What is worse for a teenager than having an embarrassing parent?
That’s right: having an embarrassing parent with a popular newspaper column.
Tony Norman, seen here wishing he had a clean shirt that wasn’t a mock turtleneck on the day they took Post-Gazette class pictures, commemerated his son’s eighteenth birthday in his column today. His aim in doing so seems to be to give Jeremy Norman’s friends something with which to mock him for years to come:
When Jeremy’s head crowned, Sting’s cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” was playing on the room’s portable boombox. It was part of my wife’s repertoire of mood music designed to get her through the evening. My first view of my firstborn was startling. Jeremy looked vaguely amphibian because his seven-pound-something-ounce body was squirming and wiggling underwater.
Thoroughly immersed in the pool’s warm water mixed with his mother’s blood, Jeremy was the most beautiful and enigmatic creature I had ever laid eyes on.
Even as I cut the umbilical cord, he looked more like an alien from another dimension than either one of us, his parents.
When he finally entered the realm of air breathers with a burp and a cry, the midwife lifted him into my wife’s exhausted arms.
“Hi there,” she said between bouts of laughter as tears streamed down her face. “Hi there, little Jeremy” she cooed while staring into her son’s face still temporarily pinched from the effort of breathing outside the womb.
Horrifying. A little later, when T. Niddy comes to the present, we get a sense of why this might be happening:
The “cool kids” orbiting Jeremy would have shunned his old man three decades ago. To my amazement, he was ducking girls at 15 who would have caused me to weep with joy had they merely acknowledged my existence when I was his age.
So Tony’s jealous. I understand; I was a loser in high school too. You can tell by the fact that I just used a semicolon. Torpedoing your son in the newspaper, though: that’s pretty cold.
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