Idyll Banter (21 page)

FLIRTATIOUS MINNIE PULLS UP
HER HEM

AFTER VISITING MY
father this winter, my family and I went to Disney World. There I survived the most astonishing ride on the planet—the amazing “Dad's Empty Wallet,” in which every credit card instantly reaches its limit—and then had the surprising experience of discovering that Minnie Mouse had a crush on me. The evidence was overwhelming.

First of all, wherever I went, Minnie was there. One day in particular stands out. My wife, my daughter, and I began the morning in the Magic Kingdom, and Minnie approached us near Goofy's roller-coaster. We had lunch at Disney's MGM Studios, and Minnie sashayed over to our table. And when we were leaving the park in the evening, she appeared out of nowhere from a faux movie set and descended upon us once more.

In between these three encounters, she seemed to be nearby all the time. We would see her constantly: on the stage by Cinderella's castle, strolling through Main Street U.S.A., signing autographs at a park entrance.

“How did Minnie get here?” my five-year-old daughter asked my wife when we saw Minnie moments apart in two separate corners.

“She's stalking your father,” my wife said. When our daughter looked confused, she quickly explained, “She has a crush on Daddy.”

“No, she does not!” our daughter insisted. “I've seen her kiss Mickey a thousand times, and I've never seen her kiss Daddy.”

That evening when our daughter was asleep, I told my wife that it was possible we were seeing Minnie so often because there was more than one Minnie. Maybe, I hinted, it was sort of like that Santa Claus thing in the weeks before Christmas.

“Don't be naive,” my wife said, her voice on the verge of deep slumber. “There's only one Minnie.”

“In that case, maybe it's just our imagination,” I suggested. “Maybe she's not really trailing us.”

“We'll see,” my wife yawned.

And the next day we did. We saw Mickey's better half everywhere. My wife counted five separate Minnie sightings and five different outfits.

“She's pulling out every dress in her closet for your father,” my wife said to our daughter.

“She's pulling them out for Mickey,” my daughter replied indignantly.

That night we went to dinner at a Disney World hotel where Minnie would be dining. We confirmed our suspicions: The mouse, who's supposed to have set her big, unblinking, plastic eyes on no one other than Mickey, is a vamp. She may even be a trollop. A harlot. A flirt.

At the very least, however, for one weekend she had a crush on me.

The indications? When she came to our restaurant table that night, her bloomers were showing, extending a good two inches below one of her trademark red skirts.

“Your underwear's showing,” my wife said to her. (Our daughter couldn't believe that her mother would say such a thing to the mouse and offered the sort of embarrassed, anti-parent death gaze that she will use well as an adolescent.)

Did Minnie discreetly shield her bloomers? Nope. She pulled up her dress by the hem and revealed even more. “I think you're paying way too much attention to my husband,” my wife told her.

Minnie tried to play coy, but she never stopped smiling. She wrapped her white-gloved paws around my chest, dipped her dinner-plate-sized ears against my retreating hairline, and gave me a very big kiss.

All the next day—our last in the Kingdom—we watched Minnie's eyes whenever we saw her, but she had made her point and her eyes never moved.

Mickey, however, had better start opening his.

MIDLIFE CRISIS RESULTS IN TAKING PART IN THE WEENIE TRIATHLON

This column appeared nine months before New Hampshire's “Old Man of the Mountain” collapsed. I've no idea whether the triathlon's sponsors will continue to refer to this event as the “Race to the Face,” or whether they will use the more precise “Race to the Place Where There Used to be a Face.” I thought my young nephew might be on to something when he suggested christening it simply the “Race to the Neck.”

SOMETIMES YOU SEE
middle-aged men who are as sensible and wise as Ward Cleaver or Cliff Huxtable, but the truth is that most of the time you are seeing them on television. “Middle-aged man” is actually the Latin term for “Male of the species who does not vacuum and believes Mick Jagger actually looks pretty good for a guy his age.”

Middle-aged men usually have at least one completely senseless and unwise interest, and the rest of their family can only hope it is something as benign as a sudden passion for Civil War re-enactment or taking a second mortgage on the house to buy a two-seater Nissan 350Z.

My current senseless and unwise interest is the Top Notch Triathlon, a triathlon held the first Saturday in August in Franconia, New Hampshire. Nicknamed the “Race to the Face” because of the course's proximity to New Hampshire's “Old Man of the Mountain,” the competition is actually a pretty weenie triathlon. It consists of a seven-mile bike ride—though every mile is uphill, and some of those miles are uphill and in the woods—a swim across the frozen slush of Echo Lake, and a two-and-a-half-mile run up the ski trails on Cannon Mountain.

My sense is that it was specifically designed for pathetic middle-aged people whose exercise consists usually of reaching under the couch for the remote, or carrying in from the car those hefty two-liter bottles of Pepsi and family-size bags of Doritos. Its slogan sums up the attitude of most participants pretty well: “The Race to the Face is tough, but it's easier than growing up.”

