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Every year our hood has a block party, and the neighbors gather to share food, conversation, and brewskis.  It’s an opportunity to get to know everyone better, and inevitably, the topic of home improvement comes up.

The womenfolk lean toward home decor.  It’s how I always lean, so I am more than happy to join in any discussion regarding furniture, bedding or paint.  At a block party several years ago, I was telling some neighbors that I was in the midst of striping the walls in our bedroom.  Oh my, they were excited and could they see how it was coming out.  Well, it’s a mess in there.  I’m halfway done.  We know how that goes, they said, and we don’t mind one bit.   Well, it’s just that the whole room is torn apart and I’d rather you see it when it’s done.  No, no, no don’t worry about that.  Well, o.k., but give me a few minutes to pick some stuff up.  And by a few minutes I meant a day and a half.

I ran up the street and into the house, and geez, it smelled funky in there, but I was frantically picking up the living room and hiding toys and clothes and throwing dishes in the sink when they knocked on the door.    I hadn’t even made it to our bedroom to pick up and what is that smell???  I took them upstairs, turned some lights on and started telling them the process of striping the walls.  And the smell was definitely worse up there.  Then, as if a beacon was shining upon it, all at once the eyes of three women landed on the pile of dog shit in the bedroom.  Oh, geez, oh gosh, oh I’m sorry, oh that dammed dog, oh let me clean it up and I’ll finish explaining what I’m doing.

But it was too late.  My budding career as the newest design talent on the block was forever and always a victim of turds.

The Big Daddy has some issues with his hearing.   Too much rock and roll is what he says in his faux Brit accent.  Then he pretends to brush the hair off his face like Ozzy Osbourne, and oh, how cute.

Except it’s not.  It is irritating the crap out of me.  Every thing you say to him, he responds with “WHAAAAAAAAAT????  I can’t hear you you’re mumbling.”  Or looking right at you and speaking.  I was on the phone talking to my sister, and he’s upstairs yelling, “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?”  I yelled back, “I’M ON THE PHONE.  I’M NOT EVEN TALKING TO YOU!!!!!”  Oh, he says, I thought you asked me something.  You are making me crazy in a bat-shit kind of way.

After a weekend of us screaming back and forth, I decided to slow down and enunciate every word so The BD would have a better chance of hearing it the first time.  So I yelled down the stairs.  “COULD    YOU   TAKE    THE    BUNS    OUT    OF    THE    FREEZER?”

And he said, “TAKE THE FUN OUT OF WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?”   Oh nothing, just my life.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.

– John Donne

When we moved to the Kansas City area, it didn’t take long to figure out that we might be able to afford a house.  Coming from the outskirts of D.C. this was a crazy concept, but we crunched the numbers and started our search.

We’d go all over the area on Sunday afternoons, and nearly always end up in an argument.  I liked older homes.  The Big Daddy liked the newer neighborhoods.  Once we looked at a new house that had the kitchen on the second floor, and I asked if I really was supposed to haul four gallons of milk and all the groceries up the stairs every week when I came home from shopping.  We looked at older homes and The Big Daddy said they smelled like somebody died in there and they buried the body in the basement. 

One day, I was reading the classifieds and saw a house with four bedrooms in our price range.  As in low.  We drove over and walked through, and when we were upstairs, I looked at BD and said, “I love this house.  I crazy love this house.”  And he said, “I think I do, too.”  We knew nothing about the area and asked the single woman selling the house if the schools were good.  She said yes and we took her word for it.

The day we looked at the house was in October.  This was in the front yard.

I have nineteen years of pictures of that tree.  Every year I tell the kids that this is the best color our tree has ever had, and they sigh very deeply and say, “Mom, seriously, you say that every year.”   

I know, but did I ever tell you about the day that Dad and I took you guys to that open house?   Did I tell you that when we saw that tree we knew this was exactly where we wanted you to grow up?

I peruse a few other blogs on a regular basis.  Mostly, they are decorating blogs that I check out for ideas for the sales that Nancy and I have.  There’s one I read every day.  How this woman manages to refurbish furniture, stock a space to sell her stuff, photograph it, and then write about it every day escapes me.  But she does, and I read it religiously.

A couple of weeks ago, she asked her readers to keep in their thoughts and prayers the son of another blogger who died in a flash flood in Virginia.  That I found this blog at the worst moment of this mother’s life has changed how I look at everything since.

She has written about the events of that night and the aftermath in one heartbreaking sentence after another.  Her latest post describes in detail the accident that took her son.  When our daughter was thirteen, we had an incident with our creek, a head injury, police, multiple fire trucks with ladders going down to get her, a seizure that thank God I didn’t have to witness, neighbors coming from everywhere to see what was going on, a ride in an ambulance – her on a stretcher in the back and me in the front, where she was asked if she knew where she was when she started coming to.  An ambulance, say an ambulance.  As if she had any point of reference for that.

I made the decision to let the kids play in the creek just to get them out of the house on Day #2 of canceled school, and like a thousand thoughts you have as a parent, it occurred to me at one point that maybe it was time to bring them inside.  Not even five minutes later, one of the kids in the neighborhood was knocking on the door telling me that Maggie fell and wouldn’t open her eyes.

