2004
The Livin’ Is Easy
Saturday afternoon started out as a simple excursion to Office Depot to find Teddy a “lethal briefcase” (don’t ask). But as happens on all the best summer days, a short trip turned into a long, aimless drive into the unknown–this one over the hills and one hundred miles into the Central Valley to California’s capitol city. We wandered around Old Sacramento in the hot hot heat and saw things like this (click to enlarge):
And despite what the signs would have you believe…
…you can’t pee in Sacramento.
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After wandering for nearly an hour looking for a bathroom, we finally gave in to the town’s evil plot to make us spend money in one of the restaurants just so we could use their restroom. Nonetheless, we had a lovely meal at Los Nopales, where we did not eat the eponymous cactus, in part because I’d just had cactus on Wednesday, silly! (I’m so cosmopolitan, no?)
Then we walked across the gold bridge and past the Aztec temple to the Triple A baseball stadium, where we bought $5 tickets to sit on the grass and watch the Rivercats beat the Edmonton Trappers. We had a rootbeer float and an ice cream cookie, we sang and danced during the seventh-inning stretch, and we cheered the hometeam like we actually cared if they won.
These people had to stand in a special smoking zone that looked like a penalty box for deliquent children or a park where dogs could do their business.
Oh, and did I mention the fireworks? What a splendid surprise!
2004
Daddy-O
Here’s the kicker. Not only is my mom the Best of the Best, but my dad is the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, and, if you’ll pardon my French, the shiznit. For every song my mom knows about rainbows and kittens, my dad knows a joke or a limerick or a chantey about something not meant for children’s ears. Where mom rounded my corners, dad gave me some edge.
And speaking of not meant for children’s ears, I submit to you the following movies that my father showed me way before I could understand what was happening in them: Jesus Christ Superstar, Saturday Night Live circa 1978, and Eddie Murphy’s standup concert Delirious (“I got some ice cream…”). For the longest time, I thought that flabby singing and dancing Herod was a product of my own twisted imagination?
And speaking even more about not meant for children’s ears, my dad’s current passions are Eminem, Obie Trice, and “Fitty” Cent. (Think Steve Martin in Bringing Down the House.) And yet, despite his current fixation on gangsta rap, he has given me a great appreciation for all kinds of music, from the soundtracks to The Music Man and A Chorus Line to Jerry Jeff Walker (“Hi there, buckaroo”) and Leon Redbone (“bobo daboo lala”) to Salt ‘n’ Pepa and Arrested Development, Cat Stevens and the Beatles. When I die, I’m positive that my exit music will be my dad playing “You Are My Sunshine” on his harmonica.
Before I was born, my dad was X-treme, years before there officially was such nonsense. He skied like greased lightening and taught himself how to hang-glide on a mail-order gilder he put together himself, for god’s sake! If I won the lottery, I’d buy him flying lessons and his very own airplane. When I was little, my dad liked to take the family out on four-wheel drive adventures in his little orange Bronco. When he wanted to go up the backroads closed to the public, he’d pull out a big magnetic label that had the Sheriff’s Department seal on it, stick it to the side of the driver’s-side door, and drive right on past the gate like it was nobody’s business. Whenever I hear Mannheim Steamroller’s “Fresh Aire” albums, I think of my dad turning up the Bronco’s stereo as we bump along through the aspen groves, the whole world butter yellow with early autumn leaves and sunshine.
My dad has taught me a lot about things that I never wanted to know, like how to read the water meter, how to illegally alter an electrical plug and outlet, and how to check the oil and refill the windshield wiper fluid in my car. (Why in the world would I want to know that?!) But he has also taught me a lot of valuable things, like how to drive, how to flip a cat end over end (they like it, I swear!), how to play blackjack, poker, and craps, and how to bend the handles of sparklers so you can spin them like a Vegas showgirl spins her nipple tassels.
One of my all-time favorite memories of my dad is when he took my brother and I on a secret excursion to this little wooded gully right in the middle of town, tucked between the railroad tracks behind his work. I’ve tried several times over the years to put that day into words, and each time I’ve failed miserably, so all I will say now is that there were ant lions and a rope swing and I thought my dad was made of magic.
I am nothing if not my father’s daughter. When I visit home, we’ll stay up until the wee hours watching reality dating shows together, usually over a bowl of ice cream or cereal or both. My mom thinks we have some sort of spooky telepathic father/daughter connection or that we speak in a complex code of sign language and blinks, but what it really comes down to is that we’re the same person in separate bodies. I have never seen the man read a book past page 12, and yet, somehow, he can wipe the floor with me, you, and your mama when it comes to Scrabble. That’s a legacy anyone would be proud of.
Somewhere in his closet, I’m sure my dad is hiding a certificate and a trophy declaring him Most Conscientious Consumer, Western States Division. It is thanks to him that I will never buy a substandard product–a pair of pants with an uneven hem, a table leaf whose wood grain doesn’t exactly match the rest of the table, a shopping cart with a wonky wheel. Favorite quotes: “Why buy a ‘pucked’ up one when you can get a good one for the same price?” and “You get what you pay for,” and “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead” (which has nothing to do with conscientious consuming, but is wise nonetheless).
My dad has scared the s’mores out of me more times than I can count (jumping out at me from behind a boulder on a hike, reckless driving on the bumper cars, dangling me by one arm over a lake, parking on the very very farthest edge of a mountain cliff), but there was also that one time he saved me from the psycho chainsaw man at the haunted house, and that pretty much makes up for everything else. (He hid us behind a tree until chainsaw man was distracted with other victims, and then we made a mad run to get past him, but run as I did, I couldn’t go fast enough. And then I felt my dad’s hands under my armpits and my feet left the ground–still windmilling in mid-air–and it was just like when the car lifts off the ground and drives into the sky at the end of Grease and Disney’s Babes in Toyland and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Magic, I tell you.)
