Author: Gary

My father passed away in 2004.  I miss him, and lately I’ve been feeling rather nostalgic about him.  I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood, and the time I was able to spend with him while he was still alive.

The thing I remember the most about my father, besides his two pack of cigarettes per day habit, and him hiding booze bottles around the house because he thought we didn’t know he had a drinking problem, was a conversation we had a few months before I turned eighteen.  I had just told him that I was thinking about taking a year off after high school and not going to college right away.

My dad took a long drag on his cigarette, paused the video game he was playing, and set the hand controller down on the coffee table.  He looked up at me for a long moment, then said, “Okay.  Where are you going to live?”

I was puzzled by his response and answered him with a carefully considered, “Huh?”

He told me that he had saved some money and he was planning to use it to help me pay for college.  He said if I decided to not go to college, he would write me a check for half of the total amount that he had put aside for my education, then he would help me pack so I could move out on my eighteenth birthday.

I asked him if he was kidding or being serious about making me move out.  He just picked up the game controller and turned back to his game.

I started college in September that year.

I know what you are all thinking.  “Who the heck writes checks?”  But you have to remember this was in the 1980’s, so give the old guy a break.

I used to think that he told me that story because he felt strongly about me going to college and wanted to scare me into going.  Now that I have two children of college age myself, I am not so sure that was his only motivation.  I think he just wanted me to get the hell out of his house.

As I think about it, there were other signs that my dad wanted me to leave.  There was the time I was fifteen years-old and he suggested I should run away from home.  I asked him why he was being so mean to me and he said, “I’m not mean.  If you run away, I would be happy to fix you a sandwich for the trip.  In fact, if you leave right now I’ll even throw in a cookie.”

While the cookie was tempting, I had school the next day and I needed someone to drive me there, so I declined the offer.

To be fair to my father, I was the youngest of three boys and my oldest brother is thirteen years older than I am.  My dad had been dealing with kids of various ages in his house for over thirty years, and he was tired of having us around.  And I don’t blame him.

I know I can’t wait until my kids have moved out and I can have my life back.  No more sporting events and recitals to go to.  No more school fund raisers I have to participate in.  Just an occasional long-distance phone call to say, “Hi, dad.  I need money.”  The rest of the time would once more belong to me.

I used to wonder why birds abandoned their nests and built new ones every year.  Now, I know.  It’s because the kids know where it is, and you can’t change the locks on a nest.

My dad wanted me to leave the nest.  Either with a goal in my mind, or a footprint on my ass, he just wanted me to go.

As I write this blog and I sit here thinking about my father, I wish I could build a time machine and go back to talk to my teenage self.  There are three very important things I would like to tell me.

One: hug your parents more often.  You are going to miss them one day.

Two: when the chemistry teacher is talking, you should pay more attention.  Eyebrows take several weeks to grow back.

And three: when your dad makes you angry, instead of yelling and fighting with him, just tell him you are going to convert the garage into an apartment and live with him forever.  I guarantee you’ll win every argument.

Over the past couple weeks, I have been driving my daughter around to various musical auditions.  She is a senior in high school this year and, like most seniors, she has been submitting applications to various colleges.  Because she has decided that she wants to major in music while in college, she is required to do two things most college applicants never have to go through.  First, she has to listen to everyone she knows telling her that she will never make any money with a music degree.  And, second, she must physically go to each of the colleges she applied to and audition with her saxophone before they will decide whether or not to accept her.

And because she has to go to auditions, I have to go to auditions.  Part of the reason I go is, of course, to be a supportive dad.  But the main reason I go with her is because, simply put, she does not yet have her driver’s license.  Yes, you read that correctly.  My daughter will be eighteen years-old this year and still doesn’t have her driver’s license.

Why doesn’t she have it?  Because she does not want to drive.  I am still trying to wrap my head around this one.  The day I turned sixteen, I was first in line at the DMV to take my behind-the-wheel test.  I couldn’t wait to be driving on my own.  Although, I had to come back later for a re-test because …  well … this isn’t about me.  Let’s get back to the subject at hand.

My daughter told me that she will take the test when she turns eighteen.  She wants to wait because when she is eighteen she will not need to do the required driver’s training before she tries for her license.  For some reason, in California, if you are under the age of eighteen, you must complete a certain number of hours of practice driving with a certified instructor before you can test for your license.  If you are eighteen or older, this requirement goes away.

