Stagnation

I had several things on my to-do list for today, so naturally, I did none of them and spent almost all of the elementary school hours reading old blog posts. It seemed like a self-indulgent thing to do, but I couldn't stop. 2007 and 2008 were two of the most complex and fulfilling years of my life. I was struck by the difference between the me of five and six years ago and the me of today. I was engaged. I was excited. I thought deeply about what I was doing and wanted to tell people about it. I was smart and funny, and I loved my job, even when it was hard and confusing and exasperating. Looking back at him, I liked that me. A lot.

That's why I think I really need to get a job.

Aerie and I agreed when Thumper started school that there was value to me staying home even with him in school. It lets out at 2:40, after all, and a couple of times a month at least there's a day off for a holiday, a teacher work day, a bad weather makeup day. I was excited that it would give me time to pursue other interests, particularly writing. The Great American Novel would at last be finished started. The house would at last be clean. Additional money would be made from all those work-from-home hours I'd be putting in.

But mostly I've been watching TV and movies, reading books, and listening to audiobooks. I haven't even kept up with my exercise and diet routines. I look back at how engaged and excited I was, how every developmental stage was thrilling and new, and I realize how removed I am from that kind of energy now.

I need to get a job.

Summer's almost upon us, so I think we'll do a last hurrah on the whole stay-at-home dad thing. We'll revisit the dads' group play dates. Though the cast of characters has changed somewhat since we were regulars and Thumper is likely to be the old man of the group, it will be nice to see old friends again, both his and mine. We have another friend who has grand plans for play dates and cooperative child care to fill in the days between kindergarten and first grade, and we'll throw in with them as well.

There's a job that I've been waiting and hoping to see open itself to me like a a flower in the morning sunlight, but it hasn't yet, and there's no telling if or when it ever will. If it does miraculously hand itself over to me this summer, I'll happily take it and make other arrangements for Thumper, but if it doesn't, when school starts again in the fall, I'll start looking for work again in earnest.

I'm not being the best me that I can be, and with complete freedom, with no pressure from my incredibly loving, understanding, and patient wife, I can't seem to push myself to be better in the ways that I know I need. It's time that I got back to work and contributed to the family in more tangible ways, like income, and retirement benefits. And not spending entire days doing not a damn thing.

The First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

As a stay-at-home dad, my only child's first day of kindergarten was almost surreal, a strange mix of emotions ranging from giddy exultation to moody navel-gazing. He's gone from this:

to this:

in what also seems simultaneously like a blink of an eye and an eternity. This parenthood gig is stranger than anyone would ever be able to make anyone else believe with just words. There's so much you can't know until you know it.

It was a grand day. Aerie worked from home so that she could be there for drop-off and pick-up. He was confident and excited and walked to his classroom with an elbows-up swagger that looked like this:

We hugged and kissed him and said our goodbyes. He shed no tears and was happy to see the back of us, but he didn't even mind all the pictures. Next year he almost certainly will. Aerie managed to hold off her tears until we were outside the school.

We came home and, of course, immediately posted pictures to Facebook, like all parents with kids in school. Then I ran a load of laundry while working on a database project. When I began to fold the laundry, including Thumper's clothes that seem simultaneously tiny and, compared to those little onesies of days gone by, huge. That was when the emotions finally caught up with me, sitting in the utterly silent house folding the little big man's clothes.

It was just as surreal how quickly the day flew by. I did too few chores, accomplished too few work objectives, and utterly relaxed through a pleasantly surprising (first-time!) acupuncture appointment, which added even more weirdness to the day. I tried it to see if it could help some of my allergies and respiratory difficulties, but when I mentioned some shoulder pain, the acupuncturist immediately resolved in about 30 seconds of manipulating needles in my shins the shoulder pain that physical therapy and 3 or 4 years of exercises have not been able to touch. I can raise my arms above my head without sharp pain in my shoulders for the first time in years. Because of needles in my shins. Weird.

Wait, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah. End of an era and whatnot. I'm not sure what the future holds for a full-time stay-at-home dad who no longer has to watch a kid full-time. I'm not rushing back into the full-time workforce, though. Aerie and I agree that there is value to having me available, with an early afternoon school release and with all of the sick days, teacher work days, vacation days, and holidays that will come up over the course of the school year, and with the opportunities to volunteer at the school that will also arise. Timing has worked out well with some additional database projects appearing at just the right time through my part-time employer, and there may, with an extra stress on may, be some full-time employment opportunities for me on the horizon. So I'm staying put, biding my time, and waiting to see what happens.

But still, it does sort of feel like Thumper and I, we're walking into the sunset on this whole grand stay-at-home dad adventure.

Hey, Me Too!

Miss Yvonne at Yo Mama's Blog (not your mama's blog) coined a phrase for something I used to do obsessively for more than a handful of years, and still do now and again, sometimes only semi-consciously. Turns out I'm not the only Phantom Typist in the world! Hooray!

I took Typing from an odd, cross-eyed man, whose name I can no longer recall, who had a weird bowl-cut hairstyle. Not to pick on the cross-eyed; that wasn't why he was weird, though it didn't help. Anyway, I was 14. It was the 8th grade. And we used actual IBM Selectric typewriters because I am old. During that semester, and for more years after than I'd care to recall, I "typed" my internal monologue as well as things that other people said to me or that I said to them. I credit this bizarre behavior with transforming me into the incredible typist that I am today.

And I'm not the only one!

Cuz

My cousin found me on Facebook! Funny, it hadn't yet occurred to me to look for her there, though I've Googled her now and again in the, oh, hundred years or so since I've seen her. Yay, Facebook!

Here's what I remember about her:

1. The photo. It's a treasure in my family, this photo, iconic of our relationship at the time. I know I have a copy somewhere, but it's after midnight, and I don't know where to begin to look. I bet Aerie'd know, if she were awake. It shows Cuz and me at two years old, her with the flaming red hair, me with round belly and cheeks, sharing a can of Coke in a field of green grass. My mother used to joke that we could sell that photo to Coca Cola if only the label had been turned a little more directly toward the camera.

