Author: Gary

Happy Birthday to Me

Last weekend, I celebrated yet another birthday. On Saturday, I turned WTF years old.

It would be nice if people reached a certain age and birthdays just stopped happening, but unfortunately that’s not how the process works. You get a new one every year whether you want it or not.

I started my special day by waking up before anyone else in the house had started moving. Ordinarily in these circumstances, I would immediately begin making as much noise as possible to wake up the kids. They have an annoying habit of sleeping in until noon if left alone and I get a great deal of pleasure out of making their lives miserable. This day was different, however. I figured a quiet house was just what I needed.

Breakfast was a birthday bowl of cold cereal. A birthday bowl of cereal is like a normal bowl of cereal except there are usually a few more tears in it. I debated putting a candle in the bowl to make it more festive, but I’m pretty sure a candle won’t light after it has been submerged in milk. To add to the air of desperation, I had to eat my breakfast with an oversized serving spoon because no one had bothered to do any dishes that week. That’s okay, though. I managed just fine since I have a big mouth. I know I have a big mouth because people have been telling me that my entire life.

Things did pick up in the afternoon. As a gift to me, my family took me to a movie and a restaurant for dinner. I got to choose the movie, and I got to pick my favorite restaurant. As an added bonus, I also got to pay for everything.

Happy birthday to me!

While we were at the theater, I bought some popcorn. I always have popcorn when I see a movie. It’s just my thing. Usually when my wife and I get popcorn we argue over whether or not to put butter on it. I prefer it dry, since I don’t like the plasticky burnt taste of the fake butter. I also hate how greasy it makes my fingers. My wife loves the stuff for some unknowable reason and insists that it be used to ruin an otherwise perfectly good tub of popcorn.

We usually argue in line for a few minutes and when we get to the front counter, she tells the kid working the snack bar to add the butter. This was my birthday, though. So, on this day when we got to the kid behind the counter … she told him to add butter.

Then I paid for the snacks.

Happy birthday to me!

I enjoyed the movie, and dinner afterwards was pleasant. I swore the kids to secrecy about my birthday. I didn’t want them telling the waiter just so they could watch dad squirm in his chair as the restaurant staff sang an offkey version of a birthday song while holding a melting blob of ice cream with a candle in it. I enjoy a free dessert as much as the next guy, but I don’t care to be the center of attention in a circus like that.

So, while we were eating, I told the waiter that it was EM2’s birthday.

After dinner, we headed home for a quiet evening. A little late-night television, a glass of wine, and two kids laughing and arguing while they watched videos on their phones.

And there was cake.

Lest anyone think we forgot the most important part of any birthday celebration, my wife baked me a lovely, homemade, chocolate birthday cake. She even managed to find a pink box to put it in and a sticker with a barcode to put on the side of the box. She always goes the extra mile because she loves me so much.

My wife covered every square inch of the cake’s surface with candles, then applied a blowtorch to it for three minutes to get them all lit. Okay, that part’s a lie. It’s just my attempt at an old age joke. The reality, though simpler, was actually much more depressing.

My wife rummaged in the junk drawer, located a single candle at the bottom of the clutter, and stuck it in the cake. The family sang Happy Birthday to me, hurrying to get through it before they completely lost interest in what they were doing. Somehow my daughters managed to get through the song without ever once looking up from their cellphones. Maybe they just forgot the words and had to read them on their screens.

After fourteen or fifteen attempts, along with a five-minute rest break when I got dizzy and started to hyperventilate, I blew out the candle. (Yup. Another old age joke.)

The kids both grabbed a piece of cake and disappeared upstairs to watch a Korean soap opera. My wife took two bites of her cake, set it on the counter and started answering work e-mails on her cellphone. I got to work cleaning up the mess in the kitchen.

Ah, yes. I can’t wait to do it all again next year.

Happy birthday to me!

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Summer Job

When my daughters came home from college this year, I suggested that they might want to find some summer jobs to keep busy and earn a little money before school starts up again in the fall. They both agreed that sounded like a good idea.

I offered to pay them to do some yard work around our house, but apparently that did not sound at all appealing. Either I was not offering to pay enough or, more likely, they did not consider anything around the house or yard worth doing. After all, I haven’t been able to get them to clean their rooms in twenty-two years, I don’t know what made me think I could get one of them to mow the lawn.

