I’d gone in to get the boys something from the refrigerator, and ended up sitting on the far wall with my back to the corner, where Charlie’s bed was, my head in my hands. The boys followed me in, uncertain.

“Da-da trine do?” asked Nate.

“What is da-da tryin’ to do?” repeated Liam.

***

I’m not sure what woke me up. It might have been the thunder, unspooling from a low, distant rumble into a flashing crack-shot that rattled the windows. Or it could have been the sudden and complete absence of sound that immediately followed as the power flicked off, taking the white noise with it. Whichever was responsible, I was suddenly awake. It was the middle of a workday, but I was home in bed. My allergies had linked hands with the giant bubble display tube virus and together, they had clothes-lined me into a sick day.

It was too dark in our bedroom, and it sounded like the wind was trying to get its fingers under the glazing and shake the glass out of the windows. I went across the room, pulled back the shade, and peered out into the side yard. It looked like a special effect from “Twister”, only with fewer cows, and more realism. I have personally weathered Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, then several typhoons in Japan, and what was playing out in front of our window now was as dramatic as anything I had seen while pulling aside any of those shades then.

Still hopping into my clothes, I met Jill in the darkened hallway. She’d been putting the boys down for their naps, and was coming out of Liam’s room.

“What the Hell?” I asked.

“It came on quick.” she responded. “When I left Nate’s room, it was a little dark outside. By the time I made it down the hallway to Liam’s room, the rain just exploded! Dude, it was like when the dancer pulled the chain in Flashdance.”

“And I just looked out Liam’s window, and saw Charlie in the driveway, running laps around the Sequoia.”

Shit. Charlie doesn’t do rainstorms. Before her hearing began to fail, she would tremble and cower at the first hint of rattling wind or smattering drops. Now, she usually sleeps soundly in her corner, peacefully oblivious. But this time, she was in it, outside - in the middle of what looked to be the worst storm we’d had since moving here. I started down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

As I opened the side door, a branch as big around as my arm fell sideways across the fence by the driveway. The rain was alternating between blowing sideways, and blowing even more sideways. It was hitting the side of the garage so hard that it looked like smoke going around the corner. The porch and driveway were papered with wet and rolling leaves, twigs, and branches. And Charlie wasn’t there.

Marveling that only minutes earlier, I had been sleeping soundly in a warm, dry bed, I opened the door, jumped the steps, and started out into the eye.

***

I’d gone out to the store to get soup, and I’d come back with a puppy.

“Do you really need a dog right now?” my mother had asked over the phone when I told her that I’d gone out to get soup, and had come back with a puppy.

“I do. Besides, she’s a Basset Hound.” I said, holding her on my lap and pulling her loose folds of skin into my hands. We’d had a much-loved Basset while I was growing up, and if you asked anyone I’d ever shared a barracks with, getting a Basset Hound immediately upon shedding the chains that bound me to the Marine Corps was right up on the list with ‘refusing to cut hair until I have to pull it out of the crack of my ass’.

She had good markings, and her face was cleanly brown and white, with starkly-defined borders between. Her ears were long and as smooth as velvet. She had thick, oversized-paws, and was puppy-clumsy and playful - her teeth were needles, and her breath was pure eau-deu-puppy. Puppy breath defies the confines of the written word, but if you’ve ever smelled it, then you’re nodding right now, and I don’t need to elaborate. It’s like ‘new car smell’, but inside a puppy’s mouth, and without the possibly harmful benzene and formaldehyde. When she growled, she sounded like a little dinosaur.

The woman at the pet store told me that they’d been calling her “Jacqueline Basset”. But that didn’t seem to fit her, and was a bad pun anyway. Later that week, I got her AKC papers in the mail, and the woman had jotted a quick note to me: “Good luck with your new puppy!”

I was living in a third-floor apartment. Sometimes at night, she would bark and howl, and I’d stack the couch and chair cushions around her crate like a fort, hoping to muffle her enough to stave off any complaints from my adjacent neighbors. There was another Basset in the complex, and sometimes I’d trade raised hands with the couple who walked it as I took my new puppy up the hill over by the apartment car wash.

At times she’d waddle up to the landing going up to the loft, and turn around and sit, looking down at me - her face sagging forward until I wondered how she could see. I’d join my fingertips to my thumbs and put my hands up over my eyes as though looking at her through binoculars. She’d start to growl, and then bark at this strange behavior. I called this her ‘barking place’, even though she soon began to bark at me immediately when I did it, regardless of where we were.

