dadandthefranchise

[dadandthefranchise]

Small things

It’s January 17, 2019. I blogged a total of three times last year. And the year before that. I feel I can do better this year. And now that I look at my actual posted blog, I didn’t blog at all last year. Sigh.

I remind myself of why I am doing this, which is to remember the little things, and the big things, that are happening now. This becomes more important the older I get. Not that I am that old, but I can still feel the past getting hazier, and reading my own words brings it back.

So where are we? Location-wise, we are pretty much where we have been for the past eight years. I was thinking back and by the time I was eight I had lived in five different houses in three different towns. Wy has only ever known one, in one.

He is in school, in second grade, at the neighborhood school quite literally just around the corner. He has neighborhood friends, kids who come over or who host him for impromptu play dates, classmates and neighbors. We still see friends from years ago, the friends he has always had, and whose parents are our friends too.

He’s bigger. Always been a big kid and that’s still true, although we are starting to enter the territory where the girls tower over the boys for a few years. Some of the girls. But not quite yet. He’s still a little kid in so many ways (thankfully — I’m not ready for him to be too big just yet). There are still some things that he just isn’t confident doing (e.g. the semi-meltdown last weekend when all the neighborhood kids were riding bikes down to the playground and he didn’t want to; I am proud to report that I forced him to and that he had a great time).

We go skating and although Amy points out that he is pretty steady, he still mostly wants me to tow him around the rink even though I have him tricked out in shin pads. Part of that is that he just wants me to hold his hand and talk with him, and do the same things we always do, including me dropping him off at one of the bench areas while I do a couple of solo laps and he pretends to sleep, and then going to Taco Time for a chicken taco mini meal afterwards.

I feel in a rut. A number of ruts. Bumping from one rut into another on a regular schedule. Work. Doing (mostly not) renovation. Doing things for and with my dad.

But there are still little things. We just got done with maybe 5 days of sunshine, which is pretty epic for mid-January in Seattle. This is the darkest time of year typically, and the time when we can most use the extra daylight. We walked down to Sunset Hill Park on Sunday, and then to Picolino’s for lunch, where we sat outside for about 10 minutes until deciding that it was, in fact, too cold, and then back home, where we came upon the kids and bikes heading down to the playground at the school, which we joined, resulting in Wy being pretty glassy-eyed at about 6 PM, which was not too surprising when I saw that my FitBit said we had walked 7 miles. Nothing spectacular, but a nice walk on a beautiful day, playing with neighborhood friends.

And last week, The Franchise and I took Grandpa out for dinner on our family dinner night as Amy had another meeting. We drove through town to Ivar’s Salmon House on Lake Union, where Dad and The Franchise had fish and chips, I had a steak salad, The Franchise pointed out to our server that they had spelled buoy as BOUY on the kids menu, which led to him mentioning that it had been his birthday a few days previous, which led to a free kid-sized crème brûlée thereafter and much talk of how nice the waiter had been.

These are the small things, the things I want to remember.

[dadandthefranchise]

Father’s Day

Note: I started this on, well, Father's Day. Finished it today. Oh, well.

Father’s Day is a great day for introspection about what it means to be a father. In my case, it seems to mean that I am a father to my six-year-old, a father to my 93-year-old father, a father to at least one of my increasingly needy cats (Chester).

It’s interesting, you know. I’ve said this before: Parenting The Franchise takes a lot of energy, but I get a lot back out — energy, love, happiness, pride. Parenting the cat takes less energy (treat dispensing, petting, being licked/bitten, letting him out), and likewise I get less back, but I still get the fulfillment of having a happy cat on my lap, or up against my legs in bed.

Parenting my dad — which is increasingly how it feels — comes with fewer rewards, I think. It pains me a little to say that, but it feels true. It really does feel like we’re his parents. He’s 93, and his grip on what constitutes modern reality (certainly anything technological, but also modern politics and meteorology), which has never been stellar, seems to be fading a little of late. As always, it’s hard to separate problems of input (maybe vision, but most definitely hearing) from problems of processing.

I have said, jokingly, but also I think truthfully, that my father last understood the world in maybe 1980. He grew up in a time when he could literally understand the workings of everything he interacted with — horses, gas and diesel engines, sawmills, even electric tools like drills and saws — and where so many of the services that are electronic now were personal then. Banking, for instance. He became an adult in a world of cash and checks and eventually cards, but the notion of online payment (online anything, really) escapes him.

So we help The Franchise learn to navigate the world, teaching him and showing him how things work, and being there as he experiments and finds out how things work. And that is mostly how he learns. We help my father navigate the world too, but mostly we do that for him, partly because it’s too difficult sometimes to explain, but partly because his hearing renders him unable or less-able to communicate.

I have written before (not here, I think) that we talk about raising a kid — in the sense of lifting them up, yes, but also of being there to support them as they grow, in size, in knowledge, in experience, in capability. How do we talk about what we are doing for my father? Lowering? His capabilities are not growing, but diminishing. There is no improvement on the horizon, and as well as he’s doing for a 93-year-old, well for a 93-year-old is pretty feeble for the rest of us, now. We help him as best we can, and give him new experiences, but we are mostly just here for him and with him.

That ended up being more of a downer sentiment than I set out to write. It’s not really that bad, you know.

[dadandthefranchise]

Music

Here we are, in rainy Seattle, living up to its reputation with a vengeance this year. I follow the National Weather Service on Twitter, which may be a mistake, because they keep tweeting out things like this: We have had 19.44” of rain since February 1. Since they have been keeping records, there has never been 20” of rain between February 1 and the end of April. So we will blow by that record in the next 10 days.

Both Dad and The Franchise are older. My dad will turn 93 in a couple of months, and for all the trouble he has remembering things he keeps pretty close track of his birthday — he says things like, “In two days it’ll be three months from my birthday,” and the math checks out. He seems feebler, maybe not every day, but certainly every couple of months I notice it. And yet, every time he comes upstairs to see us and sits down, he manages to get up unaided (unless he sinks into one of the soft chairs in the living room, in which case we send The Franchise over to haul on his arm).

The Franchise is six-plus now, which is in itself amazing to me. Still a substantial dude. Still really into Legos and now into Minecraft as well. The dining room table is really the Lego room table and is strewn with various little “builds,” some of which I think are really quite creative, as well as a bunch of essentially board games with Lego pieces and horribly convoluted rules, most of which are based on either Minecraft or Halo or both. He has taken to breathlessly either explaining a Lego build or a Minecraft build or something to us, or interrogating us about “what five things you want to build in Minecraft” and not taking no for an answer. The torrent of uninterrupted verbiage that can pour out of that kid is truly impressive.

What is also truly impressive, to me anyway, is his progress on the piano. He is not, Mozart-style, composing sonatas, nor is he some kind of performance prodigy. But he is sticking with it, he practices with relatively minimal goading most days, and he is starting to play two-hand-coordinated chords and moving parts. Listening to him practice is great, and I think the coolest part is how seriously he takes it and how carefully he practices once you can talk him into sitting down. You hear CHORD, “OK, then I need,” CHORD, “OK, and then I need,” CHORD, “then I need,” CHORD, and so on.

One of the last songs he did was B-I-N-G-O, so I got out a ukulele and played along. Turns out our piano is like half a step flat so it took me a while to appropriately detune the uke, but when I did we played a semi-creditable duet.

