Local Author Loves Raising His Family in Palo Alto

By Michael Fertik

What a pleasure it is to raise a child in Palo Alto.  Leafy neighborhoods, excellent restaurants and whip-smart neighbors are just some of the perks.  This little town punches above its weight.  Palo Alto – or, as it appears in my book, Tall Tree – is one of those surprising hubs of the known universe, a place where the world comes to you as much as the residents love venturing out into the far corners of the planet on both planes and digital pipelines.  With so much exciting intelligence and innovation in the water, catalyzed by the giant magnet of Stanford, Palo Alto draws people, influences, and flavors from all over.  We even have legit bagels.  This is a strong statement coming from a native New Yorker. The bagels at House of Bagels on University are far better than any I have tasted elsewhere in California (or 97% of the rest of the country, for that matter).

I’m not sure Palo Alto is the good green earth’s gift to young single men and women (can’t say for sure), but if you have a family with small kids, it’s hard to beat.  Head on over to Johnston Park on a weekend, and your child will pretty much lose their mind.  The slides and swings are happy baby scale, and the community garden feels like a moment out of a Wordsworth sonnet.  I’m not sure my son knows that about the garden – he prefers the other Lake Poets, which is a subject of some contention between us – but he goes berserk over the water feature in the sand box.  At least once every week he will come back home soaked to the bone and sorta beaming with pride about it, which will occasion a courteous but notable retort from my wife.  Ah, well.  You can’t win over every constituency at once.

A frequent weekend habit among our family is to walk over to the Palo Alto Farmers Market behind the Post Office on Saturday or the one over on California Ave if it’s a Sunday and score some fresh bread and ridiculously excellent almond butter.  Then our son likes to listen to the banjo player or whoever else shows up to play what he calls “mudict,” which is his one-plus year old way of saying “music” and sounds just as good to his dad’s ears.

I love Palo Alto.  It can be easy to lose sight of how special it really is but for East Coast transplants like my wife and I we are reminded every time we look at our weather app and smile in gratitude that we are here.  We are reminded when we stroll over to Philz or Coupa, get coffee and maybe a breakfast burrito, and check out the other parents and kids on their similar routines. 

Looking around the quiet streets and cafes, I find myself grateful for where we live. A beautiful place to raise a family, a place filled with activities my son can enjoy and a constant inspiration for writing. As I stroll the neighborhood with my son and watch his interaction with the other children of Tall Tree, I find myself wondering which of these toddlers is gunning for a bigger role in the secretive underworld of baby gangsters that quietly and inexorably runs the illicit trades of Palo Alto.

Michael Fertik is the founder of Reputation.com in Silicon Valley. Credited as a pioneer in the field of online reputation management, he has been quoted and featured in national print and broadcast media as the world's leading cyberthinker in digital privacy and reputation. But, in his private life, he's just a first time dad, ruled by his son’s commands for milk, toys, and apple sauce. For more information about Michael Fertik and Little Trouble in Tall Tree, visit: www.ltitt.com

Excerpt:

“Hello, Mr. Cheeks.”

 “Call me Squeezy.”

Call him Squeezy. A dangerous proposition from what I’d heard, but you never know in this business. Maybe it was a sign of affection and the rumors were all bad formula. No matter what, I had to stay on top of my game. Squeezy the Cheeks was, rumor or no, the most volatile and wily baby gangster in the entire North Wood section of Tall Tree.

I raised my arms in an involuntary overhead stretch. I think he took it to mean I hadn’t quite heard him. That happens a lot with baby gangsters.

“Yeah, call me Squeezy,” he said again.

His mouth dribbled, but I don’t think he noticed.

“Okay, I will. Thank you.”

 “And what do I call you? The new kid.”

 “I don’t know. I’m fresh out. I don’t have a gang name yet.”

“Maybe I’ll just call you Mama’s Boy.” Squeezy gurgled.

Apparently he thought the idea was funny. Apparently so did I. I gurgled and squealed. Apparently so did the big baby in the chair behind me. He gurgled even louder. That would be Soggy, Soggy the Load, Squeezy’s button man. He was the second most feared baby in North Wood after his older brother Baggy the Load, who still did odd enforcer jobs for the gang when Soggy had too much to handle.

“That sounds good. I like my mom.”

I thought of her giant milky bosoms. That made me feel hungry, and I felt like crying. I tried to hold it together.

“I heard you might have some good moves, kid. You certainly know how to get attention.”

Soggy thought that was hilarious. He cooed and squealed and spat up a half ounce of the white on to his chest. Something smelled foul from his direction. I was pretty sure he was sitting in his own shit. I was starting to think Soggy was your run of the mill, milk-fed infant gangster moron. He couldn’t help it. His parents were probably your run of the mill Tall Tree grass-fed adult morons.

“You would be referring to the incident at the bank?” I asked, curling my lip into what I was hoping would look like a smirk.

“Exactly,” Squeezy said, puffing on his pacifier for effect.

“That was an A1 job you pulled.”

That was less than a week ago. Mom had taken me down to the bank to do some transactions. After about a half hour of hanging around in the stroller listening to them bag on about interest rates and CDs and who-knows-what in what is essentially a flat economy, anyway, I’d decided my wet diaper wasn’t drying itself and it was time to eat. I let out a few peeps to shoot across the maternal bow. Unfortunately, by then, mom was halfway through a stack of paperwork and couldn’t easily wrap it up. I was gonna let it ride and see if I could just conk out for a while to avoid the discomfort. Mom is cool beans. You have to give her some operating room. But then the manager comes over in his cheap suit and garish tie and starts poking my toes, saying, “has someone got your foot? Has someone got your foot?” over and over again, as if I can’t figure out who is holding my frickin’ foot from twenty inches away. So now I’m up and annoyed and wet and hungry and feeling a little condescended to, and I can’t go to sleep because this guy is poking my toes and asking stupid questions. So I decide to go straight from zero to thermonuclear. I scream and yell and throw my arms and legs so hard I rattle the baby seat. The patrons are looking perturbed. The manager retreats a few paces, but I keep it up. Even mom is looking worried. She’s never seen me like this.

Well, mom pushes the stroller back and forth and pulls me out of the baby seat to put me over her shoulder and then tries the bottle she carries around.

I keep rattling like a berserker.

The manager is beside himself now, and the pretty ladies who work the clerk counters have come around to see if they can help. A few of the customers are coming over to see what’s what, and a lady with a three year old girl leaves when her daughter breaks down crying because she can’t take the stress of watching me wail. All I know is I am making noise and getting a response.

Now comes the haul. After a little while, the manager runs away into the back somewhere and returns with a soft plushy thing shaped like the bank’s colorful logo and another toy that rattles when I wave it around.

That’s good enough for one day, plus mom needs a break, so I quiet down with my two toys in my hands and pass out.

It was pretty much your ordinary meltdown caper, except that pulling one off at my age was way ahead of schedule. You could say I was one of those early developers. It wasn’t long before I got the call from Squeezy.