The Suburban You Read online

  That year, while you were awaiting your wife's idea for the card and for the photo, you noticed a shoe box in the dining room. “What's that?” you asked your wife, noting that it was unusual for there to be a shoe box in the dining room. “The Christmas cards,” she responded. “That what?” You opened the box to see three hundred cards, all of which have a photo of your son as Frankenstein and your daughter as the fairy princess on the front. You couldn't quite believe that this would be sent to your closest three hundred friends and family members, including your parents, Brian and his “wife” at the Clayton Inn, the Fairchilds, Annika, and your friend-boss and his family, who you are sure would all react like you, thinking, “Why did the Falangas send out a Halloween photo for Christmas? What were they thinking?” This is bad, you thought. You ignored it and made a mental note to assert yourself more next year. You received not even one single follow-up complimentary call on your card that year. Of the hundreds of cards you received, there were none that were Halloween-themed, like yours.

  This year, you are more engaged in the process. You would like something funny, but neither you nor your wife has an idea. Nothing clever comes to mind, and you feel that you have to do something big to make up for last year. You put your wife up to the challenge. “What kind of funny Christmas card can we come up with this year?” you ask. You both think on it and think on it some more and cannot come up with anything.

  Then your wife, who seems to have hundreds of friends with whom she confers on even the most mundane aspects of her life, calls Karen, her most creative friend in matters of graphic design, to see if she has any ideas.

  Not even an hour later, Karen calls back, while she is clearing the dinner table, and tells your wife that she has an idea. In less than one hour, while she was preparing dinner and feeding her three kids, Karen, who has never celebrated Christmas in her entire life, calls your wife and reveals her idea for your card. “How about ‘Happy Holidays from the Falalalalalalalalangas,'” she says.

  Instantly, you and your wife know that there will never be any holiday card from the Falangas better than that. You have had the last name Falanga for your entire life, and your wife has had it for fifteen years. No one, in generations of Falangas, has ever thought of this idea—not your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or anyone before them. No other relatives, either. Karen, who has never celebrated Christmas, did in less than an hour what the Falangas have not done in at least four generations.

  Your wife finds a printer and she takes Karen's unbelievable concept to him and in three days you have what you know will be the big-hit holiday card in your suburb. You will more than make up for last year with this card and you have Karen to thank. The cards go out and the calls pour in.

  Prove to Your Kids That There Really Is a Santa

  Your son is eight years old and is in second grade, way too young, you think, to be questioning whether or not Santa is real, but there is no doubt that he is suspicious. You think that it is a shame that such a young boy is starting to be robbed of the magic that for you lasted through fifth grade. For the most part, you sort of ignore your son's questions on the topic of whether or not you are really Santa. You do not want to deceive him straight on and you do not want to raise his suspicions further by arguing too hard.

  A week before Christmas, you are at a neighborhood holiday party—which, by the way, you were made aware of one half hour before leaving your house—and they have hired Santa to entertain this adult-only crowd. Of the many, he is one of the best Santas that you have seen at a party in the neighborhood. At this party, standing next to the fireplace mantel, you meet a woman. She is admiring all of the prominently displayed holiday cards featuring family upon family photographed at one exotic location after another. One says, “Happy Holidays from the Falalalalalalalalangas.”

  After introducing yourself to her as Mark Falalalalalalalalanga, she tells you that her young kids were once skeptical that Santa was real. “How did you address that issue?” you ask, looking for some clues. She tells you a story that intrigues you. Last year, she tells you, she hired the very Santa that is at this party to come into their home and distribute gifts. She said that after that her kids were totally convinced that Santa was real. Your wife, who gets even more excited about this holiday than you do, even though she never celebrated it as a child, gets an idea. That night, she hires Santa to come over to your house a week later, at 11 P.M. on Christmas Eve. It is her idea to set up the video camera with the kids earlier on Christmas Eve to see if they can capture Santa on film. You tell the kids that you are not sure if Santa will show up on video or not. You say that Santa, because of his magical qualities, may be invisible on the video. You do all of this in such a way that your kids think that all of this is their idea.

  Your son thinks that he's got you now, because he has this brilliant idea, and if you are Santa, as he suspects you are, then you will be the one captured on that video film tomorrow morning, not Santa.

  It is 9:30 P.M., Christmas Eve. The video is set up on a tripod and it is pointing at the tree. The kids go upstairs and get ready for bed. After reading together, you say a prayer (a Catholic one) and the kids go to sleep. At 11 P.M., Santa arrives, just as your wife had previously arranged. He is the best Santa that you have ever seen and he has shown up with a big sack. You brief him about your two children and you tell him what is in the packages that he will deliver. He earns the $80 he requests and you tip him $20.

  The next morning, your kids wake you up and, like every Christmas morning, you all go barreling down the stairs to the living room together. Your kids open all of their presents, and as they are winding down your son remembers the video camera. He turns to the family and says, “Hey, let's see the video. Let's see if Santa came last night, let's see if he is real.” You tell him that is a good idea. You rewind the video and press two or three buttons on the thing before you get it into play mode. You hope that you did not erase anything that may have been recorded the prior night.

