Looky, Daddy!

Wedding Lemonade

Summer posts will be scarce. There's not much to be said about that. Last year I bravely promised a drink recipe a week just to keep you coming back, and I managed a whole five of those before summer drowned me in grass clippings and sunscreen. Let's see if I do better this time.

Wedding Lemonade.

I only tasted it once. It seared a memory into my 8-year-old brain even as it seared away the lining of my 8-year-old esophagus.  For years to come, it reduced me to a kind of lemonade paranoia, asking with what must have been maddening constancy whether the pitcher of lemonade I saw in the fridge was "regular" or "wedding." Because to pour a glass of one thinking it was the other? Well, you know that startling feeling you get when you think you're sipping water but it turns out to be Sprite? This was thinking you're sipping lemonade and it turning out to be a mugging.

Lemonade and tequila. That's all it was. The lemonade was probably Countrytime because this was the late-seventies and recreational powders were just coming into style, but the tequila was definitely Two Fingers. I remember that name because my dad used to joke that the label read "two fingers" but it drank like a fist. As for the proportions, figure out just how much tequila you need to add to lemonade to cause blindness and stop just short of that.

My parents invented the drink at my aunt's wedding, and from that it got its name, but it hardly required another wedding for them to mix a pitcher of it again. In fact, I'm not sure if my parents ever attended another wedding after my aunt's. Make of that what you will.

My best friend from high school got married last week. It was a beautiful ceremony: Elegant and refined. They did not serve wedding lemonade. Throughout the ceremony, the groom, my friend Steven, grinned so incessantly I worried that when the time came to recite his vows, his jaw would simply unhinge and fall to the floor.

I do not want to co-opt their day for my own political and social agenda, except to ask them to treasure their marriage. Celebrate it. Honor it. Revel in it. Have an affair with it. Get drunk on it. Call it two-fingered but drink it like a fist. Because maybe if those of us who can marry did a better job of being married, there would be fewer people around who felt like marriage was something that needed defending.

Good Influence

I wasn’t yet asleep when my dad came into my room and asked for my help. If he did this now, it wouldn’t be that surprising—a man in his sixties has a multitude of uses for a man in his thirties, even at just before midnight—but I was still in high school and I had no idea what could bring my dad to my room asking for help in the middle of the night. When he told me to get dressed and meet him in the driveway, I understood even less.

“And wear something dark,” he added as he walked out, leaving my bedroom door open.

During my youth, my father owned a number of cars, most of them earth-toned Volkswagon buses, and the one we owned at the time of this story was dark, nutty brown with lighter brown stripes going down the side. I’m guessing the stripes were put on as an afterthought once the Volkswagon dealer realized that even those who were inclined to purchase late-model VW buses might themselves balk at one that looked like a great boxy turd. It was in this bus two years earlier that I had demostrated to my dad my startling fluency in involuntary English expletives when one afternoon he undertook to teach me to how drive stick. It turns out an old VW bus is not a very good vehicle for learning to handle a standard transmission, but it is an excellent venue for finding out your sixteen-year-old son can work the word “cunting” into a sentence. I expected to find my dad in the driveway next to the brown bus, but that’s not where he was. He was sitting in the cab of our pickup truck.

When you live out in the countryside of Texas, owning a pickup truck is inevitable. Ours was used sparingly, mainly for trips to the lumberyard or to haul junk to the junkyard. It was never used just before midnight on a hot summer evening.

“Get in.”

As we drove down the country roads between our house and our destination, my dad told me what we were doing. There was a plot of land he wanted to buy, he said, one he had had his eye on for a long time, waiting for the owner to put it on the market. Earlier that day, he said, the owner had finally done so, announcing the offer with a massive sign right in the middle of the land.

“It’s important that you understand,” my dad told me as we drove, “that I am going to buy the land. I’m going to buy all of it and I’m going to pay the amount that the seller is asking.” He looked over at me to see if I was following him, his bearded face lit in the glow of the truck’s dashboard. “You need to know that before we do what we are going to do.”

“And what are we going to do?” I asked.

“We’re going to knock down that sign with this pickup truck.”

********

The first hit was pitifully feeble. Neither my dad nor I knew how fast one should drive when one is ramming a billboard. The sign was huge, rooted into the ground by two round wooden posts. My dad had hoped we could drive the truck up to the sign and then push it over slowly, but the posts were dug too deeply into the ground for that, so we went with Plan 2. Which was ramming.

The truck headlights were off. My dad was driving. I was standing in the field, offering what guidance I could. We were both giggling like schoolgirls.

I do not know at what point our mission made the jump from sober undertaking to Jackass, probably about the time we both threw ourselves to the ground to avoid being seen by a passing car despite leaving the pickup truck running with its front end pressed against the base of the sign, but by the time we were backing up even further distances to build up even more speed, it was unclear whether we were both going to die from the impact with the sign or from laughter-induced asphyxiation.

When the sign finally cracked, it was almost disappointing. Both posts cracked at the base at once, tilting the sign down at an angle. After that, we didn’t so much ram the sign as drive the truck up the slope of its posts, pushing it down the rest of the way. Then we loaded the sign as best we could into the back of the truck and drove away, not turning on our headlights until we were down the road a bit because we’re sneaky like that.

Driving the country roads back to our house, the sign hanging more out of the truck bed than in, my dad used his handkerchief to wipe the tears from his eyes and admitted that, upon reflection, there were probably better tools available for taking down that sign than a pickup. It was, after all, made of wood, and try as he might, he could not recall vehicular collisions as one of the major methods for cutting wood.

“I hear axes are good,” I put forward. “Or chainsaws.”

My father nodded and agreed that those did sound reasonable and that, if ever we decided to make a habit of this kind of thing, we should invest in just such tools.

