Easygoing, No. Big Easy, Oh Yeah

A few weeks ago, after Dixie had, for the second time in two days, relieved herself on the expensive new bathmats and Tallulah had sobbed herself to sleep because Dixie had been allowed, inexcusably, to touch her American Girl doll, my wife sent me an e-mail. We’re in the market for a new nanny -- the old one is going back to school -- and her e-mail was the copy she’d written for our advertisement. She wanted me to look it over to make sure the job sounded sufficiently appealing.

I began to read of the many pleasures we might offer anyone so wise as to enter our service -- a charming place to live in Berkeley, fair wages, exotic travel, two lovely little girls, etc. But at the very end of the thing, she briefly tried to describe us. “We are a young and easygoing family,” she had written, and left it at that.

Normally I have a policy of not getting in my wife’s way. She is more energetic and competent and responsible than I ever will be. I have also found that the moment I interfere I have work on my hands. To question her ad copy was to run the risk of being assigned to rewrite it.

But this time I couldn’t restrain myself -- it was the word “easygoing” that left me uneasy. Any Martian who observed our family would note: Every meal is a war to insert nutrition into the body of a 2-year-old bent on starving to death. Every family conversation is a lesson in the art of interruption. Every bedtime is less the inevitable conclusion to a day than an excuse to argue about the meaning of “bedtime” -- and the wisdom of howling for 20 minutes after it has commenced.

This ad of ours was a bold lie. The only moments during a week when we might be mistaken for “easygoing” are the rare few when all four of us happen to be asleep.

I thought about adjectives that might fairly describe us. Playful and slightly unhinged? Undersexed and overtired? Finally, I gave up, and e-mailed my wife back. “Is it really accurate to describe ourselves as ‘easygoing’?” I asked.

Moments later came the reply: “I already changed it,” she wrote. “And, by the way, we’re not young either.”

What she meant is that I am not young. (One of my wife’s favorite tricks is to catch me out whenever I dare to describe myself as young.)

I review the new version of the nanny ad. Everything in it is as before except that now we are “an active and energetic family.”

The first applicant to respond is a 250-pound Serbian woman who says she stayed in Belgrade during the NATO bombing, as it didn’t bother her much. That sounds about right.

One of the things our active and energetic family does each year is travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. When I tell friends, they don’t quite know what to make of it. They imagine my young daughters surrounded by drunk college boys howling at the exposed breasts of drunk college girls.

Mardi Gras has suffered the fate of New Orleans, to be known only for the behavior of the tourists who come to see it.

What people don’t understand is that those people you see on TV, or hear about from friends who just got back, are all from out of town. The car dealer from Cincinnati flies down for his convention, leaving his putatively happy family behind. He heads out into the French Quarter, where he drinks too much, ogles strippers and perhaps even persuades someone to go to bed with him. Then he flies home and tells everyone who will listen how relieved he is that he does not live in such a den of iniquity.

Stay clear of the tourists and Mardi Gras is a wholesome experience -- and as this is my birthplace, I know how to do that. The only sin my children are exposed to is avarice. They sit on top of a ladder and holler wildly for the stuff thrown off parade floats. If there are no parades on Earth like those of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, it is because there are no parades that pay you so well to attend.

Off the floats fly stuffed animals, wooden spears, gorgeous balls, sparkling hair bands, real Barbies and an endless variety of beads. Each strand has something interesting about it: blinking lights, medallions, slippers that squeak when you push them.

Even to a grown-up, there is wonderful frisson to be had in the accumulation of so much free stuff.

To two little girls, these trinkets might as well be real pearls and sapphires and rubies.

Dixie is too young to take full advantage of the situation. But Tallulah uses Mardi Gras to cultivate the skills required to succeed in America. Before we leave the house for the first parade, she insists we bring a bigger sack for our loot.

That night I catch her stuffing what she catches into our duffel bag, as quickly as she can. “Why don’t you put some of those beads around your neck?” I ask her. “Because then they’ll know I have some, and won’t throw me as much,” she says.

We are not merely active and energetic. We are also shrewd.