Happy Birthday

July 5, 2010
approx 11 PM.

Doctor: You're dilated about blah blah blah
Me: The baby isn't coming in the next hour is she?
Doctor: Oh, no.

July 6, 2010
approx 5AM

Doctor: You're dilated about blah
Me: The baby is coming today, right?
Doctor: Oh yes.

approx 11AM

Doctor: You're dilated blah blah
Me: The baby is definitely gonna be born today?
Doctor: Yes. What's so special about today?
My wife: Today is his birthday.

I used to joke with pregnant women all the time. You're pregnant? Well you know July 6th is a good day to have a baby. It never crossed my mind that my first born would come on my birthday. Even when we got the expected due date, July 3rd, I thought to myself, close but no cigar. Then she missed her due date. Then none of the 4th of July fireworks did anything to scare her out. So on the fifth I was the most helpful man on Earth. I didn't want my wife moving at all for fear she would shake her loose.

I read all of the books. I watchedThe Miracle of Life. Nothing prepares you for a labor and delivery room. First off, the entire night was spent listening to other women scream for dear life in the surrounding rooms. Then came the decision of epidural or not. My wife went in there all GI Joe with the idea she'd deliver the baby herself to really get the "natural birth" effect. It was around hour number 5 when the nurse gave my wife the red pill. My wife thought that the last five hours were the main event and she was close to the home stretch. All that pain she felt was just part of being a woman but her journey was almost over and an Olympic medal was waiting for her at the finish line.

The nurse burst her bubble and did the Morpheus thing: "What if I told you that the last five hours were merely you stretching to prepare for the race and that you have about another 10 hours to go?" She unplugged from The Matrix. The anesthesiologist came, inserted the epidural and about six hours later that little button was my wife's new best friend. She was actually still pushing the button long after my daughter came out and the epidural bag was empty.

The delivery

There are some things that should remain unsaid. Until I get the counseling that I need, I will never get over what I saw in that delivery room two years ago. I don't know what I was expecting. I'm a pretty educated guy. I didn't think that doves were gonna fly out of it or anything, but I sure as hell wasn't expecting that. For about 12 hours nothing happened except my wife wincing over on the bed. Then the nurse came in and said, "You're at ten." The doctor showed up and since it's a teaching hospital about five other doctors came in.

So here we are with a crowd sitting on bleachers staring up my wife's vagina as we wait for my kid to come out. The doctor told her to push, the head moved forward. She stopped pushing and my daughter crawled back up inside. This went on for a few minutes then my wife decided she'd had enough. Her eyes rolled back in her head, smoke came out of her nose she mumbled something about "there is no Dana only Zool" and the next thing you knew blood shot out everywhere (not exaggerating) my daughter flew out and someone yelled "merconium."

A nurse hit the emergency button and a team of nurses came bursting in the door. The doctor explained that my daughter shat on her way out so we had to move fast. No tv-style "here's your baby," instead I had all of five seconds to cut the chord, they whisked her over to a table and started shoving tubes down her nose and throat to suction out all of the "stuff." All this time my daughter had yet to cry. She was purple and I was thinking the worst. I went over to the table and my daughter came online.

It was like when Li-lu was rebuilt in The Fifth Element. She roared, grabbed the tube and tried to pull it out of her mouth. The nurse said, "Is she rolling over? Grab her, I think she's trying to roll over." She looked at me, I said "it's okay" and she stopped. They finished their business, wrapped her up and handed her to me. We sat in a chair together while the doctors spent the next 20 minutes while all the kings horses and all the kings men tried to sew my wife back together again. No relatives could come in because they had to bring in someone to clean the blood up off the floor.

So I just sat there singing My Cherie Amor. It was the best birthday ever.

Rocket Man

Where are my manners? No holiday would be complete without another one of my Ducktales. I've already written about me setting the yard on fire. I can tell you about the time I found out why those fireworks from South Carolina are illegal.

The year was 1997. In keeping with the routine that I mentioned in the previous post, I was standing across the street from Lincoln Park waiting for the fireworks show to begin a few miles away down on The Mall. The usual crew was inside the park lighting the "good" fireworks from South Carolina and I decided that this year I'd go inside the park to watch instead of settling for the obstructed view across the street.

