Author: Gary

Last night, we had several members of the extended family over to the house to have dinner.  This gathering of the troops has been an on-going weekly affair started by my wife’s relatives in the early 1990’s.  One evening each week, the whole family (about 10 to 16 people depending on availability of some of the college-aged children and occasional outlier attendees) gathers together for a meal, the location of the gathering rotating among five different households.

A list is created at the beginning of every calendar year that lays out in black and white where we meet each week.  This is serious business in our family.  I can tell you in January where I will be having dinner on Wednesday during the second week of November.  It’s already on the calendar, and God help me if I forget about it and make plans to be somewhere else that day.  No one has been physically harmed yet, but I don’t want to be the one they decide to make an example of.

It is an interesting dynamic that I married into.  While growing up, I saw my aunts, uncles, cousins and more distant relatives about once every five years during one of our sporadic Wilbanks family reunions.  I would spend the day trying to remember the names and faces of the people that claimed they were related to me, then pass the next few years forgetting them all over again.  In my wife’s family, the gatherings are slightly more frequent, and they have been happening consistently for over 20 years.

So, how do they work?  I’m glad you asked.

When it is your turn to cook, the host fixes a full meal, usually including hors d’oeuvres, a main course, and dessert.  (Dessert?  Desert?  I hate this word.  I’m never sure which one you eat, and which one is the sandy hot place where scorpions kill you.)  The host prepares the food, serves the food, and cleans up the mess when the meal is over.  The rest of the locust … er, family … simply show up, eat, enjoy copious amounts of alcohol and lively conversation, then leave.

The menu can be anything from burgers and dogs off the grill, to crab and rib-eye steaks.  I have been treated with fish, fowl, beef and pork in various soups, casseroles, stews, and pastas.  Side dishes of veggies, potatoes, salads, rice and beans have also made appearances.  On occasion we have been surprised with more exotic fare such as Pad Thai, handmade spaetzli, crepes, or spicy gumbo.  Dinner, at times, may also be pizza delivered from the local pizza shop because someone just didn’t have time to prepare a meal that week, or else a more creative endeavor went completely sideways and ended up being tossed out into the yard in a moment of frustration.

It is a lot of work planning and executing dinner when it is our night.  The tradeoff, of course, is that every Wednesday night for the next four weeks I get to go somewhere and be catered to without ever having to lift a finger.  If I want seconds, I get seconds.  If I spill a drink, someone else mops it up and refills my glass.  If I set fire to a bread basket because I pushed it too close to a lit candle, I only have to sit back while the host puts out the flames and brings me more bread.  (True story … unfortunately.)

It’s like going to a really nice restaurant with attentive staff, and not having to pay for it.  There is no valet service at the end of the night, but hey, no situation is perfect.

I know this tradition is an odd one.  Most families don’t do stuff like this, choosing instead to find excuses to avoid relatives rather than invite them over to the house.  Our weekly meal is a rarity that even caught the attention of the Sacramento newspaper back in 2001.  On January 21, 2001, they published an article about my family called “A Meal to Remember.”  It was actually a very nice write-up and you can still find it online in the Sacramento Bee archives.  It will cost you three bucks to pull up a copy of it, so you may want to just take my word for it.  Or not.  It’s your money, spend it however you please.

Today, the house is still a bit of a wreck.  I haven’t finished picking up cups, beer bottles, and stray napkins.  There are still some dishes on the counter and in the sink, but I will get to them eventually.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is next week, dinner will be at “not my house.”

The week after that, it will be at “not my house.”

The week after that …. Yeah, you get my point.

It has been about a year and a half since I retired from law enforcement.  While I was working, I woke up each morning knowing that I had somewhere I needed to be and things that had to be done.  Practically every moment of my day was occupied with some sort of activity, whether that activity was just filing paperwork or a hundred mile-per-hour car chase.  There seemed to always be something that demanded my.  I had a sense of purpose.

Even when I had absolutely nothing on my agenda, there was always someone around to talk to, or go grab a bite to eat with.  (Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition.  Settle down.  This is a blog, not a thesis.)  But now that I have left the badge and the gun behind, I frequently find myself at home with nothing to do, and nobody around.

