Hey There, Bubba!

Ryan has his first loose tooth.

This is making Fran and me pretty sad, realizing that his baby teeth will start to fall out. Other signs of his growing up tend to make us look at each other and make a sad face, kind of like a running joke, but more like just a running commentary of our amazement at what it's like to have a child.

Bringing me back to Ryan's loose tooth. He has some friends who lost their first tooth over a year ago, so he is anxious to join them (remember those days?) He has been claiming loose teeth for about 6 months now, but Fran just verified the first palpable wiggler just last week. I could tell it made her sad.

Could I just let nature run its course and not use it as fodder for practical jokes? Nooooooo....

We were at Party City picking up balloons for Kaitlyn's birthday party yesterday, and I spotted these "Bubba Teeth" by the cash register. I turned to Ryan and told him that we absolutely had to get them and tease Mom with them. I must have been speaking louder than I thought, because I looked up to see several people smiling broadly at the idea. Ryan saw them, too, and became very self-conscious--he's just that way, sometimes. He didn't want to have anything to do with those wax "teeth"--he thought they were gross.

----

We walked in the door, and Fran was in the kitchen. I carried in a bundle of helium balloons, and Ryan cupped his hand over his mouth. We had discussed our scripts and stage direction on the trip home.

"Hey, Fran. You remember how Ryan had that loose tooth? Well, he's got a surprise for you!"

"WHAT!!!!??? Oh, no!" I didn't anticipate how shocked she would be at the prospect of Ryan losing a tooth when the event actually "occurred".

Ryan walked around to the other side of the kitchen table, and, using his actor's instincts, held his hand over his mouth for an extra second or two. This was the time during which Fran's mind went through every possible scenario which necessitated him holding his hand over his mouth. Well...probably all but the right one.

I really wish I had one of those high-speed timelapse movies of her facial expressions as she ran through the possibilities. Among the questions she pondered were:

-I can't believe his tooth came out!
-Did someone knock it out?
-What in the world are we going to tell him about the Tooth Fairy?
-Do people still do that? How much should we leave him under the pillow?
-Did Mike do something stupid, like tie his tooth to the car and drive off?
-Is his face disfigured?
-Did he swallow it?
-I didn't think it was THAT loose!
-Is he bleeding?
-How many of them fell out?

Part of me would like to sadistically play the timelapse movie frame by frame and watch the thoughts wash over her face--that's what a practical joke is all about, right? This one lasted just a precious few seconds.

Ryan took his hand off his mouth, then: horror, confusion, relief...anger.

She shot a look at me, "Ahhhhh! You just gave me a Mini Heart Attack!" and she walked off.

It took a minute before she burst out laughing. Gee, I wonder why she has a hard time believing me...

The Saga of '77

School had just started again in the fall in Texas. My friend, Chris, and I were a week apart in age and lived a block apart. For some reason, our parents never, ever talked to each other so we had a lot of unsupervised free reign throughout our neighborhood, which we availed ourselves of regularly, taking walks, playing in thrown-together tackle football games, and riding our bikes to a place called "the trails", a scary crossroads of dirt bike paths located just on the outskirts of the neighborhood on the other side of the railroad tracks. Big kids, and even teenagers with girlfriends would sometimes hang out there, too. Rumors circulated that The Trails was a place where people would go to fight, smoke cigarettes, or kiss girls (all of which I had done by age 7 anyway...but I was still scared.)

It was on one of these walks that Chris and I started the "can collection", as we called it. We spotted a pristine Coca Cola can tossed alongside a busy road, and Chris mentioned to me that if you take it to a recycling center they would give you money for it--I don't remember, but it was 2 cents or 5 cents, but to me it seemed a lot like finding money on the side of the road. I was intrigued.

Why did I want money? Because of 7-11 and baseball cards.

A seven year old is generally given everything he needs to live, but this was a point in my life where I started to realize that there were things beyond my grasp. Some things were just barely beyond. I was with my aunt at 7-11 and I saw rows and rows of colorfully wrapped wax-paper packets along the candy aisle--they were priced at a quarter apiece--I asked her what they were.

"Oh, those are bubble-gum cards." (sometimes, members of my family coined terms for things that weren't mainstream. These were really baseball cards with a stick of gum stuck on top).

