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My daughter is home from her first semester of college. Caitlin is the Holiday Enforcer. Christmas will now begin. If it doesn't, someone's ass is going to get kicked.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the natural development of families, particularly those families that include children who are my childrens' age. Caitlin going away to live and returning home for the holidays marks a change, the first of some pretty serious structural adjustments we're bound to make in the next few years. Walker's a Junior, giving us one more year of something like the status quo before things get a good deal quieter around here.
More than just the launching, which is good and right, there is something of a generational nature going on. Someone is "coming home" to our house.
Robyn and I come from families that are in many ways very different from one another. For that matter, Robyn's families are very different from each other. I could write a book on this subject, and may some day.
My family of origin is punctuated by distance, physical and emotional. I have four aunts and uncles living nearby and only have contact with one of them. I have a large number of cousins and we're friendly and glad to see one another when we do, but we're just not regularly involved in each others' lives. My mother left her family and never really returned. My Dad had a very strained and difficult relationship, particularly with his mother, and trips to visit his family were tense, filled with anxiety and unresolved sadness. Perhaps this is why we always celebrated Christmas at home.
Robyn's parents divorced when she was young. Her mother is warm and supportive, rather a nut, loves a good scotch, and is very much a part of our family. She can be counted on to make us an odd meal, let the dogs out, get a kid from school, go to a Christmas concert. My mother and I used to describe parents like Donna as "over-involved." Our implication was that it's the natural course of things for family members to grow up and move AWAY. Donna has taught me that families hang together, support each other in all kinds of practical ways. It's not over-involvement. This is involvement.
LeRoy is really a child of the Great Depression. He was raised to work hard and scrap for everything he got. Sports and the arts were frivolities as far as his father was concerned. LeRoy's dad had the contract for county road maintenance in Benton County and if LeRoy had extra energy there was gravel to throw. He's a very accomplished man, very bright, very active. Connecting with LeRoy really requires a project to work on, however, an idea to be analyzed. Let him use that big brain and deliberately think his way through a problem and he's at his best. He has what could charitably be described as great difficulty with emotional connection. Hug him and you can feel his ass pucker. It's hard to get him to hold still and talk to you about anything real. He plays favorites sometimes, has lost contact with one of his (best) children, tends to give with one hand and take a little back with the other. LeRoy's a hell of a lot kinder and gentler than his father was. I think he's doing the best he can.
Christmas has been structured around these two divorced families for years. Years. Donna get's Christmas Eve, LeRoy get's Christmas day, sometimes the following Saturday. As Donna's gotten older and her house had gotten smaller, the large Christmas eve gathering moved to my brother and sister in law's home. The pattern didn't really change, though.
This year Robyn proposed that we have a Christmas Day open house and stay home. Anyone can come visit who wants to. This caused some rumbling in the jungle. It seems to me everyone is pretty tired of the old pattern but no one feels comfortable shaking it up. My gal did it. This year we get to spend Christmas Eve in our own home. We will spend some of Christmas Day at LeRoy's. Couldn't get a consensus on that one, mostly because the step-sister was still locked into divorce era thinking: "He never gets to have us on the real holiday." She's in her late 40's, and well, as my Southern friends say "bless her heart." LeRoy, at 80, has wisely decided just to give us all some money and let us do our own shopping, which is a big change from his perspective. The whole sitting around a circle watching a lot of people open an endless number of presents until we lose the will to live ritual will be a thing of the past.
Tomorrow, perhaps in the morning, we'll go out to the tree farm and take down a small pine to decorate. Christmas Eve is open to whoever wants to share it with us. Now our kids will be coming home to our house. As the year goes by I have some wishes:
I hope that my children look forward to coming to visit us. I want them to come when they'd like to come and feel comfortable when they're here. When they have children (a long time from now, please, God!) I want them to stay home with them when that makes sense. I want to be involved, on terms that make sense for my kids, and for their kids.
I'm no Christian. I can and probably will rant about how many awful things have been done in the name of someone's "truth." I'm not even really a theist. If God's running this he/she has a wicked sense of humor. At the very least, The Plan is much too complicated for me or any other human to understand. What this holiday means to me is not about virgin birth (yikes!). It's not about family traditions that no longer serve anyone. This holiday is about connecting, giving, taking and spending time.
I will be playing the part of the parent no one dreads seeing.
God, he was a moody fucker, a human mood swing. Will posed something yesterday which reminded me that Cam killed himself this time last year.