  For the next half hour on that video, you and your family witness something spectacular: the process of Santa delivering the wrapped gifts that your kids just opened. The grate of the fireplace rumbles. Santa is not yet in the view of the screen. But you can hear him. He talks to Rudolph, Prancer, and Dancer. He eats the cookies that your kids have left out for him and drinks his hot cocoa, plain as day. You hear the boxes rumble. In his thirty-minute performance, he talks specifically about both of your kids by name and he tells your kids to respect each other and to always try their best, while looking directly at the camera. He talks as he moves between the fireplace and the tree and places all of the gifts that your kids just opened. Your kids cannot believe what they have seen and your eight-year-old becomes his school's biggest Santa advocate. You have bought another year.

  Get a New Computer

  You have two computers in your house. One is your wife's 1984 Macintosh SE, so it doesn't really count. It is more like a souped-up Selectric typewriter, and even your children regard it as useless because it has no application for anything they are interested in—no Internet, no CD, no games. They cannot imagine what their mother uses it for.

  You have another computer, which is now four years old, an eternity in computer years, which, in your mind, are like triple dog years, making your computer eighty-four years old. Your kids have a library of fifty, sixty—you don't know—seventy computer games, all on disks. You notice now that every time they insert one of these games it runs slowly, the sound stutters, the colors are weird, or the game doesn't open. The computer frequently sends you messages that the hard drive is full. “Not Enough Disk Space for This Application,” it says. Not knowing much about computers, except the commonsense logic that you develop after years as a lightweight user, you think that if you delete things on your hard drive then everything will be OK. By OK, you mean that you will not be interrupted from whatever it is that you are doing anytime one of your kids turns on the computer to do something and gets fr
ustrated because the computer is not doing what they want.

  Typically in this situation you stop whatever you are doing, no matter what it is, and you start to deal with the source of your kids' frustration, the eighty-four-year-old computer. They call you and not your wife because you have billed yourself to your kids as a “dad who can fix anything.” They know that your wife, who has not ventured beyond her 1984 Macintosh SE, will be useless in restoring their computer well-being. “My dad can fix anything,” your daughter tells her friends, and that makes you feel good. Now it is time to deliver on that promise.

  Your diagnostic inquiry starts with the easiest, most obvious thing: you take the CD out of the C or D drive—you are not really sure which one it is or what that really means—and you clean it with Windex. You insert the disk. Fifty percent of the time this cures the problem. This is the kind of repair that you like the most. On top of the fact that the computer now works, your kids have developed a newfound respect for you.

  If that does not work, you begin dabbling in the unknown. The window that says “Not Enough Disk Space for This Application” concerns you. There is a ton of stuff loaded onto the computer, most of which was there when you turned the computer on when it came out of the box. You have been using this computer for eighty-four computer years and have not used most of these applications. You have no idea what most of them are and you are really not sure what impact deleting them will have on what you and your kids want to do on this computer. Nevertheless, you begin deleting files, once you accidentally figure out how to do so by finding a right-click mouse function. You wonder why this problem has never surfaced before, and tomorrow, when you are at work, you ask the Information Technology guy, Dan the computer man, and he tells you that the games now use more disk space and that your eighty-four-year-old computer no longer has the capacity to handle them. You sort of believe what this expert tells you, but not really. You think that somehow he will get a commission on a new computer that you buy and that that is his motivation for telling you that your eighty-four-year-old computer is not man enough to handle these new games.

  After you have deleted just about everything from your computer and the new games that your kids want to run on the computer still do not work, you finally accept your fate.

  That Christmas, Santa brings your family a new computer, which you all witness on videotape that Christmas morning after all the gifts are opened. It is a computer that you hope will free you up from being the family's Director of Information Technology. Your sole motivation in Santa bringing this new computer into your home is to give you a year or so of hassle-free computing. Santa brings the computer that Dan the computer man recommended. He ordered it for Santa and Santa ended up paying $400 more than Dan the computer man told him he would be paying. Asked several times if the kids' eighty or ninety existing computer games will play on the new computer, each time Dan responds, “Better than ever.”

  On Christmas morning, your kids open up the new computer. They are tingling with excitement at the thought of getting at those hundred or so games they have on CDs, which they haven't been able to play, in a hassle-free manner, for a year, give or take.

  After all the excitement simmers down, it is time for you to set up the new computer. You have been told by Dan the computer man that all you need to do is plug it in and you are ready to go, a much simpler process than the last computer you bought. So that is what you do. You turn on the computer and the graphics are clear. Dan the computer man has told you that there will be absolutely no problems, that your new computer will have enough capacity to play any game. There will be a huge difference, he assures you.

  Your kid inserts a CD of his choice. Nothing comes on. You calmly ask him to select another. No go. He tries a third, fourth, and fifth. All no-plays. You cannot believe what you are experiencing and you are tempted to call Dan the computer man on this Christmas morning to see what he got you into here. But you restrain yourself, mostly because you do not know how to get Dan's phone number.

