Come Dancing

Most days, I listen to Van Halen, Foo Fighters, or Green Day to help me through my “Thirty Minutes of Hell” workout, you know, something high energy and especially loud, which helps drown out the sounds of me panting and the occasional groan. Today, though, their brand of accompaniment doesn’t strike me right, and so I go with something else: The Kinks’ Live - The Road. As the title suggests, it is a mostly live album, a collection of songs recorded in concert by that most English of English bands circa 1987.

It seems an unlikely choice, I know, but it works surprisingly well. The Kinks happen to be my all-time favorite band, and they flat out know how to rock in concert. I crank through the first three songs, and before I know it, I’ve already whittled twelve minutes off today’s timed descent into suffering. The fourth song begins. It’s “Come Dancing.”

If you were around in the eighties, you might remember “Come Dancing.” It was the last big hit The Kinks ever had. It’s a bright, breezy song with a wistful, melancholy message, the kind that Ray Davies is so adept at writing. It’s the kind of song that seems crafted specifically to be remembered fondly. It’s the kind of song that you could easily imagine being sung in an English pub during the wee hours of the morning a hundred and fifty years from now.

Bullitt Slug Bug

Remember when you were a kid, and you used to play Slug Bug?  You’d be going somewhere in the family car, and you and your siblings or friends would be watching the road like hawks from the back seat.  As soon as you saw a Volkswagen Beetle, you’d lean back and WHAM! let your neighbor have it by punching them in the arm, shoulder, ribs, neck, or wherever you thought you could inflict the most damage (aside from the obvious).  In our family’s version of Slug Bug, if the person made a sound while being hit, you got to hit them again.  I don’t know how many times we’d start a game of Slug Bug, and some time later I would find myself waking up in the waiting room of the local hospital.  Man, little sisters can be vicious.

I don’t know why, but for some reason Slug Bug only worked when you were in a car.  Inside a car, belting someone for being the first to see a Beetle was fine; outside a car, it was considered assault and battery.  I think even the hospital workers understood this.  When they found out that I had been beaten unconscious in the back seat during a game of Slug Bug, they’d just nod knowingly and tear up the child abuse reporting form they were filling out.

Remember how prolific the VW Bug used to be?  Yet, despite the German zest for the, shall we say…autocratic, they were never considered the king of the road.  Despite their lineage, Beetles just weren’t big enough, intimidating enough, or all-around serious enough for that.  No, the Beetle was all about mob rule, but of a decidedly friendly sort.  As a kid, peering out the car window at a cluster of Beetles surrounding you was like being licked to death by a dog; that is, provided there was no one wailing on you mercilessly at the time. 

In 1977 Volkswagen stopped selling Beetles in the U.S., and I think the game of Slug Bug gradually went dormant as the vehicles that once swarmed America’s streets, parking lots, and highways slowly dwindled.  Or maybe I just grew out of it.  Hard to know for sure.

Of course, Volkswagen revived the Beetle in the late 90’s, and several years ago, my daughter introduced me to a game she learned from some of her school friends called Buggy Punch.  She patiently explained the rules in the car one day, after suddenly exclaiming “Buggy Punch!” and hitting me on the back of my head.  I listened as though it were all new to me, while simultaneously fighting off panic-filled flashbacks to my childhood.

Christmas Meteor

At our house, Christmas strikes like a meteor.  Not one of those sneak-up-on-you-out-of-left-field, wake-up-one-day-and-discover-a-meteor’s-coming-for-lunch kind; no, this is one of those you can always see coming, the kind whose progress you can follow as it tracks its way towards you.  But it looks so distant and so tiny for so long that it fails to register any alarm (in fact, I can already see next year’s meteor way out there in space, twinkling innocuously).  By the time you’re ready to start taking it seriously, of course, it’s too late.  That accelerating ball of rock is looming over you in the sky, trailing fire and smoke, dropping its advance shadow on your house, and you look up knowing there is nothing that can deflect its weighty mass from smashing into you. 

At our house, the moment of impact is the same every year.  6:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve.  We have a tradition of hosting a Christmas Eve party every year, a tradition that goes back to Elizabeth’s parents, both of whom have since passed away.  The party, however, lives on, in the same house (now our house) where it’s been happening since about 1982 or so. 

Anyway, six o’clock is it.  That’s when all preparations must cease.  In years past, we have sometimes had a few moments to spare, when we would huddle together as a family in the eerie quiet, looking around in nervous anticipation, waiting for that meteor to explode all over us.  The past few years, however, we’ve been attending Christmas Eve service at our church, and so miss out on that fleeting, weird tranquility, which is no big loss.    

