You guys might not know it, but when the twins were toddlers I kept a running list of ridiculous phrases or statements I had to say as a result of everything toddlers are. I thought of that list again today and decided to start one for the youngest of you as he goes through it, in hopes laughing about him later might salvage some of my hairline.
It is summer vacation and road trip season, so I have been engaging in one of my favorite annual traditions: annoying your mom by pretending I'm about to teach you The Song That Never Ends and goading you older two while giving you the actual lyrics.
I bring it up, your mom gives me a warning look like the dog gives the fan when it has the audacity to wave his butt hair around, you kids ask about it, and I use the lyrics to explain why I'm not really going to teach it to you.
I can't wait for the groans when you finally have the simultaneous curiosity, memory, and ability to look the actual song up.
Kids, you aren't ready for this now, and I hope you won't need it when you are ready for it, but I have to prepare you anyway.
We live in a time when corporations are considered to be people. This means that, from time to time, you may have to be prepared to help kill one in defense of your fellow man when their actions become too reckless.
I love you. Keep being the heroes of your own backyard.
Here is the quintessential 2020 story of how I ended up laughing at a rerun of your grandfather's funeral.
My father died in the middle of autumn of 2020. Now, if reading that made you vocalize or even just think a sympathetic sound, then you are reading this with exactly the wrong tone in mind.
It’s not that his passing wasn’t sad in some way, but it was sad in a distant, inaccessible way similar to the sadness you get when you realize the washing machine vanished another sock. Only, imagine it’s a sock from a pair that you dreaded to put on. A sock with a weave just open enough to spend the day tugging at every leg hair that had the great misfortune of being buried within it. This was the loss of an “Aww shit! I can’t believe I forgot to do laundry and have to deal with these fucking things again”, sock. His passing was a mix of relief and sadness, confusion about the sadness, guilt over the relief, confusion over the guilt, and more relief over the course of several bong rips.
That aside, the story of the complicated relationship I had with the first of the great villains in my life story is not the one I am here to tell today. Mostly because the total tonnage of that story would kill the oxen forced to drag it and send several well-meaning therapists into therapy themselves and the therapists’ therapists would have to convey that information to the original therapists’ great-grand therapists, creating significant generational trauma for the entire therapy community. Damaged therapists and dead oxen all the way down. Constant consolation through hot beverages, warm blankets, and shushing each other’s sobbing in soft, reassuring tones. Except the oxen, who are the only hypothetical characters that would experience any relief whatsoever.
This is the story of how I came to watch a rerun of my father’s funeral.
My dad, for all intents and purposes, had been dead to me for well over a decade when he became equally dead to everyone else. When I say “dead to me”, I mean so much so that any time he tried to manipulate my sister into using guilt to get me to reach out, the effort was met with a comment about how I don’t own a Ouija board and would not spend the money to throw a séance. If he wanted to talk to me, he could write messages on the foggy bathroom mirror like any other half-competent spirit, thank you very much.
I had been told that his pneumonia seemed like it would end him about two weeks before his actual passing, but two days prior the word was that he had been discharged from the hospital and returned home under his own care. I was forwarded an email he sent my sister to send along to me, which laid out his regrets and a promise that things were different now. His brush with actual death had made him see the light, so to speak. I decided I would sleep on it for a night so I didn’t open myself up to something awful impulsively, as is my usual manner, and reach out to bury the hatchet in the morning. To my credit, this is the first hatchet in some time that I wanted to bury anywhere other than the space between his shoulder blades.
It seemed that having children of my own had softened me in ways I could not anticipate. The idea that I could possibly do something that would make my children unwilling to speak with me was as unsettling and discomforting as a mercury enema. I wanted to be able to hold my head high when I spoke of lofty ideals like forgiveness and grace to the people my small toddlers would one day become. I damn near dislocated my shoulder jerking myself off over how good a person I was for my decision.
He died in the night before I could wake up to reach out.
His favorite holiday was Halloween by a wide margin. He loved the holiday so much that he, my mother, and I used to spend months working on some of the most nightmarish haunted houses northwestern Oklahoma had ever seen in an effort to raise funds for the town’s volunteer ambulance company on which both my parents served. Our first year, we received warnings from the school and church about the gratuitous horror we lovingly crafted in the abandoned locker room of our town’s mostly defunct rec center, locally known as the Old Gym. The next year, it was decided that we would go even harder and the Pastor would just have to sit on the sharpest dick he could possibly find if he didn’t like it. We made my elementary school bully cry. It was amazing.
Anyhow, it was decided that his memorial service would be postponed until Halloween in his honor. So Halloween of 2020 rolls around and the time for the service is drawing close. Due to COVID and the particulars of my job, I was unable and unwilling to fly out to Oklahoma City, where it would be just a short 2.5-hour drive through the prairie and the overbearingly earthy aroma of cattle feed lots to the family property. Luckily, the funeral home had been dealing with a ton of COVID deaths because, you know, Oklahoma, and they were set up to broadcast memorial services via Facebook Live.