Semi-creditable duet. It’s funny to me how many of the rewards of parenting, now that I’ve been a parent for over six years, were essentially unpredictable to me. That is, I had no idea that several of the things I love and value the most would be at all pleasurable or valuable to me. Hand-holding, for instance. The Franchise is a hand-holder. Always has been. It is rare for him and me to be together, walking or even hanging around outside, and for us not to be holding hands. And I love it. I love how he’ll get out of the car and come over to me and take my hand without either of us looking at the other. There are plenty of kids who at his age and even younger rarely hold hands, or have to be encouraged. And I know that this won’t last, but I will love it as long as it does. And it’s not something that I ever would have predicted that I would love.

Tonight, as every night, I got him in bed and then hopped in with him and the iPad to do puzzles. We did the New York Times mini crossword and then played Set for a while and then did a couple of Typeshift puzzles. I got out and kissed him and asked if he wanted to read a little, which he did. I left the room and decided to noodle around on the ukulele a little in the living room. I probably hadn’t played for more than a minute or two when he called me back.

“Dad,” he said, “you could come in here and sit at my desk and play your ukulele while I read.”

“OK,” I said.

I got my big book of ukulele songs and sat there and played — Beatles songs and Simon and Garfunkel and Pete Seeger and all the other stuff that I could recognize. I am an inveterate hummer and started humming along. Wy turned and looked at me, smiling at me in kind of a funny way — he’s a hummer too, varying lately between “Deck the Halls” and the Emperor’s March from Star Wars. So I started singing along.

After a while of this he said, “Dad, I like the slow songs better.”

“OK,” I said, and played “Edelweiss” and a few other songs of that type. I noticed that he turned on his side, facing away from me, in a position that would have been pretty awkward to read 365 Things to do With Lego Bricks. I played a few more songs just because I was enjoying it, and when I got up I knew he was out. I pulled the book out from under him and tucked him in, turned out the light, and left.

He has never asked me to sing him to sleep before, but that’s essentially what he did. Pretty cool.

[dadandthefranchise]

As Expected

Sometimes things do not surprise. A few days ago, at the start of the new NHL hockey season, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ highly touted American rookie, Auston Matthews, scored four goals in his first game as a professional. This has never been done before. “And then, because it’s the Leafs, they found a way to lose the game,” as one sportscaster said1.

Ever since I was a little kid back in the 70s, the Leafs have been bad. They had glory days, but those ended in the 60s, and despite a new potential savior every decade or so, they remain. No surprises.

We live in Seattle. Seattle weather is unpredictable, and I mean that almost literally. I can’t tell you how many Storms of the Century have been predicted, only to wind up with a hapless newscaster (I remember when it used to be Danger Jim Forman) zipped up in an apparently superfluous parka reporting on the storm (wind, snow, rain) that had just missed devastating the Puget Sound. To be fair, we have had storms (the Inauguration Day storm in 1993, for example), that have lived up to their billing. But not often.

We just got done with a storm, the remnants of Typhoon Songda, that started out, last Tuesday or so, predicted to be the strongest storm since the Columbus Day storm of 1962. Then it was going to be like the Inauguration Day storm of 1993. Then the 2006 Hanukkah Eve storm. What it wound up being was…kind of a typical October storm around here. Some wind, some rain. One tree came down, maybe half a mile from here.2

The Franchise had a sleepover with his best buddy Sophia on Saturday night (as Stormpocalypse closed in). Sophia’s mom Jenny sent us a video of the dance party, which involved Mike (Sophia’s dad) playing the piano as the kids jumped around the living room. Sophia, dressed as a witch, flits around the picture. The Franchise, dressed as The Franchise, shuffles around doing an admittedly rhythmic version of The Robot, I guess, and wipes out at one point (pops up to declare, “I’m OK,” then exits frame right to remove his socks for better traction). The song was fairly slow so it took me a good 30 seconds of the video to recognize “Hotel California,” which of course it was, as this is The Franchise’s current favorite song, ever since I played it one Saturday morning while making pancakes. I suppose it could be “Bamboleo” or something else by The Gipsy Kings.

Tonight Amy and I were curled up on the couch, drinking my latest attempts at autumnal cocktails, eating popcorn with butter and salt and brewer’s yeast3, and watching The Durrells in Corfu, an adaptation of some of my favorite books. Chester, the cat, came in, moderately soaked, and walked into the living room, put his paw almost into the bowl, and meowed for popcorn. Which we fed him, and which he ate. While Snuggles, the other cat, dragged a paper coaster around, apparently because she couldn’t find any of Amy’s elastic hair bands, having stashed them all in some undisclosed location.

Dad is downstairs, where I visited him to put some eyedrops in as he recovers from cataract surgery, and as he struggles to learn a new way to navigate the remote not only to the hockey game du jour, but to the baseball game, and back again via the Last button. What will they think of next?

And The Franchise is in bed, after an afternoon spent gluing together the catapult we bought yesterday.

Or words to that effect. ↩︎

There were stronger winds up and down the coast, and tornadoes in Portland, so I don’t want to make light of all the legitimate devastation that happened. Just the devastation that failed to happen in the city of Seattle. ↩︎

Which we call Cinnamon Spice Blend, after the reused jar that Amy puts the bulk brewer’s yeast in. ↩︎

[dadandthefranchise]

Still here

I realize that in the entirety of 2016 I have posted 7 times. Less than once a month. Rather than beat myself up about it, I will just post something.

Things change. Nothing stays the same, even though it some things seem like they do. They’re just changing slower.

Dad turned 92 this year. He is still doing well, although there are little things, like the persistently swollen leg that that is getting better but remains to some extent, and the cataracts. In some sense it is surprising that he hasn’t had cataract surgery yet. We are a week past his first surgery and it’s good so far. The surgery went well — he was ecstatic afterward, perhaps believing there was going to be someone with a knife advancing toward his eyes — and even the three different eyedrops given on three different schedules three times a day has not dampened his enthusiasm.

This year also marked 20 years since my mom died, which is hard to believe. The Franchise has started including her in the list of family members (and pets) that he loves, which is sweet.

The pets now include two cats. A gray tabby, Chester (the name he came with), and a buff tabby, Snuggles (the name The Franchise gave her). Both are sweet and the most vocal cats I’ve ever known. Chester (who just jumped up on the bed where I’m writing this and is now grooming himself at my feet) meows insistently in a crying fashion to be let out or to be petted. Snuggles peeps for food, mostly. Both of them like to be near us — Chester came and sat on my chest last night as I was watching playoff baseball reclined on the couch. Just curled up and went to sleep there. I drew the line when he awoke and started licking himself.

The Franchise is now a kindergartner. This is perhaps less momentous than it might otherwise be in that he is in the same co-op preschool as last year, just in the kindergarten class. Still, it’s a different teacher and different stuff and five days a week rather than four. I think a good indication of how it’s going is the fact that one of the jobs the kids rotate through is Ambassador, which means going and helping the younger kids for part of the day, except nobody wants to go because that might mean missing something exciting.

Legos are still king. They seem to be everywhere. We have bought quite a number of sets (from the Lego Movie, Lego City and Star Wars), and they get built and then eventually taken apart and cannibalized for parts. But the stuff he builds is fantastic — robots, an entire house complete with bookcases and a safe, radar installations.

And he is finally drawing, even though sometimes there are tears because things don’t look the way he wants them to. He’s taking piano lessons.