Finally!

While I was gainfully employed, I hated every moment of it.  Now that I can lock the doors and hide from everybody else, the world is a better place.  For those that know me, you understand what I’m saying.  For those that don’t, let me break it down:

Basically, I am a terrible person.  I am cynical, irritable, and I generally despise the presence of other people.  My company is tolerable in small doses, but if you are going to spend any decent amount of time with me, we are both better off just staying in our assigned neutral corners.  Don’t believe me?  Come visit for a while.  I will show you where my wife and children have written “Please help me” backwards on several of our windows.

I must admit though, with nowhere to go each day my schedule has fallen into something of a rut.  I wake up, eat, poop, then fall back asleep.  Repeat ad nauseum.  On occasion, I will go wander around the yard and sniff the bushes.  I have basically become another family house-pet.

The only real difference between me and the dog is that I am not flexible enough to lick my own genitalia.  I do have opposable thumbs, which allow me to operate a can opener without assistance, however I am not certain that I got the better deal in that trade off.

The only other advantage I have is that I can leave the yard and go for a walk whenever I feel like it.  In addition, although my wife may disagree with this assumption, I do not need to wear a leash when I go out.  I’m not going to get lost or run away.  I may wander for a while, even chase after the occasional random squirrel, but I will eventually find my way back home.

Also, since we moved out of the city and into farm country several years ago, I have noticed the scenery is much more entertaining when I walk.  Instead of passing cookie-cutter houses stacked one on top of the other, I see trees, fields, horses, goats … and, oh yeah, let’s not forget lots and lots of dead things.

Yes, dead things.  It is absolutely amazing how many feathered, furred, and scaled animals wind up dead on the roadways out here.  I have discovered skunks, hawks, snakes, rabbits, turtles, frogs, and God knows what else during my walks.  And we don’t have animal control vans driving out to scoop up the carcasses either.  The dead critters just sort of hang out for a while until the vultures find them.

The other day, I found a cat skeleton on the roadway that had been picked clean.  Everything had been eaten except the animal’s back feet, which had been left completely untouched.  For some unexplainable reason, the buzzards had left Puss with his boots.  I thought about taking a picture of it to show my family, but they are already concerned enough about my sanity.  I don’t want to toss any gas onto that fire.

Well, I think I have rambled enough for one day.  Looking back on what I have written so far, I can see that my train of thought has sort of jumped the rails this week.  If you are a bit confused by it, don’t worry, you are probably not alone.

So, let me just sum up by highlighting the main points.

1. I don’t miss my job.
2. I wish I was more flexible.
3. There are a surprising number of dead things near my house.

See you next week.

I have allowed myself to get a little out of shape over the past couple of years.  It’s the usual story: I don’t exercise enough, I don’t eat properly, and I spend way too much time just sitting around letting my body absorb into the couch.

My days of running after the ice cream truck are long over.  I still want the ice cream, but there is no longer anything in my life that is so important that it deserves more than a determined walk.

The other day, I was doing some yardwork and I almost passed out while trying to dig up a dead tree.  It was actually quite a small tree, to be honest.  In fact, it could probably be better described as a large bush.  It was the kind of plant I have ripped out a hundred times before, only this time the tree almost won the battle of who will be the end of whom.

Part of the problem is age.  I’m getting older.  There is a reason that most professional athletes retire in their thirties and forties.  The body begins to slow down, injuries take longer to heal, and it is much harder to keep yourself in top physical condition.  But although this is a contributing factor, let’s get real, I never really set the bar that high when I was in my twenties.  I could work my way through a push up or two without joint damage or causing myself heart palpitations, but that was about it.  I wasn’t going to the Olympics to represent team USA; not unless they introduced new events like TV watching or cramming Oreos into your mouth.  I might have been a serious contender in those categories.

I need to work out more.  That’s the long and short of the situation.  But it has been difficult finding something I can build a routine around and reliably stick to.

My wife wakes up before the sun rises and goes running most mornings.  I don’t like running … or the cold, or the dark, or waking up before noon.  So, that’s out.

My old gym is too far away.  I have no desire to drive for forty-five minutes to work out for a half hour, then drive home.  That’s a waste of time that I could be spending more productively catching up on reruns of Friends and shoving something fattening down my throat.

