Money, Part 2

I was sitting in the family room when my oldest daughter comes sprinting through the front door, breathless with the news, “Dad, Dad! ---- just stole twenty dollars from Mom’s wallet and he’s outside buying ice cream from the ice cream man!”

Twenty dollars? My four-year-old son? A lot of money for the little guy—like robbing a bank before ever shoplifting a candy bar.

From the porch I see the damage has already been done: there he is, standing on the curb, ice cream in one hand, a fistful of change in the other. 

Only something isn’t quite right.

I expect my son to run and hide, to eat the goods he paid for with the stolen cash in secret before coming out to take his punishment, whatever that might be.

But he isn’t running away. He’s walking right to me, and with a huge smile on his face—like he just won a lottery, if he knew what a lottery was.  

And I’m thinking, this kid’s got a lot of nerve. Steals our money, buys an ice cream, then eats it in front of me. Or maybe he’s got some kind of cognitive disorder, can’t differentiate between right and wrong, no sense of morality or justice or guilt—innocent, in way, but a potential mass-murdering Ghangis Khan in another. How to find a good therapist?

In a moment he’s to me, still smiling, the biggest smile: “Look how much money that man just gave me!” he says, “Look how much money!”

Two fives and eight ones—eighteen dollars of change, a rather fat wad that he stuffs into my hand. “Look!” he says again, hoping, I can tell, for something like approval, for someone to celebrate with. “Look how much money he just gave me!”

What to say to this four-year-old boy with the math skills of a St. Bernard. So many bills in exchange for the single, solitary twenty he’d started out with—a thief, yes, but a joyful thief, one wanting to share, to provide a return.   

Who am I to have to break it to him.

Money, Part 1

My seven-year-old is explaining to me that if she had a billion dollars, she’d be able to spend $100 everyday for a whole week. I tell her she’d be able to spend $100 everyday in a row for a lot longer than that, and thus begins our little discussion on how many days in a row she’d be able to spend $100 if she started out with first, say, $1000; then $10,000; and finally $100,000.

The thought of being able to spend $100 for a thousand days in a row overwhelms her. She doesn’t ask it, but I know what she’s thinking. How many My Little Pony sets is that? How many La-La-Loopsies!?

“And if I started with a million dollars? How many days in a row then?”

“Everyday in a row for about thirty years,” I say, hoping I’m close.

She closes her eyes, imagining, I suppose, $100 a day for the next thirty years: row upon row, in her mind’s eye, shelf upon shelf—eternal aisles of dolls and figurines and dress-ups; no clue, obviously, that even a family living on $36,500 a year, hardly millionaires, burns through a $100 a day, spread out over the course of 365 days, if they spend it all.

When her finite mind is worn out by the thought of what must seem to her like infinite, inexhaustible toy-purchasing power, she says to me, in a voice much too dreamy, much too voluptuous for a seven-year-old to ever, ever be using: “Oh, Dad. Kill me when I’m thirty.”

Does she want the money first, before I kill her? To spend every last hundred-dollar bill of it, heedlessly, recklessly, on crap?

Or perhaps she feels that she can’t live past thirty, not on her current income, not when the millionaires out there are living high on the hog, $100 a day, even on Sundays.  

To be honest, some days I wish someone had killed me when I turned thirty, but that’s a topic for another post. 

Close Up Photographs of Hottest Man on Earth Postponed Until Futher Notice; 86 lbs. of Leftovers Devoured in Four Days

Thanksgiving has come and gone. This year I ate myself into a complete stupor. I sat on the couch still as a pumpkin for about three hours till I felt like I could stand up without rolling away. Then I walked to the fridge for leftovers. I was like a junkie in the throes of his addiction. 

By Saturday I knew I needed professional help. I had just finished a turkey sandwich, eight inches tall, layered with stuffing and cranberry sauce that spilled out of the bread and onto the plate, everything heated up in the microwave and drowning in gravy. This was breakfast, and for the sixth meal in a row I had again eaten myself to a state of near unconsciousness. I think I remember my son bouncing a baseball off my head. Three or four times, my son hitting me in the head with a baseball. 

When I came to I knew things had gone too far, that my eating habit, if I didn’t get control of it, was going to put me in a straight jacket, in a room with padded walls and rubber sheets. 

Growing up, my brothers and I were all big eaters. Sunday dinner was a three helping affair that took at least an hour. These days, when I get together with them—effete, de-masculinized men, products of the age we live in—the meal’s over in ten minutes; too worried about their “figures” to stack it high and deep on the plate like they used to. 

Me, I’ve remained a big eater, especially on Thanksgiving. I just never imagined it would get to the point it got to this past weekend, meal after meal beached on the couch, later on the floor, totally incapable of movement. 

Gluttony, that’s what it was. Pure gluttony. If my other bodily appetites were so out of control, so unfettered, I’d have fathered a small nation by now. I’m sorry, for my wife’s sake, to have to speak so crudely. But I believe it’s part of the healing process. 

Happy Birthday, Cosi!

Our little Cosette—Cosi, as we like to call her—turned one over the weekend! When people hear about all we did to celebrate, they’re going to wonder how much it cost. As if pure joy and celebration could be taken apart and budgeted like a damn work party.