All of the new things mean new routines, which will stay this way until something changes. Eye drops for Dad until his second eye is better, in something like a month or so. Driving Dad to church until his eyes are better. Hearing The Franchise haltingly play “Ode to Joy.” Expressing interest in the next Lego thing, the flying filing cabinet or whatever it is. Playing along with all the spoonerisms, which dominate our communication right now (I mean cominate our dommunication. You think I’m kidding about this but I am not). The days are shorter now, past the equinox, and soon it’ll be Halloween and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and by then other things will have changed.

[dadandthefranchise]

Some days I actually manage to be the dad I want to be

So, last Sunday: Lazy-ish morning. Made waffles, as is our custom on the weekend. Tried a new recipe, which although it violated my minimal ingredients rule (by including flour, whole wheat flour, and rice flour, along with rolled oats) was quite good.

The Franchise is going through one of his periodic display phases (not some kind of codespeak for exhibitionism by the way) — which means that items are displayed in a retail-esque way around the house. There was the period last year when the kitchen table was unusable due to being buried by priced household items (magazines, stuffed fake fruit, etc.) and an Ikea kids cash register. This year it is games. Our buffet in the dining room is now crowded with Bananagrams, dominoes, Bicycle playing cards, Rory’s story cubes, some kind of cat-based tangram game, Simon (yes, the electronic flashing-light beeping thing from your childhood), and The Scrambled States of America. A hand-lettered sign proclaims that they are “all new” or more accurately “ALLNEW.” This is your child’s brain on marketing.

So the obsession with games (including making one’s own) led to us trying to play poker as a family (Amy and I are not poker players, but went through a phase where we thought we might be. The packs of cards proclaimed that they included Texas Hold ‘Em rules — which led to The Franchise asking “how they hold ‘em in Texas,” from which I can only presume that he thought this was some new Texan card-holding technique.

We played five-card draw (I think), ending when I dealt Wy a full house and we called it.1

We then went on a very slow neighborhood walk (something like 4.5 miles, according to my Fitbit), featuring a late lunch at a local cafe and a fairly tired, moderately uncooperative Franchise. He has been coughing lately and is clearly battling something, as evidenced by his unusually lacking joie de vivre.

Back home, where Amy assured him that he could be a couch potato for the afternoon (he said he chose to be a bowl of mashed potatoes, which is interesting as he has never willingly eaten mashed potatoes). So I assumed he was going to perch on the couch, read, and possibly watch TV and probably fall asleep.

I went out to the garage to keep working away on the hand-tool workbench I am laboriously building, and had been out there for maybe 10 minutes when Wy showed up. He just wanted to be out there with me. Then he grabbed the two plastic stakes that came with the plastic horseshoes set and asked me to cut a piece of twine for him. He disappeared.

A couple of minutes later he called me out to the front yard. He had pushed the stakes into the garden bed, just beside the little eight-inch cedar-juniper wall that forms the terrace, about 3 feet apart, with the twine laid between them. What we needed to build, he said, was a little bar, a place for people sitting in the gravelled lower section of the terrace to put their drinks. We got a measuring tape. It should be about 30” long and be maybe a foot above the wall. He got a piece of paper and pencil and drew it for me. We needed to build it.

This is the sort of thing I want to be indulgent about. If he comes up with an idea, a virtuous idea, for something he wants to build, with me, I want to find a way to do it.

I had some pieces of rough-cut 2x6 cedar left over from building raised beds, maybe 18” long. So I got one and we planed the top smooth. We used my Japanese pull saw to cut the ends square and to cut away the knot that was in one end, him standing on a five-gallon paint bucket and me standing behind him with one hand on the saw.

We decided to make the legs out of another cedar piece, which I split using a hatchet and a hammer (he chose that over sawing). I cut points on the bottom of the legs so we could drive them into the ground. Then he helped me drill and drive pocket screws to fasten the legs to the top. We took the bar out to the front yard and pounded it into the ground.

We went inside and got Amy, who brought out beverages (plastic glasses of ginger beer) for us to test the bar with.

He’s been doing this lately — coming up with an idea out of the blue and then either executing it himself or marshaling one or both of us. The other day he decided we needed an attractive table so he set the dining table with glass plates, napkins, and silverware, then filled a carafe with water and asked me to put a lemon wedge in it, then went outside and picked peas, came in, and added cabbage pieces and broccolini for a salad of sorts.

He was enormously proud of himself for having the idea. I was enormously proud of myself for having pieces of lumber on hand to build something like this. And I was excited to be able to build it with him. I want woodworking and carpentry to be things we can do together, and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s a good thing to have him help me with my projects, even if that help is sometimes not, you know, unfailingly helpful. Although — he is getting to an age where I can ask him to get something for me, to hold something for me, and he can do it. I remember being relegated to gopher 2 status as a kid and feeling as though it were an unimportant job; now that I am I guess of a certain age, not having to make extra trips up the stairs becomes a real plus.

I will let you know how it goes when we redo the deck this summer.

I should mention at this point that he has started to show an aversion for losing. I won the first hand, at which point he said he was on my team. Interestingly, he just doesn’t like the idea of anyone losing — when I give him some sort of shall we say bathroom-related motivational challenge, and he wins, as he does, he says that he will get two gold medals for winning and that he will share one with me. When we went to the Mariners game last Tuesday, and they were beating Oakland 13-3, he actually got teary because he wanted them to tie so that Oakland wouldn’t feel bad about losing. ↩︎

You know, “go fer,” as in being asked to gopher the hammer, gopher the nails, and finally to gopher the bandaids. ↩︎

[dadandthefranchise]

What we are watching: May 2016

Why start this now? I don’t know. But here is the list, as far as I can tell:

Octanauts. A relatively recent addition. OK. As with many of the 30-minute kid shows on this list, I will sit down to watch them with him and drift off to sleep after five minutes or so. For that purpose they are unrivaled by anything other than perhaps Saturday afternoon golf. I do find their various British accents a little hard to follow but maybe it’s just Captain Barnacles. The exploration of different animals and the message of conservation is good, though.

Floogals. Also recent. Amy pointed out that one good feature of this show is showing kids how to observe and draw conclusions from your observations, and for that the ongoing adventures of these “tiny, happy aliens” are pretty good. Perhaps I will start referring to Wy as “Junior Floogal Boomer.”

Paw Patrol and Blaze and the Monster Machines. Still popular, but Octanauts and Floogals get reached for first.

Kid videos on YouTube. We do control this a bit, but he still loves to watch EvanTube, a channel about a kid building various Lego kits and doing other goofy stuff, as well as one where kids have Nerf-gun wars with their hapless father. Not a lot of, you know, value here.

Nova: Making North America. Still popular. Watched it first in November. I wonder if I can pull viewing stats from AppleTV. Probably from iTunes. I estimate at least a dozen viewings of each of the three parts. Now he wants to buy a rock hammer and look for fossils. I think we will, and you know, it could be a whole lot worse.

Star Wars. Oddly enough, The Empire Strikes Back is probably the most-requested. I think this is purely to hear the lines, “I don’t know where you get your delusions, laser brain,” and “Laugh it up, fuzzball!” George Lucas dialogue at its finest. But we now own The Force Awakens and have seen it at least three times, including our initial viewing in the theater as a family.

Last Shuttle: Our Journey. This has been popular for years now, a blurry YouTube upload of a show from a British science channel of the prep and launch of the last flight of the last shuttle, Atlantis. “This is the last of the last of the last,” one of the people says. I can practically quote all the dialogue at this point. I estimate 100 viewings. We hadn’t watched it for months, but in the last few weeks we have seen it at least once.

