I am 9 and it’s summer. I’m visiting with my Gram and Papa King who live in the tall, narrow house, a portion of which was once home to chickens before it was remade to be Gram and Papa’s home. We’re on the front porch watching cars full of people wheel lazily past. I commandeer what I consider to be the cat-bird seat…the middle position on the wooden porch swing. I’d prefer to have the swing to myself, but I am sandwiched between two sensible adults. 9-year-olds and grandparents have wildly opposing theories regarding swinging techniques. I am silently frustrated by their conservative to and fro, their feet rocking steadily heel to toe, never leaving the green turf carpeting on the porch. They swing so gently that they don’t pose even the slightest threat to the white wicker table that has ludicrously been placed IN FRONT OF THE SWING! This is blasphemous to my kid brain and I long for a solo test drive in the wooden Buick to see how she really handles. Because, swings, even domesticated, docile porch swings, are surely meant to soar too! It is in the swing’s nature to leave your stomach hovering in the air on the upswing and threaten to dump your skinny ass onto the coarse carpet, which will keep a portion of your palm skin as payment for its use as a landing pad, on the downswing. Beware little wicker table! If you stand your ground, you risk being punted to the end of the porch when I get to man the giant battering ram! 

Cars pass by us steadily on the road that arcs past Gram and Papa’s house and they wave to nearly every one. Not because they are being polite, but because they know the people inside the cars who thrust their sunburned arms out of rolled-down windows and smack their horns in greeting. I love this game and am completely uncool in my execution, hollering ’hellos’ and flailing my little girl arms at strangers, like a parade float queen being electrocuted. When Papa waves, his is a large, graceful gesture, his hand shooting into the air and hanging motionless there for a beat as he subtly drops his chin to his chest in head-nod acknowledgement until the car rounds the bend. Sometimes a friend slows down and turns into their driveway, making the powdery limestone rocks ping and pop under the slow-rolling tires. 

For lunch, Papa brings in tomatoes from their garden. Gram pulls the kitchen table out from the wall so I can sit on the built-in, vinyl bench, making the kitchen seem like a tiny restaurant that is open only for me. My finger worries at the small tear in the bench’s green skin and I bounce gently on the springy seat. Giant yellow and orange daisies grin down at me from the wallpaper. ”Oooooh…You’re going to like this,” the flowers whisper as they watch Gram slice the still-warm-from-the-sun tomatoes into thick, red slabs. She spreads a smear of mayonnaise on each, and tops them with salt and pepper. And the flowers are right. The tomatoes are simple in their perfection and they are the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Papa does shift work and is working midnights. Gram makes his lunch and packs his shiny silver dinner bucket with sandwiches, fruit, and a thermos of coffee. I decide that this is a fantastic concept and that I, too, will go to work at midnight when I’m an adult, breaking the rules and obeying them at the same time. I love the juxtaposition of this world, of smelling the richness of morning coffee at 11:00 o’clock at night, of seeing Gram soft and lotion-y in her sleeveless summer nightgown kiss Papa, freshly shaved and dressed in his dark, rugged work clothes good-bye as he disappears out the door and into his pick-up truck.  

I sleep with softly-snoring-Gram on the nights Papa works. The screened bedroom windows keep the bugs out, but allow their blaring, untuned, orchestral sounds to travel in, escorted on the arm of cool puffs of dark night air. I lie awake on my back and listen to the harmony played by the single-note whine of tires on the road as a few straggling friends make their way past our home to their own. Their headlight beams chase each other in silent, white, zig-zagging arcs from one corner of the ceiling to the other, waving to me as I drift off.

On the nights that Papa doesn’t have to work, they take me with them to the VFW. All the people who drove by the house and waved, apparently, were headed here to wait for my Gram and Papa. They know everyone and they are celebrities. I am a celebrity by association. Gram drinks whiskey sours, Papa drinks beer from dark amber bottles, and I drink Shirley Temples that the brilliant bartender fills with equal parts ginger ale/grenadine and maraschino cherries. I love him immediately. I’m given an endless supply of quarters which I use to begin a long love affair with a juke box and a shuffle board table. Gram and her friends have me play Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” over and over again. They are trying to capture the lyrics with paper and pen as Juice sings them from the jukebox, but Juice doesn’t know this and won’t slow down. ”The Joker ain’t the only fooool-ool-ool-ool, who’ll do anything for you!” They include me in the game and whoop and holler when I catch a random bit of the song and shout it out so they can scribble it down.  

