Looky, Daddy!

Role Playing

It wasn't a satanic thing. I mean, maybe it was for some, but nobody I knew that played Dungeons and Dragons was even remotely interested in worshiping Satan. We left Satan and all his deeds to the kids with the big hair and the chains and the black clothes, but they didn't really want him either. They wanted Robert Smith. They were just born a few years too early to know it.

It was really just for the porn. Outside of a dog-eared, all but illegible copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, there was no book I read and re-read more than Gary Gygax's Monster Manual, the first hardcover book for what was to be known as "Advanced" D&D, and by "Advanced," I'm pretty sure they meant, "Now with boobies!"

Although the manual gave a frequency of "rare" for succubi, they still kept showing up in almost every game of Dungeons and Dragons I played from age 10 onward. And don't think they were held to the "number appearing: 1" rule, either.

Rest in peace, Gary Gygax. 1938-2008.

The Goodest Friday Ever

Camilo turned eight years old yesterday and he still won't marry Kathryn, so he invited her over for a slumber party instead, a strategy that may work for him now but will get him called all kinds of unpleasant names if he tries it senior year of college. It was Kathryn's first night away from home since we learned of her epilepsy. Normally her mom and I would have gone back and forth for weeks over this kind of thing, so this time I just didn't tell her. And she didn't notice either, so we're golden.

Before Kathryn left, she asked me to water her Jesus seeds.

Exactly ten years ago today, I said "I do" to the daughter of an Oklahoman accountant. Like most such arrangements, it didn't happen without some compromises. For her part, my future wife agreed to never make us move to New Jersey, and I, in turn, promised I wouldn't interfere if she raised our future kids Catholic. So far I'm doing better on my promise than she did, but not by a whole lot.

Sharon knew this would be hard for me, and as such, she set the bar I had to clear at its lowest setting. "You don't have to go to mass with us," she told me at the negotiation table over a decade ago, her god filling up three chairs on her side of the table, me listening on the other side, alone but for the small bottle of whiskey I had set on the table mainly to piss them off before I remembered they were Catholic, "but you can't try to entice the kids to stay home and become godless like you, either." She looked at me. "Like, as we're walking out the door in our Sunday finest, you can't call out 'Bye, guys! I'll just be here eating ice cream until you get back!'."

I would like to say now that I thought long and hard about what it meant to raise kids in a given religion, because for me, organized religion comes in somewhere between NASCAR and Kate Hudson movies in the list of things without which this world would be better off. But really all I was thinking was that if I said yes, then this woman across the table would marry me and so yes it was. Yes, yes, yes. A thousand times yes.

So now in my own house, I am outnumbered by Catholics, four to one. And I'm the one watering the Jesus seeds.

Two weeks ago, Kathryn came home from church with a cup full of soil. Inside were seeds. It was her job to care for these seeds the same way Jesus cares for her, she told me earnestly. And if that's true, then maybe she should start staying home and eating ice cream with me on Sundays, because unless Jesus' dad has nothing better to do than remind Jesus about his commitments, Kathryn's up the creek on this one.

Jumpy, the Shark Fairy

Even the closed bathroom door could not dampen the exuberance of the voice inside.

"Daddy! Reading on the potty is awesome!"

Like this was an idea on which I'd been trying to sell her for weeks.

Kathryn and toilets have a complicated relationship. Kathryn will never, truly never, sit on a toilet without being told to. She will dance, jog, hop from foot to foot, and squeeze her crotch together with one hand so tightly you'd think her fingers would touch through where her girly bits ought to be before voluntarily sitting her butt down and peeing. But then, when she finally does give in, she will easily spend half an hour or more, sitting there on the john, her business long since finished, just swinging her legs to and fro as they slowly grow cold and numb, doing nothing but consorting with the butterflies in her head.

Until now. Now she reads. She reads fairy books, with titles such as, and I'm not making these up, Jasmine the Present Fairy, Lucy the Diamond Fairy, Polly the Party Fun Fairy, and my personal favorite, Georgia the Guinea Pig Fairy. Kathryn eats these books like candy. Candy for the toilet. Most days now, when I call her down for dinner, she emerges from our one working bathroom, flat on her belly, books gripped in her teeth, and propels herself to the stairs on her elbows because her legs fell asleep somewhere between Katie and Bella, the fairies for cats and bunnies, respectively. And in those moments I am truly the happiest dad in New Jersey.