I'm not angry with him now. He was the son of an escape artist, a man who abandoned his family, who Cam almost met, who left a space that could not be filled, and of an undetermined shape.
Cam found a scene from the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt in which Steve and an actress talk in a smoky jazz bar. The man playing the guitar, Cam tells me, is his father. Apparently the director liked the music well enough that what you hear in the movie is actually Cam's Dad playing.
In the scene, we can make out the man's silhouette, but not his face. He sings some scat over the guitar and it's very beatnik and 1960s. A man in those days would perhaps run from Clear Lake, Iowa, from a wife and two kids, heading off to California. . . .
You can hang around this one pump station
I'm going to take myself a lifetime vacation
Next time you see me take a long last look
There'll be one less name in the telephone book
Cam wrote beautifully about images that possessed him. I think his most evocative lyrics are the ballads. Songs about lonely highways, big moons, about being somehow outside things, driving by, hoping someone will burn a candle for him. The boy knew how to write a hook, and in his humorous songs, could certainly twist it. He wrote a song about my first marriage, Bessie's Gone, that still cracks me up. And he took the time to write a song about me. Who does that? Wrote a hell of a good one about our friend Al, too.
Cam's passing taught us another important lesson: Facebook is immortal. Cam's site is still up and people are still posting, although Cam, of course is not. For a while, Cam's site was a pretty strange place. His wife was posting and in a lot of pain, people were reacting to the news, it was raw, even a little creepy. I went there this morning just before I started writing this. It's quieter now. People are still posting, but we've all had some time to get used to this.
Steve Earle wrote "I Ain't Ever Satisfied." The song was about Cam. It was about that part in all of us that whispers to us that our successes aren't real, our better qualities are evanescent, that we are frauds about to be found out. There was no pleasing him sometimes. There was no pleasing himself. I'm not sure if this made it fair. One could safely say that Cam suffered from his moods more than anyone else. That didn't make him any easier to live with. At one point in my life, I backed away from Cam, determining that I could not ride with him, could only step back and watch him go. He was tough on wives, because of the darkness in him at times, but also because he was a very sweet, generous, expansive guy a good deal of the time, and that was real, too.
When Cam died, I wasn't that far from cheating clumsy middle aged death myself. I was watching my mother fight death brain cell by brain cell. The idea that Cam would just step off, take a lot of pills and die, left me grasping. . . .
Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to take a crack at a really good, difficult book. I'm going to work up a few songs to the point they're worth doing. I'm going to work on laughing and encouraging and being generous of spirit. I can do that.
My Dad was a different sort of cat, too, Cam, but mine stuck around. I knew that whatever I did, he was proud of me and loved me. Because of him, there are times, just some times, but times nonetheless, when I feel full, happy, thankful and at peace. I mutter to my father that I'm sorry and he sighs and says he guesses it will be okay.
I wish he'd called me, called somebody, old Camster. He was, I guess, too much apart from us, from all of us, that night. There was about Cam often a sense that he was present but also was thinking of something else, some next thing. It meant we connected but did not stay connected.
I look out the window, and see you standing in the road.
Will posted a picture a while back that I just love. I think Dan took it. It shows Will and Joe and I sitting on John Keane's porch in Athens, Georgia, taking a break from recording our last, Visiting Normaltown. I tried to paste the picture in here, but it didn't transfer well. Today you get Asters.
At the moment the picture was taken, we were recording in the best studio we'd ever used in our lives, surrounded by beautiful equipment, gold records on the wall, attended to by John, a quiet man with a dry sense of humor, who cut his teeth recording all the early stuff with REM. Locals, including a former member of the band Sea Level, dropped by to listen as we laid down tracks. We played a local watering hole and lots of enthusiastic locals came by to hear this band the Andy Carlson was producing. We got up and did a hot two or three songs and one slightly drunk man came up and grabbed me by the shoulders, got into my face and said: "You are one singin' mother-fuckah!" We laid down all our tracks the third week of December, or maybe it was the second, but it was close to Christmas, and then Andy stayed there (his family live there) and mixed our work with John.
I think at this point Big Wooden Radio was at the top of our game, in our incarnation as a six piece band. We had several other points where we were in similar fettle, once when our first CD came out, again when we added Paul on percussion and went to Telluride.
Soon life intervened, as it will tend to do. We ran into our own limitations. Could we really travel enough to support life at the "next level?" Would one person continue to do the vast majority of the booking (along with tearing down, the most thankless part of playing gigs)? Would years and years of focusing on putting on a show rather than addressing issues between us wear on us? When you're bringing original material, arrangements, and ideas that you care deeply about to a group of peers you care deeply about, a certain degree of emotional turmoil is to be expected. There's a reason most bands break up, often with acrimony.