"Can I get one, please?"

"Michael, get a different candy."

"No! I want a bubble gum card!" (Insisting, though, of course, having no idea what it was).

She gave in. I remember that waxy paper that it came wrapped in and the permeating smell of the disgusting gum that came with the cards--powdery on the outside, probably so it wouldn't stick to the cards. I remember getting confused and wondering if the cards themselves were bubble gum--I licked one of them just to make sure. The cards would keep that sickly sweet smell for weeks after you got them, and they were just laminated on one side. The other side had a bunch of numbers which meant very little to me--statistics about the players which I didn't quite understand. I know some kids really picked up on stuff like that, but I was happy just to know what position they played and what team they were on, and just to have them--brightly colored pictures, action shots, players, managers. If I got too many of the same guy, I would sacrfice or two by clipping them to the spokes of my bike, making it sound like a motorcycle while I rode it.

I don't know why, but I loved having these baseball cards, even though I knew nothing about baseball, the people, or the teams. I remember clearly that one of the teams, the Cubs, was written in a relatively illegible script that made the team name look like the "Owls". I called them the Owls for at least a year before slyly discerning that some of my friends had players from the Cubs--then I figured out my error. To me it was just fun. I would "play" baseball with them, making a ball out of wadded-up paper and placing all the players in their respective positions on the floor, then putting the ball in play and moving the players in the field.

I was hooked on Baseball cards without a means to get them other than begging family members to buy them for me, which quickly became pretty tiresome to them.

So on the day when I figured out a way to make money, I started thinking in terms of how many cans I needed to get for each pack of baseball cards, and we started our collection. We kept it going throughout the whole year, piling bag after bag in Chris' garage to be "cashed in" some day. His parents thought it was hilarious that we stuck with it. My parents had no idea of what I was up to--I believe the general impression was that Chris and I hung out at his house watching reruns of Godzilla movies and playing "Sorry" with his mom--we did sometimes, but mostly we just kept piling up cans.

Some houses were being built nearby, and Chris and I would routinely patrol the neighborhood, scouring the place for abandoned beer cans. I remember sipping warm Coors out of a can that was propped on a sawhorse inside a house--I still remember the house, because when I was in high school a friend of mine lived in it--but this experience probably soured me on beer for the rest of my life, because it was the most awful taste I've ever experienced. In retrospect, I hope it was actually beer after all...

If we found a deposit bottle, we would make a trip to 7-11. This was like getting a Christmas bonus--we would usually find a few bottles a week, so Chris and I would take our trip together. We would get the coins--quarters so thick and round that I wanted to sink my teeth into them--I loved the way they clinked together...We would turn them over and over again in our moist fingers, inevitably buying a grape Nehi, and maybe a pack of baseball cards. We felt so rich and powerful that we couldn't resist surveying the kingdom and deciding upon our purchases--it would take at least 20 minutes. And we must have seemed so small to the clerks--I remember one or two of them asking if we had permission to go to the store.

Then one day, Chris appeared at my front door unexpectedly--with $18! His mom and dad had found the 10 bags of cans we had collected and cashed them all in--$18 was my half, and I remember stashing the money under my bed until I could get to 7-11, buy 2 grape Nehi's and 20 packs of baseball cards. I opened them one after the other, stuffing at least six pieces of the stale gum into my mouth so I could hardly chew it.

All summer, I played and played with the cards until the edges became worn. I enjoyed them so much--I didn't even want to trade my "extras" with my friends. I kept them stored in an old empty tissue box under my bed.

At the end of the summer, my mom and dad found the box and accused me of stealing the cards. I can't remember if they thought I took them from a store, or from a friend, but I remember being terrified that they might found out I had been working on my can collection without them knowing--that's all that mattered to me, even though Chris and I had essentially dissolved our partnership already. I told them that I got them from a friend.

They told me to give them back to him.

So I took the tissue box full of cards over to the home of my friend, Alex. His family was pretty poor, but he was a nice guy that I didn't know very well. Something told me to give the cards to Alex, so I did. I just told him that my parents wouldn't let me keep them anymore, so I wanted him to have them. He seemed surprised, but happy, and we never talked about them again--Alex moved out of town the next year, and I never saw him or my baseball cards again.

