H_mb_g - All that's missing is "u!"

I'm pretty happy with this one. Primo's class was focusing on one letter of the alphabet each day, so I decided to combine that with the vacation countdown and this is what I came up with. You've got Uncle Scrooge strumming a ukulele, made from meat and cheese, sitting under an umbrella made from oro blanco (like a pomelo and/or a white grapefruit.) And, he's on vacation at a Floridian beach. The white sand is homemade cheese bread, the starfish is apple, the hibiscus are pear and the water is a blue fruit roll-up. The roll-up feels like a bit of a cheat, but it ended up being all he talked about. "You know what I really liked, daddy? The water. It was really good. Maybe you could put some more in my lunch tomorrow. You said it's fruit, right? So it's really good for me. We should eat a lot of things that are good for us." And so on. He was active and passive in his requests, plaintive and demanding. We were close enough to leaving town that I just rode it out.

We went to an indoor water playground here in town yesterday to meet up with some cousins who were in town. The kids had a blast, which was no surprise. What was surprising was how much fun I had how, well, infernal the place was. The roar of water echoing off cinderblock was, literally, deafening. I read somewhere that if you have to shout to be heard, you're damaging your hearing. I pretty much always have to shout for my kids to hear me, but when we left I felt like I should be wearing an AC/DC t-shirt and reeking of at least two kinds of smoke. Okay, maybe not AC/DC - I didn't have to read lips for the rest of the night. Let's call it Poison with special guests Ratt. (Or you can call it the Ratt Poison tour. They did, after all. I called it the first time I ever won concert tickets from the radio, but that was just the first thing that made me feel like a winner about that concert.)

Also, it was hot. Not just warm enough to play in water, but hot enough to need to hydrate. If I had been blindfolded, you could have told me I had been chosen to repair a ruptured boiler in the dark.

The chlorine would have given it away, though.

Have you seen the vinyl decals on cars and trucks that show silhouettes of waterfowl among the text "if it flies, it dies"? I could see, in my mind's eye, emblazoned on the glass sliding doors of the waterpark, the phrase "If chlorine can kill it, it's dead." My mind-eye didn't discern any silhouettes, but I'm sure that, at the very least, dogs that fit in purses would have been among them. I should mention that I was doing all this visualization because my regular eyes had been stung by thousands of angry hornets upon entering the pool area. So, between heat, a deafening roar and eye-pain, I'm recommitting to "infernal" as an appropriate adjective. My task, even more overtly Sisyphean than most: watch my 2-year-old on the "kiddie" waterslides.

Hyperbole aside, these things were dangerous to him. He's not overly cautious. Every surface leading to the slides was slippery, and the slides were disproportionately fast for their length and pitch. He needed monitoring, and I'm used to it. Specifically slide duty.

I did it for Primo before him, and I still don't know the best way. Both of them want to go on the highest slide possible. Twisty is good, especially twisty enough to spin you around backwards or turn sliding into head-over-heels tumbling. But sometimes straight and fast - fast enough to make it hard to land on your feet at the end - is the way to go. Regardless, there's a big, tall climb to the top. So, do I climb with them to make sure they're safe on the way up, or watch from the mouth of the slide to make sure they're safe on the way down? Is it more nerve-wracking to see them climbing flight after flight of stairs alone, or watching, fingers crossed, as they slip away, sometimes not to be seen again until they emerge at the bottom?

I guess I could climb up and go down the slides with them. It would be good practice for when I take the training wheels off their 2-seater bikes, and for their 25th birthdays, when I finally disengage the passenger-side steering wheels in their cars.

M-I-C, K-E-Y oh why do we do this to ourselves?

I banged this out when the local paper came by a few weeks ago. It was during our vacation countdown and I wanted something that was easily recognizable, so I went with Mickey. He came out alright, all things considered. I hadn't really done one for an audience, but it didn't end up being much different. Normally it's the kids shouting questions from the other room. This time they were asked at a more conversational volume and actually pertained to what I was doing.

Mickey's pants are carved apple, the rest of him is meats and cheeses. The blackberries probably could be serving a more interesting purpose, but they're in this one mainly because they were on sale.

I'm still kind of recuperating from the trip, but I wanted to get something up. I've also done a quick video of some of our time in Walt Disney World. You probably won't find a lot of Disney vacation films that need to be set up by making sure you've seen "I'm On a Boat" (edited) by The Lonely Planet, but ... you'll want to have seen "I'm On a Boat" (explicit) by The Lonely Planet.

It skips a generation

This is a pinata tostada. It feels like I ought to have thought of a lot of rhyming words to cobble together into a sentence, but sometimes you've got to resist.

