1. Picture Day

   October 5, 2009 by EDubya

   It is such a glorious day, is it not? No…it’s really not. We spent about half an hour picking out outfits tonight for the kids to wear in their pictures tomorrow. I’m not a control freak. I let them pick out what they want to wear, for the most part, with just a little steering. I do draw the line at tank tops. We did some compromising and came up with outfits acceptable by all parties. Small is quite the pickle. He might *seem* like he is all set, but when it comes time for him to step in front of the camera tomorrow, there are better than average odds that he will have stripped off his nice collared shirt for the t-shirt underneath. He’s done it before. I told him that this year, I’d like him to leave his shirt on for the picture. He owes me one after bamboozling me a couple years ago. Whatever he does, he probably won’t make a face like this one.

   How’d you like to get that stink face back in your cute little photo package? Can we also talk about the size of that collar, for God’s sake? I look like I’m about to take off. I would also like to take this moment to mention that I hated jumpers, and when I say hated, I mean HATED and walked around like a grumpy little moppet all day long while trapped in it. I don’t know why I happened to be wearing one in the picture. I can only assume it was bribery or coercion.

   Things improved slightly for me in first grade, as I got to wear my absolute favorite and BEST EVER outfit of all time. This one. I convinced myself that this getup was a reasonable replica of a stewardess uniform. A stewardess uniform, besides being awesome, was important for me to have in my wardrobe, because I had every intention of being an actual stewardess as soon as I was old enough.

   This was long before I realized two crucial pieces of information that would squelch that dream completely. First, I don’t really like flying. At all. Anytime I get on a plane, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get off of it in one piece, but rather will be found amidst it’s wreckage in a few dozen pieces. This notion was made immeasurably worse by a horrifying flight I took back from Japan just before I started high school. Second, I had no idea at the time that my height would tap out somewhere around junior high. I don’t know of too many 5’1″ flight attendants. I can’t even fiddle around in the overhead compartments effectively. I’m the sort of short that has to depend on the kindness of strangers in order to procure items off the top shelf at the grocery store. It just wasn’t meant to be. Also, it should be noted that this stewardess photo provides incontrovertible proof that Small looks exactly like his mother. I wouldn’t have guessed it either, but here it is in tan skin and forest green polyester.

   At some point, school pictures turn from cute and funny shots of sweet little kids to painful and awkward poses from tweens. I don’t know what was going on here. I remember the shirt, as usual. You can kind of get an idea of the puffy shoulders, although their full magnificence is just outside the frame. This is in something like 1982, when Gunny Sax was king, and the whole “Prairie” thing was perfectly acceptable as a fashion choice. Adding to the stellar capture of a moment in time here, is the faint glint of my braces just barely visible through my slightly parted lips. (They didn’t close without some effort due to said braces) I believe this was also the first, but certainly not the last perm I would sport while in my larval stage. I wouldn’t become acquainted with a tweezer in any meaningful way for YEARS to come. Check out the super full brows. I was fortunate to escape the unibrow that menaced my brother, but wow.

   I wonder if I even knew it *was* picture day that morning when I got dressed. I don’t remember for sure, but I DO remember waiting in line to have my photo taken, while my seventh grade teacher was having a fit about kids coming their hair. I kid you not, she forbade us from using those little plastic combs they used to hand out while we waited for our photos to be taken. You can see how well that worked out for all involved.

   My kids have lucked at every year with their portraits. They have looked beautiful every single time. That said, I’m sure they will look back at their photos the same way I look at mine, with weird recollections and mortification. It’s all just part of the exercise.
   

   

   Category Day to Day, That Was Then | Tags: | 4 Comments

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2. Baby Medium

   October 1, 2009 by EDubya

   
   
   
   Baby Girl
   
   Originally uploaded by EdubyaD
   

   Having one of those days/weeks/months thick with nostalgia. I had a dream a few months ago where I was playing with Large and Medium, only they were their four and two year old selves. I was back in time with them and it was fantastic. I could hold and squeeze them. It was that much sweeter, knowing now, only too well, how that time with them is so very fleeting.

   It has all gone by too fast.

   I wish I could have those days back. I feel like I would appreciate that time so much more now that I’m not so short on sleep. Seriously, I went something like five years never sleeping more than three hours in a row. That’s when I gave up wearing a watch. All it did was remind me how little time I had to sleep. So many days I woke up so tired that my first thought was, “Okay, twelve hours until I can go back to bed.”

