awright Brian

The Saddest Thing You May Ever Read About Growing Up

This post is the saddest thing you may ever read about growing up. I'm not even kidding. There's no tragedy. Nobody dies. Nobody breaks anything. It's almost casual, this saddest thing. On the surface it's even cute, but the depth of pathos underneath could well swallow you whole.

 My neighbor has a kid I'll call Max because that's his name and it should be illegal to give another name to a kid already called Max. He's a five-year-old boy and his mom, in an effort to spend less time with five-year-old boys, enrolled him in an after-school magic class. Yesterday he asked to stop going.

"It doesn't really seem like magic," he said. "It seems more like lying."

That's it. Read it again if you must, then follow those words back and let them inform you of everything that boy felt between learning he was taking a magic class and actually taking the class.

A better blogger than I would use this as an opportunity to explore the differences between expectation and reality or, at the very least, the bittersweet journey that is growing up, but me? I'm satisfied just listening to the "whomp" that is your happiness being clubbed to death.

 

The Cookies Were Delicious

President Obama sent me a box of homemade cookies for my vote. My neighbor got a jetski, and his neighbor got a Fisher-Price playtime kitchen, which was weird because he lives alone, but he seemed happy with it and that's what matters. The cookies were chewy and still warm, and the President's handwritten note assured me they had each spent several hours in the Lincoln Bedroom before being packed up by the newly married couple the Obamas had invited to spend the night there. President Obama did not identify whether the married couple was gay or straight and that's how it should be because marriage is marriage and until I need to start qualifying mine as an "Oklahoma" wedding, I don't see why anyone else should have to qualify theirs.

The cookies were delicious.

 

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Fashions a Metal Hockey Mask and Calls Himself The Humungus

There are no trees in our house. This may seem a mild, self-evident statement, like saying there is no life on Mars, but it isn’t. Monday night a hundred-year-old sycamore uprooted itself and crushed the roof of a house four doors down from ours, letting Hurricane Sandy inside for as long as it wanted to stay. Today an early morning coffee run took me past dozens of felled trees, many still draped with power lines, some creasing the rooflines of houses less fortunate than ours.

Hurricane Sandy was the opposite of last year’s Irene. With Irene, the damage was mostly inland, with widespread destruction and more rain dropped on the area than it could handle. With Irene, by four o’clock in the morning, my wife and I had already been in our basement for hours, bailing the water that was coming in as fast as we could get it out. We bailed all day and eventually called it a draw. Our neighbors across the street weren’t so lucky. Their houses sit only a foot or so lower than ours, down an almost imperceptible slope, but it was enough that on their side of the street, the sewer lines backed up, flushing raw sewage up through basement toilets and shower drains faster than any pumps could clear it. But that was last year’s Irene. This year we had Sandy, and Sandy was finished by 4 AM, exhausted, its fury spent on the coast.

Sharon filled our car with gas Tuesday, the day after Sandy hit. She also filled a five-gallon container for our generator. She did it casually, taking with her a child who wanted to get out of the house. The lines for gas hadn’t started yet. Two days later, when I went out to fill our empty containers, if took me six hours: One hour to find a working gas station, two hours of waiting in line, then three hours to get back home because the full gas cans in the back of my minivan made me drive funny.

We’ve been without power for seven days now, but I won’t complain. We have a generator that I run during the day to keep the fridge cool and then I drink the beer at night so it doesn’t spoil. Sharon left the country on Day 4, taking one of the first flights out of JFK on a planned business trip to the United Arab Emirates. Again, I won’t complain. She has a job, something a lot of people in my state are without right now. Two days ago, on Day 5, Victoria, the tiniest of the twins, was diagnosed with strep throat, puny and feverish, and now the rest of the family has taken to wearing her inside our clothes for warmth. I slept next to her two nights ago and it was the first decent night of sleep I’d had since the heat shut off. I asked her if she wanted to sleep with me again last night and she politely declined, explaining that I smell bad and my butt makes unpleasant noises when I sleep.

For us, it's a waiting game. Will we get power today? Maybe, maybe not. There are no crews working that I can tell, but the only thing we lack is power. We have heat when the generator runs, and our area is flush with food and supplies, though gas is hard to come by. This morning I waited in a polite line for about an hour to fill two 5-gallon containers and at one point, the guy behind me asked if I thought the people in Mad Max acted this orderly before the stations were taken over by warlords. He was smiling when he asked it, but something in his eyes made me let him go in front of me. I hope he remembers the favor when he shaves his head into a mohawk and puts on his feathered football pads.

The amazing people behind CoolMomPicks put together a list of charities and organizations doing amazing work in the area right now, and let me tell you, there is amazing work needed to be done here. I hope you'll click on the link and let your wallet and/or muscles provide the aid that your mouth says it wants to. Before one of my daughters gets cast as "feral kid #2."