  You then tell your kids that even though their games do not work, they can go online and check out some games on the Internet. You try to get online but realize that Dan did not connect your Internet service, like he said he would. For that Christmas Friday and the following weekend, your kids have one brand-new computer that they can look at but not use, because it does not play any of their games, nor can they get online. It is about as useless to them as your wife's 1984 Macintosh SE. They have access to a second computer that does not have the capacity to play the games that they now want to play, and they have access to a third, a 1984 Macintosh SE, which they would like to dismantle to see what is inside to understand how computers were made in the olden days. While you are tempted to allow them to do that in order to make up for Santa screwing up so badly on this long Christmas weekend, you resist.

  On Monday, you haul the brand-new computer that Santa brought into work. Dan the computer man is not in on that day. You leave the computer there overnight, and again disappoint the kids when you come home empty-handed. “Why was Dan the computer man allowed to take off today when you had to go to work?” your eldest asks.

  The next day, Dan is back. He tells you that he had a wonderful Christmas. You do not want to hurt his feelings, so you say that you did, too. You tell him about some of the complications that you have experienced, the first being that you cannot get a game to work on the new computer that he specified for you.

  Dan says, “No problem, let me take a look at it.” He does, and he says, “Oh, this is Windows XP. That's the problem.” “What does that mean?” you say. “The games that you have are all probably Windows 98 and 2000 compatible. They are not compatible with Windows XP,” Dan says, clarifying the problem for you, but about a month too late.

  “Dan,” you ask, “does that mean what I think it means?” Dan tells you that none of the hundred and twenty or so games that you have will ever operate on this new computer. “XP is a more sophisticated operating system,” he tells you, “and it is better than what you had on your old computer.” You disagree.

  That night, you drag the computer that you wish Santa had not brought your family back home. You describe what Dan has told you to the kids in a way that they can understand. “Let's go to Target, kids. We are going to get some new computer games,” you say.

  Go to Your Friends' House for Christmas Dinner

  Your extended family lives in the suburbs of San Francisco and New York, respectively, and none are coming to visit you for Christmas this year, like they occasionally do. So Christmas dinner is a dilemma, until you are invited by your friends, or until your wife takes it upon herself to ask for an invitation, a point about which you will never gain full clarity. The friends, whose house you will visit for Christmas dinner, have never had anyone outside of their family join them for this special holiday event.

  Like clockwork, an hour before you are supposed to arrive at your friends', the Sclafannis', your wife reveals to you the expected time of your arrival. You show up, and Joe Sclafanni's mother and brother are there along with his wife and kids. It's his entire immediate family . . . and you and your family. You met Joe on the sidelines of your kids' soccer games and since then he has become your close friend and business partner, with whom you buy, manage, and sell real estate.

  You hang out first in the large kitchen. Eventually, you proceed to the large round dining-room table, which is set with all the right glasses, all the right plates, and all the right silverware in all the right places. It looks festive. There are water glasses, white-wine glasses, red-wine glasses (which are used most at this dinner table, where everyone seated has a vowel on the end of their last name), salad plates, bread plates, soup bowls, salad forks, dinner forks, soup spoons, and dessert spoons. This is a lot of stuff to keep track of, and, as in many meals of this nature, when there are many glasses and plates, for some it is confusing as to what is what and whose is whose.

  The food is brought out in courses, and your ho
stess is a professional chef. You have scored big on this Christmas dinner. You are with good friends, you are hanging with their extended family (people's mothers always like you), and you are eating a world-class meal, created by a professional chef, that has been prepared on one of those $10,000 cast-iron industrial stoves, at a place setting that would be suitable for a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser dinner. What could be better?

  You are laughing and having a good time and are about halfway through the main course, moving through this gourmet dinner faster than anyone else sitting at the table, when all of a sudden your friend's wife turns to your wife and asks, loud enough to attract the attention of everyone sitting at the table, “Diane, what are you doing?” emphasizing each word in a discrete, staccato fashion. The question is asked in such a manner, with such surprise, so as to direct the attention of the entire table of guests to your wife. You wonder, has your wife taken her left breast out of her shirt? The laughing stops and everyone turns their attention to your wife. Your wife, who takes another gulp of water from her glass, which is three-quarters empty, before responding, says, “What are you talking about, Donna?”

  Now, at the point that this question is posed to your wife, she is simply drinking water, her preferred beverage, out of what she believes to be her glass. In her mind, this mundane activity does not warrant such a question, asked with such emphasis. As organized a person as your wife is, she is a woman who often gets confused with these complex place settings as to which side her bread plate is on and which of the six or so glasses sitting to her right and left have been allocated to her. Her confusion with these matters, coupled with the confidence she exudes, is enough to set an entire table of diners out of whack, with everyone questioning whose glasses and bread plates belong to whom. Your wife, the center of attention of the entire table, is drinking her water out of the most enormous glass that any of you have ever seen in your lives.