   I wish I could run in a perpetual loop between babyhood and the point where they start to figure out all the grown up worries in the world, sometime before their first real heartbreak, when they still think anything is possible.

   Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Ben Folds.

   Maybe when they have their own kids, I’ll come over and make sure they get enough sleep. They can soak it all up and they won’t have to dream about going back.
   
   

   

   Category That Was Then | Tags: kids | 2 Comments

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3. Gut Reaction

   September 30, 2009 by EDubya

   
   We saved shoeboxes all year for our trip to Mammoth Lakes each summer. It took my dad, an engineer, to somehow arrange our belongings like a real life Jenga in the back of our car the night before our drive. It all fit perfectly with not a smidgen of room to spare. It was almost as if my sister’s yellow portable 8 track player was built to wedge in-between my bright red tackle box and my mom’s hard vinyl cosmetic bag. Packing with that kind of precision really is a thing of beauty.
   
   Before sunrise we would pile into our Country Squire station wagon and slip out of town. My stomach would be full of butterflies. It is the same feeling I get now, anytime I leave the house before light to go on a trip somewhere. My parents manned the front seats, pilot and co-pilot. My brother, sister and I would sit in the backseat. They each had a window and I had “the hump” in the middle. We weren’t the kind of siblings that could snuggle up and enjoy the ride together. They were older than I was, by an amount significant enough to render me more of an annoyance than a cohort. They each had a door to lean against, a down jacket balled up under their nodding heads, and I had to sit bolt upright between them. If I dared slump over and touch them or cross into “their side” of the seat, I was dead. Sometimes I would get to sit on the front bench seat between my parents, which usually ended in me passed out across my mom’s lap. I distinctly remember a dream I had while asleep up there when I was something like eight. I dreamed that we were on the very same road trip, and I had wandered behind a diner where we had stopped for lunch. In my dream, there was a giant pool which I promptly fell in…as you do. Of course, I notice that the pool has a shark in it (scarred for life after seeing Jaws the summer before) and I start swimming towards the side. My sister then turns on jets that prevent me from reaching the side of the pool, leaving me hanging in peril with the giant shark. All of this may further illuminate why I wasn’t sitting in the backseat with my siblings. Adding to the ambiance of the drive was the fact that my older sister was highly prone to car sickness and a prolific car-barfer. While I don’t remember witnessing the actual retching in the car, possibly due to my tender young mind blocking the activity, I do remember the smell. Oh, do I remember the smell. All eight hours of it.
   
   We stayed in the same cabin year after year. It was named the “Pot O’ Gold” on Rainbow Court. It slept twenty something people, and meeting us up there would be my father’s parents, his sisters, sometimes his cousins, and all the children belonging to those various relatives. I can still conjure the smell in that cabin. It was a distinct combination of pine, fishing gear, and man-made upholstery fabric. Walking in, the light would be streaming through the windows of the A frame in long, careful lines, glittering dust timidly descending in each beam. With the comings and goings in the cabin, there was a near constant tinkling of spinners on the fishing poles belonging to each person. We all had poles. To be part of the family, it was a requirement that you fish as soon as you could master the pincher grasp as an infant. My first trip out on the lake was in my car seat at six weeks old. My family doesn’t kid around about fishing.
   
   There were three shifts each day. One group would hit Lake Mary before dawn each morning. I was always in this group. It was my favorite. We would spend two or three hours trawling the lake, waving as we passed cousins…uncles…grandparents in other boats. It was often cold, but always successful, bringing a bounty of fish each morning, mostly Rainbow trout, but sometimes Brown or Brooke.
   
   Second shift was still-fishing at midday. This always involved lunch on the water, usually a salami sandwich, soda and some kind of candy. My mom favored Abba Zabba bars. I’m not sure how, but I always managed to eat despite the Zeke’s garlic fish bait and salmon eggs under my fingernails. I suppose that stuff doesn’t seem quite as distracting at eight years old. Still-fishing was tedious. Boring. I almost never caught anything. Sometimes, I would go with my grandparents. I would sit dejected on the middle perch in their boat. Once in a while my grandfather would lean over ask me to try using his fishing pole since mine didn’t seem to be very lucky. Miraculously, that always did the trick. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I thought back and realized that he always handed me his fishing pole when he knew there was a fish on the line. Thinking about that now, as a parent myself, ruins me every time.
   
