The Bureaucrat of Bedtime: More Wildly Suburban Tales

By C. R. Yeager

The 'banshees' are back! C. R. Yeager's smart and sassy sequel to Breakfast At Noon: Backwards in the 'Burbs scopes out the onrushing pubertal express, his 'n hers colonoscopies, the link between thinning thatch on one's pate and in the yard, and other resonant lunacy. Illustrated by graphics genius Thomas Zahler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780977066230

Book preview

THE BUREAUCRAT OF BEDTIME

More Wildly Suburban Tales

C. R. Yeager

Copyright

Illustrations by Thomas Zahler. Copyright 2013 by Thom Zahler Art Studios.

Cover Photos by Dianne Dodd. Copyright 2013 by DiDi Photography.

Cover design by Jennifer Wheeler

Copyright 2013, C. R. Yeager

ISBN 978-0-9770662-3-0 (eBook)

QED stands for Quality, Excellence and Design. The QED seal of approval shown here verifies that this eBook has passed a rigorous quality assurance process and will render well in most eBook reading platforms.

For more information please click here.

For the banshees, Marsha and Anna, who conspire to inspire

Acknowledgements

Various partners in crime offered invaluable assistance with this project. I’m especially indebted to Thom Zahler, Dianne Dodd, and Jennifer Wheeler for their vision and professionalism.

Contents

Introduction: Return Of The Banshees

The Good, The Bad, And The Uggly (sic)

Naan But The Brave

Daddy Numb-Nuts

Time Off For Rude Behavior

Gruesome Canoesome

The Bureaucrat Of Bedtime

The Cuteness Factor

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Make ‘Em Squirm

Name-Branded

Cracking Dress Codes

Moola Schoola

Hey Dad, Got Change For A Fifty?

Ready Or Not. Not.

Five Years And Counting...Down

‘Burbs Disturbed

Uncool Pools

Back In The Running

Ill Literacy

Subspecies

Felling Time

Halloweaned

A Matter Of Taste

Catscan

Vet Visit

Fey Cat Blues

Joined But Not Hip

Grand Trunk Road

Clothes Make The Man...Crazy

Style For Sale

Self-Maid Man

Scoping Out Birthdays

Still Dating After All These Years

Privacy Matters

Dishragged

Hyperallegenic

That Obscure Object, Desire

Jus’ Talkin’ To You, Daddy

Don’t Show Us The Money, Show Us The Calendar

Grin And Bear It, Granny

Introduction: Return Of The Banshees

I love the way young women pull their face off when embarrassed. Even if you haven’t taken the cliff diving plunge into parenthood—are content with a less stressful life, say, de-mining the former Yugoslavia—you may have noticed this body language with a niece or friend’s daughter. It usually involves a scene like the following:

The doorbell rings. You answer it. (‘You’ can be a parent of either sex; ideally, your daughter should be between the ages of three-and-a-half and forty.) You answer it because this is what normal people, who aren’t fleeing taxation authorities, do. In your daughter’s eyes, however, it’s equivalent to appearing in public in a sequined Speedo. Never mind that she has failed to inform you her friends are coming over, or that she is still drying her hair. The rules are set.

You open the door. There stand three tweenies wearing braces and hoodies. How winsome. Despite threats of feeding your car keys to the disposal if it happens, how can you resist making small talk?

From upstairs the tiara-ed one yodels, I’ll get it! Too late. Looking from one to the other, you flash your best Sonicare smile and say, "Hello, girls. Here to watch Family Feud?" And just like that, you’re toast. Vulcanized. Your daughter, now on the landing, commences an impersonation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, pawing her cheeks so hard the red of her eye sockets shows. Later, this gesture will be repeated with verbal accompaniment, "OhDaddyIcan’tbelieveyousaidthat!!!," further consigning you to the dust bin for all time. At least until the next ride to Pink is needed.