Memory is a fickle thing, holding tightly to certain bits of information while letting others slip away before they can be tucked into a gray brain wrinkle. If you ask me how long I stayed with Gram and Papa that summer or why I was there, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It could have been two days or two weeks. I might have been there because my parents were out of town or because Mum was ready to hang me from the porch railing with my own jump rope and decided to ship me out of the house for a while rather than resorting to murder and almost guaranteed jail time. Whatever those answers are, they are the smooth, wan bits of information with rounded edges that were too slippery for my brain to hang onto. But, the sensory laden memories of warm tomatoes and belly-turning porch swing rides and Juice Newton lyrics are rich with dimension, color, and texture. And these bits of information are much bigger and messier because of that and have no choice but to stick. 

I don’t know if my Gram and Papa remember my visit with them like I do or if they remember it at all. It was business as usual for them, and I think that’s the magic. Like the warm tomatoes from their garden, the memories I have are organic. I hope that we’re creating memories like this for our boys…that we’re not trying too hard…forcing the fun.

I am 36 and it’s almost summer again. Bill and I have three little boys who we sandwich between us on our own porch swing now.

I have a hankering to grow some tomatoes. 

These moments. They’re accumulating faster than I can take note of or savor them. They’re the little grooves at the edge of the Interstate that are supposed to keep you awake if you get too close - dozens and dozens, blurring together… shifting and flickering to form an unbroken whole. Together, they create a timeline, stretching out to the vanishing point - in front, and behind.

Stay awake, Da-da.

Of Rockets and the Geneva Convention

For Nate’s second birthday, he received his Most Favorite Toy Ever - The Little Einsteins Pat Pat Rocket. Rocket has a cockpit that opens, a speaker that emits rocket-type noises, and lights on the front that blink in time with these noises. He’s manned by all the Little Einsteins who Nate loves to watch in their various mass-marketed DVD adventures. Each Einstein has been given a single, defining character trait: Leo leads the group, June loves to dance, Quincy plays music, and Annie chain smokes.

Nate gleefully lumbers up and down the hallways in a barely-controlled fall, hunched over Rocket like Quasimodo, with one hand on each of Rocket’s flared back fins. Rocket’s cockpit canopy is prone to pop off a little too easily, and it is slightly beyond his ability to clip back into place. His growing concern over the fact that Rocket is in two pieces is unfortunately coupled with both an inability to fix it himself, and a stubborn insistence to attempt to do so anyway. 

“Doit! Do-EEE! Hep!” he demands, insisting on doing it himself and perplexingly, asking for help at the same time. About every third time he asks for hep, he will accept the hep. He slowly taps the loose canopy over and over against the clip it fits into. He’s like one of those hapless, disoriented beetles that try to mate with discarded beer bottles - there’s a lot of tapping, but no results. Sometimes, he comes tantalizingly close, and I resist the strong urge to simply snatch it from him, click it into place and hand it back. It’s like watching someone with an inner ear problem try to thread a needle in the back of a moving pickup.

His favorite Einstein by far is June, who loves to dance. He calls her “Dooooon!”, and the first few days he had the Einsteins, she went everywhere with him. Dinner, the bathtub… he even took her back to his crib. I’ll let the teeth marks on her head tell their own story. 

Liam also loves Rocket. When things are good, he and Nate take turns, with one watching longingly from the kitchen while the other shambles up and down the hallway. When things are bad, it’s pretty much the same thing, just with more screaming and a sudden spike in slap-fight activity. Liam has to hunch a little further over Rocket, but they both laugh and generally love it.

At night as we get one of them ready for bed, the other is usually at the sink in their bathroom. They’ve both adopted the curious and slightly disturbing practice of waterboarding the Little Einsteins. They each fill their miniature bathroom cups with water, then methodically pour water onto each Einstein’s face before dunking them headfirst into the cups, often leaving them under for extended amounts of time. Even June is not safe from this practice.

Of Tricksiness and Improbable Movements

Liam has stepped up his trickery. For example, we tell him to “Buckle up!” after he climbs into his booster seat, and he appears to be agreeably doing so, and most times, he is. However, we’ve noticed on several occasions that he was simply going through the motions, then hiding the buckles and keeping his arms over his lap. He’s palming the handcuff key.

