute, tiny, naive little sprites – not the tall, sophisticates that they are today.
“Those were the days,” I thought as Clara served up my seltzer. I call this episode, “All Shook Up.”
All kids are materials engineers and that’s because the material world is an amazing place when it’s all fresh and new to you.
Take carbonated water. As with many Irish-American kids, my earliest taste of fizzy liquids came courtesy of a tipsy uncle’s beer mug. We weren’t allowed soda in my family except on special occasions, but beer was an everyday beverage, at least for the adults. I remember that first sip. The stuff seemed alive. A very interesting physical phenomenon, I probably thought to my young self, although definitely not in those big adult words.
But for all the young materials engineers out there, a carbonated drink that has been poured into a glass is nothing compared to a carbonated drink that’s still in the bottle. And that’s because when it’s still in the bottle it has explosive potential. For kids, nothing beats a boom.
Which brings me to one of the most common of fizzy drinks: seltzer. Jeanette and I have always been big fans of seltzer, and before we got DIY with our own seltzer maker in the late 2000s, we’d lug cases of Vintage brand seltzer home from the supermarket. I remember there were 12 liter-size bottles in each case.
One day in the mid-1990s the kids were playing on the floor in our old, squarish kitchen in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Jeanette was also in the kitchen, whipping up dinner and scouring the real estate ads for an affordable place in Park Slope, the neighborhood just to the south. That was the fancy part of town, so naturally it was also where the good school district was. And schools were on our mind because the kids were edging toward school age. Patrick was 4 or so, and Clara maybe 3.
Anyway, as Jeanette zipped around the kitchen, the kids were probably playing a game they played a lot back then. It was called “Walk the Plank” and it took place on our Playmobil pirate ship. The crew that walked the plank were various dolls and Lego figures and maybe an unlucky animal toy or two.
Soon, though, everybody had walked the plank, so the kids turned to another game, one that we called “Seltzer Bowling.” The equipment for this game was, unsurprisingly, bottles of seltzer, and there happened that day to be a full 12-pack of Vintage brand seltzer on the kitchen counter. That meant that the kids had 10 soda bottles that would be the bowling pins and 2 soda bottles that would be the bowling balls. Just like in real bowling. Perfect.
Now let me skip ahead past the actual play-by-play of the game, to my arrival home from work a few hours later, after the game was over. We lived then in a tall apartment house and as I walked down the corridor toward our eleventh-floor apartment, I could hear sounds of commotion. I could not make out the words that were being said, but I could tell from the tenor of the voices that things were not good.
I unlocked the apartment door and, before I even crossed the threshold, Jeanette deposited the kids — we could hold both of them at once in those days — into my arms.
“Take them,” she said. “Then pick up the seltzer bottles. They were playing that game you invented.”
“Well,” I thought. “Welcome home, Daddy!”
After I did as I was bidden, Jeanette unspooled for me the events of that afternoon. During the actual game of Seltzer Bowling, I learned, the tomato sauce was simmering —but so was Jeanette. The problem was basically spatial. The kids needed an alley, because you can’t do any kind of bowling without an alley, and that created problems as Jeanette hopped from fridge to stove to real estate ads. Her suggestion that the kids move the game to the living room was rejected, because you can’t roll seltzer bottles on a rug. Which I must say sounds sensible to me.
So the game was played in the kitchen. But even as early as Frame 3, Jeanette had expressed disapproval of this game several times.
“It can make a mess for Mommy, guys,” she warned. This idea had little impact; the kids were fully engaged. The physics of rolling a full liter bottle of seltzer straight is complicated. Again, it’s materials engineering.
In the middle of Frame 4 — close game! — Jeanette decided to elaborate on the messiness that she had alluded to.
“Do you like Seltzer Bowling?” she asked.
Even at their tender ages, the kids knew this wasn’t an informational type of question. But they answered earnestly.
“Yea, it’s great!” said Patrick, demonstrating his new push-and-steer bowling style.
Clara, who was more finely attuned to Jeanette’s mood, nodded slowly, as if to say, “What Patrick said – I think.” Basically, she was hedging her bets.
“Wonderful!” Jeanette said a bit too enthusiastically. She bent down to kid level. Normally, she does this when she speaks to children to make the conversation more friendly and equal. But this time the effect was different:
“I love Seltzer Bowling too!” she said. “And do you want to know what my favorite part is?”
“Winning!” Patrick said confidently, hands in the air as if he’d scored a touchdown.
“Even better than winning!” Jeanette said with a tight smile.
“Putting the bottles back?” Clara ventured. She was a good girl at heart.
“No again!” said Jeanette. “It’s this!”
And with that she grabbed one of the game “balls,” shook it like a craps dealer with a dice cup, and twisted off the cap. A fountain of seltzer gushed ceilingward, drenching the Playmobil pirate ship, the Legos, Clara’s Polly Pocket dolls, the New York Times Real Estate Section, and the simmering tomato sauce.
“This is major-league materials testing,” Patrick thought admiringly, though not in those words. And that was before Jeanette uncapped Game Ball #2.
In my defense, I should explain that I did invent Seltzer Bowling, but I did it for mathematical, educational reasons. Arranging 10 seltzer bottles in a 4-3-2-1 bowling formation seemed to be an excellent way to acquaint the kids with numbers. And keeping score would sharpen their adding skills.
My hope was that, when we finally found an affordable place in the good school district in Park Slope, the kids would already be in good shape, arithmetic-wise.
Of course, now the kids are all grown up and Seltzer Bowling is a thing of the past. And I realize that the arithmetic lesson I thought I was teaching the kids is not the one that they learned at all. Or not the only one.
What was that other lesson? It was the fact that life has certain detonative aspects that can go well beyond uncapping a shook-up seltzer bottle. They learned that people can detonate, too, if they get frustrated and stressed enough. Although Jeanette did the detonating that day, through the years I have probably been more detonative than she has, and so the kids learned that lesson from me, too.
I’m hoping the kids, now fully grown, also learned the further lesson that detonation is usually not worth it. Even if it’s just a spray of seltzer, it makes for quite a mess. Truth be told, I’m still working on that further lesson myself, with only mediocre results so far.
All Shook Up