Author archive for: Starshine Roshell

Kids Left in Cars

Published by Starshine Roshell on July 18, 2013

This column won’t make you laugh. In fact, if you even crack a grin, then I’ve done something wrong. But I have to talk about this issue because it haunts me, and I need to believe some good will come from airing it.

Every year in this country, about 20 infants and young children die after being accidentally left in a car. Not left for 30 minutes while a frazzled mom runs into a Walmart. Not left for an hour while a delinquent dad ducks into a bar. Those are just bad decisions: deliberate and ill-advised.

I mean left for hours upon hours in a closed-up car, where temperatures can climb to 125 degrees, by otherwise responsible but disastrously distracted parents who forget that their baby is strapped in the backseat and so get out of their vehicles and go blithely about their lives while their child suffers heatstroke and dies alone.

It’s horrific. Gut-twistingly, skull-throbbingly unthinkable. Yet it happens all the time. It happened to babies in Virginia and Maryland over the Fourth of July weekend. It sounds like something that only happens to soft-headed imbeciles unfit to reproduce. But it’s happened over the years to a college professor, a cop, a rocket scientist, a clergyman, a nurse, a social worker, a pediatrician… It happens to protective parents who put foam bumpers on every sharp corner in their home and organized parents who start college funds while their babies are still in utero.

I know because it happened to me.

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Lines 'n' Lies at Disney

Published by Starshine Roshell on June 20, 2013

School’s out and more than 5 million kids, teens, and adults are already looking forward to visiting Disneyland and Disney World this summer. I’m guessing that 4 million of them are dirty, rotten liars.

I wouldn’t have thought it before. But recent stories in the New York Post and on the Today show exposed a disturbing trend: families hiring disabled tour guides to escort them through the theme parks so they can skip to the front of ride lines. Both Disney parks allow handicapped guests and their families to bypass long lines and enter rides at a special entrance. So guests with a glut of cash and a dearth of scruples are paying upward of $1,000 per day to abuse that privilege.

“This is how the 1 percent does Disney,” a Manhattan mom reportedly told the Post — which makes you want to shove her mouse ears where mouse ears don’t belong, doesn’t it?

But I asked around and discovered something: This isn’t new. And it’s not uncommon. Friends of mine confessed to strapping on an old knee brace as teens and taking turns pushing each other around the park in a rented wheelchair to get quick ride access. Another tells me that although her son has outgrown his mild autism symptoms, they still use his diagnosis report to get front-of-the-line passes at the Magic Kingdom — and they have no intention of stopping.

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Atheists Saved!

Published by Starshine Roshell on June 6, 2013

For a brief moment last week, I was saved — and as an atheist, that was new for me.

During morning mass at the Vatican, Pope Francis offered a sort of absolution for heathens. The Lord has redeemed all of us, he said. “Not just Catholics. Everyone! … Even the atheists.”

Well, the world gasped. After 2,000 years of astonishing rigidity and intolerance, the Catholic Church was suddenly handing out pardons?

But ole Franky didn’t stop there. The Vicar of Christ upon Earth (for real, that’s what he’s called) went on to imply that our character is reflected as much by our actions as by any religious affiliation — maybe more. “‘But I don’t believe, Father; I am an atheist,'” the pontiff posited. “But do good. We will meet one another there.”

Wait, did he just …? It sounded like he … What the heaven just happened?

It was an interesting week for infidels all around. The Boy Scouts finally voted to allow gay scouts to join their ranks — while godless lads remain unwelcome. But nonbelievers found a hero in Oklahoma tornado survivor Rebecca Vitsmun, who responded to CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer’s comment “You gotta thank the Lord” by giggling, “I’m actually an atheist.” As odd as it was for a journalist to suggest that she praise God while standing in the rubble of her former home, and as unlikely as it was for Blitzer to get stuck on camera with an “out” atheist in the middle of the farm belt, the woman’s admission inspired thousands of faithless folks to contribute to a relief fund to help Vitsmun and her toddler son. You can even buy “I’m actually an atheist” T-shirts to aid the cause.