I ran.  Ran to her.  Ran back to the house to call 9-1-1, ran back to her with a blanket, climbed up the sides of the creek so the fire department knew where we were, climbed back down to her when they came, climbed back up to talk to the paramedics.  Sat in the ambulance going so goddamn slow because of the icy roads that I wanted to scream.  She was more coherent by the time we got to the hospital and escaped with a concussion and frostbite on a couple of her toes.  I don’t think I ever escaped what happened that day, but we were lucky.  So, so lucky that the next day she was fine, we were fine, we were still five.

If you’ve forgotten for a day how fragile life can be, read this.  If you are a parent, you will see yourself in virtually every moment she recounts, and how a series of seemingly harmless events and decisions can change everything in your life.

From the archives of The Big Daddy Bad Behavior file……………..

When the chillens were little, we would take them to the pumpkin patch.  At the time, we lived in Maryland, and so we drove out yonder to the farm for some good ol’ fall fun.  When we arrived at said Pumpkin Patch, the aroma of brats on the grill was the first thing you smelled when you got out of the car.  “Oh geez,” the Big Daddy said, “Those brats smell good.”  We can’t have brats, we didn’t bring that much money (this was way before the handy-dandy debit card came to be).  “Not enough for brats?”  No extra money for brats, just pumpkins.  “I love brats.  You mean there’s no extra cash for any food?”  Well, it’s not like we’d have to get a brat, we’d have to get four brats and then we’d have no money for pumpkins.   Suddenly, Sunday Funday had turned into a bitch for The BD.

The kids jumped like little monkeys on the hay bales, and played with all the other kids.  At one point, we went into the corn maze and went left and right and all about trying to find the way out.  Oh, such fun, but I didn’t see The Big Daddy.  He must have been way behind us.  When the kids and I emerged, the very first thing I saw, crouched down near the hay bales was The Big Daddy stuffing a brat into his mouth.

As soon as my eyes landed on him, I marched over and said, “Oh you couldn’t think of the whole family having fun, you just had to get a brat, didn’t you?”  He said he couldn’t help himself, you know how I love the brats, baby, and polished it off.

I gave him the stinkeye all afternoon, and when we took a hayride out to the fields to get pumpkins, the kids would lift some big, ol’ heavy pumpkin up and say, “I want this one.”  And I would look into those little, innocent toddler eyes of theirs and say, “No, honey, something smaller.  Your father had a brat so you can’t have a big pumpkin.”   They’d be so sad until The Big Daddy told ’em little pumpkins are better anyways.

Twenty years later, BD would say nothing beats a grilled brat on a fall day at the pumpkin patch, but leave The Ball and Chain at home if you really want to enjoy it.

It has been my experience in the raising of Teacher Girl, that when she decides to do something, it’s best to get out of her way or get run over.

When she wanted to get a dog, she and her Prince Charming looked around at the pounds.  When they found Butters, she wanted me to look at him to get my opinion.  Wow, a puppy.  That’s a lot to take on.  “So you think I should get him?”  Well, you’re both gone all day, is what I really meant, but she didn’t hear that.

Butters is a crack baby.  Easily stimulated.  Easily distracted.  Needs a heavy dose of Adderall.  The Teacher Girl is not one to be deterred, and so Butters is enrolled in obedience class.  As she puts it, “He will be a trained dog.”   That was a swipe at me, but I was training kids back then and didn’t have time to train a dog.  Which is why he bit a neighborhood kid who came into our house for a glass of water.  Once. 

This is the Teacher Girl holding class and getting Butters and our Old Fart to sit.  Attached to her belt is a pouch for treats.  Did you seriously buy that goofy thing?  Oh yes, she did.

The girl in on on a mission from God.   She’s a teacher.  She owns a pouch.  She’s got a dog to train.

Now move.

When I was a little girl and couldn’t fall asleep, my mom would say, “Now you say your Hail Marys and you’ll be asleep before you know it.”  All these many years later, that is still how I go to sleep.  Sort of.

When I close my eyes and say my prayers before drifting off, things get a little ADD.  I start off pretty intent, but it doesn’t take long for the train to leave the track.  Pretty soon, I’m praying for the sick and wondering if I should make chicken for dinner tomorrow nite.  Nah, there’s been way too much chicken around here.  Maybe a pork roast.  Yes, that’s what we’ll have for dinner.  I wonder if I’ve got any onions.  Did I buy onions the other day?  Surely there’s an onion in the fridge.  If I do go to the store, I have to get vacuum cleaner bags.   Does the Macy’s Mega Sale start tomorrow?   I’ll go there first, then get the onion and then a Target run for the rest.  I wonder if that check cleared.  I better do the bank balance before I go.  Say we won half a mill in a scratch-off, and say the IRS takes 40%.  O.k., that leaves me with $300K to pay the house and car off.  Say we allow $25K to redo the kitchen and paint the house.  O.k. we still have some to give to the people whose lives have been a crapshoot these last few years and……….oh, yeah, I was praying for them

I eventually get back to the prayer part after going over the river and through the woods, and it’s why I make it a point to be more accurate and say, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts.”  You plus the chicken, onions, vacuum cleaner bags, Macy’s, and a faux lottery win.  Maybe even the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.”

It’s a jumbled interstate winding around up there, but if things are really not going well with you, you will be in my thoughts, and in my thoughts, and in my thoughts, and hopefully somewhere that counts as a prayer.  

“All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow, and the long voice of the hound.”

-Thomas Wolfe