365 # 31: Heidi D.

My Mom called yesterday to tell me that your long struggle with cancer had finally come to an end. If there is any kind of cosmic karmic justice at work in this universe we inhabit, you will be reincarnated as a koala bear. Koala bears have few worries beyond hanging out in trees, sleeping, eating, and basically just taking it easy, which sounds like a pretty good life to me. Which is exactly what you deserve.

But enough about your next incarnation, what about the one you just left? I don't know much about your life growing up in Germany, only that you met your husband when he was stationed over there during WWII. The two of you got married and you came back to the States with him...or vice-versa. You left everything behind to be with him and found yourself in Houston Yee-Haw Texas where you raised up two sons and a daughter.

We moved in next door to you sometime in the late 70's or early 80's. I don't remember, I was just a kid. You nicknamed me "Snapper" the first time you laid eyes on me. It sounded like "Schneppa" in your thick German accent. You offered up no explanations for this nickname, and you were the only one who ever called me it, but it stuck for good. I don't think you ever used my real name. And why would you when you could call me a great name like "Snapper?"

It would not at all be an exaggeration to say that you helped raise me. They say it takes a village, a statement that's doubly true when you're talking about single parents, and you were citizen # 1. I floated freely between my own house and yours. When my mom wasn't home, you kept an eye on me to make sure I didn't burn anything down. And because you had never learned how to cook in small quantities, you always had tons of great leftovers hanging around. Come to think of it, it might've been partly your fault that I was a fat kid, but I won't hold it against you.

So yeah, that koala bear thing...I'd say you earned it. Thanks for everything.

365 # 30: Melissa M.

Damn, girl, you had me fooled with a capital FOOL. You seemed like a nice enough...well no, let's be real here, "nice" isn't exactly the right word to describe you. But you were cool towards me, and I found the particular brand of rudeness that you practiced to be pretty amusing most of the time. Between delivering faxes and memorandums en octuplicate we took all too frequent smoke breaks together on the loading dock of the building where we worked as lowly mailroom mugs. You and I may have been the only two who weren't planning on going to law school. I liked hanging out with you, and had I not been in a relationship at the time, I probably would have worked up the nerve to ask you out on one of those date thingies. Thank GOD that didn't happen because when you put in your two weeks at the law firm, it was because you'd gotten a job working for the campaign of none other George W. Motherfucking Bush. I was shocked! I didn't even believe you when you told me where you were going, and was certain that you were carrying on some kind of long-running gag until I saw the bumper sticker on your car. Talk about having your image of someone totally flipped on its ass. Sometimes when I think of the shit that's happened to this country over the last eight years, I blame it all on you, rational or not. I hope you're happy.

Further Dispatches From The Holmesfront

Between all the rememberating that's been going on here on this little blog, there's also been a wee bit going on around here in real life, and some of it might even be worth recording for my posterity's posterity to look back on and think, "Damn, Grampa T wasn't always an incoherent ass-grabber." So let me drop a few bullet points.

- Crawlariffic - this kid'll be mobile soon. He sees his big bro on the go, and he wants to join in the fun. Once that happens, I get to join the ranks of y'all who already get to enjoy chasing multiple kiddos around. It should make trips to places like Target that much more life-affirming.

Oh, and let's not forget the sitting up:

So much better than the spitting up:

- Agree to disagree - so I knew kids could be disagreeable little beast dwarves at times. What I was not prepared for, however, was my child's ability to completely ignore any and all facets of this thing called reality, even when they are sitting right there in front of him, politely introducing themselves. "Hi there, I don't believe we've met. We're Facts. And you are?" Here are a few things Henry has argued with me about in the past few weeks:

• Whether or not I am hungry...not him, but me.
• Whether or not the dog is hungry.
• Whether or not Simon is hungry/sleepy/upset.
• Whether or not I'm driving the right way to Grandma's (I was, thank you very much).
• Whether or not dinner is on the table.
• Which shoes I wanted to wear.
• Whether or not Yoda is a Jedi Master - I found this one particularly upsetting, so much so that I actually allowed myself to get pulled into the discussion. Always a mistake.

Not that his "arguments" are all that thought-out. They're typically just emphatic declarations that the opposite of what I said is actually the truth.

- I am beautiful in the mornings:

This is not so much news, but more of a reminder. Don't front, you know you'd love to peer over your morning coffee at this vision of manly loveliness.

