Daddy Zine

In which we review the first of no doubt many future afternoons I will spend in a darkened school cafeteria.

 

We crossed a parental Rubicon this weekend when we attended our kid's YMCA spring dance recital. This marks the first occasion that we have seen our kid perform in public and she gives every indication that this sort of public declaration of love to Terpsichore has provided her a heady and perhaps necessary draught. Who might have imagined that you could don construction-paper bear ears and dab your nose with mascara and then bask in vocal public acclaim for what you would have willingly done in the privacy of your own home? Certainly the first brush with public applause has made an impression on our kid (though she also not surprisingly seems to take it as her due).

At some point in the cultural extravaganza that was this past weekend -- a weekend that included a matinee performance of the local high school's production of the Wizard of Oz and a charismatic magician at a neighbor kid's birthday party -- it began to dawn on me that I had plugged into this local Keith circuit for the long haul. I suspect that our family policy is not going to veer too far from the one followed by the Trillin family of New York (N.Y.):

For a number of years, high school friends in Kansas City who were trying to be understanding about my bizarre decision to live in New York would say, 'I guess the cultural opportunities must be wonderful,' and I would always answer, 'Well, we see a lot of school plays.' By then, Alice's policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covered pageants, talent shows, reviews, recitals and spring assemblies) was well known. She believes that if your child is in a school play and you don't go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinee for the fourth grade, the county will come and take your child.

I don't want to sound as though I am complaining. My kid and I both agreed that the YMCA's adult belly-dance class performance was both entertaining and highly educational.

(A video excerpt of the kid's performance here provided courtesy of the Zapruder family.)

The inherent chaos of handicrafts.

  Potholder chaos 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

Even though my middle name is pretty much Maria Montessori, I have to admit that I have a hard time enjoying all those old-fashioned enrichment toys meant to turn my kid into an organic goat famer -- those lace-up cards spring immediately to mind, as do loop looms.

So when my kid got a loop loom for her birthday it was a classic instance of the manifold benefits of complementary parenting styles. My wife is all over these sorts of handicraft projects and helped my kid set up a cottage industry to protect the tender palms of grandparents across the nation from the unsafe holding of pots. Our informal division of labor allows me to play instead to my strengths, such as our ongoing project of aimless meandering that masquerades as a latter-day evocation of the Platonic academy.

Of course, during the esteemed spouse's trip to a conference last week I was cornered into an injudicious promise[1] of a session with the loop loom. As bedtime approached, my daughter reminded me that we had not yet turned our attentions to the pursuit of that art sacred to Athena[2]. So, muttering oaths and wiping my dishsoapy hands on my pants, I got her loom set up and we spent the next forty-five minutes bent to the task of potholder construction.

As the scheduled bedtime ticked past and the body of the potholder finally took shape, my daughter handed me the crochet hook used to loop the edges of the potholder together. "Mom does this part," she said to me. I studied the potholder and then turned to the task -- admittedly with a certain degree of trepidation, much in the way I might try to slip a collar onto a surly dog.

I had pretty good fortune with looping together the first two edges of the thing but then the loops began to slip maddeningly from the loom before I was ready for them and I became engaged in a furious race against the truant loops as they receded ahead of me around the edge of the potholder. By the final edge I found myself engaged in a helter-skelter looping of anything my crochet hook could reach, regardless of the consequences. At last I held up the finished product with no small degree of triumph and pronounced it time for bed.

"Do you think mommy can fix that when she gets home?" my child asked.

My wife did come home at last and such are her talents that she did indeed fix the potholder. I spent a couple of days with her and then drove down to Illinois, where I am now. My mom and dad are back in Illinois, my mom having been flown back from Tucson in an air ambulance last Wednesday. Her new hospital is about a ten minute drive from their house and my dad looks better already. I have not yet seen whether a new potholder is medically necessary, though we might very well be able to slip one past the insurance company. Cross your fingers.
___
[1] I must here give credit to those Friends who have taken my child's religious education in hand and point out that my kid won't allow me to promise her anything. "You don't have to promise!" she admonishes me. "Let your yesses be yesses!"