For the past month or so, both girls have been taking on jobs housesitting, babysitting, watering plants and caring for animals. All these little side jobs give them something to do each day instead of just sitting on the couch reminding me why I was so willing to pay a lot of money to send them away to school. They are also earning some decent wages. People will pay quite a bit more than I expected to know that their animals and yard are being taken care of while they are away on vacation.

And surprisingly, the girls are doing really well. Given my history with them, I fully expected the people that hired them to come home to brown, wilted plants in the house and brown, wilted animals in the back yard. But everything so far – fingers crossed – has gone smoothly.

The only glitch I have noticed is that when I suggested to the girls that they should get summer jobs, I didn’t realize that I, too would end up being saddled with a variety of summer jobs. Unpaid, summer jobs. Internships, I suppose you could call them.

After spending a morning in my own yard, weeding, gardening, and harvesting fruit off our trees, I hadn’t planned on spending my summer afternoons taking care of someone else’s property. However, it is becoming unpleasantly predictable that somewhere around one or two o’clock in the afternoon, I will hear one child or another tell me, “I forgot to water the plants at Mrs. ———‘s house. Can you drive me there?” Or, “I was supposed to take in the garbage cans and get the newspaper at Mr. ———‘s. Dad, can you go over there and do it? I don’t have time right now.”

Or my personal favorite: at eight o’clock at night, while EM1 was house sitting for some friends who live a half hour away, she called me to say, “There isn’t any food in this house, can you go pick me up something to eat and bring it to me? Oh, and while you’re out, can you stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things? I would really appreciate it.”

I think the most surprising part of this conversation is that she got what she wanted, and that was totally my fault. I should have reminded her of all the times I asked her to help me with chores and she refused, then hung up the phone, laughing maniacally. But there’s something about a child asking you to bring them food. Baby bird syndrome, I’ll call it. It makes me want to spit chewed up worms in her mouth.

Unpack that statement however you like.

Anyway, this whole ordeal makes me wonder what my life will be like when the girls go out and get real jobs. You know, the actual 8 to 5 routine. Long hours, short lunches, and angry bosses. Am I still going to get phone calls asking for help? “Dad, I was the last one at the store and I forgot to lock up. Can you go close out the register and lock the doors for me?” Or, “I’m in surgery right now, but I forgot my lunch. Can you pick me up something and bring it to the hospital?”

Okay, that last one was just wishful thinking, but who doesn’t want a doctor in the family?

All I know for certain right now is that I seem to get sucked into helping the kids with whatever tasks they agree to do for our neighbors and friends, and I’m not making a penny doing it. This seems very wrong, especially when EM2 tells me that she just got paid $100 to go pet someone’s cat for five minutes. A cat that I probably fed, bathed, and cleaned their litter box.

From now on, if EM1 or EM2 take on a new job, I’m not going to lift a finger to help. They are the ones getting paid for it, so they can do all the work. If either one of them suddenly find themselves in trouble and they need my assistance because they forgot to do something, or need my help at the last second…

Yeah, who am I kidding?

I’ll probably do it.

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Hot Dog

School has finally let out for the summer. For parents this is the beginning of a three-month long nightmare where we suddenly have to be responsible for our own children all day long. No more letting the state provide free babysitting for the little monsters 30 hours out of every week.

For my wife, however, summer vacation is a much-needed break. She is an elementary school principal and to her, summer vacation means about eight weeks of time away from the hundreds of children that crawl around her school campus like ants on a dropped lollipop. Although we still have to take care of our own two little disappointments … I mean, our little darlings … at least for the summer months she doesn’t have to watch anyone else’s demon spawn.

In celebration of this event, my wife wanted to do something for the kids at her school. She decided she would set up a grill on campus and cook hot dogs for each and every child on campus. This way she could give all the students a free lunch as a way of saying “have a great summer and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

I know this sounds like a great idea. And, it is … for the kids. For me, it is a bit of a headache. You see, the only thing my wife knows about using a grill is handing me raw meat and telling me to bring it back to her when it’s ready to eat. I have the burn scars to prove that statement. So, for her grand plan of cooking the kids lunch, she needed volunteers to come to her school in the mornings and grill hot dogs.

200-300 hot dogs. Each day for three days.

Why three days? Well, there are almost a thousand kids at the school, and to make sure that everyone was included in the frank-themed festivities they broke the kids into groups by grade level. Fortunately, I did not have go do the grilling all three days. Other parents were foolish enough to volunteer, so I was able to skip the first couple days of Wiener-Mania.