2. That house. The house of my cousins, not far from the home into which I was born, was the coolest place on the entire planet. As I recall, though the memory of a child before he was five is less than reliable, they had a sauna in the basement. They had an electric organ. They had cable (we watched Breaking Away again and again!) and a home computer (an Apple II! With Hunt the Wumpus and Lemonade Stand!) before people had cable and personal computers. They even had that most exotic of appliances: the trash compactor. They had the big back yard in which we celebrated the 4th of July, with sparklers. My uncle was rebuilding a Fiat from the ground up, and he drove like a lunatic. As I recall.

3. Cuz and I, getting busted by my flustered aunt, in that hazy time in my memory when I was 5-ish or before, in bed together, exploring the differences in our parts when we were supposed to be napping. I can't recall now whether she was amazed that I had what she did not, or if I was amazed that she did not have what I did. But one, or both of us, was astounded.

4. The lake vacation, some handful of years after we moved a couple of states away, when the cousins all came together for a couple of weeks, and Cuz and I played smurfs, or maybe trolls, and the cousins all made fun of our new Texas accents and repeatedly sang "Put Another Log on the Fahr" at us, and we fished, mostly unsuccessfully.

5. The splintering of that family of cousins through what seemed like a long string of bizarre and unjust tragedies, beginning with the too-young death by cancer of my well-loved aunt, whom I called "Aunt Piggy" because it was almost her name, and I was young and confused, and because she gave me some sort of fabric pig book when I was two and was hospitalized with pneumonia, that I still had years later. The pig book, that is, and not the pneumonia.

I think the loss of that extended family, first by our moving away when I was five, right at the early edge of my current memory, and then by what seemed from a distance to be the dissolution of the cousins' family, has shaped how I feel about familial connections now. I have pined, now and then through my life, for that connection with the cousin who was only a few months younger than I, who was in some ways, for a little while there, almost like a sister. I want Thumper to have and know and love his cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. I want him to grow up with them, to still be playing with them long after he's five, to never feel like he had and then lost them.

So. Anyway. I'm glad to hear from her again.

When She Left

I can still recall that surreal, disconnected, floaty feeling, not unlike the scene when Eddie gets cheated by Hatchet Harry and just sort of wanders out, then pukes in the street. Yeah, kind of like that.

I walked through the neighborhood, and every white car on the horizon was our car returning home, bringing her back home.

I remember my brother, who came when I called him, sitting with me, not talking about it, then sort of talking about it, and telling me, "If it was me, I'd fight." And suddenly realizing that I could fight or not fight, that I could let it be over, or I could try. It was entirely up to me. And I chose to try.

And things were bad, and things got better, and I learned that there is no happily ever after and you never hit the point in a marriage when you can stop working at it.

Now people we love are floating in that same boat, and the Mrs. has gone over while I stay here with the boy. I hope she can be what my brother was for me: a comfort and a sounding board. I wish both parties well, and I hope they can both find what they're looking for. I hope they can fight if they want to fight, and let go if they want to let go.

By the way, Big Brother: I know you don't read this, but your wife does. I hope I told you some time how much it meant to me that you came over. Thanks.

In My Life

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

I've been thinking about high school lately, and I'm vaguely disturbed that I just don't really remember it. Part of the signup process for Facebook is putting in your high school and your graduating year. Then it gives you a long list of people from your graduating class who've already signed up so you can "friend" them. I scrolled through pages and pages of that list and only recognized two names. And I only vaguely recall the person attached to just one of those names.

Of course, Aerie joined Facebook, too, and went through the same process. Her list perusal was punctuated with frequent, "Oh, wow"s and "I know him!"s. Now she gets a dozen emails a day notifying her of Facebook messages from the friends she had in high school and college. Good thing it's not a competition, because she's way more popular than I am.

I just don't remember it. I don't have a high school year book to flip through. I didn't go to my graduation. I don't remember teacher names. Even my creative writing teacher, who actually meant something to me at the time, I can only really remember her name, and only that because I was reminded of it by that one Facebook friend.

So anyway, I was wondering if that's normal. Do most people remember high school? I mean, I know that repetition improves the transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory. We remember the things that we come back to in our thoughts again and again. And I've thought about those days and those people, with a few exceptions, almost not at all in nearly twenty years. Then a couple of weeks ago, I worked a marathon session of high school graduations. I worked several different positions over the two days, so I got to see things from multiple directions. At the doors, I watched the families, the parents and grandparents, come in. On the floor, I watched the students and faculty.

I never really regretted skipping my graduation, and I still don't. At least one speechmaker at every ceremony describes this class as unique and the best the school has ever seen. Every valedictorian touches on the same elements of ending and especially beginning, of responsibility to the future. Some with more humor; some with more pathos. The bands and choirs all performed with pomp, and with circumstance, and with much dignity. By far, the best arrangement I heard was an a cappella version of the Beatles' "In My Life." I almost welled up for a minute there.

I watched the faces of the graduates as they queued up right in front of me, waiting their chance to cross the stage. I looked for something in those faces; a sign that they were no longer children, perhaps, or that they felt the weight of the occasion and the new maturity and responsibility it heralded. I didn't really see anything there. Some were nervous. Some excited. Some thoughtful. Some bored. Faculty and administrators worked the lines, checking in on the particularly nervous-looking, perhaps to nip any vomiting or fainting incidents in the bud. They shook hands with some students as they passed; they hugged and laughed and reminisced with others. And others got only a polite smile. I thought that would have been me, the one who got only a polite smile.

Strangest of all, though, was the uniform handling of "special needs" students. In every school that I saw, they were segregated. For one school, they were seated separately, off to the side, with a cadre of faculty handlers flanking them, while the rest of the population sat en masse in the center of the floor. For another school, they were seated among the other students, but still segregated, grouped together and again flanked by faculty like bodyguards. In each case, they were carefully inserted into the alphabetical listing when their turn to cross the stage came, but after they were photographed on the far side, they were removed from the alphabetical listing and returned to their corrals.

One of the faculty serving as a special needs bodyguard caught my eye. He was young, white, conspicuously sunburned in the face, and sporting corn rows. For some reason. He struck me as trying to be more like one of the students than one of the teachers, and I wondered what subject he taught and how many of his students he's slept with. Then I felt ashamed of myself and wondered if that was a recurring burden for him in his professional life, having to deal with that same prejudice from parents, administrators, and colleagues. I thought of the guy in my dad's group whose children were approached by a mom on the playground and interrogated about whether that man was their father or not. I should've had more male solidarity with that teacher. But in the end, he still seemed kind of creepy.