The meteor’s arrival is marked by the muted thud of car doors closing.  Within seconds of that, the first of many shockwaves comes blowing through our doors.  Within mere minutes, we are swept away by a surge of friends and family, pulled apart and lost amongst a roiling sea of merry-makers, often losing visual contact with each other for half-hours stretches at a time, even though we are all contained in three connected rooms within the same, modest ranch-style house.  There may be fifty or more of us on any given Christmas Eve, bumping and ricocheting and pardoning each other, and a fair number of children, who, with an art long forgotten by us adults, weave nimbly through a dense forest of moving grown-up legs. 

A brief history of lemons and lemonade

If the internet is to be trusted, it was Dale Carnegie (famous lecturer and author of How to Win Friends and Influence People) who first coined the phrase, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

Today, Mr. Carnegie would be called a motivational expert or a self-improvement guru, but he was born ahead of his time, and so is simply referred to as a writer and lecturer.  Mr. Carnegie was one of the first people to realize that the essentially American combination of constitutionally protected freedom plus disposable income equaled one hell of an opportunity to profit from our long-standing obsession with self-improvement.  His book How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold 15 million copies since it was first published in 1936.  Lord only knows how many more copies have been pilfered from public libraries over the years.  He was a pioneer of sorts, paving the way for the modern self-improvement industry, which took in 11 billion dollars in 2008, according to Forbes.  Compared to the home-improvement industry, which had revenues estimated at 250 billion during the same year, this may not seem like much; but remember, people are generally much smaller than houses, and need to be reroofed far less frequently. 

Many people don’t really understand the important role lemons have played throughout human history.  Sure, most of us probably recall learning in elementary school about how lemons were used by sailors to prevent scurvy.  Interestingly, they never said how they used them.  Maybe they kept the lemons in their pockets, or rubbed them on their bodies, or hung them around their necks, like garlic was used to ward off vampires.  Personally, I have a hard time believing that they or anybody else would just eat raw lemons.  Scurvy can’t really be that bad, can it?  Still, it’s fun to imagine a bunch of pirates as they come swinging over the side of a captured frigate with their eye patches and their bandannas and their parrots, raising their swords aloft and then suddenly exposing bright yellow lemon smiles, the way kids like to do with orange wedges.  After all, if there was anything pirates were known for more than their lack of vitamin C deficiencies, it was a finely-tuned sense of the absurd. 

Goodbye to a Good Man

For those of you who met Kent Yoder through the guest post I published here back in June, I have the difficult task of informing you that Kent died on October 27th, 2012.

He battled prostate cancer for more than a year before the disease vanquished his body, and in doing so, freed him from his body’s terrible confinement.

Kent was 49.  He had been married to Janelle for eleven years, and in that time fathered a son and a daughter.  As I trust in God’s grace, they will all live on and do amazing things.

I last saw Kent the weekend before he passed.  I went along with our friend Rick to see him in a hospice facility.  We spent some time with Kent, and Janelle, and a few others who came through to see him.  He looked nothing like the Kent of just a few short months before, which was nothing like the Kent of a short year before that.  His body looked like that of a concentration camp victim.  He had that same ageless, ancient look that I remember from photos I would show my sophomores each year when we read Elie Weisel’s Night together.  As with them, it appeared that it was only the spirit of the man inside that prolonged the life of his body, and prevented it from crumbling to dust on the spot.

I took a copy of the Bible, and a collection of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons with me when we went to visit him.  If that seems like a strange combination to bring to a dying man, well it just felt right, knowing Kent to the extent I do.  Inside the Far Side book I tucked a copy of the lyrics to Bridge Over Troubled Waters.  I don’t know why.  I guess I was just thinking about what might comfort me, if it were me instead of him. 

Kev's Really Gnarly Meat Sauce Recipe

Generic picture of spaghetti
with meat sauce

Last Thursday I made spaghetti for dinner.  It turned out to be an inspired decision, but at the time I was just trying to do something with the two pounds of cooked hamburger meat that had been sitting in the fridge for several days.  Exactly how many days I can’t say, but I’m using the word several in its highly elastic sense.  It was long enough, at least, that I was close to losing my nerve and throwing away $7.32 worth of 80/20. 

I also had a veritable heap of pasta left over from dinner the night before, which is why spaghetti was the obvious choice.  I don’t do all my menu planning this way, but when you can kill two birds with one stone, you should do it, right?  Anyway, I thought if I made a meat sauce from scratch to put over the noodles, maybe no one would notice that we were eating old hamburger mixed with old pasta. 

So I found a recipe online for a homemade spaghetti sauce whose ingredient list matched what I was fairly confident we already had in the house.  Many times I will come up against a recipe I would love to try, but then discover we’re missing a key ingredient or two.  In these situations, there are a few things I can do:  make forced substitutions, or order pizza.  This is why, in our house, when we’re not eating pizza, chicken parmesan is sometimes made with canned tuna. 

