Last night after work I dragged the Big Guy outside for Car Talk Home Edition. While he took my car for the “what’s making that embarrassing sound” portion of the show, I wandered around the yard looking for something to draw.
That’s when I saw it. One tiny yellow bloom on the forsythia bush. The bush is still mostly woody shoots right now, but that blossom, more than any isolated 80 degree day, was it. The first real sign that mud season is giving way to spring.
Our dog is pretty good about not begging at dinner time, but Snoop, our fat black god of pleasure, has a habit of parking himself by the Big Guy’s chair as soon as the Big Guy settles himself and his plate at our round pedestal dinner table.
Snoop stares longingly up at the Big Guy. The Big Guy, doing his best ogre imitation, orders him to go away and starts to eat. Snoop begins a classic silent meow, but ends it with a squeak to make sure the Big Guy is aware of how adorable he’s being. The Big Guy ignores him for a few bites until Snoop reaches a paw up to pat the Big Guy’s leg.
Then the contest begins, with the cat and Big Guy staring each other down until someone gets the next bite of whatever is on the Big Guy’s plate. Snoop doesn’t always win, but he does so often enough to make it quite clear to the humans that it’s not the cat who is looking at a king.
If it suddenly looks like apples are trending at your grocery store, it’s because there’s a growing giant in southern Vermont who’s decided that a crates of apples a day is just what the doctor ordered. I’m working on a theory that, in addition to generating a grocery bill the size of the national debt, he may single handedly be capable of causing an apple panic.
O Little Thinker Girl, hanging out there,
I care not if you have old clothes or un-abundant hair
For it is not mere beauty that me ensnares.
No, I hide quiet under the boughs, for now from you apart,
Waiting for the algae of our love to grow again between our hearts
Just as it did a just few weeks ago at the very start.
P.S.
If you please, a little extra sludge at your feet
Would also be really neat.
The fact that it’s gluten-free makes it a real treat.
– by Herman the Hermit, guest contributor to the Guppy Poets Society, on the occasion of finding no new algae at the feet of the Little Thinker Girl.
About a week ago Thing1 mentioned that he and Serious Girlfriend were starting to think about the problem. The two kids go to different schools, so for a minute my wallet started mimicking heart attack symptoms as I calculated the cost of two proms. As soon as Thing one confirmed that they would only be going to the prom at her school, however, I was able to relax enough to realize that he and SG have been seeing each other for about a year now. That’s like an eon in teenager time.
T1’s tenure as Serious Boyfriend has coincided with improved grades and a kid who’s acting more and more like a responsible adult every day. I give SG some credit for that. She even hinted jokingly at that last night when I took the gang out for dinner, but it’s not for the reasons she may think.
SG is successful in her own right. She’s a good writer and ambitious, but in the end we like her for the reason any parent likes their kids significant other. I suspect it’s the same reason her parents are willing to have T1 over for dinner off enough to possibly make them wonder what happened to their food budget. It’s a simple reason.
They make each other happy. What more could any parent ask for?
The only concern I have now is how to get better at drawing glasses and smiles.
Last Friday night Thing1 had a hot date, and the Big Guy had a gig playing guitar with his Québécois band at the local country store, so Thing2 and I decided to have Mommy-Thing2 evening.
We got to our favorite pub in Manchester, VT and, after ordering our drinks and appetizers, I pulled out my sketchbook and started sketch the candleholder.
Right on cue — as he does at every art museum or any time I’m sketching on the road — T2 asked if I had an extra journal. For once, i had thought to pack an extra, and the two of us sketched together in silence until our food arrived.
We came up with with wildly different pictures and spent the rest of the meal talking about art, architecture on Mars and art supplies.
It made for a different but quietly wonderful kind of date night.
I think that I shall never see a tree,
Sweet blue Guppy,
as lovely thee.
Not even that bonsai
that looks just like mine
Is as perfect in my eye.
– written by Oscar the Guppy upon spying the identically colored guppy in the next tank
A funny thing happened on the way to the buzzer. Herman the Hermit was determined to hide behind the bonsai so I decided to draw the tree instead. It was supposed to be a 3 minute doodle, but I kept hitting the snooze button until almost 10 minutes had gone by and Herman was still hiding. Then I remembered there were lots of other fish in the tank and restarted the timer from the beginning.
Sixteen year old Thing1 got into fitness in a big way last summer. He started working out like crazy. He spent the summer cutting hay (with a scythe) at his girlfriend’s house and jumping in ponds and rivers.
Just about the same time, he began having digestive issues that caused him to lose over 20 pounds in a few weeks — no mean feat for a kid who can seriously endanger the profit margin of any restaurant daring enough to put out an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Thanks to my job, we have excellent insurance, but it still took multiple visits to the ER and the regular doctor, along with a healthy dose of nepotism to finally find us the right specialist to hand us a diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis.
At the time, all I could do was feel eternally grateful for our health plan and angry at a system that would have left Thing1 at sixteen without a colon if we hadn’t known somebody who knows somebody who could make something happen. I was angry for a while at the seeming apathy of the people in the system and not just on behalf of Thing1, but on behalf of the millions of Americans who have bad insurance or none at all. It left me wondering how many kids miss their potential because of lack of access to adequate care.
I still think about that every time we go for a checkup, wondering what we can do — aside from regularly calling our elected representatives — to change things.
Thing1 has clearly been thinking about it too, taking the ‘change the things I can’ approach to a life that now suddenly includes up to 12 pills a day.
At first when I saw his reaction, I thought I was worrying about oranges and he was thinking about apples. While I made my daily calls to my reps, he began researching his autoimmune disorder and adjusting his diet long with his workout. He googled and read. He experimented with different portions of protein and fiber, fruit and starches as he learned what his system would tolerate (incidentally coming up with a unified digestive theory that involves eating whole crates of clementines while simultaneously helping your parents run up a grocery bill to rival the national debt).
At the same time, we’ve started the time-honoured college search. T1 is a math fanatic, so we started looking at math/science schools, but he surprised us by announcing he wanted to study nutrition to help other kids who might be dealing with similar digestive issues. We’ve since signed him up for a course at the community college, and he’s even considering a blog with fitness and nutrition tips.
I finally realized T1 and I really were both thinking about oranges and oranges. We were just thinking up different ways to get to the good stuff under the skin.
Herman sometimes has trouble distinguishing between kissing up and just kissing butt.
The neon tetras are hilarious to watch sometimes.
I got a bonsai so Herman the Hermit could have a retreat for the more social fish, but the the tetras, a.k.a the Minions immediately claimed it for their daily 3PM game of tag.
Herman got sick of the ruckus and gave up the shady spot under the bonsai to spend more quality time with the thinker girl.
Picking My Battles 