I even liked my dad between the ages of eleven and seventeen, when no one likes their dad. When I was in sixth grade we stayed at the school’s father/daughter square dance just long enough to make three jokes each about the other hoe-down participants and to have our picture taken in gingham dress and large belt buckle before ditching to go to the mall. In high school, he lent me the best hippie clothes for Seventies Week–baby blue hip huggers, a leather vest, and a killer “Butterflies Are Free” T-shirt in fluorescent yellow.
When I moved to California three years ago, he drove the U-Haul 900 miles through the desert and over the mountains, and then helped me unpack in 95 degree heat. The next day he rewired the kitchen and bathroom, labeled all the electrical breakers, and fixed the doorbell so it ding-donged instead of dong-dinged. When he comes out to visit, he leaves my car with a full tank of gas and an impeccably squeegeed windshield.
My dad is a cowboy and a homeboy, at once a goofball and the most serious person I know. He can fix a broken radio and a broken heart, and I absolutely think the world of him.
Happy Birthday, Dad.
(I have in mind the exact perfect pictures to post between each of the above paragraphs, but alas, they are in Salt Lake instead of my apartment, and unless some kind and generous soul back home wants to dig up and scan them all, I’m afraid you’ll have to do with these few. Sorry.)
My dad making me my first snowman, 1979.
My parents on a cruise, circa 1996.
Dad sitting on the porch, May 2004.
2004
The Best of the Best
I have the best mom in the world. When I was little, she sang me songs and taught me how to read and indulged my constant need to be tested on my spelling and math skills. She let me have pets that taught me about love and the miracle of life and the harsh reality of death. She taught me not to litter and not to talk to strangers. She said that if someone was bullying me, I could tell him three times in a calm, clear, and respectful tone to leave me alone and then if he still didn’t leave me alone, I had her permission to pop the kid in the nose (which I did, once, to my arch-nemesis/sometime-best-friend Jenny Berg from down the street). My mom taught me to stand up for myself, to stand up for my little brother, to stand up for what I believed in.
She took me to puppet shows, magic shows, Shakespeare plays, and modern dance concerts. She took me to swimming lessons when I was nine months old, T-ball when I was ten, ballet when I was sixteen. When I was eleven, she took me to the mall to get my ears pierced and then let me back out of it even after I’d gotten in the chair and had the piercing lady mark my lobes with a purple marker and everything. She hand-sewed my Halloween costumes every year except those when it was very important to my social life that I not have a hand-sewn costume. She was my Girl Scout leader, my chauffeur, the one who surprised me in school with donuts and balloons on my birthday, the one who designed the sets for the school plays, the one who made me the most spectacular birthday cakes, beyond a kid’s wildest dreams.
She once ruined my coolest pair of stonewash jeans by patching over the rad holes in the knees with little blue and yellow teddy bears with button eyes. When I was in eighth grade, she wouldn't let me go to Classic Skating with my friend Liz because she knew I was going to meet a boy there. She made me take piano lessons but she let me take guitar lessons. She made me try scary new foods. But she never made me clean my plate. She wears costumes with confidence.
My mom is the best mom in the world, but she is also an extraordinary person. Part of that has to do with her being a nurse. She starts IVs on the tiniest preemies with veins the thickness of a single hair; she gives CPR to mothers of five; she brings comic books to teenage skiers who break their legs on the slopes and are waiting alone in the hospital for their parents to fly in from the East Coast the day after Christmas. When a crazed man with bombs and a gun took hostages in her maternity wing in the early nineties, she coordinated the hospital's evacuation and made sure all the patients were safe and taken care of. When people lose a loved one, she helps them grieve but also asks them for organ donations to save the lives of others. When the kid across the street splits his lip, she gives him a popsicle to distract him but also to keep the swelling down. When Jenny Berg, the girl from down the street, was four months old and stopped breathing and turned blue, my mom saved her life, not knowing she would be the bane of my existence until I turned nine and went to a different school.
Last month, my mom graduated with a master's degree in nursing, finishing what began as a basic R.N. degree almost thirty years ago. She graduated with honors, wrote a thesis, learned PowerPoint, taught a few undergraduate classes, made some friends, served on a community panel that wrote editorials for Salt Lake's major newspaper, and gave a commencement speech in front of the entire School of Nursing. Unlike the other student speakers, who celebrated themselves and their own accomplishments and talked on and on about how hard Mr. Professor's tests were and how heavy the Nursing 101 textbook was, she spoke with depth and clarity and wisdom about what it means to have a job that requires not just learned technical skills but qualities like caring, compassion, and sometimes a good dose of humor in the most difficult and painful situations. At the end of her speech, she quoted Homer Simpson, threw a handful of sparkly confetti on herself, and blew a kazoo. We blew our kazoos back at her from our seats in the audience.
Today is my mom’s fiftieth birthday. To look at her, you’d never know it. (I used to think she looked like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.) But if you look at all the things she’s done in her life, you’d swear she’d have to be at least 114 to fit all that living into one lifetime. For the last ten years, she’s been telling us she’s going to see the Statue of Liberty before she turned fifty. Well, she’ll be a few days late, but next week she’s going to New York City for the first time, off on another adventure, still ready to try and learn and see new things. Even now, she’s still teaching me how to live, how to love, how to be a good person, and how to know when it’s okay to pop a bully in the nose. See, I told you she was the best.
Happy Birthday, Mom. We’re all lucky to have you.
