Author: Gary

This week, my oldest daughter, EM1, is taking a friend and going camping.  Ordinarily, this would not be a big deal.  People go camping every day and no one feels the need to write a blog about it.  But this trip is a bit of a special occasion.  You see, this is her first time going camping without her parents.

To provide a little bit of background, this is the same girl that won’t leave the house to go into the garage by herself because, “there are spiders out there.”  This is the same girl that won’t go in the back yard and do yard work because it’s dirty and she will have to touch bugs.  Her entire experience camping up until now has been hiding in our trailer, away from the dirt, mosquitoes and animals, while other people worked to set up camp and provide her with meals and snacks.  She is like a baby bird, poking her head outside the nest just long enough for someone to cram food into her mouth.

Before leaving for this trip, she asked me if I would take her outside and show her how to set up the tent.  I thought that was a smart, logical request, and I told her I would be happy to do it.  I removed an old plastic tarp from the garage and handed it to her, explaining that she would need to place the tarp on the ground under the tent to keep it dry in case there was any unexpected wet weather.  EM1 refused to touch it.

“It looks dirty,” she told me.

I said that yes it was dirty.  We used it on our last camping trip and it was on the ground for four days.  Then she asked if there any bugs on it.  I said probably not, but that I could not guarantee some critter hadn’t crawled in at some point.

She asked me to open it up and check.  I suggested we open it up together outside while we set up her tent.  She walked away and told me she had something she needed to do.  I am not sure at this point if she is going to take the tarp with her.  I do know that she has still not learned how to set up the tent.  I can only hope that the friend camping with her knows what she is doing, and they won’t end up just draping the tent over a tree branch and sleeping on the ground underneath it.

Honestly, I am not completely sure why she decided she wanted to go camping.  My only guess is that EM1 was talking to a friend and told her that she camps with her family every year.  Which is true.  Then perhaps she said that with so many years of camping experience, she was an expert.  Which is a shameless lie.

I am afraid her friend may have been lulled into a false sense of security, like a blind man who has been promised a guide animal and then dropped into the middle of a busy freeway with a squirrel on a leash.  Except that the blind man probably wouldn’t get eaten by a bear in the middle of the freeway.  So, maybe it’s more like being surrounded by bears in a cave while holding a squirrel on a leash.

My daughter would be the squirrel in both analogies, just in case anyone was wondering.

My second concern has to do with the campfire.  While rummaging through EM1’s grocery bags (yes, I was snooping.  Shoot me.) I noticed that she had hotdogs and marshmallows.  I also noticed that she is packing absolutely no firewood or charcoal.  I don’t know what she thinks she is going to be burning to cook her food while she is on her outdoor adventure, but I admit to very mixed emotions on the proposition.

On the one hand, I would feel bad if she is unable to have a fire and has to eat all her meals cold.  That would be unfortunate.  On the other hand, I can vividly picture the ten o’clock news announcing that 5,000 acres of forest have just been burned to ash because two girls decided to set fire to their tent to make s’mores.  That would be … well … slightly more than unfortunate.

My friends and I were putting up tents and camping in the wilderness by ourselves at her age, so although I would personally prefer that my daughter do her camping in the backyard where I can see her and I know she is safe, I also know that she is an adult and needs to be able to make decisions for herself.  I just have to hope and pray that those decisions are good ones.

In other words, not the same decisions I made at her age.

My dad used to tell me that you can grow up lucky or smart.

I grew up lucky.  I hope EM is smart.

My eighteen-year old daughter, EM2, came to me the other day and said something that I’m quite sure no parent wants to hear from their teenage child.  She walked into the living room, stood in front of the television so I couldn’t completely ignore her, and she told me, “Dad, I want to get a tattoo.”

I don’t know what prompted this conversation.  Apparently, she had been thinking about it for several years, but was waiting until she turned eighteen before she decided to verbally punch me in the gut with the idea.  My mind immediately began to spin out of control with questions.