There's a huge statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in Lincoln Park. I can show you better than I can tell you.


 

People usually climb up on that to watch the fireworks. I had my five year old sister with me and both of us got up there. We were sitting there watching these two guys have an escalating fireworks battle. It started small with bottle rockets, then they brought out the little spinners that light on the ground, lift into the air and explode. This went on for about 20 minutes before one of them decided to bring out the big guns.

He had this big cylinder that he placed on the ground with a long fuse. He lit it, ran away and one-by-one it shot off about fifty little rockets that each exploded once they got about twenty feet in the air. The other guy, not to be outdone, pulled out something similar except his was a giant box. He lit it, ran away and it did the same thing except when they exploded they set the sky on fire. They were huge! I doubt very seriously that he bought those. They seemed like something you steal from a real fireworks show.

So anyway, everybody clapped and the guy did this fake bow. The other dude conceded that he lost. The "winner" went back over and pulled out another box just like the first one. He put it on the ground, lit the fuse and ran away. No sooner than he got a safe distance away, one of the rockets misfired causing the the thing to tip over...in our direction. There were about ten little kids under the age of seven on that platform with us. I wanted to help them, but you don't really wanna toss Black people's kids off a platform five feet in the air onto the concrete below.

"RUN!"

Some listened to me, some didn't. The ones who stood there wide eyed and bushy tailed became cover for me and my sister as we crawled behind them so that we could hide behind the bronze cast of Mary. It felt like one of those scenes from a Vietnam War movie where someone's crawling through the jungle trying to take cover behind a tree as other people are getting shot. Little kids were screaming "Ow" as they got hit by pieces of the firework.

We made it behind the statue, but that was of no consolation because some of the little rockets that came to rest on the platform were starting to explode. So now we went from dodging projectiles to dodging mini explosions. So, in keeping with the movie theme, we jumped off the platform a la Die Hard as the little things exploded and we ran out of the park. I got burned on my back, arms and legs. My little sister was unscathed. As far as I'm concerned, that was a big brother success.

Now I know why those things are illegal.

[caption id="attachment_2437" align="alignnone" width="400"] And knowing is half the battle![/caption]

 

 

 

Happy 4th!

Happy 4th of July!

When I was a kid this was my favorite holiday. I don't know what it is about little boys and controlled explosions, but I'd take The Fourth of July over gifts on Christmas any time. With my birthday only two days later, my mother used to make me pick whether I wanted a birthday present or fireworks. I always went with the latter, so we'd get a Moonshot Rocket from one of those wooden stands that spring up all across the city. Every year she and every other adult in line would complain about how much the price went up.

In all of my years living here I only know of one person who actually went down to The Mall to watch the fireworks. Everyone else I knew went to that spot in the neighborhood where they could see at least the tip of The Monument. Ours was up at Lincoln Park. They'd sit me on a trashcan so that I could see over people and we'd wait for the show to start. The pre-game show was brought to you by those people who went down to South Carolina to get the good (read: illegal) fireworks.

We'd watch the illegal fireworks with as much excitement as the real show. When both were over we'd go back down the street and light our fireworks. The next day I'd get up early in the morning and run up to the park with a trashbag, so that I could beat the National Park Service before they cleaned up. I'd scour the park for fireworks that people misplaced in the dark (and thus never lit) and I'd take them all home to light that night. Usually I would find about 5-10 fountains and a few packs of sparklers.

It's a given in DC that you're gonna hear fireworks being shot the entire month of July, so no one had an issue with me lighting fireworks on July 5th. It's also given that you'll hear people shooting at the sky when they run out of fireworks, so maybe that's why no one says anything to people lighting fireworks way after The Fourth.

Kiss The Girl

(Editors Note: This one's kinda long. Take a bathroom break.)

Three days until 30. Let the random memories roll:

They say you never forget your first kiss or first love or first "other thing," but let's just stick with kiss for today. I was a late bloomer when it came to relationships. It's funny because I started puberty at 10 and had a full mustache before I left elementary school. You'd think I would've had kids by the time I was 14, but I still hadn't kissed a girl. That changed in 9th grade.