If he’s supposed to be asleep for his nap, we’ll sometimes hear him jumping from his bed to the floor with all the stealth of a bucketful of bricks. Once, on about the sixth chandelier-shaking landing, Jill interrupted our conversation and said, “Did you know that Liam isn’t asleep? Yeah. He’s upstairs, jumping.”

Sometimes he sits on the side of his room opposite his bed and shakes the radiator pipes. Once, he was doing this, and I walked over downstairs and gave it a good shake back. I heard his footsteps scurry back across the room, where they presumably took him back into his bed and stayed there with him.

One afternoon, I opened the door unexpectedly on him, and caught him sitting on the floor with his blocks. I stared at him, and he stared at me. I struggled to keep my poker face, and he didn’t know which way the wind was going to blow. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Hi Da-da. Liam just woke up!” he lied cheerfully.

Another day I walked in to find him sitting in the middle of his bed, sucking his thumb. All his curtains had been pulled down, so I asked him how that had happened.

“Nay-nay did it. Nay pulled down all those curtains.” he replied.

“Really? So Nate got out of his crib, came into your room, pulled down all your curtains, then went back into his room and got back into his crib? Nate did that?”

He took his thumb out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and responded, “Naynay pooped in Weem’s diaper too.”

Of the Inherent Hilarity of Tooting

Sometimes, when I’m changing Liam, he tries to toot on Da-da. I’ll yell, “Don’t toot on Da-da! NO toots!”, and he’ll strain to the point that I worry he’s going to give himself a hemorrhoid. It probably doesn’t help that I’m either laughing or trying not to laugh the entire time. You try not to laugh while he’s grunting and pushing, and his ass looks like a dry-heaving starfish. Once, he succeeded in blowing the diaper cream completely off my finger, like he was blowing out a birthday candle. The lad got me.

Of Being Fat and Reaching New Gastrointestinal Milestones

Note to Sam: Sam, you’re fat. Maybe the heftiest of them all. Like, 97th-Percentile-Tubby. By definition, that means that you’ve got bigger tits than 96 out of every 100 other babies who were born when you were. Seriously, where are your wrists, dude? You look like a pack of Ball Park Franks. I bet you’d be delicious to an alligator - all chewy and pink - nothing to spit out. Of course, he’d have to get you after a diaper-change, because damn. Now that you’re on solid food, you’ve soared to new levels. You can spackle up some serious adult-sized stanky. And you smile when you do it. Of course, you smile at almost everything. And I don’t care if you annihilate a diaper or have dimples where bones should be. I love you, baby.

Of Sleeping and Waking

Sometimes, Liam does sleep when he’s supposed to, and he wakes up pretty cute and with a head and eyelids two sizes too large. Several weeks ago, he rubbed his eyes and told me, “Yellow egg is sleepy and his mouth looks like a pentagon.”

I sat on his bed next to him and listened intently.

“Purple egg isn’t sleepy; he’s just waking up slow.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but I appreciated the number of words that were in each sentence, and how earnestly the information was relayed to me. I don’t know if it was that he was half-asleep, or half-awake. Maybe that he’s half-and-a-three.

Nate sometimes wakes up and cries in the middle of the night. One of us will go upstairs and hold him in the cushy Pottery Barn rocker until he calms back down. If you try to put him back into his crib too early, he’ll hug you like a Spider Monkey - a Spider Monkey that can say “No! Bed!”

Sam wakes up several times a night, or so I’m told.

Of Easter

All three boys were visited by the Easter Bunny, and he hid many eggs and baskets. Nate delighted in finding his behind the hallway door, and sat down immediately to explore its many unexpected treasures. We led Liam directly to his and basically pushed him towards it. Visibly agitated, he declared “No Easter Bask-KEEET!”, thereby continuing his unbroken streak of acting in completely the opposite way that one would guess a three year old would act. Sam sat in his highchair and smiled. They all got stacking robots, spinning tops, and sugared snacks. Sam also got a helicopter that was immediately commandeered by his brothers, which caused him to smile again.

Of These Scenes I Don’t Want to Forget

Nate, hearing any unfamiliar noise, dropping whatever he’s doing, finding one of us, then tapping his ear while asking repeatedly, “Whazzat? Whazzat, Da-da? Whazzat Muh-mum?” until we tell him whazzat is.