Another generic picture of
spaghetti w/meat sauce

The option that is unequivocally not on the table is to make a special trip to the grocery store for that one missing ingredient.  Oh, no, not on my watch.  I’m a man, dammit, and we can make do with what we’ve got on hand.  As with most men, I pride myself on my resourcefulness.  In fact, resourceful is my middle name.  Well, actually it’s Jon, but that just shows how resourceful my dad was:  he found a way to give me that name using only 75% of the necessary letters. 

After several minutes spent trying to memorize the recipe off the computer screen, I concluded that it would be easier, and quicker, to just run back and forth between the kitchen and my desk as many times as necessary.  I focused only on the first step, which was to cut up one medium-sized onion, and four cloves of garlic.  For some reason it’s always the little ambiguities that get me when I cook.   I know what an onion is.  But do I really know exactly what constitutes a medium-sized onion?  How big, exactly, is medium?  I lined up my three suspects on the counter, and pondered each carefully.  Yes, they were definitely onions.  And they were all almost identical in size.  But were they all medium, or were they all something else?  I was already at a definite disadvantage working with old hamburger and pasta; I didn’t want to compound my problems by over-onioning or under-onioning the sauce.  I stared them down, hoping one of them would crack and spill the scallions.  After several long moments, I realized that my youngest daughter was watching me, so I pretended to be examining the onions very carefully for blemishes.  After the kid wandered off, I selected the most average-looking one, and then, so I wouldn’t be tempted to second-guess myself, hid the other two in a nearby cookie jar. 

Floating Lessons

I watched Maria struggle with learning to float on her back in our local public pool.  It was her second week of swim lessons.  The instructor had his hand underneath her, holding her up, and he was encouraging her to relax, and spread her arms and legs out. He was there, he told her soothingly, and nothing bad could happen.  Maria’s arms were flailing and slapping the water, and her rigid legs were sticking out of the water like two arrows shot from the same bow. 

This was actually progress.  She had spent almost all of the first week clinging to the side of the pool and wailing.  And last year’s lessons, when she was two, were a study in a small-scale disaster.  We were in the pool together for those classes, and she had absolutely no interest in anything but the bucket of pool toys the instructor brought with her.  Every day we tried, and failed, to practice blowing bubbles, dunking, and doing “big arms.”  Leg-kicking was the only area where she would make any effort at all, in short spurts, and only because we shamelessly dangled toys like carrots as a reward.  Her stubborn tendencies were on full display, as were mine, and many days our lesson ended early.  Sometimes very early. 

This year we decided to put her into the first level of real swim lessons straight away.  No toys, no holding onto Daddy, no getting out early.  Thus, the initial clinging and wailing.  

It might sound harsh, but we desert dwellers take the ability to swim seriously.  We have to.  In Phoenix, every other house has a pool, and for a long time we led the nation in child drownings and near-drownings every year.  When you live here, swimming isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill.  So, watching her struggle with putting her face in the water, or floating, while difficult, was a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

Fear the R.O.U.S!

For those of you who continue to refuse to believe in the existence of ROUS’s, I would like to draw your attention to a little article that appeared in the New York Times several weeks ago.  For your benefit, it has been reprinted here in its entirety.  If you don’t take the threat of ROUS’s seriously now, you will by the time you finish reading this post.

New York Times

May 6, 2012

Betty Conklin – staff reporter                       

Public safety officials have issued a preliminary report stating that the death of a Waldorf Astoria hotel bellhop was ‘most likely’ the result of an ROUS (Rodent Of Unusual Size) attack.  Stephen ‘Kip’ Stevens, a bellhop for the venerable Manhattan landmark, was on duty when he disappeared around 1:32 a.m on April 20^th.  He had last been seen unloading the luggage of a Mr. Atagatawa, a visiting pharmaceutical representative from Bellevue, Washington, from a Super Shuttle van next to the hotel’s Lexington Ave entrance.  Neither he nor Mr. Atagatawa’s bags ever made it to his room.   According to John Riordan, chief of hotel security, Mr. Stevens, a Waldorf employee of eleven years, was first suspected of absconding with Mr. Atagatawa’s luggage and was reported to the police Friday evening after an exhaustive search of the hotel premises.  Six days later, however, Mr. Stevens’ remains were located behind an isolated outcropping in Central Park, along with the luggage and abandoned luggage cart.  Mr. Stevens’ body showed ‘significant evidence of being gnawed to death,’ according to Sergeant O’Hurlahy, the lead investigator from the city’s elite Bizarre and Occasionally Silly Crimes unit.  According to Sgt. O’Hurlahy, “At this time, we believe the attacker was most likely an ROUS.  We are currently working with the Museum of Natural History, which, fortunately, has one of the few ROUS skeletons in existence, for confirmation based on the size and severity of the many incisor marks present on the victim’s person.”  Mr. Carvato, director of the rodent department at the Museum of Natural History, confirmed that the museum is working on a “gruesome, but fascinating” investigation, but would offer no further details.  When asked to explain the presence of the luggage and luggage cart more than a mile from the hotel, Sgt. O’Hurlahy responded that “one of the bags had been ripped open.  In our interview with Mr. Atagatawa, he described having placed two large summer sausages in the bag in question, which were gone when the bags were located.  We can only surmise that the perpetrator of this crime, whoever or whatever it was, somehow detected the sausages and removed them.”  Nothing else was reported missing from the victim’s luggage, which included “some gold jewelry and a dozen iPad knockoffs.”  Neither police nor Mr. Atagatawa would comment further on the sausages, except to say “they came from a specialty cheese and sausage shop in Nasonville, Wisconsin, and [Mr. Atagatawa] was extremely distraught by their loss.”  If authenticated, Mr. Stevens’ death would be the seventh this year to be attributed to an ROUS, placing it 48^th in causes of death in the city, just behind non-vehicular jogging fatalities, and just ahead of mattress suffocation.

