Jake and I walked to the grocery store a few weeks ago. The list, administered by Amy, was simple:

• asparagus
• milk
• bread
• tomatoes
• PENIS!

The last piece was my contribution, if you couldn’t figure that out. Whenever Amy leaves a written list of anything lying around—eulogy notes, for example—I add PENIS! to it.

Back to our walk. I spent the first leg programming my boy.

Me: M-I-A-M-I

Jake: Fight! Fight! Fight!

Me: C-A-N-E-S

Jake: Canes!

Me: We got some Canes over here…

Jake: Woosh! Woosh!

Me: Good boy.

We entered Dominick’s.

“Wow! We go grocery store!” Jake said and exploded with curiosity. From his stroller, his little hands pointed everywhere.

“Wazat Daddy Davit?”

“That’s a Starbuck’s.”

“Wazat Daddy?”

“Cookies.”

“Jakey eat it?”

“No. You’ve got your pretzels.”

“Wazat?”

“That’s a scooter for people who can’t walk.”

“Man riding can’t walk?”

“That’s right.”

Jake turned to me and held out an opened hand. “How come man can’t walk?”

“I don’t know. It can be any number of reasons.”

His expression became more perplexed, bordering on concern.

I sighed. “Maybe he has Polio or diabetes. Or he fell off his roof.”

Jake pointed elsewhere. “Wazat?”

“Paper towels.”

“Wazat, Daddy Davit?”

“Tampons.”

I crossed everything off the list except for PENIS!, and we checked out at the self-service section. I put the groceries in the little basket under the stroller, and we walked outside into the hot, dense air.

For several minutes, Jake played with and gnawed at a box. I thought nothing of it, and kept going. A little later, I snapped out of my aloofness. What is that box? Where did it  come from? Did Jake pull something out of the stroller basket?

I walked to the front of the stroller and saw that Jake was playing with a box of cake mix. Jake had stolen it.

I stole a pen from a gift shop in Marco Island when I was twelve. Jake shoplifted at two. The sun beat down on us. He looked at me with squinted eyes and smiled.

“Hi,” he said, and I laughed hard.

For the rest of the walk, I tried figuring out just how in the hell Jake so easily stole the box of cake mix. He must have simply and swiftly swiped the it from his stroller. Holy shit, the stealth!

Amy also laughed when I told her. It tired explaining the transgression to Jake.

“Jake, you stole something.”

“Jakey stole it,” he said with a wide smile.

“Stealing is illegal.”

Jake’s new affect is to laugh while talking. “Yeah-haha,” he said.

“I’m glad you think stealing is funny,” I said, not angry in the slightest.

“Stealing so so funny-hahaha.”

“You’re a thief.”

“Jakey feef-hahahaha.”

“How does that make you feel?”

He shrugged and smiled.

“You’re proud of this?”

“Ah ha.”

“You’re a proud thief.”

Jakey pwowed feef. Bake cake?”

“No. I think the right move is to return it.”

Amy brought it back, and her story drew laughter from the employees. Jake stayed home.

Jake is 2, and while I have tried many times to traumatize him, he seems to just roll with it and be happy. I’ve determined that he’s incorruptible, and his short-term trauma memory plays to my favor.  Still though, I’ve had to make sacrifices and reign it in a bit. I’ve cut back my cursing around him by 10 percent, but as he can’t read, I express it in other ways (See Figure 1).

He also mistakes my deviance with playing when I do this: 

And this:

And this:

Jake understands tone. He knows when I’m serious and when I’m not. Should I say with a smile and giggling voice, “I’m gonna gobble your feet!”, and pretend to eat them, he laughs because he knows I’m being silly. But when he takes off toward the street and my heart free falls, and I yell, “Get back here!”, he knows I’m sincere and mad. Jake believes everything I say in a serious tone because why would he imagine his father lying to him? I took note of this early.

Sometimes, all I want is to eat string cheese. I love the way it peels into perfect sizes. It always hits the spot as a snack before dinner. I don’t like sharing it because it won’t hit the spot then. And who shares string cheese? Jake interrupted my spot-hitting recently:

“Jakey eat it?”

“No.”

“Jakey eat it the stwing cheese?”

I sighed and tried to reason. “Come on. It’s only this big.”

“Jakey eat it?”

“You can’t,” I said sternly. “It will kill you.”

Amy glared at me until my insides hurt. But next time I ate string cheese, he asked for some, so clearly he wasn’t scarred.

When Jake graduated to people food, he was eager to try everything (Still is). He watched me use Tabasco Sauce back then and asked for some.

“Oh no,” I said. “It’s too spicy.”

“Too picee.”

“Right.”