[2] Potholders having been the undoing of Arachne, I believe.

Can a red Camaro be far behind?

The five-year-old kid from next door is in my daughter's room at this moment singing "Shakin' my booty, yeah, I'm havin' a good time." I'm not certain what to do. I am vaguely uneasy. Of course, early exposure to K.C. and the Sunshine Band did not seem to have any lasting ill effects on my character.

Anyway, I've been flying a bunch lately. At least for me I've been flying a bunch. I'm nowhere near reaching any kind of elite status but I am strangely proud of myself for not having suffered much from my time in the air. The placebo effect of expired Xanax is not to be discounted.

One of my concessions to my newly-minted frequent flyer status has been the purchase of a pair of black-checkered Vans (easily slipped off to speed my passage through security checkpoints), which I have been wearing with some frequency since my return from Tucson. I understand that the purchase of a pair of Vans at age 37 with the aim of optimizing my travel experience really just puts me a few steps away from traveling in a green velour sweat-suit emblazoned with an applique teddy bear on the chest.

But one fringe benefit of my pair of black-checkered Vans has been the esteem in which my daughter's peers now hold my fashion sense.  "Wow! Those are craaa-zee shoes!" say the four-year-olds at my daughter's preschool. And the esteem of four-year-olds provides some balm for the evident contempt which the sight of a balding 37-year-old in Vans seems to provoke in the middle school students at the YMCA. The contempt is actually pretty good, because it tells me I'm on the right track for my projected Great Droopy-Pants Program of 2014, when I plan to implement my salutary fashion mortification program for the good of my daughter's adolescent character.

In which our daughter takes me in hand to increase our resale value.

Eine kleine home improvement
Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

The way we take care of minor home improvements around here is to talk about them at length for a while and grow frustrated with our lack of progress until one of us suddenly goes insane and rolls out of the driveway to Home Depot and goes on a do-it-yourself bender.

Last week, just after I had gotten back from Arizona and just before wife B. left for two days at a conference in Chicago, she said to me in passing, "I wish we had $10,000. I would give that $10,000 to someone who would come in here and just paint our rooms. They would move the books and buy the paint and do all the painting and I wouldn't worry about anything. They would even pay for us to go on a trip for a week. Someplace nice. With a beach."

"I could paint a room," I said. "I think."

"How would anyone paint with a five-year-old around?" she answered.

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, the day my wife had left for Chicago, I was mentioning to the kid that wouldn't it be fun to paint the living room as a surprise for her mom. Ha ha.

"Yeah!" she said. "Let's paint!" She paused and sat quietly for a moment. "Let's paint it pink!"

The more we talked about it (and a vigorous exchange of ideas characterized our discussion of the color choice) the more my kid began to convince me that we could pull it off. So after the kid's dance class at the YMCA (where she told everyone she was going to paint the house and everyone in turn seemed to laugh nervously in response to this announcement) we drove out to Home Depot and bought a gallon of Misty Iris flat enamel and the necessary tools for the job. We had already moved the furniture and I put the kid to work rinsing off one of the walls with a wet sponge.

After a dinner of pizza -- eaten picnic-style on a drop cloth for maximum effect -- I set to work painting the edges and around trim. After a few firm words to the kid on the necessity of a gentle touch with the paint tray, I turned her loose on a stretch of wall. She painted giant hearts.

I tucked her in by 9:30, paint-covered but fairly pleased with herself. I finished up around 1:00 AM or so and moved the furniture back into place Wednesday morning. I worried that perhaps I should have consulted wife B. about the color choice rather than relying on my possibly faulty recollections of previous conversations of what it might be nice to paint the room. But it turned out when she got home Wednesday night that she loved it!

So it turns out if you want anything done around here, you need to get a five-year-old to get you moving. We're planning to tattoo the motto "Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood" across her back in commemoration of her assistance.

Daddyzine's consumer corner!

Hi! I'm back! I mean from under my desk. Just now. I was under my desk.

