Spontaneity

Yesterday I was in my car waiting at a stop light. To my left, in the turning lane, was a young professional woman with huge earrings checking her makeup in the rearview mirror. I have no idea what radio station she had on, but her mouth flashed into a bright smile when a song came on she knew. 

Within seconds she was singing along and dancing practiced arm moves in her car seat; her earrings were swinging all over the place. It just made me smile, but I'm glad she didn't see me watching her dance. It made my drive to work a lot brighter.

Later that evening I was getting ready to grill in our backyard, and as I was climbing the deck stairs to get the burgers "Gold on the Ceiling" by The Black Keys came on my iPod. I have no idea how to get some one's gold on the ceiling, but I had a flashback to the gal at the stop light. It was dark, and we have a high fence, so why not? I stopped my climb and started playing air guitar. Then I gave up on the air instrument and returned to the yard to dance around and perform some improvised moves for a minute or so. That may sound dorky, but it was a heck of a lot of fun.

Here's hoping that if you have some spontaneous fun this weekend no one catches you in the act. At least as far as you know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yCIDkFI7ew

What kind of improvised moves you ask? You know, like covering your eyes with the left hand and waving the index finger on your right when they sing,  "I ain't blind, it's just a matter of time."  But that's just an example. I didn't do anything like that.

At least as far as you know.

http://mithan415.hubpages.com/hub/Storing-Gold-In-Your-Home

Rubber Slides and Padded Mats

Ever pull up to a stoplight on a busy multi-lane street and hear car brakes squeal? My first thought is "Is that my car?" and I'll try to casually roll ahead a little so I can press the brakes to check.

It's the same experience at a mall's crowed playground, and you smell a dirty diaper. My first thought is "Is that my kid?", and I'll try to casually bend down to Char's backside to check. Sure it's awkward, but at least I wasn't the dad who pressed his face far enough into his child's diaper that he could have suffocated himself. That guy's gross.

Happily, this weekend anyway, it was someone else's car and someone else's kid.

Random observations after visiting various toddler playgrounds in local malls:

1. The bottom of the slide is much more dangerous than the top. I didn't see anyone fall off, but I witnessed plenty of crashes at the foot of the slide. Some pileups were five kids deep.
2. Nothing exciting happens when I'm watching my girl play, but if I look away for a couple of seconds there will be a minor disaster. So, it's just like home.
3. I can always smell warm pretzels. 
4. Parents treat the playground like it's an elevator; none of the adults talk to each other. Maybe they're just too tired.
5. Or they're too busy looking at their cell phones.
6. I know that little boy who just ran full steam into Charlotte and sent her flying into the padded bark of a rubber tree didn't mean to hurt her. But while I'm picking up my sobbing girl and watching him rounding the corner for lap number two, I want to trip him.
7. And his mom who didn't even see it happen because she was too busy staring at her phone instead of watching her human torpedo.
8. But I don't...

At the sound of good music, I'll sing or I'll dance

About a month ago the three of us were coming home from a short shopping trip, and Charlotte had had enough of being trapped in shopping carts and her car seat. The iPod full of children's songs wasn't cutting it anymore, and every book handed to her was thrown overboard, "No, No, No, No, No!" A meltdown seemed imminent. 

Luckily, I'd been recently previewing some St. Patrick's Day music in my car, and I had a hunch that the little girl who likes the banjo and bluegrass music might also like the "sing along style" of Irish drinking songs. So I hit play.

After a few seconds Charlotte started clapping her hands and kicking her chubby legs. Daphne was a bit bewildered by my music choice, but could see how much Charlotte was enjoying herself, "Have you two listened to this before?"

"No, I was just guessing she might like it."

Daphne then leaned back between the front seats to talk to Char, "Okay, we'll play this for you. But as soon as you say the word 'pint', we shut this off."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhbFu78kqQ

Thanks?

Last December we found ourselves in an Iowa City church helping Daphne's Grandma celebrate her 90th birthday. After three cookies and 45 minutes of celebrating, Charlotte decided she had enough of the crowded atrium, and wanted to go exploring. She's quite the walker, and with a little forward lean she's quite the runner who falls down a lot.

While we were admiring the aquarium in the narthex an older employee of the church walked over to talk to me. "I've been watching your little daughter playing out here, and I have to tell you I have never seen a child who looks so..." See, here at the end of her sentence is where I thought the woman was going to give me a compliment. 

Nope.