I tried walking around the neighborhood for a while.  That was okay, except for the days when it rained, or was too hot, or too windy, or a sci-fi movie marathon was airing on television.  That leaves about eight perfect walking days each year.  But otherwise, not happening.

I bought some free weights and put them in our spare room.  They have been a remarkable success at holding the carpet in place on the floor.  I would hate to pick one of them up now and ruin their perfect record.  They have become part of the décor in the room, and just like I don’t pick up the couch and shove it around every day, the weights aren’t going anywhere either.

I also bought a stationary bicycle.  I put it upstairs so I don’t have to trip over it or be reminded that I own a stationary bicycle.  Every couple of months, I walk up the stairs with the idea that I will get a little bit of exercise.  After standing on the landing trying to catch my breath for a few minutes, I stare at the bike and tell myself, “Nope.  That’s enough of a work out for today.”  Then I go back downstairs to search through the pantry to reward myself for my good intentions.

Maybe I need to just accept the fact that I am on that long, slow decline into death.  It doesn’t need to be a deep dark thought.  It can be a pleasant realization.  It’s a natural part of human existence, after all.  It is as inevitable as me eating a bacon cheeseburger.

Which brings us to the second part of my death-spiral equation: my eating habits.

I know I should eat better, but let’s face it, eating healthy is a lot of work.  It requires meal planning, careful shopping, and cooking.  These are all skills in which I am sorely lacking.  My forte is microwave dinners, waffles, and fast food drive-throughs.  On a good day, I can throw together a couple of scrambled eggs and make some toast.

I once watched a cooking show on television that challenged viewers to make a complete meal with items they already had in their freezer.  I popped open my freezer but was at a complete loss over what to make using frozen peas, ice cubes, and a dead hamster that I had forgotten to bury.  I finally resorted to a bowl of cold cereal.  I ate it dry because I had neglected to buy milk that week.

Like I said, planning and shopping are not my strengths.

My crappy diet isn’t a new thing, either.  I’ve been eating poorly since I was a kid.  Fast food, sweets, starches, and soft drinks have been my staples for years, and I don’t anticipate that is really going to change anytime soon.

My mom once tried to get me to eat spinach by telling me that Popeye ate spinach and it made him really strong.  I told her that a dung beetle can lift ten times its own weight, but I wasn’t going to eat any of that either.

I would like to eat better.  I would like to exercise and be in better shape.  I want to be around for many more years to watch my kids get married and have kids of their own.

I also want to eat an entire chocolate cake by myself.

We’ll see which way it goes.

As my youngest child rapidly approaches her eighteenth birthday, it has occurred to me that my days of raising children are over.  I am now responsible for parenting young adults.  This new phase of my life involves making suggestions rather than giving directions, since my daughters have reached an age where they must learn to make decisions for themselves.  That, and they wouldn’t listen to me anyway if I did try to tell them what to do.

I have to admit that dealing with younger children is much easier than dealing with young adults.  Younger children are more likely to follow directions, because you can still take away their stuff.  If you try to discipline an older teenager, they just roll their eyes and say things like, “Whatever, old man.”

It’s the “old” part that hurts.

Younger kids also are more willing to believe you when you lie to them.  When my girls wouldn’t go to sleep, I would tell them that if they moved too much or made too much noise, the child-eating dragon would wake up and come out of the closet.  It worked every time.  The girls would immediately quiet down.  Of course, I still can’t get them to hang their clothes up in the closet, but a parent sometimes has to compromise to achieve the greater good.

A parent can also shield a child from some of the harsher realities of life.  My oldest daughter had a hamster when she was eight.  It died suddenly while she was away at school, but I did not have time to dispose of it.  So, thinking fast, I told her that I had taught it a new trick.  The hamster was just ‘playing dead’ whenever she came into the room.  Of course, I had to place it in different parts of the cage from time to time so she thought it was moving around when she wasn’t looking.  This trick bought me an extra two weeks before I was able to bury it in the yard and tell her Mr. Fluffy Pants had run away.