And there was singing of school songs and playing of sentimental photo montages over touching music and much talk in the speeches of school pride and remembering these days for the rest of their lives. I thought of the University commencements that had taken place the week before, and how high school spirit and songs and traditions will for many of these kids be quite soon replaced with those of their colleges, and new friends made and new connections forged. But what occurred to me in a way that never had before was that the day was more for the parents than for the students. They jockeyed for seats, sometimes even devolving into pushing and shouting matches. They crowded the aisles for pictures. Their arms were loaded with balloons and flowers.

So while it wasn't an event that was important to me, my graduation may have meant something to my parents. If it did, then I stole that experience from them. I'm sorry, Mom and Dad.

The Invisible Man

In junior high school and high school, I tried to be an invisible man. With rare exceptions, I kept a low profile in classes; I talked to few students. I knew only a handful of people, and only a handful knew me. For some of those years, I was spending more time with middle-aged drug addicts than I was with members of my graduating class.

Aerie decided to finally hop on the bandwagon this week and join Facebook. As she was setting up her account and looking for people she knows, she scrolled through the list of people from her high school graduating class. She read the names and marveled at the people she hadn't thought of in years: "In know him! I remember her!" So I decided to do the same. I scrolled through the list of my high school graduating class. I only recognized two names. And one of those, I can't remember anything but the name. The picture rings no bells.

So I succeeded. I was the invisible man. Aerie said, "So go back and look through your senior year book." I don't have one. I didn't get one. I didn't go to graduation, either. I was ready for my school days to be over, and I didn't think I'd ever care to remember any of it. And now, I don't.

A Rainy Afternoon

Jolted out of his nap by a combination of rumbling thunder, a rumbling trash truck, and a horrible wracking cough, Thumper called for me. "Daddy!" It was too soon, and he was clearly not ready to be up yet, so we sat together in my chair, with the lights off, listening to the rain and the thunder and the ticking of the clock. We both dozed and woke and dozed again. And I remembered a night some seven years ago, when I babysat a sick Robert McGee. He was, I think, about nine months old. He was feverish and unhappy and didn't want to do anything but sit with me in a rocking chair. The first couple of times he fell asleep, I tried to transfer him to the crib, but he wouldn't stand for it. So we just sat and rocked, his heat baking into me.

I've thought of that evening now and then over the intervening years, and it was in my memory a sort of pietà that represented my desire to be a parent, to be the one that little voice is calling to when he calls out for Daddy. And this afternoon I got to live it again. When he was ready, we shared an apple and some goldfish crackers, and now he's running around the house yelling, "Give it me! My chair!" So the moment is passed. But I loved it while it lingered and made a gloomy, rainy afternoon glow golden for an hour or so. Thanks, Thumper. I love you.

What Did I Expect? That IS What It's For...

Some time ago, I thought, "Facebook? Why the hell not?"

In 1991, I moved from suburban Dallas to Back Bay Boston to attend Emerson College. I lived in the Fensgate dorm. The cool kids got to live in the bizarre and apparently haunted Charlesgate dorm, but alas, I wasn't that cool. Emerson sold both dorms as they dumped their Back Bay properties and centralized their campus downtown. Now Fensgate is the Charlesview, a luxury condo development. Rumor at the time had it that it had been a mental hospital long ago, because there were strange panels in the door that looked like they had at one time been cutouts, supposedly for passing through food to the patients locked inside. Not true. It was a hotel. Maybe that was the Fensgate uncool kids attempt at one-upping the Charlesgate cool kids.

Anyway, what was I talking about again?

Oh, yeah. I had three roommates. The first, a sophomore, moved in a week earlier than the rest of us because he had volunteered for Orientation Week, showing the new students and their parents around. Consequently, he claimed the dorm room's one bedroom for himself, leaving the rest of us to share the common room. He was also extremely active in his fraternity, which was actually a Boston University chapter, so we didn't see that much of him in the room. Within a few weeks of the start of school, the second roommate was asked to take a leave of absence to seek treatment for alcoholism. So, for the most part, the room was shared by the third roommate and me.

We weren't the best of friends, but we got along fairly well. He was a charmer and a ladies man. I latched onto him because I didn't have a lot of friends. He invited me to Seder at Passover, and his parents welcomed me warmly. We lived one floor above Aerie, and once she and I got over hating each other, she, the roommate and I would spend a lot of time hanging out in our room together. He was a relentless flirt, and she enjoyed messing with him, and I liked playing along. Except when he tried to tell her that he could drive her crazy by kissing her neck, and she said something to the effect of "good luck with that," and I had to leave the room when he began to try while she stared off into space looking bored. Weird moment. Didn't realize at the time that it bothered me because I was jealous. We were still months away from being a couple.

So summer approached, and I decided to stay in Boston, though I couldn't afford to continue going to Emerson. The roommate wanted to move out of the dorm and into an apartment, so we agreed to be roommates. We searched for an apartment, but I couldn't afford rents in the Back Bay area, and he refused to compromise and live a little further out, even though we were talking about places right on the T line, only a few minutes ride away. He was spending his parents' money and had no financial motivation to live further out, so he flatly refused to do it. That should've been my first clue that this wasn't going to be a good arrangement. In fact, it should have been the latest in a string of clues, but I wanted to stay and didn't have many other prospects, so I went ahead.

We rented an expensive condo right at Mass. Ave. and Commonwealth Ave. Not a cheap neighborhood. Nope. But so that I could afford it, we got a one-bedroom, and he paid (slightly) more per month and got the bedroom. I lived on a pullout couch in the living room. I had been essentially doing the same in the dorm, so I thought it wasn't that bad of a compromise.

But it became quickly apparent that he didn't really respect it as my "bedroom." I worked overnights, and came home to find his party guests of the night before sleeping everywhere, including my couch.

When Aerie and I had our first kiss, and I told him about it, he told me to be leery of her because she'd wanted to do the same thing with him not long before, but he'd refused. Was it true? No, it was not. Yeah, he was that kind of friend.

As my relationship with Aerie blossomed, we once did a little fooling around while the roommate was out. In the middle of it, we heard his key in the lock. I jumped up and ran toward the door yelling for him to give us just a minute, but of course he wouldn't. He came right in, doing his best to get a look at her in flagrante delicto. He found it hilarious, and he teased me for weeks about coming through the door and seeing me running right at him, naked. Hilarious.