Just know that when it comes to our children’s birthdays, my wife and I have been blessed to be able to do things up right, but even if we hadn’t been blessed, we’d still do things up right, no matter the cost, especially for first birthdays, which my wife and I both agree are the most important.

After all, a person may live to be a hundred, heck, may live, given future advancements in technology and medicine, to be two hundred years old—but of all those birthdays, only one is a person’s first.  And though our babies may not remember their firsts, dang it, we will! That’s our philosophy.

The day started with Dad’s Famous Breakfast for Birthday Girls, which no one got up for.

Then we were off, first to Perky’s Farm, or something like that, where the kids got to sit in a tractor wheel. And don’t think we got in for free, because we didn’t!

Then, for a very expensive hourly fee, which only enriched the sacrifice we were making as parents to celebrate our child’s life, we rode in a paddleboat.

After the paddleboat we took time for some face painting, even rode horses, both very expensive, yet somehow rewarding—gratifying, that’s the word—to be able to pay for it all.

After the tractor wheel and the paddleboat and the face painting and the horse rides, we were off through a corn maze, that again we had to pay for, person by person, the total cost of the celebration increasing by the hour, as well as my own sense of fulfillment, of satisfaction (increasing, that is).

Then we visited the zoo, and I’m so glad we did. If the children loved the wheel, they loved the animals even more!

After the zoo we went to Disneyland. Then we walked through a weird castle. Then we went on a nature walk.

By then it was getting late. So our stop at a National Park was hardly more than that—a stop—time enough to climb a giant pile of Paleolithic sandstone and pose for a picture.

We must have looked like complete tourists just then—parking the car, posing for the camera, and then back into the car and driving away. But this was our baby’s birthday, so screw people who can’t mind their own business!

Then we had to pull over because the older kids saw a rock wall and wanted to climb it. Cry, cry, cry, the whiners get whatever they want, especially on a day like this, and they know it. So we stopped.

Then we were home and all the extended family came over, presents piled like bricks, only a lot bigger than bricks, all the way up to the ceiling. Grandma made her famous strawberry and cream thingy that she only makes for birthdays.

Everyone was having a good time, I felt like it had been a full day, and so with what little daylight remained, I went into the backyard and put in the french drain I’d been meaning to install.

Happy birthday, Cosi, a great, great time had by all, even if I had to put in the french drain, but at least we got to do some cool things before that. Once you’re old enough to remember all this, don’t you forget it! 

Ode to the Cultural Elite

One thing you got to be able to do, if you want to be as cultured and sexy as I am, is quote a couple of lines of poetry every now and then, to suit the occasion.

There’s a story all of the cultural elites know about Bill Clinton that makes them swoon every time they tell it to each other. Clinton was having dinner with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great writer and Nobel Prize winner, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and they were having dinner together, probably sucking out shell fish together, tossing their shells onto the hand woven rugs from Nepal at some billionaire’s shack in Martha’s Vineyard, some place like that, and during the dinner Marquez and Clinton get to talking about novels, and old Bill pushes back from the table, stands up and recites two or three paragraphs from a William Faulkner novel, I forget which one.

That’s a true story. Listen: you think it had to do with Clinton’s tax plan or something. Or with that little fist thing he did when he was talking to the camera. That’s not why they loved Bill. He was a cultural elite who could recite Faulkner. You have no idea how far reciting Faulkner can take you in life—if you know when to pull it out.

Here on this blog we’re going to keep things simple, at least for today. Instead of three paragraphs by Faulkner, three lines by the great haiku poet Matsuo Basho from seventeenth century Japan (translated by Robert Hass):

         Even in Kyoto—

hearing the cuckoo’s cry—

         I long for Kyoto.

It takes like ten seconds to memorize.

But don’t anyone sound the What the hell does that mean? alarm bell. Don’t anyone jump out of a window because they “don’t get it.” The secret to poetry is that there’s nothing to get. You either like it or you don’t. You don’t take a bite of salmon and spit it out because you “don’t get it.” If the salmon tastes good, you keep going. If not, you move on. Same with poems.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t talk about poems. My lawyer friend who wants to be one of the cultural elite told me that this particular poem would be more original if it didn’t repeat the word “Kyoto.” Like it should be “Even in Kyoto I long for, oh, I don’t know, Paris.”

But that’s the whole bloody point, I said (and here I was tickling the edges of the get-it/don’t-get-it quagmire, a risk I felt I needed to take). Because, I explained, even making love to your wife, you long to make love to your wife. Even getting someone the death penalty, you long to get someone the death penalty.

Oh, he said. Oh.

And I knew the words I long for Kyoto had lodged in his heart, that his dream of someday becoming one of the elites was that much less a dream, that much more a possibility. That in actuality, there is more to life than getting people the death penalty.   

But you got to know when to pull the poem out, when and how to do so. Fortunately, in this case, it’s easy: any time you get a whiff of nostalgia, a bit of homesickness, a wave of yearning. For example, you’re walking through the woods on a crisp autumn day with your significant other. You stoop to pick up a blazing red leaf, which you hold up against the sky to admire the contrast. And you pause.