Me, trying to wash Liam’s hair while he screams, and eventually just stepping back and letting Jill take over. Then listening to her calmly talking to him, involving him in the process, and finishing the job as he looked up and actually smiled at imaginary airplanes.

Liam and Nate, dragging their disconnected swings back under the swingset and collapsing into them, understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘where’, if not quite the ‘how’. Then, with little hands firmly grasping the sides of each swing, sitting expectantly and waiting for something to start, like the guy in the old Memorex ads. Me, walking over to them sitting there in the grass like two broken puppets, and Nate looking up and saying, “Hi Da-Da!.”

Jill, under her umbrella in the backyard, kneeling and picking up toys in the rain.

Me, standing at the kitchen window, feeling the coolness of the glass, and watching Jill picking up toys in the rain. And appreciating how lucky I am. How lucky I am to have found my perfect accomplice. How lucky I am to be holding firmly onto her hand as we’re pulled along like two kids in a crowded funhouse through this uncharted adventure. And how lucky I am to be dry, and inside, instead of out there, picking up toys.

Sunday mornings that smell like cinnamon bagels, sound like slamming screen doors, and look like small boys running through tall grass.

Sam, giving us blueberry raspberries.

Of Seizing the Moment

But too much time has now passed between when I observed these things, and when I found the time to write about them. Most of these things are already done and gone. They were really gone the moment they occurred, and trying to capture them here is like trying to catch moonlight with a butterfly net. They are as tinny echos, chasing each other down hallways like carefree footsteps and pealing up through the unfolding leaves of spring, like laughter from a sandbox.

Rocket’s canopy is now in a different room than Rocket, and Nate doesn’t seem concerned to see one without the other. This morning, I saw June laying forgotten in a plastic pumpkin, alone but for Leo, group leader. I can’t remember exactly when I last saw Nate with either of them. He’s moving on.

Liam no longer needs to resort to slight of lap to escape from his booster, as with a little effort, he can defeat his buckles even when clipped. And when he does buckle up, he clips in not around a diaper, but around a Pull-up. So there’s no need for changing tables or diaper cream. He’s moving on.

It’s also stopped raining, so Jill no longer needs her umbrella.

Thankfully, Sam is still pretty fat.

For the moment.

Would it be the thin, barely life-sustaining gruel? The routine beatings administered by hardened Turks in the prison steam factory? The dripping waterpipes over your sleeping mat? Your roommate’s incessant crying?

I think it would be all the line-cutting in the gruel line, but not the Steam Factory beating line.

After dinner, Liam and Nate are watching the stellar kids’ music DVD, Here Come the ABCs by They Might Be Giants (Thanks Uncle Kevin and Aunt Jess!) TMBG must be up to their mic stands in some deadly black magic to have created a product that appeals to both the under 5 and the over 30 demographic. I highly recommend it to those of you choking on the purple swill that is Barney.

“Here Come the ABCs” is, obviously, about letters and the alphabet and features maddeningly clever songs paired with charming animation. In one song, a tin man reminiscent robot sings the alphabet in a gravely, synthesized voice as letters drift up slowly from his silver toaster head. As he is wont to do, Liam tries to take possession of the unpossessable. He informs Nate, “Those are Weem’s letters!” and thrusts his pointer at a ‘J’ as it puffs out of the robot’s head. He waits for the fight to begin, but Nate, who turns into our short-circuited little robot when in front of a TV, cannot process Liam’s transmission. Liam tries again. “Nate! NATE! Those are WEEM’S LETTERS!!” Nate continues his tree bark impersonation. Frustrated by his inability to goad his little brother into a duel, Liam leans across the table and positions his face two inches from Nate’s and says very calmly, “Those are Weem’s goddamn letters, Nate.”

(Click here to see the boys make landfall in full size)

I was watching television recently, and Peter Walsh, organizational guru of “Clean Sweep” and “Oprah” fame, was on, breaking down a woman’s disorganized life like a shotgun, then holding up the pieces for her to see and explaining all the underlying reasons behind her disorganization. Explaining why her inability to prove the existence of a couch in her living room was really just a symptom of a much larger problem. 

To the crying woman, sitting in a kitchen filled with boxes, he said, “you save things for one of two reasons - either a thing has sentimental value, and you keep it, or you think you’re going to need it someday, so you keep it”. He accentuated each point by jabbing the air with a potato masher. Or maybe it was a whisk. The specifics don’t really matter, because I’m paraphrasing anyway.

