IRISHMAN FOR HIRE

In this day and age, it is a difficult task to be a good father to your children. There are so many distractions that pull your kids in every direction and the more distracted they get, the lessons we try to teach our children seem to get lost in translation. So I decided to start early in their lives and I have tried to be a good dad to my offspring. I play with my kids, I read to my kids, and from time to time, I try and pass on a little nugget of useful knowledge that will be helpful for my children as they make their way through the world.

I also understand the rules; mom comes first! I understand this rule and know exactly how to decipher in twenty years how my kids made out with Stephanie and me as their parents. If my children end up extremely good looking and highly intelligent, they will be able to thank their mom for the most part because Stephanie has what I call the “IT Factor.” If my children have the “IT factor,” they will be able to thank Stephanie for the influence she had on their lives during their formative years.

If my kids end up moderately attractive and moderately intelligent but exceptionally funny, then they will be able thank or blame me for the influence I had on their lives. It’s a double-edged sword but just because I don’t have the “IT Factor,” doesn’t mean that I won’t be allowed to impart my own worldly knowledge to our children. I realize that Stephanie might have to go back and undo the damage later, but I feel as though I have a right to impart some information to my children as they grow up. I just want to make sure that they grow into well rounded children.

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Last night, I had just put my daughter, Chloe, to bed when I realized that my wife, Stephanie, was still downstairs getting our son, Joshua, ready for bedtime. I was about to go downstairs when I remembered that Joshua had tried to scare me earlier in the day by hiding behind a door and jumping out at me when he thought I hadn’t noticed him. So I decided that I was going to get even with him for trying to spook me.

I went into his room and noticed that the comforter on his bed was hanging over the footboard and down towards the floor. I decided this would be the perfect place to hide, so I sat on the floor near his footboard, covered my head and body with the comforter and sat there quietly waiting for him to come to his room. A few minutes later, I heard him make his way up the stairs. He opened the door to his room and looked at the comforter that was draped over me at the end of his bed; it looked exactly like someone had built him a fort.

“Cool, who did this?” he said as he walked toward the comforter to check it out.

“BOO!!!!!” I said as I flipped the comforter off my head and raised my arms in the air.

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The current business climate of charging a fee for every single transaction I have made has started to get a little irritating. Every time I have used a foreign ATM, I have paid a fee. If I don’t carry a minimum monthly balance in my checking or savings account, the bank has charged me a fee. When I have used my credit card at different stores, I was charged a fee for the convenience of being able to purchase the item with that piece of plastic.

I wish I could have only blamed the banking institutions of the world for the implementation of the current fee epidemic, but I can’t. Ticket Master has charged an exorbitant fee for every single ticket I have purchased from them. They even charged me a fee for postage and handling when I opted to pick my tickets up at the “will call” window but the most irritating fee from Ticket Master was when I choose to have my tickets emailed to me. I was still charged for the postage and then I was charged another fee for the convenience of having the tickets emailed to me and saving them the cost of the printing as well as the cost for the actual postage and handling in the first place.

The electric company has now joined in the fracas as well. When I looked at the itemized list on my electric bill, I realized that they have been charging me a monthly fee. My town government charged a flat fee for garbage pick-up, which struck me as more of a tax than a fee, but they call it a fee nonetheless. When I placed an air conditioner in with my weekly garbage, the town charged me an extra fee which I believe they referred to as an “environmental recovery fee” in order to take the old air conditioning unit away. The phone company charged me for a “universal line fee” and then, literally, two lines down the bill, there was a “federal line fee.” I guess “universal” doesn’t cover as much territory universally as it once had in the past.

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Last year, my daughter, Chloe, was playing next to the basketball court where her five-year old brother’s team was playing a game. She saw one of Joshua’s friends approaching her as he chased the ball as it rolled out of bounds. Chloe was calling his name and running toward the child when he ignored her, grabbed the ball from the coach, turned, bumped into Chloe, threw the ball into the court and continued playing in the basketball game. Chloe fell down on the floor, looked around to see who was watching her and then started to generate attention for herself with her ‘look at me, I’ve been knocked onto the floor’ cry.

“Your daughter’s crying,” one of the other fathers said to me as I sat on the sidelines watching her.

“I know. She’s hamming it up for attention.”

“I don’t think she is; I think that kid really hurt her when he knocked her over.”

“Trust me, she’s fine” I said as Chloe started to wail louder.

“Uh-uh. If she is crying like that, she is really hurt.”

“Watch this,” I said as I reached into my back pocket and took out my wallet. I opened the wallet, took out my credit card and held it up in my hand, “Chloe, are you alright?”

Chloe looked over at me, saw the credit card in my hand, smiled, stood up and ran over to me and said, “Have it, Daddy?”

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I was driving home late a few weeks ago after a very long day, so I decided to put in my U2 “Live at Red Rocks” CD so that I could sing along with it in order to help me keep my eyes on the road. As I pulled into my driveway and was about to turn off the car, I heard the familiar and eerily subtle beginning of “40” as Bono said to the crowd, “This is forty, sing this with me.”

I put my head back against the head rest, turned the volume all the way up, closed my eyes and started singing along with the CD. In an instant I was transformed back to a concert hall two decades ago when I was standing in the crowd while U2 performed “40” right in front of me. Twenty thousand people of different races, creeds, religions, political backgrounds and various other ideologies came together as one voice to sing the chorus with Bono:

I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long, how long
How long, to sing this song?

