I came home from work last Wednesday and my wife was upset. Our son's fever was above 103 for the third straight day and the doctor had said that even though it was probably nothing more than a common cold, we should get a urine sample to check for infections. If you don't have a child, you probably don't know that it's basically impossible to obtain a urine sample from a one and a half year old boy who wears diapers. What you have to do is get a bunch of plastic sacks from your doctor. Each sack has a small opening at its top. The plastic around the opening is covered with a sticky adhesive substance that is in turn covered with paper. The whole thing looks kind of like a cross between a condom and a vacuum cleaner bag and it's specially designed to collect a urine sample from a toddler. To use it, you peel off the paper, thereby exposing the sticky substance, and push your child's tiny penis through the opening and then press the sticky plastic down onto the skin around his groin and that's it. Your son's penis is now encased in a plastic bag that's ready to collect urine. Needless to say, it doesn't work. The urine just seeps right through the adhesive and gets absorbed by the diaper, leaving at most a few drops in the plastic sack. My wife had been putting these things on our son all day and she'd barely collected any urine at all. There was maybe a quarter of a teaspoonful in a little plastic cup in our refrigerator and, according to the doctor, we needed about ten times that amount to do the tests. My wife was going crazy. Our son, oddly enough, seemed okay, except that he was refusing to eat his dinner. My wife kept trying to put him in front of the soothing bowl of yogurt and he kept screaming and kicking and refusing. This is not abnormal--our son often refuses to eat, especially when he's sick--but it's frustrating and, combined with the all the nerve-wracking and unsuccessful time she'd spent trying to gather urine, it had made my wife very unhappy. So I suggested that I take our son out for a brief walk to the video store. It seemed like a good idea. Our son is almost always ecstatic when he's walking the streets of Manhattan. He runs along as fast as he can, holding my hand, sweating a little bit, and laughing and shouting "Hi!" to all the dogs, and he just thinks everything is hilarious, including his face-first falls onto the pavement. He usually doesn't even care where we go or for how long--he's just glad to be outside the all too familiar confines of our apartment. So I put him in a coat and took him out, hoping to give my wife ten minutes to herself and then return with a movie and a happy baby who would eat his dinner and go to bed and maybe have a decent urine sample, too. But the walk did not go very well. As we left the building, my son began to whine and drag his heels as if he did not want to leave. I probably should have attributed this to his fever and the plastic bag on his penis and gone back inside right then and there, but instead I decided to continue on to the video store which was not very far away. I was thinking that it would be nice for my wife and I to have something enjoyable and relaxing to do after our son went to bed. I was also thinking--or perhaps deceiving myself into thinking--that our son might cheer up as the walk progressed. Unfortunately, I had to lift him to carry him safely across Broadway and this upset him further. He began to thrash around in my arms and yell, so I put him down as soon as I got the other side of the avenue. I had meant to carry him south a little bit in order to get past the Love's Drugstore that has the balls in the window that he's obsessed with, but I didn't want him to have a tantrum and I thought he'd like to be on his own feet, so I put him down. In retrospect, this was a mistake. He immediately spotted the balls in Love's Drugstore and he yelled "Ball!" and then we had to walk over and look at them. Not going to look at the balls would have caused an enormous tantrum--much bigger than the one I'd just sought to avoid. So we went over to the balls. I don't know if you've ever seen them: they are small and made of black plastic and they have little colored lights in them and they kind of spin around in the window of the Love's Drugstore on Broadway and 85th Street. You might have looked right at them and not remembered it because they aren't interesting in any way, but my son really, really loves them. I have mixed feelings about these balls. I mean, I like to watch my son jump up and down and gleefully yell at them. It's great to see him so happy and to know that there's something just a few hundred yards from our apartment that can cheer him up instantly, even when he's sick. But there are some problems with the balls too--one of which is that after a few minutes at the window, my son usually tries to run into the store itself and pull stuff off the shelves until I drag him out screaming. He's slowly learning that it's okay to enjoy the balls, whereas it's not okay to go into the store and attack the shelves, but you know, he's also only one and a half years old, which means he's basically just a highly energetic mass of impulses and desires and, as such, he's pretty hard to control. Anyway, we stood happily in front of the balls for a while and then, inevitably, the struggle to enter Love's Drugstore began. He tried to run through the open door and I, expecting this, stopped him and said "no" with a serious look on my face. My son smiled and laughed at me and tried to run into the store again. I decided that it was time to go--my wife and I are trying to teach our son that he has to listen to us when we say no--so I picked him up and began to walk down the street towards the video store. My son, predictably, began to cry loudly and yell "Ball!" as if I were causing him physical pain. The video store was only five blocks south and I thought about simply carrying him the whole way there, but he was sick and I felt badly that this walk, which was supposed to cheer him up, was just making him more and more unhappy. So, once again, I put my son down on the sidewalk in an effort to improve his spirits. The moment my son's feet hit the ground, he tried to run back to the balls, but since I had a firm grasp on his hand, he didn't get anywhere. This infuriated him and I realized that putting him down again had been a mistake--another mistake--and that we were teetering on the edge of a serious tantrum, so I began to pull him towards the video store, hoping that just moving forward might solve all of our