“So how did we find out in the first place, chief?”

“The usual.  Garbageman came by on Tuesday, noticed a garbage bag full of blood, towels, clothes.  You know how it is.”

“Yeah.  Were you tempted to confront them right away?”

“Nah.  Always talk to the neighbors first, you’d be surprised the things they see.  Turns out there was a lot of commotion the previous Friday.  Some kind of jacuzzi party.  Guy hears this godawful noise like a jet plane taking off, glances in the perp’s dining room windows and instead of a table and chairs like usual there’s some kinda’ hot tub.”

“What about the women, I heard…”

“Oh yeah, there were girls alright.  Neighbors say the ladies started arriving in ones and twos after supper, hanging around the jacuzzi, at least one of them nude.”

“Damn.”

“It was all fun and games at first, loud music, dancing, but then something must have gone wrong ‘cuz one of the women starts making all kinds of noise, wailing like a cat in heat.  Neighbors say they would have called us, but they were scared.”

“What about the lab work, what’d they find?”

“Two victims, both female.  One lived in the house, most of the blood was hers, but the other DNA belongs to somebody not even in the FBI files.  How the hell does someone in this day and age avoid having their DNA on file?  Touch a light switch in a lavatory and the spooks’ll be able to tell what you had for breakfast, am I right?”

“Yeah.  You’re right alright.  Hey, Chief?”

“Yeah?”

“We got the guy in custody yet?  Or are we still playing watch and wait?”

“Watch and wait, kid, watch and wait.  Haven’t seen the woman leave the house so we have to assume she’s dead, her husband was seen spraying down a shop-vac on the side of the house one day, shopping for medical supplies the next, could be she’s being kept alive for some reason.  Soon as the warrant gets signed we’re breaking the door down and finding out.”

“All due respect chief, but screw the warrant, I got a feeling we can crack this thing ourselves.  Let’s go get this scumbag.”

“Fine by me, let’s roll.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“Hey kid, good thing we trusted your gut.  Do you wanna file the nursing person’s report or should I?”

The Fargo course was closed…the sadness then arose…

to Moorhead in a bound…

where we did throw a round.

The boy and I just got back from an appointment at the county health office.  Dylan is part of a cohort that is allowed to get the H1N1 influenza vaccine, so we hurried out the door in search of a shot this morning.  Once the paperwork was filled out (less onerous than usual) a nurse appeared and called us to follow her.

“Oh, you don’t have to work today,” she stated.  This may have seemed like a safe and polite way to start a conversation in her mind (giving her the benefit of the doubt) but to a stay at home father who is working on a history paper on gender ideology and fatherhood this is like lobbing a softly padded pink grenade.

The equivalent in my mind would be to observe this fifty-ish woman and state, “Oh, your husband let you out of the kitchen today.”  How well would that go over?  Ok, so I will admit that I am more sensitive to this kind of casual sexism than others, but I feel that it makes a point that is worth repeating: sexism works both ways.

Once I asserted that I was at work, that my wife was the primary breadwinner and I was the primary caregiver, she came around in a hurry.  The nurse mentioned a television news story she watched recently about involved fathers and how “nice” that is to see.  The error is forgivable, but clearly an error.  To observe my bulging muscles, manly beard, and two year old son and conclude that I am taking a temporary leave of absence from my traditional gender limited vocations is a kind of casual prejudice that props up the corpse of separate spheres gender ideology like a bad Weekend at Bernie’s movie.

Maria Shriver has released a report claiming that the battle of the sexes is over, and that women won.  In the mode that dominates today, women are not working for pin money, they are full economic partners; men are not merely playing with the kids on the weekend, they are parents who share in the joys and drudgery that accompany life with small children.

The fact is that the doctrine of separate spheres (wherein the male dominates the public and the female dominates the private sphere) had a good run over thousands of years that has thankfully come to an end.  We will continue to carry our biological differences as long as we have bodies, but it is our destiny to mute the outdated gender differences that we are dragging behind us like a tin can.