I was still simply calling her “Puppy” when I went home for Christmas later that month. My sister was pregnant, and I joked that my puppy was actually the first grandchild. Puppy got into both the candy dish and the cat box during that trip, eating things from each that she shouldn’t have. Want a new spin on Christmas cheer? Watch the looks of dawning horror on your family’s faces when a Basset puppy comes galloping into the living room, shakes her head, and sends a litter-riddled cat turd flying through the air - Christmas’ nastiest lump of coal, special delivery!

I received “Travels with Charley: In Search of America”, by John Steinbeck, as a gift that year. I unwrapped it, held it up, and looked at the dog. “You look like a Charley to me.” I told her. She wagged her little puppy tail, and it was set. Although I decided later that she looked even more like a Charlie.

Charlie slept in my lap almost the whole eight hours home.

***

“You boys leave Charlie alone!” Jill yelled across the yard. “She’s an old girl!”

I looked at Jill. “Charlie’s like: ‘What the hell? This is NOT how I envisioned my golden years! I did NOT sign up for this’.”

The boys ran towards the swingset, and Charlie slowly settled back down into the grass, possibly planning escape routes; possibly reflecting on these small, ever-present people; or perhaps simply feeling relief at settling her old bones back down into the cool grass.

***

Senior and I were sitting on the couch in his living room, watching Gordon and Jett, his Black Lab, play with each other. Gordon was going for the cheap shots and snapping at the larger, more solid dog’s front legs.

Sometimes, they would stop to rest, smiling and panting and occasionally pulling their oversized tongues into their mouths to take a swallow before letting them unroll and loll again. Sometimes one or the other would disappear and could be heard messily lapping from the water bowl in the kitchen before running back into the room. They were really stinking up the place, and if you pet one of them, you had to be prepared to wipe your hand off afterward.

Charlie lay on the couch beside, and on me, and eyeballed them, growling them away if they drew too close. She’d grown into her paws now, and each time the dogplay did come near us, I could feel her claws curl down as she tensed and readjusted. Sometimes, she would nudge me with her cold nose, and I’d absently rub my arm, then stroke her head as we sat there.

Gordon had his paws on Jett’s back, and was now using him to walk back and forth across the room, like a bear in the Russian Circus. Senior, still looking at them playing, and years away from getting any grandchildren from me, smiled.

“Son, you’ve got a lot of good years left with those dogs.”

“Yep,” I nodded.

Although I had no way of knowing it, I would reflect upon this moment many times in the coming years.

***

“We normally weigh her on the scale in the back,” I told the technician. She looked at me uncertainly.

“It’s okay,” replied another, who’d been there longer. “That’s Charlie, and Bill is family. Besides, he’s the only one who she’ll let pick her up.”

We went back into the lab area, Charlie padding closely behind me. I bent down and picked her up. She was pitifully easy to lift onto the scale.

29.4 pounds. 4 pounds less than two weeks ago, I noted sadly. And about half as much as she was in her prime. She’d been steadily losing weight over the last year, but especially over the last few months, and it appeared to be hastening. Her once-meaty haunches were now alarmingly sunken, and where there was once shiny fur and a solid back, there was only dry, shedding hair, and too much backbone. Her sharply brown and white face had been replaced with one that was now entirely white.

She’d had a kidney infection a month earlier that we’d successfully treated, but the weight was still coming off. Four days earlier, she’d started throwing up, and was unable to keep anything down, not even water. She was trying, but nothing would stay. So I made a last-minute appointment for Saturday morning to see Karen, Charlie’s main veterinarian for almost 14 years. Karen’s the kind of vet you call by her first name, and she’ll come to your house for Halloween parties. Once, when it had been a long time since I’d been in, she hugged me.

Karen or not, Charlie doesn’t do vets. As we waited in the exam room, she trembled and panted. I stroked her from the top of her pointy Bassety topknotted head down her neck, and onto her back. I spoke calmly and soothingly to her and let her know that things would be alright. She stopped panting and sat quietly at my feet.

Undoubtedly, Karen would come in and prescribe something to her to ease her stomach, and then we could concentrate on getting some weight back on her. Maybe some vegetable oil in her food would even bring her coat back a little.

She greeted us, reviewed the file, and began Charlie’s examination. I told her about the last few weeks with Charlie. I was still talking when Karen gently interrupted me.

“Stop.”

“Stop what?” I asked, blinking. But I knew.

We talked for several minutes. Eventually, Karen left us alone, and for the last time, I made a lap for Charlie. I held her and loved her, and told her that everything would be okay. I stroked her head and her back, and soon, there was a little pile of shed hair on the floor beside us. Everything she had ever been to me, she was in that moment.