Please Punch Any Climate Change Deniers in the Mouth Today

Better yet, vote them out of office Tuesday. Thank you.

The Last Three Years Told Exclusively Through Doctor Who Gifs

2009 was a long time ago.

We have broken a lot of things since then.

Victoria broke her left arm.

She broke her right arm.

She broke her collar bone.

That one happened 48 hours before we flew to Disney.

That gif is actually for going to Disney. This is the one about Victoria's broken collarbone:

Kathryn broke her toe. Her little toe.

I made a lot of jokes about Child Protective Services visiting. I stopped making them because nobody ever laughed.

Lila, by the way, is fine.

Kathryn had seizures. A lot of them.

(I am going to hell for using that for seizures.)

Then she had fewer seizures. Now she has no seizures. Over a year, seizure free.

 

That's actually worth a few more gifs than just that.

With our nights no longer spent listening for every little sound coming from Kathryn's room, Sharon and I have started to sleep again. Together.

In bunk beds, mind you, because we have three kids. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, bunk beds.

Not a Pony

Note: I wrote this a little over three years ago, just after I retired my old blog. I sat down this morning, planning to update it and post it, but something I swear isn't laziness compelled me to leave it as it is (laziness). If you are new here and are interested in following the saga of my oldest daughter's seizures, you can find it all over my old blog, especially here, here, and here. For the many of you who have contacted me to find out how she is doing now, the short answer is, she's doing fine. Very fine. The long answer will come soon.

 

I have stopped speaking to my family. I communicate now through grunts, squeaks, waving hands, and, if necessary, tersely worded notes, the latter being the least effective as 2/3rds of my kids cannot yet read.

I have stopped speaking because of the tarantula in my house. More specifically, I have stopped speaking because of the size of the tarantula in my house and what the size of the tarantula in my house does to my voice. The size of the tarantula in my house makes my voice sound unpleasantly high, like the voice of a frightened nine-year-old girl. Which is doubly embarrassing because the tarantula belongs to a nine-year-old girl, and she’s having no trouble at all speaking, thank you very much. She got the beast for Christmas. She named her Imelda.

Or maybe she named him Imelda. I don’t know. I’m not sure if there’s any way to tell the sex of a live tarantula. I’m certainly not flipping it over to check. I’d say it doesn’t matter except female tarantulas live about 15 to 20 years longer than males. And males jump. They jump. I’m not sure if the jumping contributes to the male’s short life expectancy in general, but it certainly will in my house.

My daughter Kathryn picked the name Imelda from a website of “cool & fun spider names.” It means “powerful fighter.” Kathryn says that’s why she chose it, but I’m guessing that she chose it because it was the only “cool & fun” spider name listed that didn’t appear to be lifted from The Lord of the Rings. “Ungoliant” was neither cool nor fun enough for her.

We got Imelda for Kathryn for two reasons. One, Imelda is not a bird. I hate birds. That Imelda can possibly kill and eat birds is the one thing she has in her favor right now. The second reason we got Imelda is Kathryn asked for it.

Something you may not know, but should in case your daughter ever has a seizure while climbing the stairs of her elementary school, is that if your daughter ever has a seizure while climbing the stairs of her elementary school, you will buy her whatever she asks for. Even it it’s poisonous.

It wasn’t Kathryn’s first seizure at school. It wasn’t her worst seizure either. Kathryn has something called Rolandic epilepsy, sometimes referred to as “childhood” epilepsy. It is supposed to go away when she hits puberty, which means I am now the only dad in our town actively hoping my daughter goes through puberty early. It also means in a few years we’ll be trading in a daughter whose brain problems can be treated with medicine for one whose brain problems cannot. It’s a devil’s trade.

Kathryn’s seizures first appeared two years ago. They started off mild, but have grown steadily worse until just before Christmas when she seized on the stairs of her elementary school and used that opportunity to ask for a tarantula.

“It’s not a bird,” she said later that evening. “And it’s cool.” I couldn’t argue with either one of those. Truth is, I thought it was cool. A teacher at Kathryn’s elementary school had once brought a tarantula to school, and Kathryn had amazed her classmates by letting it crawl across her arm. If, when Kathryn was born nine years ago, someone had asked me what kind of girl I’d hoped she would grow into, I’d have said the kind that lets tarantulas crawl across her arm. I’m not sure, though, I would have added “and wants to own one as a pet.” And I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have mentioned a seizure disorder at all.

The next day, Kathryn had a seizure during a grammar test. She lost consciousness. It was followed by another, smaller episode just after that. And then finished the test, the teacher kindly wiping the drool off the unfinished pages while Kathryn collected herself. She got an 87. She tried to hide the test from us because it was not an A. She also asked again for a tarantula.