There's a base of seasoned rice and refried butter beans beneath all the embellishment and the same beans cementing everything to a flour tortilla I cut into the shape of the pinata and fried until crispy. The pinata has stripes of diced avocado, shredded cheese, chili powder, sour cream and white ("Swiss") American cheese as well as reins and a saddle of some of the last of the cherry tomatoes from our garden. The background decor is of similar composition, with the additions of radishes cut to look like peppermints and some sliced carrots. I sent along tortilla chips for him to scoop up the stuff underneath the pinata.

I hadn't worked in dip since a seven-layer version of van Gogh's "Sunflowers" I did for a friend's party a few years ago. You might think I was throwing that line in for a laugh, but no, really. The theme was something like "the art of food," and it was potluck. Mostly there were a lot of very pretty hors d'oeuvre and trays embellished with flowers, but somebody did an installation of metal saucers suspended by wires and filled with dips. Anyway, nobody touched the "painting," but there was a bowl of the dip next to it that got cleaned out, so I can only assume that people either didn't realize that it was the same dip or didn't want to mess it up. As I've said before, that's really the paradox about these things. They're made from food specifically so you can eat them, but people often don't eat them.
Primo's reason for not eating this one wasn't not wanting to mess it up, though. Instead, it was because he "[doesn't] like cheese."

My grandfather was dying of cancer when Primo was born. I wasn't with my grandfather all the time, but if he was in a lot of pain, he didn't show it when I was with him. He mostly just seemed to be getting more and more tired. The one comforting thing for me was that things we hoped were taken for granted didn't have to go unsaid. All of the grandchildren wrote him, well, goodbye letters. His sons who live elsewhere visited often. People made time.

Nothing I saw affected him quite the way Primo did, though. Maybe it was an affirmation of the sort of ebb-and-flow nature of human life. Maybe there was no history between them, no hard feelings or regrets to moderate the joy of their interactions. Maybe my grandfather just liked babies more than I had cause to appreciate before. Whatever the reason, he positively glowed when he held the boy. He found strength in the arms that now mostly rested on his chest to lift Primo up over his head and let his new great-grandson look down at his great-grandfather. The traces of resignation and acceptance of his mortality that colored his brave smiles evaporated when those smiles were turned toward my newborn son. I can't describe it any other way than "spiritual."

So I'm not surprised that I played medium to my grandfather when Primo told me he didn't like cheese. The man had lived through - come of age during, really - the depression. I had no reason to doubt him when he told me he used to play with sticks and rocks as a youth. He never, ever wasted food. As a kid I'd "finish" a chicken leg and he would take it from my plate and clean it. You know the cartoons where the bear gets hold of a ham, puts it in his mouth and pulls out a perfectly white bone? That's what he would do. Maybe I'd gotten most of the meat, but when he was done there was no meat, no skin, no fat, no gristle, no sinew. His plate looked like Death Valley at the end of a meal. I swear the bones were even sunbleached a little somehow. I don't remember them ever having a dog, but it might have just had the sense not to bother hanging around the kitchen table.

Once, when my brother and I were visiting them in a retirement community in Arkansas, before they moved back to Omaha, he took us fishing at the marina where residents docked their boats. You could look over the side of the dock and spot the little bluegill and sunfish lazing near the boats, so they were no great trick to catch. And catch we did. I'm not sure why we weren't releasing them all, but, probably at my behest, we kept several in a bucket and took them home to fry. I ate most of what was put on my plate, but despite catching them and helping to clean them, it wasn't as rewarding as I thought it might be. My brother, who probably wasn't more than six or seven at the time, refused to even taste his fish. It had never really been a sticking point in our house. Neither of my parents voiced much concern over whether our plates were "cleaned." That probably accentuated the attention my grandparents paid. My grandfather asked him why he wasn't eating, and my brother told him "I don't like fish." "You don't?" my grandfather asked. "Well," he continued in a voice that suggested even to my nine-or-ten-year-old ears that he was about to trap my brother in a hypocrisy, "what do you eat when you go to Long John Silver's?" My brother cast his eyes to the side and answered: "chicken." And it was true. And the part of me that hadn't ever gone without a meal laughed a little when, tables turned, my grandfather didn't have anything else to say.

Not for almost 30 years, anyway, until I asked my own son "You don't like cheese, huh? Well, you like pizza, don't you?" As soon as I'd said it I was back at that dinner table, but now I was the one baiting my picky little adversary and waiting for that one, vindicating answer I believed was the only he could possibly give. Maybe he could have given me his own version of "chicken." Wriggled out of the trap I'd set for him and left me scowling because I'd been outmaneuvered. Maybe he'd have no answer. What was to be gained either way? So, instead I just said "don't say you don't like something. Especially something you eat all the time. Say you didn't like it this time." And we left it there. I threw out what he hadn't eaten and thought about his great-grandfather. "My grandpa who died," as Primo calls him.