   The third shift was at dusk. I never went. It was basically meant for cocktails on the lake. It’s probably a mystery best left alone, since I’m sure my grand fantasy of my parents yucking it up on the lake with thermoses of booze could quite possibly be better than the real thing. Almost certainly.
   
   The combination of all that fishing and all those fishermen led to a huge amount of fish cleaning done by my older siblings and aunt every night at the kitchen sink. It was a disgusting job, and not a few dry heaves were scattered throughout the process. Someone, at some point, decided to start saving the guts.
   
   This is where the shoeboxes come in.
   
   It was the brainchild of my grandfather, my father, and my older brother. Each night, we would take one of the shoeboxes and line it with plastic wrap. Next, we poured the day’s worth of fish guts into the shoebox. My older sister and aunt took it from there. They took the box and wrapped it in lovely gift paper. Once in a while, they would tear the corner off a dollar bill and stick it under the edge of the lid to give the impression that it was a gift box stuffed full of money. It was impressive camouflage.
   
   Since the cabin we stayed in was located on a cul-de-sac, our own street was out of the question. There was, however, another street running behind the cabin with just a small, sloping section of woods between our cabin and the street. You had a perfect, yet not obvious, view of that street from the back deck of the “Pot O’ Gold”.
   
   After dinner, while the adults were sipping Manhattans on the deck, the kids would slink through the woods and quickly, quietly deposit the package on the road, and race back through the trees. Some of them would hide behind trees or in rotted out stumps or rolled up in a hammock. Then, we would wait. It never took long.
   
   A car would drive by, slow down, pass the box, and then stop. Sometimes, they would back up. Sometimes, someone would get out of the car and investigate. They would look around. They would look from all angles at the package. Once in a while, they would nudge it with one daring toe. Inevitably, they would pick it up, dash back to the car and take off. At this point, we would collapse in laughter and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Then, we would race back to our hiding places and watch them circle the block over and over again. For hours.
   
   Later, our devilry escalated when my dad rigged the box, using rubber bands on the undersides, so that when the lid was lifted off, the sides slammed down delivering the payload of fish guts onto the lap and into the car of the person that picked it up. We went to bed before that car stopped circling.
   
   
   
   *From the Archives

   

   Category That Was Then | Tags: fish kids guts pranks | 1 Comment

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4. 13

   September 24, 2009 by EDubya

   Tonight, for reasons that will remain somewhat vague for the moment, I was trying to remember what I was like as a thirteen year old kid. I started out drawing a total blank, then piece by piece it all started coming into focus. As it does, I am realizing just how the events that happened that year were so monumental to the way I viewed everything forevermore. Thirteen may be when I first became cognizant of the bigger world out there, and conscious of what would become my go-to trivia catagory, pop culture. Some fantastically humongous personal events happened too, like how I got linked up with a hairdresser, an Irishman named Brian, that would see me through most of my teenage angst years, always at the ready with a pair of shears to shape both my hair and the all-too-important high school image, TOTALLY 80′S NEW WAVE TEENAGER™.
   
   That’s me on the bottom left.
   
   
   
   I loved loved loved music. I loved Mtv and I still have some of the VHS tapes I made while sitting for hours watching and absorbing all that I could. I even have some (get this) slides that I took OF THE TV SCREEN when Simon LeBon and Nick Rhodes were the guest VJ’s one night. SLIDES. THAT I TOOK OF THE TV. THINK ABOUT THAT. I had an exponentially expanding and AWESOME LP collection, so much so that I ended up acting as DJ for most of my 8th grade dances that year. I know, right?
   
   What other amazing things happened you asked?
   
   1. The final episode of MASH - I so didn’t get it. To me, MASH was the super boring show that my grandparents had on every time I visted them. My grandfather had been Army Air Corps and then Air Force and my grandmother was a nurse. THEY LOVED THIS SHOW. I’ve watched the final episode in recent years and I can tell you with crystalline certainty that the scenes that I did not have the depth to appreciate at 13, rip your guts out as an adult. RIP YOUR GUTS. I completely get it now.
   
   2. Michael Jackson did the moonwalk on the Motown 25th Anniversary special - I watched it that night. It is no wonder that when he died a few months ago, I felt like a big chunk of my childhood died right alongside him.
   
