Tag Archives: Dads

Halloween relic

Halloween came and went, and it took something with it.

Halloween gave us candy. In exchange it took part of my fatherhood experience away.

For the first time in 17 years, I did not go Trick or Treating. I was no longer needed.

Once upon a time, I pulled a wagon, with a baby passenger, from house to house. I walked with a toddler, holding his hand, until he asked to be carried home. I brought the younger brother, hurrying with him, so the older brother didn’t get too frustrated by the anchor around his candy-gathering ankles. I flitted among three boys of varying ages and speeds, struggling to keep the herd together as three lengths of legs progressed at different strides, slowing down the fast and speeding up the slow so that no one got lost and no one lost faith.

It was exhausting; it was wonderful. Everyone needed Dad to facilitate the fun. As the night grew dark, no one worried, as long as Dad was in sight. Dad was always in sight, because these were his boys, and this was them together.

More than any of them, Dad wished to stay out until Trick or Treat was officially ended. This unifying quest was two fleeting hours, and when it ended, it was ended for an entire year.

After Halloween last year, it ended for always.

Perhaps, Dad should have known, but the hope for one more time is difficult to subdue.

This year, the two boys who still had interest in Trick or Treat, looted the neighborhood under their own authority, which was only right. They had grown into that freedom. They ran with their own pack, as time had long determined they should do.

Dad stayed home, warm and dry, as old people should be kept. He had no more babies to protect. Only memories of babies. Memories don’t make new memories; they stay home too.

One more thing put away in the scrap book, the way it was always meant to be. But I claim the right to cling to the fraying strand of nostalgia.

The way we were.

Don’t bring a knife to a baguette fight

It was Tuesday when I cut my hand on a piece of bread.

This tragedy requires a bit of backstory.

I bought the bread, a $1.49 grocery store baguette, on Sunday morning.

Big Man, who still refuses to eat middle school cafeteria lunches, asked for roast beef for his sandwiches this week. I don’t like paying roast beef prices, but it’s the start of the school year, and maybe this little luxury will help him let go the utopia of summer and ease back into the drudgery of school.

Next week, when summer is a distant memory, we downgrade to ham.

The sliced roast beef looked exceptionally good, lean and red (a rarity in our town). Maybe I too would like a sandwich for some near future lunch.

The kids are happy eating the preservative-doused sliced bread, but if I’ve got to take out a second mortgage to pay for the meat, my sandwich should be on bread with enough dignity to die young.

I picked out a baguette; little did I know, it didn’t want to die alone.

Bread of character, even third-rate, store brand, character, should be eaten in one day. That didn’t happen.

On Monday, Big Man chose to have his sandwich on a hunk of baguette. I didn’t have a chance to make my sandwich. This was my undoing.

On Tuesday, half the baguette remained. I tried to get the boy take it again. “No,” he said. “That bread’s too hard.” I didn’t see the warning in his wise words.

At lunchtime, I cut off a hunk of the aging bread for my sandwich. The previously cut end was too hard to possibly enjoy. I must cut a bit off that end. Though my knife seemed sharp, it struggled through the crust.

I needed more leverage. Leverage is key with baguettes.

This is why I picked the bread off the plate and held it tight in my left hand as I sawed at the end with my right. Finally, I was cutting through it.

And then calamity struck.

The bit at the end gave way. The long piece I was holding in my left hand crashed into the side of my right hand. That’s when I learned that I had not cut off enough. A still hard, and now sharp, edge of crust dug into the skin of my right hand, leaving a splinter of crumb under the layers of scraped skin.

Don’t mock me for my delicate hands. They’re soft, lovely hands that any man would be proud of.

Ah, but I had the last laugh against the bread that bit me. I bit it back many times, with pleasure, and roast beef. I bit it until it was nothing. (After having put it in the microwave to soften it up; I do learn my lesson sometimes.)

Revenge!

In the garden of time

When we first moved into our house, my wife and I wanted a vegetable garden. A flat piece of lawn behind the garage seemed the best spot.

There are a lot of hungry creatures, with big front teeth, in our neighborhood. We would need a fence before we planted anything.

We had no experience building fences, and too little money to pay somebody to build one. But we had a fresh homeowner’s optimism and a starter set of tools. We wouldn’t be deterred from our dream of fresh peas and string beans.