Fixer Upper and The Pioneer Woman. Still popular.

Mars lander videos on YouTube. Still popular, although we couldn’t find the one video compilation we used to watch the last time we tried. Not that much of a loss, I think — the audio and video were unsynced in the last half of it, which used to drive me a little crazy. Normally I would solve that problem by falling asleep.

[dadandthefranchise]

Bridge to Somewhere

Before we had The Franchise, the whole notion of having a graduation ceremony at every conceivable level seemed ridiculous to me. It still seems ridiculous to dress little kids up in cap and gown and herd them down the aisle to “Pomp and Circumstance,” but I’m not sure if anyone even does that.

Having said that, though, I do get the notion of wanting to mark a transition, the end of something known and the beginning of something unknown, with some kind of ceremony.

It was The Franchise’s last day of co-op preschool this week. I took the afternoon off work and attended. Mostly I wanted to go because they were having a play, and I wanted to see him in it. It was a play written by the kids (well, dictated to the teacher) and if I hadn’t known the kids in it, it would have been excruciating. And I don’t know these kids that well — I have not been the parent participating in the co-op — but we have had some of them over and I have participated in a few outings.

I wanted to see him in the play because for the longest time he didn’t want to be in the play. It has only been in the last few weeks that he decided he was in, playing one of the race cars. He has been by inclination, a slow joiner for some group activities (tee ball has been a notable exception), and a non-performer (unless you count jokes and general holding forth on any topic, which, come to think of it, counts). So part of me wanted to see him as part of the class, taking part and being just one of the kids.

And he was just one of the kids, tearing around the room with the other race cars, wearing his repurposed astronaut shirt and astronaut helmet, from which he carefully picked all the foam padding and left it in little piles wherever he sat. Kids went up on stage, did their part, narrated gravely by the teacher, and then sat down.

“Han Solo goes on stage,” the teacher says. Han tromps on stage in his vest, white shirt, dark pants, rubber boots, and a white blaster.

“He kills somebody,” the teacher says.

“Die, you stupid storm trooper,” Han says.

“He goes back to his seat,” the teacher says. Han goes back to his seat.

You get the idea. It goes on like this. “The Luke Skywalkers come. The Elsas come. The timekeeper comes. The race cars come, and they run around the audience three times. They throw donuts.”

At this point they all lay down on the floor and spin in circles.

It’s all good fun, and we parents are variously laughing and taking shaky video on our phones. It goes on like this, everybody coming on stage and departing, again and again, in various groups. Everybody dies. They come back to life! They die again. At the end they line up on stage and Wy solemnly tucks his chin against his chest in a head-only bow, which is something I’ve never seen him do before.

We go outside and the kids play and eat pizza. It’s a crazy outdoor play space, with bars to climb on, a playhouse to play in, a sunken rowboat to play in, swings, a little raised-bed garden, a pump, a concrete slope, tools — kids just roam around in groups, playing and making up games and building and tearing down.

The Franchise will be back here in the fall for kindergarten. But most of his class is moving on, moving out, to different kindergartens at schools all over Seattle. This co-op community is breaking up. Some will stay together in little groups, the way we still see a few people from the baby groups we were in, from earlier preschool years, but this group, as it exists now, is over forever.

Everyone feels that, in some way. The teacher bangs on the drum and invites us back inside for the bridge ceremony. The kids line up and he calls them one by one to the stage, where they walk over a little bridge laid out on the stage, and he says three things about them, taken from a survey of their classmates.

It is alphabetical by first name, and so Wy is last. Sidebar: It does seem like people name their kids disproportionately with names starting with letters early in the alphabet. Our tee ball team has 11 kids. There are three As, a B, two Cs, and a D. That’s 7 kids — well over half the team — in the first four letters of the alphabet. And I am struck by much the same watching the bridge ceremony. Twenty-two kids, and three As, a C, two Ds, two Es, two Js, and a K — not quite as notable as the tee ball team. Never mind.

The teacher says three things about each kid — “His friends say that he likes to read, he loves to tell jokes, and he is a good friend.” The “good friend” bit is repeated for every kid, and I believe it. They are all good kids, whatever that means. And they each walk over the bridge, and the teacher gives them their little certificate, and he says, “You are now a kindergartner.”

And some people tear up, and sniffle a little. It is the end of this thing, and those parents for whom it is their last kid, or their only kid know that this is the last time they will do this. Even if we were having another kid, it would never be like this again. It would be different.

Wy says, “I wish we could go back to the start of the year.”

“And do it again?” I say. He nods.

“Life doesn’t work like that, buddy,” I say. “It’s one way.”

It is one way. Things happen, and this is the last time that this thing will happen to me, to us.

It is a cliché, I know, but he really is growing up so fast. He is getting bigger. I swear, I look at his hands every week or so, and they are noticeably bigger every time. He is doing new things — until a few weeks ago drawing was of very little interest, and now he draws every day. He is reading and learning new things — heck, we have even quietly dispensed with the little step stool in the bathroom because he is tall enough to spit his toothpaste into the sink and wash his hands without it.

He is, of course, five, and so he still fundamentally has a five-year-old’s judgement (minimal), sense of humor (bodily functions still hilarious), and need to be comforted and helped. Which is fine with me. I might wish that he were able to blow his own nose or wipe his own butt, but that will come. If those skills come at the expense of him still wanting to hold my hand everywhere, that is not a trade I will make gladly.

But that day will come too, I know.

[dadandthefranchise]

Being sick

I used to feel — still do, sometimes — that the one thing I am really good at is being sick. I spent a fair amount of time being sick as a kid. Chickenpox. Measles. Tonsilitis. Every cold that seemed to come our family’s way.

My dad, on the other hand, is a legendary tough guy. I swear it seems that he didn’t get a cold until he was in his 70s. He once was diagnosed with pneumonia and he came home and went to bed. Stayed there all afternoon. He was back on the job site of the house he was building in the morning.

I do remember him getting a mysterious illness that may or may not have been shingles when he was in his 50s. That one knocked him down for about a month.

As I’ve gotten older, I don’t get sick quite as much as I used to. Although I guess I had a couple of bouts of strep a few years ago. And the crazy ear infection thing I had last spring. Hmm. Maybe not quite the argument I wanted to make. Anyway.

One of the things I worried about in my worry-too-much way, before having a kid, was how my inevitable episodes of illness would play out. Would he/she refuse to leave me alone? Be constantly noisy? Be a source of constant infection?

What I hadn’t counted on is on him being a sick buddy. Meaning that it seems that he and I get sick either at the same time, or overlapping, with some frequency, and that we end up hanging out together. I have memories of sitting snuggled up on the couch together, watching baseball or golf or (oddly enough) 2001: A Space Odyssey, or (today) Nova.

Today, we snuggled up under a blanket and watched the same episode of Nova twice: The first time before dinner, wherein I fell asleep for about half of it, waking up a few minutes before he fell asleep; the second time after dinner, as he was somewhat unreasonably distraught that he had not seen the whole thing, wherein I fell asleep for about half of it but he stayed awake.

When I’m feeling bad, and he is too, I can think of very few better ways to spend my time than to hang out with him on the couch.

I have lately begun to try to hide my illnesses from my dad. Legendary tough guy, as I said, and even now at almost 92 he gets maybe 10% of the colds I get. It’s not that he’s unsympathetic. It’s almost the opposite. Every time I get a cold he’s up here even more frequently than usual, showing great concern. This has been an ongoing bit of mystery (and, I will observe, annoyance) for me over the last few years, but something he let slip the last time I got sick (sadly, less than a month ago) may have cleared it up for me.