Preach it, Peter.

I silently appreciated his clear manner of illustrating each problem, and the insightful language he used to bring her to their solutions. He’s one-part closet organizer and two-parts psychologist. And he was peeling this woman like an onion. This silly, disorganized woman, who had so much crap in her house that she…

Suddenly, I had the feeling that I was not alone in the room; I had the feeling that someone was looking at me. This really shouldn’t have been that strange, as Jill was sitting on the couch directly to my left, and she was looking at me. I slowly turned towards her and met her gaze, which was unflinching, slightly accusatory, and firmly fixed upon me. It was one of those looks that could make you say at least three stupid things before she blinked. One of those looks that was saying that Peter was right, and that if he were here, she would totally tell him that I keep a can of egg nog in the basement that I’ve been saving since 1993. A look that said that the woman in the kitchen was actually the man on the couch, sitting next to her, blinking and trying not to say stupid things.

I had no defense, so I simply smiled at her.

There was no denying it, because I do have a can of egg nog in the basement that’s a teenager. In fact, even as correct and true as Peter’s assessment was as to why we save things, the nog doesn’t really fall into either of his two categories. I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where I got that can of egg nog. One day, I just noticed it, and its origins were no more than the faint memory of a dim recollection.

When I was a kid, I remember watching an interview with a guy who’d lost several hundred pounds on an ‘all liquid’ diet. For months, he’d eaten nothing solid, and instead drank only shakes or a thin broth.

“So for seven months, you ate absolutely nothing?” asked the incredulous interviewer.

“Well, there was one time, I realized that I had a salty taste in my mouth, so I think I might have eaten some crackers. But I don’t remember doing it,” the man had answered.

And that’s the nog: a salty taste in my memory that one day left me standing in my kitchen, wondering why I was holding a can of egg nog that was so far past its expiration date. Maybe I’d wanted to save it because it was so old when I first became aware of it. But in any case, it was unassociated with any good times or special memories, so sentimentality is out.

That leaves practicality. Will I ever need it… this antiquated nog? I don’t think so. If I ever did open it, I’m pretty sure it would softly hiss, then slide slowly out like white cranberry jelly, still holding the shape of the inside of the can even as it plopped out wetly onto the countertop.

Each time I find it again, I wonder what I’ll do with it. The last four or five times I’ve come across it, the best reason I can come up with to keep it is that one day, one of my great-grand children could take it onto whatever passes for the 2099 versions of Jay Leno or Regis, and produce it with a flourish to the amazement and delight of a post-apocalyptic audience, sitting attentively around their piles of burning tires. And as far as reasons to keep something go, that one shouldn’t really count.

But I save many, many things, and my reasons for doing so aren’t always valid. At least not to anyone who doesn’t have to wait for their dinner to get pushed into their cell at the end of a broomstick.

A small sampling of the things I’ve saved that defy convention, logic, decorum, and at least three laws regarding the disposal of hazardous biowaste are:

• My wisdom teeth.
• A tooth from my beloved Basset Hound Gordon, which through a series of zany, madcap misadventures, ended up in a batch of my father’s Thanksgiving Oyster Stew.
• Approximately 42 pounds of loose cassette tapes, featuring assorted K-Tel compilations, various individually-purchased cassette singles, and no fewer than 3 copies of Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ album.
• Every Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve for the last 19 years.
• The world’s ugliest tie collection, truly.
• Magazines I have never, and will never read.
• Approximately 150 broken and empty frames.
• Every greeting card and letter I’ve ever received… ever.
• A cinderblock-sized stack of Ricky’s Rice Bowl receipts.
• The hot dog chair.

These are all posts for a different day… each of them, and more.

For years, I saved cups beneath my desk at work. My best reason for keeping them was that one day, I was going to make something… like a suit, maybe. A cup suit. I envisioned myself marching into some future Halloween party like the Michelin Man, if the Michelin Man were made of red soda cups. Everyone would turn towards the door, and I’d just be standing there - a giant pile of cups with eyeholes - my hands on my hips, not that you could tell. No one would say a word. Shocked, someone would drop a cup of something, and I’d pluck a new one from myself like some strange tree picking its own fruit, and say, “Need a new cup?”

And everyone would start clapping, and someone would shake my hand and pat me on the back of the cups and say, “It was so worth it, man, saving all those cups!”