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No, I Won't Go to Your Kid's Show

Published by Starshine Roshell on May 23, 2013

The last few weeks of the school year are a grueling gauntlet — a narrow, clamorous chute of activity that swallows every last hour of a family’s free time. Evening performances. Weekend tournaments. Early-morning muffin-and-melon affairs in Appreciation of Someone or Other. The only way to get through it all is to keep your eyes focused straight ahead and be impervious to distractions.

It’s like Zumba class or (from what I’ve been told) the urinals in a public restroom: You’re supposed to just mind your own shakey-shake and pay no attention to the person next to you.

And yet you have a friend — we all do — who is going to break this sensible, unspoken rule and invite you to her child’s concert/meet/ recital/play-off even as you’re scrambling for something clean to wear to your own kid’s ceremony/championship/potluck/musical. And when you don’t show up to her child’s event, because, let’s face it, you haven’t hit a grocery store in 19 days and your family is eating old trail mix for breakfast, she is going to judge you. She is going to raise her eyebrows, purse her lips unattractively, and be wounded by your conspicuous absence.

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Backyard Chickens a Fowl Idea?

Published by Starshine Roshell on May 9, 2013

It seemed like such a good idea. And it was — until it clucking wasn’t.

Last week, I dragged my family for an overnight stay at a working farm. They didn’t want to go; it was a long drive, and they had concerts and ball games to attend back home. But I thought it would do us good to get off the grid for just a single stolen day — to slow our pace, dirty our hands, smell weird stuff, and touch base with our agrarian, distinctly non-iPodian roots.

We fed pigs and cooked flapjacks on a wood-burning stove (you’re required to call them flapjacks in these circumstances). We petted sheep and hauled logs in a wooden wagon and had a ferret habitat cage visit. We chased chickens and collected their warm, pastel-colored eggs. It was farmulous.

To be honest, though, my favorite part was leaving. To me, that’s why you go on hikes, or camping, or visiting working farms — so you can fully appreciate how clean and bug-less and easy your life is back home and so that the next time you’re inclined to whine about the timer of your Cuisinart Grind-and-Brew Thermal 10-cup coffee maker going off an hour too early, you can just be immensely thankful you don’t have dirt in your teeth.

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My Midlife, Half-Hearted Crisis

Published by Starshine Roshell on April 25, 2013

My grandmother, who is twice my age, is always threatening to die. “Yep,” she tells me, in that matter-of-fact way that only wise old people can, “I’m about ready to take this show on the road.”

It amuses me when she says it, and saddens me. But it also stops me in my tracks because if her predictions are right, and my math is correct — then I’m officially middle-aged.

This is it. The notorious half-life point. The infamous midlife milestone that lands men in the bucket seats of exorbitantly priced sports cars and spins women into torrid affairs with beefcake boy-toy trainers, neither of which sound like torture exactly, but …

But over this?

Forgive me. I thought middle age would be different. With all the credit it’s given (or blame it’s bequeathed) for sending forty-somethings into existential marriage-busting, job-quitting, marathon-training tailspins, I just thought that becoming halfway-to-dead would be more dramatic. More disruptive. More electric.

I always assumed that balancing atop the very fulcrum of my own personal timeline would be all-consuming, wholly engrossing, 100 percent distracting. Maybe I secretly hoped it would.

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Manhattan Made

Published by Starshine Roshell on April 11, 2013

Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it …

I grew up in a big city with billboards and litter and bellowing horns. We lived in a concrete jungle with beggars and highways and smog — and we vacationed, naturally, in charming, palm tree-punctuated beach towns.

Now I live in this charming, palm tree-punctuated beach town. It’s lovely — a safe, peaceful, pretty place to raise kids. And yet a part of my urban-bred brain wonders if there’s something missing from the soul of children who don’t know how to hop a subway turnstile or sleep through the blare of constant, distant sirens. Are they too content? Too … untested?