“We could even buy one of those two-handled saws,” I said. “We’d be outlaw lumberjacks.”

My dad smiled at the thought, and so did I. I’m not sure if his cheeks hurt as much as mine did, but I’m guessing they did.

Happy Father’s Day, Outlaw Lumberjack.

You Wish You Knew How to Quit Me

I shared how the twins got their names over on nameberry today. Don't click if you named your kids Hester.

Side Effects

So apparently, when your child's behavior is controlled by anti-seizure meds, you're not supposed to yell at her for it. Which sucks. As a general rule, my parenting style is pretty straight forward: Misbehavior met with swift retribution. I learned it from God. But now I'm being asked by paid professionals to greet Kathryn's uncontrolled bursts of anger with "understanding" and "redirecting," even though the only thing I can think of to redirect her toward is the television and the reminder that the cable that came free with our house probably won't be free much longer.

On Saturday, Kathryn asked if we would paint her room blue. I don't blame her for asking. Right now her room is pink. We didn't paint it pink; it came that way. Just like the bathroom came pink-ish. I try not to think about it too much. Still, nobody had planned to keep Kathryn's room pink for the past year and a half, least of all Kathryn, but since the room is not a Webkinz, Kathryn kept forgetting to talk about it with us. Until Saturday, that is, when she said she wanted it painted blue.

She wasn't angry when she made her request, which caught my attention, but I told her no anyway since I like to stick with what I know. Kathryn didn't ask again, but the rest of the day, Kathryn kept coming out with these bizarre statements, like "I need a snack because I saw orange," or "I'm hyper because of my red shirt," and it didn't take more than 73 of those before I figured out what was going on: Some hippie must have gone to her school and given the colors-and-feelings speech. Damn hippies.

"Kathryn," I asked in a quiet moment, and by quiet I mean the ten minutes between ice cream trucks passing outside, "why do you want to paint your room blue?"

"Because blue makes you calm." Kathryn looked at me. "I thought maybe if my room was blue, I might not get angry so much." She batted her eyelashes exactly once.

You might be thinking at this point that I'm a good dad, trying to do what little is in my power to give Kathryn some more control over her wild emotions, but the way I figure it, I'm just a second coat away from getting to yell again.

More on Rocks and Words

Something that I left out of my post two days ago, the one about rocks, Kathryn, and the words she contains, is that all that talking I did to her made her a genius.

Once, as a three-year-old, she came to me with a question. She asked me why half of our front yard was wet and half of it was dry. Before I could answer, she said, "Is it because the wet part is in the shade and the dry part is in the sun?" and then "and the sun made the water warm and it turned into a vapor and it went up to the sky?"

I don't talk to the twins. Unlike Kathryn, they were born into a different time. With Kathryn, I talked to retain my sanity. Now, the only thing that has any hope of preserving what sanity I have left is silence. So for four years, the twins have been left to fend for themselves.

Which is why, the day after Kathryn collected so many rocks and put them on our porch a few months ago, the twins went to each other for an explanation:

"Where did all these rocks come from?" one asked. Don't ask me who it was. I still can't tell them apart and at this point it's kind of embarrassing to ask.

"Well," said the other, thinking it over. "Sometimes it just rains rocks."

"Oh yeah. Sometimes it does."

I think I need to talk to the twins more.

Rocks

A few months ago, Kathryn spent a day collecting rocks. She collected maybe three dozen of them from around our neighborhood and placed them all on our porch. Most were small, only a few were bigger than my fist, but despite the fact that none of them looked in the slightest bit out of the ordinary to me, Kathryn told me she selected each one for a reason. Each one, she said, had something special, some unique quality that set it apart from the rest. So I sat down next to her on the top step of our front porch and she told me about them. She told me about each rock individually, asking me to recognize and confirm the differences that she saw, to affirm the uniqueness of her selections, and in doing so, affirm Kathryn herself. Affirm her uniqueness. It was one of those special moments a dad shares with his daughter if you define special moments by skull-bashing tedium.

Oh my god that girl uses a lot of words. And she just keeps using them and using them.

When Kathryn was younger, it was I who talked to her about everything. I filled our time together with a running monologue of anything I could think of. A lot of it was high-minded and ideological, like what she could be when she grew up or the proper response to handsome princes who might imagine her to be in need of rescuing, but much of it was just stuff I was saying to keep my brain from crusting over with the same dried shell of spit-up to which most of my clothes had already succumbed.

I told her about the water cycle and about social justice. I told her as much as I remembered from my philosophy classes, about Schopenhauer's delightful pessimism and how the Platonic ideals were crap but they were important crap. I explained crock pots and told her the secret to my brisket dry rub. I told her words and phrases I knew from other languages. I told her there is magic in the world and she didn't need to look any farther than a bottle of sunscreen for proof of it.

And Kathryn listened. She drooled and listened and filled herself with the words I spoke.

In her, the words multiplied. They grew and begot more words. And then they came out. A hundredfold. Gizmos turned to gremlins, besieging the air, ridding the world of silence.

However lately the words Kathryn's been using have been hard to hear. These past few months Kathryn's medicines have been speaking to us through her, and they haven't been saying nice things. They say things that eight-year-olds shouldn't say, putting voice to feelings that it's not fair for eight-year-olds to feel. And it hurts. So now we are starting to pull back on the medicines. We have seen the seizures, we have seen the medicines, and we are choosing the former. It is a grotesque choice.

But

four mornings ago I set a dish containing five pills next to Kathryn's Bite-Sized Mini-Wheats. Today the dish contained just two. And for the first time in a long while, I did not begin my day feeling like I was making a mistake.

Let the sparks fly.