A Fourth Outline in the Haze

Work responsibility has not usurped my will to blog, but it's doing a number on my time. So, until something new graces these virtual pages, this recycled Facebook note will have to do. It's from April, and all this rainy, foggy September weather reminded me of it...

2 a.m. walks in a cold rain are one of the many pleasures of dog ownership. The Dude, our golden retriever pup, has developed the annoying habit of rooting around for just the perfect spot to drop a deuce. Sometimes this can take 15 or 20 minutes, which is far too long when it seems a thick layer of misty fog has infiltrated your very soul.

Tonight, as is frequently the case, The Dude and I had a third member on our expedition, Orange Cat. Orange Cat may actually believe that he is a dog. He used to fetch before I got too lazy to keep up his training. And unlike most self-respecting cats, he gladly ventures outdoors in the rain. Grooming himself is also out of the question.

So there we were, enveloped in a fog so heavy that I frequently stumbled over the edge of the road or into potholes because I couldn't see all the way to my feet. Dude's pulling the leash taut, sniffing every blade of road-side grass intently, while Orange Cat trots amiably along. And then Orange Cat's posture changed. He reversed course, back towards home, and in the distant glow of our front porch light I made out the figure of a fourth outline in the haze. Surely Phoebe, our elderly, mostly housebound cat, would have sense enough not to venture out into this cold soup. But the way Orange Cat approached the silhouette, confidently, tail in the air, and the way it, too, approached us with an air of familiarity, meant it had to be of a familiar fur. The noses of the animals even met.

Despite his breed's nose, Dude isn't always the most aware pup. A night before, we nearly walked right into a spotted bovine, obscured in the fog, before the dog's sensors tripped and a barking frenzy ensued. But, finally, he became aware that our three had grown into a foursome. I felt the nylon of the leash strap dig into my hand as he yanked me towards the nosing shadows, and then the fourth member of our party emitted a low rumbling, like a grizzly bear.

But, thankfully, it wasn't a grizzly bear. Just a possum who, like us, was on an early morning stroll.

Dude never did take a shit.

Love Triangle

Ella, the boy’s step-sister, has frequently proclaimed her intention to one day take Silas’s hand in marriage. The boy, though prone to sew his wild oats with an endless string of babysitters—if making them play trains with him can be considered sewing wild oats—does not object, and insists on at least seven kids. Ella also planned to marry some kid named Carter from her daycare. Apparently she’s learning from my example—one marriage is never enough. Or maybe she’s planning a move to Utah.

Now she’s in big school, and this Carter kid appears to be a flash in the pan. That would be good news for Silas if it wasn’t for David, the BMOC of the kindergarten class at Blowing Rock Elementary school. Ella made the connection tonight at the dinner table that there’s an Ella, a Rachel, and a David in her class, just like at home. But there’s nary a Silas at her school, and perhaps that’s telling, as the boy appears to be a passing cloud in her distant nuptial forecast.

“Oh, David! I am soooooo in love with David,” she announced at dinner, picking at her last bit of a second helping of shells and cheese in hopes that dessert would be her reward for making a happy plate.

This revelation piqued the boy’s interest. His expression seemed to say, “Who is this David mofo? I wonder if I can kick his ass?” Apparently he inherited his dad’s jealousy gene.

“I’m sure David’s great,” I interjected (after all, he shares my name). Then I stirred the pot: “But you’re still going to marry Silas, right?”

“I’m still going to marry Silas, but I’m going to marry David first,” she proclaimed.

First is everything when you’re a four-year-old. Second is just the first loser. Silas did not take well to being a loser. The boy, jilted by a would-be lover for the first time, folded his bottom lip inside his mouth, squinched his nose, put a death lock on Ella with his eyes, and Romeo-like, held his breath in an attempt to put a premature end to his unrequited existence. Two silent tears did nothing to quench the red hue that rose in his cheeks.

Feeling a bit complicit in this unfolding melodrama, I tried to restore peace to the dinner table.

“You guys won’t be getting married for like 20 years; you don’t have any idea who you’re going to marry,” I said.

The boy finally gasped a big chunk of air. In a soft almost inaudible pout, he said, “But I want to marry Ella.”

She stared at him with a mix of, I think, compassion and delight. She didn’t want to hurt her future second husband, but the strange power she discovered over the opposite sex was exhilarating. In my mind I imagined an endless string of broken hearts.

