I tend to give personal titles to every year.
1973 was “The Year I Realized I Would Not Dunk a Basketball.”
1978 was “The Year of the Great Migration South,” when I moved to North Carolina on a Greyhound bus.
1986 was “The Year the Red Sox Hurt Me Deeply.” You’ve heard of Bill Buckner.
Some recent years have had less dramatic titles, reflecting more of an obsession with the little things that challenge my routine.
Last year, known as “The Year of the Intervention,” saw my wife and kids force me to carry a cell phone, install a wireless router at our house and throw away my microcassette recorder for a digital brand.
Beware, I still speak loudly into my cell phone. I have come to understand that a wireless router has nothing to do with cleaning the septic tank. And a digital recorder is an amazing innovation, though I still carry around the instructions.
This year already is sizing up as “The Year of the Toilet Paper Holder.” My handyman skills are legendary, because they’re so bad, and for years I have struggled to keep the contraption that holds a roll of toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom from falling off the wall.
With new resolve over the holidays, I took a trip to Lowe’s and purchased new screws and spring-loaded anchors that surprisingly have worked. The holder is straight, solid, a work of art.
My wife refuses, however, to put the roll of toilet paper on the holder out of fear she will destroy the karma and bring it all down. I understand this.
Which brings me to “The Year of the Tattoo.”
It was 2006 and, as our youngest son was heading toward his 18th birthday, he revealed his plans to have someone puncture his skin with a needle and inject ink in there permanently.He was going to have a tattoo, and that was it.
My wife and I reacted as most parents of our generation would. We freaked.
Unless he chose something such as “My Dad Is a Genius” for his tattoo, I later told him calmly, he would regret this decision when he was 30-something or 40-something and his own children were making fun of all the old people who had defaced their bodies way back when.
I described the possibly painful process of getting a tattoo and how it would hurt worse to have it removed later on when he no longer liked it. I warned that a tattoo might keep him from being hired somewhere in the future. You never know how an employer might take it, I said.
These and other arguments were wasted, of course. To him, 18 meant he could vote, register with the Selective Service, go off to college and have a tattoo ó something he had been anticipating for a couple of years, he acknowledged.
Around his birthday, he came home one afternoon bandaged, sore and imprinted.
The new decoration had established its home just below his right ankle, on the outside. It simply said, “© 1988.”To this day, I’ve never said anything to him about that tattoo.
I can’t argue with a good year.