If this incident rings bells for you, you’ll find a carillon like it in this book, the second in the suburban saga of yours truly and the banshees, my wife Marsha and adopted daughter from China, Anna. (I call them ‘banshees’ because they function at a higher frequency than I do, somewhere in the vicinity of a dog whistle.) As before, I’ve sought balance in the unbalanced. You might say it’s my version of love.

C. R. Yeager

The Good, The Bad, And The Uggly (Sic)

Naan But The Brave

May I be excused? Anna says, one foot already in the starting blocks at the dinner table. The halibut sits on her plate untouched but for one mouthful. Our hoary calico sits on the floor beside her, licking her chops expectantly. Marsha and I sit trading stony-faced looks. Once again, the mealtime playbook has fallen open to the picky-and-roll play: food declined, followed by a rapid exit.

It wasn’t always this way. At one time Anna would eat just about anything we put on her plate (spinach, rice, carrots) and a few things we didn’t (dryer lint). When we prepared her meals she’d yip with delight and clap, bouncing in her high chair, looking like the little man in the San Francisco Chronicle ‘Datebook’ who applauds movies rated excellent. Those days now seem distant as a solution to her current selectivity.

It’s a dilemma reinforced by some finer distinctions of our own.

Believing that dinner theater should involve a three-course meal followed by South Pacific rather than a tug-of-war over a plate of rotini, we’ve so far avoided the Draconian mealtime tactics of our parents, such as the Clean Plate Club. Everyone we know who belonged to the Clean Plate Club as a kid now claims membership in another group: Weight Watchers. Better to leave a few forkfuls of spuds, we rationalize, than fork out for fat-free pizza later on. And raising a kid to know her own mind, then getting involved in a stalemate that ends at 1:00 a.m. in tears, seems contradictory. With Anna, I get the feeling we’d be cleaning cobwebs from her plate before she emptied it, anyway.

Nevertheless, it’s frustrating as hell when kids turn up their nose at perfectly good grub, especially if you or someone you know has experienced privation. After nine years of rationing in England during and after WWII, involving such strictures as one egg and one strip of bacon a week, my mother practically saved table crumbs to use as breading. Waste not, want not, she’d intone, scraping the pattern off the dinnerware. For her, even chewing gum was eligible for leftovers. So it’s all I can do at times not to blurt at Anna, from the rural village of Yi Yang, In China you’d be living on Shar-pei drool!

It’s even more aggravating when kids leave half their main course, then want dessert. Ice cream? Sure. How about a hamburger sundae? Hot fudge goes great over ketchup and onions! Or they use their entrée as a bargaining chip. I’ll eat two more bites of chicken if I can have a brownie. Great. Just make sure each mouthful could fill a tri-axle.

A lot of this fine-mouthedness starts at school, where kids don’t always share according to FDA guidelines. You send them off with a balanced lunch, only to find out the carrot sticks and apple have been traded for enough processed sugar to sweeten Dick Cheney. Sometimes it’s learned on sleepovers. What’d you have for breakfast at Natalie’s? I once asked Anna. A donut, she said. And lunch? She giggled. A donut, right? Laughter.

In fairness, our Gogurt-gobbler is no pickier than many, and occasionally even pluckier. This was confirmed recently on a trip to an Indian restaurant with her friend Moog, her cousin David, and his parents. While Anna and David nibbled shrimp curry, Moog, who normally subsists on Slim Jims, proceeded to try everything on the menu and spit it out. Tandoori chicken, lamb, sausage, even the naan bread, were duly chewed and expectorated plateside, as though she were a mother penguin feeding her young. Indeed, I came close to some youthful avian behavior myself when, because of karma or an AWOL cook, the adults were served half an hour later than the kids. By then, Moog’s gastro-loogies seemed pretty appetizing.

But you never know. We were about to send a few rupees kitchenward for a plate of Tandoori Slim Jims when dessert arrived, a syrupy confection called gulab jamun. Moog and Anna practically