“You know, you don’t even have to get married,” I told him, still hoping to defuse the drama. “You can take care of me when I get old instead. We’ll move to the beach and go fishing.”

This set the gears in the boy’s mind turning. The pout gradually receded from his voice as he made a plan. Dad would drive the boat and he would hold the pole. We would catch those fish with the swords. I have to admit, this was sounding promising.

Ella, drawing the salt from her well-sucked thumb, sat quietly, taking this all in. Cheer finally returned to the boy’s voice as the father-son fishing scenario swelled with more and more details. It turns out that I will be a shrimp and shark sailboat captain, and we’ll use nets and little hooks. The little hooks are so we don’t catch any big sharks. We’re planning to eat the little ones.

Defiantly, he concluded: “I don’t want to get married. I’m going to live with my Dadda.”

Ella burst from the table, crying out indecipherable utterances of unbearable pain en route to her bedroom, where she threw herself on her bed and buried her face in her pillow.

Rachel called after her: “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sad!” she shouted. “I want to marry Silas!”

Perhaps tonight the boy learned a valuable lesson too: always play hard to get.

Dear lord, I wonder what it's going to be like when they get to high school?

Once More to the Sanderling

Essayist E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake," a vivid description of a trip he took with his son to the same lake where White's father had brought him as a boy, always stirs my memories of my own father and our sojourns to the Sanderling. Now my trips to the coast are with my own son. The years and the yearning fade away, and, if only for a few days, three generations merge into a single grain on the grand strand. Here's a passage from White's classic:

I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. The sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger.

My father is with me always, but nowhere is his presence more acutely felt than at our family beach house. Silas would be so fortunate if, when his father grows up, I can become half the man my father was.

Existential Crisis

On our way to school one morning...

Boy: "Dadda, who made the grass"

Me: "God made the grass."

Boy: "Dadda, who made the trees?"

Me: "God made the trees."

Boy: "Dadda, who made the John Deere elevator?"

Me: "Excavator?"

Boy: "Yeh. Ex-cuh-vuh-lator. Who made the excuhvuhlator?"

Me: "Well, people made the excavator, but God made the people."

Boy: "Dadda, who made God?"

Squirmy Wormy

In a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore claimed: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." I am forever in his debt for the Internet. I can hardly even remember the days when I used to waste countless hours that would've been better spent sleeping (or studying, or working, or writing, or living) in front of the antiquated black box that my elders refer to as the boob tube. No more TV for me. Now, procrastination finds me courtesy of Facebook and online fantasy baseball. Ah, Al Gore giveth, but he also taketh away. Another of his inventions, global warming, has down right ruined the once cool and breezy Blue Ridge Mountain summers of my wayward youth. Upper 70s = windows and screen doors open and the peaceful song and dance of chirping toads chasing chirping crickets. Upper 80s = an expensive call to the friendly HVAC technicians at Watauga Heating & Cooling. They were so friendly, in fact, that they used Senator Gore's technology to download countless hours of pornography to my PC while doing the install. I imagine they probably just tacked on "Cooling" as an after thought since no one really needs air conditioning in the mountains. Right? Not any more, thanks to Senator Gore. I’m not suggesting some grand conspiracy theory—I don’t think the porn industry and Gore are somehow “in bed” together, leading to countless porn downloads by countless HVAC techs across the globe—but, regardless, no longer are my late night (porn-free) surfing hours accompanied by nature's music; instead, the steady hum of the ironically named heat pump drones on.

(Before I go on, I would like to apologize if you got a distasteful mental image when I mentioned Al Gore, the porn industry, and “in bed” above, all in the same sentence.)

