My Father's House, August 2012

They grow blueberries in the back yard.

Dash picked some before dinner.

Fuschia buds...

...and in bloom

Picking veggies for our salads with Grandma.

A quiet moment for Mama

Apple tree

Dash befriended some neighbors and spent most of his time thrashing around in their pool with his new love:

Miss Reagan-Reese.

Stage IV

My parents divorced when I was five years old. I have no memories of living with them both. After the divorce, my dad just kinda disappeared for many years. I used to joke that I could have passed him on the street and not recognized him. (I used to carry around a Glenn Miller record album and tell people the guy in the picture was my dad. I didn't actually think my dad was Glenn Miller, he just looked a lot like I what I remembered of him.)

When I turned thirteen years old and started seriously butting heads with my mother, my dad resurfaced and started the hard, hard work of rebuilding his relationship with me. It wasn't easy, but he was vigilant and unwavering in his determination to make up the time we had lost. And you know what? It worked. I ended up living with my dad, and later my step mom, for most of my teenage years and then off and on through my twenties (what? I was a late bloomer. also, their house was fun. and they had a cleaning lady. and food.)

It was my dad who showed me the satisfaction of growing your own vegetables. He was the one who taught me to cook. To shop for steaks at the carnecerias and for fish at the Korean grocer. The pleasure of long dinner parties with too much food and too much wine. He taught me to take chances, but not too many. He taught me that I deserved (as much as anybody else) to eat ice cream out of Baccarat crystal bowls and drink champagne out of Lalique flutes. He introduced me to Hemingway and Vonnegut and Garcia-Marquez. When I had writerly aspirations, he read every word and never failed to fawn over each turn of phrase.

My dad's house was always the place my friends wanted to be. Not because I was there, but because he was. Everyone was welcomed with a bear hug and a shot of vodka. The sound of his raucous laughter still rings loud in the memories of everyone who's ever known him. He was the first man I ever really loved, and his love for me is ferocious and informs everything I do.

And he's dying.

Stage IV renal carcinoma. There's no treatment, our only job is to keep him comfortable.

When we heard it was cancer--but not yet what kind or how bad--Dash & I flew up (he and my beloved step mom moved to Oregon shortly after Dash was born) for a few days. We're going back next month, but it already feels like it's getting too late, like he's starting to fade away. His memory is going and he needs oxygen to breathe. He sleeps most of the day, and only wakes for maybe half an hour at a time. He hallucinates and doesn't seem to be able to tell what's real and what's not anymore. I didn't see any of this coming. My heart is broken.

August 13, 2012

Grade the First

How long do you think he'll indulge me with these signs?

With pals Ethan & Jack

Nervous?

Last year (!):

The Bowl

We packed up our nearest & dearest, along with some snacks and some wine, and hit up the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. They were playing the music of Pixar, and it was a beautiful way to spend a Summer evening. (Well, you know, until Dash decided he'd had a fat assful halfway through & we left at intermission. But still).

Olympics!

Invitational

On July 14th, Josh and I celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary. TEN YEAR WEDDING ANNIVERSARY. And the weird thing is, I still find him utterly engaging. He still makes me laugh in a way that no one ever has. He still is able to surprise me, inspire me and make my heart go pitter pat. Ten years later and I still learn from him--how to be a kinder person, a better mother and a somewhat faster runner. His is the first face I see every morning and the last one I see every night and I never want it to be any other way.

And, so, since I'm still all mushy on him, I thought we should throw a ridiculous party to celebrate the last decade of marital bliss and the next many more.

So, we threw a raingutter regatta. Like you do.

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(I've wanted to have a raingutter regatta since before Dash was born--it's even on my Life List. It's something that Scouts do, but because of their stance on homosexuality, we can't let Dash join Boy Scouts. Ours was better anyway, we had booze.)

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OK, blah blah blah, lady. Get with the photos already.

The invitations went out with little boat kits that I ordered from the Boy Scouts. The invitation asked the guests to decorate their boats and come up with a theme.

Our yard isn't big enough to host the race, so we converted the garage into the prom scene from Back to the Future.

