It's All About How You See It 01/20/23

After three installments on Craig, we can safely say that the thread of this underwear story has run out. Sorry, couldn’t resist. At the last second, John came up with the final joke on a joke line about putting the item up for sale on eBay. With Dottie asking for Craig’s autograph, you can’t be too sure what her actual motives were. I was listening to sports talk radio in the car the other day (please don’t judge me, the Giants are in the playoffs for the first time in years and I can’t get enough), the former star running back Tiki Barber told a story of people coming up to him asking him to autograph footballs for a holiday, birthday, etc. And then he found out that some of those people were turning around and selling them on eBay. No one has asked for my autograph or John’s. Yet. Of course neither of us were former underwear models either.

The other comic was based on a real incident, as opposed to the stuff we make up out of thin air. John and are both proud new grandparents of beautiful baby girls. I regale him with stories about mine, he doesn’t have as many stories yet because his granddaughter is still an infant. In the case of this comic, it was based on my granddaughter who was about 1 1/2 years old at the time. She came for a sleepover along with her dad and mom (who doubles as Joanie and my daughter). The next morning, our kids packed up the car to go to breakfast and head back home. My wife joined them for the breakfast part. When the kids buckled their daughter into her car seat she started wailing. When Joanie returned home from breakfast, I commented on how sweet it was that Charlotte (our granddaughter) looked at me and cried when they left. I asked her if she noticed Charlotte crying because she missed her grandpa. Joanie told me gently that no, Charlotte was just crying because she hated being buckled into her car seat. Oh well, a guy can dream, can’t he?

Have a great weekend, especially those of you who root for the Giants, and we will see you next week with two new ones.

Andy and John

Perspective 09/09/22

If you’re old enough to be reading The New 60, you’re probably old enough to have grandchildren. And if you’re old enough to have grandchildren you know that you’ve just been knocked back a rung or two in the family pecking order. Speaking from experience, my wife and I rented a beach house this summer and invited our daughter, her husband and their child, who doubles as our first grandchild. Now admittedly she is cute as a button, likely the cutest baby ever (okay that’s just grandpa getting carried away…a little) but enough is enough. One day my wife was feverishly working, door to our bedroom closed as she conducted a zoom meeting on her computer. I needed to desperately ask her a question and couldn't wait for her meeting to end in order to ask the question. She had at least another hour to go. So I gingerly opened the door and entered the room. She looked over her shoulder, saw it was me and waved me away, as if to say “Get out of here, can’t you see I’m in the middle of an important meeting?” I retreated. Now to be fair, she is the only one of us with a full-time job since I unceremoniously “retired” from advertising at the end of 2016, and her work is very important. At any rate, not five minutes later our granddaughter came crawling down the hallway, and I, feeling rejected (and being a wiseass) , wanted to get my wife back. So I said to the baby, “Want to see grandma? C’mon, she’s right in here. So baby Charlotte crawls right up to the door, and slaps at it, making a loud sound repeatedly. My wife comes to the door ready to hand me my head, when she looks down, sees who’s making the racket, and in her sweetest, highest voice, says Hiiiiiiiii sweetheart, want Grandma to pick you up?” And of course she does, brings Charlotte to the computer, introduces her to the zoom meeting, and everybody is oohing and ahhing and speaking in their own high voices for the next five minutes, before she hands Charlotte back to her mom, shuts the door and resumes the meeting. Now couldn't she have done the same with me? Granted she couldn't have lifted me up, but at least an “Excuse me guys, I just have to speak to my husband for a second, oh wait, want to meet him?” I mean I am 69, which is not nearly as cute as our 16- month-old, but I am temporarily disabled with a broken ankle suffered while riding a bicycle. So give me a little break, but wait, I’d rather not have any more breaks. Okay, I guess it’s pretty tough to score sympathy points when competing with a baby. She wins. As does my wife and her accurate set of priorities. But what I had to say was important. Something crucial like, “Could you pick up some tonic water at the grocery store?” In truth it was so unimportant that I can’t even remember what it was. So maybe it wasn't that important, but it did inspire our first comic.

Next up was Pickleball. John is a tennis player and has also tried his hand at Pickleball. It is being billed as a great sport for seniors, right up there with walking and frisbee golf. It requires good hand-eye coordination and not much running since most people play doubles and the court is about a third the size of a tennis court. But what it does require is a lot of quick movements including lunging. Back to my broken ankle. I was reading an article about the emerging popularity of Pickleball, when they quoted Dr. Neil Roth, an orthopedic surgeon, extensively. Dr. Roth said it was a great game for seniors for many reasons but cautioned that he had repaired a lot of broken limbs as a result of Pickleball. That stopped me because that is the same Dr. Roth who just performed surgery on my ankle. When John and I discussed how we were going to approach Pickleball, I suggested doing a comic about a broken limb, but he went right to the fact that part of the court is called the kitchen and we both knew who has trouble in the kitchen. Loveable old Marv, that’s who.