Then, with 4 months left in the lease, he stopped coming home. One of his grandparents had died, and he was spending more time at home, or something like that. I don't remember exactly. He just left. We talked to our landlord about letting Aerie take over the roommate's part of the lease, or to sublet it from the roommate, or something. But the landlord had a perfectly good lease and didn't care to make a change. So the roommate's mother continued to pay his portion of the rent, and I told the roommate we'd pay him back monthly. He told me to just hold on to the money and pay him the total at the end of the lease.

Then after Aerie moved in, the roommate decided he wanted to come back. We were almost through with the lease anyway. He never really moved back, but he did come and go whenever he pleased, and I didn't put it past him to do something to mess with us, so I put my own lock on the bedroom door, and we rode out the awkwardness. And when the time came to pay him, well... I didn't. I kept the money. I still feel guilty about it, a little. Mostly I regret, though, that it was his mother's money I stole and not his.

We ran into him a few years later, walking on the street on New Year's Eve. He wished us the most sarcastic Happy New Year ever, and kept walking, and we never saw him again.

But yesterday I got a Facebook message from him: "Well, well, well. If it isn't Rodius. What's it's been, 15 years? You still with Aerie? How the hell are you? What have you been up to?"

And that's when it hit me: Oh. Facebook. That's why the hell not.

Camp Songs

I was reading In the Woods, and the main character talked about dreaming about kids voices chanting different rhymes, and one of them was:

Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-ho. One is one, and all alone, and evermore shall be so.

And suddenly I was thinking of something I hadn't thought of in twenty years or more.

I'll sing you one ho.
Green grow the rushes, ho,
What is your one ho?
One is one, and all alone,
And evermore shall be so.

And two, two, the lily-white boys, and three, three, the rivals, and four for the Gospel makers, and five for the symbols at your door... And, uh, well, Wikipedia remembers better than I.

I never thought about the meaning much. I wonder what other bastardized religious mnemonics I sang when I was a Boy Scout? What camp songs do you remember? This goes back so far, there must be a million I'm forgetting. Ah, the group participation experience, in the dark, around or across a fire. Good times. Let's see...

Let me see your boogaloo. What's that you say?

Squirrel, squirrel, shake your bushy tail. (Squirrels were brown where I came from. I recall Aerie telling me that when she was singing camp songs, it was "Gray squirrel, gray squirrel..." Freaky ass squirrels in the northeast are gray! You believe that? The first one I saw when I went up there for college, I thought it was just really old...)

The other day, I met a bear, a great big bear, away out there.

Father Abraham had seven sons. Seven sons had Father Abraham.

In a cottage in a wood, little old man at the window stood, saw a rabbit running by, frightened as could be.

Mmm mmm went the little green frog one day, mmm mmm went the little green frog.

And the green grass grew all around, all around. The green grass grew all around.

It skiddly oaten dotin', bo doh skee deeten dahtin, wah dahtin chu.

The Circle of Life II: This Time, It's Personal

In 1974, I had a Fisher Price Joey Lapsitter. I loved him beyond his ability to endure it, and so eventually I got another one. I named him Georgie. I don't believe I recall the original Joey, but I definitely remember Georgie. I carried him around by his hair until it stood straight up on his head.

And now, thanks to the miracle of eBay, 34 years after Joey broke onto the scene, I give you:



"Let the circle be unbroken by and by, Lord, by and by."

The Circle of Life, Reader's Digest Condensed Edition

When Thumper was two months old, we decided we'd take a stroll around the mall to give his Mama some peace and maybe some sleep. That's when we discovered the Simon Kidgits Clubhouse, the mall playground that we frequent now that the boy is mobile. We sat, I fed him a bottle, and we watched the kids play. Several toddlers ran up to him, fascinated. "Baby!" they exclaimed, and they wanted to touch his hair, his face, his hands, but their mothers said, "No, don't touch! Nice baby," and asked me how old, and told me how cute.

Now, Thumper is a year old, and he's one of the toddlers running around the playground. Grandma gave him a couple of baby dolls for his birthday, so we've talked a lot about babies. When a tiny infant appears, he can think of nothing else. He runs up to them and points and looks at me and says, "Beeeeeebee!" And he tries to keep his hands to himself, he does. But then he reaches out, wanting so badly to touch their hair, their faces, their hands. And I say, "No, don't touch! Nice baby," and ask how old, and say how cute.

Ah, Belikin

I'm doing pretty well on my goals this week, except for the drinking. I've met my workout goals, which makes me think I should up the goal to 4 per week. I probably should wait and see how it goes over the next few weeks though, so I don't set myself up for failure. I've watched less TV. I've read more. I'm still working on the negativity and the complaining about other people, though, especially in traffic. If Thumper is paying attention in the back seat, he's going to learn some real doozies of curse words to bust out on the Grandmas some day.

But really, drinking seems to be the toughest one for me. I don't [like to] think of myself as an alcoholic, because I function just fine. I don't miss work. I don't go into rages or beat my wife [because she'd kick my ass]. I get up every morning at 6:30 to take care of the boy. I mean, it has its negative effects on my life, but it's not ruining me. And I sure do like it.

I've been watching Alpha Dog on the treadmill the past couple of mornings, and there's a fifteen-year-old who goes to a party as a kind of guest of honor. Everybody knows him, everybody's his friend. He drinks, he smokes, he loses his virginity to two girls simultaneously after a rousing game of skinnydippin' Marco Polo. I watched it and thought, "That kid's doomed. He's going to spend the rest of his life chasing that moment, going from party to party trying to get it back, and it'll never be the same. But he'll keep on trying."

My first drink was a teaspoon of schnapps that Biggest Brother brought back from a year-long trip to Germany. He was eighteen; I was six. I remember that it was the most horrifying taste I'd ever had in my mouth. I thought that if this is what drinking is, I'm never going to do it. Why would anybody want to pour that toxic acid down his throat?