Rings of Fire

We in the Southwestern U.S. found ourselves smack dab in the path of a solar eclipse on Sunday, proving once again that when desert dwellers say we’ll move heaven and earth to create a little shade, we mean business.  And it’s only May.  Imagine what we’re capable of come July and August…

The eclipse we experienced May 20^th is known as an annular eclipse, and it occurs when the moon is too far away to fully obscure the sun as it passes before it.  This is in contrast to the more famous kind in which the moon completely covers up jolly old Sol, creating a total eclipse of the heart.  No, wait, I mean sun; Bonnie Tyler’s song just kind of naturally slipped out, child of the 80’s that I am.  Annular eclipses are also known as ring of fire eclipses because at their peak the moon fits perfectly within the white-hot circle of the sun, like a nestled pair of measuring spoons, if you can get your mind around a bigger spoon made of boiling, burning hydrogen gas.   These kinds of eclipses don’t occur very often, unless you’re a redwood tree, or a Galapagos tortoise maybe, in which case you’re probably thinking, Another one of these?  What’s it been?  Twenty years? Seems like just yesterday.  And why am I reading this person’s blog?

However, Phoenix wasn’t quite far enough north to experience the full effect of the eclipse, so on Sunday I packed up the family and drove them to the Grand Canyon, which was located within the annular sweet spot.  Three and a half hours drive each way, straight through; although when your traveling party includes a three-year-old, there is no such thing as ‘straight through.’

Zachary - the other half

In "Zachary," the previous post, my daughter and I went to Duck Park (Cortez Park for those of you who live in Phoenix) after running errands on a Tuesday morning.  While there, we met a young boy with a lazy eye, and a speech deficiency.   The three of us spent time together enjoying the ducks who hang around the park's lake.  This is the second half of the story of our encounter with the little boy.    

There is a fountain of sorts in the island’s middle, made to look like a spring.  It is formed from granite boulders of various size, pushed together to create a rocky trough.  The water pools and trickles downward through the gully until it is absorbed into the green water of the lake.  The boy practically beats you there.  He clambers immediately up onto the rocks and looks down into the water, where some sparrows are dousing themselves in a shallow pool.  “Bird ’imming?” the boy asks, pointing at them.

“No, not swimming.  I think they’re just taking a bath.”  Your little girl wants to see the bathing birds, and starts to climb, far more inexpertly than the boy, onto the rocks.  He’s a stocky boy, and you’re not certain of his coordination, so you subtly change positions so that you’re ready if he happens to stumble into her, or bump her obliviously.  Also in your mind is that persevering intimation of wildness.

The sparrows seem to have given him an idea, and now he creeps closer to the water, almost dipping his shoe in.  “Go ’imming?” he asks with a smile. 

“Oh, I don’t know.  That’s not my decision.  You need to go ask your Dad.”  You smile helplessly, but your tone is serious.    

To your surprise, he accepts this and says, “Be ’ack,” scrambling down from the boulder and over the short wall.  You watch him as he hurries over to where the man in the red shirt is sitting.  It is then that you first notice the shopping cart next to the rock where the man is seated.  The cart holds a half-load of clothes and other things, none of which you can readily identify.  Your heart sinks.  You knew the boy was in need of cleaning, because of his messy face, and you also noticed that his dark red Diamondbacks shirt had some dirty streaks on it.  But it hadn’t crossed your mind that the boy might not have a home.  You focus on the man in the red shirt, but he’s too far away to see in detail.  In addition to the shirt, he’s wearing a non-descript ball cap, and some baggy pants.  A brown, scruffy beard is the only other thing that stands out.  This new element, the shopping cart, inspires multiple chains of questions, about the man, about the age of the boy, about school, about the boy’s safety.  Is that where that latent sense of wildness you detected comes from?  It would explain that, too, wouldn’t it? 