The cap on my Pilot BP-S Fine-tipped black ballpoint pen fell off again and went skittering off somewhere under the desk amid the voluminous stacks of printer paper and toner cartridges and that boxed-up multi-volume 19th century French biographical encyclopedia. Somebody seems to have been asleep at the switch back at the Pilot pen factory -- my most recent batches of Pilot pens have all had issues with the fit of their caps; said caps sit but loosely on the end of the pen, the merest involuntary caffeinated twitch of my hand proving sufficient to send the cap flying off the pen. This might not seem like much of an inconvenience but consider that not too long ago I made a house call out in Ypsilanti to look at "a whole bunch of old books" which had been rescued from an estate sale and once I got out there I could tell that the books -- some three or four hundred in all, which had been laid neatly out on a series of card tables in the downstairs rec room -- were worthless.

I made a show of examining the books and after a decent interval went upstairs to break the news to the woman who had called me to look at the material. She was watching reruns of "Emergency" on cable and she left the television on while I launched into my song and dance about the books. I began to explain in the kindest terms possible that her books were absolute crap, at one point punctuating a particularly eloquent oratorical period with a gesture of my ballpoint pen-wielding hand; this gesture in turn dislodged the cap of my pen, which described a majestic and mesmerizing arc across her living room.

The woman continued to gaze at me inscrutably from the couch as I spent the next couple of minutes crawling across her white shag carpet to retrieve the pen's cap from beneath the coffee table. Her silence further unnerved me and in my nervousness I maintained a running monologue on the state of the market for cheap early 20th century reprints of pious literature (in a word: non-existent) with as much dignity as I could muster while wedged buttocks-up beneath her coffee table.

Quite frankly, at this juncture I am not at all pleased with the cut of Pilot's jib.

Back to a lovely state where it snows on Easter.

  Not a bad idea. Boy, I'll say. 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

Saturday night I drove up to Phoenix to spend the night in a motel room along a moderately sketchy thoroughfare near the airport so as to more easily catch my flight out on early Sunday morning.

So that Saturday night I checked into the motel and then drove to the nearby gas station -- I drove past the burnt-out gift shop next to the motel and the row of low cinder block houses (one at least hung with hand-painted signs advertising a hair stylist operating out of the house), the whole row fronting on your basic proximate-airport stretch of potato-chip bag and glass-strewn pavement, and stopped at the gas station, where I disappointed an amiable panhandler while I filled the tank of the rental car. Thus braced for a night on the town, I turned my thoughts toward finding some dinner.

I drove out Van Buren past Bill Johnson's Big Apple restaurant (the original!) and decided that the number of pick-up trucks in the parking lot, when taken in conjunction with the fiberglass steer on the roof of the porch, suggested a credible barbecue menu. I was not disappointed -- the brisket was quite tasty, though a little heavy on the sauce. (It certainly did not measure up to the brisket from Memphis Minnie's anyway, though the latter brisket is one with which I have a strangely complicated emotional relationship. One can rarely unseat a culinary assessment built on a memory built in turn on sociable excess with a since-departed friend. This unfortunately means that for a restaurateur to reach me effectively his best bet is to kill off my dining companions, a business plan that in the end seems maybe self-defeating.)

Anyway, I have of late been kicking around some relevant thoughts on solitude and fatigue and the dissolution of self in respect to becoming a transparent eyeball while traversing hospital parking lots at dusk but it's past midnight and my injudicious deployment of phrases and clauses without respect to the gentility of grammar is no doubt injurious to readers of delicate sensibility. So I will conclude with saying that I'm home and my wife leaves tomorrow for Chicago for a conference for a couple of days. I would rather be upstairs in bed with her than down here in my office working. So further updates later.

Gourmet dining in our bachelor quarters.

Strawberry tool.
Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

This is the kitchen tool my father has been using to prepare his strawberries.

"I like a lot of juice," explains my father.

Paging Dr. Freud.

I had started the whole testicle/Romanian zipper post below thinking I would conclude with the episode that has made me most uncomfortable so far during this whole experience -- even beyond the tentative nomenclature for Arm & Hammer (if you get my drift). Worse than all that was sitting in my mother's ICU room and watching an episode of Sex and the City with her.