To repeat: "I've been watching your little daughter play out here, and I have to tell you I have never seen a child who looks so much like I did when I was a child." Insert sound of a record being scratched.

"Really?" This isn't the comment I was expecting, and my smile fades.

"Oh yes, she's the spittin' image of me. It's so strange to look at her and see myself."

"Just like looking into a mirror, huh?" I'm was trying to keep my sarcasm at bay.

"Oh my, yes. I looked just like that. Same face. Same eyes. Same height. Yes, just like that." With that said, the woman sauntered away into a workroom of some sort. 

That's certainly not the worst thing someone will ever say about Charlotte, but who says that? Who has memorized what they looked like when they were 16 months old, and then goes around comparing that mental image to other people's children? When you think about it, it's pretty arrogant. And weird. 

What if she hasn't memorized what she looked like back then and instead is lying? That's even weirder, especially in a church. 

A few minutes later in a hallway near the nursery, Char found a couple of poster tubes sticking out a recycle bin. While we're happily banging them together, the same woman emerged from another door way. "Oh! There I am again! Hello little me, how am I doing on this lovely afternoon?" 

Unsure of what to say, I go with "Oh, hi again. I guess your little twin is stalking you." She chuckles down at Charlotte, but her soft laughter sounds somehow forced, and as she bends over and gets too close to my daughter I begin wondering if I shouldn't be holding something heavier than a cardboard tube.  

 Luckily, the woman abruptly turned and walked pass us down the hall, and then Charlotte leaned her body in the opposite direction and we ran/ stumbled back to the party in pursuit of more cookies.

Death from Above

Cleaning the gutters is the only chore of the year that actually scares me -  and so I have taken my fear of heights (and falling to my death) and twisted that fear into despising trees. 

Trees are fine in artwork, and they look great on other people's land, but our trees...I can't stand them.  You can preach to me all day about the virtues of natural shade and beauty, but I'm throwing the BS flag - I can pull down our window shades and crank up the AC and get the same results. Here's the truth: trees and the animals they house drop crap all over you and everything else you own, and nothing nice does that. Trees release leaves that have to be raked into about 50 lawn bags in the fall, seeds and nuts that clog gutters to overflowing during the spring, and branches that can destroy fences, windows, roofs, and entire homes.

"I think that I shall never see  

A poem lovely as a tree..." 

Alfred Joyce Kilmer, American journalist and poet

Tell you what, if Alfred's poetry-writin' butt was planted on the outermost edge of my roof, staring down two and a half stories while precariously leaning over the edge so he could hand-scoop about twelve pounds of maple tree "helicopter-muck" out of the gutters, I bet he wouldn't have been reciting that particular poem.

That muck is a combination of new maple helicopter seeds growing in wet, decayed leaves from last fall.  The bonuses are the stench and how the muck stains your clothes. Facing north on our house, the front gutters never dry out, and this dark, slimy mess lays in the bottom half of our gutters like wet cement.  If you try to blow the muck out with a leaf blower, then large glops will splatter the house, staining the siding for at least a season. So, this is a "hands on, butt slides on shingles" type of job.

Yes, I have heard of the gutter toppers that cost four figures to install; I've also heard of axes.

Our trees are a pain, and to add insult to injury, the biggest offender behind my house isn't even my tree. It's this huge elm that is on my neighbor's property, but almost all of its branches hang over our yard. At any given time there will be at least one 20 foot long "gift" from that elm. For instance, I found this in my back yard on a day with no wind blowing whatsoever. Thanks, neighbor.

Dr. Thomas Fuller once wrote, "He that plants trees loves others beside himself."  Really?  Doc, come on over to my house and I'll give you some love.

A Spot of Jame

I recently uncovered some old recipe cards that I filled out for 7th grade Home Economics. I doubt anyone would read these and think, "Wow, this kid's gonna grow up and teach high school English."

I have to agree with 7th grade me. An pitted prune stuffed with nut baked would be a real sarprize.

Keep in mind I copied these recipes out of a cookbook- way to concentrate, 7th-grade me. The only one that looks sharp here is the chese.

Looks like failure in middle school is not a guarantee for failure in life. 

PS. "Then put shallow layer on a bake as usual."

How was your St. Patrick's Day?