As my children grew older, they became, well … not smarter, but much less gullible.  They figured out that mom isn’t actually allergic to messy bedrooms, vegetables don’t taste better than candy, and dad can’t tell when they are lying just by looking at their faces.  That last one was where I really lost control.

They got a lot meaner, too.  We were all at the dinner table a few nights ago, and I asked my youngest to clear the table and carry the dishes to the sink.  She leaned over and placed both of her hands flat on my stomach.  I asked her what she was doing, and she told me, “Trying to feel the baby kick.”

I may have gained a pound or two in the past couple years, and this apparently provides unlimited amusement for my daughter.  I told her it’s not nice to make fun of someone’s weight.  She said, “It’s also not nice to wake a kid up and drop them off at school on a Saturday.  What can I say?  Lousy parents get lousy kids.”

I didn’t know if I should get mad at her for mouthing off, or be proud of her for being so self-aware.

It is an odd dynamic in the house with adult children.  Instead of yelling at the kids to be quiet, I find I am usually begging them to talk to me.  Rather than wondering when they are going to move out of the house, I am more often wondering where the hell they are and when they’re going to be home.  And the only family members that seem to have a bedtime these days are me and my wife.

And I suppose it only gets worse from here.  It won’t be too long before the kids will be making all of my decisions for me, and I will have to do what I’m told so they don’t take away my stuff.  They’ll decide where I live, what I eat, and what I wear.  They’ll also pick out the person that will take care of me when I can no longer take care of myself.  It will probably be a large lady with the name, Gerta.  And she will say things to me like, “C’mon old timer, it’s time to take a bath.”

It’s the “old” part that hurts.

This week, my daughter’s school asked me if I would be willing to chaperone the annual band trip to Disneyland.  Because I chaperoned during last year’s trip, they thought I would be a perfect candidate to do it again this year.  Honestly, I think I would rather work in the County Jail watching inmates than go on another high school field trip.

You may feel that this response is an exaggeration.  I promise you, it isn’t.  You see, during my lifetime, I have actually had the opportunity to serve in both capacities, and therefore, I believe I am uniquely qualified to make this comparison.

Let’s do the math, shall we?

First, let’s look at the bus trip.  In jail, the guards ride in the cab of the bus while the inmates sit in the back.  There is a metal fence between the guards and the inmates so that there is no interaction between the two.  On a school field trip, there is no protective barrier.  Chaperones are placed right in the middle of the zoo, surrounded by all the animals.  The chaperones must remain ever vigilant as there is no way of telling exactly which monkey will be the next to fling feces.

When it is time to eat, in jail it is the guard’s responsibility to advise the inmates where to be and when to be there so that they may get their next meal.  The food shows up, the inmates show up, a meal is accomplished.  This generally takes between fifteen and thirty minutes, depending on the number of mouths to feed.  With teenagers, the process takes significantly longer.  For example, you tell them where to go to eat and there is an instant argument.  No matter where the meal is to occur, there will be a sizable percentage of the population that would rather go somewhere else.  Even if you manage to get everyone right up to the front door of the restaurant, there will inevitably be someone that decides the place across the street is better.  Even if the place across the street is actually across six lanes of busy freeway traffic.

Which brings up the next comparison.  What happens if you lose somebody?

When a guard loses an inmate, he notifies the person in charge who, in turn, notifies local law enforcement to start searching for the missing person.  The guard then returns to watching whatever remains of his flock.  During a field trip, well … actually … the exact same thing happens.  Except in a jail, it is unlikely that the guard will be fielding a phone call from the missing inmate’s angry mother.

Sleeping arrangements.  In jail, every inmate has a room.  That room has a door.  And all of those doors have locks on the outside.  When an inmate goes to bed for the night, the door is locked and they stay put until the doors are opened the next morning.  On a field trip, the kids all get hotel rooms.  Each room has a door.  And all of those doors have locks … on the inside.  I don’t think I need to go into any further detail on this point.

Finally, let’s look at jail vs. amusement park.  When someone builds a jail, the entire building is designed to make sure the people on the inside stay on the inside.  An amusement park does not have a similar goal.  In fact, once you buy your ticket to go inside, they would actually prefer that you leave so that they can sell somebody else a ticket to take your place.  The only thing keeping teenagers inside the park is their promise to the chaperone that they won’t leave.  Having been the parent of two teenagers, I know exactly what a teenager’s promise is worth.