Times have changed, baseball cards have really changed--it cracks me up that some people see them as an "investment"--like a Certificate of Deposit they can cash in to pay for their kid's education. Instead of a quarter, they cost over two dollars a pack, and they don't come with bubble gum anymore. They are not only laminated, but they are hologram-embedded and require you to store them in a museum quality holder so they don't lose their value. You would have to be insane to clip one to your bike tire. I never had a desire to own baseball cards after having to box up my collection and give them to another kid, but I sprung for the $5 for a couple of packs for my little boy this year when he learned about baseball--I taught him the rules of the game by placing cards on a makeshift baseball field on our kitchen table and "playing" baseball just like I did when I was seven. It just seemed natural to me to do it that way--I wonder if anybody else ever did that...I wonder if he enjoyed it.

My son turns seven next month, and it's surreal to me that he is at this same point in his life that I was. I can relate to the confusion about the adult world and the unseen values that influence kids. I remember the awareness that I had at that time, and that adults seemed oblivious to the fact that I understood the things that I understood. Simple pleasures, like a waxy pack of cards for a quarter, would make me happy. Maybe there are things for me to learn from those memories that will make me a better dad to Ryan---not to make all the decisions behind the scenes, but to listen closer to him and to share my rationale for decisions and get his input. But in those days, I learned to rely on myself to get the things I want, and to be ashamed of breaking rules. And, in my own way, I guess I made things right, and dealt with the consequences and regret of unfairly losing what I had worked for. The cards had to go.

But the memories are priceless.

Two Guys go into a bar...

I have this weird impulse-control thing that I've never conquered--it does make for an interesting life, though.

Business meals are very weird--it's not like going out and having dinner with friends. It's more like the extended dance mix version of the relatively unsatisfying experience having coffee and donuts at a meeting in a conference room, wishing you were chomping the same donuts and coffee in your pajamas while reading a book in your favorite chair...

One of my colleagues, named John, whom I don't know very well, was in town to help me with a tough training class for a group of nitwits. Since he was visiting from out-of-town at my request, and didn't have a car, I felt somewhat obligated to take him out to dinner that evening. Some guys have "road" personalities, where they go nuts and drink like crazy or otherwise misbehave, so you never know what you're going to get--this guy seemed pretty tame, so I decided to take him to a restaurant relatively close to his hotel.

We sat, somewhat awkwardly making polite conversation. He is a pretty formal guy, very professional and not too open about his ideas. Some guys will go on and on about politics, which just bores the shit out of me. Others stick to very neutral topics such as events in the industry, "where I'm from it's like this...", and even funny work anecdotes. If I ever run into someone who reads literature, likes to hunt or fish, or talk philosophy (open-mindedly, not trying to convince me of anything), then I'm good for the whole evening. But that night I was trying to switch my brain off from work mode and was just enjoying stories of John grow up in a military family, moving from place to place. He's a decent guy.

I let my guard down for just a minute.

"Did you hear that Peter McDonald left the company? He went to the competition."

"Good--I'm glad he's gone. He's a smug bastard!" I shot back with blinding speed, just enunciating the word "bastard" at about the time I caught myself saying it.

Normally, this in itself would be funny enough of an interjection just because it was such a sudden and disproportionally dramatic departure from the somewhat passive tone of the conversation, but then I saw John kind of press his lips together with some effort and look down at his drink.

I had one of those flashing episodes like in "Run Lola Run" where bits of information about John and Peter ran through my head, tracing back to a convergence of their paths. I realized that John had known Peter from working with him at their former company.

Now, here's where I'm coming from on this: I had just had the opportunity (privilege, if you ask Peter) to work with Peter for about 10 days in a row at a conference. He's a smarmy British guy who is extremely brilliant, gifted, well-spoken, and clever. The kind of person that I become quiet around because there isn't enough room for my ego in the same room with theirs. The kind of person who is constantly correcting you with hyper-accurate language. An Example:

Me: "Am I attaching the X-ray correctly?" (putting something together)

Peter, scoffing, sighs, rolls eyes, then responds: "It's an energy-dispersive X-ray analysis detector." (note that he really didn't answer my question).