As my computer (the one you guys know as Goliath) was sitting in several pieces within a disused closet, I opted to create a fake Facebook profile and watch the service stream from my phone. I cracked my third beer of the afternoon, navigated to the page, and hit the live stream. The buffering icon swirled helplessly like a snake in a washing machine for five minutes. I collected another beer. Ten more minutes I watched the icon spin like a cow in a tornado. Time for another beer. After about fifteen more minutes the video flickered up and soft music began playing.
Did the feed suddenly start working at the end of the service? Not at all! Due to the joys of rural Oklahoma internet, I had missed the entire live portion of the service and was now watching the finished recording of the funeral service for my father.
Upon reaching this conclusion, the complete absurdity of the situation hit me with full force. Here I was, reasonably intoxicated early on a Saturday afternoon, watching a rerun of the old man’s funeral. I laughed so hard at how utterly emblematic of our entire relationship this situation was that even the dogs looked at me with confused concern in their eyes. The twins turned away from their rerun of Paw Patrol at the repeated shotgun blasts of my laughter at the rerun of an allegedly solemn event and started laughing along. The oldest of you boys, the one who has the most infectious laughter I have ever had the pleasure to elicit, haw-haw-hawed so hard that I was brought to tears in my own upheaval of absurd hilarity.
And that is the story of how I accidentally shed a few tears while watching the rerun of that son-of-a-bitch’s memorial service.
Today I thought about the time my tiny, rural elementary school brought inmates into my class to tell us gangs are bad, and how clueless, 9-year-old Dad played a part in making that necessary.
The oldest pair of you is in third grade this year. You are (mostly) sweet, good-hearted kids learning the intricacies of interpersonal relationships while those same relationships help mold who you are.
I was a lot like you two when I was your age, but in a much, much smaller town. There was only one class per grade in K-6, and all of K-12 was taught in the same building. I would have made the 24th student in my graduating class if we stuck around long enough, and that included students from far out of town and in communities too small to maintain schools of their own.
I had a small group of friends I was excited to see every day and we spent a lot of our recesses playing together. We started to refer to ourselves as a club and would appoint any remotely building-like structure our clubhouse for the day. This was generally considered fine, provided we didn't keep anyone away from the clubhouse who would complain to the on-duty teacher.
During school vacations a lot of the club went to the same home daycare run by a lady who did not care for my personal brand of innovative childish bullshit. What she did care for was any activity that kept us from needing adult intervention, and during our frequent thunderstorms that meant movies.
When we put her copy of The Little Rascals in the VCR, we had no idea what events we were putting in motion.
It only took one viewing for us to change our "club" into a "gang". As far as I can recall, only the way we referred to ourselves changed.
Little Rascals was my first exposure to any concept of a gang aside from maybe members of Mystery Inc. using it to suggest a group activity. I was 9. I listened to the music my parents had on cassette (hair metal or the Batman Forever soundtrack until the tape warped twice) or the radio in rural Oklahoma. I watched Nickelodeon and played games on their sick AOL-era website. Not much in the way of gangster media.
I had no clue why my teacher gave the class a talking to about being in a gang and we weren't going to stop because some teacher told us to. We were rebels! Like The Little Rascals!
A week later the sheriff brings in a couple inmates from the nearest town of any size to give us a talking to about the dangers of gang life. I wish I could tell you any of what they said, because I am sure it was hilarious to be telling it to a room full of the whitest little farm/oil town children plus the one Hispanic kid. As of our last meeting, not a single member of The Gang remembers what we were told that day, because one of the inmates had a tattoo of a naked lady with real long titties.
Maybe we should have paid attention. One of those kids has spent most of his adult life in and out of correctional facilities and another was in for murder before he could finish middle school. It's hard not to wonder if their lives would be different if our teacher hadn't brought a picture of swinging mammaries in to tell pre-pubescent boys that crime isn't cool.
First things first, hug and thank whoever pointed you here. I'm sure you already have, you're good kids like that, but this one is from me.
I started this little collection of meandering memories with entirely too much context on a beautiful spring day. It is just after "snow shovel the pollen away" and just before "chowderboarded when you step outside." Truly one of our few annual magic weeks.
Before the two eldest of you left for music lessons today, you both groaned at a story I started to tell. Your reactions were expected. I'm fond of joking that I thought I was ordinarily intelligent and sort of funny for so long, until my twins came along to correct me. I timed your groans with my impression of your groans and laughed, then mentioned that one day you'll be glad for my silly stories and wish you'd heard more.
It's likely that there are a few in here you don't know, or some details that have been left out in earlier retelling. Some, like the next post, are just random, odd memories that got triggered by something, and I felt it was funny or relevant, but too mature to tell you at the time I wrote it.
Anyway, I sincerely hope you enjoy some aspect of it, and I love you all very much.
