Yesterday I was pushing the stroller down Lake Avenue, the main drag here in Lake Worth, Florida, when a voice cried out, “Henry!”
I look up. It is two members of Blair’s cast.
Pause…pause…
“…and John!”
Moments later I’m in Starbucks with the boy, and I hear (can you guess?) -“Henry!” It’s another member of Blair’s cast.
While this is a little humiliating, it’s difficult to hold anything against the perpetrators. In the first place they are lovely people, all three of them. In the second place - well, who can blame them? While I’m a perfectly decent looking guy (if a tad chunky), Henry is freakishly cute. People collide into each other on the street to look at him. And when he turns his megawatt toothless grin on you, as he will to almost anyone, resistance is futile. What do I have that could possibly compare to that?
The answer is simple – nada, zero, zip.
For those of you keeping score, what this means is that my current status in my family has dropped from second (we are down here so that my wife, Blair, can do a show) to third. Out of three. I’m third out of three. Truth be told I think I’ve always been third, I’m only just now realizing it (ego has a way of shading our eyes from unpleasant truths).
But this brings up the question - why is that so awful? Somebody’s got to be third. Why not me? Especially when it’s just for a couple of months. And it has its compensatory pleasures.
For example, Blair, who is often away working, is amazed at all the people I know here in Lake Worth. In Brooklyn, I can go for months without talking to the guy who lives next door to me. But here, with no friends around, I’m Mr. Personality. I know the local librarians and the baristas at Starbucks. I know the people at the old folks home next door who go outside to smoke. I even made friends with the drunk guy across the street, who seemed so scary until he said, in the midst of a drunken rant, “God, you’re an amazing father!”
Blair calls me “the Mayor.” But this is inaccurate. What I actually am is closer to the Chauffeur to the Mayor. Henry is the Mayor. On my own, my inner dork rises to the surface and I speak to no one. But with Henry, I’ll talk to anybody. And everyone talks to me.
This brings me to what I think is actually the greatest unspoken perk of having children, namely the incredibly wide range of people you meet. I can’t remember the exact statistics, but somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of people in the world end up having kids. What this means is that when you have a child you instantly have something in common, something very big, with most of the adults in the world. It crosses every line of race and class. I talk to Latino gardeners and rich retirees. We share the glories and agonies of raising children. We laugh and commiserate, and I find a real bond can be made with total strangers amazingly quickly.
That may not sound like much, but to someone like me, who is very interested in people but is mostly too shy to talk to strangers, it is a great gift. Particularly down here, where I know no one. These people have become my community. And they are everywhere. I don’t even have to look for them.
I read recently that there are people in Queens who want to promote their borough with t-shirts that say, “We’re Number Three!” I could wear a t-shirt like that down here. But the back should read, “And It Really Ain’t So Bad.”
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