Dadchester

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. Avocados are water in our household. When the faucets aren't working because I forget to press the button that closes the garage door and the pipes freeze (this happened this winter when it was 6 degrees), we can just subsist on avocado. At least that's true if you talk to the newest member of our family. She's starting solids, which means she's throwing food at her face like a painter working through all her personal trauma on a canvas. She's Jackson Pollack with a size 2 diaper. You can't speak to her because she doesn't speak, barely babbles, which worries my wife from a development standpoint. "Ga. Ga," she says, which seems like enough to me. Apparently, there's all these milestones that we're supposed to be watchin...

My teenage daughter says a lot of things that I don't understand.  Many of them I miss because she is talking so quickly, and I as an "old" am unable to keep up with the pace and the rhythm at which she fires off thoughts and ideas. Amongst other things, she has thoughts on Keeper of the Lost City, Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Potter, and Sephora. When I do hear her, sometimes I'm confounded. That's okay though. She gets good grades. She is generally kind to me, and when she isn't I ignore it and chalk it up to her being a teenager who can't drive and her being a person who had to grow under the guise of TikTok overlords and their unforgiving algorithm. My point is that I don't usually let this phase me, but it sometimes leads to arguments with her mother.  Last week, my family and I were walking the Rye Playland boardwalk. My daughter saw a kid flapping his wings and making dinosaur noises.  "Brah. That's so skibidi," she said loud enough so th...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. I wondered how long they'd been dead before they decide to sell her scarves. The estate sale, the far more depressing sibling to the garage sale or tag sale is my nightmares come to life. People walking through artifacts of the past. Things you never expected to be shown to the public are there. Things like an unused copy of Muzzy (Je suis la jeune fille. Je suis maligne) or the extensive stencil collection that was hidden in the attic. Or, for me, the scarves that smell like moth balls, all of them hanging in the center of the room off a rack near the winter coats.  This particular estate sale is packed. People have traveled from far and wide to see if they can find a record player (yes), a clock radio (yes), or plates with the face of the woman who died in her...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have  been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog.  The cardboard box sits on the stone path that leads to our house. It is large, upright, and mocking me with its bizarre commonness. From my view through the bay window, I see the box has a picture on it. Unfortunately, I can't quite make out what the picture is without my glasses, so I grab my spectacles off my copy of John Cheever's short stories on the bookshelf. Then I turn on the light dangling above the steps leading to our door. Am I seeing that right? Is the picture on the box a car seat? Yup. There's definitely a child, no older than four, sitting in an uncomfortable strap laden seat.  There were no car seats when I was growing up. Mom and Dad just put us in the van and hoped for the best. That's a lie, but I don't have the bandwidth to...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. When I think about childhood, I think about waking up on Saturdays in the fall, still in my boxers. Brown, yellow, and orange leaf piles plastered to the end of the driveway. They're probably piling up at Highlands Middle School. The radiator is working, sort of, it's making a sound but the heat isn't emitting out the way it should. I lift the sheets, then the comforter off, and I glide across the wooden floors. Pictures of ancestors and relatives I don't know are hanging. Down the stairs, through the kitchen, and then back up the other set of stairs to the room my parents called the yoga room. The name was aspirational. No yoga was done, though there was a yoga mat in the room that collected dust. My brothers and I called it the television room.  Th...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. Greg Miller smokes cigars in a lawn chair on Saturday mornings. I don't know what his job is, something in the city, something that allows him to slow dance to music in the living room with his wife like he's character in a period piece about the 1950s. If I had to guess, and I don't, but I will, I think he probably works somewhere down on Wall Street. Takes the Metro North in the morning from Greenwich, even though he could take the Port Chester train, reads the New York Times on his way there, works, and then returns just as the sun falls in the sky.  Greg and Anne Miller have been together for 30 years. They have a child who went to Cornell because he couldn't get into Dartmouth, and they drive a Tesla and have one of those stickers that says that...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. In some places, Sundays are for waking up, putting on a suit, and making amends for all the sins you may have accumulated over the course of the week. Not here in Westchester. Well, maybe here, just not with my family. We're not very religious, or at least I'm not very religious. My wife is Jewish. She and the kids go to a synagogue a couple of miles away during the high holidays. Me? The last time I stepped into a church (St. Patrick's Cathedral) was after I missed the 5:31 train home, and I decided to see some of the tourist attractions I always ignore (When is the last time anyone went to the top of the Empire State Building?).  No. Sundays are for another spiritual endeavor. Going to the supermarket.  I'll be honest. The worst possible day to go ...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog.  In the suburbs of New York, it's common to run into a fellow New York sports fan. When you find yourself at Saxon Woods Park, the premier park in White Plains, New York to watch your child consider going down a slide, you may be wearing a hat of your favorite sports ball team. I tend to wear either New York Mets or the New York Knicks paraphernalia as I am glutton for allowing God to reach into my soul, by way of trachea, and tear me asunder. However, you may make different choices. It's up to you.  As fate would have it this year, the New York Knicks are in the playoffs. This is great for three reasons.  1. It's fun to watch your team in meaningful games.  2. Supposedly, some of the players live in the Westchester area, and you may spot the...