Me (who really just asked to politely fill an awkward silence, knowing what it was and how to attach it, including the full, annoying name): "Thanks."

Then, in my imagination, Peter is drinking tea later on with his comrades (At least 5 English people magically materialized at our station during the conference): "I work with a group of gorillas. They are all complete morons who know nothing..."

Gloriously gifted Peter pranced around the conference rolling his eyes and speaking condescendingly to others the entire time, in that manner of him being in on some large, cosmic joke of hyper-awareness amongst dullards. But still, he was one of those guys that made me glad he was on our team because he is quite knowledgeable about technical matters. Believe it or not, I can easily put aside personal dislike for someone if they do a good job.

So, when given the ability to unleash my pent-up wrath about Peter, I opened my mouth and inserted my foot firmly--I guess I could be a wuss and retreat, chalking up my outburst to an instantaneous lack of judgement, but nooooo, not me...I've gotta go the other way:

"You must know him pretty well from when you worked for xxx, huh?"

"Yes, he was my contact with that company for eight years. He called me to tell me he was leaving" John responded, smiling slightly as though he really caught me in a big faux pas. Turns out they've been friends for eight years or so...

"Well, if you talk to him again, you can tell him he comes across like a real smug bastard. But then again, maybe that's the effect he's going for..."

John politely changed the subject, and I just laughed at the absurdity of the situation and my own silliness.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda

There was no mistaking that it was Mrs. Davenport. I knew it was her without even looking.

I had taken my wife's car to a car wash and was trying to get 5 minutes of reading done while I was waiting for the guys to wash it, dry it, and deliver it back to me so I could let the kids smear twinkie filling and chocolate milk on the inside of the windows again...

And I recognized a voice that belonged to the mother of an acquaintence from high school. In fact, her son, Jay, and I had been in scouts together for several years, and I had been over to their house several times. Fifteen years ago.

I'm cursed with this overactive memory that clings to details, so sometimes I recognize someone, know lots about them including every interaction I've ever had with them, and then when I go and say something I get the blank stare of complete non-recognition. This happened a year or so ago at the same exact car wash (probably been that long since I had gotten the car washed)--I recognized a man from my old neighborhood who had twin daughters, one of whom I had worked with for about six years while we were in high school (I didn't mention it to him, but she had paid me $100 to write her term paper and she got a better grade on hers than I got on mine!)--I knew these girls since we were four years old, as well as about ten members of their extended family, so I spoke to him and asked about his daughters. Sadly, I learned that one of them had died of cancer (not the cheater).

This is what I learned from these girls as we grew up in the same neighborhood: 1) Girls go to the bathroom sitting down 2) Fried baloney really stinks up the house and is gross and 3) The Beatles songs are cool--we used to listen to their parents' old records in their house (while they were frying baloney). All of these I consider to be valuable life lessons, and I owe a debt of gratitude to this family.

Not that I didn't care about the other one dying, I mean it was a sad story, but I hadn't seen her in twenty years so (callously I say) I probably won't miss her greatly. I wondered what I had gotten myself into, sitting there at the car wash talking to her dad in front of 10 strange people. But I felt obligated to hear the whole death tale and I knew that the dad had no idea who I was, and it seemed a little awkward for him to be telling me this very personal story--but we both lived through the experience unscathed.

So, when I heard the unmistakable sound of Jay's mom's graveley voice, I had to do a quick evaluation of life convergence to determine if we had interacted enough to meet the criteria for me to not seem like a stalker who needs to get a life.

We were friends in scouts.
Their family bought me a nice gift when I graduated.
Went swimming at their house about 20 times.
Did some work for Jay's dad and got paid very well.
Remembered his sister's name...
Knew a little about Jay--he is a multi-millionaire now and has been on talk shows. At least he's not dead and I'm forced to listen to a verbal obituary...

Yeah, I guess that's enough to briefly say "hi" and "give my best to Jay".

As I started to speak to this bewildered lady, my mind filled in a critical incident: "The Car Story". Yeah, it would have been helpful to have remembered THAT a little sooner...