We sang as loud as we could and as the band on the stage had settled into the mellow, soft drum beat, we sang louder. We came together as a community around this one anthem singing loudly back to the stage. As the house lights came up and we filed out into the city streets, twenty thousand strong kept singing the chorus to “40” in unison over and over again. It was electric. The goose bumps ran up and down my spine as we all headed off singing in various directions, consumed by our new marching orders, as we spread the word that the time for hatred and intolerance in the world had come to an end.

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“Honey, where did we put the snow scrapers?” I yelled up the stairs as I was rummaging through our garage trying to find them.

“I don’t know. I think mine is in my car still.”

“You think it is in your car or it is in your car?”

“I think it is in my car.”

“Yeah, right” I said under my breath as I trudged out to Stephanie’s car. Even though I knew there wasn’t a snow scraper within five hundred feet of her Saturn, I looked in every nook and cranny of her vehicle and I didn’t find what I was looking for.

So I went back into the house and frustratingly stated, “There isn’t a snow scraper anywhere in your car! Any other ideas?”

“Well, then I have no idea where it is!”

“How is it possible that two, rationale, responsible adults can lose their snow scrapers every single year?!”

“I don’t know,” she said angrily in her ‘this conversation better be over if you know what is good for you’ voice. As I realized my cue from the intonation of her voice, I did what I was supposed to do in these situations; get the heck out of the house! Whenever my wife gave me “the look”, “the voice” or “the sigh,” I instinctively knew that I had better make myself scarce for a little while or else! It was like some prehistoric ritual that got stuck in our genetic code and has been handed down from generation to generation throughout history.

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I believe the hardest part of being a parent comes from the undeniable truth that every single day of our lives, my wife and I are making conscious and subconscious decisions that will ultimately impact the character, belief systems and morals of our children. Decisions range in category from extremely important to nonchalant; from religious, moral and virtuous choices down to simple basic choices like the type of foods we would like them to eat or the type of clothing we would like them to wear. Our decisions have far reaching implications for our children and when we think about it in the proper context, the decisions we make for our children will impact the other children around them at school and on the playground.

One of the decisions my wife and I have consciously made is to use the proper words for everything in the world. This core belief in the proper use of words and terminology has led our family to engage in some of the strangest conversations imaginable, especially since everyone in my family has a wonderful, innate sense of being able to use exactly the wrong word at some of the most interesting times.

It all stems from the fact that my wife, Stephanie, is adamant about making sure that our children use anatomically correct words for their body parts and their bodily functions. If they need to go to the bathroom, its poop or pee and our body parts are; breasts, penis and vagina. We do not use colloquial terms in our family and we do not use made up words like “wee-wee”, “poo poo” or “who-who”. Stephanie is adamant that these anatomically correct words are the terms our children are going to use to describe their private parts. I am in complete agreement with my wife about our children using the proper terminology, but I fully expect to get many phone calls in the future from teachers or parents who do not use anatomically correct terms at such a young age.

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It was a hot day and I was glad that I had decided to go out to the beach, soak up the sun and do some “sightseeing.” I felt bad about ditching the guys for a day at the beach so I could check out some of the “local scenery” because we came to Hawaii on a golf trip so we could play two rounds of golf each day, every day for seven straight days. As good as this idea sounded in theory, realistically, once we got to Hawaii, how could I have possibly passed up on going to the beach for a day? I couldn’t! The sand was pristine, the water was crystal clear and the views were amazing and this is from a guy who doesn’t even like the beach.

I knew that once my wife found out about my day at the beach that I would be in some serious hot water for a while but until you have been to Hawaii and you have seen all of the skimpy bathing suits, you could never understand how worthwhile this day at the beach was for me. It was like a Mecca of toned and tanned bodies. I picked the best spot on the beach to set up my chair and relax. Off to my right was a group of women who kept rubbing sun tan lotion all over each other. They had been rubbing each other with the lotion constantly and although it seemed to me like they should have covered every part of their bodies by now, I wasn’t complaining. Maybe they really wanted to protect themselves against the harmful UV rays of the sun, who was I to judge them? It was this specific type of “sightseeing” that made skipping out on a day of golf with the guys absolutely worth it.

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Welcome to the Irishman for Hire.

In the days, weeks and months to come, these pages will be filled with the stories of life that will be shared for your enjoyment. There will be no rhyme or reason for any of the stories, poems, thoughts or ideas that are shared in this forum. Irishman for Hire will be a place where a good story comes first (even if rational thought is sometimes tossed out the window) and the obscure ramblings of the mundane world will be examined, but not for any other particular reason then it is there to be observed and scrutinized.

A good way to understand the philosophy of this site is to recall the following quote from the preface to the book THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN written by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens).

NOTICE

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

We can claim that the narrative won’t contain motive or moral, but any message you take from the pages to come will be from your own personal connection to the piece in its simplest form; a good story.

So as we welcome in the year 2008, I wish you and your family a Happy New Year. I also welcome you to Irishman for Hire. I invite you back every few days to enjoy the content that will appear in the pages to come but most importantly, I welcome your feedback and thoughts about any and all of the stories that will be shared with you here.

Cead mile failte romhat!