Merle Haggard, or somebody equally cool, commented "Anyone can be gracious on the way up." After that photo was taken, we learned a lot about our limitations. We did therapy together, for God's sake! Over the coming years, the number of gigs we played diminished. Our lives and band process really did not permit taking the time and making the commitment to make another recording and work together to play gigs and sell it. Much of being a band is working to retain the illusion of some sort of momentum. It helps to be the band that is going someplace. One really has no control over this. What does one do in order to be prom king year after year? Popularity is evanescent. There's even a band by this name, of course, chosen, I hope, with irony.
We continued to make good music together, perhaps not at the level of practice and attention to detail that we brought to our game during the Athens days, or by the end of a summer playing more than 50 gigs, but solid, honest music. We worked as a quartet, the way we started. This was probably our most interesting formation. This isn't a reflection on the other fine musicians we've included in the band. It's just that we were most surprising when we looked like a quaint little bluegrass band, but then played an amazing array of songs. It was great fun to play eight songs in a row, all unlike each other, and watch the audience figure out "what kind of band we are."
I miss playing music in public. So far, I don't miss it enough to book any gigs. I have a standing offer from one of my favorite bar owners at my favorite bar, and on this very computer I have a song list to work on when I pick up a guitar. Playing even two hours in a bar requires arranging at least 40 songs. All my old arrangements have spaces in them for Will or Joe or Andy or Greg or Al to play instrumental solos. My list needs to be rearranged now so that I can do something on the guitar, or scat sing, or tap dance and fart, to fill that space. Because of my association with these fine musicians, I know I can't just fill that space. I need to make it matter, make it my own. I pick up my guitar, not regularly enough, and work through arrangements. One of these days I'll book that gig, providing enough pressure for me to finish the arrangements and learn them satisfactorily.
I don't know who it was, maybe Paul, who introduced the term "clams," to our vocabulary. Making an error in our highly arranged material became known as "dropping a clam." Paul taught us a lot about rhythm and arranging. He also taught us not to make faces when we "dropped clams." "You guys have to learn to smile when your pants are full." He was right. It was not permissible to make a face. It was permissible to turn to one's partner, off mike, and say "this is a real chowder-fest!"
A solo artist is responsible for his own arrangement. He or she can take more liberties with arranging, since changing direction mid-song doesn't cause any trouble for any partners. We're also lonelier. When times are bad, a good band becomes a closed committee. "They sure hate us. Let's crank this out and get out of here!" A solo artist bombing is lonely. He can only rely on the audience or on himself for strength. His clams are his own and he must stand in them. (Standing the Clams! There's a song.) I miss the good gigs. I also remember bombing slowly, a musician on a slow rotisserie, basted with audience disregard.
I'm happy with where we turned out. I'm grateful for those times on the porch, times when our hard work and discipline paid off, when opportunities seemed unlimited, when we found ourselves playing out of our league and doing well. That, my friends, is a really fine feeling.
Any person who has broken his back and can walk knows what gratitude is. It was a good Thanksgiving. We had a relaxed mid-day meal. The dogs didn't get any of the food.
The food deserves it's own paragraph. We had a turkey basted lovingly in butter and Reisling, covered with cheesecloth until the last quarter hour, as moist as the day it first gobbled. We had a ham, a big local one, cut cross-hatch and basted in brandy and brown sugar and slow baked to let all the wonderfulness soak in. It was pork, as candy. Robyn mixed sweet potatoes and sliced sauteed apples. We had mashed potatoes and green beans with the french onion thing going on and cranberry jello stuff and the traditional Caitlin's boiled cranberry relish, which is actually fabulous, and we had three pies: pecan, pumpkin and apple. John whipped cream, really whipped it with a whisk, and we ate it on our pie, glad to be fat and happy and warm together.
Why, then, did we all go out into the bitter cold and stand outside a Target for two and a half hours? It was windy, too, a breeze that cut through my parka and my stocking cap and reminded me how old and frail and middle aged man can be in the early morning, with no rising sun in sight.