What kind of tattoo?  Where are you going to put it?  How big will it be?  Who gave you this idea, and do I need to kill him?

Then, I started imagining the things she might be contemplating.  Was she going to have a rose put on her chest?  Or perhaps some kind of elaborate lower back tattoo?  Or was she just going to cut to the chase and print the word “NEXT” on her thigh?  All these things flashed through my mind in an instant, but to my credit I just sat still and said nothing.

I wanted to tell her, no.  I wanted to forbid her from doing anything permanent to her body that she might one day regret.  But, I didn’t say anything to her for two main reasons.  One, it is her body to do with as she pleases.  I have no control over that.  And, two, I was afraid if I told her she couldn’t do it, she would go ahead and do it anyway.  I know that kid.  She would probably get a tattoo in hanzi that said, “I have the world’s worst father,” just to spite me.

I finally asked, “Are you sure you want a tattoo?  People will have a certain perception of you when they see you have a tattoo.”

EM told me she wasn’t worried about that.  She said that most of the other girls at the strip club already have tattoos.

Most of the time, I love my daughter’s sense of humor … but not always.

By the way, just as a side note, why is it when a man has the word “Mom” tattooed on his arm it is considered to be endearing, but if a woman has “Daddy” on her, it is a homing beacon to every predatory male on the planet?

Okay, that isn’t really important.  What is important, is my daughter researched local tattoo shops, picked one out and made an appointment to go in.  EM then asked me for a ride because she doesn’t have her driver’s license yet.

I’m still not sure if I made the right decision, but I agreed to drive her to her appointment.

The tattoo parlor was in a small, outdoor strip mall, located between a Jiu Jitsu studio and a liquor store.  I felt this was incredibly appropriate as both establishments probably added to their business clientele.  Martial arts students, flush with their recent promotions to blue belt, could wander in to request a tattoo of their dojo’s logo or emblem, making a quick stop at the liquor store beforehand to bolster their courage.

Inside the tattoo shop, EM and I were met by a large garage-style mat on the floor that said “Welcome,” a cow skull with ornate etchings on its surface hanging on the wall, and a receptionist with straight black hair, several facial piercings, and a butterfly tattoo on her neck.  The receptionist smiled at my daughter pleasantly, then gave me a look that clearly stated, “who are you, and why are you following young women into tattoo shops?”

I just pointed at my daughter, indicating that I was with her, then sat down in a chair in their waiting room.

I sort of zoned out at that point.  I remember watching my daughter get escorted into another room by a young man who had enough metal in his face to give an airport security guard fits.  Then, I just stared at the front counter, my gaze moving back and forth between a gold-colored statue of Buddha, and a small handwritten sign that said, “Cash Only!” and “We provide financing plans.”  That seemed a little bit of an oxymoron, but I didn’t have the headspace at that moment to wrestle with it.

It was only about fifteen minutes later when EM came back out to the waiting area with a bandage wrapped around her forearm.  She held out her phone to show me a picture of a cross inked onto the inside of her right wrist.  It was small, tasteful, and I felt as if I had somehow dodged a bullet.  I sighed quietly in relief as she paid the receptionist, and we listened to a rather lengthy litany of how to take care of her new tattoo over the next week.

As we walked out of the shop, I asked my daughter if she was happy with the cross on her wrist.  She said she was, and that she was already thinking about what her next tattoo was going to be.

As I sat down in the middle of the parking lot to digest this new bit of information, I couldn’t help but wonder what the other girls at the strip club were doing at that moment.

I have always loved gardening.  Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have always loved having a garden.  I actually hate all the work that goes into it, such as weeding, hoeing, digging, planting, etc.  But nothing beats the feeling of picking your own vegetables from plants that you personally put into the ground and tended for eight to twelve hot, miserable weeks.