I must admit, I think this is a moronic rule.  Age should never replace actual study and practice.  For example, how would you like to go in for surgery and hear the doctor say, “I didn’t go to medical school.  I just waited until I was thirty-five, so now I can cut you open and it’s okay.”

Anyway, with no license, and places she needs to be, my daughter requires a chauffeur.  Lucky me, I drew the short straw.  I get to drive for hours all over the state so she can play her saxophone for ten minutes, and a small group of bored professors can decide if she is good enough to let me and my wife give them all our money.

The auditions might not be so bad if they would let me sit in the room and listen to her play.  But, no.  That might be a “distraction.”  As if they suspect I might be standing in the back of the room with an air horn and a banner that says, “That’s my girl!”  Okay, I might, but the point is they never gave me the chance.

During the most recent audition, I got to sit in a small room with a dozen other parents, all of us not talking to each other.  (They represent the competition after all, so why should I be nice to them?)  We all just sat in uncomfortable folding chairs and stared at the “hospitality table,” where someone had put out a twenty-gallon coffee pot and a paper plate full of stale cookies.

That isn’t speculation, by the way.  Those cookies were as stale as bleached cardboard.  I know because I ate one.  After the first bite, I was too polite to just throw it away, so I went ahead and finished it.  I have no explanation as to why I went back and got another one.  But, again, this isn’t about me.

When my daughter came back from the audition room, I asked her how it went.  I got about as much from her as most parents get from their teenage children.  She told me, “It was okay.”

I asked her what she meant by, okay.  Okay, as in they rushed the stage and begged you to come to their school?  Or, okay, as in you crapped your pants and they had to open a window to air out the room?

She said, “I dunno.  It was just okay.”

That’s it.  That’s all I got out of her.  Now, I can only sit back and wait to see if any of the schools are going to let her in.  Hopefully, at least one of them says, yes.

But if not, maybe when she turns thirty-five she can become a surgeon.

I do not fall asleep easily.  That is not a recent development, however; I have been like this from a young age.  I never have been able to fall asleep quickly.  I find I have too much garbage circulating in my head as I lay in bed and it usually takes some time to process it all enough to let me fall asleep.  I greatly envy those that can crawl into bed, turn the light off, and be asleep before the pillow starts to get warm.  Envy them, and perhaps hate them a little.

The late-night insomnia is only made worse when I have to be up early the next morning.  Thinking about what time I have to get up makes it harder to fall asleep, and this usually means that I will most likely manage a few hours of sleep at best before the alarm clock demands that I get up.  I will stagger through my day, thinking about nothing except how much I want to go home and go back to bed.  Yet, when I finally do get to crawl back under the covers, I will be wide awake again.  And the more often it happens, the worse it gets.  I have discovered that sleep deprivation can at times make even simple coherent thought difficult.  Fortunately, yellow never delivered too many bees.

I have attempted methods of falling asleep more quickly.  I have discovered that if I drink copious amounts of alcohol during the evening, I often fall asleep quite easily.  The subsequent hangover the next morning, and trying to remember where the hell I am, often negate any benefit I might have derived from sleeping longer, so I have ruled this tactic out as a long-term solution.

For me, finding sleep is a process; a long, grueling process.  First, I have to go over everything I did during the day, usually focusing on the things that pissed me off or that I somehow screwed up.  I think about what I could have said or done differently that would have created a better outcome than the one I am actually stuck with.  It is a very depressing game of “if only” that can last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.  It never accomplishes anything or actually helps me feel better in any way, but it is an unavoidable part of falling asleep.

Next, is the to do list for the following day.  This list includes: where I have to go, who I need to talk to, and (of course) what I’m going to be having for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  These are pivotal events each day and must be carefully planned out.  They are not to be left to chance, lest I find myself poking carrot sticks into a peanut butter jar while driving to Jack in the Box.

After, and only after, the essential planning has been completed, then begins the fun stuff.  If anything about insomnia can be referred to as “fun stuff,” that is.  This is when the esoteric crap starts to flow through my head.  This is when I start to wonder about things like death, and what happens to a person after they die.  Is there an afterlife, or is it just eternal darkness?  And then I start to panic a little bit because I’m afraid of the dark, and eternal dark would really suck.  I wonder if maybe this is going to be the night that I fall asleep and don’t wake up in the morning.  And I wonder if my wife will ever be convicted of the murder.

When I finally work my way through the depressing blackness of my own soul, this is typically when I begin to doze off.  The ideas in my head begin to break apart and focus on less important things like: Why aren’t there any animals with just one eye?  How do you describe what chicken tastes like?  Why do they call it celery root?  It is neither celery, nor a root.  And, do dogs ever accidentally step in their own poop?