So what does any of this have to do with the boy? Well, Silas, who has an aversion to wearing clothes anyway, didn't seem to mind the heat. He was not yet two at the time, and the promise of central cooling gently circulating pet dander throughout the house wasn't enough motivation to get him to suspend his constant desire to be held and/or played with. I had to 86 an old stack of mostly rotten firewood to clear a spot for the air conditioning unit. It was a sizable stack, but with only normal delays for freaking out every time an upset section of log revealed a giant snake or spider, I could've knocked out the job in about an hour or two. But the wheelbarrow wasn't full once before the boy, already bored with the dump truck load of toys I hauled out to the yard for the occasion, took to writhing and crying in the grass. I might've stuck him in front of the TV and gotten back to work, but, at not yet two, his taste for TV was still undeveloped. I couldn't even trust it to get an uninterrupted shower in, much less a project in the yard. And besides, I was still idealistic enough as a fledgling parent at this point to think that I would be forever limiting his exposure to the evils of television. Fortunately, I did have just the thing for this, our trusty backpack. Before I loaded any more wood, I loaded up the boy, snapped him in, and slung him over my back. He directed the rest of the project contentedly from his perch between dad's shoulder blades. More projects have been neglected than completed over the years, I'm afraid, but the backpack quickly became an integral tool whenever dad became motivated to tackle chore time. It was particularly useful for doing dishes and laundry; you can only wear the same shirt so many days in a row.

The backpack: it's how house and yard work gets done.

It doesn't work so well for inside jobs, but by the time the boy outgrew the backpack I had discovered another method for making yard work manageable: earthworms ("squirmy wormies" in boyspeak). I don't know if Al Gore invented the earthworm, but they seem to be thriving in our little corner of the warmed globe. Every time a bored and attention-starved Silas approaches, one needs only to turn a bit of earth, pluck out a worm, and—voila!—five or ten minutes of uninterrupted time to get back to work. He takes some leaves, a bit of dirt, and makes a "quarium" for them. The little trunk of his tricycle, the backs of dump trucks, Tupperware containers—if it will hold worms, it has. The health of our yard and garden, robbed of the benefits of so many worms, would probably be considerably improved had we not discovered how much the boy loves them, and my conscience doesn't care to count how many of them have been martyred in the name of weekend warrioring in the yard. Collecting squirmies is not in and of itself the problem, it's the not letting them go. Invariably, a dump truck is left out in the rain, and its bed becomes a watery grave for floating, bloating worms. Or a Tupperware bowl goes untended for a few days under Al Gore's sizzling sun, shriveling and finally baking its occupants. Now Silas has become pretty adept at capturing and sequestering squirmies all by himself. Instead of constantly badgering me about my progress in detecting them, he'll burst around the corner, worms snapping back and forth in both hands as he bounces up and down, and shout "squirmy wormies!" For a few minutes anyway, I’ll plod on with my yard work—no weed is safe.

I’ve been working on convincing Silas to do the environmentally responsible thing and practice catch and release. Ol' Al, not to mention countless captured squirmies, would surely appreciate that.

Delicious and nutritious.

Nightcrawler tiara. It's what all the cool kids will be wearing this summer.

There's Plenty of Room at the Duneside III

I’ve never really taken the boy anywhere, well not anywhere other than his grandma’s house and Garden City. We are so blessed to have inherited a beach house—passed down through three generations—that we’ve always just high-tailed it to the coast whenever the opportunity to vacation presents itself. And the fact that the beach house would not be vacant Labor Day weekend did nothing to quell our urge to splash in the surf, so we decided to carve out a new adventure. OK, so we went to the same beach, but this time we’re renting a tiny one bedroom condo. Baby steps. Maybe some day we’ll choose an entirely new destination. I can safely say that we will not be returning to Duneside III, room 202.

We drove down late for two reasons: I was hoping for some peace while Silas slept (have you ever traveled with a four-year-old?), and I wanted to miss the migrating mass of wide-eyed humanity making one last dash to the beach before the unofficial end of summer. No luck there, as we became the caboose of a fifty-mile long train thanks to a nasty pile up near the dreaded Conway bottleneck. An hour and twenty minutes of sitting still in the truck afforded me the opportunity to surf the full glory of Myrtle Beach’s still distant classic rock stations, and I heard “Hotel California” no less than three times. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget, indeed. Thankfully, Silas slept through the whole clusterf*ck, and by 1:30 a.m. we were living it up at the Duneside III. They haven’t had an air freshener here since 1969, and you can actually see puffs of thirdhand smoke emit from the furniture when you lower your haunches.