When I was fourteen, though, I took a two-week trip to Belize with my father and two other Boy Scouts. That trip was an [at the time] under-appreciated experience that really did open up my eyes about a lot of things. I learned that much of the world cares passionately about soccer, and we're the only ones who call it that. I learned that people live in crushing poverty and work back-breaking jobs. I learned that chicken necks in the stew can be a luxury brought out with pride and generosity for guests. I learned that treasures of the past aren't always preserved in museums; they sometimes rot away in the jungle far from the eyes of people. And the ones that are preserved in museums and private collections are sometimes there because they were stolen away illegally, for money. I learned that capitals can have dirt roads and open sewage canals. I learned what a junkie was.

But I also learned that not all nations have a drinking age. My father and I stayed with separate host families, so when the father of the host family asked me at dinner my first night if I'd like a beer, there was no one but me to say no. And I didn't. Belikin Beer was everywhere, and I drank as much of it as I could. And it was a wild time. I recall going to a party with my host brother, a party in a field on the edge of town. The people were so friendly and accepting of me. The music was pounding and joyful and alive. I remember lots of reggae and "Feeling Hot Hot Hot" sung by somebody other than Buster Poindexter. I remember saying no, thanks to the ganja and being afraid that people would laugh at me, but they didn't. I recall being told that I got my companions and I kicked out of a nightclub, though I don't remember that at all. I remember running through streets laughing while someone far behind us yelled and yelled about how he was going to shoot the white boys up with heroin, shoot them up right in their heads.

There were so many things about that trip that we did sober that were the best times of my life: swimming in a blue hole in the jungle, with no one else around; picking burlap sacks full of oranges, then eating them in the back of our broken-down truck, waiting for help and reading Oscar Wilde aloud to each other; hiking to Mayan ruins and watching the Belizean Boy Scouts hack up a huge python with their ubiquitous machetes; playing pool and drinking Coke from glass bottles; watching A Cry in the Dark in Spanish at the movie theater, along with a variety of kung fu movies. But to be honest, it was the drinking that really capped it for me. I felt more outside of myself, more a part of the world. And of course I [thought I] was doing it without my dad knowing, which had its own appeal.

So that was the beginning. I came home that summer and immediately fell in with the younger siblings of Big Brother's cool friends and the party circuit. By fifteen, harder drugs were in the mix, though it took me to seventeen to overcome my mother's warning that, because of the pneumonia I had when I was two, I'd die if I ever smoked. By the time I got to college, drinking was a well-ingrained habit. I used it to decompress during the days that I worked full-time and went to school full-time. I used it for the same purpose through some particularly rough marital troubles in the late '90's. And I can use just about any excuse at all to worry about it next week, or next month. So by the time I got to the point in my life where I don't think I need or want it as much, I'm pretty well-conditioned to do it anyway; there's an excuse.

Thumper woke up with a cold today, and he's way off his usual eating and sleeping schedule; there's an excuse. And if you drink on Wednesday and Thursday, you might as well drink on Friday; there's an excuse. And if you drink on Friday, Saturday's a goner, too. So I guess I'll applaud myself for my successes, not beat myself up too bad for my failings, and just keep trying. Now who wants a drink?

How To Watch Your Father Sleep

Guest blog entry from Mrs. Rodius...

You really don't want to read this. I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. Fitting, since it was recently Father's Day. But, this started several weeks ago.

As I mentioned in my last guest blog, Thumper's been vocalizing more these days and he often talks about "Bob." He bob, bob, bob, bob, bobs so often that The Man and I have decided Bob must be Thumper's imaginary friend, and he often blames Bob for the things that crash! And, Bob is the reason why Thumper does some of the things that he should not...Bob told him to. My dad was Bob, and I lost him a long time ago now. Some say that imaginary friends aren't imaginary at all...that they are some other force or form or spirit. I don't know...the thought has struck me, though.

It makes me sad that Thumper will never know him and that my father will never have the chance to meet the little guy I'm so proud of. He was far from perfect, but he was that dad running like mad away from the sewer he'd just dropped an M-80 down (on the 4th of July) as all of us neighborhood kids cheered on. Boom! Ha ha ha ha ha!

The Man recently resurrected some old writing we'd stored on floppy disk. Floppy disks...yep! I came across this. One of my writing professors used to have us do free writing exercises to start class. She'd give us a topic and we'd just start writing. It was an exercise in free-flow writing. I believe this day must have been "What if..." Excuse how rough it is. I never went back to flesh it out, though that was the idea behind the free-flow writing.

How To Watch Your Father Sleep

What if when you were nine years old your dog died? She'd have been german shepherd and husky and her name would have been Kelly, and she'd have been the first thing in your life to go and die on you. What would you do? You might cry a bit and think about the time when you were out riding your bicycle (and Kelly was outside too because there wasn't a leash law then) and Mikey Powell came up and stood in front of you and wouldn't let you by. You would remember that you had been too scared to do anything when he pushed you off your bike, but Kelly had rescued you. She'd charged at him barking and barking, and you knew she didn't bite, but Mikey had run away, the piss scared out of him.

And what would you do if you found out years later that all day long your mother thought she heard the dog whining on the back porch where your parents had hidden her the morning they found her cold as stone on the kitchen floor? They would have done this so you wouldn't know until after you had come home from school that day. Parents do that kind of thing. If Kelly had been your goldfish, they would have bought you another and secretly switched it with Kelly thinking you wouldn't know the difference, trying to spare you this pain. But a dog would have been much more difficult to switch, so it was the back porch until they could get rid of her.

"I kept thinking I heard her crying on the porch," your mother will tell you one day when you are older as you sit in the kitchen drinking coffee with her and some of her friends. "I kept going out there to check and I'd say 'Kelly?', but it was just my imagination."

You won't be mad or sad when she says this, having long since gotten over it. You will think it's eerie and let the words pass away with the rest of the small talk. It will come back to you though, this thought.

Because when you were twelve, just a few years after Kelly, you would stumble groggily into the kitchen to find your father as gray as modeling clay sitting at the breakfast table. He'd be sweaty and cold and you'd watch, unable to move, as he turned to your mother and said "I think I better go to the hospital."

What would you do if you heard this from a man who refused to take so much as an aspirin when he had a headache? You won't be able to remember a single day when you shivered more, even though it was June. Your mother would come home from the hospital, alone and crying. She would continue to cry as she called all of your relatives to say that Bob had had a heart attack and they don't know if it means surgery or not but that she needed everyone's support and couldn't some of them take one or two of the kids for a while if she needed them to?