Zachary

Tuesday, you have decided, is going to be errand day.  You enlist your three-year-old daughter’s enthusiasm with a promise to take her to the park.  You haven’t been in a while, and now that it’s May, you don’t know how many pleasant mornings you have left before the summer sear sets in. 

“Which park, Daddy?”

“Let’s go to Duck Park,” you say.  Duck Park is your name for Cortez Park, one of the larger parks in the city of Phoenix.  It’s got a man-made lake, and ducks, which distinguishes it from the smaller parks in your neighborhood.

“Does Duck Park have a playground?” she asks, frowning uncertainly.

“Yes, it has a big playground.”  She brightens in immediate response, as though she only needed to hear it to remember.

You load your little girl into the car, and join the straggling traffic of the post-rush city streets.  You complete your errands without much difficulty, dropping reminders of Duck Park when necessary to steer your little girl back into compliance, which only happens once or twice.  You arrive at the park as promised around 10:30.  Before you even open the door to unlock her from her car seat, you’ve already taken note of several dark men reclining in the shadows of sheltered picnic tables, but you see no reason to give them any more than a casual glance.  They do not stir.

You walk hand in hand across the grassy expanse of the park, passing in and out of the shade laid down by enormous old pine trees, following the cement trail that leads to the playground, and beyond that, the concrete-lined lake.  She wants to swing, so you push for a few minutes, and then she wants to climb, so you lift her out and let her carve a path through the sand to the play structure, a combination of enameled steel and plastic in a swirling jumble of teal, and two kinds of purple.  There are a few other little kids and their parents on the playground, and a small group of preschoolers under the supervision of a gentle-looking, but rough-voiced, African-American woman, but they’re all over at the bigger kids’ play area.  You give your little girl the opportunity to roam far and wide, but she doesn’t want it.  She wants you to go up the stairs with her into the structure, and stand by the cone-shaped tube at the top, which is too high for her to talk into, while she goes back down and talks into the other end of the cone-tube sticking out of the sand.  You play this much sturdier version of tin-can telephone, and then she leads you across the elevated walkway to the curly slide at the other end.  She wants to go down the slide, but it’s in the sun, and the plastic is hot.  So you put her on your lap and go down the slide with her, taking the heat of it on your bare, but far less sensitive legs.  Then you ask her if she wants to go see the ducks now, and she nods. 

Potty Training, Part 2 - Operation Take No Prisoners

Note:  If you missed part 1, you can read it here.


Roughly five months have passed since the commencement of potty-training hostilities in our house.  For the first four months we largely avoided direct engagement, opting for a low intensity, target softening campaign to win the heart and mind of the enemy.  However, once Maria turned three in January, and no promise of capitulation was in sight, we felt we had no choice but to initiate operation Take No Prisoners, a ruthless, full-scale offensive.  A few short weeks later, I can report to you that barring a major setback, Maria appears to be on the verge of becoming one of us – one of the potty trained.  At this time, I guess you could say that we are mopping up the remaining resistance…

As far as early milestones go, potty training belongs in its own category.  I think this is because learning to walk or talk, weaning off the bottle, or eating passably with utensils are, to some extent, shared goals.  As parents, we are heavily involved in encouraging and facilitating the acquisition of these key skills; but there also seems to be some natural impulse at work inside the child that helps propel them forward.  They watch us doing these things, and they want to be able to do these things too; and that means the child is willing to engage in the learning process, albeit some more than others.  It creates some sense of a common purpose, which makes learning these critical skills a collaborative endeavor.  Not so with potty training. 

This is evident the first time parents try to explain to their children exactly what goes on in a bathroom, and how it will soon directly impact them.  At first, the toilet is just too big – and seemingly irrelevant – a concept for the little tykes to grasp.  They are wearing a diaper.  None of this long-winded potty stuff applies to them.  If anything, they’re questioning why you would choose to handle your business in this fashion.  It seems so complicated, their sincere and somewhat admonishing eyes tell you, and honestly, kind of gross.  You should do what I do, and find someone to take care of that for you.

A Little Thursday Silliness, Uh-huh-huh

Sometimes ideas come from a couple of pretty strange bedfellows getting busy on the Posturepedic of your mind.  Today’s post is an example. 