I can’t remember our exchange verbatim, but it was something along the lines of:

Dad: Are you feeling better? Me: A little, I guess. Not much. I’ll get better eventually. Dad: I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be all alone.

I suppose it’s possible that Dad lives in a world where a common cold is life-threatening. It’s possible that he’s always felt this way about me, that I was the kind of kid who probably wouldn’t have survived to adolescence in the 1920s, and maybe that’s true. Maybe he has always felt a little helpless, being so healthy himself and seeing me being sick so often, at least comparatively.

The Franchise has that kid strength where only the most severe illnesses seem to get him down. Otherwise, irrepressible. I can’t say that he seems to get any more illnesses than his friends, which pleases me, as his mother has always seemingly had a great immune system.

So tomorrow Amy cancelled his play date and might keep him home from school. I will probably go to work for at least part of the day to infect my coworkers in the finest American workplace tradition. Plus if I come home too early I subject myself to being sympathy-stalked by my dad. I have honestly considered driving my car around the block and parking it there whenever I stay home to conceal my absence from work.

[dadandthefranchise]

Baseball

The seasons come and go, and baseball is here again. It is a game, as Bart Giamatti observed, designed to break your heart — “The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

Maybe a little overdramatic, but ask me in November.

But this is the season of love and of Opening Day. Our Opening Day, too. The Franchise is playing tee ball.

I am one of two coaches on his team, and Coach Phil and I share the same qualifications: Enthusiasm and a desire to hang out with our kids, unencumbered by any actual baseball playing or coaching experience.

First game yesterday, and it was fun. It’s been remarkably warm here for early April — already several meals eaten on our deck, which is borderline unheard of for this time of year. Warm enough that I couldn’t figure out why the skin on my left elbow was irritated till I took off my shirt at night to shower and saw that I have a tidy farmer sunburn on my lower arms.

So: A beautiful day for our first game. The hats and jerseys, which we had thought were going to be delayed, showed up, and we got all the kids hatted and jerseyed and on the field. Moderate chaos. But fun. It is clear that one of the drills we need to do in the next practice is throwing to first base. Also who fields the ball (the answer is not everyone, which seemed to be the trend). One kid covered up the ball like a hockey player trying to draw a whistle. One of the baserunners on the other team tried to field a grounder. You get the idea.

But enthusiasm! We have it. I shouted encouragement till I was hoarse. All the kids were psyched to hit, to field, to run, to throw. We have a great team — great in the only sense I care about, which is that the kids are all happy to be playing baseball and full of excitement for the whole thing, and not old enough for it to be uncool to be excited — if they are excited, they let you know (often for hours/days afterward).

Some good hits. At least one good fielding play — second baseman fielded a grounder and threw to the little girl playing first base (who is easily my most baseball-knowledgeable player), who caught it. I came moderately unglued. But everything toward the main goal of tee ball, as given to us the the organizers: For the kids to have enough fun that they come back next year. “We have to make it fun, and not just standing around,” one speaker said, “or we’ll lose them to soccer.”

And then, luck/fate would have it, we went to our first Mariners game yesterday evening (6:05 start). They are the Mariners, and we were in attendance, therefore they lost. But it was a beautiful evening — for so many typical April games the choice is between the warm jacket and the really warm jacket and don’t forget the hat — so to walk out the door in a T-shirt and shorts carrying a light sweatshirt was strange. We did all the things we do: The Franchise and I watched a couple of innings, then left our seats while Amy and her sister stayed, to wander the ballpark. Up to “our favorite view of the ballpark,” from the Lookout Landing in right field, down and over to the golf club fitting place, where they remembered us from last year and where Wy took the club they offered, swung and missed once, and then hit three very creditable drives for a five-year-old, to the amusement of a gaggle of moderately inebriated twenty-something women. Then around the ballpark in a loop, walking through the crush of people, holding hands. We bought Cracker Jack for Amy and her sister, and Dippin’ Dots1 for us (cookies and cream, which led to a minor incident at the end of the night when he got up from his seat and Amy observed a brown streak down the back of his shorts, which he assured her was just the Dippin’ Dots). He was tired, and he fell asleep, I kid you not, in the bottom of the ninth. We woke him up and he walked under his own power to the car, thank goodness.

It was a day spent together, playing baseball and walking and holding hands and sitting together with him rubbing my arm, as he does. I had been a little worried as to how eager he would be to play — sometimes he is a little reticent to join in — but not this time. He, and all the kids, got right in there, with eagerness and joy. The same with hitting the golf balls last night — a year ago he might have balked at all the people standing around and the commotion, but not now. He’s growing up.

Amy and I were talking about how we miss the little (littler) boy he used to be, some of the things he no longer says and does, even as we love the things (most of them) that he does now. But there is enough little boy still in there to need hand holding and arm rubbing and cuddling to ease the transition somewhat. Even though I am starting to think that having a kid, like baseball, is designed to break your heart a little.

These are essentially little frozen balls of ice cream, roughly the size of BBs. You can keep them a lot colder than ice cream because you don’t have to roll them into a ball — they’re loose enough that you just scoop them up. They melt into an ice-cream-like texture in your mouth. Wy loves them. Amy despises them. ↩︎

[dadandthefranchise]

Movies

The Franchise’s approach to movies and TV has always perplexed me somewhat. I suppose there is room here for philosophical digressive rambling about why kids like so-called kids’ shows — is it because they inherently like them or because a few kids genuinely like them and the rest go along out of a wish to fit in or because it’s just something to do?

I would say the number of kids’ movies The Franchise has watched is — well, let’s count:

I think — good Lord — that the first movie we forced him to watch might in fact have been Frozen. He had very little interest and we had wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so we watched it. My memory is that he spent the whole time either standing up by Amy’s chair or doing something else.

Finding Nemo. This might have been number one, actually. He’s seen this one a couple of times, I think. Some scary bits (sharks!). And why does every kid movie have to start with the active orphaning or half-orphaning of the kid protagonist?

Ratatouille. I mention this not because he has actually seen it (he’s seen maybe 20 minutes) but to point out that what he thought was scary was not the rats, nor the rats being shot at by the old lady (comment est-ce qu’on dit N-R-A en Français?) but when the chef was being mean to and yelling at the goofy protagonist.

Home. I know nothing about this. His — what do we call her? Babysitter? Nanny? Anyway, the girl who has been essentially the only source of non-parent childcare since he was born — showed him this movie on TV, I think. I remember being surprised that he seemed to have liked it, based on the number of times I had suggested watching a kids’ movie and been roundly dismissed.

The Incredibles. Maybe not a great choice. Fairly anxiety-producing, cartoonish but relatively frightening bad guy, but lots of family bonding?

The Lego Movie. Again, introduced by the babysitter. For the first time on this list, a massive hit. I suppose it was predictable. This hit while his Lego obsession was still on the way up (might actually still be on the way up) and although there were a few scary parts (really just the hallucinatory Piece of Resistance scene) the action and humor of the rest seemed to compensate. We had to buy it and I will say that we have gotten our money’s worth. I estimate our viewings in the 20s. Surprisingly watchable by adults, especially if you allow yourself to drop off to sleep.