I promise I will do my homework.  I promise I will clean my room.  I promise I will feed the dog.  And, what is the actual end result?  I have an uneducated kid with a messy room and a malnourished dog.

Despite all this, my wife tried to convince me to chaperone the trip anyway.  She said I should do it to spend time with my daughter.  She said in this respect, the field trip is better because if I were working in a jail I could not hang out with family.  I reminded her of the family she married into.  If I were still working in a jail, the odds are actually a little too high that I might be running into various relatives.

So, will I be going back to work at the County Jail?  Hell, no!  I hated that job.  The happiest day of my life was getting reassigned to work in patrol.

Will I be chaperoning my daughter’s field trip?

What do you think?

Yeah.  Probably.

A couple months ago, my dog started to limp.  And no, that is not a euphemism for some kind of sexual dysfunction.  I mean it literally.  I have a German Shepard named Sky, and she started to hobble on her left front foot.

When we noticed her limping, my wife and I took Sky to the veterinarian to have her foot examined.  Unfortunately, as soon as the vet saw my dog, she started saying things like, “Wow, I’ve read about this before, but I’ve never actually seen it,” and “I’m going to have to call my friend at UC Davis to figure out how to treat it.”

I felt like I was talking to a car a mechanic running up the price of the repairs.  “I don’t know what you did to this car, but it’s going to take a while to fix it.  And I don’t have the right parts in the shop, so I’ll have to special order them.”

Long story short: I knew this was going to be expensive.  Sky has a congenital defect that caused calcium deposits to form in the pad of her foot, and it was going to be about $1000 to open up her foot and remove them.

The vet gave us an estimate on the surgery, then sent us home to discuss it.  At home, I suggested to my wife that it would much cheaper to simply shoot Sky and go find a new puppy that looked exactly like her.  Bullets are cheap, and I had a couple extras lying around in the closet.  We could even name the new dog Sky to make the transition more seamless.

My wife didn’t talk to me again for three days.

When the subject of Sky’s surgery came up again a week later, I advised my wife that maybe amputation would be a better way to go.  I have a brand new circular saw in the garage that I am dying to try out, and I have seen several three-legged dogs that seem perfectly happy hopping around with a missing appendage.  I think my wife took this suggestion a little better than my first one, because I only got the silent treatment for two days this time.

Finally, reluctantly, rather than going on vacation, buying a really nice new television set, or paying the monthly mortgage on the house, we decided to take Sky in for surgery.

The surgery went well (for a thousand bucks, I should hope so), and we brought her home with a brand-new plastic cone around her head, and a bright pink bandage on her foot.  The bandage was pink because Sky is a girl and the veterinarian is, apparently, a bit of a sexist.  She just assumed that a girl dog wanted a pink wrap regardless of the dog’s actual preferences.  Maybe Sky wanted a blue bandage, but we will never know because the doctor didn’t ask.

Also, dogs can’t talk.

When Sky got home, she promptly began to bang her plastic cone into every damn thing in the house.  My wife said she was crashing into things because she couldn’t see where she was going.  I, however, think she was doing it on purpose.  I know if I had a plastic cone around my neck, I might throw a bit of a tantrum and break some stuff.  Especially if someone had wrapped my foot in a ridiculous pink bandage.

Sky isn’t supposed to move around too much until her stitches come out in a few days.  Too much activity might cause her to tear out some of the stitches and cause the injury to bleed.  This means that she is stuck indoors most of the time, and when she goes outside she must be kept on a leash so she doesn’t try to run on her bad foot.  She doesn’t seem to enjoy this very much.  Sky spends her day lying on her doggy bed in the living room glaring at me because her foot hurts, she’s bored, and she blames me for all her problems.  And I glare back at her because she’s the reason I’m completely broke.

My wife is upset because her dog is injured and her husband is acting like a child.  Basically, everyone is unhappy.  In fact, the only one in the entire house that seems to be enjoying this situation is the cat.

She had better not gloat too much, though.

I’m still looking for an excuse to try out the circular saw.