The first day, no one actually did any grilling. The school’s barbeque decided that was a perfect time to stop working. Apparently, even inanimate objects at that school couldn’t wait for the kids to go away. Plan B was to throw 100 hot dogs into the microwave oven, then use the campus art supplies to paint black grill marks on them. The kids didn’t seem to mind. It was still free food, and I have discovered that when it comes to mealtimes, children are like feral dogs. They’ll pretty much eat anything that gets too close to their mouths.

Day two went a bit more smoothly. The school brought in a new barbeque grill that hadn’t yet given up on life and everybody got fed as planned. Day two was also a good day because I didn’t have to be there for that one, either.

Day three was my day.

Cooking hot dogs is no big deal. Even two hundred hot dogs are pretty easy. It just takes time. Where the real problem began is when my wife scheduled me to cook on one of the hottest days of the year. I’m almost certain she didn’t plan it this way, but knowing how much she likes to torment me, I can’t be completely sure. The day I cooked, the outside temperature was pushing a hundred degrees.

Imagine standing around in 100-degree weather for two hours while stationed next to a grill fired up to about 400 degrees. It isn’t a pleasant experience.

Each dog took about eight minutes from the time I placed it on the grill until it got tossed into the aluminum pan to be carted off to the lunchroom. Eight minutes times 200 hotdogs. Lather, rinse, repeat. Although, I think if I just dropped the dogs on the concrete I might have been able to shorten the cooking time by about half. The soles of my feet were certainly well done by the end of the day.

At one point, while I was poking at some franks with the melting pair of tongs in my hand, the devil popped up. He hung around about five minutes, then said, “It’s too hot, bro. I’m outa here.”

At least, I think it was the devil. To be honest, it might have just been a hallucination brought on by heatstroke.

Despite the heat, I managed to get through the day without bursting into flames. I even got a free hotdog for my troubles. Kids got fed, and the school year officially came to a close.  

Now that summer has arrived, my wife can take a breath and relax … for about five minutes.

Did I forget to mention Summer School?

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Anatomy of a Bad Day

What constitutes a bad day? I suppose it’s a bit different for everyone, but I also think there are some basic components involved that will reliably turn any normal day into a bad one. In an attempt to identify these components, I have studied and dissected a terrible day I had recently. So, what have I determined?

A bad day – for me anyway – seems to be made up of four individual factors that all come together at the same time. Those factors are as follows:

One: Find out that you have been the victim of a crime.

A couple weeks ago, I woke up to discover that my mailbox had been broken into and some mail was stolen. Initially, I thought this was going to be my bad day. It turns out the theft of my mail was merely the precurser to an actual bad day. A sort of bad day warmup, if you will. The crime that actually triggered my bad day came about three days later.

My wife woke me up an hour before my alarm was scheduled to go off, which was a poor start all by itself. But, she woke me up to tell me that she had received an e-mail from our credit card company advising her there was suspicious activity on our card. She was on her way out the door to go to work and did not have time to deal with the problem so she figured she should drag me out of my own blissful sleep, dump the news in my lap before I was even fully awake, and have me try to fix it. She told me to call the credit card company and clear up the mess.

After an hour on the phone, my credit cards were finally canceled, and the fraudulent charges refunded to my account. Apparently, my old credit cards were about to expire and the company had mailed me new ones. You guessed it, the mail thieves from a few days back ended up with the new cards.

This was a very solid beginning to a bad day.

Two: Have something you are looking forward to get suddenly cancelled.

Later that day, I had plans to get together with my friend, Bob, and have lunch at my favorite restaurant. We typically meet up for lunch about once or twice a month depending on our schedules and I look forward to a good meal and sometimes a cigar afterwards. Bob usually tries to convince me to go fishing with him again, and I tell him I’ll think about it, knowing full well I am never getting on a boat with him again.

On this particular day, about the time I was hanging up with the credit card company, I got a text from Bob telling me that he was cancelling our lunch date. Something else had come up, and he wasn’t going to be able to make it. My original plan of Chinese food with a friend suddenly became me, the cat, and a peanut butter sandwich.

Swing and a miss. Strike two.

Three: Shit that was working just fine yesterday is now broke.

With lunch plans down the toilet, I decided that I should at least accomplish something productive. The fields needed to be mowed again since the weeds had bounced back to twice their original height from the last time I mowed. I grabbed the tractor keys and headed outside.

I jumped on the tractor, put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing.