As the daughter of a writer and an editor, Kathryn resisted reading with the same gusto that a daughter of a preacher resists her virginity. For years, she refused to read anything that didn't have three letters and was "cat," and the idea that she would voluntarily pick up a book to seemed about as remote as her voluntarily picking up a car. Or her dirty clothes. But in the course of one weekend, a weekend that culminated in visiting every library and bookstore in the area for more and more fairy books, (there are dozens of these books and they must--oh yes they must--be read in order, because god knows what chaos would be unleashed if you read the tale of Willow the Wednesday Fairy before Tara the Tuesday Fairy, and I'm still not making these up) Kathryn has finally crossed the border into literacy.

And her butt has the oval indention to prove it.

This Is a Post About My Dad

This is a post about my dad.

This is a post about my dad, about how he was elected coolest dad of my third grade class when he let us choose the name of a road he had built. And then how he was banned for life come fifth grade when he came to show us slides of Germany. Wearing lederhosen.

Its a post about how he taught me how to make my own cocktail sauce and how he gave me an appreciation of the raw oysters to dip in it.

It is a post about how he took my brother and me to see this new movie he heard about called Star Wars and then had to indulge our lifelong fascination with it. It is also about how, two years later, he took us to see Alien and then indulged me sleeping at the foot of his bed for the next seventeen months.

It is about how he left a job as an insurance salesman and built a house out in the country to sell, and when it did, he built a second one. And when that one didn't, we moved out to the country. It's about how he now speaks all over the country at ceremonies honoring him for building Green homes. It's about how I once sat in the audience at one of these events and listened to him describe the innovative  techniques he started using back in the 1970s and how I spent the rest of the presentation wondering how he had been so smart back then and how he had so cleverly hidden it from me.

It is a post about how I used to find him awake late at night watching Monty Python reruns on PBS.

It is about how he will always play pool just a little bit better than me.

It is a post about how he knows everyone in my hometown and can't go anywhere without stopping to visit. It is about how once, when I was sixteen, he started talking with a friend at our local barbecue joint and then made me feel like the biggest man in the world when he turned and handed me the keys to his car and told me I could head on home if I wanted to. And it is about how he didn't kill me when I wrecked the car before I had even left the parking lot.

It is about how he will turn down clients who want him to build big, wasteful homes, but is secretly wants someone to ask him to build a house out of compressed blocks of earth.

It is about how he can sleep through anything except the gentle clink of an ice cream spoon against a china bowl.

This is a post about my dad and how today is his birthday.

This is a post about my dad and how I am proud to be his son.

This is a post about my dad.

 

Tomorrow She Will Master Water-Bending

Yesterday afternoon at pre-school, Victoria burst into flames. Which seemed odd. Today she and her twin are home, heating the TV room with their fevers and asking for hot chocolate with big marshmallows, hold the hot chocolate if you please. The impact of two sick three-year-olds to my day hasn't been that major and I've actually been able to accomplish much that I had intended today, if only you replace "work on the basement" with "self-medicate."

Still, the basement is coming along quite well, despite the fact for almost two months this house hasn't seen 48 consecutive hours without a thermometer going in someone's orifice and coming out with three digits of fun. The walls are up and the floor is stained, and all that is left is for me fill the spaces with hundreds of dollars of stylishly crappy furniture from Ikea, transforming this:

into this:

I took about 30 pictures of the acid-stained floor because 1) I am fairly proud of it and 2) soon I'll never see it again:

You can also see, right next to the imaginary bookshelf, the cat door leading to the furnace room, which is where we keep the litter boxes. It is also, coincidentally, the only room in the house the furnace effectively heats, effusing the entire basement with the gentle hint of warm poop like some kind of Glade plug-in from Hell.

Of course, we'd get the same effect if we heated behind the upstairs couch.

Conversation with a Stranger at Burger King

She had three boys playing on the playscape. I was there with my three girls. They were the only kids there. The noise was deafening.

She turned to me. "I wish I had one of these things at home, like, in a separate room. A room I could seal off."

"So they would suffocate?"

"So I couldn't hear them."

"Oh."

Silence.

"You're in a dark place, aren't you?"