My entire life, wherever I have lived, I have planted gardens in the back yard.  Sometimes that consisted of nothing more than a three-foot by five-foot planter box with a few tomato plants and a zucchini bush, but I always tried to do something.  This year, my garden goals are a little bit more elaborate than they have been in the past.  I currently have a large area in the yard tilled, manicured and planted with tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelon, cantaloupe, peppers, corn, and several varieties of squash.  Since retiring, I’ve decided to get a little more ambitious with my some of my projects.

When the field was cleared of weeds and the various seeds had all begun to sprout, I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishment.  I had done a really nice job.  At least, I thought so.  Unfortunately, others had different ideas about what I was doing.

Recently, I brought my wife outside to show off all the tiny plants popping up in neat little rows.  She asked me what I had planted.  I told her, pointing to the various tiny shoots of green as I described what they would one day produce.

“What about carrots and radishes?” she asked.

“What about them?” I asked back, slightly confused by the question.

“You don’t have any,” she stated simply.

Well, she had me there.  I had not planted any carrots or radishes.  I hadn’t realized that I needed to, but fortunately for me, my lovely wife was there to point out the folly of my oversight.  A garden without carrots and radishes is apparently nothing more than a mockery and a slight to the entire gardening community.  If the neighbors ever found out I had attempted such a thing, they would rally the village and run us out of our home with torches and pitchforks.

Hanging my head in shame, I climbed into my truck and drove to the nearest landscaping shop to purchase additional planter boxes in which to foster those critically important root veggies.  I bought four wine barrels, each one weighing in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds, then wrestled them into the bed of my truck to bring them home.

I’m pretty sure I tore something in my shoulder as I dragged those barrels off the truck and lugged them into the garden enclosure, but I had no time to worry about something so petty as permanently crippling myself.  I still had work to do.

Next, was a trip to the rock quarry to buy two thousand pounds of compost and planting soil, followed by an hour of shoveling the mixture out of the bed of my truck into the barrels.  When I had finished, I took a few minutes to lie on the ground and rest.  Okay, I think I actually passed out, but I can’t be certain because I don’t remember much after I started hallucinating.

When I was confident that I didn’t need to nap any longer and the taste of blood in the back of my throat had gone away, I ran one more errand.  This time I went to the local gardening center for seeds and watering equipment.

I finally had everything I needed.

When the seeds were planted, and the sprinklers were set on timers to water them regularly, I once more brought my wife outside to show her the garden.

I had spent seven hours of my day, as well as over $300 dollars from our bank account, to provide something that could have been accomplished at the grocery store in fifteen minutes for under two bucks.  But this had been an act of love, not a properly planned economic decision.  We might not be able to afford to feed the children dinner tonight, but in six to eight weeks they could have all the carrots and radishes they wanted.  (Which would be exactly none, as neither kid liked carrots or radishes.)

Flushed with pride – and perhaps a little bit of heatstroke – I  pointed at the barrels of dirt.  They weren’t much to see at that moment, but soon they would be teeming with green shoots of potential food.  The project might have almost killed me, but I was deeply gratified to see my wife smile and nod at the final results.

Then she glanced around the yard with a perplexed look on her face.  She tapped her chin a few times in thought.

Feeling my stomach turn and a sense of dread settling over me, I watched her gesture at an open spot of ground.

“What about lettuce?” she asked.

The faucet in my daughter’s bathroom broke.  It started as a slow drip and gradually picked up momentum until the water was running at full speed with no apparent way to shut it off.  I closed the water valve under the sink as a temporary measure, then promised my daughter that I would replace the faucet as soon as possible.

That was six months ago.

I will admit that I am not the handiest guy on the block.  I am generally about as useful around the house as a houseplant with emotional issues.  When it comes to home improvement and do-it-yourself repair projects, I am a master at watching others do them on television, but as far as going hands on in my own home, not so much.  “Fixing” a problem, in my experience, involves futzing with something until I make it worse, calling a friend for advice, then proceeding to cause so much damage that I am forced to hire someone to replace whatever it was that I was originally trying to repair.