The story could actually be called "The Spitting Incidents of 1987", because it all revolved around spitting. Jay had bought a new bitchin' camaro and had pretty much turned obnoxious, peeling out all over town and picking up groupies that just wanted to hang out in his car. It was a cool car, but I wasn't really into cars so it didn't mean much to me. Jay did lots of bragging and big talking, so that was a little tiresome. It didn't occur to me in the least to be jealous of the camaro--getting a car was so out of the realm of possiblities for me that it just went over my head.

But my buddy, Cameron, was burning up about it--it really bugged him. Cameron had a 1967 baby blue mustang which he always seemed to be fixing up. Driving home from a scout meeting one time, we saw Jay's camaro parked in a lot, and Cameron pulled over. And, sitting in the car still, he spit on the windshield about 20 times. I know it's quite convenient to say that I remember birthdays of people I haven't seen in 20 years, but I can't remember something significant like whether or not I joined in the spitting incident. It's not beneath me, but I seriously can not remember doing it. I do remember being a little surprised that Cameron had such rage in him over a silly car, and that there wasn't anything specific that sparked it.

I'm not sure how Jay figured out who it was, but a week or so later he got revenge on us--he went to my younger brother, Don, and spit on him, maybe even giving him a shove for good measure. I'm sure that Don went ballistic on him, but the whole thing became an embarrassing incident and somehow violated pretty much every point of the Boy Scout code or something tragic like that, so we all got invited to a meeting at the scout leader's house and Jay's dad did most of the talking. Seems that he was afraid that we might all retaliate against Jay. He even tearfully and convincingly explained that he thought of Cameron and I like his own sons (Hey Dad, can I have a camaro, too??) It all ended there, though.

So, that would have been a good detail to remember before talking to Jay's mom.

Luckily, she didn't remember me and thought I was an Amway salesman or Jehova's witness or something, and jumped back about a foot when I went up to her, said "hi" and introduced myself.

We engaged in mostly small talk, and she was pretty guarded about saying anything too personal.

I asked about Jay, she mentioned that "one of his houses" is here in town, and he visits it occasionally.

I asked about his sister, Carmen, who was two years younger--I said, "she must have turned out to be so pretty"--I know, this was a risky thing to say. Her mom gave me a blank look and didn't reply. I bet she inherited the "blow up like Violet on Willy Wonka" gene (that scene disturbed my 6-year-old Ryan so much that he had to leave the room).

I asked about the dad (since I'm like a son to him)--The response was interesting: She looked down, fumbling a little aimlessly for something in her purse, and said "Well, we're just going to have to see about him and if he behaves himself. Right now, he's in trouble." And that was that.

After she asked me politely about my family, during which time I realized she had no idea who I was and of course no idea about my family. I asked her to give my regards to Jay and we parted.

Then it hit me--It would have been well worth it to pay for her car wash and tell her that I owed it to Jay. Damn, that would have been funny.

A Slippery Slope of Stealth and Sneakiness

My goal-setting for the year is a weak point that can easily be exploited.

Fran knows that I have set a goal of redoing the kids' bathroom--tiling the floor, tearing down wallpaper, painting a faux finish on the walls, a complete makeover. But, unfortunately, we already have a major project going 10 feet away--Fran is hand-painting butterflies and daisies on Kaitlyn's walls and windowseat. Two large projects going simultaneously would just be too much.

Somehow, in a moment of delirium, I decided that if I shoulder the burden of entertaining and caring for children, it would help expedite her work--so I can get to my projects before summer. So, for the past two evenings, I've bathed the kids, dressed them for bed, and cleaned the kitchen while Fran relaxes in sweats, drinks tea, closes the door, and cranks up some tunes while supposedly painting. Today, we're going to make a whole day of it--hopefully she'll finish.

What was I thinking?

This technique is called the "soft sell", but I'm not sure who's selling what to whom...seriously, if the roles were reversed, how motivated would I be to hurry up and finish?

Skiing seemed like a good idea...

When I was in high school, I had several friends who would take ski trips every year and come back with lift tickets clipped to their jackets that they would wear for the rest of the winter (and the next)--now that I think about it, that was a nerdy thing, wasn't it? But it seemed cool at the time. It was one of those things that I must have been a little jealous of, because it became one of those things that I started to feel wasn't a real thing--I couldn't visualize myself doing it.