Duneside III is nestled a shell’s throw from the Kingfisher pier and Sam’s Corner, a 24/7 greasy spoon that, along with the pier, form the epicenter of what used to be a sleepy little family beach town. Rather than kingfishers, or any type of fishers, for that matter, the pier is home to a pair of watering holes, one at the base of the structure and another at its termination, way out over the breakers. An endless stream of vacationers traverse the pier as if walking to its end and back is their own personal pilgrimage to Mecca. A full moon, wreathed in a halo, keeps watch from a nearly cloudless sky overhead, but, at the very limit of my vision, an occasional flash of lightning fills in the endless, black stretch of ocean with a fleeting boundary, the distant horizon. I don’t think the rain’s headed our way. Waves approach in a series of tiny detonations set off by the shearing of the pier’s pilings. But the tranquility of this scene is ungraciously interrupted by “live music” in the form of a sort of dueling banjos of bad cover bands taking place on the pier, which brings us back to “Hotel California.” Now I’ve heard it four times in the last few hours, but never quite like this. And, I hope, never again quite like this. I think there’s an unwritten rule that no band shall ever cover “Free Bird.” That would be blasphemy somewhere on about the same level as diddling the preacher’s wife in church, on a Sunday, during the service. And if we were going to construct a top ten list of songs that should never be covered, “Hotel California,” while paling in comparison to “Free Bird” in terms of its rock anthem awesomeness, would at least make the top five.

The band closest to the beach, and to my position perched on the balcony of Duneside III 202, is mercifully taking a break to blow the meager contents of their tip jar at the bar, allowing me to hear Bob Segar’s “Turn the Page” wafting in from cover band #2’s position out over the Atlantic. The band on break played the same thing not 15 minutes ago. And this, too, is a song that belongs somewhere on our list of songs not to cover, as your local everyday-ordinary-average-run-of-the-mill cover band probably cannot relate to the concept of “playing the star” or being “strung out from the road.” Later, a painfully long drum solo is punctuated intermittently with the snap of bottlerockets. Their whistling blasts make me flinch every time. In my mind’s eye I see a chubby bleach blonde emerging from Wings with a new thong. She will don it for her stay on the back of her boyfriend’s crotch rocket, clinging tightly to him as he pops wheelies up and down Waccamaw Drive, and Myrtle Beach’s annexation of the sleepy little family beach of my youth will be complete. I just hope I can sleep through it.

I smoke the day’s last cigarette by lying down in bed.

Toy Story

"David, you're the bestest David ever in the whole wide world."

The boy often calls me by my first name, which I do not mind. I call him by his first name, too.

I replied, "Aw, that's so sweet. Thank you. You're the bestest Silas ever in the whole wide world."

"Thanks, David. And you know what?"

"What?"

"You're the bestest toy buyer in the whole world."

There's always a catch.

Toy Story II

Circumstances conspired to my committing one of the least pardonable sins of parenthood on a recent road trip. I gave in to hungry boy's incessant requests to patronize the Golden Arches (better known as McDeath). At least he got apples instead of fries with the Happy Meal. Silas, of course, cared less about the food than the toy surprise that dad would pass back to him once his food found its way to his belly.

"It's a transformer, I think," I said as I made the awkward handoff to the seat behind me.

"It's a robot, dad, not a transformer," he corrected.

It was a robot, one that fired projectiles from a gun-like attachment sprouting from its right arm. I was thinking about potential lawsuits as the sun said its final goodbyes, heading west. Darkness infiltrated the cab, and I heard the boy rummaging about, straining the limits of booster seat confinement. He had dropped his new toy and, whether or not he could reach it anyway, could not see enough to pinpoint its whereabouts.

"Turn the light on daddy," he said.

I explained to him that I couldn't. It was distracting, kept me from seeing out to the road that I had to concentrate on.

"It's just not safe," I said.

"Just for a second, daddy."

"Not safe," I repeated, "You'll just have to get it when we get home."

"Nooooooo," he moaned; an annoying blend of demanding and whining creeping into his tone. "Turn the light on!"

"No," I said, finally. "And no amount of whining is going to make any difference."

"Fine, than you're not my father. And I'm never ever talking to you again."

There was a long pause. In the silence I determined to ignore the hurtfulness of those words. He didn't mean it.

I think he was considering the impossible impracticality of this vow of silence.

"You're not my father," he repeated, before adding this amendment: "And I'm never ever going to talk to you again, unless I want food or a toy."

I couldn't help but smile a little at that.

Through the rearview mirror, I saw the defiant set of his jaw in the lights of a passing motorist. His countenance soon softened; he drifted off to sleep. I think we both needed it.