And yes, futzing is a real word.   Feel free to look it up if you’re bored.

Because of my very long string of handyman failures, I have adopted the strategy of ignoring small problems and hoping that they will go away on their own.  Granted, this is a strategy that rarely pays off.

By the fourth month of pretending there was no sink in my daughter’s bathroom, the whole situation was already beginning to get embarrassing.  My daughter hung up a sign over the faucet stating, “Out of Order, Use Other Sink,” as if the bathroom was located in a bus terminal somewhere.  Friends and family had noticed the ongoing issue and started offering to come over and help me fix the faucet.  They were just being nice, but I couldn’t help seeing it as a reminder of my own ineptitude.  I was being backed into a corner and forced to take action.

Finally, there was only one thing left for me to do.

Sell the house.

My wife quickly said no to that idea, and suggested I call a plumber or fix it myself but to stop acting like a baby.  Actually, her comments weren’t quite that nice.  Her exact words involved some harsher language and the implication that I might be a bit confused as to my actual gender.

Bolstered by my wife’s motivational diatribe, I went to the hardware store, bought a new faucet, and prepared for battle.

At home I opened the box the faucet came in and pulled out the directions.  Step one stated that I would need an adjustable crescent wrench and a pair of safety goggles before getting started.  As I did not see any parts of the faucet that looked like they would jump out and poke me in the eye, I grabbed a wrench but opted to skip the glasses.

I crawled under the sink and began uncoupling the old faucet from the water pipes.  A thick brown sludge was released from where it had stagnated over the past half year and it immediately splashed down directly into my face.

The glasses suddenly made a little more sense.

Figuring that the worst was already behind me, I powered on, loosening nuts and bolts, and removing pieces of pipe.   More sludge was released, and it seemed like every bit of it found its way into my eyes.  Nearly blind, and dry heaving just a little bit, I placed the wrench around the last nut holding the old faucet in place.  It was rusted to the bolt, so I put some effort into breaking it loose.  The wrench slipped, and I raked my knuckles against an assortment of sharp edges under the sink.  Metal and porcelain vied with each other to see which could take more skin off the back of my hand.  I could not determine a winner as both did an admirable job.

My blood began to mix with the puddle of muck I was lying in, and I wondered briefly who the first person would be to discover my body if I died right there in the bathroom.  And would anyone be at all surprised by the manner of my death?

Battered, but still not deterred, I finally wrested the nut free, crawled out from under the sink and ripped the old faucet from its mounting.  I tossed the hardware over my shoulder in triumph, then made a mental note to myself to buy some sheetrock putty to repair the hole in the wall I had just made.

The new faucet went in much easier than the old one had come out.  When all the pipes and water lines were reconnected, I re-opened the water valve that had been off for the last six months and was elated to see that the faucet did not leak so much as one drop.

The deluge of water now shooting across my feet was coming from somewhere else.

I hastily turned the water off and glanced around at the carnage.  Between the water, the blood, sink parts and random damage in my immediate vicinity, I looked like I was the center piece of a rather nasty crime scene.  I wasn’t sure if I should call a plumber, or a cop.

It took another fifteen minutes of searching to find the cause of the new leak.  The connection between the hot water line and the faucet was not securely attached and had uncoupled under the pressure of the water flowing through.  I reattached them and once more turned on the water.

Everything held, and everything worked.

I ran to the living room and called for my wife to come see what I had done.  She followed me into the bathroom and paused, staring at the floor.  I turned the faucet on and off in demonstration of my accomplishment.

“What do you think?” I asked her, proudly, still turning the water rapidly off and on.

My wife nodded slowly, then said, “I need to take a walk.”

I heard the front door open and slam shut.  I think she was a little bit overwhelmed at the great job I had done.  She probably wanted to go visit one of the neighbors and brag about her husband.

Who can blame her?

