Daddy Zine

The two newest additions to our family.

  Porky and Borky 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

I have a secret affection for doing the laundry and thus one year on the occasion of a minor holiday (perhaps Father's Day) my wife got me a couple of these hippie dryer softeners. The idea is they bounce around in your dryer and give your clothes something of a magic fingers massage and everything comes out of the dryer all relaxed and fluffy and mellow because there's no chemicals involved, dude.

Unhappily, there seemed to be a strong correlation between these softening devices and my handkerchiefs and underwear coming out of the dryer looking like a Vice Presidential memo.  So I returned to my previous program of benign neglect and contented myself with casting the occasional fond glance upon these tokens of domestic affection where they sat amid the sundry bits of pocket detritus (ponytail holders, paper clips, nickels) strewn about on the top of the dryer.

So daughter L. has of late caught some of her old man's enthusiasm for laundry, an enthusiasm stoked by her mother's strategic purchase of a small laundry basket for her room. "I want to help out on wash day!" has become my daughter's vaguely anachronistic cry. And thus on a recent visit to the laundry room my daughter paused in her task of heaving underpants up into the washing machine and her unoccupied gaze came to rest on the two prickly fabric softeners.

"Baby porcupines!" she cried.

The prevailing animism of a moderately pious five-year-old with a domestic bent can of course be something of a challenge. We have been chided for throwing away gross lint-covered stickers that had allegedly been possessed of sentience; angry tears have followed our imprudent decision to recycle empty toilet paper tubes. So I was not particularly surprised to discover that this otherwise innocuous drug store impulse purchase had become another member of my daughter's ever-expanding and increasingly complex interspecies kinship structure.

"This one," she said as she waved it around in her left hand as we walked up the stairs, "this one is Porky! And this one is . . . Borky!"

Mindful of the financial advantages of a future sinecure in a federally funded research facility like the NIH, I suggested perhaps her young charges might be named "Virus" and "Birus," but alas! the idea of the porcupines had already taken root.  Porky and Borky have made two fine additions to our household, though my daughter's tendency to tuck them in for naps under washcloths on the couch has meant that I have jumped up rather suddenly on a couple of occasions after incautiously sitting down in the living room.

In which the old fashioned virtue of persistence at last pays off.

  Period crocs 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

Long-time readers of Daddyzine may have noted my daughter's long-standing affection for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. We have read all the books in the series at least a couple of times and we can say with some certainty that Laura dominates the slot in our preschool daughter's personal pantheon otherwise occupied in some other kids by the brachiosaur or the pteradon.

My mom, who knows her way around a sewing machine, obliged my daughter with a complete Laura outfit for her fourth birthday last year -- calico pantaloons, a pinafore, a long skirt. The works. The kid dons her outfit with some frequency and with the introduction of a strategic tiara and a running monologue manages to create that sort of hybrid universe of juvenile liminal spaces where princesses and pioneer kids and talking dogs and razor scooters all work together under the umbrella of a single identity for the betterment of mankind.

Given my choice to follow the antiquarian book trade, the allied choice to work at home, and my affinity (both commercial and personal) for Americana, the boundaries around this household between the present day and at least minor tokens of 19th century material culture might also seem pretty fluid at times. The fact that I have for the past three or four years been taking my kid along on errands at the local research library devoted to the study of American history and culture (otherwise known to my kid as "the place that gives me cookies") has also further eroded the mystery for the kid of having old-timey stuff around. And without romanticizing the century -- certainly there are aspects of slavery, child labor, typhoid, etc., that are troublesome at best -- I would of course argue that I can't understand myself without trying to understand the complicated roil of the 19th century.

Anyway, it was on one of our visits to the Clements that somebody suggested to my kid that she wear her Laura outfit to Greenfield Village. (I'll assume here that most people have heard about Henry Ford's fetish for importing historical buildings -- say, the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop -- to create a simulacrum of the gauzy American pastoral whose demise he had pretty much insured; given my mania for cultural artifacts, which co-exists with a heavy-duty ambivalence about attempting to recreate the past, it's little wonder that the whole Greenfield Village experience produces in me a vaguely queasy giddiness that is likely the closest I will ever come to the emotions of an illicit affair.)

So this idea of rocking the Laura dress at the Village took root and the kid finally pinned me down on a date to visit the place. We've been out there before and she has shown a tendency on past visits to loiter around the Firestone farmhouse for periods of an hour or two trying to recapture the Laura experience. We might drag her away to the carousel or something but pretty soon she'll start agitating for a return to the farm.

So yesterday we showed up at the farm in full Laura drag around 10:00 AM. The women working in the kitchen and the garden were friendly enough but were busy doing the work of a farm--weeding the garden, making dinner, feeding the pigs, etc. My daughter's tendency to lapse into a sort of hysterical monosyllabic giggle by way of answering questions when she's excited certainly didn't help her make her case that at root she was essentially a 19th century farm girl. But she seemed to be having a pretty good time exploring the farmyard at sort of soaking up the experience.