- I am the best husband on my block - So we bought one of those little kiddo crawly tubes from Ikea so that Henry could have something to crawl through other than the underside of our deck. I stepped out of the shower one lovely weekend morning to hear my wife calling for help. I walked downstairs and found this:

I hummed "Mack the Knife" to myself as I strolled to the office to fetch the camera, grabbed it with a flourish, then danced back to the playroom to snap a few pictures. The awareness that I was creating photographic evidence of her predicament served as sufficient motivator for The Ash to work her way out of the child-sized tube, so you see, I was actually just helping her out. And creating blog fodder. It should be noted also that I asked her if it was okay to blog about this, and got the yeah-totally-for-sure on the condition that I point out that she was NOT stuck because she's fat, because she's not fat. No, she was stuck because the tube is made for a child...so my wife isn't fat, she just doesn't think things through sometimes.

- Aesop Rock - Hip-hop show buddy and I headed out for another night of hipping and hopping, this time with the mighty Aesop Rock.

It's funny, I live in a city full of music, but on the rare occasion that I take a night out, this seems to be the music I'm interested in seeing lately. I may be on course for a bit of genre burnout, but no biggie.

- And one last thing - See this face? It's gonna rule the world.

365 # 29: Oanh L.

There were four of us in our group. I know we met because we were all theater majors, but I'll be damned if I can recall what it was that actually brought us together to form our little quad. I know there's a stereotype of the typical theater student, and I would certainly never
claim that embodiments of this stereotype don't exist, but the four of us were all so remarkably different from one another. Hell, maybe it was all that difference that made the difference. Whatever it was, it seemed like the four of us hung out all the time for a year or two there.

But enough about the group, what about you? For starters, you were big on keeping people fed. I recall more than one occasion where you had us over at your place to chow down on homemade Vietnamese food. Seeing as how we were in college, this was some of the best eating we did during those days...or at least it was for me.

And I'm rather certain that those trips that the four of us took to Mexico and Florida would not have happened without the aid of your mad organizational skills. You didn't even get upset when the rest of us decided that we wanted to deviate from your carefully crafted itinerary in favor of following the moment. Which was very cool, since in the movies, the bookish organizational character usually gets mad when their plans are thwarted by the non-planning slackerish characters in the group.

And I must say, I don't know whose idea it was originally to throw me that very late surprise birthday party in May (mine's in January), but it seems like the kind of thing you would dream up. So thanks!

365 # 28: Hunter

In the six summers that I spent as a camp counselor, I taught a whole lot of kids a whole lot of outdoorsy know-how. But for some reason, you're the only one whose name I can remember. It was your first year at camp and you were as homesick a child as ever I saw. You had begged your mom not to make you come, so she had struck a compromise with you whereby if you were not having fun by midweek, she would come get you and bring you home. To hear you tell it, she had sliced open her hand with a dagger forged from ancient steel and had sworn this oath on her own blood under peril of hellfire.

You were my shadow those first few days, your very first extended stay away from your mom. You tugged constantly at my shirt sleeve, repeating the same question over and over in a desperate plea for the reasurrance you had decided I had the power to bestow on you.

"You think my mom's gonna come? You think my mom's gonna come?"

And about every fifth time, you followed that up with a vehement, "She promised!"

Man, I didn't know what to tell you. I wasn't about to say yes, because for all I knew, your mom might decide to unplug the phone come midweek. All I knew to do was to try to do my part to make sure you did have fun. After all, that's what the Boy Scouts were paying me all that fat cash for.

Lucky for your mom and my stretched-out shirt sleeves, you did finally, grudgingly start having something akin to fun. Your mom's gamble paid off. I was glad as all get out to see it.

365 # 27: Tina D.

You were literally the girl next door, about 7 or 8 years my senior. One weekend, I was at some Cub Scout function, and my mom had asked you to come pick me up and bring me home. I had on the uniform and everything. You showed up in your dad's beat-up old truck clad in nothing but a white bikini. Ah, memories.

"Get in!"

You smoked cigarettes and shrieked curse words at the whole awful world all the way home. My little Cub Scout heart wasn't sure what to do with the toxic combination of abject horror and puppy love that flooded its chambers.

365 # 26: Greg G.

You and I both played ridiculous Roman soldiers when we were in "Romulus" together, I as the lowly private and you as the general. You made us all giggle backstage whenever you pronounced your line "As minister of war..." as "ASS MINISTER..." Your temper burst out a time or four at rehearsals, but they never seemed particularly ego-based like the typical actor tantrum. I think you got on most of the cast's nerves, but I liked the bit of chaos that you occasionally introduced.

You signed up to be one of the directors in our 24 hour theater project, an undertaking that had basically zero budget, a ton of logistical challenges, and a reasonably good chance of going down in flames. One of the funniest, absurdest, and theater-iest moments of the night was when you yourself let loose with your falsetto version of "Carmina Burana" to accompany a slow-motion fight scene you had spent the day painstakingly choreographing. Nicely done, sir.