Now she’s waiting for you to say something, to explain this sudden gesture of sensitivity. And what do you say, just as you let go, red leaf twirling to the ground?

         Even in Kyoto—

hearing the cuckoo’s cry—

         I long for Kyoto.

It’s very important, though, that you say the poem in the correct voice, with the correct rhythm and tone and emphasis. You’ve got to feel the words, like death, coming up from the soles of your shoes, traveling through your body.

If you’ve got to say it with an accent, then dammit, say it with an accent. Whatever you do, don’t blow it. I recommend studying the final scene from The Last Samurai, which I have included below, before trying this out for real. Watch the clip. Where the dying man says, They are all perfect, you say, Even in Kyoto. That’s the voice you’re going for.

Let me know how it works out for you. Are you one of the cultural elites? 

(Just so you know, the guy doesn't really die in that clip, not in real life I mean.)

Over Before It Started? Not If I Can Teach the Pottery Merit Badge . . .

So Earth’s Hottest Man was just asked to be an Assistant Scout Master. And he couldn’t say no. Because one of the things that makes me so hot is my ever willingness to help out, to give succor where succor is needed.

This is serious though. A damned-if-I-do, damned-if I-don’t conundrum, because:

1) walking around in a scout uniform, in public, threatens the very existence of this blog

2) as would turning down the call to serve

In previous posts I have written extensively about my uncanny ability to

A) make swearing at my kids look sexy

B) make driving a minivan look sexy

But driving a minivan and turning around to swear at other people’s kids? On my way to Camp Woodchuck?

Even if I don’t swear, even if I don’t volunteer my minivan, I don’t know if I can make the handkerchief thing look sexy. Or the knee high green socks with the red trim, the little beads and braided things hanging from all parts of the body. Maybe in the bedroom fooling around I could think of something. An allusion to Titanic, perhaps, to set the mood: “You want to see me in these, and only these?”

If I could tie the handkerchief around my head, like a bandanna, maybe. And I’d have to roll my sleeves up, show some bicep.

But if I’m going by handbook regs, if I’m forced to recite the Scout Law with a handkerchief secured around my neck by a corncob thingy one of the boys carved at camp—this blog is over.

Can you imagine Earth’s Hottest Man teaching the Coin Collecting or Basketry merit badges? Neither can I. The Fingerprinting merit badge? No way. Pulp and Paper? Nope. Indian Lore? Possibly. Pottery? Yes. Totally. My firm wet hands shaping, squeezing, massaging the clay. We might have to invite the Relief Society in for this one.

It’s so true what they say about writing—it really helps you think through the seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Hell, teaching the Pottery merit badge, a little “Unchained Melody” playing softly in the background—I’ll be hotter than ever. (Would I get disfellowshipped if I took my shirt off?)  

Ode to the Minivan

There is nothing more de-masculinizing than driving a minivan. And a load of kids in the back only makes it worse. The fact that I can still look as sexy and hot as I do driving a minivan, flinging my head every thirty seconds to yell and swear at my kids, is proof of just how sexy I really am.

I never started swearing at my kids until my wife made us drive a minivan. That’s what minivans do. They turn gentle, soothing-voiced men into foul-mouthed devils. One moment you’re talking serenely to your wife in the captain’s chair next to you, planning a summer vacation, perhaps, or just a getaway for the two of you, your hand on her knee (or is it her hand on your knee?); the next moment you’re swearing like a chicken farmer who just got the feed truck stuck in a giant mound of bird turd, demanding-begging-yelling at the children to stop whatever—and there’s no other word for it—shit they’re involved in. 

Because going sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour on the freeway there’s nothing you can do but swear. The little darlings are completely out of your reach, and they know it. Who’s going to stop them from spitting and wiping boogers on each other, on the seats, on the windows? Not you. Not you.

You can threaten to pull over. You can name the consequences that will take place once the family’s home. Only they know it’s a load of crap. No one’s pulling over. And what would you do if you did pull over? Turn and yell some more? That’s the de-masculinizing configuration of the minivan, of the family car in general, I suppose.

So with the Battle of Armageddon heating up in the rows behind you, your only option is to somehow beef up your language. You throw a little “hell” in there for effect. You progress to “damn.” But one or two damns into it and you might as well be screaming “fooey.” No one’s scared, and no one’s listening.

Meanwhile the crying and hair pulling and spitting and booger wiping goes on. In fact, it intensifies. And the children are beginning to defend themselves. Your ten year old daughter has turned sideways, is kicking her four year old brother in the head, with the backs of her heels: the boy’s head is ricocheting back and forth off the window like a ping pong ball. Her heels, his head. You see it in the rear-view mirror.

But in the end, not even “shit” or “sons of bitches” gets anybody’s attention. Nor does such language release the extreme pressure building up inside you—

Impotent rage, that’s what I’m talking about here. The de-masculinization of America—thanks, in part, to having to drive minivans. Fortunately, I have the looks and sex appeal to pull it off, even in a minivan, even swearing at my children. But I feel for my brethren.