There have been times where I've broken the bubble of surrealism--one time I was walking down Broadway in New York, and, suddenly realizing where I was, was overwhelmed by the feeling--it had been such an abstract concept to me that Broadway was actually a street that existed somewhere. Come to think of it, New York City gave me that feeling everywhere I went--famous architecture, Central Park, and . Another "worlds colliding" feeling has happened when I have personally seen beautiful paintings in person that I had previously seen prints of: Monet (favorite), Rubens (surprising to me), Renoir. Nothing compares to seeing it in life.

So, all the fantasy stopped when, after long struggles, almost certain cancellation due to no snow, and kid-wrangling for over an hour, I found myself at the top of my personal Mount Everest (AKA the top of the Bunny Slope). At was at that poignant moment that I realized what skiing really is. Abstract concepts faded: Skiing is actually sliding down a mountain with the slightest deluision of control via slick boards strapped to your feet! This is in no way an easy thing to learn! If someone tells you that it is, they are lying just so they can laugh at you in your near-death dilemma.

Keep in mind that I am a "flatlander". The highest hill in our city is the mound of trash at the dump, which wafts like potpourri for miles...Ahhhhh.

Luckily, I had Nate and Nicole with me to serve as witnesses and direct the rescue team to scrape my carcass off the rocks when the inevitable happened...

This is how you teach someone how to ski, apparently: Just yell at them to "Make a wedge!!!" If the student looks like he is about to fall off the side of the mountain, just say it louder and repeatedly...

Seriously, though, I was so thankful they were there--it was such a foreign concept that we wouldn't have attempted it without their help...Of course, it was a beating of phenomenal proportions for them, I'm sure. I had to helplessly watch as they helped my 6-year-old boy out-ski me like crazy down the mountain. We were told that he would probably pick it up pretty quickly...and he seemed to.

Just about that time, I learned what a face-plant was...I left an impression like one of those plaster-of-paris death masks on the side of Bogus Basin--kind of an inverse Mount Rushmore type of thing. Then I remembered "Hey, this is how Sonny Bono went out..."

I realized that I was stressing out about Ryan every time I would go up with him, so eventually I took a couple of trips down the slope pretty much by myself, which was much more fun and relaxed.

A highlight of the day was when my wife Fran, who merely one week before had mustered the stamina to outshop the rest of San Francisco at a seven-storied Macy's, decided to try skiing. Now, Fran is not widely known for her athleticism, but I was really proud of her for having the guts to try this, so I curiously watched as she assembled herself and went up the ski lift. I turned to Nicole and told her "Right about now, she's trying to figure a way out of this."

Second-hand account begins here (as related through multiple sources):

Fran, slides off the ski lift and starts heading over the side of the mountain. Nate has to ski in front of her and body-block her from going over. Looks up.

"Is there any other way down this mountain?"
"Could I just lay down and roll back down?"
"Why don't they just let you ride the ski lift back down? I would come out here just to do that--it's so beautiful..."
"I don't think I can do this"
"I can't believe they won't let me ride down the ski lift"

Then, when the inevitable finally sank in:

"Shit Shit shit!" (Yes, this is my dear, sweet wife we are talking about, here).

She made it down in one piece, I think with just one fall, although I think Nate had a grip on her and held her up as she came down the slope. One trip was enough. At the bottom, she is rumored to have said "Thank you Lord Jesus, Amen", a reference to a line from Places in the Heart...

Nate's response "Don't you think Jesus heard you at the top of the mountain, too?" (grinning--see photo below).

Two days later I was so sore I could barely stand up, but still glowing from the experience--it was really a highlight of our trip.

Do you think it would be too nerdy for me to leave my lift ticket on my jacket for a little while?

Okay, that was just God messin' with my head

As I'm leaving for work this morning, Kaitlyn, my daughter who will turn 2 later this month, says to me:

"Bye, bye Daddy. See you in the funny papers!"

I promise.

Just call me "The Shred-Meister!"

I really hate those people who (usually with eyes closed, head tilted back, as though they are smelling something distasteful) say "My New Year's resolution is to not make any resolutions...because I never keep them." How clever.

I'm very big into goal-setting and making big mammoth projects for me and chopping them up into little pieces and tackling the pieces one at a time. It works for me, anyway.