I'm thinking of doing a photo essay entitled, "Where in the World Did Charlotte Leave Her Sippy?":

Whining 

I have one small room in our house I call my own, but I'm losing ground. Sure, there's evidence of my hobbies/ obsessions on every shelf and in every corner, but Charlotte is steadily staking her claim. The remotes and breakables have been slowly creeping to higher shelves, and the floor is usually a minefield of wooded puzzle pieces, plastic balls, and those slippery, paperback picture books of hers. 

The bookcase shelf where I use to store my collectable paperbacks now holds her "sippy", her "chewy", and any cookies that are best left half eaten. Pretty soon I'll have to pack up every DVD that has art work that could be considered disturbing. That will leave me with just a handful of Disney and Pixar films. 

Anyway, it isn't just my stuff being taken over; here's one of Daphne's wine racks:

It is the Best

No matter how crabby I am, no matter how poorly I've slept, no matter how much I may be dreading the workday, all of that melts away when I slowly open my daughter's bedroom door in the morning. I could have been cursing the clock twenty seconds earlier, but I'll find myself smiling and whispering in a higher octave as soon as I turn that doorknob.

Sometimes Charlotte's already awake, chattering away to her stuffed menagerie, and she'll say "Daddy!" and point at me while I peak around the opening bedroom door. It's very cool.

What's better yet is finding her lying on her tucked in arms with her butt sticking up in the air. I get to rub her back and say things like, "Hey there, Big Girl. It's time to get up..." Watching her transform from a silent, little lump of pajamas into a smiling, dancing girl is quite a sight to behold. 

Some days I know this will be the best moment of my day, but at least I had a best moment. 

His Voice in Mine

"It doesn't matter who my father was, it matters only who I remember he was." - Anne Sexton

When I left for college in 1987 cell phones were just a novelty technology. No one I knew owned a one. Seriously, even land line phones were scarce at USD. The dorms weren't yet wired for individual phone service, and each room had an intercom that would alert you if there was a call waiting at the front desk: one buzz for you, two buzzes for your roommate. 

Since calling an out of state number required an expensive collect call - or spending a fistful of laundry quarters at the pay phone - I was only expected to contact home once every two weeks. That wasn't out of the ordinary; most kids spent very little time on the phone. The mailboxes were where the action was, especially around 4:30 when the "out of school" mail arrived. It's understandable. Twenty two cents didn't buy you much talking time, but it did buy you a stamp.

My problem was that I got homesick. To my surprise, I found that I really missed hearing from my parents. Frequently I'd visit the long bank of student mail boxes to see if anything was behind my box door, but the box was always empty.


Of course I didn't think to write a letter myself to get the ball rolling. Instead, when I came home for Thanksgiving break, I tried to guilt trip mom. "You know, it gets kinda depressing watching all the other kids get letters from home and never getting any myself." I was whining, hoping she'd take the bait. She didn't. To this day my mother sends cards, but rarely writes more than a single line, and that's okay.


I did start getting letters, though.  On the Wednesday after Thanksgiving I found my first one. To my disbelief, it was from my father. He was listening? And he didn't just write once. Or just once every two weeks. Dad wrote every weekday.

For the next five and a half years I would find a hand addressed envelope waiting for me after school. Inside would be a single sheet of yellow paper with a brief description of what my parents had for dinner last night, if their pets were in trouble, or how any home projects were coming along. I'd read news about my grandparents and people at church. I'd learn how much rain fell yesterday and what were the symptoms of mom's latest cold. The letters even followed me here to Des Moines for my first year of teaching.

It's true that every letter was a small gift, but you can't receive a gift everyday and appreciate it as much as the first. Sadly, opening them became a bit of a chore, and some letters went unread - unceremoniously thrown away or left forgotten in a desk drawer.

My dad was diagnosed with clinical depression in the spring of 1993, and the letters stop coming. His battle with mental illness wasn't a roller coaster - it was a rolling train wreck charging south. He became such a mess.

Now that Dad is gone I have a choice. I can dwell on the man he became after he got sick, or I can remember the guy who wrote me all those sweet letters. Although not easy, I'm going for the latter. I kept a small stack of his unopened letters, and two years ago I started the tradition of opening one on Father's Day. I sit alone on the edge of our bed, tear open the envelope, and read what the snow totals, my mom, or the neighbors were up to eighteen years ago. I think it's the closest you can get to time travel. If I read the letter out loud, I can even hear his voice in mine.

Why tell you all of this? Well, the next time you read one of my posts and you wonder, "Who does this? Who takes the time to write about such trivial stuff?" Well, you've got your answer.  

Barry's son does that. And he gets it from his dad.

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