The whole experience of the past two months of medical crisis has made me much more comfortable seeing my mother as a fellow adult with whom I can hold frank discussions of medical and physical minutiae. It has not made me any more comfortable sitting in the same room with my mother while watching a show that involves a frank discussion between television characters on the merits of anal sex. I am tentatively willing to declare that my tolerance for frank discussion ends somewhere in the region of the merits of the Foley catheter in a clinical setting.

It appears perhaps my relationship with my mother might in some instances defy fully rational analysis.

Starsky and Hutch?

  Menlo Park Video 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

I was moping about by myself in the ICU waiting room one night last week when an older woman sitting across from me -- she was apparently waiting for her husband to come out of the recovery room after surgery -- decided to use her cell phone to update a friend.

"The doctor was surprised at what he found, Lorraine" she said. "The doctor was surprised. So he took out Frank's right testicle."

I could hear the faint interrogatory buzz of her friend on the other end of the conversation.

"No, Lorraine," she said, her voice rising. "I said the doctor removed his right testicle!" There was a pause. She raised her voice another notch: "His right testicle!"

The conversation went on like this for several agonizing minutes until Lorraine evidently managed to wrap her head around this uncomfortable new truth. I had comes to terms with Frank's condition pretty quickly during the initial announcement and had instead in the interim begun to rethink my long-term antipathy toward granting nicknames to my own body parts. From what I understand, there are some individuals who (without putting too fine a point on it) have granted a snappy pet name to their external organs of reproduction; I understand that other erogenous zones on occasion come in for similar treatment. Though I have long been an advocate for using the proper names of body parts in the education of my daughter -- we pretty much call a penis a penis around our house -- I think experts in jurisprudence have long advocated limits on one's right to shout "testicle" in a crowded waiting room.

Anyway, given the statistical likelihood that my wife will sometime in the next forty years find herself sitting in a hospital waiting room needing to shout testicle updates into a cell phone, I have decided that perhaps I need at least to come up with code words or something. Alpha and Omega? Scylla and Charybdis?

Please note that any and all suggestions for alternative testicular nomenclature made in the comments section will be mercilessly deleted.

I remarked another example of blurry personal boundaries on my flight into Phoenix on Monday night. The woman behind me on the jet-way kept up a running general conversation as the line crept up to the boarding door. The conversation was not with anyone in particular but something of a running plaint on the woes of travel. Her cell phone rang at some point in the midst of her lament and it quickly became clear that she couldn't find her phone.

"Shit!" she yelled, as she started digging through her bags. "Shit! Like this is a good time to call me! Wouldn't you know it! Shit!"

(This woman looked a little bit like Debra Winger at her more unhinged moments in Terms of Endearment. Inevitably, she sat down in my row. She was on the aisle; I was by the window. We were flanking a woman who turned out to be a monoglot Romanian grandmother.)

Debra Winger launched another search for her cell phone and asked if she could eat her hamburger. She proceeded to dig through her backpack in search of the phone with one hand while she held the hamburger in the other hand and took occasional bites. After a couple of minutes she put down her burger and handed her purse to the Romanian grandmother.

"Oh, hell," said Debra Winger. "The damn phone has to be somewhere. I heard it ring, right? Just start unzipping zippers and see if you can find the phone. Go ahead, just unzip the zippers."

The Romanian grandmother looked at the purse on her lap.

"Zeepers?" said the Romanian grandmother. "Zeepers? Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no."

Anyway, I am sensitive to the possible ironies of cracking wise about those with porous personal boundaries while I engage in Internet speculation on possible code names for my testicles. By way of distraction (or atonement, depending on your point of view) I have included here a photo of my new favorite video store. Otherwise, Mom is out of the ICU and up in a room on a medical floor. We'll see where the next week takes us.

Doctor recommeded, monkey approved.

St Mary's
Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

The oldest surviving wing of my mom's hospital was built sometime in the 1940s. I finally realized that one reason I've been pleased with the care my mom has been receiving is that the look of the building recalls to me the hospital in which Curious George receives his medical care.