Inside Out. First movie we took him to a theater to see, this past Labor Day, I think. As with many Pixar movies, aimed almost more at the parents than the kids. And the kids it was aimed at are I think older than Wy. He was OK with it but there has been zero clamoring to see it again.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Watched this a couple of months ago, I think. I think he liked most of it and even powered through the scary bits. I might be remembering it wrong, though; he might have bailed partway through to go play with his Legos over near the dining room and sneak peeks at the screen.

How to Train Your Dragon. We watched this last night, over some protestation. The initial part of any movie, where they establish the problem that the protagonist is going to have to solve during the rest of it — that’s the part he doesn’t like. But he put his hands over his ears during the scary parts (a genius technique taught to him by his preschool teacher) and by about the 20-minute-mark was enjoying it.

I am probably forgetting a couple, but that’s the list as I remember it. Eight kid movies in five years. Maybe that’s typical. And it’s not counting the TV shows that he likes — when he was smaller it was Peg + Cat and a little Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood — but now it’s Paw Patrol and Blaze and the Monster Machines. And it’s not counting the other stuff he likes to watch — all the space-related stuff like Last Shuttle: Our Journey, When We Left Earth, and all the YouTube animations of the various Mars rovers being designed and taking off and landing. Nor is it counting the Nova Making North America episodes that have just recently been the obsession. Nor is it counting the cooking shows (mostly The Pioneer Woman but also the Kids Baking Championship) or the renovation shows (Fixer Upper) that he watches too. Nor the adult (not that kind of adult) movies he has watched with me / us: 2001; Star Wars: A New Hope.

One take on this might be that the list says as much about his attention span as anything, but he will sit and play with Legos or read books for a couple of hours, so I don’t think his reluctance to watch movies is about that. I think it’s about what I touched on earlier — that he doesn’t like to see people being mean to each other, that he doesn’t like to see bad things happening to people. Every movie on this list (every movie in general?) features something bad happening up front (generally to the kid’s parents) and then some rough times before things improve and the credits roll. He is a bit of a tender-hearted little dude, and all the bad stuff is hard on him, I think. The big winner on the above list — The Lego Movie — is there partly because of the Legos and partly because I think it’s one of the funnier movies on the list, and because the bad thing that happens to Emmet is finding the Piece of Resistance, which marks him for everything that happens next. Nobody dies at the start (well, Vitruvius gets blinded) and it’s all a relatively good-natured quest. And clearly, the problems that are there to be solved in TV shows are, you know, the mayor’s cat up a tree, an elephant who can’t find its mommy, prepping Thanksgiving for 50 hungry ranch hands, renovating a house. Not a lot of inter-personal conflict there.

I will add at this point that I don’t remember my dad ever sitting through a movie other than whatever was on The Wonderful World of Disney at 6 PM on Sundays (e.g. The Love Bug and its sequels, movies starring a young Kurt Russell, My Fair Lady and what not). Pretty sure (for religious reasons) that he has never seen a movie in a theater. Not sure if that was from a lack of interest, from a conviction that fiction was not worth one’s time (probably). These days (and for the last 20 or so years) his hearing is bad enough, and his literary sophistication is low enough that he wouldn’t be able to follow the plot of a movie anyway. He sticks to hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer, and news and weather all the time.

Well, here we are.

[dadandthefranchise]

Entering the holidays

It is the day before the day before Thanksgiving. Actually it is the night before the day before…and it is actually a dark and stormy night. Windy night, at least.

I realized today just how routine our whole lifestyle has become. I left work early to accompany Dad to a doctor’s appointment. I came home and soon after Amy and The Franchise came home from co-op preschool. We had an early dinner and then Amy took off to, as it turns out, a co-op preschool meeting. Wy and I snuggled up on the couch to do what he wanted to do, which was to watch a Nova miniseries on the origins of North America, which he/we had watched part of earlier this week. So we sat on the couch under a blanket and ate popcorn and apples while we watched Kirk Johnson 1 talk about layers and sediment and basalt and volcanoes and faults.

The cats played around a little bit, and then Chester got on our lap 2 and went to sleep and then Wy slumped over against me and was out too, at maybe 6:45. You’ve got a tired one there, Amy had observed on her way out the door.

And here I am. Wind howling down the chimney and occasionally slapping the screen door out front. Chester passed out on top of the piano, after eating voraciously. Snuggles hunkered down under the couch, probably asleep too.

The screensaver on our Apple TV is a slide show of selected pictures, mostly from Wy’s life but some from travels of mine. One that has caught my eye recently is a blurry picture from probably 2011. It’s a selfie of me, holding Wy in my lap in the glider that used to be in his room. He’s passed out. I remember that night because I think it was the first night Amy had left me alone with him. I wasn’t worried, exactly, but I remember being, well, worried that he wasn’t going to fall asleep well. I remember snuggling up with him in his room, playing Dreamland on the stereo, and rocking him, and having him fall asleep gently and naturally on me, and then having him sweat profusely on me, as he does every time he falls asleep, which we were just learning back then.

And I remember feeling awkward the first time I went to a doctor’s appointment with my dad, but also feeling pleased that I could be there for him 3 to translate between him and the doctor, to hear the things his damaged ears couldn’t, to show by my unconcerned demeanor that things would be OK and that this wasn’t a big deal.

I have grown into the role of father to Wyatt and, well, father to my father. That’s what it feels like. I don’t have to discipline my dad the way I do Wy — for example, he is not given to shouting bathroom words whilst at the dinner table — but I sometimes feel like I have to explain the world to my dad in much the way I do to Wy, and honestly I have to do it more often because his memory is so much worse than Wy’s 4. So many of the things that completely mystify my father (e.g. how a cell phone works) are taken by Wy as a fact of life no more remarkable than gravity. He will grow up this way, of course, and my father will continue to feel that the world began to stop making sense in the 1980s, when computers started taking over and the simple mechanized and horse-powered world of his youth began to vanish forever.

And me? I’m caught in between. I remember parts of that horse-powered, mechanized world, growing hay and oats and wheat on our little farm, building houses with my dad, going out in the winter to cut firewood and toasting sandwiches made on my mom’s homemade bread over a campfire. I remember the first computers I saw, the Vic 20 and Commodore 64 and how badly I wanted one and how firmly my dad said no. And now I’m the adult, for Wy and for my dad too. I can feel my age whenever I hear somebody talk about something computer/internet related that I feel I would have intuitively understood a few years ago but which now sounds a little gibberish-esque to me.

I feel comfortable in this world we inhabit and in my role in it, for now. It will be Thanksgiving in a couple of days and my dad will be upstairs with us and with Amy’s sister and her husband (both of whom Wy adores) and it will be good. The next day we will go get our Christmas tree as is our custom, and we will decorate it and our house and that will be good too. We will have Christmas, and Amy’s parents will come, and after that New Year’s, but before that New Year’s Eve, where tradition dictates that Wy will come to work with me and we will work together for half a day before going out to lunch and then coming home, and all that will be good too.

Who is the head of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and almost an acquaintance of ours — we know his father. ↩︎

The cats probably warrant a post by themselves. I will just observe here that we got them about a week ago from a shelter, and Chester (8 months old) and Snuggles (3 months) seem to be getting along well and fitting into the family dynamic, um, dynamically. ↩︎

I honestly couldn’t think of a better way to say this, despite the fact that I despise the phrase “being there for someone.” It just seems like a fuzzy, over-used cliché, but damned if it doesn’t fit sometimes. ↩︎

To be fair, my memory is worse than Wy’s too. ↩︎

[dadandthefranchise]

Taste

I often say that one of the interesting things about living with a 91-year-old and a four-year-old is the astonishing number of developmental parallels between the two. Actually I don’t say that, exactly, because I am not that eloquent in conversation.