problems by giving us new things to look at. Toddlers have very short attention spans and this strategy frequently works. If there had been a nice big dog in front of us, everything might have been okay. My son might have seen the dog and cheered up and completely forgotten about the balls. But there was no dog and I was now basically dragging my son down the street against his will. I didn't know what to do next. I couldn't go back to the balls, because my wife and I are trying to establish some rules with him and one of those rules is that if we say he can't do something, then no matter how much he cries, he can't do it. This may not seem like a very fair rule--it may seem to favor the needs or whims of the parents to the detriment of the possibly healthy desires of the child--but when you have a one and a half year old boy who likes to throw glasses and suck on knives, you just need some rules that you can stick to and pretty much any rules will do. So we weren't going back to those balls. I thought about carrying my son home and just sort of abandoning the whole idea of this walking trip as a positive experience for anyone, but then I noticed that he was actually crying slightly less on the ground as I was dragging him along than he had been in my arms just a moment ago--possibly because he was expending a lot of energy trying to pull me in the opposite direction (energy that, in my arms, he might have devoted to crying). But no matter--he was not crying as much. Also, he was no longer yelling the word "ball" over and over. Instead, he was calling for his "mama." So, in a way, my strategy of forward movement was working. My son was not happy, but he was slightly less unhappy than he had been when I was carrying him. So I kept walking us towards the video store. It was, of course, just another in what is turning out to be a lifetime of interrelated small scale fuckup errors on my part, and I soon noticed that there was a woman about twenty feet in front of me who was walking slowly towards us and staring at me and my crying son. This woman was in her late thirties and she looked like she was on her way home from her job as lawyer and I would never have given her a second glance except that she stopped in her tracks as we neared her and continued to stare at us. Then, as I walked past her with my struggling and crying son in tow, she came over and asked me what was going on. She wanted to help, she said, but I could tell from her tone of voice that she was really very suspicious of me. Intensely aware of this, I tried my best to smile and said that we were fine. She just kept staring at me. I smiled again, tousled my son's hair affectionately, said we were running an errand, and started to walk away. My son looked up and screamed "Mama!" as I pulled him by her. This unnerved me a bit, but I kept walking. People always stare at the parents of crying children. It's kind of strange, but I'm used to it. This woman had crossed a certain line by actually approaching me and speaking to me, but I felt like I was getting used to that too. Then she called out to me. "His shirt is hanging out," she said. This was true. My son's long undershirt which is supposed to snap around his bottom was dangling unsnapped outside of his pants. I'd noticed it when we'd first left our apartment and assumed (correctly, as I would later learn) that my wife had left it that way when she'd last changed his diaper because she was tired of snapping and unsnapping his clothes in her vain efforts to get a urine sample. I hadn't done anything about it because it didn't bother me. My son was going to be put to bed pretty much as soon as we got home, so I didn't care what he looked like. It was kind of unusual, though, and I don't think I'd ever seen a child dressed this way in public before, but that didn't mean I wanted to discuss it with this woman who seemed to believe that I was doing something terrible. So I looked back at her and smiled yet again and said something vague and probably inaudible and kept walking away. After a few more steps, my son decided that he'd had enough of my dragging him around and he slumped to the ground crying. I could hardly blame him, but at the same time, I wasn't in the mood to negotiate anything anymore, so I picked him up and kept walking, tucking his undershirt into his pants as I went. He was kicking me and crying loudly, but I didn't care. We were on our way to the video store and this horrible failure of a walk would be over soon. At the next intersection, I had to stop to let traffic pass. While I was standing there, I looked at my son's red, wet and trembling face. Suddenly, I felt terrible. I started kissing his tears and telling him that I was sorry for ruining his walk. He continued to cry, which made me feel worse. I nuzzled my nose against his and kept apologizing and, in the process, I noticed that the woman was following us. She had been walking north when I'd first seen her and now she was walking south, which meant that she had reversed direction on her way home from work to pursue me. I guess it was pretty obvious that she was very concerned about my parenting abilities and quite possibly believed that I was not even my son's father, but rather, some sort of kidnapper or worse. And I had to admit that I was not doing a very good job of dealing with my poor, feverish son--so she definitely had me there--and then, on top of that, I look like shit because I haven't exercised in about three years, I eat crappy sugar food all the time just to stay awake, and my skin feels all oily and itches a lot. Plus I have a beard that I don't shave because I'm lazy, and hair that I don't comb for the same reason, and I was wearing an old greasy, buttonless coat and a bunch of other old clothes, some of which I'd bought used ten years ago when I was in college and it had seemed like a good idea to dress like a greasy person. Back then, there was a point to wearing these clothes--which once might have been called "vintage" but are now better described as "old" or perhaps just "dirty"--there was a point to it all: something about being young and having some kind of style like everyone else, or something, I don't know. Suffice it to say that at thirty years old, with a sick, crying child in my arms and a suspicious woman chasing me down the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I live with my wife and our collection of possibly unpayable bills, I felt like an idiot in my torn pants and soiled coat and in every other regard as well. And I could understand why someone