I learned a few things from this adventure:
1. When your son says "I think we should go earlier" he is right. We did and we got the television. Had we come a half our later, our success would have been doubtful. 2. Columbia parkas and stocking caps are great, but nothing beats an old wool blanket held over the head Civil War POW style. 3. Some people need their mommies to dress them. There were a lot of people out there in light coats and no hats. I don't think stupidity entitles you to favors from God, if that's what they were trying. 4. Prepare to be tazed for causing a ruckus. There were lots of cops patrolling and the tiny Target security guy insisted in an adolescent voice he wouldn't tolerate nonsense.
The last time I stood in line for an equivalent period of time, it was 1975 and I got Dylan tickets. It was a great show, the Rolling Thunder Review, and the memories lasted longer than any television I ever owned.
The second Thanksgiving was at my father-in-laws. It's the one I rant about every year. I think we can just replay last year's rant. I did the math this morning, and there were five people there I like, including my father in law. There were six people there with whom I would go to great lengths not to visit. (Notice I didn't end with a preposition!) We sat in a semi-circle around an enormous television. Robyn says I'm focusing on the negative. The whole scene left me in a bad mood even though I was psyched up to be a "sport." I might have made it but the only other company when we got there was the "neighbors," a relatively nice not very bright buy guy with a toupee that would only be more obvious if it got up and danced on his head, and his wife, the alcoholic former prescription drug abuser, who offered up nuggets of wisdom such as "violent videos are just awful," "that dog is going to knock over my wine," and "oh . . . oh. . . my vertigo! (x12)" The social worker in my wanted to suggest that wine and vertigo are perhaps not the best combination, but then neither are abject stupidity and verbal expression, and that never stopped anybody.
I left in a foul mood, no longer thankful for any-fucking-thing. It took me the rest of the day to decompress by myself in the upstairs bedroom, muttering to myself. Today is sunny and stretches out before us filled with possibilities, strengthened by caffeine and foolish optimism.
Nathan Bell suggested yesterday that we all celebrate monkeys, and call it "Thanksgibbon."
I like to get up early on Sunday. I usually drink some coffee, read the paper, then go see Mom. I try to do this every Sunday because Mom can't tell if I'm there or not and I could never go or go twice a day and she wouldn't know which.
Since she's moved to the nursing home Mom has been attending church. Attending is probably the least appropriate term for what she's doing.
Mom's consciousness exists for seconds at a time. These seconds are very seldom connected now. If I sit with her, I often get a glimpse of her, of some familiar neuron firing, perhaps for the last time, and Mom looks at a sleeping old woman and then at me and says sternly: "You should help her." I tell her I will.
This morning I was confronted with very energetic, pretty doggone old volunteers who were busy wheeling residents, except for those who declined, to a room at the end of the hall. I found my mother in her high backed wheelchair, in a line, like a stately old jet at O'Hare, waiting for takeoff. I woke her. She sleeps most of the time and had no idea what she was in line for.
When we moved to Wichita in 1965 we were not a religious family. We'd lived in Illinois, New York, West Virginia and Ohio and it hadn't really come up in our conversation as a family. "Where's God?" I asked once. Mom said "God is everywhere." Mom was a Catholic girl who left the Church and her family to marry Dad, a divorced Non-Catholic. "In the potty?' I asked. I think Mom changed the subject. I was three and she could do that.
Southern Kansas - well, really most of Kansas - follows one evangelical Christian faith or another. Evangelicals must witness to others to fulfill God's plan for them on earth and so I was repeatedly questioned by all my new friends, who wanted me to come to their churches on Sunday mornings, or to Sunday school on Wednesday night. That's "church night." After not very long, my good friend Jay invited me to go to Olivet Southern Baptist Church with him. I was intrigued, and told Mom, who said, not missing a beat:
"Oh, didn't I tell you? We're going to the Unitarian church this Sunday. We already have plans." That's how Mom saved me from the Southern Baptists.
Given this history, I decided that I needed to step out of my comfort zone and see what this service was all about. An energetic old woman had already gotten me a chair right by Mom, who is really slumping in her chair, sawing logs. Big logs. Mom is 5' 10" and I can't lift her up in a chair without hurting her, so I asked one of the energetic old women to help me, but she wasn't allowed. "God will give you strength," I wanted to suggest.
I found some help and got Mom straightened up so she wouldn't be rolling on the floor. I was pretty sure that this was not going to be that kind of service. For a while, the energetic women continued to roll their audience in. Some were cheerful and responsive. Some, like my mother were somewhat less aware, or not aware at all. Mom, for instance was snoozing happily. One wonders why they couldn't have just rolled them from their rooms directly to the church room, without lining them up in the halls first, but I didn't inquire. God works in mysterious ways.
