Oh, It’s Such a Perfect Day. I knew what was coming. Two weeks ago, at a backyard birthday party for a newly anointed 4-year-old girl, I met a number of Nora’s classmates, and her teacher. Mrs. Hicks asked me if I’d be the class’s Helping Parent anytime soon. Yes, I replied, right after Election Day. (The Helping Parent is part of the deal: They keep our kids’ tuitions relatively low, and we come in once every 12 classes to help the teacher get through the day.) Mrs. Hicks all but rubbed her palms together at the prospect: “I love it when the dads are the Helping Parents,” she told me. “I try to make sure we do an extra-messy project.”

A hazing ritual. Fun! Would I be exaggerating to say I was nervous? That I was up at least once the night before, anticipating my 2-1/2-hour workout? I would not. I even worried about whether I’d need to stop at the dry-cleaner on the way home. I remember once seeing a photograph of Damien Hirst and David Bowie “collaborating” on a piece of Hirst’s spin art, not unlike what I imagine Mrs. Hicks and my daughter putting together. Hirst was in the trenches, covered in paint, while Bowie had daintily pushed up the sleeves of his now-ruined black Prada jacket, trying to suppress the annoyed expression of someone who wanted to murder a photographer who’d suggested he do a painting with Hirst for a photo session.

Anyway. That’s how I came to be at home yesterday, avoiding my commute and preparing to work my ass off. Mrs. Hicks got right down to business, gathering a dozen 3- and 4-year-old kids to scoop up red maple leaves off the ground and create “leaf people” (orange glue, magic-markered limbs, googly plastic eyes). Not that everyone created leaf people, or had to—although I noticed that nearly everybody drifted over to the table eventually, even Nora, who’s much more given to the performing arts than the visual. The no-pressure aspect of the class seemed like a good approach.

And ultimately, the class time went much quicker and more smoothly than I’d hoped for. I admit I get a kick out of being called “Nora’s Daddy” (or, occasionally, “Nora’s Mommy”—I know, it’s confusing) and the kids were really sweet. I witnessed no high-calorie tantrums, no altercations, no Def Con 1s. And Mrs. Hicks was, of course, a cool-headed pro. “I’m not a referree,” she explained to me on the playground. “I don’t mediate.” And that seemed like a good strategy. Whenever I found myself involuntarily lunging for stray jackets and plastic cars, Mrs. Hicks would shake her head. Note to self: You do this a lot. Stop it.

So we didn’t even have an extra-messy project, and I didn’t have to drop my shirt off on the way home. But the lesson of the day was really more a refresher, and it went like this: My wife does this every three weeks without breaking a sweat, and almost without comment. She organizes herself to prepare as Helping Parent, and she got me organized for it, too. And when she’s not the Helping Parent, she’s the helping parent (small caps) all day, every day, with a kid full of liquid kinetic energy.

These jobs, teaching our kids both formally and organically, are hugely undervalued in our society, even when they’re paid gigs. I’m actually not sure whose job is tougher, Mrs. Hicks’s or my wife’s: the 2-1/2-hour wind sprints four days a week, or the slow, loping everyday marathon. But I never doubt, every evening, when I return home from intense workloads and stupid commutes, which of Nora’s helping parents had the tougher day.

Lead Us Not Into Penn Station. Last week, an old friend of mine, a prominent journalist, came in from out of town to interview my governor. Chris Christie isn’t too popular around these parts—Maplewood’s got an enormous Brooklyn diaspora, and Christie looks like your garden-variety fat-headed, fat-cat Republican: wrestling with a tight budget, he trains his sights on education and transportation. New Yorkers might be dimly aware of an enormous train-tunnel project, in the works for years and already begun, that Christie just scotched. Well, it’s a big deal to us out here in New Jersey. It would’ve been our Second Avenue Subway.

My friend accompanied me to the Maplewood train station. “See all these commuters?” I asked him. “They’re waiting for the 8:31 to Penn Station.” We checked our watches: It was now 8:50 a.m. Everyone looked resigned—all those appointments, meetings, early starts to the day—all snafu’d now. But we all know the drill: We have to be at the station right on time to catch our trains. New Jersey Transit, of course, is under no such obligation to us schlubs.

