Fly-By

For Christmas, Tiffany's dad gave us an electric fly swatter shaped like a tennis racket. All through the winter and spring, it sat in the corner of our apartment, untouched. But Tiffany finally unsheathed it one night when the summer flies came around to spoil our deck time.

"Is it dangerous?" I asked her.

"Hold out your finger," she suggested.

"No way! Test it on yourself!"

There were lots of flies circling our dinner that evening. But Tiffany, whose hand-eye coordination leaves something to be desired (she once got a horseshoe caught in a tree), couldn't hit a single one. And, I, unwilling to swat anything to its death, wouldn't take the racket from her hand.

I guess the flies told all their friends what a great hangout they'd found because, later that night, just as we lay down, an enormous fly rose above the foot of our lofted bed. It looked--and sounded--like an Apache helicopter. 

"Disgusting!" I yelled.

"Get me the zapper!"

I scrambled down our ladder and came back up with the Racket of Death. It turns out it is dangerous. Before I had time to take cover, Tiffany wound up and swung, narrowly missing my head. 

"Watch it!" I cried, diving across her body to get out of the arc of her swing.

She swung again and again, letting out little screams each time. 

"Is it possible you are missing it every time?" I asked, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. "Maybe it doesn't work."

ZAP!

The fly suddenly dropped, lifeless. Onto my pillow.

"Disgusting!" I yelled again.

"Ha!" Tiffany laughed. "I knew I could get it!"

Childless Adults

"So, how many kids are going to be there again?" I asked Tiffany as we packed on Thursday for a weekend in Cape Cod with some of our best friends and their children.

"Seven, I think," she said.

I considered the number in my head.

"Weren't there seven dogs at Thanksgiving last year?" I asked.

"I don't think it's the same thing," she said.

It's not.

First of all, at last year's Thanksgiving, humans outnumbered dogs 18-7. In Cape Cod, children outnumbered parents 7-6. When you count Tiffany and me, grown-ups outnumbered small people by one sleep-deprived body. But I'm not sure you should count us. Tiffany and I are not parents. We are childless adults. I have a new appreciation for what that means after this weekend. It means:

1) We can go to bed when we want.
2) We can wake up when we want.
3) We can leave when we want.

But we didn't want to do anything without the kids. So we went to bed late and got up early and didn't walk out the door without holding the hand of or carrying someone's child.

As non-parents, Tiffany and I are extra cautious. Whenever we left one child to attend to another, we made an official hand-off to a mom or dad:

"Molly, your son is sitting in your car in the driveway with headphones on. The keys may or may not be in there with him."

"John, does your daughter eat sand?"

"Darren, your son took his pants off. Again."

"Bobby, your daughter tried to pee in her bathing suit behind that tree. You might want to get a hose. And some soap."

"Teresa, your youngest is starting his 1,000th ascent of the hard wooden stairs."

"Megan, your youngest bit that one."

Releases of liability aside, the truth is, we had a blast. When Tiffany and I got back to the relative calm of Manhattan (we aren't in charge of anyone here), it felt weird to just hold each other's hand as we walked to dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, I saw a baby in a stroller and had to think for a second:

"Am I partially responsible for making that baby smile?"

And I was kind of sad that I wasn't, so I made a funny face at her anyway.