That night, after we had gotten Kathryn and her sisters to bed, I turned to my wife. “Are we going to get Kathryn a tarantula because she has epilepsy?

“Yes,” said my wife. “Be happy she didn’t ask for a pony.”

So now we have a tarantula. We bought it on the Internet. And it’s size does terrible things to my voice. It’s not big, you see. It’s very, very small. It’s a baby, no more than a quarter of an inch from leg to leg. One minute after we put it in its little enclosure, it disappeared. Maybe it burrowed down in the earth we put in there with it. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not in there at all.

Its friend disappeared, too. The dealer we bought Imelda from threw in an extra one, a bonus baby tarantula, just in case the first one didn’t survive the journey. The second one is maybe half the size of Imelda. Kathryn hadn’t known it was coming, so she hadn’t had a chance to come up with a name. She let the twins name it. It’s called Foo Foo Cuddily Poops. We think it burrowed down, too, when we put it in its little cage. Maybe not. Maybe it escaped and is somewhere in the house. Hiding. Eating. Growing. Maybe Foo Foo Cuddily Poops has found Imelda and together they have decided that together they may be able to take down bigger prey.

 I hope they start with birds.

Eleven

I got my first job when I was eleven years old. I was short for my age, but with a clean face and almost shoulder-length straight blond hair. If you knew me then, you'd easily agree that my looks peaked at eleven. If you didn't, you'd still quickly agree, your haste betraying your relief that I'd ever had a peak at all.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be eleven. While on my blogging break, I wrote a lot, trying to add "unfinished novelist" to my long list of abandoned careers, but to my surprise, I finished one, a middle grade novel with a main character who's eleven.

When I was eleven, a renaissance fair opened up on a few acres of land outside my home town of Waxahachie, Texas and my first job ever was as a character there. Auditioning for the job was my dad's idea, possibly because he thought it'd be a fun experience for me but mainly because he was sick of seeing me sitting in front of the TV, spending my evenings reciting entire episodes of Monty Python with the sound off.

The fair was like no place I'd ever been before. The people who worked there were a wonderful and strange group. They lived in trailers in the parking lot, traveling gypsies of the renaissance fair circuit, as much stuck in the 1960s as they were in the Middle Ages. I've never worked with a friendlier or more generous group of people, but their lives were far removed from any I'd encountered before. They snorted snuff from boxes and swallowed swords. They were quick witted and casually sexual. One evening as the season was winding down, the queen of the festival bent down to me and asked, "Do you want to feel something amazing?" When I nodded, she leaned in close, delicately placed both lips on my eyes, and gently sucked my eyelids into her mouth, one after the other.

I kissed my first girl at that renaissance fair, drank my first wine cooler there, and ran my first con. It was something I made up myself and I was rather proud of it, considering it successful because I made money more often than I got beat up.

The con was simple and stupid, in a very eleven-year-old way. I stood on a wooden bridge in the center of the fair and, when people passed by, I offered to jump for a quarter. If someone took me up on it, I'd look for someone else to pay me double not to jump. The bridge wasn't terribly high, but it was high enough. A rocky creek flowed underneath and most times there was someone crossing who didn't want to see a little kid jump and get hurt. The con worked best when there was a bidding war, back and forth between the pro-jumpers and the anti-jumpers. I always let the pro-jumpers win. My biggest take was $18 from a drunk guy who was not going to back down while his horrified girlfriend kept trying to outbid him to keep me safe. I took his money and I jumped, just like I did for everyone. I gave a little hop, right there in the center of the bridge.

To people's credit, most of them just groaned and moved on after I'd done my stupid little hop. Only once did someone take things into their own hands and pick me up and toss me over the railing themselves. I can't say I didn't have it coming, but I should note that if you ever throw a little kid off a bridge, you should make sure he doesn't count people wearing chainmail among his close friends.

It was the kind of con a person could only pull when they were eleven. The next year I tried to do it again, but the results were unsatisfying. People were angrier, less likely to laugh it off, more likely to bring out fists. Eleven was the perfect age.

Once

Once my daughter was served a hot dog that had a plastic bag inside. Not inside the bun; inside the actual hot dog. She was a fussy eater, the kind that decorates the seat around her with strings of those things that aren't quite banana but aren't quite peel, and after the first bite of hot dog, she made a face and started picking at it. And then she pulled out a plastic bag.

I do not know how an entire plastic bag got inside the casing of this hot dog, but it did. She pulled out a corner of it and then some more and then some more, like a magician performing the most disgusting trick ever conceived. When the whole thing finally came out, I half expected it to be attached to a string of multi-colored handkerchiefs or for a dove to emerge from the hole and fly to the ceiling, shaking off its coating of meat by-product and drawing gasps and applause from everyone around.

I'm leading with this story, making it the first post on this new blog. If it helps, consider it a metaphor.

All the best,

Brian