First Blood

It was born in his marrow. It merged onto the circulatory superhighway at various onramps throughout his skeletal system. Driven by a double pump, it circumnavigated every vessel of his being, carrying both the essence and detritus of life. Its work chanced to bring it to the nasal cavity just as Silas was mounting the arm of the living room couch which, to a boy of four years, bears a strong resemblance to a diving platform. For this dive, Silas would be performing a leap of faith onto an adjacent piece of furniture. There was only one witness--Silas's five-year-old stepsister, Ella, who steadfastly maintains her innocence--so details are sketchy. What we know for sure is that something went terribly wrong, and it--his blood--was forever loosed from its confines.

The red river's crest was barely visible beneath his left nostril when a series of powerful sniffles sent it back through the nasal cavity, down the throat, and finally to the mouth. Meanwhile, a steady flow of tears served as the catalyst for increased snot production. En route to the mouth, the red river picked up this snotty debris. It pooled there on his tongue for a second. Unseen taste buds, housed in the papillae bumps on his tongue, alerted the brain to the presence of a strong metallic taste bathed in a slimy sauce of saltwater and bacteria. This was not to be swallowed, replied the brain. Silas tilted forward, formed a wide O with his mouth, and, in an action best described as a hybrid between spitting and spitting up, listened to his brain. If only he listened to and heeded the innumerable warnings from grown ups about not jumping on (or off of) the furniture, this snot island dotted plasma puddle would've avoided an unexpected off ramp onto the kitchen floor.

This was his first bloody nose. Before the damage could be assessed, Silas had to unlearn the urge to try to retain free flowing liquids with his well-honed sniffle. Due to his impatience with nose blowing--you have to stop playing for like two seconds--he is rather adept at sucking up snot. If no grown up sees the emergence of those green-yellow bubbles, it never happened. I was actually delighted that, unlike most other kids you see on the playground, my boy was usually bereft of the two-pronged snot highway. I cannot count how many times I've been staggered by this unsavory image: daydreamy children with curious, probing tongues sating themselves with the salty emissions of noses chilled by a cold winter wind. It's not chicken noodle soup, kids, but I digress. On this occasion it was important for Silas to stop sniffling so the headwaters of the red river could be properly charted. Was the bleeding isolated to the nose, or did he have a mouthful of missing teeth, too? It was hard to know with blood springing out of so many holes.

By now Rachel and I were pushing a small forest's yield of paper towels in his face. "That's good," I told him, as he mouthed deep breaths one on top of the other, "just try to slow it down a little." The sight of the towel growing red did little to stem the hyperventilating, but at least his nose finally, reluctantly relaxed. Chaotic conditions in the kitchen weren't helping matters. The boy still favored tears to words. Ella, ever fascinated by all bodily functions, crowded in for a better look, all the while simultaneously absolving herself of compliance in the accident while scolding Silas for not making good choices. She takes after her mother in the latter regard. Rachel, the self-proclaimed bad cop in our sometimes blend-resistant miniature Brady Bunch, reminded Silas how many times she had told him not to jump on the furniture. ENOUGH! Still unsuccessful in my attempt to survey the damage, I shooed the womenfolk from the kitchen and tilted Silas's head back, hoping that the platelets could better do their job with gravity on their side. I prodded his mouth open. The three grand worth of dental work that had repaired the damage done from relentless Juicy Juice toothbug attacks was intact. It appeared the river's source was purely nasal in origin.

The boy's hands, too small and too delicate, despite the dirt under the nails, to seem real, became blood-speckled as he pawed at the paper towels. "I need to wash my hands; I need to wash my hands!" he squealed, freaking out as he saw that he wore his own blood for the first time. I think he was less concerned with hygiene than the prospect of running out of blood, so I assured him his body would make more, hoisted him onto my hip, and hefted him down the hall to the bathroom. His tight hug dotted my evergreen shirt with festive splotches of red, a development that amused him. By the time we got to the bathroom--five seconds at the most--the tears and his blood had almost dried up and he couldn't wait to see his booboo. He smiled at his Rudolph-red nose, and, rather than wash his hands, plunged his face under the sink's still-cold stream, instantly undermining the persistent work of his platelets. The blood ran anew, and Silas, laughing hysterically, flashed the translucent red teeth of his smile. It's amazing how quickly the fortunes change at four.

Two days later I chanced to find him on the arm of the living room sofa, toes taut, body leaning forward, contemplating his next move. Our eyes met. He slowly climbed back down. His guilty smile was blood free, for now.