I realize that saying this is either insulting to my dad (implying that he is somehow mentally or physically or emotionally on the level of a four-year-old) or…I was going to say complimentary to The Franchise (wise beyond his years, etc.). But I’m not so sure about that. It’s probably not complimentary to either. Maybe.

One thing that occurred to me the other night during a truncated family dinner is their somewhat parallel approach to food. The truncated part is that in addition to it being a “just-us” dinner (i.e. an off-week for Amy’s sister and her husband), Amy herself had a parent meeting for our co-op preschool, so she ate a little and ran.

We had baked potatoes, which you would think would be fairly innocuous. Toppings: butter, cheddar, sour cream, Bac-o bits. And a salad that Amy made. And a baked sweet potato that Amy had made for Wy, when he announced that he hated baked potatoes. On receipt of the sweet potato he decided that wasn’t going to work either. I countered by giving him a baked potato. He pointed out that he hated baked potatoes. I pointed out that he seemed to do OK with potatoes in another form, such as fries. He countered by pointing out that those included ketchup. I pointed out that these toppings were pretty awesome in their own right. He pointed out that I was wrong.

I made a baked potato (geez—almost spelled it with an ‘e’, Dan Quayle style) for him and laboriously cut it into bite-size pieces. I put some salad on his plate, and a bite or two of sweet potato. We generally adopt the approach of “you can hate it, but you have to try it first,” with limited success. In this case, I talked him into a bite of baked potato, which got me a thumbs-up and further requests for bites. He tried the salad. He even tried a bite of sweet potato, plain, which was particularly good. He made that face he makes when he’s not sure about something, sort of a cross between angry and queasy, while chewing, which cleared when he figured out that the sweet potato was actually pretty good.

My dad was eating slowly, as is his custom. Always has been. In pretty much every meal I have eaten with him in my life, he has finished last. He semi-plays with his food, nudging a bite into just the right shape, scraping the bottom of a bowl five times with a spoon before shoveling in the last bite. He seemingly chews each mouthful twenty times. By the time I was taking my plate to the kitchen and Wy was back to playing with Legos, my dad was almost done. He had scraped the guts of the baked potato out and had carefully left the skin.

“How come you didn’t eat the skin?” I said.

“I never do,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

I have observed my dad’s picky attitude toward food before. He peels peaches. He peels apples before eating them if he can. He definitely doesn’t like spicy food. Or lemon cake. Or pasta, not really, anyway. He eats the same dinner every night (unless he eats with us). He calls it “cracker sandwiches.” In its deluxe form, you start by placing a slice of onion on a cast iron frying pan (which you never, ever wash) and heating it to take some of the oniony sharpness out. You also place a piece of faux Canadian bacon on the frying pan and a piece of soy cheese on top of that, and heat them until the cheese softens. In a different filthy frying pan you heat two crackers for each sandwich. The preferred cracker is a Stoned Wheat Thin, which was the only cracker allowed in our house when I was a kid (although I remember saltines from time to time as well, and Cheez-Its). Onion on top of the cheese-bacon combo, whole mess sandwiched between crackers: done.

Every night. Onion optional. It’s simple, it feels like cooking to him (I think) and he can make it essentially in his sleep. I would venture to guess that in the almost 20 years since my mother died, he has made that dinner probably four or five nights a week, every week.

Wy is a more adventurous eater than he is. This is probably because of Wy growing up in a city, and eating chicken pho since he was old enough to chew. Wy has even decided that he likes spicy food, and the last time we had pho, he not only put the jalapeños in it but ate a jalapeño slice afterward. My dad grew up on a homestead in Saskatchewan in the 1920s and 30s, eating whatever they could grow, raise (cows and chickens) or catch (fish), generally smoked to preserve it and then fried in cream for eating. That sounds pretty adventurous to me if a little monotonous.

I’m not sure I’m triangulating toward some kind of significant point here. I don’t think it’s that sort of post.

I guess it’s significant enough eating dinner together, eating baked potatoes, each in our own way, and then all enjoying hot drinks (tea for me, hot chocolate for Dad, Ovaltine for The Franchise), and sharing the assorted cookies and brownies Amy bought. Perhaps that’s enough intergenerational cohesion to even hold this blog post together.

[dadandthefranchise]

Today's 9th hole selfie

[dadandthefranchise]

Let’s see where this takes us

In this era of on-demand TV and movies1 we are blessed (or you know, cursed) with the ability to watch something whenever we want, over and over.

This is mostly good. A while ago (year? Two years? Who can tell anymore?) a colleague of mine turned me on to a series called When We Left Earth. It’s a multipart series chronicling the American space program from Project Mercury through to the Space Shuttle. We have watched it many times and it remains in the rotation as something Wy will acquiesce to watching and that we can still manage to get through ourselves.

I am getting to my starting point. Just hang on.

The intro to every episode has shots from the parade thrown for the Apollo 11 astronauts and the voiceover says: “This is the story of our greatest adventure.”

One more detour: I struggle2 in writing about The Franchise to strike the right tone. I kind of hate reading people who write about their lives as nothing but positive — where everything is awesome 3 and their lives are never-ending journeys of happiness and fulfillment. I am not saying my life is that way — I certainly have moments of unhappiness and um, un-fulfillment.

The thing is that those moments seldom involve my family, including The Franchise.

I was going to write (in fact, I wrote and then deleted it) that I hate reading people who are relentlessly positive about their lives, no matter what bad things happen. The truth is I don’t really resent a positive spin — what I think I resent is the falsehood inherent in pretending that bad things don’t exist in life, either by ignoring them altogether or by turning them into some kind of positive.

I hate fake.

And I feel that sometimes what I write here is a little fake. Because I don’t spend time talking about the negatives. I don’t want to be a whiner. I don’t really have anything to whine about. And I don’t really want to talk about what bothers me. And I don’t really need to remember the bad stuff. The bad stuff nags at me and is always with me without trying.

The things I want not to lose are the good things. The high points of Our Greatest Adventure, which is of course The Franchise.

And so that’s what I write about. That detour was just me talking myself into feeling OK about doing what I was going to do anyway which is to write about the positive.

I feel lucky to be his dad. On the weekends especially he’s all over me. He gets to sleep in The Big Bed on Friday and Saturday night, so he was all over me for much of the night last night. In the morning he taps me on the shoulder and stage-whispers, “Last time when I went to the bathroom I forgot to wash my hands.”

We get up. I suggest that as long as we were in the bathroom he might as well try to pee. He agrees and lets loose a power stream, which is of course the real reason he got up. Somehow washing hands seems like a better reason to get up than to pee, which I don’t understand. Back in bed. More snuggling. He wakes Amy up to have a family hug, which involves him putting his arms around both our necks and pulling us close to him.

Up for real. I make coffee and clean the kitchen while he builds Legos, which he essentially treats as his job now. We make pancakes — chocolate-chip for him, blueberry for us — and he does basically everything except crack eggs (hates to get his hands messy) and fry.

