It Takes a Worried Man by Brendan Halpin Page A

I feel bad about this whole thing. We are both kind of depressed–we have just lived through the week with our epic meetings with Maryann and Dr. J, and I can totally see how her parents want to do something that will be special and fun, but they are being so solicitous that it keeps reminding us that this is not just a normal weekend, which is all we really wanted.
    Still, it’s nice to hang out. We go to playgrounds a lot, I get my skates, which I have used about three times since I bought them, out of the trunk and do some great skating on the traffic-free streets of this sleepy rich sailing town in the off-season. I also start writing this in a notebook that Kirsten’s dad gives her. The sense that the shit is en route to the fan casts a pall over the whole weekend, though.
    One notable thing that happens is that we are at this playground with Rowen, and we are playing this game where she drops me of on one play structure and says, “Okay. You have a good day at school, honey, I have to go to work now,” and then runs over to another play structure for a minute, then comes back and “picks me up”so we can go to our “home,” which is a third play structure. and I see this very attractive woman jog up with her jogging stroller and toddler, and I am kind of admiring the whole look–you know, attractive young mom all sweaty and spandex-clad–and about five minutes later her much older husband comes wheezing up to the playground. He is also decked out in jogging gear, but his wife was pushing a stroller and beat him by a solid five minutes.
    I immediately judge the guy, which I am sure I will pay for eventually, and I am seized by a desire to kick him to death. I mean, when a guy in his fifties shows up with his twenty-years-younger wife and toddler, you just know there’s a fifty-something ex-wife and kids just barely younger than the trophy wife somewhere. Right? I mean, I am sure there are exceptions, but this is the rule.
    And I just get so fucking mad at this guy. Now again, I don’t know his specific situation–maybe his first wife was an abusive drug addict or something, or maybe he’s even widowed, but I can’t help feeling that he has a perfectly good wife somewhere that he threw away because she got old. And all I want is for my wife to get old.  

The Mice
    When we moved in to our new house, it became clear that it was infested with mice. We have baseboard heat, and under all of the radiators were lines of turds. Behind the oven and washing machines was the telltale blue-green of mouse poison and, of course, a ton of turds.
    We occasionally see the mice running through the halls at night, and I always find turds on my stove and countertops in the morning. I love to cook, and I therefore do basically all the cooking. I like it because it is creative–take a bunch of stuff and mix it together to make something wonderful–and it’s finite. You chop some stuff up, you cook it, and you eat it. Done. This is incredibly unlike teaching, where nothing is ever complete. You do get kids coming back years later and saying you changed their lives, which rarely happens after you’ve cooked even a really fantastic meal, but you very very rarely feel at the end of the day or even the end of the year like what you wanted to do is done. There’s always more to do. This is not the case with cooking.
    So cooking is very therapeutic for me, and I take it kind of personally when mice shit in my frying pan. Or on my countertops, or all over my industrial size can of sesame oil that I made a special trip to the Chinese supermarket for. So when we first move in, I buy a bunch of poison and scatter it throughout the house. Of course, it doesn’t work at all. This is probably more a comment on our housekeeping than anything else. I mean, if you are a mouse, are you going to go for poison or for some succulent crumbs of last night’s dinner that are here, there, or everywhere?  It’s really no contest.
    I am doubly