From the Archive: Our Trip to Target

The following article is one of my early attempts at a ‘humour column’, inspired by the likes of Dave Barry. It was first published here on the blog back in 2013. The two kids that feature in it are now 14 and 12! I hope it brings a laugh, or maybe just a smile, to your Monday.

We decided to go to Target. We had a two year old toddler and a three-week old baby, and we decided to go to Target. And not just to pick up a couple of things. No, we were going to “do a bit of shopping,” and “look around.”

Now before you come to any premature conclusions, let me stress one simple but important fact: it seemed like a good idea at the time – which I think is the single best catch-all excuse mankind has ever devised. To me, it provides a satisfying answer to two of the most perplexing questions that all people eventually ask themselves; namely why we started World War 1, and why Cheez Whiz was invented. Nevertheless, there we were, climbing out of the car, unbuckling a myriad of buckles, snaps, zippers, and locks, and walking towards the glowing red store.

Before this all began, I had imagined a leisurely stroll through the store, coffee in hand, casually picking out some fantastic deals and putting them in the bright red cart that held a sleeping baby in the car seat and a smiling, obedient toddler. In this fantasy, my two-year old, Jackson, is humming Mozart’s 40^th symphony and thinking about how content he is with all of his current toys, periodically tapping me on the forearm to let me know that he loves me and that I am a great father; my wife is happily shopping for clothes, those unicorn clothes that all womenfolk chase after, the ones that fit perfectly and always look amazing – she finds two of everything and they’re all half price.

This is roughly what I was picturing:

In and out in 35 minutes, under a hundred dollars, and we’re laughing all the way home before the bleary-eyed herd of 9-to-5’ers kick off a couple hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

As you can tell, I have a rather loose grip on reality.

We had been in the store only five minutes and already the warning signs were everywhere. For one, our daughter Addilyn was wideawake. It’s been cold outside so she wears this fuzzy bear suit that leaves only about three square inches of exposed skin – you know, so that she can breathe – and wraps the rest of her little body tight like a hug. From behind, she looks just like a teddy bear, and whenever she is in it she sleeps like a rock. Or like a rock would sleep if rocks were alive and were heavy sleepers. The fact that she was awake did not bode well.

But as an eternal optimist, I held out hope that my fantasy shopping trip would come at least partially true. The breaking point, that moment when all pretense is finally and completely abandoned, happened about thirty-five minutes in, right around the time I had imagined we would be leaving. I was holding my screaming daughter with one hand while I pushed the cart with the other. My son had been helping me push the cart, but then he tripped and fell on his elbow, which set him off crying in a kind of call and response gospel moment with his sister. I wasn’t able to pick him up what with my arms full of screaming baby, so we set off down the interminably long and obnoxiously shiny aisle towards the women’s clothes section, towards our only hope: Mommy.

On that long walk, with shoppers and store clerks giving me a wide berth as if I was holding a couple of lit Molotov cocktails, I realized that it had been a bad idea to come here, and a very bad idea to think we could do anything more than run in and grab the bare essentials we needed to survive another week. Kind of like they do in those apocalyptic movies when the zombie infestation or tidal wave is coming; which, aside from the pushing of old ladies and the fear of imminent death, is my ideal way to shop.

Devastation was everywhere. The coffee we had brought in was lost long ago, set down on some shelf somewhere while we wiped a nose or patted a bum, and instantly forgotten like an important paper from the government about your taxes. The cart was literally full, what with the massive car seat in the main section, laden with all of our coats, mittens and hats, and our few purchases crammed into the nooks and crannies and the top section.

Kailtyn had apparently heard the wailing duo (I hadn’t yet joined in to make it a trio but I was tempted) while trying on clothes in the change room. She came out and administered the love and pity I had been unable to provide for Jackson. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been faring much better, finding no clothes that fit well and feeling worse about herself for the effort. I pleaded for us to surrender and go home.

We needed an exfiltration plan, to cut our losses and live to fight another day. We decided on a course of action. Kaitlyn took Addie to the family washroom to change her diaper while I took Jackson with me to go pay for our stuff. Well over a hundred dollars later, with no clothes to show for it aside from six pairs of baby socks, Jackson and I went to the family washroom to check on the girls.

I heard a familiar shrill scream as I walked towards the washrooms, and realized that Addilyn was making her displeasure known in the loudest possible manner. Then the screaming stopped. I tried the door but it was locked. Kaitlyn opened it with her one free hand and pulled me in while she held Addie up with the other. She was feeding Addie milk, and I’m not talking about the kind that comes from cows. This was a clear departure from our plan; an unexpected delay. I couldn’t cope – I panicked. Kaitlyn was stressed, and in the chaos and confusion, we decided, for some reason – probably because it seemed like a good idea at the time – that I should run to the car to drop off our bags, leaving Jackson with Kait and baby Addie in the cramped, overly bright, and not overly clean bathroom.

I ran to the car, dumped the bags of stuff I wished I had never heard about in the first place, and ran back to the family washroom. As I rounded the corner towards the bathrooms, I heard crying again. But this time it was Jackson’s voice.