A husband and wife team led the service, eventually Both looked retired and energetic. The woman apologized that there was no piano but let the room in song , referring us to the SonShine Songbook, Large Print Edition. I found it at the SonShine Society website.
The energetic woman began to sing energetically in a voice that was quavery but strong and mostly in tune. Others sang along as best they could, songs about how Jesus suffered and died and how we should humbly glorify him and his Father God, how anyone can be assured of Heaven, how for every instance of pain and suffering there is, somehow a Plan. The plan involves me and Mom joining up, of course. Not much chance of that. Remember the Spanish Inquisition! I'm the strangest creature you ever have heard: my mother's a virgin, my father's a bird! Nananananana! During the second song, Mom woke up, and picked up her side of the Victory Edition SonShine songbook. She looked over at me and smiled a beautiful smile, one I remember from church a long time ago, holding a Unitarian Universalist Hymn-book full of not much better songs. She tried to sing a few words, then flickered out, a brief signal on an old television, and went back to sleep. But what a smile that was! It warms me up just remembering it. The minister talked to us about showing humility and bowing down before God. I thought about Mom's evil illness, how it's rendered her incapable of noticing that she's at a Christian service, or that I am with her. I'm humbled by this terrible disease and it's certain victory over my mother. I wonder how this could possibly be part of a Plan. What an awful plan. New plan, please! Still, that smile. . . the minister wrapped up and we all began to wheel ourselves out of the room. An energetic old woman thanked me for coming and I thanked her for having us.I wheeled Mom back to her room for a long snooze. Was a time she'd have politely dismissed these folks and spent Sunday morning with a paper, or with a bunch of nerdy Unitarians and me. Now they can't convert her.
Hey, don't forget your SonShine pin!
There's a fascinating article in this month's Harper's about "prodromal" treatment of schizophrenics. I can see your eyes drifting away, disappointed that I'm not ranting about Thanksgiving yet. I'm sure I will yet rant. Be patient.
The article focuses on treatment of schizophrenia while symptoms are just developing. This requires that psychiatrists listen to their patients with well tuned ear, since early pre-schizophrenic thought is a very introverted process. People ponder whether solid objects are really solid, they focus intently on religious or relational themes, latching onto symbolism or ritual to try to make sense of things that used to be certain. I knew a guy who spent a lot of time wondering whether or not his arms and legs really existed. This can seem "funny" but it's not. Schizophrenia causes the physical deterioration of the brain over time - patients' brain scans reveal widening fissures, significant measurable deterioration over time.
My father and his father both suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Dad's most profound worry was that I too would succumb. My mission in life for a period of time involved the absence of this disease. Accomplishing the absence of something can be a confusing mission. To this end, my father and I had a number of fascinating conversations. We read R.D. Laing, a British psychiatrist who advanced a "behavioral" theory of the evolution of schizophrenia, which is now largely disproven. I was somewhat attached to the behavioral theory, given my dubious inheritance, but Dad didn't buy it.
What Laing did that was brilliant was to record a great number of interviews with individual patients and their families, sometimes scripting family interactions and interviews. This provided Dad and I with a look inside other heads than our own, gave us reference points for comparing our internal states. We were particularly interested in comparing my mental status at the time (an early 20's person) with the mind-set my father had before he had his first full blown episode, nervous breakdown, violent outburst, at the age of 27. Dad's behavior when psychotic was violent and dangerous, and it offered no basis for comparison, no way for me to relate or compare. I've just never thought about grabbing an axe, heading into my wife's bedroom, and accusing her of infidelity.
Dad talked to me about feeling a certain hollowness, emptiness, an absence of self. He was a good student, a talented writer, a decorated veteran and a very good teacher. His accomplishments always seemed hollow to Dad, as though he were playing a role, acting a part, rather than being genuinely present. He talked about no knowing how to love, or to trust the love of others, because of that same hollowness. He was preoccupied with somehow being a "success" in life but had very rigid and unrealistic expectations of what that would look like. He worried endlessly about interactions with other people, what they might have meant, what he should have said. He was a jealous lover, afraid of abandonment. How can you trust or understand others if you have no internal frame of reference? You're left trying to construct theories that somehow match the external world with your increasingly confusing thoughts.
Before Dad was a "mental patient" he suffered for years in this prior state, uncomfortable and uncertain, but not delusional or particularly unstable. At some point stress put him over the edge and he spent a good deal of the rest of his life teetering there, struggling with symptoms he recognized but could not conquer.