It's given Primo easy entree into a darkish part of his own head to have a relative who's seen holding him in pictures in his baby book, but isn't around anymore. He's probably no more haunted than most 5-year-olds, but we've had to address the subject. Repeatedly. When we do, we try to be frank and genuine, but more even than that we try to change, just by degrees, how Primo's framing things. He'll ask about his "grandpa who died," and we'll remind him that his "grandpa who died" was also his "grandpa who loved him very much and was happy to have met him." And remind Primo that he was lucky to have met his great-grandpa. Nevermind that his great-grandpa would have told him to eat that cheese.

The Clone Ranger

I had an interview with the local newspaper today. It was different working on one of these with other people in the room. I didn't quite finish in time to take the lunch I was working on to school, so I'm trying to decide whether to post it. Maybe if he eats it as a snack this afternoon. Okay, here's the other shoe: I sent a "plain" lunch with him in case what ended up happening happened.

While the jury's out, here's his lunch from Halloween. I'd sent pepperoni pizza for two days in a row, so I went with a turkey sandwich masquerading as pepperoni pizza. Kinda pomo, huh? (Note to Wikipedian responsible for Postmodernism wiki: though it "may be abbreviated to pomo in adjective form," it really shouldn't.) It was well-received.
Our whole family was able to make it to school to watch the costume parade, with Primo as the lone (and blue, and Power) Ranger. The expected red Power Ranger had been replaced by a young Jedi named Ben'dic Ar-Nald. Primo is recovering comfortably from the lightsaber wound to the back. It's nice the way those self-cauterize.
I was surprised how few Power Rangers there were, though. This year's panicky parent poison would have been the Clone Trooper. "Has anyone seen my son? He was dressed as Captain Rex! No, he's got blue accents on his armor - that's an ARC Lieutenant! Cody? Co-deeeee!"
I can't decide whether that would have been harder for me to accept than a Power Ranger. Power Rangers I have no vested interest in, but Clone Troopers are another subject entirely.
We've let Primo watch "Star Wars." ("Episode IV: A New Hope," if I must.) I'd be lying if I said I hadn't hoped to bond over it, but that, it seems, was not to be. He didn't seem to dislike it, but he hasn't asked to watch it again. That's made the household discussion of when he's old enough to see "Empire" fairly moot.
We have some friends who started their own youngster on "Episode I." Reasonable people can disagree, I suppose. After all, people like to get bad news out of the way, eat their vegetables first, and put horrible burns into cool, soothing water. Besides, Primo will finish the series first, because they're going to hit the PG-13 roadblock in the story arc that is "Episode III," which we're saving for last. Anyway, "Episode I" apparently sucked their kids right in. Enough that they've got a "Jedi party" coming up. (Thanks again, Ben'dic. If we would have gotten the Jedi memo I could have gotten a twofer out of the Obi-Wan costume I ended up buying for the party. At least it was on clearance.)
Back when it was Morning in America, my friend's dad was in his living room watching "Goldfinger" on the Sunday matinee. When I asked him what it was he regarded me for a moment, incredulous, and said "James Bond." I had seen "For Your Eyes Only" in the theater recently and told him that the man he was watching was not in the James Bond movie I had seen. He told me that I had been watching Roger Moore and that I should take a minute and watch James Bond. Rather than just one, I took a few minutes to consider Sean Connery and then remarked, with authority, "Roger Moore is better."
I never really got to apologize to my friend's dad. Not in any way that was meaningful after his stroke. They say he probably could have made a full recovery if he had received immediate treatment, but I figured he was just slumping back into his chair to finish watching that dusty old Sean Connery guy. So I left him to it. 
I've forgiven myself in the intervening years, and I've grown more circumspect. After all, I was young. Now I can't believe I could ever think Roger Moore was the best James Bond. But, to be fair, who could have seen Timothy Dalton coming? And it's hard for adults to accept that everything newer is better.
Which may have saved me from an attack of the clone. If I would have realized that "Episode I" is the Red Bull to my "Star Wars" Postum, maybe Primo would be "really into 'Star Wars'" now. Then, besides watching him embrace the patently inferior portion of the mythos, I would have had to watch him express himself by dressing as a Clone Trooper. Unironically, which would keep it from being performance art. Like a sandwich wearing a pizza mask. Yeah, I guess the Clone Trooper would have been worse. So, that's decided. Yessir, I can cross that right off my list.