Head Lice

BERKELEY â€”  It’s back-to-school night at Tallulah’s new kindergarten, and it occurs a full three weeks after she has gone back to school. It’s the first time we’ve been given a clue what our oldest daughter has been up to. The first day of school, which I had anticipated would be an elaborate, emotionally charged ritual, was conducted with cold Teutonic efficiency. Moments after we’d helped our children find their lunch cubbies and stow their backpacks, we were shown the door. Since then the school’s attitude toward us has been “the less we see of you, the better.â€�

Tonight these same people want to make us feel at home. It’s our school too, after all. The tour pauses in the art room, where a woman with a great big smile and the best posture in Northern California tells us how much all our children love to paint.

I page through the impressive stack of artwork composed by Tallulah’s class -- and can’t find one by Tallulah. Every other child appears to have an oeuvre; mine doesn’t have her first piece. Tabitha and I flip again quickly through the drawings, searching for some sign that our daughter exists. Finally, Tabitha turns over a piece of paper with a few black scratches on the front, and finds it signed TALLULAH on the back. She’s moved, I’m relieved.

When it comes time for questions, I ask the teacher if all the children enjoy art. Making it, that is. Surely, there must be one or two who find the whole messy business a bit tedious. Oh no, she replies, every last child in the kindergarten class has the impulse to create. She asks me, “Didn’t you used to love it?�

As it happens, some of my creepiest childhood memories are of what was once called crafts. Glue in all the wrong places, paintings that always ended up some shade of brown, the sense of always being 20 minutes behind -- what was there to like about it? I recall, at the age of 8, my crafts teacher handing me a piece of paper with the name of the animal I was meant to sculpt. “An eaglet,� it said. What was “an eaglet�? She didn’t say; it felt wrong to ask. Soon I was covered in plaster of Paris, frantically trying to mold “an eaglet.� When the bell rang, I handed over a creature with saggy dark features and yellow pointed ears that, if it resembled any living creature, called faintly to mind a black-faced Al Jolson.

“This place is my idea of hell,� I confess to my child’s new art teacher. She looks at me for a moment and asks, “You’re Tallulah’s daddy, aren’t you?�

*

At the start of the year, the Writers Guild of America, in an effort to cut costs, switched to Blue Cross of California for its -- and, therefore, our -- health insurance. Cut costs they must have done. Ever since the switch, we’ve spent 20 minutes a day opening letters from pediatricians who’ve been stiffed, arguing with pharmacists about how much we owe for some prescription drug and filling out the fourth request to Blue Cross for reimbursements. Not since Southwest Airlines discovered how much could be gained by making passengers clean the airplane has a business found such a painless technique for saving money. It wears us down, saps our will to fight, and just when we believe we might have won some minor claim -- say, 30% of Dixie’s polio vaccination -- the insurer leaps in and snatches the victory from us. Six months ago, Tabitha had back surgery -- but before she did, she made sure the insurance company agreed to pay for it. How could they wriggle out of an expense they had promised to cover? Today we receive a note from the clinic saying that Blue Cross refuses to pay the surgical bill. Tabitha calls Blue Cross. We, and the doctor, checked already, she explains: The health insurance plan had agreed it was covered. Oh yes, the insurer tells her, but we never said you could be operated on in a hospital. As opposed to where? The kitchen table?

There are more than just two categories of U.S. citizen, the health insured and the health uninsured. There’s also us: The Fully Insured Whose Insurance Company Never Pays.

*

An editor calls and leaves a voice mail with an idea for a piece. He wants me to sample all the cures for what everyone now calls male sexual dysfunction -- Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, etc. -- and describe their effects. Following fast, as this message does, on the heels of a request from a men’s magazine writer who wants me to give him quotes for his story on “the culture of Viagra,� I can’t help but feel ever so slightly curious. Why me?

The question’s on my mind as I crawl into bed tonight. A conversation starter! “Heh heh heh,� I say, “you’ll never believe what this editor wants me -- I mean, us -- to do.� Tabitha reacts quickly. “I assume you told them you wouldn’t do it,� she says. And so to ESPN I go. The many purveyors of brand-new erections have come to realize that the closest thing to their target audience can be found on the receiving end of “SportsCenter.� Sure enough, here comes the new ad for Levitra -- a middle-age man with the hot wife he apparently is no longer able to satisfy. A single pill and -- poof! -- he can satisfy her again. But the ad ends with a list of warnings. “If the erection persists for more than four hours, consult a physician,� intones the voice.

But would Blue Cross pay?

*

Although it doesn’t want to see me, Tallulah’s school expects me to perform 10 hours of volunteer service each year. Left to my own devices, I’d wait to the very last moment to lift a finger. The great thing about procrastination is that it enables you to discover the minimum amount of effort you must expend to get through this life. After all, by the end of the year I might be dead, and, if I am, I’d have wasted 10 precious hours working when I might have been doing nothing.

But I am married to the opposite of a procrastinator: My wife looks for things that might need to be done, say, six months from now, and then does them. When she runs out of all her possible future chores, she moves on to mine. This morning she cc’d me on an e-mail sent by her, on my behalf, to Tallulah’s school. It begins:

“Dear Denise,

I would love to volunteer to inspect head lice in Tallulah’s kindergarten classrooms.... “