She was my Old Charles; she was my funny puppy. She was my Whirl. My brown-faced puppy, barking at the top of the stairs, and my old white-faced girl, lying in my lap, exhausted.

Unashamed, I wept, and the tears I shed were those of a 23-year-old boy, freshly on his own for the first time, holding a puppy in his jacket and bringing her home. They were the tears of a man of 25, moving into his first house, and spending long weekends alone but for his hounds. They were the tears of a 30-year-old, checking to make sure his dogs were okay after being T-boned at an Interstate off-ramp. They were the tears of a man of 38, a husband and daddy now, sitting and looking down at his beloved hound and hoping desperately that he was making the right decision.

A short time later, Karen came back in, and Lori, who had also known Charlie for many years, was with her. With wavering uncertainty, I turned, and lowered my face until it rested on the top of Charlie’s head. I prepared to do the last thing for her that I ever could.

Karen didn’t say anything. The door drifted shut, and closed silently behind her.

***

I could hear a cat meowing.

I was in the driveway two houses away, and there was still no sign of Charlie. The rain was hitting me so hard that it hurt, and I was holding my elbows in front of my face as I yelled into the din. The possibility that I had left my sickbed and run into a tornado only occurred to me later.

And now, just under the deafening wind, I could hear a cat meowing - a thin ribbon twisting and curling, swept through a roaring river of sound. I turned to look towards the house, and saw not a cat, but my neighbor Clarie, standing on her side porch. She was yelling, but I could barely hear her. Her mouth was moving, and she was pointing to the house next door.

I followed her waving hand, and turned, calling Charlie again. Just then, I saw her, lower to the ground than usual, and looking like a boiled otter. She scrambled almost apologetically up to me, and I scooped her up into my arms and sprinted back through the limbs and the bedlam to our house, meeting Jill in the driveway.

Later, from a place of dryness and safety, I thought about what it must have been like for her, lost and alone in a strange place while the world fell down around her. Then, even through her cataracts, bloodshot eyes, and the perfect storm, recognizing me… and possibly against all her instincts to the contrary, coming to me. Knowing that I was there, and that she was found, and that I was her safety.

I watched her, asleep and still drying, lying on her bed in the corner, and I no longer felt sick at all.

I had protected her from the storm, as she trusted I would.

***

“What is Da-da tryin’ to do?” repeated Liam.

“Daddy’s sad. Daddy’s sad because Charlie’s not here.”

“Where’s Charlie?”

“Charlie got sick. She had to go to the vet with Daddy, and then she had to go to sleep,” I said, fighting the rising lump in my throat.

“That’s Charlie.” Liam said. “She’s old dog. And she’s sick out there.”

“That’s right, buddy. She was sick out there.” I brought them both closer to me, and Liam nodded again.

“Charlie’s gone.”

I nodded too, no longer fighting the lump.

“Yes, Charlie’s gone.”

Our backyard wedding, four years ago today. Happy anniversary, Buhbee!

Liam was having an “off” weekend a few weeks ago. Yeah…”off”…we’ll just leave it at that. One of the few tactics that consistently works to redirect his energy when he’s freaking out is to ask him if he wants to help you with something. Doesn’t matter what it is. You could ask him if he wanted to help you amputate your leg with a rusty butter knife and he’d be jazzed to hold the wash rag in your mouth steady so you could bite down on it. He can be mid-screaming-fit with tears cascading down his chubby cheeks and if, in the few seconds of silence provided when he has to take a breath, you can quickly sputter, “Hey! Want to help me do laundry?”, he’ll turn on a dime, waterworks and yelling gone, and say in the most pleasant and earnest little voice, “Weem help Mum-Mum!! Weem is a *great* helper!” 

This particular weekend, I was getting ready to color my hair. I had planned to sneak away to the bathroom by myself for half an hour, but sacrificing the rest of the family’s quality of life wasn’t worth that, so I invited Liam along to “help.”

“Hey, Bean! Want to help me color my hair?”

I’m sure this sounded like a much more interesting endeavor to my three-year-old than it actually was and I could tell later that he was somewhat disappointed that I had decided to forego using the rainbow of broken nubs from his Crayola box and had, instead, opted for a bottle of goo in a very suburban shade of brown. Warm Medium Brown, actually. Man. Could there be three more neutral, boring words strung together EVER? They should have just called the shade, “Nice.” Well, it was Nice-N-Easy, so I guess they did in a way. This is getting more depressing the more I write!