He wants to go family golfing — 9 holes of the short par-3 at Jackson Park — but Amy isn’t feeling well. He and I go by ourselves. There’s no one on the course (it’s an overcast Sunday and the Seahawks are playing). He kicks my ball on the first green and I yell at him a bit but that’s the low point. No more incessant teeing the ball up in the fairway — he just whacks away with his 7-iron. He hits several good shots — a straight, halfway-to-the hole shot on #6 (maybe 70 yards?); a couple of good iron shots; a couple of good putts. I start plying him with snacks on the second hole: Grapes, one for each cheek; a string cheese; the last homemade doughnut from our party yesterday, which we share while sitting on a bench at #6, just after the highlight of every round, which is using the ball washer there (I have to drag the bench over so he can be tall enough to move the washer thing up and down); and a Baby Bell cheese, which we share on the bench at #8 (and which I offer to him entirely, but he gravely tears it in half and gives half to me).

We take our usual selfie on the 9th green and then go and play “chip-catch” on the chipping green, in which we stand on opposite sides of the green and chip balls at each other, trying to hit each other’s clubs.

Before we played, on our way from the parking lot we had been walking in the road, holding hands, golf bags on our backs, and a car came up behind us. As they passed, a woman leaned out the window and said, “I wish I had a camera — that would have made a great picture.”

At our last Mariners game of the season a week ago, we went to get soft-serve (the big size, in the Mariners helmet, because, you know, last game of the year). The woman working the counter was clearly having a bad day. No smiles. Rolling her eyes at the guy in front of us, who was dithering (“Oh, that’s $10? Oh, not that then, I’ll just have the fries…”). We get up there and I pick Wy up so he can see. I don’t see what he does, but she reacts: “Oh, hello!” Big smile. To a coworker who’s on our side of the counter restocking Cracker Jack: “Hey Tina, say hi to him and watch what happens!”

What happened, of course, is that he winked at her, and probably added the “click” sound effect that I ill-advisedly taught him. I don’t know if that encounter turned her night around but it sure looked like it did.

And I know how that feels — to come home from work tired, feeling like I either didn’t do my best or did my best and it still wasn’t enough, and then to have him run at me and hug me, or want to snuggle me on the couch, or want me to be the one in bed with him reading his favorite book (National Geographic “Meteors.” I know. It’s weird.).

It’s not (probably another blog post on its own right here) that I pity couples who don’t have kids. I pity couples who don’t have this kid, or one like him. Maybe everybody feels this way about their kids; I don’t know. It all feels worth it, all the time: All the money we spend; all the books we read, the golf we play, the Police Chase (Legos) we play; the food we cook, the snacks we carry; the things we take him to — all the time that we spend on him and for him and because of him and which might be the only thing about which I might be resentful: I regret (almost) none of it. That’s the weird thing to me. I might have predicted before we had him that I would begrudge not only the activities I would have to do but but the time spent doing them, and the surprising fact to me is that I generally begrudge neither.

Let’s see where this takes us.

The absence of which is yet another thing that will mystify The Franchise when he becomes of age. ↩︎

To write anything at all, obviously. ↩︎

Inadvertent Lego Movie shoutout here. ↩︎

[dadandthefranchise]

The year so far

Just kidding. I am not going to write a “this year so far” post in late September as my first blog post of 2015. That would read like a holiday letter, which I am not going to write until late February. I am probably not kidding about that.

Maybe I should have called this post “Be Here Now,” although that carries with it a little baggage to — what? Sixties-era hippy philosophy? New-Age-y crystal harmonics? I don’t actually know. It’s a hazard one encounters when one knows the words of a term but not what they actually refer to. And I refuse to stop writing right now to look it up.

Anyway. Here. Now. Here is our house in Seattle, in the (now) early-morning darkness of a Saturday morning. No one else is up. Not my dad (asleep), not Wy and Amy (asleep), not the cat (dead, killed by coyotes a few months back). Just finished half a Bagel Oasis blueberry bagel but still have substantial coffee left.

Dad and the Franchise. Dad is just returned (Thursday) from a trip to Canada to see his friends in Merritt and his sisters in the Okanagan. 1 I will save the discussion on whether a 91-year-old should be making international driving trips for another time. He made it back. He has continued for so long in an ageless-seeming fashion (OK, not really; but his age-related decline has been so gradual over the last few years while he has lived with us that it has been imperceptible on a daily basis) that the decline he has experienced this year (2015) has been pretty noticeable.

He has gotten old. He says it himself, after years of referring to himself as middle-aged, he has finally stopped that and says things like (to Wyatt), “I could pick you up if I weren’t so miserably old.” He is slower. Slower to walk, slower to understand. He is more easily confused. His cell phone, which he has had for several years but only uses sporadically, has defeated him on his last two trips to Canada, even though the night before he left on this last trip he successfully test-called me on it from downstairs.

Last year, Amy and I said to each other that we could imagine him living for 10 more years. Now, that seems really unlikely.

But. It could be worse. We might as well put that on Dad’s tombstone. It’s essentially his mantra. Although usually he’s referring to some natural disaster (flood, tornado, earthquake, volcanic eruption) or war zone. “Let’s be thankful for what we have, and for what we don’t have,” he says, as though concluding a sermon. Most of my conversations with him wrap up with some kind of sermon-esque ending.

The Franchise is four. And a half. Actually we might need to start saying four and three quarters. His changes are subtler too. There was a time when the changes were frequent and massive. Teeth! Talking! Walking! But it’s more a matter of degrees now. Degrees bigger — still big, still substantial. Still golf. Still reading.

But he’s developed interests (obsessions?). It’s Lego right now. He’s had Legos for maybe years, and they’ve been popular, sets (fire truck, RV, motorcycle, plane, cement mixer truck) to be put together, played with in context, and then put away. The Lego Movie changed all that. Its surprisingly adult-watchable message of “you don’t have to just follow the instructions” has been fully received. Now, to quote another phrase I have read somewhere, everything is a remix. All the sets have been pulled apart and are recombined in pieces to create mostly flying law-enforcement vehicles, which require near-constant siren sounds, made first with the voice and lately by whistling. We are enlisted in games of “Police Chase” which mainly require the defenseless perp (usually Emmet from the Lego Movie) to flee across the landscape of my legs and shoulders and possibly the couch, or the table, taking cover behind my coffee cup; while he is pursued by Bad Cop in his Flying Law Enforcement Vehicle of the day, equipped with a tracking gun, growling promises of doom in a throaty Liam Neeson imitation, accompanied by a fine mist of spittle.

He will play with Legos quietly for what seems like hours, the silence punctuated only by the sirens, the dialogue, the faint tinkle of Lego pieces falling to the floor, and the occasional crash as he empties the giant Lego bin on the floor in search of the handcuffs.

He is his own person. Always has been, I guess, but it has gotten more pronounced lately.

But still, thankfully, a sweet kid. Always has been. Wants to play on my phone, yes,2 but when he’s tired wants to do it while snuggled up next to me on the couch. Still wants me to read to him and tell him stories in bed. Still hugs and kisses me. Still goes through periods (weekends) when Mom is proverbial chopped liver and he just wants to hang out with Dad, to go golfing or frankly whatever it is I’m doing.

“The Okanagan” is a region within British Columbia, at least as we used it in our family. It refers to, I guess, the Okanagan valley, largely occupied by Lake Okanagan and assorted towns/cities, and is always associated in my mind with where one goes for summer vacation. ↩︎

Current apps of choice are The Human Body and Simple Machines (Tinybop) and QuickMath Jr. And watching ads on the app store for various apps and games we don’t have. ↩︎

[dadandthefranchise]

This is not a village, silly!

It's a golf course for rabbits.

via https://dayone.me/16VMzGT