But that never happened. Halloweens came, and Halloweens went, and the closest I ever came to using those cups for anything was that one year I went as a garbage bag filled with various things, and cups were among them. Oh, and I taped receipts to my face. And when that party was over, I gingerly removed all the cups, restacked them, and brought them back to my desk for further saving.

Until one day, I decided that I needed to lose even more weight than Liquid Diet himself, and I threw them away. I documented it here, and that made it easier. Suddenly, I realized that I could do away with a great many things in the same manner. I admitted to myself that I would never use these items for any giant, complex reasons or to moderately impress future generations of talk show audiences, even twice removed.

So I’m going to purge our lives of these things, and tell you about it here, whether anyone cares or not.

Documenting these things and posting them here will be my new reason for saving these items. Except that instead of saving them just to save them, I’ll be saving them to get rid of them, the latter of which is what you have to do to get rid of things, by definition. But I’ll still have saved them, after a fashion, as I can always come here to look at them.

And their being here won’t interfere with Jill’s ability to walk across a room, open a closet, or make her all mad and… rational whenever she opens the downstairs fridge. 

And maybe the next time Peter Walsh says something insightful, she won’t stare at me. But if she does, it will be with that ‘I-love-my-man’ look, and we can raise our cups in a toast to self-awareness, and a willingness to cut the bonds of sentimentality, unrealized practicality, and foolish pursuits.

And when we do, it will be with regular cups that we may or may not throw away, because we could totally keep them or we could totally throw them away; we aren’t bound to them by some twisted and misplaced sense of nostaglia or purpose, and therefore don’t really need to save them.

Unless Jill wants to.

After a long season inside, the boys storm the yard in full force.

I don’t remember my mom taping this to the fridge.

Today is my brother Craig’s 31st birthday. It is also my 36th birthday. Weird, right?! What kind of nuclear timing did my parents have going on? Here’s the other thing. We were born at almost the same time. I was at born at 10:56 a.m. and Craig was born at 11:07 a.m. I know!

When I tell people about this coincidence, they usually say something about how it must have sucked having to share the spotlight on our birthday or how we only got half as much cake as we should have. But really, it was just the opposite. Our birthday always felt bigger than just a birthday. More like a holiday with a big build-up, grandparents coming in from out of town, and two cakes. Always two cakes.

The specialness carried over into our adult lives too. We’ve always made it a point to try to see each other around the 18th, even if we were living hundreds of miles apart. Ten years ago, Craig traveled from upstate New York to be with me in Charlotte, NC for our birthday. He was turning 21 and I was turning 26 and somehow, we managed to end our drunken evening embroiled in a spectacular full-on bar brawl. Craig and Jill vs. the bouncers of the most ironically named bar in the history of bars, Have A Nice Day Cafe. As Craig says, “We got gaffled!” I was on crutches for a week. Really. But, that’s a post for another day.

Hope you Had A Nice Day today, little brother. I love you.

Recently, while cleaning out the area beneath my desk, I came across several soda cups. And by “several”, I mean 867. No, really… I literally had 867 cups under my desk. And by “literally”, I mean “free from embellishment or exaggeration”. Eight-hundred-and-sixty-seven… just 133 shy of 1,000.

Sitting on the floor and holding a stack of cups in each hand, I had a brief moment of head-tilting clarity. Something suddenly occurred to me that has no doubt been occurring to many of my coworkers for the last 866 cups:

“Dude. Why are there so many cups under your desk?”

I suddenly saw myself through the eyes of someone disconnected from the cups. I saw myself swimming through piles of loose cups like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his piles of money. I saw myself as an old man, alienated from my family and complaining about them to colorfully-decorated stacks of cups, seated around a long table. I saw myself wearing a large hat made of cups, flattening cups and laughing. I saw myself drinking, strangely, not from a cup, but from a dishwashing sponge, which is something someone might do when they’re batshit crazy from all the cups, which start out under your desk at work, but eventually take over everything else.

I saw myself on Oprah, and Jill was crying, and Oprah was shaking her head while they rolled footage of a bulldozer pulling down a wall at our house, and cups spilling out into the yard.

Dude…

I was like a zombie lurching to a surprised stop and asking, “Whoa. I’ve been eating WHAT ?”.

…why are there so many…

I was a dog, suddenly self-aware and wide-eyed, slowly removing my tongue from beneath my tail and looking around balefully. 

…cups under your desk?