Here I come to a little sticky part--I may have lied in my blog somewhere back where I mentioned a box in the attic that has random things in it--when I went up to fetch Fran's ridiculous quantity of Christmas boxes this year, I set aside at least seven or eight boxes which have in them:

1) Every greeting card ever received into my hands
2) Every receipt I've ever had (not sorted, just lumped in toghether in no order)
3) Every check I have ever written, stacked in the old checkbook boxes
4) Notes from Parisitology class in 1994
5) Twenty-three leftover copies from a speech I gave ten years ago
6) Every tax form I have ever filed
7) Warranties to things I don't own anymore
8) Shirts and hats and collector soda cans and an empty coke bottle, three baseball cards, and 12 postcards
9) A wooden crucifix I stole from my great-grandmother's estate when I was 7
10) Every letter and ticket stub from when Fran and I dated (Yep, even the ticket stubs from the first movie we went to see togther: Field of Dreams, September 2, 1989)

It became clear to me that I needed a shredder--I mean, come on, we can't have someone stealing those twenty-three copies of my speech and delivering my thoughts across the earth, right?

No, I guess more like all the stuff with my credit card info, identity, etc. I'm super-paranoid about that stuff, so occasionally I'll just burn it in the backyard (it smells terrible). My goal is to condense my mementos into one or two reasonable-sized boxes and shove them back into the attic for all time.

I went out and got the Shred-Master 7000--a great leap forward in itself, but a mental change needs to take place as well. I've been doing better and better at losing the annoying pack-rat personality, but I tend to get this gloomy, panicky feeling whenever I'm disposing of something that I may possibly be called to recover.

Yeah right "Ahem, Mr. Mike, could you plesae present that check you wrote back in 1992 proving that you had the oil changed in your car?" Me, sheepishly sorting through tubs of boxes with check carbons flying everywhere, rifling through bank statements..."No." Getting very disapproving glares.

The truth is that I rarely have to dig something out of a file--why am I keeping all this crap?

So yesterday I fired up the shredder and went nuts, shredding unsolicited credit card applications, receipts for meals that were eaten during the Clinton administration, and phone bills from three addresses ago. I stopped for a minute, reminiscing about the fishing license I fed into it from 1993, then watched it get sucked into the blade and spit out as confetti.

Ahhhh. Like a weight off my shoulders.

Christmas in Idaho (Survivor: Boise Edition)

After about 10 days in San Francisco, I came home and turned around and took my family to Boise, Idaho for Christmas. It may be interesting to note that we were spending time with a total of nine family members in my grandparents home, and that, through events that would ruin the story here, some of the family had never met each other before, and five of the members have not been around kids in any way for the past 20 years for over about an hour. Before we brought our kids to their house for 10 days, I called each party individually and warned them that even the best-behaved kids have their "moments", an asked for patience.

My six-year-old boy, Ryan, is one of the most well-behaved children I've ever seen, and he didn't disappoint me on the trip. My little girl, Kaitlyn, turns two this month (January), and she hit the "terrible twos" in full stride as soon as we set foot in Idaho. Well, maybe it hit two days before we left when she knocked over our Christmas tree while trying to wedge herself between it and the window, but why quibble over technicalities?

For those of you who don't know, the Terrible Twos are a time of exponential mental growth in children. They continually test boundaries of time, space, and people. They start to talk with full ideas ("No! No eat that-that yucky!"), exert independence, and, in general, require full attention during all waking moments. It's a very confusing time for the child, and a lot of time they misinterpret their own emotions--they know they are feeling something strongly--it may go from delight to a crying fit in just a few seconds.

The fun thing about the terrible twos is that you can really start to see the mental processes that the child is going through while working out ideas. Our Kaitlyn is very sweet and snuggly, so it was cute for her to run around saying "Merr-ree Kissmus!" and giving us big hugs. That is, it was cute to us...

My grandparents home is made of metal and glass, with sharp-pointed corners and jagged rocks interspersed throughout the house. My Grandmother collects china, figurines, hand-painted stuff, and other shrapnel-like items. They did take a lot of time to childproof the house before we got there--that is, they took steps to prevent the house from being destroyed by our child. Childproofing is actually designing the house to be safe for the child to walk around in, not "whew, now they won't break our stuff..."