This is also the time when flawed logical concepts start to make sense.  For example: if I drive 80 miles per hour for 45 minutes, then stop for 15 minutes for gas and maybe a snack, I only averaged 60 miles per hour.  So, is it really speeding?  Think about this factoid some night when you are only half awake and see if it doesn’t make sense to you as well.

Each night, sleep does at last arrive.  Unfortunately, it generally doesn’t last.  I am a very light sleeper, and I find myself waking up several times during the night for no apparent reason.  As I grow older, bodily imperatives such as a desperate need to pee every night have added to the number of times I wake.  I find this terribly inconvenient, however I have to admit there is an upside to the situation.

I have discovered that frequently, when I wake up in the middle of the night, it is right in the middle of a dream.  As a writer, these ephemeral events in my head have been the basis for several short stories and have even triggered ideas for a novel or two.  To take full advantage of these moments, I have begun to keep a notebook beside my bed, so I can write down whatever it is that I’m thinking about when I wake up.  This way I don’t just forget about the idea later.

Recently, I was flipping through my bedside notebook and came across entries for spinach-flavored bubble gum, and a giraffe with three teeth.  Not exactly useful stuff.  I realize that not every idea can be a winner.

Maybe I just need more sleep.

A smoke detector is a marvelous invention that everyone knows saves lives.  It is a compact, incredibly effective piece of technology that should be in every household.  Most importantly, lest I forget to mention it, the smoke detector is also evil incarnate.

Somehow, manufacturers of the smoke detector have discovered a way to ensure that the batteries in their products never die during the daytime.  A battery will cling to the last of its charge in these tiny, plastic, life-support systems while there is a sun in the sky, and only in the absolute darkness of night will they at last decide to release their hold on this earth.

And they do not die quietly, unnoticed.  Oh, no.  As anybody who has ever owned a smoke detector will attest, when the battery dies, a smoke detector will begin emitting a noise that sounds like the cry of a baby bird oddly distorted by the howling moan of a damned soul in hell.

Last night, at two o’clock in the morning, I was awakened from a deep restful slumber.  My eyes opened, and I realized that my heart was racing, but I had no idea what had startled me awake.  I listened intently in the current silence, waiting for the footfall of a burglar in my room, or a cry for help from the street outside.  But as I lay there in my bed, time passed, and I heard absolutely nothing.  Finally, convinced that I had perhaps been forced awake by a bad dream, I closed my eyes and prepared to fall back asleep.

Chirp!

My eyes snapped open once again, and I knew – I knew – what that noise was and what horrible events it portended.  At first, I tried to ignore it, thinking I could sleep through its intermittent screams and deal with it in the morning, but thirty seconds later … Chirp!  The noise pierced my ears like a sonic icepick.

The alerts are spaced a half minute apart.  Manufacturers have determined this to be the optimal pacing based on years of research conducted by Chinese water torturers.  The time is long enough to let you convince yourself that maybe the bleat you just heard was actually the last one.  Silence stretches, building your hopes that the problem has miraculously fixed itself.  You begin to relax, relief begins to set in, then … Chirp!  Madness is the only guaranteed outcome.

I crawled out of bed, realizing that the only hope of rescuing a few more hours of sleep was to silence the intermittent distress call.  Unfortunately, another side effect of the thirty second delay between alarms is the difficulty it creates in identifying exactly which smoke detector is the true culprit.  I stood in the hallway, lost and waiting for the noise that would guide me to my destination.  At last it called out to me.  I moved forward toward where I thought I had heard it.  When I stood in the kitchen, I paused again.  Thirty seconds crawled by.

Chirp!

Shit.  It was behind me now.  I had gone right past it.  I returned to the middle of the hallway and waited again.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.

Chirp!

I was close this time.  I realized it was in one of two bedrooms.  I poked my head into my daughter’s room and listened.  As I felt myself growing noticeably older, I finally received audible confirmation that I had found the bastard responsible for waking me up.  I went to the garage, retrieved the ladder and a nine-volt battery (because everyone knows that when you are barefoot and half-asleep, the safest place to be is on top of a ladder).

I climbed the ladder without any major incidents, removed the dying battery from the smoke detector and pulled the new battery from my shirt pocket.  Looking back at the detector, I realized that there were no marked positive and negative contacts in the battery compartment and I had completely failed to note the orientation of the original battery in the space.  Swearing, I stuffed the new battery inside, figuring I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.  I climbed off the ladder and waited in the silence.

