Daddy is a wimp

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 17:01:00 +0000

"Daddy, can you win me a Domo?"

My daughter and I were walking briskly through a gigantic amusement park, past a huge pegboard loaded with bizarre, oversized dolls resembling Sponge Bobs on steroids, when Alexandra popped the question I was dreading.

"Please, Daddy! I really want a Domo! Puh-leeze!"

In her six years on this earth, the word "Domo" had never before left my daughter's lips, not once, not ever, but that's the nature of the beast. Silly Bandz and Uglydolls yesterday, some Japanese TV mascot called a Domo today, a yet-uninvented fad tomorrow. But the problem wasn't my daughter's fickleness. The problem was something else.

I glanced at the arcade in front of me. Not one of those ring-the-bell-with-brute-strength things. Whew. I'm no weakling, but strength has never been my, well, strength. Nor, thank God, did it involve a hoop. The last time I played basketball, Captain & Tennille were topping the charts. And I was quite relieved to see this particular game didn't require shooting anything with a gun. My scientist father played tennis my entire childhood: white sneaks, white socks, white shorts, white shirt. An NRA family we were not.

When we dreamed of being astronauts

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 01:01:00 +0000

With the final mission of the space shuttle looming on Friday, NASA puts a lid on five decades of U.S. space exploration with nary an ace left up its sleeve. Let's face it, hitching future rides out of a launch facility in Kazakhstan doesn't constitute a program so much as a glorified car service. And while some enthusiasts might feel a bit of a black hole each time they look skyward, I only need glance at the upper corner of my computer monitor to experience a sense of loss.

For the last 25 years, from the time I landed my first job out of college in 1986, the year Challenger went go at throttle up and then went no more, a small, bendable astronaut named Major Matt Mason has been perched atop my display.

Rescued long ago from the attic of my parent's house on Long Island, not five miles from the Grumman Aerospace Corp., where the Apollo Lunar Module was built and where my father spent his days scrawling bizarre math figures resembling hieroglyphics on chalkboards located inside buildings I was rarely allowed to visit ("What do you do, Dad?" I once asked, and he replied, helpfully, "You wouldn't understand."), this little action figure -- never call it a doll -- has always been within reach.

Salon.com > Matt Mendelsohn

Daddy is a wimp

When we dreamed of being astronauts