We just cleaned out all of Dash's toys, bikes, scooters and other assorted wheeled and or armed items (ha, "just"). Then we got one of those big banquet tablecloth rolls from the party store & tacked up long strips to camouflage our myriad boxes of Christmas and Halloween decorations and tools and crap.

Then we hung up some fishing net I found at the party store, and taped up a bunch of pictures of seagulls and anchors and assorted sea life I printed out onto card stock & cut out.

Josh built the race track out of lipless rain gutters (you want to get the kind without the lip so the sides of the boats don't get stuck under it) & wood. That's literally all I know about the process.

Since nearly all of our guests had kids, I wanted to make sure we had stuff for them to do when they weren't actually racing. These are balloons that I filled with toys (Squinkies, rubber bracelets, cute erasers and stuff like that). Then I filled them with water & froze them. Once they were completely frozen, the rubber from the balloons peeled right off. The kids were supposed to chip away at them to dig out the treasures.

Here's what they did instead (ran out into the street and hurled them as hard as they could, over and over, until they shattered).

This station had a big stack of paper hats that I folded along with markers and a pile of stickers for the kids to decorate. (Please to enjoy my mad fotograffing skillz.) 

We also had a little tattoo station. I made the tattoos with Silhouette tattoo paper. This is the second time I've used that stuff, and it really is awesome.

Also, we had food.

Oh! These were cute! I made a bunch of little origami boats & filled them with Swedish fish.

Here's our boat. We initially were going to call it "Breaking Wind," but then we got all excited about the nose art shark, so obviously we had to change the name to "A Bigger Boat." Get it? "We're gonna need a bigger boat." Get it? Get it?

And, because we're friends with all of the world's most awesome people (sorry everybody else, I'm sure your friends are fine, it's just that we got the best ones), these are some of the boats our guests brought to the race.

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(Can you believe we're this far in & I haven't even gotten to the race yet? Also, it's gonna be a while yet.)
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Fuck yeah we had trophies made. What, do we look like amateurs? (2012 Engel Invitational, yo).



I also made ribbons in a bunch of hilarious (to me) categories. It worked out that everyone who didn't get a trophy got a ribbon.



Here's the trophy display. I made the nautical flag bunting by printing a bunch of flag clip art onto card stock & stringing it on twine.



We're seriously about to start with race pictures, but first! Look at Tom's socks!



Here's Jordan vs. Andrew. Jordan's boat was listing pretty seriously, but that's because he added flashing lights and a pirate at the helm. If you're gonna go down, might as well go down big. (He won the "Pirate-iest Boat" ribbon, though, so not all was lost.)



Dash vs. Ben! Brother against brother!



Bracelets to his elbows, glittery nail polish & his full Lakers uniform. This kid is the light of my life. Seriously.



Since each race was a four-lap relay, Josh pitched in on his dad's race. Still lost against a 6-year-old.



Auntie kicked my ass in several races despite a bronchial infection. Ollie was too cool to engage in our childish bullshit.


There's a reason Josh & I have been happily married for 10 years. His crazy compliments my crazy in a perfect way. This is his double-elimination bracket. (You'll notice we got our asses handed to us in the first round).



But we did award ourselves the "Silliest Boat" ribbon in consolation.



More like "Most Terrifying Boat," but whatevs--I didn't make one of those. Next year for sure.




The next morning, Josh sent "A Bigger Boat" on a retirement lap in the booze bucket. A fitting farewell, I think.

Thanks to all our wonderful friends and family for helping us celebrate! We'll see you next year for the 2013 Invitational (God help me).

Alone Time

Josh took Dash & his buddy Will to the Dodgers-Phillies game on Monday night.

(Dash rocked his Dodgers getup & Will is a Phillies fan, so Josh was walking around Dodgers stadium with two near-identical boys in opposing team gear: 

That is some cute America-fuck-yeah stuff right there)

Anyway, having the boys out of the house for an entire evening left me with too much free time. So, after folding all the laundry, watching my entire backlog of Real Housewives and drinking half a bottle of wine, there was nothing left to do but get Dash's lunch bags ready for the rest of the Summer:

And that is exactly the type of shit that's going to make Dash's wife hate me some day.