Yesterday, I was playing with my daughter Maria on the floor in her room with her Disney collection of characters.  Well, actually, she was playing.  I was in limbo, awaiting orders to let me know what my next playtime move would be.  I was lucky that day; she was letting me have Jasmine from Aladdin, who she knows I’m partial to. Usually I get stuck with the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, or the Pocahontas figure that won’t stand up on its own.  Anyway, her characters (always the blue-dress version of Sleeping Beauty and usually someone like Belle from Beauty and the Beast or Snow White; today it was the pink-dress Sleeping Beauty) were engaged in an extended conversation about something Rapunzel apparently did or said, and so my mind was left to wander on its own for a few minutes.  My thoughts turned to Whitney Houston, who had just passed away last weekend, and how great a voice she had.  While I was doing that, Maria accidentally pressed a button on the Fisher Price Little People barn with her foot, causing it to spring to life with a lively rendition of “The Farmer in the Dell.” 

Well, these two totally unrelated things somehow tangled themselves together in my mind, and by the time I was able to restore some order in there, I was left with the thought, “What would some of the great singers of the past sound like singing nursery rhymes?  I immediately began to pine for such a collection of songs, but of course, no such thing exists.  So I made one up.

The Broken Door

I had to break into my own house last Tuesday. 

Maria, our three-year-old daughter, locked me out.

On purpose. 

It all started, as things like this tend to, innocently enough.  I was cleaning up around the house while Maria played in the back room.  The recycle bin in our kitchen was full, so I took it out to our large, city-provided recycling container, which sits not more than three steps from the door in our carport.  I lifted the blue lid of the big container and shook out the contents of our smaller kitchen bin.  I didn’t dawdle.  I wasn’t lollygagging.  The whole process took ten seconds, tops.  But, as I turned back and reached for the handle of the outer storm door, I saw the door behind it shut tightly, closely followed by the clear, metallic ‘tick’ of the lock being turned. 

Maria, whom I thought was oblivious to my random movements, must have seen me go by, been seized by a sudden and brazen inspiration, dropped whatever she was doing, trailed me through the dining room, and closed the door, all within that fleeting window of opportunity.  Working through this sequence of events in my mind, I still don’t know how she was able to do it, let alone why.  Maybe it was her attempt at an Occupy! takeover, or a less-than-subtle way of expressing her displeasure at being left alone with me yet again, or just an instance of temporary demonic possession. 

All I really know is that I am abruptly and unceremoniously staring at a locked door. 

At first, I assume she is just having some fun, and that she will unlock the door after only a brief pause for comic effect.  But a few silent moments pass, and then a few more.  “Maria?  Ha ha.  That’s very funny, sweetie.  Now please unlock the door for daddy, Maria.”  No response.  I knock softly.  “Unlock the door, please.  Maria…”  Absolute quiet.  No giggling.  No fumbling fingers on the handle, not one incidental sound.  Then it dawns on me that she isn’t even considering unlocking the door.  I look around in surprise, trying to digest this new development.  I am in my shorts and a t-shirt; I have nothing else on me.  The true extent of my predicament starts to settle in.  I begin to pass rapidly through the five stages of loss:

Denial – “Oh no she di’int!”

Anger – “Maria Margaret, you better open this door by the time I count to three! One...Two...Three!”

Bargaining – “All right, make that ten. (pause) Maria… I know where the cookies are.  I’ll give you a cookie if you’ll just open the door for Daddy… (maybe she knows we don’t have any cookies)  All right… Maria, in my wallet, I have some cash…”

Acceptance – “She’s not going to open this door ever.” 

Depression – “I’m going to feel really bad spending the rest of my life in jail after I kill my daughter.”

Family and Friends

My cousin and his wife came to visit their Arizona relatives this week, and stayed with us with us for a few days as houseguests.  Tom and Heidi live in Wisconsin, and we see them every two or three years if we’re lucky.  Tom is the closest cousin I’ve got; we’ve been friends since we were too young to consciously make those kinds of choices.  When I married Elizabeth, he came out for the wedding.  He was a groomsman, the only family member in my wedding party, but he was there because he was a friend even more than he was a part of the family. 

As with all my best male friends, communication between us is infrequent and inconsistent.  This drives Elizabeth crazy.  “How can you maintain a friendship when you make no effort to keep it going?” “How do you even dare to call yourself a good friend?” “How do you know you’re even friends anymore?  You haven’t spoken to some of them in ages.”  Maybe this is a point of divergence between men and women, or maybe I just have exceptionally tolerant friends.  The sum total of my experience has led me to the conclusion that friendship is the only true perpetual motion machine that’s ever existed.  In a way, it’s actually superior because, in addition to requiring no added energy to keep it running, it requires no actual effort to start the initial movement.  It all happens spontaneously.

Nothing Gingerbread Can Stay...

We all have things we wish would stay the same forever.  We all wish we could hold on to certain precious objects and never have to let go.  All of us have a deep desire to believe, at least selectively, in the permanence of material things.

