the stork landing pad

a short story about social media trends, anti-consumerism, and home projects

“So there’s this thing...” Begins my pregnant wife, what she always says before turning her phone in my direction to show me something I need to open up my wallet for.

Absent from social media, I am blissfully unaware of emerging adulthood consumption trends, particularly those relating to marriage. It frustrates me to find they are sometimes formalizations of marital phenomena that were previously latent, natural, and left up to your own discretion, instead transforming them into commodified signifiers of status and class, like what happened with engagement rings mid-century.

Take, for example, the ‘babymoon’—a term which formerly implied an unadorned period of rest before childbirth—which is now a honeymoon-equivalent trip you post pictures of yourself taking on Instagram, ostensibly to show something like: ‘Hey, look at how much disposable income we can afford to use in granting our wanderlusting (interesting) selves one last hurrah before we are strapped down by an infant!’

They—‘they’ being the immutable forces of consumerism, I presume?—have found many new ways to turn life milestones and experiences into credit card debt.

What I see when she turns the phone to me is perhaps not quite of this ilk, but of a more benign and cutesy sort, and certainly one of more recent invention: a series of vertical videos depicting something like a large circular tabletop atop a post or pole in someone’s front yard, usually conspicuously near the mailbox.

The machinery in my brain cranks pitifully to ascertain what this is.

“It’s called a ‘stork delivery pad’,” my wife explains as she shows me more. In some, people are assembling such landing pads as a family; in most, the dad does it. In all, they smile or gesture to the pad in a hopeful manner, and then—with varying levels of creativity and panache—cut to a young baby, usually just old enough to sit up on their own, at rest on the landing pad, with due smiles and happiness. I presume this is what the ‘stork’ has brought them, thus ‘delivered’ unto the pad.

Some of these ‘stork landing pads’ are outrageous in their scope: neon signs attached with arrows saying ‘DROP BABY HERE’; pads that are not hoisted but span entire yards along the ground, painted with clever taglines; pads that have targets on them, etc.

“No way,” I say. “No one really does this. Who do we know who did this?”

My wife shows me a picture of some good friends who this past year indeed posted a picture of them expectantly by the landing pad (an appropriately dull and uninteresting one), then another with the baby laughing and smiling upon it.

“Okay but for real? Why haven’t I seen this before? Like, around?”

She explains there is, in fact, one in our neighborhood on the route of our daily walks, which I had seen many times but figured to be some kind of modern art, an avant-garde sculpture.

In showing me these ‘stork landing pads’, my wife is hinting we should maybe buy one, or at least build one, or make it happen in some way as is my duty to do, or else face endless questions from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law for what they see as an egregious denial, and I’d rather placate their confusion than to explain to them the pointlessness of it all.

Understanding this, I arrive at the contrarian attitude I aspire to when confronting such an ask of me, a compromise between being the change I want to see (which would be not doing it at all) and not feeding the beast which created it: How can I spend as little money as possible on this?

There are sparse options on Amazon, or at least all the ‘stork landing pads’ for sale there are devoid of character or made by someone working in a sweatshop.

Based on the variety I find on Etsy, I find this trend must really be a psyops effort of the creative middle class, those who peddle homemade stuff in the plying of a secondary income, a way to feel their creative hobbies are not vacant time-passers but monetary contributions to a fantastical future without student loans. If they’re the ones coming for my money now, we are truly fucked. Too bad the ‘stork landing pads’ on Etsy all contain the same basic affectations inherent to the trend, cost an absurd amount of money and, for the most part, still need some assembly upon delivery.

For it sickens me, suddenly, to think I might have a ‘stork landing pad’ for my future child which is the exact same as someone else’s. This thing formerly unknown to me has rapidly become an important signifier for who I am; which is, of course, the most unique individual on Earth.

A solution presents itself: Earlier this winter, an enormous tree branch—nearly the size of a whole tree—came down in my yard, and it has sat there as the snow melted around it and stayed as a constant reminder of my own laziness and incompetence, but now seems a fortuitous deposit of raw materials.

I don’t have a chainsaw, but I have a hand saw, for some reason. Could I buy a chainsaw? Sure, but I don’t.

For now, all I need are my own muscles, which I take to the downed tree on a cool spring weekend morning, digging into the thickest part as well as I can until I get the blade stuck midway through and have to take a YouTube break to search “how to remove saw from tree trunk”, which—sparing the details—I succeed in doing, and apply the lesson to the next cut, eventually coming away with a foot-and-a-half diameter, several inch thick disc of pine wood, just big enough for a baby to sit on, fresh smelling and surprisingly un-sticky.

Next, I spend time hand-sanding both sides with some old sandpaper left in the garage from a half-completed project in the distant past, until the disc of wood is splinter-free, leaving the bark on the exterior as an ‘aesthetic choice’ (so I tell myself).

Then I find some black paint and a paintbrush from a similarly discarded project and in my distinct, upper-case, un-artisanal scrawl, write on it:

“MR. STORK! DEPOSIT CHILD OF ___ AND ___ HERE! GENTLY PLEASE.”

This feels imbued with an appropriate amount of my personality.

Should I mount it, or let it lie somewhere in the yard? Another solution is already present, a split, stone birdfeeder lying half-submerged in dirt, left there for years by the previous homeowners. I dredge up the base, turn it upright, and spray it down with the hose, affixing the wood ‘pad’ atop it in the middle of the yard, where it sits surprisingly steady.

My only regret is my wife is not home to see me struggle with all this from the window, to know the hours-long toil of cutting the wood, the genesis of my later complaints of shoulder pain and hand cramps, which of course pale in comparison to bearing a child, although I wish they were approximate.

“Look what daddy did!” My wife says to her belly. She ends up not posting it to social media, though, so I perceive it to be good enough, but not worth sharing. Questions from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law to abound, then, until they see it in person.

All the ‘real’ men build their own ‘stork landing pads’, of course, but I am not a real man, not really, anyway, despite doing so. I failed to record the whole process or post it anywhere, so who would ever know?

The next day I sit in my kitchen with a coffee, look out the window above the sink at my creation and think of a dumb joke, a play on Hemingway’s sad short story: For sale, stork delivery pad, zero landings.

A robin flits down and lands upon it. For a second, I envision a future in which my ‘stork landing pad’ has actual meaning and usage, a place for migratory birds to rest. Then for another second, I envision a universe in which the men of our species must build such things for the storks to literally deliver the baby upon, for it is how babies truly arrive, and the future of our stock depends on them.

The robin shits and flies away.