You wouldn't know what to do that night or when two months, one more heart attack and by-pass surgery later, he finally came home from the hospital. Your mother might tell you what you have to do. You musn't upset him and you kids musn't fight in front of him and your father won't be allowed to do heavy lifting anymore, so if you're a boy, you must do it for him. You might do it for him anyway, even if you are a girl.

You would have only gone to visit your father once while he was in the hospital because you had gotten so upset that one time that your mother didn't think it was a good idea for you to go again. You wouldn't have been able to say much or even look at your father with all those wires and tubes attached to him and that machine that beeped in time with his heart. Your father would have noticed you staring out the window and would have called you over to him to explain to you what each tube and wire was for and to tell you that he was going to be okay. And you'd have choked trying not to cry because you were ashamed. Ashamed because you're not supposed to upset someone in I.C.U. and because he was the one in need, not you.

Once your father was home from the hospital, you'd begin to notice that you watched him a lot more than you ever used to. He'd be lying on the couch taking a nap after work and you'd stop suddenly, your face tingling and fear cementing all of your joints and you'd stare. You'd stare, but then you would relax and tell yourself yes, he was breathing. You'd get really good at scaring yourself this way. You'd practice different methods of ignoring other sounds, the television, a car passing on the street. It would be a game almost, a kind of art, shutting out all other noises just to hear his breathing. This is how you watch your father sleep.

And years would pass and your father's health would continue to deteriorate and all new complications would develop, too many sicknesses for one man. You would wonder why he refused to quit smoking and why he couldn't seem to stick to the doctor's diet. You wonder how long a death can be carried out. You would think it's strange as you stood outside his bedroom door listening, that he goes to bed earlier than you now. Yes, he was breathing and it was just your imagination. But no matter how many times you tell yourself this, you can never make it stop. You always find yourself straining, holding your own breath to listen for his.

Oh, How Things Might Have Been Different

Speaking of Soul Coughing:

In the summer of 1996, Mrs. Rodius and I went to see Soul Coughing at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade in Boston. We went because it was free, it was a beautiful day to be outside, some friends had invited us, and because we liked that song that was on the radio, that song that if you know any Soul Coughing at all, you know that song.

There were maybe fifty people lounging in the sun on the grass. It was fun. We didn't know the music. Most of it seemed too slow. It didn't really click with me as what I liked in the days when The Chemical Brothers were the coolest thing I'd ever heard.

After the show was over, our friends mentioned that they knew a couple of the guys in the band. They were going to go backstage, hang out with them, and probably smoke a fatty. Mrs. Rodius wasn't into that kind of thing, but I most definitely was. But the friends didn't think it would be cool for them to bring somebody else along. They were sorry. They hoped I'd understand.

Over the next few years, I learned to love Soul Coughing with a deep and abiding passion reserved for only a few bands, like Pink Floyd, Fishbone, and System of a Down. So now I can look back on that day as the day I almost got to hang out with M. Doughty. Of course, he's Mike Doughty now. He's cleaned up, and his music is much more Grey's Anatomy than Ruby Vroom. But oh, how would my life have changed if only I'd been able to smoke out with the man who wrote these immortal words:

Get onto the bus
That's gonna take you back to Beelzebub
Get onto the bus
That's gonna make you stop going rub a dub

Leadership

It is a gulag. A prison camp. I am awakened in the middle of the night. I am interrogated, bright lights in my eyes. Day four of leadership training. I am fourteen. I am a scout. I am in hell.

I lay my head on the table. The Coleman lantern still roars. It blazes just on the other side of my shuttered lids. I can smell it. 2 a.m.? 3? 4? I open my eyes. The clear lines of the wood grain are hallucinatory. It's so bright. The ladybug and the ants trundle on, and I think I am dreaming them. It's too late. It's too early. No one should be awake at this hour.

They say they know I did it. Did what? I was involved, they know. The other scouts have already told them. I might as well confess. To what? I don't know.

Pee. Somebody peed. Somebody ran from camp to camp, peeing on tent flaps. Somebody shit in the fire. They know it was me. Somebody sprayed shaving cream on the camp director's tent, too, and damn well ruined the water proofing. They know that I did it, with a few other boys. The others have already confessed. If I admit it, things will go easier for me.

What the hell kind of camp is this? I just want to sleep. I don't know what they're talking about. There was no pee on my tent. No shit in my fire. Convenient? Coincidence? I guess. The Coleman roars on.

And Mark. Jesus. On the overnight hike. No adults. Part of our leadership training, of course. Leadership. Hiking aimlessly. Smoking grapevine 'cause we heard it gets you high. Just like banana peels, if you cook them right. That's what I heard. I'm so high! Not as high as me, man, I'm all fucked up! Mostly it just makes my lips kind of numb and itchy, but I say it like the rest of them. High! So high! Grab-ass and horseplay. Chris swinging the entrenching tool in the tall grass like a machete in the jungle, blazing a trail, then knock! The sound of a hammer on a coconut.

And Mark goes down. He's out. And there's blood. We carry him. We take turns. Two miles, five. Ten. All night. He's woozy. He's delirious. He fades in and out. His face is black in the moonlight, but the road shines like silver. His shirt is soaked. There's blood in his shoes.

How could they leave us out here like this? It's ridiculous. It's an outrage. We're just kids. He's going to die, I know it. We can't save him. A badge for first aid, my ass. First aid? He needs surgery. He needs transfusions. Stat! There's so much blood out of him, there can't be much more left in him. What did they think was going to happen, sending us out there alone?

Two stitches! Two stitches and he's back, and the very next day. He was practically dead! They should've graduated him at least, no question. Graduated him in absentia, or whatever. Graduated us all. We saved him. No thanks to them, we saved him. Carried him for miles. But two stitches in his head, and they throw him right back in again. It's a gulag. It's a prison camp.

Well they can send me home without my certificate. Man, I don't care. I'm not telling them shit.

The Scent of Now

I'm not the first to notice that the senses are strongly connected to memory. It probably even has a name, and suttonhoo probably knows it. Me, I'm too lazy to look it up.

In my early teens, I visited my brother in the hospital after he was in a traumatic accident. I had to don the paper scrubs and booties, and a mask. Many years later, I bought some paper masks at the hardware store to wear while doing some sanding, and when I put one on, I was immediately transported back to that hospital room.

