Things To Remember

That morning when I was cooking bacon and I heard little footsteps racing to the kitchen followed by Simon yelling "I smell bacon!"

My kids' cute little voices. 

The way Simon asks to listen to "Jam" and he means "Millionaire" by Queens Of The Stone Age. Also, the day I introduced them to "Iron Man" and how Simon demanded to hear it a dozen times throughout the day. 

The time Henry was all pissed off about doing his science homework until he started measuring things on the scale and got all into it. 

The way Simon used to ask "What's his naaaaame?"

How the boys like to wrap themselves around my legs and make me walk them around the house. 

How the boys like to wrap themselves around one of my arms and let me lift them up. 

The way I'm able to make them both fall over laughing by pretending to be a dumb monster who's just stumbled across a lightsaber. 

That Simon likes to sleep in a tent in his room. 

Henry putting his arm around Simon and saying "we're little brothers!"

The time Simon shouted "I'm a princess!" and meant it. 

Listening to Henry would rap along with "Egg Man" on the way to school during his kindergarten year. 

Taking a walk with Simon and the treasures he found - a stick and a feather. 

Taking the boys out of bed to go to the bathroom and the way they'll talk in their sleep. Or fart. 

The way Henry asks to go to the donut store for breakfast by just saying in a deep voice "DOOOONNNUUUUUT."

Hearing Simon downstairs, singing to himself while he plays.

The way Henry ducks down in front of me, then leapfrogs up into my arms.

The time Henry went jogging with me, smiling the whole way, and how he said "I didn't think I could run that far" when we made it back to the house. 

The Ideas of Forgotten Meaning: A Writing Challenge

So you remember how I told you a while back about how I'm writing a book?

“Oh my GAWD, Holmes, is this the post where you tearfully admit that you’ve given up on your novel and then offer up a series of lame excuses for your lameness?”

Hell naw. The book’s still bumping along, slower’n I’d like, but steady, punctuated by just a few creative freak-outs, a few moments of lost perspective, of feeling like I’ve trapped myself in a maze from which there is no escape. But it’s going, and for the most part I’m finding it...not enjoyable, exactly. Let’s go with rewarding. In summary, It Will Happen.

But this post isn’t about the novel. This is about competing creative interests that emerge while in the midst of such a long-term project. And in the end, it’s a challenge for any of you who care to take it.

You see, just because I’ve got my creative energies focused on one thing doesn’t mean that the ideas stop coming. If anything, they come faster and in greater number. Where once I might find just a few mushrooms rising up out of the soil, I now find a whole freaking village of them bursting from the earth’s surface.

Of course, they don’t all taste so great, no matter how you saute ‘em. Most of them wither and die and fall right out of memory. But some capture my notice so well that I actually pluck them up and place them in my basket to be put to use later. That is, I write them down in a list. Ideas for later.

One such idea occurred to me the other day, so I pulled up the list and added it. I realized that it had been a while since I’d read through my past ideas, so I took a few minutes to scroll through it, and I found...

“What the ffff...?”

Most of the items in the list contained enough description to make sense. In some cases, I’d even added some notes to remind my future self what past self had meant. But there were a few where I had absolutely no idea what I was thinking. Was I drunk at the time? Sleepwriting? No idea. But just because their original meaning is lost, it doesn’t mean they’re useless.

So this is the challenge part of the post. I’m going to list several of these ideas below. The challenge is to pick one or two, or hell, pick all of them, whatever you like. Take it and run with it. Write something with it. A story, a poem, a script, a comic, a Grammy-winning country song, the next club hit. When it’s done, put it out there somewhere. And if you happen to think about it, hit me with a link to it in the comments section so I can go check it out.

And now, what you’ve all been waiting for: The Ideas of Forgotten Meaning:

1. Beer: put a crazy straw in it.
2. Strawberry: you wouldn't eat a head.
3. The view out the window during some afternoon doggy-style.
4. The Fat Fuck and his sidekick Stab Face.

Youston

Memory’s tricky, you know? Even with only thirty-five years behind me, there are things in there that are plenty hazy. Half-remembered. Uncertain of their position in The Timeline, which often seems like a garden hose that’s been drug all over the yard until it’s not at all straight or linear, but instead full of loops and kinks and aw shit it’s caught on something. Sometimes I even think tiny shards of fiction have gotten themselves worked in there, like Memory and Imagination have been leaving stuff at each other’s houses. There’s the Truth of the Matter, the What Happened, and then there’s the Memory of the thing. I guess that’s why we point cameras at stuff. Why we write things down.

I don’t trust you, Memory. But like anybody else, I cling to you.