We bought lath wood, fastening hardware, and a staple gun. We didn’t know that we didn’t know what we were doing, and on the strength of our vast ignorance, we produced a 10’ x 12’ fenced garden.

It was actually kind of cute. The rodents thought so. They admired our rustic enclosure as they borrowed under it. They appreciated its ineffective beauty as they mowed our infant produce to the ground. They wished we would build similar, ornamental fences around additional tasty treats elsewhere in the yard.

It took three years, submerged chicken wire, sunken garden borders, and a fist fight with a ground hog before our garden fence became useful security against the order of Rodentia. Then came our salad days. Our third-rate soil was good for a handful of peas and enough spinach, lettuce, and cucumbers for two medium-sized salads each summer. Carrots and radishes wouldn’t grow in the clay.

We began raising children as well. Each year, the garden was planted later, the weeds were given more authority, and the fence looked less fresh.

Abused and distorted by many winters.

The variety of plants we grew diminished at the inverse rate to the number of children demanding attention. Even the rodents lost interest in our garden in its gradual transition from an Eden of forbidden fruit to an enclosed weed patch.

The years of neglect let the weeds grow tall, until some of them graduated into small trees. The area assumed a sad new role as a corral for outdoor toys the children had outgrown. Each winter brought accelerating decay to our once cute little fence. The ruins of our erstwhile grand vision became a mere hindrance to mow around.

This summer, we made the decision to put our garden to rest. The rotten wood was easy to pull down. The entangled chicken wire offered more resistance. As I dug up the roots of the most highly educated weeds, I realized that this fence had stood for 20 years.

Twenty years is a long time for a homemade, lath wood fence to endure. The fence stood through births, diapers, preschools, field trips, ball games, band concerts, book reports, detentions, award ceremonies, final exams, laughter, and tears.

The fence watched its builders grow rounder, and slower, and more fragile.

It almost seemed a shame to say goodbye to our fence. But time demanded it.

Time neither stops nor reverses for any fence. Every fence must come to terms with that.

Shadows fall on an empty plot.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light wash cycle

Most of the appliances in our house are old. They are old and broken to some degree. They’re not completely broken, just mostly broken. They still kinda work though.

It’s not just the expense that keeps us from buying new appliances, although, with three growing boys at home, there is not much money left to put into savings after the kids have been fed.

It’s also a reluctance to throw out things that still work, marginally. I must have struggled through the Great Depression in a previous life, because I don’t like to replace machines if I can trick them into thinking they still work. My previous life was likely a short one, ending with me pushing an old Model T down a very steep hill to get ‘er goin’ again.

A third reason for my hesitance to buy new appliances is the delivery nightmare I can’t get out of my head. Every time I contemplate a new appliance, I am haunted by visions of the delivery/installation men running away at first sight of our narrow doorways and corroded plumbing fixtures.

Sure, I could install the appliances myself, but I don’t like the looks of our narrow doorways and corroded fixtures either. I want to be able to blame someone else for the floodwaters.

After years of coaxing our washer and dryer into living life one day at a time, we finally broke down and bought a new set. I sweated out the days until delivery, wondering at what point the delivery men would abandon the project and how far from our laundry room the new machines would be left. Also, the 20-year-old collection of random stuff piled up in the laundry room would need to be temporarily relocated.

It went better than I’d feared, and the new machines got to where they belong, but it took a toll on my nerves. That’s why I’m still tinkering with the old dishwasher.

I had to switch out the door latch on the dishwasher last summer. That helped, but in the process, I learned that most of the connectors holding the inner door to the outer door are busted. The two doors cling to each other with the tenuous embrace of star-crossed lovers.

Consequently, the machine stops mid-cycle until pressure is applied to the top of the door. Then, it chugs away again, for a while. I could keep pushing on the door every few minutes, or I could come up with a brilliant solution involving a dowel and barstool cushions.

It’s not a long-term brilliant solution, mind you. It was just until I could determine the weak points on the door, so I could apply the true long-term solution: duct tape.

Now that I’ve got my tape applied at the crucial spots, the machine has been completing its cycles unaided, and will, no doubt, continue to do so for days to come.

Cross your fingers. And let’s not even talk about the frozen milk in the fridge right now.