Cracked Window

I drilled into our little boy today another of my dead mother’s irrational holiday rules: everything Christmas related must be taken down before the new year begins. Otherwise, the most dire bad luck will ensue.

Atticus accepted the rule as if our very existence hinged upon it, and we did mom proud. As a bonus, he learned another valuable lesson while helping unscrew the Christmas tree holder — lefty loosey, righty tighty.

And he’s been repeating it over and over while setting up a make-believe bookstore and pretending to take phone calls from Santa Claus. All this after his first inauspicious attempt to use his Christmas gift scooter and showing off in this video that his mother, Suzame, made.

What my mother missed.

I want to be like Barack Obama. So does my wife, Suzame. Using a nifty new plugin, we photographed ourselves tonight on her Mac in a vain attempt to emulate the iconic “Hope” portrait poster.

The now-ubiquitous image of our soon-to-be president is the work of Los Angeles street artist Shepard Fairey. The best evidence of its popularity isn’t the hundreds of thousands of copies but the cleverness of artists who have lampooned it. Dubi Kauffman wrote the Obamafy plugin for the Mac program Photo Booth. The download site features clever shots by other Obama wannabes, and even more are here.

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I made my last donation to Barack Obama last night. Not that he needs the cash at this stage of his campaign, a fund-raising juggernaut that politicians and political scientists will study for years to come. My wife and I have made modest donations six or seven times. With victory appearing all but certain, this was the first motivated purely out of selfishness.

Donating by midnight put me in a drawing. The prize: an expense-paid trip for two to be among ten people backstage with the next president of the United States at his campaign headquarters in Chicago on Election Night.

Imagining that possibility, seeing Suzame and me with Obama and his family, was too much to resist. It also seemed like a good luck omen, as was the purchase of an Obama painting Friday. (The painting, displayed in our home office window, is getting many smiles and words of praise from passersby.) Such omens, though irrational, ease the intensifying tension as we reach the campaign’s end.

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“What’s in the cup?” asks the woman x-raying our carry-on bags at Orlando International Airport. Our cross-country trip home to Portland is not beginning well.

“Our little boy’s water. It’s his sippy cup,” says my wife, Suzame.

“You say it’s water. But I don’t know it’s water,” the woman says, her tone curt and accusatory, as if an interrogation has begun.

“At other airports this has never been been a problem,” Suzame says. “They must have different rules.”

“The rules are the same everywhere,” the woman says. She gestures to a colleague, who takes the cup to a table and displays tools for detecting the presence of explosives. But it’s a sham — he tests nothing.

“She’s nutty,” he says softly so his fellow-employee won’t hear, and gives Suzame the cup.

It’s hard not to spot a woman riding a bike and wearing a skirt. I mean that strictly from a safety standpoint. After all, it’s a benefit given how cyclists and motorists in Portland struggle at times to share the road.

Don’t believe the safety bit? You shouldn’t.

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