We were coming back from a place we’d been for a few days, a place that is not our home, a place with an ocean, or if you want to get all technical about it, a great big-ole Gulf. It belongs to Mexico, but they let us use it. It was Mother’s Day when we were coming back from this place, and the path from it to our home goes right through the place where my mother lives. So we made a plan for a little visit on the way back.

“Can you look at googlemaps and figure out how to get there from 45?” my wife asked.
“I can get us there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh, yeah.”

So Memory’s not all bad. Driving directions. Not so awful at those. Not yet anyway.

On the way in, we pass through the city’s core, a mass of serious towers wrapped up in ribbons of highway that bring people in from all corners to put in their hours and take home their cut. I point it out to the boys, and in their impressed silence, I can hear the gears turning, the comparisons being made to the downtown of our home city, the only other one they’ve ever seen which, by comparison, is quite meager. In this moment, I suspect, it’s occurring to them just how big things can be.

I spot the building where my mom worked for so many years. At least I think that’s it, the mid-sized white one with the insets of windows creating a stair-step effect up the side. Some architect’s contribution. When my mom worked on weekends, she would take me along with her, me with my bag of toys and, later, homework, her with her bags of...stuff. Thirty-plus floors up, there was a great view, machines that would give me all the soda I could drink, and plenty of desks to sit behind.

There’s something tugging at me as we pass through the core, then beyond it through the tangle of intersecting highways and on into the the northern half of the city. I can’t put a finger or any other body parts on it. The car’s speakers are churning out songs by a band that sounds, to my ears, like they have something to say about what it is to be a person from a place. Some of the band’s members are from this city - one of its many suburbs anyway. I know this, but I can’t help but feel that even if I didn’t, their notes and words would still be perfect accompaniment to this inexplicable churn I feel going on inside. There is no particular memory I can bring to the fore, no specific image, no other bit of sensory remembrance I can grab a hold of, but for a few seconds, I feel like I’m going to burst into tears, an urge I push back because I have zero explanation for it, and bursting into tears isn’t like sneezing or cracking your knuckles where you can just do it and then not explain.

“It’s like everything’s been relabelled,” I say at some point. I’m not sure I’m explaining it right, but my wife gets it anyway. She usually does.

The place where my mom lives is the place where I grew up. The same house in the same neighborhood - a word that some shorten to its last syllable when applying it to this area - on the city’s edge, but outside of it in name only, the kind of edge that seems to extend forever. Saturn’s fattest ring, visible from thousands of miles up.

“That’s the street where Bryan and Wade lived. Wade played guitar, too. We hung out. That’s Robert’s street. He was into Morrissey, did the whole Mexican pompadour thing.”

The main through street is a narrow two lanes lined by ditches so deep they seem to have their own gravitational pull. I saw plenty of vehicles go grill-first into those ditches over the years, plenty of tow-trucks called out to give them a lift. I once ran my truck into a cow to avoid running it into one of those ditches. The cow was fine.

“That’s the trailer park where my friend Craig lived.”

This small patch of land is an odd conglomeration of urban, rural, residential, and industrial whose oddness didn’t occur to me until I was outside of it. But that’s the way, isn’t it? You live in your box and the box is The Way Things Are until one day you poke your head outside of your box and realize that not all boxes are like your box. Some of them aren’t boxes at all.

We arrive at the place that used to be My House, but is now My Mom’s House. I don’t remember exactly when this transition took place, but I suspect it was gradual. We’ve spent the last two days going between a beach and a tent, so my wife and I want to shower, but the boys want to see these old Star Wars toys of mine that they’ve heard so much about. My Mom locates the box among her storage, catching a wasp sting for her troubles. We open the box and show the boys a few pieces of their old man’s past. Various action figures. A snow speeder. A T.I.E. fighter. A blaster, which is always good to have at your side. And the crown jewel, the Millennium Falcon, which is faster than she looks. This will all be theirs one day soon, but not today.

“I thought you had a lightsaber, Daddy.”
“I did, but it got pretty beat up in all those lightsaber battles.” It’s the truth. It’s something I remember.

The visit and lunch and everything are wonderful. I usually send flowers or something, so us being here, children in tow, is an extra treat.

The route out of town carries us through more of the sprawl. Memory flares up here and there, at this corner or that, but offers nothing really solid. It’s all just vague familiarity. Maybe something happened over there one time. Maybe we went there back when it used to be. Is that the street where...? Or maybe not. It’s all different, it’s all the same. It looks like everywhere else. My wife uses a term she read in article somewhere, “secondhand suburbs.” It’s perfect.