We are repainting the house next week.  And by “we,” I mean a professional painter has been hired to paint the house and I will be standing outside asking questions and offering advice while pretending that I am actually helping the process along, rather than actively hampering it.

The decision to paint the house was an easy one.  Selecting what colors to use was significantly harder.  For some reason, my wife and I seem completely unable to come to a consensus.  Initially, we both just started suggesting colors that we liked.  We quickly discovered that we have drastically different ideas of what appropriate colors for a house should be.  My wife suggested yellow or green.  I advised that I would rather the house not look like it belonged in a row of buildings in a Norwegian fishing village.  As an alternative, I suggested red.  My wife agreed that red is a lovely color – if you are a cow – but she herself was not prepared to live in a barn for the next ten years.

Stalemate.

After much discussion, we found that there were only two things that we agreed on.  One, we both did not want a color that was so bland and neutral that birds would fly into the sides of the house because they didn’t notice that it was in the way.  And, two, we did not want something so bright and offensive to the eyes that the neighbors would wander into the yard because they thought the circus had just come to town.  That wasn’t much to work with, but at least it was a starting point.

We ended up going to a paint store to browse and do some brainstorming.  The plan was to peruse the store’s “color wall” and eliminate the hues that made either of us want to claw our eyes out of our heads or dry heave in an abandoned corner of the store.  Gradually we would, we hoped, find ourselves with a few possible choices that we both could agree upon.

It worked.  Sort of.

We discovered that we both liked a small assortment of colors in the spectrum of blue to gray.  This was progress, but we weren’t out of the woods yet.  Now, we needed to agree upon the exact shading of blue and gray.  Do we want more blue than gray?  Or should we go with a color that was more gray than blue?  I found myself saying things like, “I think we should pick a color that has enough blue in it that when you look at it, you know that it’s blue, but you don’t say to yourself, wow, that’s really blue!”

And my wife would nod her head as if I was still speaking English and was making perfect sense, even though I sounded to myself like an art critic trying to decide if he liked a Jackson Pollock painting.

We finally narrowed the selection down to two potential winners.  My wife began to discuss the pros and cons of each choice when I suddenly discovered that I had completely lost interest in the whole project.  One moment, I’m engaged and alert, and the next I’m staring at the floor, unable to focus on anything other than what kind of leftovers I might find in the refrigerator when I got home.  The needle on the gauge to my male tank of tolerance for home design projects had firmly landed on “E.”  I found my brain cluttered with thoughts like, “I’m going to spend most of my time inside the house, so what the hell do I care what the outside looks like?”  And, “Why do we need new paint, anyway?  The cracks in the old paint give the place character.”

My growing apathy must have been noticeable, because it was at this point that an employee of the shop decided it was time to intervene.  He offered to mix up two quarts of paint, one of each color we were considering, so we could take them home and paint sections of the house to get a better idea of how they would look on the entire exterior of the home.  I recommended that he should go back behind the counter and mind his own damned business, but my wife diplomatically reminded me that selling paint was his business, and I should probably just shut up and let the poor guy do his job.

We drove home with my wife cradling two small buckets of paint in her lap.

And that is pretty much where we are today.  The house has two large blotches of blue paint on one side, and I honestly can no longer tell the two shades apart.  The bad news is that we still have not decided on which color to go with, and the painters show up next week.  The good news is that I no longer care.  I might just tell them to use both colors in an elaborate pattern of stripes and swirls.  They can even add a few black patches and make polka dots if they like.

Why not?  I don’t have to look at it.

I will just sit on the couch in the living room and answer angry phone calls from the neighbors.

I guess the circus is coming to town, after all.

As the parent of a graduating senior in high school, it seems like the past month or so has been a blur of award ceremonies, banquets, rallies, and student/parent meetings.  I don’t think I have had a free night in two weeks.  Instead, every evening is dedicated to the Academic Award Ceremony, the Spring Band Concert and Award Ceremony, the Scholarship Foundation Banquet, and so many others that I could list, but I don’t want to completely fill up the available space on my computer’s hard drive.

