“Hey, Dad. This is banging good fun.”
As a kid, my house was noisy, very noisy.
I don’t know how my parents survived.
At probably the noisiest point, we were two teenage girls and three boys under the age of 10. The girls would stop spinning Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and we boys would start blaring punk rock and then taking a whack at playing it ourselves in the garage, the eldest at one point on vocals, the middle one on drums and me the youngest on bass guitar. We never made it out of the garage, and that may have been a big reason why one neighbor started gathering signatures for our ouster from our leafy Brentwood Glen neighborhood in West Los Angeles and later threatened to take us all out, quite literally. It could also have been the skateboard ramp out front or our firework bonfires that ticked him off.
I can’t remember the specifics or even the noise. [continue reading…]
“What do you mean everything looks a bit hazy?”
We went to the coast this weekend with friends. We cooked beef on the barbeque and had a long night talking and laughing as we sat at a table under the pine trees. The kids – five of them – raced around until the tiredness of the night put them to sleep and we adults continued merrily.
The next day under blue skies and a hot sun we hit the beach.
We set up on the edge of the water, and the kids ran to the waves almost before even taking off their shirts.
My eldest daughter, who is eight, later came up to me, an avid surfer, and said, “Why aren’t you coming in?”
“Oh,” I said with a sigh . “I don’t feel too hot.”
That’s not like me. The sight of waves usually starts a fever that drives me to want to get in and have a go. The waves weren’t great this day, but they could have been fun nonetheless.
“Come on,” my daughter insisted.
“No, not today,” I said. “My stomach doesn’t feel too good. I must have eaten something that didn’t agree with me.”
She thought for a second about the implication. We all ate the same thing, including her, and she felt fine. Her pondering continued and then she said, as if a light bulb had lit up above her head, “Or you drank too much wine.”
“Yeah, man. I hear you. There aren’t many of us real snowmen left. Everybody’s going store-bought these days.”
My youngest daughter wants a Zu Zu Pet, and she’s making it known to us parents with a steady repetition of “I want a ZuZu Pet” as we clean up after lunch.
My wife interrupts her with a grand idea: “Why don’t you ask Santa Claus?”
The three-year-old stops her chanting, turns and stares at her blankly before announcing her grand idea: “We can go to the supermarket and buy one right now.” [continue reading…]