Nothing.

Celebrating that I had gotten the battery in correctly the first time, I folded up the ladder and carried it down the hallway to replace it in the garage.

Chirp!

This, in a nutshell, is why I don’t like to gamble.  With my luck, let’s just say I hope my life is never dependent on a coin toss.  I took the ladder back into the bedroom and managed to get the battery situated correctly.  The whole procedure from first awakening to crawling back into bed took only fifteen minutes, but at 2 AM it felt like a lifetime had passed.  A miserable, sleep-deprived lifetime.  As I drifted off to sleep again, my wife suggested that when one battery dies, the rest are not far behind, so I should probably replace all the smoke detector batteries.

I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but I do remember waking up the next morning on the couch.

This week, I said goodbye to a dear, and beloved member of my family.  My tent-trailer.  It has been a faithful companion for the past ten years and is more important to me than my own children.  For those of you who may be thinking this is an exaggeration, let me assure you, it is not.

My tent-trailer would sit tirelessly and uncomplaining outside in the driveway for months, patiently waiting for me to take it out on our next outing.  The kids can’t go five minutes without demanding food, clothes, or some kind of attention.  The trailer provided me with safe shelter from rain and snow on many camping trips.  The kids can’t be bothered to get me a soda out of the refrigerator.  The trailer is a cheap alternative to hotels when travelling.  The kids suck money out of my pockets like a Vegas slot machine.

Advantage: tent-trailer.

So why did I get rid of it?  Optimism.  I made the blunder of thinking positively.  And I should know better than that by now, because optimism has consistently kicked me in the teeth over the years.  It always comes at a price.  And for me, this time, that price was $26,000.

Let me explain.

On the last day of 2017, I received an e-mail advising me that a short story I had written was going to be published.  The magazine to which I had submitted the story stated they loved the piece and wanted to buy it.  I chose to view this as a sign that 2018 is going to be a terrific year for me.  I furthered my string of bad decisions by mentioning my new positive outlook to my wife, and she informed me that, because 2018 was going to be so fantastic, we should replace our old trailer with a brand new one.  I am not totally sure how she made the connection between selling a story and buying a trailer, I still have not completely figured out how her head works, but nonetheless we ended up buying a new trailer.

I took my old trailer to the dealership and received $1,500 against the cost of the new one in trade.  When I asked what I could get if I signed over the children as well, the salesman threatened to call the police.

Advantage: tent-trailer.  Again.

I am going to miss the old trailer.  I still remember our very first camping trip after buying it, or as my wife and I fondly refer to it: the weekend that almost killed our marriage.

When we arrived at the campgrounds, the sun had already set.  It was dark and so cloudy there wasn’t even any moonlight to help us see.  My wife hopped out of the truck, ran behind the trailer, and began to direct me as I attempted to back the trailer into our reserved spot.  I promptly backed into a tree.

I believe my wife did it on purpose.  She insists that I simply do not know how to follow directions, but since I am writing this blog and she is not here to defend herself, I am going to go ahead and say it was on purpose.  Following the collision, there was a brief discussion about visual impairment, challenged intellects, and head placement in relation to other locations on the body.  There was also a lively round of suggestions as to other locations we could go and colorful methods of arriving there.

While my wife and I had our “chat,” the children ran off to hide in the woods shouting some nonsense about the advantages of finding a family of wolves to adopt them.

When I had run out of fresh new ways to describe my wife’s skill at giving directions, I told her I no longer wished for her assistance, and climbed back into the truck.  She told me that was a fortunate coincidence as she no longer wished to assist.  After five more unhindered attempts at parking, I finally got the trailer situated in its designated slot with only minimal additional damage to local flora.

I unhitched the tent-trailer from the truck, and I began to set it up, an activity that generally takes about half an hour.  Five minutes into the process, it began to rain.  The kids finally made their way back to our campsite, but only so they could crawl into the truck to stay dry as dad drowned in the downpour.  While the rest of the family sat in the truck with the heater running, I toiled blindly in the water and mud, working with a tiny flashlight clamped between my teeth, trying to remember if I was supposed to crank clockwise to lift the roof or counter-clockwise.  By the time I had finished setting up the trailer, I was soaked, shivering, tired, and ready to kill the next person that said, “If you need any help, just let me know.”