But the works of men are transient.  Time levels all.  We try to build bulwarks against the impassive destroyer, but even the greatest of these wear down, fall apart, or crumble away eventually.  Permanence is an illusion, a fiction, a story we tell ourselves so we can feel a little more important, a little less vulnerable to the inevitable cutting strokes of time.   Even the Egyptian pyramids, those great ‘eternal’ monuments, are, at best, 5,000 years old.  They originate in the mists of human time, and their existence encompasses all of recorded history.  But in the life of our planet, it’s only the flutter of an eye.  And the planet’s life itself is but a flutter of space-time...

These were the thoughts I had as I regarded our leftover gingerbread houses a few weeks ago.  For several years now, my wife’s family, led by the remarkable Nin, gets the nieces and nephews together during the Christmas season for the making of gingerbread houses.  She has turned it into an annual tradition, and they spend an entire afternoon eating candy and creating colorful, sugar-induced hallucinations of houses.

Angels and stars

Part I – The Conversations (a fictionalized account of two families and their tree-toppers)

Angel or star.  There are really only two options when it comes to what goes at the top of the Christmas tree.  Many of us don’t take a strict position on which one is better.  However, there are some out there that swear an angel is the only way to go, while others say that it just wouldn’t be Christmas without that star atop the yuletide tree.  I grew up with angels on our trees.  I can’t remember a year when we didn't have one.  

When Elizabeth and I first married, we were very young and without the kind of money that today would be labeled “discretionary income.”  We barely had indiscretionary income, although anyone who happened to see our W-2’s would surely consider our combined income an indiscretion.  As a result, we started our married life with some surplus Christmas ornaments donated from both families, and an old fake tree.  From this motley assortment of hand-me-down decorations, we pieced together our first Christmas.  One thing we got from Elizabeth’s parents was the frail, tinseled, silver star they used to use on their tree when Elizabeth was growing up.  Even though the plastic back was cracking, and the whole thing felt as though it were about to collapse from exhaustion, Elizabeth’s mom had had the foresight to see this day coming, and held on to it.  We gratefully accepted it from her as a gift, and placed it oh-so-delicately at the top of our Christmas tree.  That’s when the trouble started.

Musical Christmas stockings

Music is as integral to the Christmas holiday as a tree, or lights, or elbowing the poor sap next to you in order to grab the last carton of eggnog.  It’s a vast subcategory of popular music, one that continues to grow with each passing year.  It seems like every recording artist since the invention of the victrola feels compelled to offer us their unique interpretation of “Jingle Bells.”   Seriously, how many varieties of “Frosty the Snowman” does one nation under God really need?  But these are smart people; they realize that if they can somehow wedge their version of even one song into the popular memory, their fame will be eternal, or at least last long enough to give them a convenient way to introduce themselves in the afterlife.  Take Bobby Helms and Brenda Lee, for instance.  If it weren’t for “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” respectively, we wouldn’t know that these people ever existed.  Even singers like Perry Como and Andy Williams, who were great stars of their day, are identifiable to today’s  generations only for their unsurpassed renditions of “Home for the Holidays” and “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (again respectively).   

We’ve now had 70-some Christmases since records and radio entered the cultural mainstream, and that means many thousands of Christmas songs and Christmas albums have been recorded.  A great number of these have survived right down to the present day, thanks to the natural human proclivity to hold on to every piece of circular black vinyl ever printed.  I myself have a box of LP’s sitting in my closet, even though I haven’t had a working turntable since 1992.  That means there’s an awful lot of Christmas music floating around, which makes it all the more difficult to understand why I have to listen to Wham! singing “Last Christmas” at least once an hour whenever I have the Christmas music station on. 

No matter what your musical tastes are, when it comes to Christmas music, there’s an absolute surfeit of choices.  Even if you have no taste at all, you can still enjoy songs like “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,” a barking dog version of “Jingle Bells,” or that absurd “Christmas Shoes” song, which I understand now comes with its own EpiPen for people who are allergic to treacle, which is most of us.

Uncle Day Weekend - Part 8

My prolonged absence from the blog has been due mostly to my determination to finish this story once and for all.  I have been working on it non-stop for two weeks, and while the result is far from perfect, I am thoroughly ready to call 'uncle' on Uncle Day Weekend...

For readers who can remember that far back, Part 7 detailed the majority of our visit to a little-known place called Bearizona. This visit occurred within the larger context of our Labor Day weekend trip, which we rechristened 'Uncle' Day weekend because we couldn’t take the summer heat in Phoenix anymore, and so sought refuge in the high country around Flagstaff.  Another goal was to get there and back without using the I-17 at any time, and to not travel the same road twice.  Part 8 carries us all the way to the conclusion of this story. 