So that’s it for this week. Enjoy your weekend, Can you believe it’s already football season? See you next week with two new ones,

Andy and John

Twins, twins 9/16/21

Twins are nature’s way of saying, so nice, let’s do it twice. On the one hand, you get over the process of having a complete family more quickly, but on the other hand…

What if they’re not on the same sleep schedule, feeding schedule (well that would be technically challenging since there’s only one mom and two kids) or pooping schedule? So John and I decided to have a go at another three part series, called Twins Come Home, parts 1, 2 and 3. So why do they appear on the website in reverse order, you ask? That may be because someone has not figured out how to put them in, in the correct order. One of us, but that particular person, if it happened to be me, should be given a pass today because it’s Yom Kippur and because that person happens to be fasting, and because being hungry makes that person pissed off and because that same person is expected to write a sunny and funny blog while he’s hungry and pissed off, capiche? I’m not saying that person is me you understand but if it were, that is how I’d react.

Oh yeah, the comics. Part one was last Friday featuring the exhausted parents and the calm, cool and collected grandparents. We can afford to be cool because we get to sleep through the night and not be awakened every 3 hours or so. So we imagined what would happen if the grandparents offered their services as babysitters for a night. We imagined the bedraggled couple would accept their offer rather quickly.

This summer, my wife and I shared a beach house with our daughter, son-in-law and their new baby. They wanted nothing more than a night off to feel human, go to dinner and a movie, and we wanted nothing more than to hang with the baby and put her to sleep. A win-win if there ever was one. Which leads to the part 3 comic, in which no sooner do the parents leave, than the baby starts shrieking. This too comes from personal experience. I recounted to John how my daughter asked me to babysit for one half an hour while she got on a phone call about a potential freelance job. My wife was working, my daughter and son-in-law were working so it was just me and the baby for 30 minutes, from 2pm until 2:30. I couldn’t wait. As soon as my daughter got up from the living room the baby started crying. I picked her up to soothe her. She cried louder. I rocked her in my arms, she began to shriek. Doors opened from other rooms, what are you doing to her? Nothing! I swear! I took her outside so nobody could hear anymore then when she calmed down I walked back into the kitchen to see how much time had passed. It was 2:08 This went on for the rest of the time, outside, inside, me: oh look, this is a tree, these are branches, want to shake the branch, go ahead, shake it…2:12

Finally, mercifully, my daughter’s phone call was over a few minutes early and she came out to her daughter who suddenly was all smiles and sunshine. When my daughter asked how it went I said, “Fine,” even though everyone in the surrounding zip codes could hear it wasn’t fine. John turned this story into Twins, part 3, even though you see that comic first, is that clear? Yeah, I don’t understand it either.

Enjoy the weekend a lot more than I am enjoying this freakin’ fast. And we will see you next week with two new ones, not about the twins.

Andy and John

New Dad 11/06/2020

Confession: we rented a house in East Hampton for our 30th anniversary in 2014 and never looked back. We’ve done it every year since. Why do I mention that? One it’s a great bribe to get your kids to come and visit you all the time. But the other reason is you see all sorts of sights. From the beautiful…the pristine beaches, spectacular sunsets, the golden light … to the less than beautiful … including older, saggy men with young starlets strolling down said pristine beach. And that leads into today’s comics. Sort of. It’s not that Sam is in his 80’s and Shellie in her 20’s (and believe me, I’ve seen that combo). It’s not even that he has attracted her with his spectacular wealth and power (of which he has neither). It’s just that he married a significantly younger woman. And we thought that might affect the dynamic between Al, Marv and Sam. Primarily because Al’s wife Joanne and Marv’s wife Rachel liked Sam’s first wife and related to her, and they were all part of the same generation. But this new young whippersnapper Shellie, as they say in Brooklyn, fuhgeddaboudit. Except now Shellie (the young whippersnapper is 40, mind you) has had a baby, and this brings Rachel and Joanne around. And it’s going to make Sam’s life far different from his buddys’ lives all over again. First they were the ones who couldn’t stay out late, who had to cancel plans because they couldn’t find a baby sitter, who were always exhausted, but now HE is goingto be the one experiencing all of that when Al and Marv can stay out as late as they want (of course, being in their 60’s that’s not very late, but it’s nice to have options). The first comic also touches on the fact that men are basically babies themselves. Think about it. The woman does all the carrying. Goes through all the nausea. Bares all the labor pain and is the baby’s source of nutrition. And Sam sort of feels bad that all the attention is on the baby and Shellie. We all go through personal growing pains. Sam is about to go through his.

The second comic, on the same topic, touches on the ways in which society has changed and keeps on changing. When we grew up we had chocolate cigarettes and even better big, fat chocolate cigars (only milk chocolate in those days, thank you very much) and who can forget Big League Chew, which took a cancerous product like chewing tobacco and reformulated it as shards of bubble gum. It even came in a resealable pouch just like the real thing. In the past we ran a comic about a grandchild’s horror that Al was still using plastic straws. And so today, we thought one further shock to Sam’s reality was that he no longer could pass out cigars. But hey, organic fruit rollups are almost just as good. Especially when paired with an aged 12-year old scotch. Sam’s life is about to change big time.

Ours, not so much. We’ll see you next week with two new ones.

Andy and John