Traveling back and forth to Maryland to visit my family in exile has turned into a ritualistic exercise in tragicomedy.
On the lighter side: before each journey, I check with my kids by phone to see what they need from our house in New Orleans.
Of course, they need everything, they tell me. Every toy, every article of clothing, every piece of furniture, everything that hangs on the walls, every piece of building material down to the studs.
“Itemize,” I urge them.
“Barbies,” they tell me.
“I can do that,” I tell them.
And so my chore began one afternoon, as I crouched and crawled into their secret places in our house—small, dark spaces I have never been in, places that are not hospitable to people larger than, say, a dorm refrigerator.
In the process, I discovered that there has been a population of approximately fifty Barbies living under my roof. I did not know this.
An absurd number, I was thinking, but then I remembered that I used to collect empty egg cartons when I was a kid and I probably had a couple hundred—a closet full of them—before my mother brought the hammer down on that curious little hobby of mine.
Truth is, I don’t recall even the barest notion of why I collected egg cartons nor what I did with them. I just did. So who am I to tell my kids they have too many Barbies?
Let them be, I say. I mean, I turned out okay, right?
Don’t answer that.
The other thing about our Barbies is that they are all naked. They lie in heaps and piles of tangled, plastic, not-quite-anatomically-correct nakedness—a truly discomfiting sight to a father who hopes to shield his children from any and all dissolute imagery, although I suspect a contemporary child would need to be at least thirteen before these tableaux would access the lurid pockets of the imagination.
My kids, they dress and undress their Barbies incessantly, obsessively, compulsively, but—at the end of the day—they are all naked. (The Barbies, not the kids.) They are bare canvases, so to speak, upon which to begin the next morning’s sartorial exercises.
I decided I could fit about fifteen or so Barbies into my carry-on bag and began to try to dress them from the mounds of discarded dresses, gowns, and fashionable minis that litter my floors.
I found this task about as easy and pleasant as hanging Sheetrock. Apparently you need fingers smaller than toothpicks to accomplish this. I gave up the task.
And that’s how I ended up recently wandering around several major American airports with a small satchel stuffed full of naked Barbies. All mashed together in a fleshy heap.
No other luggage to speak of. Nothing checked in. No personal clothes or items; I am fully outfitted in Maryland.
Just a laptop computer, a couple of notebooks, and a suitcase full of naked Barbies.
If anybody was ever wearing a sign at airport security that screamed “Full body cavity search!” it was me.
Guns, knives, drugs, explosives, cigarette lighters—that’s old hat. A travel bag stocked with Lesbian Orgy by Mattel is a whole ’nother circumstance.
Mercifully, I made it from Point A (New Orleans) to Point B (Maryland) without incident. That’s because none of the security screeners would make eye contact with me. Or maybe I was only imagining that.
Maybe the X-ray machines render the plastic components of Barbies almost invisible. Or maybe the imagery was so creepy that no one wanted to deal with this haggard man with a carry-on bag full of naked Barbies.
Pass by, horseman.
And that’s my story. Not much there, really. But there comes a point at which I choose to purge myself of the images and the smell and the dust and the sepia horizons of New Orleans. Of all the doubt.
Sometimes I just want to ponder something else.
Sometimes I just want to travel halfway across the country just to see my kids smile and to crawl under the covers with them at night and listen to their syncopated chorus of snores and nose whistles, wince at their involuntary spasms and howls, and stare at the ceiling and wonder at the wonder of it all.