And it's not just smell. Sounds, too, can transport me back. The generous use of cowbell on Motley Crue's first album still takes me back to my bedroom and the "You Pick the Story" Dungeons and Dragons book that I was reading when I played that audio cassette over and over and over.

So I was thinking today about what the Scent of Now is. There are three. First, the hair and body wash that we got at the baby shower that we're still using for the boy's baths. He only holds that smell for a day or two, but it just smells like him and his fuzzy wittow head.

Second is the laundry detergent we use on his diapers. It smells even more like him because I get a noseful several times a day, every day.

Third is the smell of melted plastic I get every time I use anything that's been in our dishwasher lately. Two or three weeks ago, a black plastic slotted spoon fell to the bottom of the dishwasher and was melted into oblivion on the heating coil. Ever since, though we scrubbed the heating coil clean, removed all trace of the spoon, and have run load after load of dishes since, everything still smells of that melted plastic. I've even got to the point now where it's not even really unpleasant. I raise a glass to my lips, and it's just sort of comforting and familiar.

So I think in twenty years, it will be those smells, two kinds of soap and burnt hard plastic, that will propel me suddenly and forcibly back to these days with Thumper. Ah, memory.

In honor of Franklin and her beloved paper artifacts, here's a letter I wrote a month after beginning dorm life a couple thousand miles away from home. God, I was an idiot. And apparently I would've been happy to schtoop Robyn. And Mac wasn't nearly as cool as I thought he was, though [roommate] probably was. It's strange to look back at who you were and see someone almost completely different, and even weirder to see what's still the same. God, I'm still an idiot...




10-3-91

Mom and Dad,
As you say, I am pretty removed from the “mundane” things like T.V., but sometimes a show becomes a dorm event, like when Doogie Howser lost his virginity. Beverly Hills 90210 is a weekly event as well, though I can’t understand why. Like I keep saying, these performing arts people are a strange lot. The other T.V. show I see with any regularity is Cheers, which appears to be on somewhere, on some channel, 24-hours a day. Other than that, I don’t see much. How are the Cowboys doing? And the Broncos?

Things around here are going really well. [Ex-girlfriend] and I have given up trying to be lovers, and we’re putting our efforts into making a solid friendship now. That has removed a lot of angst and frustration from my life. Tonight I’m going to see my first Red Sox games (Fenway is within walking distance), and tomorrow [roommate] and I are going to the Museum of Fine Arts. He’s really been trying hard to help me understand what it’s like to be black in America, and the resulting conversations have gone well beyond interesting. He’s going to show me an exhibit at the museum that deals with racism in mass media. He also wants me to see one of his favorite places: a Buddhist rock garden that is open at the museum from late spring until mid-October. It is a permanent part of the MFA. I’m gaining more and more respect for [him] every day.

New subject: Boston is a scary town at times. Last night, Robyn (who is a very wonderful person whom I admire greatly) had a fight with (apparently her boyfriend) Mac. So at about 11:30 she decided to go for a walk. Alone. About midnight I went out looking for her and saw her walking down Beacon Street. I asked her if she was all right and if she thought it was a good idea to be out alone so late. She said she was fine, that she could take care of herself, and she made it very clear that she wanted to be alone. So I watched her walk away and then I went back to the dorm. A little after that, Mac went out looking for her, and I started feeling bad for letting her go. So I went out again shortly after Mac. I did not find Robyn, but a little while later I did run into Mac. Two guys had tried to mug him, but he had been able to fend them off through his knowledge of martial arts. He did, however, get cut on the arm by the straight razor one of the muggers had. When I saw Mac and heard his story, I got really scared about Robyn. We walked up and down Beacon, Newbury, and Mass. Ave. looking for her, periodically going back to the dorm to see if she’d gone home. By 1:00, I thought for sure that I’d killed her by watching her walk away earlier. Anyway, by 1:30, she had gone back to the dorm and everyone was fine, except Mac and his cut, which really turned out, after he washed off the blood, to be very minor. But I was so scared, especially when I thought how if it had been me or Robyn who had met the muggers, we might very well have ended up with a cut throat. One has got to be careful in this town.

So that’s the news from around here. Classes are going well, my writing is being well-received by my teachers, I did surprisingly well on my oral performance for the freshman seminar on Monday, and I’ve got my first tests in Western Civ. and French tomorrow.

Love,
Rodius

P.S. How’s the golf game coming, Dad?

Making You Feel More Secure

SO WHAT DO YOU DO? I KILL TIME...

I watch the carousel rolling by
As I sit here inert in my clip-on tie;
Would I rather be part of their mechanical herds
Or waiting and watching and doing crosswords?
Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll find a job that is hard,
But today I'm content as a security guard.

an original poem by yours truly, April 1993.

In 1992 and '93, I was a security guard working overnight shifts in several different office buildings in downtown Boston. If you have an office, or maybe even just a desk, in a building that's "protected" by overnight security guards, your desk has been thoroughly searched for food, booze, and porn. Just thought you should know.

The overnight shift, depending on the building, was usually two guards. Every two hours, one guard would tour the building. We carried around a heavy, leather-bound clock; there were 18 keys located throughout the building. Each key, when inserted into the clock and turned, would make a mark on an ever-advancing roll of paper. The next morning, the supervisor would remove the paper and make sure that the tours were done at the specified times and all locations were marked. It was a thirty- to forty-five-minute tour, every two hours, and the two guards alternated tours. That left a lot of free time all night in a quiet, empty building.

When I started dating the future Mrs. Rodius, we spent night after night talking for hours on the phone while I was at work. She had to get up in the morning to go to school and to work, while I could go home from work in the morning and sleep all day. I don't know how she kept going, but as I believe I've mentioned, she's the world's most capable woman.

But the rest of the time, there were vast stretches of empty night to fill. That's when I started smoking regularly, because if I went outside for a cigarette break every hour on the hour, it broke up the time into manageable chunks. But there was still too much of it, so the other guards and I did what any normal people would do in that situation: we rifled through other people's stuff. I'm not proud of it now, but it was just a part of the culture then. So believe it. Your desk has been searched, and its relative value as a source of ill-gotten booty has been calculated and reported to all the other guards that might work other shifts. If your office has booze with which it schmoozes clients, it's been hit repeatedly, and it's been watered down repeatedly, too, to disguise the lost volume. It's a fact.

