T-Rex By The Tail

When 81 year old neo-conservative Karl Patton dies, his four sons must gather up his bones and dredge the river of their own lives lived in the shadow of their father -- the T-Rex. “The T-Rex father possessed an abnormally large mouth from which he would chew out loud, belch, curse, and devour any weaker form of life. He possessed a great sweeping tail that could strike with unusual dexterity, hitting anything, including his own children, for the slightest infraction. His arms were unusually short, which precluded him from washing dishes or changing diapers. He was the perfect machine—an eating, sleeping, and working automaton preprogrammed to control every aspect of his white-picket world. The T-Rex father was fashioned out of reptilian conservatism, while his partner, the She-Rex, served as his alter ego. In an epoch of profound social climate change, the T-Rex father would have devoured his young rather than yield to sacrifice them to a softer ecosystem of collectivism. She-Rex served as his interpreter and voice of reason, helping her companion defend their family against a frontal assault from change, battling the corrupting elements of the antiwar demonstrations, oil embargos, drugs, terrorism, racial strife, assassinations, pandemics, and urban decline." As the boys gather to break the news to their mother who is suffering from early stage Alzheimers, life takes a turn for the bizarre and forces each son to come to grips with their birth order, personal biases and comical shortcomings. For anyone who has wondered whether today's parents are indeed a more evolved or devolved version of those who preceded us, grown up in a household fashioned out of conservative timber, felt the sting of a belt or heard the roar of creative profanity, this eulogy to the last great age of Jurassic parenting will have you feeling right at home.

Michael Turpin is a native of Southern California who has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and New York. For the last six years, he has been a regular contributing columnist for two Connecticut based Hearst newspapers, The New Canaan and Darien News Reviews. He is also regularly published across a range of healthcare and business journals for his views and columns on industry trends. Turpin has worked both in the US and in Europe as a business insurance and healthcare consultant. He has served as regional CEO for an $8B division of a national insurer and led two firms as a national practice leader for healthcare and health reform. Having grown up with three brothers, a conservative father and "psychic" mother, he has entertained readers for the last six years sharing stories from the last great era of Jurassic Parenting - the 1970s. He maintains a popular blog at http: //usturpin.wordpress.com that sarcastically covers a range of issues from popular culture to the travails of modern day parents. He draws heavily on his own life and his literary heroes -- Erma Bombeck, Woody Allen, David Sedaris and Bill Bryson -- to remind readers that "the only normal people we know are those who choose to close their drapes at night." T-Rex By The Tail is an anthem to a slice of history and for some, a too-close-for-comfort return to the days when the motto of "my house, my rules" was tattooed on every teen's forehead.