DADWAGON

An actual deployment, at LZ Hotel, not the Sheraton Hotel

Ah, yes, the joys of being in the news business. One minute I’m planning a leisurely cookout yesterday evening for a friend in the Army stationed overseas who’s on leave and (happily) stuck stateside because of all the ash. The next, I’m packing my little roller-bag headed for (way too) sunny downtown Phoenix, where I’ll try to get excited about eating a room service club sandwich at the Sheraton in a town where I know no one.

It is actually part of the pleasure of the job. I’ve got happy feet, the kind that can only come from growing up on a 3 mile by 5 mile rock in the middle of the ocean. But there’s something about being dad, where you spend so much time trying to get your kids on a regular schedule–where that regularity is sold as a key to everyone’s well-being–that makes me wonder if it doesn’t mess with my head to jump on airplanes moment to moment and to not really know when I’ll be back. And, of course, the potential trauma for kids whose dad suffers these mini-deployments from time to time.

Although using the d-word (deployment) reminds me that my brief troubles are but a spittle in the vast ocean of suck that is deploying away from your kids because you’re, say, a soldier. I wrote about Fayetteville’s extraordinary mass baby shower in TIME a while back — all pregnant women whose husbands were away with the 82nd Airborne. It’s hard to think about what those families were going through and work up much pity for myself.

If you really need someone to pity on the DadWagon, it should actually be poor Christopher, Theodore, and Matt, who will have to somehow make this site run without my frequent and glorious contributions this week.

In the meantime, watch this for some throwback Arizoniana, via Hollywood.