Three weeks previously, I had paid over $300 dollars to fix the tractor because it had stopped working sometime during the winter months. When the repair guy left, it was running perfectly. Now, when I was ready to use it again, it had decided to go back into hibernation. $300 dollars wasted and I had a two-ton paperweight parked in my driveway.

Frustrated, and about ready to run away from home and look for a circus to join, I went back inside the house. To calm down, I decided to get myself a drink of water. I grabbed a cup and opened the refrigerator to pour myself some cold water from the water dispenser. And … nothing.

It made a clicking and humming noise, but nothing came out.

Broken tractor. Broken refrigerator.

The only thing left to do at this point was pour myself a drink of something stronger than water, then order a cake for the pity party I was about to throw.

I grabbed up the cat (my lunch date), collapsed on the couch and started petting the animal to bring my blood pressure down. I must have looked like some sort of demented Bond character.

Four: Use the very next excuse, no matter how minor, to fly off into an uncontrolled rage.

I sat down on the couch, trying to figure out what I needed to do to get the tractor and the refrigerator fixed. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall, but I knew that would not accomplish anything except create something else broken that I needed to fix. Namely, my hand.

At that exact moment, my youngest daughter wandered into the room and saw me on the couch.

“Hey, dad,” she said to me. “The light just burned out in my bathroom. Can you put in a new lightbulb?”

It’s possible that I overreacted. I’m not sure. All I know is that my daughter locked herself in her room and the cat ran to hide under the bed.

That was my bad day.

Since then, the tractor has been repaired, the refrigerator is working again, and we have gotten our new credit cards. Everything has pretty much gone back to normal.

Well, everything except it’s still dark in my daughter’s bathroom.

And the cat is still hiding under the bed.

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At Home on the Range

As many of you may or may not know, before slipping into the life of luxury that is called being a writer, I used to do something quite different to earn a living. For twenty-five years, I put on a blue uniform every day and wandered the streets of the city so society could treat me like their own personal chew toy.

That all ended in 2016 when the State of California told me that they would send me money every month on the condition that I did not come in to work any longer. I happily agreed. My agency stamped the word “retired” on my badge and we both went our separate ways.

While I was working, I was required by law to attend hundreds of hours of training every year. I attended classes and had to prove my proficiency during drivers training, arrest and control training, domestic violence and abuse courses, sensitivity and mental health lectures, etc. etc.

That was fine. I get why all that has become necessary.

What I didn’t know, however, was that even after retiring I would have to go to training. That’s right. Once a year, every year, I have to go to my department’s range and demonstrate that I still know how to shoot a handgun without losing a toe or other body part. For twenty-five years I carried a gun every day at work without any unfortunate mishaps. (Well, there was that one locker-room incident, but I still think that ceiling fan had it coming.) Even so, when I retired, I was advised that I needed to attend range training at least once every year.

This year, I almost missed it. I just happened to bump into a buddy of mine who asked if I was going to the retired employees day at the range this year. I told him I hadn’t heard anything about it. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe they don’t want you there for some reason. Who did you piss off?”

As I was sure (mostly) that I hadn’t actually pissed anyone off recently, I sent an email to the person in charge of scheduling the range for castaways like myself. I asked about the qualification date and why I hadn’t heard anything about it. She answered the next day.

She wrote:

Hi, Gary. Sorry you didn’t get the email, but we all thought you were dead.

I will go ahead and put you back in my email distribution list. I apologize for the mix-up.

Despite the surprise of hearing about my early demise, I soon received the relevant information and I showed up at my scheduled range date two weeks later.

The nice thing about a firearm qualification day for retired cops is that there is always food. Providing something to eat is pretty much how they guarantee that people show up. There is very little that motivates a retiree better than the promise of a free meal. This year, the Chief of Police and his three Captains fired up the grill and cooked tri-tip while I and the other old-timers wandered down to the firing line and, with shaking hands and poor eyesight, fired hundreds of rounds at mostly undamaged paper targets.

We may not have successfully hit a lot of those silhouettes, but I’m sure we scared several of them pretty badly.

Regardless of our scores, we still got to eat, so I consider the day a win.

When I was working, we were never allowed to bring food to the range. If we did, the range master would get mad and tell us to hike back up the hill and put it back in our cars or else he would take it away and eat it himself. We also had to clean up the range when we were done. As soon as we finished shooting, he would yell at us to pick up all the stray brass, clean our guns, then hurry up and get back to work.

