Sometimes even the greatest of adventurers have to stay home. I hate to be the bearer of such harsh life lessons, but that’s what I’m almost paid for, and I won’t shrink from that responsibility.
For the first time in my life, I find myself bound to the confines of my immediate neighborhood. What strange turn of events could bring about such imprisonment? If you guessed that it’s a Jose Canseco-style house arrest, you’re close.
I just became a father.
But as you know from reading this column, I like to do things on an epic scale. So when my wife and I started a family, we couldn’t just have one baby. I mean, how mundane is that? No, we vowed that if we were gonna do this we would go strong, and therefore we ended up with two babies: beautiful girls born healthy and vigorous last month.
Despite the limitless joy of becoming a father, I couldn’t help but ask myself the question every would-be adventurer asks when parenthood beckons: would I ever leave the house again? And along those lines, how could I continue to be a shining beacon of adventuredom if I no longer actually go anywhere? I’m sure my tens of loyal readers are no doubt worried sick over this column’s future existence. That’s totally understandable. A world without "The Idiot’s Guide to Adventure" is a bleak world, indeed.
All around me, friends were planning or undertaking interesting trips: relocating to Argentina to master Spanish, diving with dolphins in Polynesia, winding along the Amalfi Coast. Suddenly those things sounded like a spin in a decrepit Russian spacecraft compared to what I’d be doing. Forget a month-long trek through the Hindu Kush or kayaking the Amazon--with these new arrivals, a midnight trip to Walgreens for butt paste would become an epic outing.
These thoughts swirled through my head as I rocked my babies to sleep in the tiny antiseptic confines of the hospital, marveling at the expressiveness they displayed while expelling waste out of every orifice of their tiny bodies. I looked over at my wife, still recovering from pushing out those two gurgling medicine balls. She was radiant in an exhausted, after-this-the-Eco-Challenge-would-be-a-cakewalk kind of way.
She barely had the strength to open her eyes, but she nodded at the wall behind me. The room’s only decoration was a framed poster from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (and how this poster ended up in the maternity ward of a Los Angeles hospital is anyone’s guess).
“You know, this poster is a sign,” my wife said. “We’re gonna have to take these girls to Egypt.”
And suddenly I knew with absolute certainty that my adventuring days were far from over. One day, sooner than I even realize, my girls will be old enough to tag along on our great adventures. They will gape at the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China. They will gaze in awe at a herd of elephants rumbling across the savannah. They will stomp their feet in frustration in an LAX security line.
And they will wander through the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to change some diapers.