But, thankfully, we did have a cure, which we discovered a couple of days before we left--Kaitlyn has been entranced by the movie "The Sound of Music", which we got on DVD. The DVD even allows us to play all the songs and skip the dialog, which worked out great--as soon as we popped it in, we have about 20 minutes to get something done with less than full supervision. Somewhere between the scene with the puppet show and Mother Superior singing "Climb Every Mountain", she loses focus on the movie and takes a break to wander around and test the tensile strength of random objects.

So we whipped everyone's ass with "The Sound of Music", which we played about 40 times while we were there and soon became a soundtrack inside my brain. And I, subconsciously, sank into a paranoid delusion that we were ruining everyone's time with our high-maintenance lifestyle. We also all lived in the same room for 10 days, which reminded me of a cross between "Angela's Ashes" and an episode of "The Twilight Zone".

In our house, there are a couple of "Safe Zones" where we can situate poor Kaitlyn, knowing she won't plug a fork into the wall socket or stuff M&M's into the VCR. We can leave her toys out to come and go and play with as she likes without having to disinfect the place after each play session. No such luck at the Grandparents' place.

An additional humorous contrast is that my grandfather was an airline pilot, and operates his life on quite a systematic schedule. Additionally, he hates to waste time waiting for things, and pretty much refuses to wait in most cases. Contrast this with the twenty minutes it takes to put a two-year-old's socks, shoes, and coat on. Quite funny (to us).

So, after a couple of days of standing vigil, I developed that self-conscious paranoia like the sailors on the submarine that start cutting themselves across the arm and imaging that the walls are closing in. my eyes started to dart back and forth, I heard voices saying "You suck!" and "Thanks for ruining Christmas, jerk!", and the corners of my mouth started twitching involuntarily.

There were also dogs. In an interesting ironic-karma thing, I have a somewhat irrational distrust of dogs that, despite my continuing efforts to rationalize and overcome, persists. Here is a picture of the aftermath from my formative-years experience with a German shepherd. Subsequently, I had to have rabies shots, have to shave twice a day, and disappear for hours whenever there's a full moon out (just keep to the road and stay off the moors)....

Try not to be jealous of my sweet threads.

At some point, I stopped counting all the times it was said that "raising kids is just like raising dogs"...This seems quite rational to a person who has dogs and not kids, and is highly offensive to people with kids and no dogs (and fodder for humor for the former). This was okay until my grandfather decided to test the theory by stalking up behind Kaitlyn, clapping loudly right behind her head, and yelling "No!" when she touched the figurines on the table, hoping to condition her against touching them in the future (thank God it didn't work--she just turned and looked at him blankly)--I also had to draw the line at them tapping her on the nose to try to make her swallow her medicine...

So the facts are that it was a wonderful time and the whole crowd was quite patient and extremely generous, said nothing whatsoever critical, and we had a very nice time (although we were tired and ready to come home at the end). My paranoid delusions eventually ceased when the purple grasshopper told me to chill out and stop taking things so personally, and that intelligent adults who understand that they are going to spend several days with a 2-year-old probably realize that,at some point, the child is going to act like a 2-year-old and said adults probably won't hold me personally accountable for my offspring's actions.

So Long, Farewell, Auf wiedersehn, Good Bye...

Mike's Drumbeats

When I started my blog last year, and entitled it "Mike's Drumbeats", I had this image in mind for a "logo".

It's a photo that I submitted to my Fine Arts photography course in college--I wanted a silhouette image of a guy playing a drum set, and I set up so the light would reflect off the cymbals. Essentially, I took several pictures and got the one that I wanted--a little mysterious, it's kind of a challenge to tell what is going on...

My entire class, as well as the teacher, hated this picture. I think I got a B or a C on it, and everyone else got an A. They contorted their face, turned their heads sideways, crossed their eyes, and then declared it very difficult to understand. I think the top grade in the class went to a girl who dressed up all Goth-ed out and took a self-portrait laying on a grave with her own name with a rose across her breast. At that point, I realized I would never be artistic.

But I may change the blog image to this one--I found it in the attic when I was putting 12 boxes of Christmas decorations (took a little while to cram in the 10 Lords a Leapin').