Liam was extremely interested in the array of plastic gloves and bottles I removed from the “Nice” box. He looked at me and asked, “What color is Mum-Mum making her hair?” (I’m not sure when this third-person-speak of his will end, but I kind of like it right now. Might be awkward in the 5th grade if he still sounds like Tarzan.)

“Ummm…well, just brown, buddy. I’m actually trying to make the gray hair brown so it all matches.”

He looked at me, confused.

“Some of Mummy’s hair is gray. See?” I pointed to several colorless sprigs but could see that he wasn’t focusing on them. “Um…here,” I said pointing to a more prominent patch of gray at the top of my forehead. I put my finger on my forehead under the white patch .

“See there? What are those?”

Liam studied the area above my finger and sat back down, unimpressed.

“Wrinkles.” He said matter-of-factly.

You. Little. Shit.

Now. Here’s the thing. I don’t think he and I or he and ANYONE have ever had a conversation about wrinkles before. How the fuck did he know to say, ‘wrinkles’?? Are the lines and valleys on my face such that they embody the purest essence of wrinkliness and therefore transcend the normal flow of knowledge and learning, standing on their own as the epitome of “Wrinkle?” He knew without knowing that they were wrinkles. See? Depressing!

On the plus side, I now have at least two things in common with Gandalf, who is awesome. So, there’s that…

“What if, when I went downstairs to dry Charlie’s bed, I turned around to come back up, and I saw a rackbone-thin little ribby dog standing there, all quiet. Just staring at me, but half his face was gone? And what if he looked so real that I was all like, ‘Heeeeey boy.’”

“Okay.”

“And then, I’d suddenly notice that there was someone standing behind him… this silent man, just standing there. And even though he would be standing in the light, I still wouldn’t be able to see his face. He’d just be this dark, shadowy figure. Then suddenly, they’d both just be… gone.”

“That’s pretty specific for a “what if’.”

“Yeah. But what if that really happened? We’d have to move.”

“Oh, we’d move. Right now the ghosts are probably taking notes and saying, ‘That’s all we have to do to get them to leave? A skinny dog and a shadowy dude? Take the boys with you, but leave that baby.’”

“Buhbee! On TV… It’s a dog! And there’s a dark, shadowy dude behind him!’”

“That’s Russell Simmons, Honey.”

Even backwards or forwards, Jill is my lovely navigator. Lovely? My, is Jill! Forwards, or backwards, even!

Click here to view in high resolution

Bill: “Do you hear that buzzing noise? I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

Jill: “I’ll tell you where it’s coming from. It’s coming from that motherfucking toy phone on Sam’s saucer. The batteries are dying.”

Bill: “That’s annoying. How do you even change them?”

Jill: “I don’t know.”

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 chilly 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.

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.

“Where is Mum-Mum’s nose?”

Liam’s chubby index finger sneaks out from under his sheets and gently pokes the tip of my nose. His skin smells like apple juice and talcum powder. He smiles at me from behind his thumb which is nestled in the roof of his mouth. (Somewhere, our future orthodontist cackles and orders up a Space Shuttle.)

This is my favorite time of day with Liam. He’s peaceful and unguarded, personality #17. There are no little brothers lurking about threatening to steal his toys or my attention. He’s reclined and vulnerable on his bed, little boy armor checked at the door because it would be far too exhausting to bring so much stubbornness and fight to bed after having lugged it around all day.

Although he can be a wildly difficult creature, I secretly love that he is such a little bull. I see something of myself in his fire and anger. Controlling it without crushing it will be tricky as he grows up. While the fire/anger gene it is not my most admirable or desirable component, it is a component with strength.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s cheeks?”

He reaches out with both hands, presses the flats of his palms against my cheeks, and gently squeezes. I look like a fish. He smiles again and his eyes tell me that he’s in on the game…that he knows that I know that he knows all of these answers. It’s a game we’ve played with him since before he could speak. It’s probably a bit indulgent to have continued on with it for this long, but it’s familiar to Liam and helps him power down for the night.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

His index finger lands on the thin, blue-from-lack-of-sleep skin beneath my eyes. He studies me and I decide to change the game slightly.

“Hey Bean…what color are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

Liam leans in. He takes his time inspecting me and finally snuggles back into his pillows.

“Ummm… Mum-Mum’s eyes are blue. And, white.”

Indeed. A surprised laugh bubbles out of me. I laugh at how unexpected his answer is as well as how accurate it is. I kiss him. This is my favorite time of day with Liam.