My best friend lived across the street and his sole mission in life was to hook me up with a girl. I ended up talking on the phone to this girl that he met. Like all high school flings, we felt we had so much in common because we both liked the same 5 songs that they played on the radio and we both thought Friday was funny, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we decided to meet up after school to go to the movies. I caught the train all the way out to Silver Spring, which wasn't cheap back then either, especially on a high school budget, and I met the girl.

Instead of going to the movies as agreed, she suggested we go to her house. "Okay, where is that?" She swore it was just a five minute bus ride away. Note: I grew up truly in DC. I knew nothing about Maryland, its bus systems or any of its roads. For that reason I had a rule to NEVER talk to suburban girls. If you didn't live in DC and weren't on a train route then you were short shit out of luck as far as I was concerned. But I liked this girl, so I made an exception.

Forty-five minutes later we were still on that damned bus. "Where the hell are we going?" She said it wasn't much farther. Eventually we got to her stop and we went and sat on some bleachers at a nearby school where we talked about absolutely nothing. It was that nervous conversation that kids have before they kiss for the first time. I went in my pocket to get some tic-tacs at the same time that she pulled some out of her's. We laughed and before you knew it we were doing what we were doing.

It sucked. I don't think she'd kissed anyone before either. Her teeth crashed into mine. She bit me. It was bad. But, practice makes perfect and eventually we got the hang of it. So then someone from the school told us we had to leave so we went to her house. I'd just graduated to kissing and was not looking to adding parenting to my list of skill sets so my plan was to just drink some Kool-Aid or something and go home.

We went inside, she put on a bootleg copy of Set It Off and then (of all things) she started vacuuming. I don't know if she was trying to show me her domestic side, but the vacuuming went on for about 15 minutes. Very weird. So anyway, she got that out of her system and sat on the couch with me. We kissed some more and things got a bit heated and she went from 0 to 100 really quickly. She asked me, "You wanna go upstairs?"

I most certainly do not.

"Don't you like me?" Yes, and that is why I don't want to go upstairs with you. Don't get me wrong, I'm not scared (I was) but my mother had me when she was 15 (she did) and I'm not trying to beat her record. "Come on, I just wanna show you my room. I have a computer." I felt like a toddler being offered candy by a stranger to get in their van. I won't lie, everything inside of me (and I do mean everything) wanted very badly to go up there. I imagined it being like a pleasure paradise and myself about to have a Prince Purple Rain "Darling Nikki" moment ("Sign your name on the dotted line, the lights went out and Nikki started to grind). But, I couldn't do it. Yeah, I was nervous, but it had more to do with me not wanting to mess my life up with a kid. That was always my fear.

Fate took it out of my hands though. We heard the sound of a key going in the door. "Oh shit, it's my parents. Hide in the basement!" What the fuck? Hell no! I'll go out the backdoor. "We have bars on the door and I don't have a key for it. Please go in the basement and I'll come get you when they go to sleep." What!? When they go to sleep? You done lost your goddamned mind. I gotta go home.

I smooth out my clothes, take my hat off and try to look like we were studying or praying or something and in walks (not her parents) her older brother...and three of his friends. He stopped dead in his tracks and just stared at me. I started thinking, "Goddamn I should've gone in the basement. I should've gone in the basement. These niggas are gonna jump me and I have it coming because I never shoulda come all the way out here with this damned girl." I considered just getting up and running, but the four of them spread out like they anticipated it.

The three friends looked at the brother like, "Say the word." In a strange twist of events which completely defies logic and "the big brother" code, he started laughing and said "Damn she getting her man in here. Imma leave yall to it." He went in the basement to grab something and they all left. "He gets on my fucking nerves, nosy ass!" I played it cool like what just happened was normal. She went back in for a kiss and I just sat there kinda confused like, "Does anyone in your family give a damn about you?"

I told her I had to go home and asked her to show me how to get back to the bus stop but she refused. "I don't want you to leave." Rrrright. (Reading off an imaginary script with no feeling whatsoever) Yeah, I don't want to leave either my dearest (insert name), but the fates have conspired that I doth go home. "Stay five more minutes and I'll take you to the bus stop." It was like 7:55 and at that exact moment I remembered something that a friend told me months, maybe even years earlier....Maryland buses don't run 24/7 like DC buses do. I asked her what time the last bus left and she looked down at the floor kinda before saying, "eight o'clock."