The tears have gone back down into their ducts to wait until they are needed again. But I still wonder what it was that called them up in this instance. There’s nothing at all remarkable about these stretches of city, but they were pieces of my everyday back in a life that seems forever ago, though really it’s been less than two decades. The blink of an eye. Not even that much. The start of the eyelid’s downward sweep, the lashes still pointed upwards, not having received word yet that a blink is in progress. Maybe my Memory is mourning the stuff I’ve already forgotten.

After we get home and the car is unloaded, I upload the pictures on my camera from the trip we’ve just finished. Most of them are of my boys on the beach, headed into or out of the water lapping up on the sand. Their joy is clear and unbridled. I stood in the water with them, the camera around my neck, and captured a few moments of it. Years from now, I’ll look at these pictures and smile as tears fall down my face, and I suspect that the question of why won’t even occur to me.

Just a string tied around my finger

Don't misunderstand, if you read this post and enjoy it, that is totally cool with me. But be forewarned, I'm writing this post more for me than anything. And I guess for my wife. See, one of the things I thought would be great about the daddy side of this blog would be to keep a written record of all the stuff my kids are doing in there here and now that I want to be able to recall when I'm old, gray, and bitter. But it occurred to me recently that there's tons of that kind of stuff that I've posted not a lick of. It's mostly just little things, little quirks of behavior, funny utterances, interesting childhood habits, and so forth. And as much as I'd like to work each of these into the telling of a larger story, I don't see that happening anytime soon. And so, in an attempt to plug up ye olde memory hole just a wee bit, here's a nice little bullet list of some of the latest and greatest hits from the world of my kids...mostly the older one, that is, since the younger one just got born like, the other day.

"Hold you." - this is what Henry says when he wants to be picked up. I have no power to resist it.

Bossiness - If he doesn't like something we're doing or saying, we hear about it in the form of "Don't do/say that Daddy/Mama!" Ash was the brilliant one that figured out that if we just keep doing it, but in a silly fashion, his mood turns much brighter. At times, his bossiness takes the form of telling us what we want, as in, "Daddy wants to sit on the butt."

Love baby bro - all of our worries about Henry rejecting his baby brother came to nothing. Henry likes to point at Simon and shout "it's baby bro!" and then kiss him on the head. The other day he even sat down next to him and "read" his animal book to him.

Protective - by that same token, Henry's starting to be kind of protective of Simon. When Ash drops me off at work in the morning and I kiss the boys goodbye, Henry tells me "don't take baby bro, Daddy."

"1, 2, 3, 5..." - Henry has started counting. He gets all the way up to 10, but he always always skips 4.

Neighbor dog - our neighbor has two very sweet dogs that like to come to the fence to say hello. If they're not there, Henry walks up to the fence and calls "Neighbor dog, where are you?"

My nuts - one day not long ago, Henry was walking towards me with a tennis ball, his arm cocked back ready to throw it. By instinct, I covered my crotch and said, "my nuts!" Henry walked around for the next hour repeating "my nuts...my nuts....my nuts."

Chalkboard - one of Henry's Christmas presents was a chalkboard. He's taken to asking me to write people's names on it. I guess he just likes the way the letters look. He'll point to where I've written M A M A and say, "that's Mama" as affectionately as if he were looking at a picture of her. He's not actually reading, of course. I guess he's just figured out what the names look like.

Ocupado - the kids likes privacy when he poops. He goes into his room and asks you to leave if you come in. If you ask if he's pooping, he'll say yes. When he comes out and you ask if he's pooped, he tells you "Don't check it." Except there's no need to take a visual because everybody's shit stinks.

Musical tastes - Henry has no problem requesting the music he wants to hear. "Island", "Middle", "Up and Down", "Reee", "Clappa Hands", and plenty of others are all shorthand for his favorite jams.

"I forgot something" - this is Henry's code for "chase me, catch me, and tickle me."

There now. That oughtta be fun to read in another 30 years.

Memories are made out of now

It's really funny to be writing down the grocery list that your wife has emailed you and suddenly realize that in your head, you've been saying each item the way your toddler says it.

milk....mano!

honey....hahnee!

syrup....surp!

blueberries...blues!

beans...um, beans!

All these little things, the way he talks, his little quirks...

The way he points at an airplane as it flies over and yells his word for plane, "beam!", and then waves to it after it's flown off.

The way he walks backwards and says "beep, beep, beep!"

How when we drop him off at his grandparents, he lets us know in no uncertain terms that he'd like us to leave by forcefully yelling "bye-bye!" over and over. Does the same thing when he's pooping and wants privacy.

The way he'll sit on the sidewalk and push the little bumps in the cement like they're buttons.

The way he lets me know that he'd rather not hold hands by putting both of his arms straight out behind him, as if he's going to take flight.

The way he yells hi to strangers.

They bring us so much delight every day. I almost can't stand it sometimes, and I never want to forget a bit of it.