Living in New York means a hop on the subway: some jostling, some drama, a whiff of menace. Living in New Jersey means a commute, and no matter how good my karma is, I know I’ll never be in transit less than an hour each way. That’s less time to see my wife and daughter, and more exhaustion at both ends of the day. I know I should view this hour as my sanctuary. Verizon doesn’t yet sell the iPhone, so I usually read on the train. I try hard to remember that I should be fully present at home—playing with Nora, being with Rachel, instead of drifting off to read or to work. I’ve already had my leisure time. I don’t have a man-cave. I have a commute.

It also means arriving and departing Manhattan through its armpit. This was how I first saw the city, at its very nadir, when my family took the train up from D.C. one weekend. It was 1977, argubably New York City’s best and worst year in history (Ramones, Talking Heads, Annie Hall; bankruptcy, blackout, riots, Son of Sam). I remember a homeless woman kicking a cardboard box down Madison Avenue. I remember my parents clutching my brother and sister and me as close as physically possible. I remember an entire city looking like Penn Station looks now.

Whenever I glance around Penn Station, waiting to be sprung from “stand-by” (or “cancelled”) status, I think two things: One, that the commuters to Westchester would never stand for this kind of shabby treatment, being forced to stand around a grubby station until we have to stampede to our abruptly announced track. And two, that it could be worse. I could be standing at the Bedford Avenue L stop. The biggest difference between the Bedford stop and that Sebastião Salgado photograph of the Mumbai train station is that the hipsters at Bedford subsist on more than 4,000 rupees a month. So I shouldn’t complain. But complain I do. Because I do, after all, live in New Jersey.

Lady Lasagna costume, Dosi USA Inc

All Is Quiet on All Saint’s Day. You wouldn’t have confused our Maplewood street for Greenwich Village on Sunday night, but the kids gave it their all. There wasn’t anything much scarier than the house down the block, decorated with a crossover SUV artfully arranged to look like it had crashed into a port-a-john and killing the skeleton within it. (No blood; plenty of dry ice.) Nora chose to ring in All Hallow’s Eve dressed as a bat, and no question she was a lot cuter than the actual dead bat I’d found on the floor of our basement a year earlier, reporting to Rachel: “Well, the good news is, it’s not a mouse.”

The evening began as stock-photo-perfect: dozens of kids and parents, nobody getting hurt, the sky darkening into an authentically spooky pink-streaked indigo. Nora wore her colors (well… black) proudly for her first Halloween of real significance, joining her next-door neighbors, Strawberry Shortcake and a bumblebee, and a girl from down the block, iCarly. I nodded and laughed at this one, feeling like President Obama on The View when he chuckled gamely at a Snooki joke before confessing, “…I actually don’t know who Snooki is.”

Nora got about two dozen houses into her candy basket before bedtime approached. Rachel and I made our routine observation borrowed from the Dyson vacuum marketing campaign—”She’s experiencing loss of suction”—but back home, Nora and I handed out a little candy, then read a couple of genuinely creepy library books in front of a nice fire—hey! a fire I built! Myself! Nora was asleep within five minutes of heading to bed.

That was just after 8, and then things took a scary turn. Halloween, as everyone with school-age kids knows, is closely followed by Election Day, which for many coincides with School Bake-Sale Day. Our co-op’s reasonable tuition is paired with this devilish pact, signed by parents every year at the crossroads at midnight. We’ll teach your children well. They’ll be happy and healthy. Just provide your signature, your check, and two homemade baked goods—one sweet, one savory—to sell to hungry voters. All well and good. Although it turned out the sweet and savory had to be at the school Monday afternoon, not Tuesday, as we had thought.

Rachel, as always, had done a masterful job with the prep-work, and that saved us from blowing our deadline. And Mark Bittman was a true sherpa, leading us through his unchallenging lasagna. We were chugging up K2 right alongside him until we hit our first snag. Now, I don’t know how long it takes you to make a béchamel sauce, but Bittman says it takes him less than 20 minutes, which is precisely how long it took for us to figure out we’d wrecked ours. And that might’ve been funny in the afternoon. But after 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, two rapidly aging parents found the matter taking on far greater import.

I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, but the two trays of lasagna were cooling their boots in the fridge no later than 1:30 a.m. Which gave us two full hours of sleep before Nora would awaken and call out for her parents, as she’s been doing every night lately. Yes, somehow, we’re back to that. And that’s how I finished my pagan celebrations this year, and observed the wee hours of All Saint’s Day.