I banged on the truck window to let my loving family know that I was finished and to ask if they could stop singing along to the radio long enough to help me move our luggage.  They grudgingly assented.  Finally, we all crowded into the trailer to hide from the weather and to have dinner.  I warmed some hot dogs for us to eat.  I say “warmed” because “cooked” is too strong of a word for what that tiny propane stove did to food.  It was like trying to prepare a meal over a candle flame.  I suppose it was fortunate we had opted for hotdogs rather than hamburgers for the trip.  A nice case of E. coli just might have been the final nail in the coffin where our marriage currently rested.

Ah, good times.

The amazing part of this story isn’t that we survived to go home two days later.  The amazing part is that we actually packed up the trailer a little while later and went camping again.  And then again.  Over and over, year after year.  We survived snow, wind, rain, and even a few bears in our little trailer, and still we didn’t have enough common sense to just stay home.

Now, we have a bigger, fancier trailer.  Does this mean better camping?  Or just bigger disasters?  I suppose only time will tell.

I think my wife already has an attorney on retainer just in case it doesn’t go well.

After pounding on the window and screaming at her little sister accomplished nothing, my oldest daughter finally gave up.  She did not move to the other side of the car however, she just grew very quiet.  She leaned over and peered through the window at her sister, like a cat watching a goldfish in a bowl.  The goldfish in this analogy never bothered to look up or admit she had even noticed a cat in the vicinity.

What were my wife and I doing at the time?  Well, let’s just acknowledge that we suck as parents and move on, shall we?  Let’s focus on the fact that the kids were engaged in an epic standoff, and I just wanted to see what would happen next.

Except that nothing happened.  Absolutely nothing.  After about five minutes passed and neither girl had spoken or moved, my short attention span got the better of me.  I became bored, then a little irritated.  I realized it was time for me to take action.  I put the car in reverse, backed out of the driveway and drove off.

I’m not kidding.  I drove away with one kid still standing in the garage.  Why?  Well, as I noted above, I was merely continuing the parental suckage, maybe even kicking it up a level.  Besides that, I figured if they couldn’t settle their differences, maybe they needed some time apart.  I might have driven all the way to LA, if my wife hadn’t placed a hand on my arm and convinced me to go back.  She is often the only voice of reason in our family.  She told me, “You can’t do this to her.  She is going to be the one that picks which nursing home we end up in.”

I stopped the car, put it in reverse and returned to the driveway.

“Don’t run her over,” my wife told me, quietly.  I would say it was an unnecessary warning except that I actually did consider it for a moment.  A very short moment, but still….

I figured my daughter would be relieved enough that I came back that she would happily climb into the car without further confrontation, but I gravely underestimated the hate that two siblings can generate for one another.  She returned to her previous post, slammed her hand once more on the window, and ordered her sister to move over.  With her left hand, the younger one patted the empty seat next to her, then closed her eyes to focus more fully on her music.  The cat and fish game resumed.

I yelled.  I know I yelled because I did that loud, shouty thing I do that generally makes people start telling me to stop yelling.  In fact, I was louder and shoutier than usual, but the motionless golem standing outside the car did not react.  She was completely unable, or unwilling, to pull her attention away from her younger sister (who, by the way, was now bobbing her head to whatever she was listening to and pretending that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary was happening).

Being ignored while I’m yelling does not usually help to improve my mood.  I’m funny that way.  And this particular time was no exception.  I opened my door and lurched out of the car.  When my daughter finally looked up and met my gaze, I reminded her that I used to be a police officer.  I told her that being a police officer means that I own guns.  It also means, I know how to make a homicide look like an accident.

She finally got in the car.  Before she did, she rolled her eyes and muttered something about me always overreacting to things.  Yes, the kid that had just spend the past fifteen minutes banging on a window and screaming at her sister rather than walk around the car to get in told me I was overreacting.  I’m not saying she was wrong, but she said it with absolutely no irony in her voice.  She was serious.

Shaking my head in numb disbelief, I climbed back in, buckled my seatbelt, and took a deep breath.  I was still upset, and needing to have the last word, I told the girls, “I swear to God, if you two start fighting again, I’m going to stop this car and our vacation is over.”

I don’t know who said it.  I wasn’t looking in the rearview mirror at the time, so I can’t say for certain.  I just know that I heard a voice coming from the back seat that said, “What vacation?  We’re still in the driveway.”

I blacked out.

The next thing I remember is my right foot tangled up in my seatbelt and my head in the rear floorboards.  Both girls were out of the car, screaming and running for the neighbor’s house, and my wife was on her cell phone, talking to the hotel and explaining that we would be arriving much later than originally planned.