Last year one of my wife's three sisters participated in the triathlon as one-third of a female team, and convinced my brother-in-law and me to start a team and join the race this year. She thought it would either be great fun to have us around her, or we'd both die of exertion and she'd stop having to share her sisters with us.

My sister-in-law, I should note, had a great time because she was on a team that came in second to last. She was the swimmer on the group, and by the time she dove into the lake the other participants were already huffing their way up Cannon Mountain, and the only people left cheering from the shore were her extended family. She had the whole lake to herself.

I'm actually not sure how her team managed to overtake one of the teams ahead of her. Maybe someone was eaten by a bear on the mountain.

In any case, what might save my brother-in-law's and my team from complete athletic ignominy next month is that my wife agreed to be the swimmer. I will bike, my brother-in-law will claw his way up the ski trails, and my wife will keep us in competition by swimming Echo Lake. She's always been a pretty good swimmer because she swims three mornings a week at the Mount Abraham High School pool, but over the last few months she's started to take her swimming more seriously.

This means that she has been buying lots of new Speedo bathing suits—which brings me back to why I have become so focused on the Top Notch Triathlon. Sure, I'm biking a little more than usual, and recently I even picked up a second pair of bike shorts for the big day. But my real interest has been in helping my wife choose her training suits. I have been a vocal and articulate proponent of the argument that the less material there is in her Speedo, the better her time will be in the water.

And because my wife knows that the only prayer our team has of not coming in last is her speed in the lake, by that first Saturday in August I should have her down to the official Speedo race thong.

Yes, we middle-aged men might have interests that are senseless and unwise . . . but at least we are predictable.

RICE PUDDING AND FRENCH EDITOR HELP NOVICE CYCLIST SURVIVE

EIGHT DAYS AGO
I survived the “Race to the Face,” the first triathlon in which I was a participant.

As a brief recap for those readers who are not related to me by blood and therefore do not begin and end their Sundays with this column: I have been biking with some earnestness this year, because I was going to be one-third of a team in last week's Top Notch Triathlon in Franconia, New Hampshire. I would bike the seven miles uphill toward Franconia Notch, my wife would swim the alpine slush of Echo Lake, and my brother-in-law from Manhattan would run, walk, and—if necessary—crawl his way up to the top of Cannon Mountain.

I must confess, I didn't think a seven-mile bike ride would be all that difficult, even though it was uphill and almost half in the woods. After all, I'd been biking two and three times a week to the top of the Lincoln Gap.

Well, as a friend of mine says, “I was wrong before. I'm smarter now.”

I started in the first wave of 150 cyclists (the second wave a mere two minutes behind us), and there were moments in even the first three miles in which I felt like an ailing jalopy in an interstate breakdown lane while high-performance sports cars zoomed past me. I used up so much energy trying to be competitive in the first half of the race that when I reached the portion in the woods I seriously considered pretending to be a bear and going into an early hibernation.

By the time I dismounted my bike in the transition area and handed off the wristband to my wife so she could embark upon her swim, I looked like one of the living dead from the George Romero horror movies about corpses that refuse to stay buried. Witnesses tell me that I did not exactly race with élan down to the lake to watch my wife swim, but rather staggered there in slow motion, bobbing and weaving like a drunk. My skin, I gather, was the color of craft paste.

Nevertheless I survived, and I survived in part because during the thirty-six hours before the race I had a personal trainer: My sister-in-law's French editor, José Sanchez, happened to be visiting the country and staying with my mother-in-law in New Hampshire. When he was younger, Sanchez used to ride in professional bike races, and he was a cyclist whose specialty was taking on hills.

Though he couldn't speak a whole lot of English and I couldn't speak a whole lot of French (Translation? None), through my bilingual sister-in-law he offered to discuss the number of teeth in my gears (I hadn't a clue), and which gears to use on which parts of the hills (I suggested hitching my bike to a truck and being pulled). We agreed I'd have rice pudding for breakfast, which he said was a part of many cyclists' pre-race fare.

And then on the day of the race itself, he learned two words of English to share with me as I stretched: “Work hard.”

I did. Our team came in thirtieth out of sixty teams, sneaking (barely) into the top half thanks in large measure to my wife's exertion in the lake and my brother-in-law's grit on the mountain. I shaved eight minutes off my best time on my training runs, though this effort did mean that I walked like a cowboy for days and my bike looked like it had been hit by a car.

Incidentally, other Vermonters were astonishing, including triathlete Jim McIntosh, also of Lincoln. McIntosh—who actually commutes to work via bicycle over the Lincoln Gap—placed eleventh overall, and had the best time in the forty-plus age group.

Will I do this triathlon again next year? You bet. I may have been in need of a walker when I was done with my portion, but in some ways I'd never felt better: confident, healthy, and not a little proud.

And I even discovered that I liked rice pudding for breakfast.