Soon, he’d be begging to try our food even after he was fed when it was our turn to sit down to dinner. He wanted Amy’s pasta one night, and she said the sauce was too spicy, and he understood and quit the begging. And so we continued the harmless white lie, telling Jake our food was too spicy, so he’d leave us the hell alone while we ate. Again, I took note. What neither Amy nor Jake knew was that the wheels were spinning in my head, and I had hatched a master plan.

Since every single freedom I enjoyed prior to April 18, 2008 has vaporized, I needed something in order to hang on. For my survival, I decided to give myself creative license as a father. A lot of it. Which meant I could just make shit up. Consequently, now everything is too spicy.

We took a walk in Libertyville as they worked on our car, and I just didn’t want to stop at another Goddamn park.

“Go to park?” Jake asked.

“No,” I said. “The park is too spicy.”

“Come on,” Amy said to me.

“The park is too spicy!” I demanded.

I didn’t want Jake to play with my Palm Pre.

“Jakey hold it?”

“No. It’s too spicy.”

Nor did I want to get up from my lying down position to play music.

“Jakey listen to Yaydee Gaga, Bad Wohmance?”

“I don’t want to listen to Lady Gaga. Too spicy.”

Now Jake just curls his lips and turns away from me. He totally knows I’m bullshitting him.

I’m comfortable with all this. What am I supposed to do, tell him the truth? Parenting wouldn’t be any fun.

Amy and I just returned from our fifth-year anniversary trip to Seattle, the Oregon Coast, and Oregon wine country.

But you’re unemployed.

I know. Thank you.

How could you go on a trip?

Easy. We boarded a plane, and it took us to our destination.

But, but…

But nothing. We planned the trip a long time ago, and we weren’t going to cancel.

We went away for a week, and when people asked me if Jake was coming, too, I said,

“Of course he’s coming. Why wouldn’t we take him on our fifth anniversary trip? The thought of sleeping in nauseates me. I would cry if I missed changing his diarrhea diapers. Receiving 100 percent of my wife’s attention would just suck. Not schlepping Jake from vineyard to vineyard and tasting room to tasting room while not entertaining him between fast sips of Oregon pinot noir, would be a FUCKING CATASTROPHE!”

No, Jake did not come with us.

We flew first class, which was something like 712,000 miles each, but we had the miles. No Jake + traveling first class to the Pacific Northwest = the recipe for the best vacation ever.

I flew first class once by mistake when I was 14, and I was upgraded to business class on a flight home from Spain because I was food poisoned (When you’re in Madrid, always place your order by saying “buen cocinar” or well done. Otherwise, they will serve you raw chicken with its vagina still attached.) That was pre-9/11 when you could buy a coach seat and get upgraded by simply asking.

I haven’t had the privilege of flying first class as an adult, so I decided to act like a condescending asshole. When they announced that they were now boarding first class, I looked at all the sad bastards still sitting and said,

“Yeah, not second class.”

Once seated, I sipped  a Bloody Mary and shook my head at the lowly coach passengers doing the walk of shame to their seats, waving my drink at them.

After my Bloody Mary, I ordered a glass of wine. It was 8:30 in the morning. We took off, and they served us an underwhelming breakfast on a small tray covered with a sheet of foil. Right about then, I noticed that my seat wasn’t very large.  There were free drinks, but no cool amenities like our own T.V. screens that slickly slid out of the top of our arm rests, or anything mutli-media for that matter.  Hmm, I thought. Small meal and average sized seat. Yep, we were flying coach from 12 years ago. At least we used miles. Only a shithead would pay for a first class ticket.

Our trip was fantastic, and Seattle and Oregon are beautiful, progressive societies with the freshest food and the best wine I’ve ever tasted. Being there made me forget that places like Newark and Indiana exist.

But a weird feeling came over me.

I missed Jake. We’ve gone away without him a few times, and I was happy to see him when we returned, but I’d never been away from him for seven days. By the fifth day, I didn’t just miss him, I wanted him to be with us. By the seventh, it felt like I had been away for a month. Not on vacation for a month, but away from my son for a month. Don’t get me wrong, I had a memorable vacation, and Jake, who stayed with Grandma and Pappa, was happier than a tapeworm eating intestines, but I missed a week of Jake’s life, and that is a long time during the insanely rapid development of a two-year-old.

My father-in-law brought Jake for the ride when he picked us up at the airport. He looked older, I shit you not. He even sounded older when he said,

“Hi Mommy Amy. Hi Daddy Davit.”

We’ve only traveled with Jake to see family. I used to  think it was stupid to take a small child on a destination vacation. What a waste, right?  How could a two-year old appreciate Maine, Maui or Paris? I’m over it, and we already decided one day soon we’re taking Jake to Portland.

And if we have enough miles left, we’ll fly first class again, and Jake will drink his first Bloody Mary.