I was a drone, disconnected from the Borg collective, and blinking rapidly with dawning realization.

I had to act quickly, before I lost my focus and sudden awareness. I had to act while I was still un-undead, un-dog, and un-connected… while the whole cup thing made as much sense as eating brains, picking a fight with Jean-Luc Picard, or tonguing my own asshole.

I suddenly felt like I had to lose some weight. Not from around my midsection, but from the middle of my head. I had to lose several hundred cups that have been weighing me down. I decided to throw them away… all of them, to a cup.

And so they went, into the shitcan.

“Dude. Why are there so many cups in that shitcan?”

Over the course of the afternoon, several people saw the long stacks there, heaped like cordwood and leaning like pairs of giant chopsticks out of the trash, and stopped by to see if I was really throwing them away. To see if I had come to my senses, or if something terrible had happened to me. One person called me on the phone to ask if I was okay. At least, that’s what I think she asked - she was laughing pretty hard, and I think there were other people in her office.

I peeked around the corner at the trashcan several times that afternoon, but resisted the urge to rescue them. I ended up leaving for the day, ignoring them as I strode past, thereby resigning them to their fate there in the can.

I suspect there were several colorful phrases uttered in Spanish that night when the cleaning woman came upon that heaping pile of cups, growing from the garbage like some kind of telescoping monster-plant.

Note: The previous remark is not meant to generalize or stereotype all cleaning women as being Hispanic. I say that because the specific woman who cleans our office is Hispanic. Sometimes when I’m there late, she asks me about my pictures of the boys, and she laughs at my butchery of common Spanish words and phrases, such as “muchachos“, “lápiz“, and “¿Usted ha visto mis muchas tazas finas de la soda?“.

Regardless, the next day they were gone, and I feel a lot lighter without them.

Literally. 

Soda Cups, 2008
28″ x 56″
Depicts 867 soda cups, the number used by Bill every 8 years

One thing you should know about Liam is that he suffers from multiple personality disorder. Among the roughly 37 that we have documented, there are two overriding personalities under which all the others fall. There is Han Solo Liam and there is Dynamic Duo Liam. Solo Liam is way cool, laid back, chilled out, melllllloooow. He listens to Dark Side of the Moon and drives a VW Bus to preschool. Duo Liam is an angsty, whiny, control freak. He drinks way too much coffee and flosses with barbed wire. The difference between the two? The absence/presence of Liam’s perpetually airborne little brother, Nate. (The other little brother, the 20 lb. eating machine called Sam, does not have this effect on Liam. Yet.)

In addition to the assholish behavior mentioned above, Duo Liam also thrives on excluding Nate from things. Bill and I have been making it a point to take the boys out with us separately so that they can spread their turkey wings a little. They’re silly outings, errands really…Safeway, CVS, Wal-Mart. But even more than the adventure, Liam loves telling me about how Nate isn’t with us. ”Just Weem and Mum-Mum are going! Not Nate. Nate’s not going. Just Weem!” He’ll roll around in the idea and scrub the words all over himself again and again. He had a similar reaction last week when I tried explaining to the boys the importance of cooperation, especially during the day when the ratio of crazy parent to crazy kid is 1:3. “We need to help each other and work as a team. OK? Do you think you can do that for Mummy?” Nate beamed his sunny little face my way while Liam crossed his arms over his chest and said, “NO! No Nate is team! Just Weem is team!!” Um-hmm. There’s no L’i'am in ‘team,’ apparently.

So, when we took away Liam’s diapers cold turkey yesterday and began potty training, I used his love of excluding Nate to make the potty look like a delicious indulgence that NATE CAN’T HAVE! And, yes, I did consider the dozen or so ways this manipulation might come back to kick me in the junk in the future. But, having exhausted all logical arguments for not crapping your pants, I opted for the unconventional approach. ”The potty is just for Liam. Not Nate. Nate’s not potty trained like Liam will be.” And, it TOTALLY FREAKIN’ WORKED!

However, while my deception was well crafted and thorough, I failed to be specific enough in my instruction. What I said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty.” What I should have said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty…and if you do? LEAVE! IT! THERE!” 

So subdued for one who just dipped his toys in a shit fondue pot.

…dipped his toys and his leg.

W! WTF!

I think this ‘Little People’ was supposed to be holding #2. 

It was almost worth the gagging to say, ”EAT SHIT, ELMO!!”