Psychiatrists in clinics that use the Prodromal treatment model are intervening with patients before the "big snap," putting them on low doses of the newer antipsychotic medications, allowing them the time space to regain their balance without experiencing the full blown agony of a psychotic break. The editors of the DSM-V, which will be published within the next couple years, are working to quantify this pre-schizophrenic state and define a diagnosis that will make it more recognizable.
It's early to say whether the patients at these clinics will avoid full blown schizophrenia. It's hard to stay on medication. Great stressors may still trigger psychosis. It doesn't sound as though there are definitive studies yet. The patient anecdotes in the article, however, seem to indicate that patients feel more control over their lives and are functioning pretty well.
Dad had fourteen years, corresponding to my later teens and early adulthood, when he was relatively symptom free. He was eccentric and occasionally cantankerous, but he was an active, involved part of our family. He was a wonderful father to me and a great support as I tried to figure out how to be an adult. He learned how to love us, to feel it, and to be loved in return. He has told me several time that this was his proudest accomplishment.
One day, during the time when I was living alone after moving out of the home I shared with my former wife, Nancy, he called me and in a strangely familiar voice asked me if "I had been hearing things about him." His symptoms were back and he could no longer internalize them. I assured him that I was not hearing anything and begged him to contact his doctor, which he did. What ensued was a fruitless painful struggle to find something that worked for him. The meds that bought him 14 years betrayed him, leaving him with nothing but tremors as a side effect. Dad submitted to electric shock treatments, culminating in a particularly barbaric process called "maintenance ECTs" which involved ongoing regular shock sessions, rather than discrete periods of treatment followed by recovery. ECTs scrambled his thoughts and left him very confused. They did not control his symptoms but no one seemed to have any other ideas. Eventually Dad learned about a new trial medication called Clozapine and got himself included in a study. By then we discovered what we thought were neurological side effects of anti-psychotic drugs were actually the early symptoms of ALS. I'm still convinced that the ECTs weakened his neurological system, making him vulnerable to ALS.
When I close my eyes and call my own name, I can feel myself, inside myself. I am a person, responsible for my actions, taking credit and sometimes blame, loving and being loved. When Dad and I talked, I realized that this was the difference between my father and I. I am present in my own body, a self, a soul, and I can feel this. My father taught me how precious this is.
On Halloween, my daughter Caitlin comes into her own. She and her mother and Nana have collected a vast array of Halloween related items over the years, all of them tacky (but fun). Caitlin erupts into a frenzy of decoration which always includes stringing fake spider web across the front porch at just the right height to garrote her father.
My attitude toward holidays borders on the curmudgeonly. I like a few simple decorations (particularly if I don't have to do them). I already have my house arranged the way I like it and tripping over pumpkin related items placed inconveniently is not my idea of a restful home life. Put the pumpkin (one pumpkin) on the porch, get a triple bag of Milky Way, pour a scotch and we're set.
This little guy is Cullen. He's the grandson of our neighbor Jackie. He came over to admire the severed hand lights, multiple pumpkin, witch and spook related items, as well as the life-threatening spider web. He was evidently impressed and eventually touched one of the severed hands. I think he could have done Halloween quite successfully as a little skater and not changed a thing. Note the skull and crossbones on his stocking cap. He and his family came across the street to visit our dogs, the next door neighbor's and ours, who were in turn visiting each other in the front yard. After a brief interlude with dogs (dogs is just dogs after all) he went straight for the severed hands. In a very business like tone, he announced several times to anyone within earshot that he was going to be Spiderman. He was of the opinion that it was time to get into that Spiderman costume.
My father was a holiday curmudgeon. His birthday was "just another day" unless you forgot it. He would grumble about Christmas hassle and then get misty watching us decorate the tree. "This is the best tree we've ever had," he would inevitably declare. He and I are still one in spirit in this regard: we like to be taken along for the ride, grumbling. If you listen closely you'll hear small murmurs of enjoyment.
We had a visit from Spidey later in the evening. Here he is demonstrating his web prowess with some minor parental assistance. Note the mask slightly ajar. He's using his spidey-sense.
Some kids approach life with great gusto. There's a clarity to their enthusiasm. Cullen is full of juice and ready for the next moment's wonder. What could be better?
I really like that Spider Man costume. My favorite though is Cullen's natural skater look. I'm going to have to find one of those hats.
My daughter is home from her first semester of college. Caitlin is the Holiday Enforcer. Christmas will now begin. If it doesn't, someone's ass is going to get kicked.