When did all these “ceremonies” get started?  And does absolutely everybody have to get some kind of notice or recognition?  Are we concerned that somebody won’t get a crappy plastic trophy and from that moment forward their life will be ruined?

Last week, I attended the high school’s Academic Achievement Awards with my youngest daughter, EM2.  Just to give you some background, the night before this event the school had a banquet to honor the Senior students that had finished in the top 10 positions academically.  Now, I myself am not a whiz at logical puzzles, but I do know that if the school has already recognized its top 10, then the “Academic Achievements” that remain to be acknowledged are probably nothing I want to get too excited about.

I was correct to be skeptical.

The evening basically consisted of running through the names of students that had managed to finish their high school careers with a 2.0 GPA or higher.  For those that don’t want to do the math, that’s a C average (emphasis on “average”).  I spent an entire evening in an uncomfortable, metal, folding chair so I could hear my kid’s name mentioned somewhere in a crowd of 257 others.  No, wait … excuse me.  It was 258.  Apparently, there was a tie for 153^rd place.

Why does the school do this?  I don’t know.  I’ve never watched an Academy Awards show and had to sit through an extra two hours because: “In addition to our top 5 nominations for Best Picture, here is a list of two-hundred movies that we thought were just okay this year!”

When I graduated from high school (yes, I’m going to play the old man card here) there was the class valedictorian, and then there was … everybody else.  There was no ongoing list of students in ascending order of suck.  The only recognition anyone else received for their academic performance was a little piece of paper known as a diploma.  In fact, that piece of paper was the whole point of going to high school in the first place.  We were just happy we had managed to hold our shit together for four years without stabbing anyone.  Graduating was enough for most of us without sending us into a black spiral of depression because we didn’t get an extra pat on the back.

And if our grades and SAT scores were good, the only acknowledgement we wanted for that accomplishment was an acceptance letter from one of the colleges we applied for.

No plaque necessary.

Not only do I think the number of ceremonies these days is ridiculous, but I also have serious concerns about some of the specific awards that are handed out.  Model Student Award?  Really?  I mean, do we really need to recognize the kid that reminded the teacher when they forgot to hand out homework at the end of class?  Does a certificate ease the sting of the severe beatings he took in the bathroom from the other students after the bell rang?

If the school is going to make up reasons to give out trophies, can’t they at least make the award titles a little more interesting?  For example, in my daughter’s school band they could hand out the “Most Surprising Musician” award for that kid that nobody knew what the hell notes he was going to play next.  Or how about the “Sociopath Prize,” given out by the school faculty in hopes that the recipient might stop breaking out car windows in the staff parking lot.  That is an award ceremony that I would definitely want to attend.

But, no.  The schools seem determined to make these evening events as long and as dry as humanly possible.  And along with the seemingly interminable list of students crossing the podium and shaking hands with people they spent the rest of the year actively avoiding, with each name, there is a teacher making a “short” speech about why this student was selected for this particular accolade.  After the first two hours, all those speeches began to sound the same.  “This student made it a pleasure for me to come to work every day …” Blah.  Blah.  Blah.  I think it would have been a little closer to the truth if the presenter had simply said, I could tolerate this kid, while the rest of those little bastards made me want to cry into a whiskey bottle before cutting my wrists.

EM2 received a few awards this year. I don’t remember for what.  I think I fell asleep right before they announced her name.  I did see the trophies when she got them home, however.  They looked suspiciously like the Participation Trophy I got when I was twelve-years old and my little league baseball team finished dead last in our division.  Mostly because of me, but we don’t need to drag up those painful memories right now.  We can dive through that dumpster of shame some other time.

For now, it is enough to celebrate my daughter and her many accomplishments.  So to her I say, way to go, Sweetheart!  Congratulations on winning Best … um, … Most … uh….

Whatever.