On the day my middle child was born, I didn't cry. I woke up at three in the morning, looked over at my pained wife, waited for my parents to come watch my oldest, kissed my oldest, then took my wife to White Plains Hospital across from Star Diner in White Plains, New York. The nurse received us, the doctor talked to my wife, and said how dilated she was. We were put in a room with a machine where I watched a monitor that tracked her contractions. It looked like a bad day on Wall Street. After a while, my wife told me the contractions were getting worse. There was pushing, there was waiting, and there was more pushing. When my middle child came out, he was quiet, beautiful, and then they poked him a bunch on a table, and he was still quiet (not at all like on the television). My wife fell asleep, and they took him to  the NICU for a week. I sat in a chair and watched television in that NICU. I watched many bad movies and saw commercials for a show called Paw Patrol. After that week...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog.  On Sunday, there is sheep sheering at Muscoot Farms at noon. I will not be attending as it is Mother's Day, and I'm splitting my time celebrating the mother of my children, who doesn't know if she's free that day, and my actual mother (massages for my wife and brunch for the woman who brought me into this world). However, if I had my druthers, if I had a choice, I would choose to go to Muscoot with its two tractors for kids to pose for pictures on, to relive the moments I spent with my oldest child,  staring at horses, donkeys, and chickens. Sometimes we'd argue about whether or not a cow can have horns, or whether that just made them bulls (I still don't know the answer. I should probably look that up).  When I think about the summer, I oft...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. The space beneath my porch is a graveyard for Christmas trees. Every year since I moved back to Westchester from New York City, no matter how diligent I am about putting the corpse of Christmas past at the end of my driveway, somehow it never gets taken. The wind blows it away, or the snow buries it, and then one March day, when the garbage men are no longer collecting trees, or they are, and I'm just too self conscious to put the evergreen out where my neighbors can see it, I drag it under the porch.  I don't remember this being a problem for my parents. In my youth, our family's trees were purchased at Westchester Greenhouses and Farm, put up the week after Thanksgiving, and brought down the day after New Years. Of course, if this were an issue for my ...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog. On the Metro North, when I'm not watching lawyers and bankers trying to forget their day by staring out the window at the changing scenery, when I'm not tooling around with drafts of poorly considered blog posts, I throw on my headphones and listen to music. Today, I'm listening to a band that came on an advertisement on my wife's instagram (I don't have Instagram, but sometimes she gives me her phone to look at pictures of sisters or friends from college). As far as music goes, my tastes are what I would call eclectic, and what my oldest would call "trash." Aerosmith. Bruce. Green Day. The Cranberries. No Doubt. Music people would call classic now. Music my oldest would call "tired". Anyway, I found this song called "St...

Disclaimer: I am a dad living in Westchester, New York. The names of all people, but not all places, have  been changed to protect the innocent and me from the glares of my neighbors who are definitely not reading this blog.  It's May, and our neighbors hate the dandelions claiming squatter's right next to the fire hydrant on the edge of our lawn. Our being the operative word here. Our meaning the lawn belongs to my wife, my three children, and me. Ours and not the Millers' whose lawn is three doors down,  across the street, and has a "hate has no place here" sign. I know this fact because Greg and Anne tell me on Sundays when they're up eight in the morning to walk Molly, their golden doodle, who is suffering from incontinence and continuously uses our lawn as his open air toilet. I just came out to get the New York Times. Yes, I still order a paper copy.  The thing about Anne and Greg is that they don't say it out loud. That would not be nice. That would...