Category: Family & Home

Happy fifth anniversary to Amy and me! I guess the fact that it doesn’t seem anything like five years is testament to how much we enjoy one another’s company. Amy, choosing to spend my life with you was the best decision I’ve ever made. I feel that as strongly today as I did the day we met.

The greatness of the day much dampened by excruciating pain emanating from my upper right molar. Can’t eat anything but soup, can’t even let my uppers and lowers touch. Talking is difficult. Couldn’t sleep last night for the pain. Saw an endodontist this morning, turns out the nerve is dead and complications abound. Good thing that crown I got a couple of weeks ago was temporary, since the dentistas con drillistos are going back into the hole. Can’t get a root canal until Tuesday. It’s going to be a long three days on an antibiotic regimen, plus generous doses of ibuprofen and vicodin.

Oh, and it’s Mom’s birthday. And Friday 13th. Strange days.

In 20 years, when Miles joins M.I.T.’s Time Traveler’s Conference and attendees ask him about his first invention, he’ll be able to tell them he taped a vacuum cleaner attachment to the funnel of a steam train as a toddler. OK, he had a bit of help, but it was his idea, and he did most of the taping. Unfortunately, his attempt to make a cow catcher out of Scotch tape didn’t fare nearly as well.

Aunt Geri, life threw you a lot of weird curveballs, but you remained irrepressibly happy despite everything. You had such a flair for drama and poetic scenes, so it’s not surprising that you died yesterday in a slightly magical and surreal way. Lounging in a chair on the deck of a cruise ship, gazing out over the Atlantic ocean, fever overcame you. Suddenly, you were gone.

We differed on almost everything, and I’m sure it was as difficult for you to have a nephew as liberal as me as it was for me to have an aunt as staunchly fundamentalist and conservative as you. I never was able to convince you that the death penalty was wrong, but you changed your mind when the Pope said the same. Even though I didn’t see a lot of you in later years, the year we spent tossing political footballs back and forth via email was the year I got to know you the most — despite my wife begging me to stop the dialog to save my blood pressure, I valued that exchange tremendously. Our motorcycle trip to Vancouver will always be one of my happiest adult memories of you.

You were mother to five children, you were the levity and, in many ways, the backbone of your family. And as if five weren’t enough, you and Dennis had enough love in your hearts to take on ten foster children through the years. Not all of those experiences went well, but the fact that you took it on filled me with admiration.

You never missed an opportunity to throw a celebration, and few things meant more to you than getting the family together, despite all of our bitter differences. In fact, my mother met my father at one of your infamous parties, in the early ’60s.

As I write this, your body is in refrigeration down in the hold. In a couple of days you’ll land in Portugal, which you had never seen. Your husband will have you embalmed and shipped back to the States for a proper Catholic burial. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be him right now, alone at sea without the rock of his life by his side. And yet somehow I know that your light will shine for him, and in it he’ll find strength.

Peace and love, Aunt Geri. Forever.

Speaking authoritatively, Miles informed us recently: “I’m going to have a baby sister, and I’m going to name her Fifi.” This was news to us.

——-

At the park, looking out towards a nearby hedgerow: “Daddy, I have two friends named Siso and Bibo, and I met them in the bushes.”

Long after Miles is supposed to be asleep last night, hear him making noises in his room. Walk in to find him with one foot up on either rail of his crib, hands on the headboard, head held high on an outstretched neck. He’s making weird smacking noises, opening his jaw wide and moshing it shut. He stops to look at me and says “This is how a giraffe eats, Daddy.” Great. While he’s supposed to be asleep, he’s in there doing giraffe impressions for an audience of one.

——

Amy takes Miles to Petco to look at hamsters and frogs. In an aquarium, one of the fish is dead, lying on the gravel. On the way home, Amy asks if he would like to have a pet. “I want a fish!” “What kind of fish?,” she asks.

“I want a died fish!”

Miles grabs a book at random from the shelf, runs toward Amy, holding it high. “Do you like THIS book, Mommy?”

It’s a copy of The Communist Manifesto.

Playing soccer at the park with Miles, we stop to rest, lie on our backs looking at the sky. An airplane flies overhead.

“Where do you think that airplane is going, Miles?”

“To Habitot and Mocha, Daddy.”

Earlier in the day…

“What should we have for dinner?”
“Cookies.”
“Where did you get the idea that we have cookies?”
“From an old magazine.”

(This last was a reference to a line from one of his books, Wegman’s Surprise Party, in which dogs get party ideas by studying old magazines, but it knocked our socks off that he recalled and applied it.)

I really need to spend more time wandering around at Flickr. Stopped in on a lark this morning and immediately found Photos tagged with one letter. Had great fun with Miles stepping through and identifying the letters. He can rattle off the alphabet pretty easily now, but the unusual shapes and contexts of these gave him a bit more challenge.