CSotD: Some healthy juxtapositions
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Today's comics provided a cascade of health-related juxtapositions to write about, starting with Candorville (which happens to be a rerun, but it's a really good rerun) and, yes, exactly, Lemont.
And this is a good argument for having kids before you're too old to get down on the floor with them and disappear into their world, and I'm not just talking about stiffness of joints.
I became a parent at 23 and 26, respectively, and so it wasn't all that hard for me to look back at a youth I wasn't fully out of yet. I find that, as a grandparent, I still remember, but in an almost academic way, and I can observe with delight, but I no longer fully participate.
My grandparenting began at 46 and I'm sure the window changes for everyone, but, still, you don't want to be so long in the tooth that you've seen everything else by the time you see your kids. There's a possibility of being too smart to have any fun at all.
The trend to older parenting may explain some of the helicoptering Rina Piccolo lampoons in today's Six Chix, for example.
On the other hand, being old enough to know all the things that could possibly go wrong doesn't obligate you to obsess over them. When we'd find our eldest paddling in the dog's water dish, we'd just laugh and shout, "Boil the baby!" which was our standard response to overprotective warnings.
Not only is it quite possible for a 40-year-old to have the same relaxed sense of perspective, but there's also such a thing as being "older and wiser" in terms of the fairly common factor that second- and third-borns, besides never being photographed, often are not followed around with the sterile wipes and swaddled in all the protective gear some first-borns must endure.
I should add that our more relaxed attitude towards such things didn't mean we weren't sensibly cautious: Our rule on seatbelts was a whole lot stricter than those in other families, and, if you were caught riding in a car without a seatbelt, you were barred from that car for a month. A second offense meant you could never ride with that driver again. (We didn't have any second offenses. The first was sufficient.)
But we were right about the dog's water dish.
Mind you, once your kid is up and running around, seatbelt rules aren't the only differences you'll encounter between families, as Wallace the Brave points out today.
One of the lessons of parenting is that, if you send your little one over to spend the night with a friend, you'd better get that romantic evening rolling early, because there's a strong chance you'll have a homesick kid to fetch by about 8:30.
And if, when the call from the host parents comes, you ask them if they can maybe hold on for another 20 minutes, you may expect peals of laughter.
Just chalk up the loss and go get your kid.
Of course, as Fowl Language notes, this issue of social interaction is based on an assumption that anybody gets anywhere at all in the first place.
This particular gag is based on people with small kids attempting to interact with people without small kids, but that tends to sort itself out fairly quickly, and you find yourself socializing almost exclusively with people who have kids roughly the same age as your kids, and that's what you have in common.
When it works, it's lovely, and if you not only genuinely like the parents, but find that the kids genuinely like each other, too, well, if I ever hear of it taking place, I'll update this.
For now, I have no idea what that might be like.
(Lio)
Meanwhile, going back to health risks and suchlike, this was a pretty good Juxtaposition.
I recently switched dentists because her five-year-plan for my dental health looked a lot more like her five-year-plan for a winter home in Barbados. My plan was to have my teeth, not my wallet, picked clean, and I'd rather have a session with Lio's examiners because not only do they not charge, but they invest in the latest high-tech equipment.
My new dentist also asked if I had insurance, but it was more in the line of differentiating the necessary from the potentially beneficial than in figuring out how fast she could collect.
She's even used terms like "yeah, we'll keep an eye on it, but it looks okay" with regard to the old fillings that her predecessor was sure would fall out next month and take half my jaw with them.
Finally, there's this:
I do believe in sensibly monitoring your health, and, whether "sensible" and "huge rubber colon" belong in the same paragraph, the two are connected.
Keith Knight reruns this 2003 cartoon as commentary on the death of Scalia, but that would be political and I'm not going there on a Wednesday.
Rather, it happens to juxtapose itself with a general decluttering of my workspace this weekend that included setting aside a stack of papers to be scanned and discarded.
Which included a series I did back in those days, profiling successful locals under 30, which included Molly McMaster, co-creator of the (now retired) Colossal Colon.
I did the series as part of my educational program, because the standard "20 under 40" business page series is really just a suck-up to the emerging stars of the Chamber of Commerce and I didn't think kids could relate to people that old.
So I chose to show them people at the start of good careers, as a way to see the beginning of a road, and Molly had certainly been down an interesting one, and on roller blades, too.
BTW, I couldn't afford a colonoscopy until I got on Obamacare. My previous cut-rate employer programs wouldn't cover it.
I guess they'd rather pay for treating cancer than for nipping it in the … well, you get it. Anyway, here's Molly:
(A dozen years later, she's healthy and still fighting the good fight)
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