Sunday, Calfgrit8 challenged me to a game of Pokemon. We played and Calfgrit4 watched. I won, as usual. This was the first Pokemon I’ve played with him in several weeks.

Then last night, Calfgrit4 challenged me to a game of Pokemon. Now, CG4 has only the barest understanding of the game — he doesn’t know any of the rules, he only knows how the game looks when played. But he was giving me the smack talk for 20 minutes before we actually played.

“You’re going down!” he told me.

“My deck is going to beat you up,” he threatened.

He’s learned this kind of talk from his big brother. I don’t know where CG8 got this smack-attitude from — probably some of his friends at school. (I don’t talk game trash to my boys, like that. Not yet, anyway. When they get 12 years old, yeah, maybe I’ll give them some smack.)

A few days ago, CG8 and CG4 were playing a ball game in the backyard. CG8 gave the old “You’re going down!” smack, giving CG4 a thumbs-down salute at the same time. CG4, not one to back down from anything, shouted back, “I’m going up!” and gave a thumbs-up salute.

My Dialga Pokemon deck has become the terror of the house. Dialga has sort of become my signature Pokemon, and they know that’s the only card in my collection that I won’t trade. My Dialga has become their white whale.

So last night while we were playing, Calfgrit8 had to take over for Calfgrit4 because little brother just didn’t know what to do. But CG4 hung close and cheered his big brother on and gave me the trash talk. He considered himself playing by proxy. I was winning 5 to 1 (6 points wins), but then CG8 managed to defeat my Dialga. They both cheered and high fived each other. “In your face,” one of them shouted at me.

I got a good laugh out of it all, but I reminded them about good sportsmanship. They tried to reign it in, but their triumph was just too much to contain. They actually danced around the kitchen table for a minute. They had finally managed to beat down my great hero, and they wanted a parade like VE day.

And to make it even more exciting, they poisoned and confused my Level X Dialga with some basic green Pokemon I had never seen them play with before — Koffeen or something like that. They found that beyond awesome, “We beat Dialga Level X with a little Koffeen! Ha ha!”

I turned around and won the game 6 to 2, but it didn’t matter. They had beat Dialga, and that meant Daddy was bested, regardless of the actual game score.

CG4 told me with righteous certainty, “Now you’ll have to trade your Dialga to me.”

I didn’t respond to the demand right then, but he’s going to be sorely disappointed when I tell him that beating my Dialga in one game does not entitle him to taking my favorite card as a trophy.

Bullgrit

I changed the first diaper on both our boys, when they were less than a day old. For Calfgrit8, I just happen to be the one holding him when nature called. So I laid him down and changed him. Cowgrit watched over the operation, as she had changed baby diapers before, but I performed the deed.

For Calfgrit4, when natured called for him the first time, I wasn’t holding him, but I accepted the duty. <insert pun here> By this time, I had a lot of experience, so I didn’t need supervision.

Since that very first diaper change, eight and a half years ago, I’ve taken care of one or both boys enough to be moderately offended by stereotypical comments about men not knowing how to take care of children. Not only have I taken care of my boys as part of a team with Cowgrit, after my work hours, on the weekends, and for the occasional some hours alone here and there, as I expect most modern dads do, but I regularly have the boys all to myself at least four times a month, from the time we wake up to the time I put them to bed.

Cowgrit works four days a month (usually every other weekend — she’s a nurse in the maternity ward at the local hospital). On her weekends to work, it’s just me and my boys all day. This has gone on for years.

I know how to cook for and feed the boys. I know how to do the laundry. I know (knew) how to change diapers. I can take the boys to the museum. I know how to pack for a weekend for the three of us in my hometown. I know how to handle pretty much everything that comes up in a regular day of being with kids.

So it annoys me when a woman who doesn’t know me suggests (or says right out) that I must not know how to properly cook for and feed my boys, clean up after playing all day, do laundry/dishes, etc. Surely I’m not the only man in the modern day who can take care of his children. Surely people don’t still think all dads are as shown in silly sitcoms on TV.

In this day and age, men have come to accept the fact that women can be competent in the work place, but for some reason, a lot of women can’t accept the idea that men can be competent in the home.

Now, just because I can be competent in the home — cooking and cleaning and such — doesn’t mean I like it. I like playing with my boys, but I endure cooking and cleaning because it has to be done. I don’t have to be good at the work, I just have to be competent. When I need to be. When Cowgrit ain’t there to grab the laundry just before I was about to.

Bullgrit

Something that totally surprised me about Johnny Mercer’s pier in Wrightsville Beach was the price for admission. That there was a price for admission. There was never such a price when I lived in the area.

This was the first time I’ve ever encountered a charge just to walk out on any pier: $1 per adult, $0.5 per child. This concept was so foreign to me, it took me several seconds to realize the guy behind the counter was serious. I had to see the sign on the door to really believe it.

As a teenager, visiting Emerald Isle beach each weekend with my family, I walked out on the Bogue Inlet pier with friends and girls a multitude of times. (Really: friends a multitude, girls a few.) The BI pier was a regular “strip” for teenagers to see and be seen at the beach. At night, the covered and sided benches along the centerline of the pier were perfect places for making out with the weekend babe. (Not that I ever did that, Mom. This is just something I heard about other people doing.)

A charge to just walk out onto the pier would have ruined that whole teen rite of passage. There was no mall at the beach, so without the free pier access, we would have been relegated to walking on the unlit beach sand or hanging around the trailer parks and campsites near our parents. One you can’t see anyone or be seen by anyone, and the other you can see and be seen by people you really don’t want to see or see you.

There was just something about the warm, night wind, the roar of the crashing waves, the smell of dead fish, and the swirl of fishing line and barbed hooks flying about that just set the mood for teen cruising. Nothing said, “Let me hold you close,” like the danger of getting hooked like bait while walking on a dim, wet, and uneven wooden pier.

Ah, the good old days when teenage hormones overrode all sense of romance. We were at the beach! Summer love was on our minds. For that, a public pier was as good as a mall back home.

Bullgrit

We took our boys onto a fishing pier for their first time. This is not the ocean pier I grew up knowing (Bogue Inlet pier in Emerald Isle, NC), this is the ocean pier I got to know as a young adult when I moved to my college town (Johnny Mercer pier in Wrightsville Beach, NC).

Originally, JM pier was wood, just like BI pier, but hurricane Fran in ’96 destroyed it. They rebuilt it with concrete a few years later, but it’s now a completely different animal than it used to be. It looks more like a pedestrian bridge nowadays than a fishing pier. But there were plenty of fishers when we walked it last week.

While we walked this pier, I noted a universal fact that let’s me dispute something my brother said about my fishing in the old days.

On this post: Gone Fishin’ brogrit said:

yes, it is true. although…i seem to remember that the catch has something to do with you over handed cast….(for those of you who don’t know, you cast under handed off of a pier, which puts you hooks below out of hooking a person…or seagul……)

Every fisher on this pier, including this one ->
(he has rings in both nipples) cast into the ocean with an overhand action. No one, not a single person, used an underhand cast.

I even told Cowgrit to look and note what they were doing. (She thought I was insane for caring and wanting her to care.)

So, I can say, with recent eyewitness knowledge, that casting overhanded from a pier is the norm.

I would say something antagonizing, and do a “I’m right, you’re wrong” dance, now, but brogrit will surely respond to this post, and I don’t want to get into a back and forth argument that’ll absorb way too much time from my day when I should be doing actual work.

But I’m right, he’s wrong.

Bullgrit