I wanted to curse her out, but I needed the map that was in her mind to get home. So I gave her the most passionate Billy Dee Williams-esque speech and kiss I could come up with. It must have worked because she was like, "If we run, we can make it." And run we did. It looked like the end of Ferris Beuller's Day Off. We ran through bushes, backyards, whatever and then we got to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up. "I'm never gonna see you again am I?" I looked her in the eyes, gave her a deep passionate kiss and said, "Hell no."

I got on the bus and haven't seen her since.

Anderson Cooper Is Gay

Wow, Anderson Cooper came out. I must be the only person who didn't know he was gay. He says that he came out because he didn't want people to think he was ashamed or hiding that fact about himself. Also, he says he wanted to be yet another celebrity to step forward to hopefully make some kids feel okay about who they are.

I think it's a damned shame that people have to "come out" at all.

I don't pretend to understand the complexity of what it's like to be gay in this screwed up society, but I do wonder what it would've been like had the equality movement gone a different route. As far as I know the whole violence towards gays thing has been a one-way street. Celebrities are coming out to raise awareness by kind of saying, "Hey, you know the guy you like all the time on TV...he's gay too. So stop being a dick." I just feel like there are too many Anderson Coopers and Jim Parsons coming out and not enough "other" people.

I've had my fair share of gay men come on to me. I don't get offended by it or turn into a bigot. I actually see it as a compliment. "I'm so beautiful that women AND men want me. Booyah!" Almost every time it happens it is never the stereotypical gay man that you see on TV. Most of the time it's a dude that looks like Michael Clarke Duncan from The Green Mile. Even the strongest of bigots would be compelled to be polite in that situation and that's exactly what I'm getting at.

I think that more bodybuilding, football playing, "I pick up cars in my spare time" gay men need to come forward. If not that, then the Jason Bourne ex-special ops types need to do a PSA. None of that "It gets better" shit either. It should be something scary with a big dude bending a tire iron with his bare hands and the special ops guy holding a grenade and they should look directly into the camera a la Fight Club. "Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."

[caption id="attachment_2416" align="alignnone" width="450"] And if you have to cut "something" off to get your message across then so be it[/caption]

 

 

 

Hi, My Name Is...

Me:  Thank you for calling customer service, this is Ordale A. May I have the subscriber ID number that you're calling about today?

Person: What's your name?

Me: Ordale, last initial A.

Person:Cordell?

Me: Or-dale

Person:Wordell?

Me:Or, like truth OR dare, and then Dale like Chip and Dale.

Person: Or-dale. Well that's a new one.

I would like to dedicate today's post to everyone named John, Chris or Mike. Actually, this is dedicated to anyone with a common name that doesn't require repeating during introductions. I'm currently reading a book where the main character has a brief internal dialogue where she wonders how different her life would be if she didn't have a unique name. It got me to thinking: If you add up all of the times I was the new student, employee or in some workshop, how many hours of my life have been spent explaining my name?

People with common names don't have the faintest idea of what the hell I'm talking about. Let's say your name is Robert. You start school, work, rehab...whatever...and they ask you to introduce yourself. You stand up, "Hi, my name is Rob/Robert/Bob." Everyone says, "Hi Rob" and things move along. No one asks you to repeat it. They don't ask you if it means something. No one repeats it back with extra syllables, consonants or accents. Introducing yourself to someone takes all of three seconds and it's so fast that you probably don't even think about it.

Well lemme tell you something Bob. Us "strange namers" go through hell. At least I do. I prepare for introductions the way an opera singer prepares for a solo. I make sure my mouth isn't parched, clear my throat and do those weird lip exercises to aid in enunciation. Then I brace myself for all of the followup comments, keeping in mind that people usually don't mean any harm. I let the sardonic tones slide as people repeat my name and I feign a smile every single time someone tells me that they've never heard it before.

My name isn't that complicated. Or-dale. I went to school with quite a few Africans andthose are some tongue twisters. My heart goes out to them, because if Ordale throws people off then I know that the Temitopes and Olufemis out there just bring meetings to a screeching halt. People ask me if it means something. They assume that I'm only half Black and mixed with something else. I'm like a roasted pecan color and I've had numerous people ask me if I was half-white. Go figure.

