Bike orphan

Some wives call themselves golf widows, or football widows. My wife has joked about being a mountain-bike widow. Our kids like to get in on the action—especially our 11-year-old daughter, who delights in giving the old man a hard time. I catch hell for everything from gray hair to going bald to bad memory to my obsession with bikes. She gets endless laughter out of hassling me.

On the mornings my wife works and I take our daughter to school, she often hangs out at my office for 30 or 40 minutes. To kill time, she started "decorating" my daily Coke before I put it in the fridge. At first, she put art on the cans. Dragons, horses, odd faces. Now she writes a message on each can and then laughs as she runs off to stash the Coke so that I can't see it until she's gone.

After I dropped her off and returned to last Friday morning, I pulled the can from the fridge to see what she had come up with:

"This Coke belongs to a man who threatens his kids so he can go biking.

"HELP US!"

She kindly remembered to add a line at the bottom saying, "Joking."

My co-workers are starting to enjoy reading my Coke cans.

But they're starting to look at me funny.