I knocked and Kaitlyn opened the door again. This time she looked quite exasperated, like someone forced to stay in a tiny room the size of a Dilbert cubicle with two children under the age of three. She explained to me how Jackson had been walking around touching everything, the way toddlers do, and accidentally set off the motion-activated high-velocity hand-dryer, which sounds not unlike a Boeing 747 during takeoff. The poor kid had been startled half to death and started crying. I entered the fray and distracted Jackson from his recent trauma by getting him to put on his coat, hat, and mittens.

Kaitlyn, realizing that her own coat was still in the cart immediately outside the bathroom door and therefore perilously exposed to theft and, even worse, uninvited alterations, said accusingly, “You left my coat out there?!” I was completely overwhelmed by this point, and my reply was heavy on bite and light on grace. We had a frank exchange of views on the subject at hand, as married couples do from time to time, and in order to spare the reader the uninteresting details of our conflict, and to leave room for some doubt as to who acted more childishly (I will give you a hint: it wasn’t Kaitlyn), I will close this scene and move on to the brief finale.

There was a silence, a heavy silence, which enveloped the car as we started home. In these kinds of situations, it always takes a bit of time for things to cool down and for wisdom and perspective to take their place. Lucky for me I had plenty of time to come around to such a place because we were stuck in the stinking armpit of rush hour traffic for over an hour, but at least the kids were asleep.

A Too-Good-Not-To-Share Paragraph on the Problem of Evil from G.K. Chesterton

Be warned, a paragraph for ol’ Gee-Kay is a five page article for most of us, but nevertheless, here ’tis.

Context: He is here near the end of his book, and working to show how Christianity differs from both mythology and philosophy. I’ve adjusted the formatting for improved ease of reading, since as superiorly intelligent people in the age of the perpetual interruption we are quite unable to follow a train of thought or argument for more than a dozen or so words.

But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy. It is not a philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. It is not one of those simplifications which resolve everything into an abstract explanation; as that everything is recurrent; or everything is relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive.

It is not a process but a story.

It has proportions, of the sort seen in a picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing.

In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life. For indeed it is life.

An example of what is meant here might well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at in the literal sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all, perhaps, to say as the dualists do, that life is like a chessboard in which the two are equal; and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board.

But every man feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Every existence, as such, is good.’ On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realizes that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism.

These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more truly a rebellion.

He does not think that everything is right or that everything is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a right to be there; and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a usurper.

So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly; no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy a cosmos that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions and its lines and colors are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolize in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night.

But that strange story has one small, advantage over the diagrams.

It is like life.

My Big Beef with Car Culture

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved cars.

They’ve always been able to tug at my imagination, to capture my fascination, and I’m not sure why. Other people don’t seem to have this reaction at all when they encounter a motor vehicle. To them it really is just a collection of metal, rubber, and plastic. Perhaps the simplest way to describe what it means to be a car person is that a vehicle is more than the sum of its parts, and that it evokes something from within.

A car, as a product of engineering and design, is not merely functional, but a work of art. It may be a poor work of art, or the art may be more in its functionality than anything else, but the shaping and moulding of panels, the calculating of proportions and angles and sight-lines, the tone and growl of the engine and exhaust, all require at least some measure of esthetic intentionality. It may look like a cross-eyed bullfrog but you know that someone somewhere presented that design to some decision makers who decided to make that hideous car.

This is why we can begin to speak of a car’s personality, stance, face, rear-end, or ethos. Some cars exude power and aggression, others confidence and class, and still others just scream “I’m a Korean-made sub-compact from the mid-90’s and I’m utterly terrible.” Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got nothing against the Koreans – in fact they make some very fine cars now – but don’t ever buy a Daewoo, or a mid-90’s Hyundai. When you contact Daewoo to tell them that your driver’s seat fell through the floor of the car and the gear lever came off in your hand, they will simply laugh at you and say: “Hey! What you expect? You buy Daewoo!” Or that’s the rumor at least.

We all know that cars can be an endlessly fascinating subject of interest and conversation among men. The majority of those people who have an above-average interest in cars are indeed men. But like anything in which the majority of participants are men, there are some problems, and I’d like to talk about one of the major ones.

For a long time, I’ve wondered why it is the case that many magazines and websites which feature nice pictures of nice cars, will also contain sexualized pictures of women models. This is predominantly true of anything in the tuner culture, but is also more broadly applicable. If it isn’t outright portrayals of women in sensual poses, the same spirit is there in the sexist jokes and comments that presenters or writers make. Regardless of the form it takes, there is a pervasive attitude in much of this sub-culture that women, like cars, are pretty playthings that exist for men to enjoy.

This is done so casually and thoughtlessly, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to have some woman in her underwear standing beside a car. As the father of a daughter, I feel very strongly that this is not a natural thing at all. Say what you will about the decisions and career choices that these women have made, but I wouldn’t wish for any woman to have to take off her clothes in front of leering men in order to make a living, or to have worth in people’s eyes. I want my daughter to be valued for her character, personality, and spirit. For a long time, I didn’t really understand why this association between cars and women was so ubiquitous in car culture.