So when the tourists began pouring into Santa Barbara for spring break, I dragged my family to Manhattan for a lesson in culture, congestion, and crabby cabbies. We needed grit, I felt. Too much sustained simplicity makes ya soft in the head.

But could two laid-back pups from paradise really glean value from a week in a city that never sleeps? Could my dyed-in-the-wool country mice ever truly appreciate the bracing bedlam of Gotham?

Most of what the boys knew about New York came from Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind”: “Yeah, I’m up at Brooklyn, now I’m down in TriBeCa, right next to De Niro, but I’ll be ‘hood forever. I’m the new Sinatra, and since I made it here, I can make it anywhere …”

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Benefits of the Boob Tube

Published by Starshine Roshell on March 14, 2013

I’m what you might call a selective consumer of news. I like stories that make me feel better about my flaws and foibles, that buttress my skewed and even irresponsible but terribly comfy world view. For example, I skim right over articles that beat the tired old “you should exercise” drum. But I memorize whole paragraphs of stories about people who got hurt or died while exercising, proving once and for all that no good comes from needless sweating, which is just as I suspected.

See how this works?

I eschew news reports about people who’ve failed in life because their parents were divorced or worked outside the home or fed them carbs. Feh, who needs the guilt? I’m always on the lookout for tales that justify my lazy parenting — but the dang things are hard to come by.

Or at least they were until Nicholas Joy whooshed into the spotlight last week. The Massachusetts teen became lost in the Maine wilderness while on a ski trip with his dad and was found by rescuers two days later — cold and hungry but otherwise utterly unscathed. How did the 17-year-old manage to survive two full nights in a blinding snowstorm with strong winds, temperatures in the low teens, and nothing but the clothes he was wearing?

By using skills he learned from watching TV.

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No Children, No Comment

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 28, 2013

As far as breeders go, I like to think I’m pretty tolerable. I don’t preach to my child-free friends about the unparalleled rapture that is (but kind of isn’t) parenthood. I don’t scoff when they call their pets their “babies.” I don’t sneer resentfully as they jet off to tropical, adult-only vacations in fricking February, when it’s not even a school holiday and they have no natural right to be warm and free and happy. (Okay, I do that, but they don’t know it.)

What I definitely don’t do is ask people why they don’t have children. My nonparent friends say they get asked this question all the time — sometimes by relative strangers. No one with a modicum of manners would ask, “Why aren’t you married?” or “Why don’t you earn more money?” Yet childless adults who appear within an egg’s toss of breeding age are often asked to explain why they’re not helping to populate this poor, desolate planet.

The real answer is often complicated, but my put-upon pals like to have a short, simple response at the ready — something that’ll call off the procreative inquisition and let everyone get back to vapid small talk, for the love of god.

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Paranoid or Preventative?

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 14, 2013

It’s a typical day in classrooms across America. Students turn in last night’s homework, take their seats, open their notebooks, and settle in for a lesson in handwriting. Or calculating the diameter of a circle. Or avoiding being shot by a madman.

Schools from elementary to high school are now putting students through “lockdown drills” to rehearse what to do if someone starts shooting up the campus. Some have been practicing like this since Columbine; others only began after the Sandy Hook school massacre in December.

The drills usually begin with a loudspeaker announcement from the principal, after which teachers lock and/or barricade their classroom doors, close any blinds, and instruct their students to huddle in a corner and remain absolutely silent for 10, 15, or even 30 minutes. Sometimes staff members bang threateningly on classroom doors or fire blanks in the hall to add realism. One school had students lay down “dead” with fake blood.

“I cried the first time my son came home and told me about these,” says a friend of mine. “They told him, ‘If you’re in the bathroom or hall when the classroom doors are locked, find somewhere else to hide because the teachers won’t let you in.’ He was 9.”

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