True to form, we left the farm a couple of times to look at other stuff but after a while she would suggest we return to the farm. By mid-afternoon the women in the kitchen would say in a perfectly friendly manner "It's you again!"  And as we stood in silence in the kitchen watching the women make cookies, my daughter finally blurted out, "I'm dressed like this because I love the Laura stories!"

Guess what? It turns out the women who work on the farm at Greenfield Village all read the Little House series. They started swapping stories with my kid, comparing favorites (all agreed that Plum Creek set a pretty high standard) and by the time one of the women decided to give my daughter a chore to do, my kid was ready to fall down at the feet of the workers in adoration.

After about 45 minutes spent in search of eggs laid by the free range chicken in the yard (the kid was unsuccessful but showed a certain era-appropriate pluck) she returned to the kitchen and reported her failure. A little surprised at this latest reappearance of my sweaty, red-faced daughter, one of the farm women thought for a moment and began to rummage around in the pantry until came up with a couple of day-old biscuits.

"We need to feed the chickens," she announced. "Come with me."

And with that, my kid was out in the yard grinning like crazy and tossing hunks of biscuit to the chickens. We eventually left around 4:30 and the farm girl fell into a slack-jawed sweaty slumber on the drive home. She has been plotting our return to the farm since she woke up this morning.

I hear good fences make good neighbors.

So there we were today after lunch, sitting around in the back yard of a friend's house enjoying some play-group time. My kid and her friend had wanted to run in the sprinkler and since I hadn't had the foresight to bring a bathing suit we just let my daughter and her four-year-old buddy take off all their clothes. The other dad lathered up his son with sunscreen and I did the same for my daughter. Then we let them run around naked in the back yard for forty minutes or so.

The other dad and I spent this time chatting and keeping a weather eye on his two daughters -- his two-year-old, who had been similarly gooped up with sunscreen, subsequently insisted on rolling around in the sandbox with her shirt off until she looked like a cinnamon donut and required a certain amount of pro forma chiding, while his nine-month-old kept grabbing random bits of flora and shoving them into her mouth with fairly astonishing quickness and coordination.

So after a bit the two older kids decided to incorporate some fresh excitement into the naked sprinkler play and left the backyard to wander off into the garage to collect the necessary equipment for a round of naked sprinkler Wiffle ball or whatever and were out of sight rummaging around for a bit while the other dad and I sat in the shade and continued to chat. As we chatted, his next-door neighbor came out into his driveway in a suit and tie to return to work. The neighbor stopped and waved at us from across his driveway.

"Hey!" he said, "How's it going? Nice day!"

"Yeah," said my friend, the other dad. "Just hanging out over here. You want to take off your clothes and join us for some naked sprinkler time?"

This query was met with silence. My friend realized that with the two kids absent in the garage it looked as though we had simply been sitting in the back yard  meditating on the idea of a little neighborly naked frolic on a pleasant summer afternoon.

The silence lengthened.

"Um," added my friend, "because that's what our kids are doing. Playing naked. In the sprinkler."

"Summer is nice for that sort of thing," said the neighbor.

Then he got into his car (fully clothed) and drove away.

My mother the cyborg.

  Some equipment 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

The kid and I are back from a brief trip down to see my parents. My mom has been out of the hospital for about three weeks and is generally hooked up to one sort of machine or another at all times. There is a constant whirring or beeping to be heard throughout their house now -- a series of short beeps whenever her night-time machine resets, a long piercing beep (with an accompanying whir) whenever we turn on the oxygen condenser, and a nifty little syncopated beep (trip-o-let-pause-dah-dah) whenever her blood oxygen saturation falls to 90 or below.

And one weird unexpected pyrotechnic consequence to all this medical apparatus was we weren't able to use birthday candles on my dad's cake because if we did the house would have blown up and where's the fun in that? But at least we got to add the beeping of me climbing up on a stool and testing the smoke alarms after I read the big placard on the importance of NO FUMAR! my dad had buried in a stack of papers on a card table.

The visit was good for my kid--she hadn't seen her grandmother since Christmas--and certainly a boon to my mom. I'm still a little wobbly from the whole thing but at least have been able to turn my attention to my latest evil scientist plans for world domination now that I can plausibly create a legion of hyper-oxygenated quilting grandmas to unleash on an unsuspecting world.

Walking a mile in somebody else's shoes.

  Shoes 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

As you can see it's not like nothing is going on around here. But I have been having some thoughts about phasing out this blog and really have been pretty happy over the past week not bandying the particulars of my personal life (or my family's personal life) around the Internet. There's some weird 21st century anxiety of influence or confluence or something about having to come up with these ephemeral anecdotal entries and neglecting any productive activity. (Hell, I should have been the one to come up with the idea of acid free snow-shoes, not my daughter!)  The form becomes a little bit of a template, like the modern quiet epiphany short story and what fun is repetition?

Anyway, we're heading out of town for a few days and I will chew on the preliminary decision while I'm traveling. For those who can't get enough of my deathless prose you can always check to see what sorts of book-related nattering I'm up to at bibliophagist.