Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) Read Free Page B

a one-on-one with you, either in a small Herald conference room or your cubicle.
    Yes!
David Beckham was
thinking of a one-on-one with my wife!
Just the two of them, in her cubicle or a small conference room!
    Needless to say, this email generated much excited discussion among my wife’s female friends, all of whom voted for the small conference room. They also had many non-journalistic suggestions concerning pedicures, body waxing, etc.
    For her part, Michelle, who knows I am deeply insecure, handled the whole thing very sensitively. She assured me that the meeting was going to be just another routine interview for her, although she did not explain why she wore a low-cut strapless evening gown.
    No, really, she wore regular business attire to her meeting with Beckham, and when she got back she told me that it had been a strictly professional business encounter and, in all honesty, no big deal. She was obviously lying, but I appreciated the effort.
    Anyway, that’s why I hate David Beckham. I know it’s not his fault that he looks the way he does. I just wish he would go look that way in some other city. But as it stands now, he’s going to be around Miami for years, and if I’m not careful, it’s going to drive me crazy. I’ve given a lot of thought to what I should do about this, and I think the time has come for me, finally, to grow up—to get past my juvenile self-image hang-ups; to confront and overcome my insecurity; to stop obsessing pathetically over what I am not and instead learn to accept myself for who I
am
, which is plenty good enough.
    So I’ve made up my mind.
    I’m going out for the track team.

A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER AS SHE BECOMES ELIGIBLE FOR A FLORIDA LEARNER’S PERMIT
    * * *
    Unless I Can Get the Law Changed

* * *
    Dear Sophie—
    So you’re about to start driving! How exciting! I’m going to kill myself.
    Sorry, I’m flashing back to when your big brother, Rob, started driving. You and I both love Rob very much, and he has matured into a thoughtful and responsible person. But when he turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, he had a marked tendency to—there is no diplomatic way to put this—drive into things.
    This was never his fault. I know this because whenever he drove the car into something, which was every few days, he would call me, and the conversation would go like this:
    ME: Hello?
    ROB: Dad, it wasn’t my fault.
    Usually what he had driven into through no fault of his own was the rear end of another car. Cars were always stopping unexpectedly in front of Rob for no reason whatsoever. Or possibly—we cannot rule it out—these cars were suddenly materializing from hyperspace directly in front of Rob, leaving him with no option but to run into them. Whatever the cause, it stopped happening when he got older and more experienced and started buying his own insurance.
    My point, Sophie, is that just because the State of Florida thinks you can drive a car, that doesn’t mean you actually can drive a car. As far as I can tell, after three decades on the roads of Florida, there isn’t anybody that the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles
doesn’t
think can drive a car. I cannot imagine what you would have to do to fail the driving test here.
    DMV OFFICER: OK, make a left turn here.
    TEST TAKER: Whoops.
    DMV OFFICER: (
Writes something on clipboard.
)
    TEST TAKER: Does that mean I fail the test?
    DMV OFFICER: Nah, she’s getting back up. You just clipped her.
    You may think I’m exaggerating the badness of the drivers down here, Sophie, but that’s because you haven’t been at the wheel of a car on the Palmetto Expressway going 60 miles per hour, traveling forward—which, as you will learn, is considered to be the traditional direction for vehicular traffic on expressways—only to encounter a vehicle, undoubtedly operated by a licensed Florida driver,