Elijah and I are in Phoenix, at my parents' house. We decided as a family that it would be better if Regina stayed at the new house to unpack because she's got that decorator's gleam in her eye, Elijah would be in the way, and my unpacking strategy generally involves staring at the boxes, confused and overwhelmed, and then sitting on the toilet for an hour.

I swear I'll tell the full story of the move soon. It will be entertaining. Stand by your RSS feeds. But for now, an interlude...

This morning, I woke up just before nine to find the house empty. I would have slept later, but some guy was hacking at my parents' grapefruit tree with a chainsaw. Yard-maintenance noise, I've decided, is the curse of middle-class humanity's existence, the price we pay for relative prosperity.

A cup of tea, some email, and a lot of Offsprung perusal later, I heard the garage door, and then the familiar, and increasingly fast, clomping of Elijah's feet.

"DADDY!" he shouted.

"SON!"

He arrived at my bedroom door, naked from the waist down.

"Where are your pants?" I asked.

"I pooped and peed in them," he said.

"Oh," I said. "And where did you do that?"

"At the gym."

My dad approached, his voice loud, defensive, and maybe even a little hysterical.

"It's no big deal, Neal," he said. "It's fine. He's fine. Everything is fine."

My mother followed behind him.

"He's fine, Neal," she said. "Fine, fine, fine!"

I wanted to say, hey, parents, relax, I'm not blaming you. Besides, you'd have to really fuck up for me to play the Bad Grandparent card. It's not something I want to throw out every time my kid shits himself, especially because it rarely happens anymore.

My oddly calm response to the crisis earned me some story details from them.

My parents spent much of my childhood smoking cigarettes and eating pork chops, but after I turned 30, they suddenly became people who go to the gym every day. This time, they took Elijah and left him at the Kid's Club. Apparently, the Kids' Club gets a lot of small kids, so they keep the bathroom locked. It's proved a very successful strategy, as the LA Fitness at Tatum and Shea Boulevards has a perfect safety record when it comes to kids drowning in toilets.

Regular readers of this space know that Elijah is a smart kid. On the airplane yesterday, he looked at my Sound Of Young America T-shirt, featuring a rocket trailing sound waves, and asked, "is that the rocket's echolocation?" But even smart kids lose their senses when they have to go to the bathroom really bad. It was locked, and he was feeling too shy to ask an attendant to unlock. So he went to the top of the play structure, stood in a corner, and unleashed the fury of his waste. Later, my parents found him playing innocently. Apparently, the club's crackerjack staff hadn't noticed the accident.My parents took off Elijah's soiled clothes in the car, and he rode home half-naked.

At the house, Elijah got into the bath.

"Elijah," my dad said, "We need to soap up your bottom and your legs."

"Seriously?" I said.

"You didn't see it," he said.

Thank God for that, I thought.

Posted by at 11:39 PM | Permalink