Now, the only reason the range master yells at us is because someone’s hearing aid stopped working.

Personally, I prefer the old, retired guy range days.

After shooting, the day quickly devolved into tri-tip sandwiches, sodas, cigars, and gossip about what was happening at the police department since we left. (Okay, that last part is actually a lie since most of the retired officers don’t really give a crap what’s going on at the police department since we left. If the building burned down, I think the general response would have been, “I’m glad I don’t have to write that report.”) It was nice chatting and catching up with people I haven’t seen in several months.

In a year, I will have to do it all over again. Shoot my gun for two minutes, smoke a cigar and eat barbeque. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I’m just that kind of a guy.

Hopefully, next year I won’t need to remind anyone that I’m still alive.

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Packed House

Last year, I wrote a blog about moving away from home. The article, Empty Nest, was about my own experiences of going off to college, but I wrote it because I was thinking about what my life would be like in the coming year when my own children went away and left me behind.

What I have more recently discovered is that it is pretty much impossible to have an empty nest when you have effectively raised a bunch of Homing Pigeons. They are never truly gone. They are just lurking around the corner waiting to see what kind of food I’m going to put out on the table. Like buzzards circling overhead, as soon as they see an opportunity, they swoop back in to take whatever it is that caught their attention.

That’s a lot of bird analogies in just one paragraph. Oh, well. Moving on.

Last week, I drove to Sonoma to move EM1 out of her apartment and bring her back home. I was able to get most of her stuff into the truck, but there will need to be a second trip to gather a few last pieces of furniture before her lease runs out and the landlord tosses it all to the curb. (Although, I’ve seen EM1’s furniture and the curb would not be a bad place for it.)

Two days later, I drove to Sacramento State University to move EM2 out of her dorm. I thought we got everything, but it turns out she forgot to grab her saxophone from her locker in the Music Department building. The saxophone costs three times the total value of everything else she owns, yet somehow that is the one thing she forgets to bring home. Sometimes I wonder who raised that kid.

Now, and for the next three months, I will never again have a moment’s peace. There will always be a kid or two parked on my couch, eating my food, and watching music videos and K-dramas. Not to mention all their excess furniture and stuff I have to trip over trying to move from one room to another. It looks like a yard sale that got relocated into the house.

I have tried asking them to do some chores. There is always shopping, laundry, and yardwork to do around here. But, EM2 looked me straight in the eyes and said, “But, Dad, it’s my summer vacation. I worked really hard in school this year and I need a break.”

I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or get mad. I settled for turning red for a few minutes and stammering at the cat about ungrateful children and their total disregard of reality.

When I told EM2 that the real world did not have summer vacations, that when she got a job, she would need to go to work twelve whole months out of every year, she nodded at me and smiled as if I was on her side.

“Exactly,” she said. “So, before I go to work, I have to enjoy the time off while I have it. Thanks for understanding, Dad.” Then she went back to watching some boy band on her cell phone singing in Korean.

It wouldn’t be so terrible except for the fact that while they are on “vacation,” I am shopping, cooking and cleaning up for four people again, two of whom are complete slobs (I’ll let you guess which two). I am not allowed to use my own tv, I can’t keep snacks in the pantry for longer than eight seconds, and although I get yelled at if I go into either of the girls’ bedrooms, somehow I can’t get a moment of privacy even when I try to hide in the bathroom.

I know what you’re thinking right now. I’m doing an awful lot of complaining about having my kids back home with me. Sure, there are some adjustments to make, but aren’t there good things about having the girls around?

Well, if there are, I haven’t found them yet. Recently, I asked EM1 to run to the store and pick up a couple items that we needed for dinner. She came back home with three bags of garbage that she paid for with my credit card, stuck it in the pantry after telling me I wasn’t allowed to touch any of it, and then went to her room, leaving the items I had asked for on the kitchen counter.

I suppose I should be grateful she went to the store when I asked her to. After all, it’s progress over the personally hurtful answers I usually get to such requests.

In the distant future, when (if?) the girls finally move away and get homes of their own, get jobs and become self-sufficient, there may come a time that I look back on these days fondly. I might actually miss them and wish they were still home with me. I might call them up on the phone, just to hear their voices, or drive over to their places to have dinner or just spend a quiet evening with them. There might come a time that I’m sad they’re gone.

I mean, I’m not holding my breath or anything, but stranger things have happened.

For now, I’m stuck with two leeches fastened to my sofa while they enjoy their “vacation.”

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