   3. Nintendo went on sale in Japan – the trajectory was set. In another two years it would be released in America and BLOW ALL OUR MINDS. I used to play so much Super Mario Bros that I would DREAM about it at night and work out ways to find invisible blocks.
   
   4. Korean Air flight 007 is shot down by the USSR - First, allow me to say that I was sure I would never graduate from high school because I was so terrified of the Soviet Union that I was POSITIVE that I would die in a horrible nuclear annihilation before I could. This plane crash ruined me. All I could think about was how this mother and father confirmed that their two young daughters had died onboard by identifying their shoes that were found in the debris field. They had had a special way of tying their shoes and that’s how they knew. I’ve never forgotten that. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.
   
   5. Microsoft Word is first released - There it would be…lurking…waiting for me… Thank God I took typing in high school. Single most valuable class I ever took. EVER.
   
   6. Thriller Video released – see number 2. lather, rinse, repeat.
   
   
   My kid just got cast in 13. He’ll turn 12 in the middle of the production. All of this…all of that…it’s blowing my mind.
   

   

   Category That Was Then | Tags: | 8 Comments

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5. TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGERS™

   September 22, 2009 by EDubya

   On the day when the ban on the sale of clove cigarettes in the U.S. goes into effect, I return to the scene of the crime where I first encountered them. As a TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGER™, I was fascinated by the smell of them, maybe for the similarity to the smell of my grandfather’s pipe. (Sorry Mom and Dad if you are reading this.) Back then we heard incredible tales of their effect on other TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGERS™.

   “Oh, yeah…he used to smoke so many cloves that his lungs were bleeding. BLEEDING!!”

   As the impressionable youth that I was, that was pretty much all I needed to hear. I wouldn’t be making a habit of cloves any more than I would have made a habit of eating a pack of pop rocks and then chugging a Coke.

   “Mikey from the Life commercials did that and his stomach exploded and he died. DIED!!”

   All this happened at Club X, the TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGER™ equivalent of a nightclub which was held at the very same rented roller rink where we now go to the kids’ school sponsored Skate Night once a year. My how the times have changed, my friend. Tonight, instead of watching milling herds of Bauhaus loving goths sway and smoke cloves, we watched Small, Medium and Large skate the night away, red-faced and sweaty under the flashing lights. Nothing else there has changed. I stand by my less than kind yelp review of the place that I wrote up last year. It is kind of a dive as far as kid destinations go, but they have fun regardless and that’s really what it is all about. There are not too many kid activities where you can delight in their excitement and simultaneously mourn your lost youth (and cloves) as a TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGER™.

   

   Category Day to Day, That Was Then | Tags: kids | 6 Comments

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6. New Yorkers Don’t Like Blueberries

   September 11, 2009 by EDubya

   
   
   
   Light On
   
   Originally uploaded by EdubyaD
   

   The day I moved to Manhattan, I discovered I was pregnant. Checked into a hotel and awaiting the arrival of our belongings, I found out the daughter I never believed I would have was brewing. I also discovered what it was like to be puked on by my two year old with an ill-timed flu, while having breakfast in the Carlyle. Twice. One of those discoveries was better.

   My daughter is a New Yorker. She was born at Mount Sinai Hospital the following April. Born on Fifth Avenue. It doesn’t get much more official. We scooped her up and moved back to the west coast 10 days after she was born, but if you ask her, she’s a New Yorker. That fact accounts for any differences she perceives between herself and her California born and bred bookend brothers.

   If there is a game she doesn’t like or a food she can’t tolerate, it is due to her status…New Yorker. “New Yorkers don’t like blueberries, so I don’t like blueberries.” There you have it. She personifies the stereotypes of the city. She is headstrong. She is in charge. She is the center of the universe that she lives in. She is the catalyst. Her energy is intoxicating. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

   My girl will forever bind me to that city. I will love it always, if only because it is where I met her all those years ago. Today, that is a little bit heartbreaking. This is the day eight years ago, on an otherwise beautiful Tuesday morning, we all became New Yorkers. While standing in my flip-flops in my California backyard and watching the last of the planes overhead as they flew back from every direction to be grounded, I joined my daughter as a New Yorker.

   

   Category That Was Then | Tags: Anniversary,kids,NYC | 3 Comments

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