Bearizona’s black bear exhibit was large in size and impressive in the number of bears it contained.  The dirt road through the enclosure was probably close to a half-mile long, if you straightened out the two large loops designed to give the visitor more viewing opportunities.  Once we entered, we saw almost immediately that the bears were active.  The staff must have just fed them, because a substantial number of bears were just off the edge of the trail, eating breakfast.  For some reason, they reminded me of old pictures of Dust-Bowl-era migrants pulled over informally along the shoulders of the Mother Road to eat, picnicking on their way to the Promised Land.  I must have seen a picture like that once upon a time; otherwise, I have no idea why that thought would even come to me.  Some of the bears were on all fours, and some were sitting straight up on their haunches, but all were doing the same thing:  eating slices of white bread.  Each one had a slice of the stuff already in its mouth, or was holding it with a paw.  We noticed one bear was holding his piece up to the sun as though he were appreciating its form, the way I might hold up a plump chunk of king crab leg glistening with clarified butter.  Some had piles of slices next to them.  

Black bears and white bread.
Sounds like a country song...

Who knew bears had a thing for Wonder Bread?  And they ate it with such apparent relish, too; it seemed to be a delicacy to them, like eating dessert first.  I’m sure they had been given other food as well; good food, healthy food, food with actual flavor.  All they seemed interested in was the Wonder Bread.  It was funny, but on some level, also a little disturbing.

Veteran's Day 2011

Reflections on Veteran’s Day, 2011

 Phoenix Veterans Day Parade - 11/11/11.
Although it got off to a shaky start (notice the misspelling, twice, of the word 'Hero's' on the banner), the parade immediately recovered its dignity and continued from there with great aplomb.  

I’m not sure I could tell you the last time I went to a big parade, but I’m sure it’s been ten years at least, maybe fifteen.  Parades are not really my thing, for two primary reasons.  For one thing, I don’t like crowds.  I don’t know what it is, but parades just seem to attract them.  Whenever I’m in a crowd, I quickly get very uptight and anxious.  It’s nothing personal against the rest of humanity; it’s just that so many things can go wrong when you have to stand next to folks you don’t know for longer than a standard elevator ride or forty-two seconds, whichever comes first.  Whenever I find myself in that kind of situation, I focus on all the mishaps that could occur, ranging from personal embarrassment to outright calamity, and then spend whatever time remains combining them in imaginative and unusual ways. 

The other reason is that parades are usually connected to a holiday, and I have always looked at holidays as precious and fleeting gifts of freedom from the rat race.  Thus, I tend to jealously guard these days much the way a dragon guards its treasure, specifically a dragon that’s down to its last few pieces of gold because some thief has absconded with the rest.  Holidays, especially the paid ones, engender a feeling similar to the one you get when the tax refund finally shows up in your bank account: even though you knew it was coming, you can’t help but get a little giddy anyway.  Putting myself in a situation where I would feel uncomfortable, such as a parade, for instance, has always struck me as an extremely non-giddy way to spend a holiday. 

However, things have changed drastically for me this year.  I’m a newly-minted freelance writer, which means I’m out of the rat race, because let’s face it, even rats don’t race for free, like I happen to be doing now.  One of the positive side effects, however, has been that I no longer feel a need to protect every spare moment that comes my way as though it were the last remaining seat in a death-match version of musical chairs.

The parade was preceded by a B-25(?) bomber
making several passes overhead.

So, on November 11^th, 2011, we took the plunge.  We gathered up the kids, and went downtown to watch the VA Veterans Day Parade.  Many people don’t realize this, but Phoenix’s Veterans Day parade is one of the largest in the country.  I know we were surprised by how big a parade it actually is.  Looking at the program, handed out by scurrying troops of freshly-scrubbed Scouts before the start, we saw that there were a total of 49 groups participating.  We were duly impressed by that, until our daughter alerted us to the fact that there were another two pages of entrants, bringing the total to 105. 

The parade itself ran a very solid two hours.  Before we left the house, I heard the local news estimate thirty to forty thousand spectators would attend this year’s event.  Two hours in, I thought that was the number of people in the parade.  It’s a long parade, and it feels even longer when you spend the majority of the time preventing a frisky two-year-old from running into the tangle of marching legs, especially when the pretty horseys and the friendly doggies are passing by.  Fortunately for us, my daughter was eventually overwhelmed by all the excitement and fell asleep.  For the last half-hour, my wife and I alternated holding her slag-like body in our arms while doing our best to continue waving and clapping and cheering.    

The VA Veterans parade had all the things that make parades the joyous and nerve-wracking (maybe that’s just me) experiences they are: bands, floats, giant balloons, dignitaries, celebrities, great old restored cars like Ford Model T’s and convertible Caddies, big trucks and military vehicles of all shapes and sizes, really loud motorcycles, music, flags, baton twirlers, and, of course, crowds.