One of my buildings had a barber shop on the second floor. What could be better? It had candy. It had a years-deep backlog of Playboy magazines. It had TV's. It had perfect, reclining chairs for sleeping.

The only security guard that I ever knew to get fired was Phil. Phil got fired because he didn't write an incident report. The battery on a floor scrubber exploded, within feet of Phil's desk and within sight of a security camera, injuring two of the janitorial staff. The supervisor was incredulous. Phil didn't think it qualified as an "incident." Phil was wrong.

That company also had a contract with the New England Patriots. I was offered a position on the detail that protected the cheerleaders at each home game. About the only thing you really could do to get kicked off that detail was hit on one of the cheerleaders, but even so, the turnover rate was surprisingly high. It wasn't a complicated job. Mostly we stood around outside the practice bubble waiting while the cheerleaders were inside doing whatever it is that cheerleaders do before a game. Then we would walk to the stadium while the cheerleaders were driven over in vans. During the game, we stood on the field facing the fans and did two things and two things only: catch anything that was thrown at the cheerleaders, and be able to say with certainty which fan threw it. I never, in half a season of home games, had to actually do either one.

But what I did do was stand around in a yellow windbreaker and watch people get drunk. My favorite conversation with one of those drunk fans, back when Dick MacPherson was coach and being a Patriots fan did not mean quite what it does today, went something like this:

"So what are you gonna do?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You gonna, like, tackle me if I run out on the field? I bet I could out-run you."

"No, sir, I won't tackle you."

"Oh. I didn't think so. You don't look that fast. So what good are you?"

"I call over that state trooper and that state trooper, and they tackle you. Then they escort you out of the stadium. Then they charge you with felony trespass."

"Oh... Well, I didn't mean I was going to do it. I was just curious what you'd do."

"I understand, sir."

And thus, the world was made safe for one more day.

In the Beginning

anniemcq emailed me this morning to make sure I understood that she was not offended that I used her sweet, innocent child as the starting point to a story about anonymous sex in public spaces. She also expressed the desire to give my pea-coated, pipe-smoking, bearded nineteen-year-old self a hug. It occurred to me that my nineteen-year-old self could've used a hug, and it was a good thing he connected soon thereafter, despite himself, with the future Mrs. Rodius.

So, even though I should probably be saving up this kind of thing for NaBloPoMo, I thought it was the perfect time to tell the story of "How Mrs. Rodius and I Met and Didn't Murder Each Other."

She lived on the floor below mine in the dorm, which, rumor had it, had once been a mental hospital. There were strange inserts in the doors that I heard used to be removable for shoving trays of food through to the nutjobs. I wished I'd lived in the dorm across the street, which was dark, musty, and mazelike, with low ceilings and uneven floors. It was rumored to be haunted.

My first impression of Mrs. Rodius was that she was definitely out of my league. She was a sophomore, and I was a freshman. She's four months younger than I, but I had spent my first year out of high school taking only a couple of classes at the local community college before following my Brandeis-attending girlfriend to Boston. We maintained a long-distance relationship for a year after high school, but within a month of me moving to Boston, that girlfriend had dumped me. She liked me more when she saw me less.

Mrs. Rodius was confident. She had friends. She walked with authority, thumping her heels through the hallway like she had places to go and people to see. She had a boyfriend who wore a fireman's coat. It was the coolest coat I'd ever seen, much better than my pea coat and felt cap. I was jealous of him in his coat. He also had a job at the college radio station, and you can't get much cooler than that. I later found out, though, that the coat really was his best feature.

I was also in the same French class as Mrs. Rodius. I had two years of French in high school, but Mrs. Rodius had no previous French experience. She had taken Russian instead, a fact that made her even more intimidating. But she was defensive about the fact that she was behind the rest of the class due to her lack of previous experience in French. I was a little cocky because I felt sure my pronunciation was lightyears ahead of the rest of the class, what with my familiarity with Inspector Clouseau and all. Consequently, I thought she was a bitch, and she thought I was an ass.

Our professor was much amused by our interactions in class and decided always to pair us together in classroom exercises. He even took me aside after class one day and asked me to take her under my wing, as it were, and correct her pronunciation at every opportunity, thereby jacking up my ass factor considerably. Our annoyance for each other began to really blossom over the first few months of the semester into a deep and abiding dislike.

Over time, though, our dormroom proximity and my tendency to skip class for no good reason began to bring us together. We came to each other to find out what homework assignments we may have missed. She began to spend more and more time in my room, finding great pleasure in toying with one of my roommates who was, incredibly, an even greater ass than I. We discovered a shared appreciation for Captain Morgan and Diet Coke. She started treating my roommate and I very well at the sandwich shop at which she worked, one of a couple of jobs she held while paying her own way through school. I was impressed by that, because I was attending entirely on my parents' dime, as were most of the student body there. And for the most part, those who had it the easiest were achieving the least.

By the time the school year ended, we'd become good friends. She dumped the boyfriend with the cool coat, whose ass factor was also greater than mine, though perhaps not greater than my roommate's. With the free ride from my parents ending, I couldn't afford to come back to school after the summer, but I moved into an apartment with my roommate, who wanted to stay close since he would be returning. So by the next fall semester, I was working full-time and no longer a part of the college community, though I stayed close to it.

Mrs. Rodius went back to her parents' home for the summer and returned in the fall looking absolutely smoking. She'd worked out all summer, partly out of revenge against the ex-boyfriend, and she looked amazing. I honestly didn't realize that I was attracted to her, though. I wrote SWSIL (Social Worker Sister-in-Law) a letter telling her about my good female friend, and how nothing would ever happen between us because our friendship was too strong.

Five days after I sent that letter, the roommate and I were throwing a party; Mrs. Rodius was working late that night and would miss most of the party, but I invited her to come over after work for a margarita and a massage. I think she believes that this was me being smooth, but honestly, smooth was not in my repetoire. She came over long after the party had petered out. We sat on the couch and talked. Eventually, she asked me, "What would you do if I kissed you?" I think I said something like, "I'd probably kiss you back." And so we did. Now, fifteen years later, there's finally a third attendee at the party. I'm glad he's here, but it's strange no longer being alone on the couch together, after all this time.