like this woman might think I was not a decent parent or even a decent person. I could certainly understand that. So I crossed the intersection, feeling completely exhausted and depressed and put my son down on the sidewalk. He ran away from me screaming. When I tried to take his hand, he swung his fists at me and screamed louder. I decided to just let him go free and concentrate on keeping my body between him and the traffic. This wasn't hard to do, since my son's main interest was staying as far away from me as possible; so if I stayed near the curb, he stayed near the buildings--and thus away from danger. In this manner, my son and I went up a side street--away from the video store--but that didn't really matter any more. The woman followed us, but that didn't really matter anymore either. The whole walk seemed like a giant preordained disaster at this point and I was not trying to resist anything. When my son finally got tired of running without a familiar hand to guide him, he stopped and indicated that he wanted to be carried. I lifted him up and hugged him. He was still crying, but it seemed like the worst was over. The woman came up to me at that moment. She said she was sorry and that she just wanted to help, but we both knew what she was really doing. She said that she couldn't help noticing that I didn't have a diaper bag or a bottle or anything to comfort my son with--which meant that I didn't have any of the normal stuff that normal parents carry around with them when they go outside with their children. She was right and I knew I was being tested, so I explained, very calmly, that I'd just taken my son out to run a brief errand and that I would be going right back home and therefore, I hadn't brought a bag or bottle. Then I added, for effect, that my wife and I were actually trying to wean our son off his bottles, so I probably wouldn't have given him one anyway. This was true and I think the woman recognized it as something that a real parent might say, and maybe she relaxed a bit. But I couldn't really tell. My son was still crying and I was having trouble focusing my eyes and I was sweating and, rightly or wrongly, I felt like I'd done something awful. I couldn't seem to forget that thing she'd said about me not having anything to comfort my son with. The word "comfort," was particularly apt, I thought. She'd chosen the right word there--I wasn't providing any comfort to anyone. Of course, neither was this woman. For the third time in five minutes, she announced that all she wanted to do was help, but she wasn't helping at all--she was just asking a bunch of accusatory questions and staring at me like I was covered in blood or something. She said she had two children of her own, as if this was a qualification for interrogating me, and then she asked me how old my son was. I told her. She looked at him and decided that I was telling the truth. She made another comment about how I didn't have a bottle, but this time, her tone was less suspicious. She was, I felt, trying to offer an explanation for her suspicions and I knew that she was satisfied that I was in fact his father--maybe not such a great father, but not a kidnapper either---and she wasn't going to run off and call the police on me. So I said that I should really be going and I began to walk away, clutching my son to my chest. She didn't try to stop me. I carried my son back to Love's Drugstore and put him down in front of the balls. He started laughing and yelling at them like always. I sat on the ground next to him. It was getting dark. The idea of going to the video store seemed ludicrous. I was terrified, or in shock, or something--as if I had actually been caught trying to kidnap or injure a child. I think I felt this way because I knew that I had not kept my son's best interests in mind throughout the course of this evening. I knew that I had tried to go to the video store when I really should have just tried to entertain him. There had been no need to drag him through the streets in his condition. It had not been necessary, and thus, it now seemed a lot like cruelty. I thought about the woman who had stopped me and chased me and basically treated me like shit and never apologized for it or showed even the slightest kindness or sympathy towards me and, although I was pretty irritated with her, I understood why she did what she did. She'd thought my son was in danger and she'd been trying to protect him. By staring at me and asking me all those questions, she had made it extremely clear that my son and I were out in public and that meant we were being watched by people who notice and will not tolerate the mistreatment of children. If my son was ever kidnapped for real, a woman like her might save him, I guess. I mean, the chances of this happening are like one in a million and even if it did happen, it seems equally likely that she might drive the kidnapper into a rage that would consume both her and my son, but never mind that--it is possible that she might save him from a kidnapper someday. And for that, I was grateful to her. And slowly, as I sat there outside of Love's Drugstore, I came to see her in my mind as an admirable person. She had taken a risk in approaching me. I could have been the violent person she thought I was. That was a risk. And, even if she didn't really think I was violent, even if she just thought I was a bad parent who needed shaming--even if that's the worst she thought--well, she may have been right and, in a way, she had forced me to treat my son better. So that was kind of admirable too. Maybe I didn't want to invite her over for dinner, or ever see her again, but I thought she was an admirable person. If you aren't a parent, you probably think I'm a deeply confused moron right now and I'm not going to argue with you. Being a parent is an awesome and frightening responsibility. It is, quite possibly, a mind-destroying responsibility. But it is also my entire life--the only life I have or want--and so, when, after a few more minutes in front of the balls, my son ran past me into Love's Drugstore, I followed him and pulled him away from the deoderants and dragged him home kicking and screaming and then he calmed down and my wife fed him his yogurt. The godawful fucking walk was over at last. The world of kidnappers, and asshole women who fool me into admiring them, and all other people and everything that might suggest in any way that I am a bad parent or mindless person--it all was safely shut outside our door. Goodnight, I thought, goodnight. And that was all I thought.