Then one day it hit me.

Men like cars for many reasons but one of the main ones is that they are good looking objects. Well then it only makes sense to have another good looking object to go with it.

Never mind that this second ‘object’ is a really a human being with a heart and soul and is of precious worth far beyond that of any Ferrari of Bugatti.

Never mind that all the men leering at the pictures of these girls wouldn’t want their own sisters, wives, or daughters displayed like that for all to see.

It’s just one of a hundred thousand ways in which our world doesn’t see or portray women as full and complete human beings, worthy of dignity and respect. It’s not right, and it’s not okay.

I’ve always told myself that I would love whatever my kids love and not try to get them to be interested in my own interests. So I don’t know if I failed at that or if my son really came to love cars by himself, but anyways he really loves cars and trucks. He’s only two and a half, and already (with a bit of coaching from me) he can tell the difference in his toy car collection between the ‘Porsche Nine Elebben’, the GT-R, and the Audi, as well as between the Jaguar E-Type and the Toyota 2000GT, which look quite similar at 1:64 scale. I want to be able to take him to the annual Auto Show when he’s a bit older, but it makes me sad to think that I will have to explain to him why there are women dressed in really small, tight dresses standing around in the modified cars section.

We need to do a better job of guarding the honor and dignity of all human beings, especially those whose honor and dignity and humanity are so often dismissed.

And we also need to treat objects as objects. I did go to the car show this year, and although I really loved seeing all those gorgeous cars, pulling open the back door of a $500,000 Rolls Royce (I wasn’t supposed to, but how often do you get the chance?!), climbing into the trunk of a Toyota Echo to test out the emergency release cable they’ve installed in there in case of kidnapping, and pushing all the buttons and knobs in the Jaguars and Audis, I left the conference center feeling quite flat about the whole thing. At the end of the day, it really is just metal and rubber and really nice leather, and we would do well to remember it.

The sad reality is, for many people walking through that auto show, they had a far more human interaction with their dream cars than they did with the ladies who were put on display. They were far more conscious of the personality and soul of that new Audi than of the eternal value of each of those girls.

Dear car culture, you’ve humanized the object and objectified the human, and that is my big beef with you.

Just Keep Swimmin’

It’s been a few weeks of straight-piped no-foolin’ craziness around here. Kids and babies getting sick and spewing bodily fluids in every direction. Parents going down in tandem like tightrope walkers tied to each other with electrified bungee cords. Why gosh darn I tell you it’s a front-line field hospital that’s as messy as a school cafeteria after sloppy joe Wednesday and national food-fight day happened to be on the same day.

Just when you make it through one endless day and have some time to recalibrate your sanity-machine by injecting it with coffee and multi-syllabic ‘grown-up’ conversation, you realize you have less than seven hours before the one that can walk gets up and walks out of his room, demanding sustenance and entertainment. And those less-than-seven-hours are by no means guaranteed or uninterrupted – nooo – expect to be called upon more than once to get up, make a bottle, change a diaper, fill up a water glass, paint a picture, and wax the car. Well maybe not those last two. So with the prospect of not very much not very good sleep, here I am throwing an open-house pity party with free whine and cheese.

One does well in times like these to remember those words which alone can summon that superhuman level of commitment and perseverance:

Alright I think I got it out of my system now. Some weeks are just like that, you know? We seem to be making a habit of taking about a month of winter around the January-February mark and just writing it off with a self-propagating cycle of sickness through mutual infection. We even took our little show on tour this year and went to Ontario and visited a whole bunch of our friends, making sure that they were left with something to remember us by such as laryngitis.

But although it’s been hectic, there have been many recurring evidences of profound blessing. Life is such that while you’re trying to tear your hair out you can also have your heart melted by the precious sweetness of family life. Love also shines a little brighter in dimmer circumstances: selflessness, service, hugs, life-giving words of affirmation, these things are that much more special when you really need them.

Friendship, too, is that much more meaningful in such times. I’ve had the words of author Tim Keller on the subject of spiritual friendship in my mind lately. He says that friendship blossoms out of commonalities, but that spiritual friendship in a Christian context can happen between any two believers. The strongest and most fulfilling friendships, however, are when those two aspects dovetail together so that not only is there a spiritual bond borne out of similar beliefs and experiences, but also that simply human connection that happens when personalities and passions agree. It is a rare gift but one that I have had the great fortune of experiencing repeatedly along our journey – foremost with my wife, who is my closest friend in all the world, but also with others. These kinds of friendships are worth nearly any amount of time or money required to keep them alive, and the dividends are not measurable in this life.

This post isn’t really about anything, so I’m having a hard time drawing any satisfying conclusions about it. But there you go, another life lesson: sometimes things just happen and the purpose is inscrutable.

That’s okay, some blog posts are like that too.