Sometimes I make light of it and joke that my name is the result of giving hallucinogenic painkillers to someone during labor and then empowering them to name something. The truth, however, is always stranger than fiction. My mother was considering naming me Dale or Gale. She couldn't decide. In going over the names aloud she said, "Should I name him Dale or Gale? Gale or Dale? Gale OR Dale? OrDale." My name is the combination of Dale and the conjunction, "or," immediately preceding it during that thought process. That's it.

I lived in the principal's office in elementary school, so I came to hate the way my name sounded when said aloud. "Ordale Allen report to the office IMMEDIATELY!" I started using my middle initial in junior high to give it a different tone: Ordale J. Allen. It had a nice ring to it like Michael J. Fox, John F. Kennedy or Samuel L. Jackson. It sounded professional and went well with the fact that I used to wear suits to school once a week to hide the fact that I didn't have a week's worth of school clothes.

But that had unforeseen consequences. People started wondering what my middle name was. "If Ordale is your first name, what the hell is your middle name?" So then I'd tell them.

"Like Superman?"

Well actually that's his dad, but yeah, my middle name is pronounced Jor-El. My mother really liked the Superman movies and I think she had a crush on Marlon Brando or something, so she named me after his character. She just didn't know how to spell it, so I ended up with Jorrel. You'd think being named after Superman's dad would get you some cool points with kids, but it doesn't. Instead they point out another obvious fact.

"Your name rhymes! (Insert laughter) Or-dale Jor-rel!"

smh

Heat Induced Blog

If you can read this then you have electricity...or a charged cell phone. El Derecho or whatever the hell the storm was called that came through the other day knocked out half the power to my neighborhood. I'm fortunate because we still have power, but for some dumb reason I went outside.

Stupid.

Maybe I felt sympathetic to the dozen or so people camped out in our lobby. The high rise building, my building, is the only one in the complex that has power. So now our lobby looks like a hipster homeless shelter with surge protectors sprawled out on the floor and everyone charging their phones and laptops. It's like a very whitewashed version of Hurricane Katrina. People sprawled out on the floor sharing Triscuits and drinking lukewarm Poms.

As a show of solidarity I went outside to get the true homeless experience. I opened my car door and fire came out. It was like Backdraft. I leaped sideways to safety and everything. I looked like Bruce Willis. He wasn't in Backdraft, was he? No, that was Kurt Russell. Well then I looked like Kurt Russell. He died in Backdraft didn't he? Okay, then I looked like Kurt Russell but with a Bruce Willis knack for survival. It's hot outside.

The man on the television says that it's 97 degrees with a heat index of 104. That means that anyone, anything and anyplace outside my air conditioned apartment is dead to me. We have enough food to last until... (I'm checking the fridge)...tomorrow afternoon. 4:28pm to be exact. We have enough food to make it until 4:28pm, maybe 4:29pm  if I control my pretzel consumption. I'm not sure what we'll do for food after that. There's a family of squirrels who live in the tree outside my window. It's disgusting to consider, but I'm committed to my family's well being. Not enough to go to the grocery store in this heat, but enough to assassinate a squirrel.

How do you catch a squirrel though? Not getting eaten is kinda their thing. If I could slow one down... I hurt my foot on one of my daughter's mega blocks the other night. Those things are hard as hell. A well timed shot could possibly work. I'll open the window, toss the mega block into the tree. If I'm lucky, it'll land on the branch just as the father squirrel is leaving to go find acorns. He'll be so preoccupied with the daunting day ahead of him and the argument he had with his baby mama squirrel that he won't be paying attention and he'll trip on the megablock, stumping his toe. A squirrel with a limp is pretty much a squirrel without a future. Unable to hunt acorns, he'll begin to question his squirrelhood and plunge deeply into a state of depression. He'll begin looking for hope at the bottom of a bottle. Mama squirrel will leave him and he'll find himself standing at the edge of the branch pumping his squirrel fist at the sky cursing God for being born. His children now call another squirrel "daddy." Discouraged and completely checked out of life, he'll eat one last acorn and leap to his death.

I'll be waiting at the window with a net.

That takes care of dinner for Monday. I have no clue what we'll do for Tuesday.