2011-05-22 - 10:55 p.m.
Greetings and salutations!
I figured I couldn't let a whole YEAR go by without updating, so I have managed to squeeze this in here at the last minute. How are you doing? Everything is well, I hope. I'm doing just fine, thanks for asking.
Say, you'll never believe this. Do you know what document I have in my posession right now? Do you know what letter is sitting on my desk as we speak, laughing and mocking me?
Yes, you guessed it: another summons for jury duty. The fourth update I ever posted on this blog was about going to jury duty (archived post helpfully titled "Jury Duty") and ever since that time I've been getting tons of... whatever the plural of summons is. Summonses? Anyway, it's quite ridiculous. To the best of my recollection, I have not actually had to go to jury duty since that time I wrote about going. But still. Why are they so obsessed with bringing me back?
But enough about that. What say we move onto other business? Like my girls! Melody and Madison their names are. Or Maddie and Mellie, but only if you know them well enough to call them that. Or Peanut and Sparkles, which only I call them. I wish you could call them that, because that would mean you were me, and if you were me then you'd be the one writing this right now. But such is life.
Anyway, by any name, hopefully you remember them from the other times I've talked about them. They're two and a half now. To be honest, when it comes to the girls I really don't even know what to talk about, because I could go on all day about pretty much anything.
They're just so great. Charity and I are either the most amazing parents ever or we hit the baby jackpot. I don't want to say it's easy because I'm not the one who spends all day with them, but I cannot imagine there being two lower-maintenance little girls in all the world.
Like there's all this stuff out there about the "terrible twos" and all that. Maybe in other houses that sort of thing happens. Maybe it happens to crappy parents. But I'll tell you what, friends and neighbors, there's none of that "terrible" stuff happening around here. More like the terrific twos.
And I know all parents think their kids are brilliant, but mine truly are. They can use Charity's iPhone. They know how to call me, they know how to use it to look at pictures, they know how to watch whatever kid stuff is on there. They know how to use the credit card app to pay when they buy cigarrettes. You'd be really impressed.
They sleep in their own beds now too. Well, toddler beds, not grown-up beds, but beds nonetheless. I actually hate these beds -- they're about six inches off the ground so that they can't fall out and hurt themselves. Which is good, I certainly don't want them to fall out and hurt themselves. But I have bad knees and every night I'm getting down there and reading to them and tucking them in. Then I gotta stand up from the floor, which is no day at the beach. Unless the beach is all polluted and full of dirty syringes or something.
I don't really know what more to say about them, because as I said before, I could keep going on and on. And I do have other stuff I want to talk about. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that their mommy is also doing quite well. I could go on about her just as much as the girls.
Without getting all sappy on you, I can honestly say that as amazing and incredible and wondrous as it is to watch our babies grow into actual people, it has been equally impressive seeing Charity grow into the fantastic mom and just overall amazing woman that she's become. Every day I wake up and look at her and realize that I love her even more than I did the day before. It's quite remarkable. (FYI, tomorrow’s her birthday, so I'm just going to show her this paragraph as her present.)
Unfortunately, not all the news has been good in our little family. About two months ago, our canine pal Rocky was called to the Big Doghouse in the Sky. We didn't have him put to sleep, he died at home, which did not make for a very good time. I've had animals put to sleep and that’s obviously not nice either, but I think I prefer that to watching them die, knowing that there's nothing you can do.
I don't know if he was in any pain. I hope he wasn't, of course. I was just watching TV and Charity called me from the other room and said he was acting weird. I could hear a bit of alarm in her voice, and I turned and watched him as he was walking to his bed. But he couldn't make it there and laid down about 6 feet away from it.
Other than the fact that I loved him and miss him, there's two things about him dying that really bothered me, and him not getting to his bed is one of them. Several years ago I had this dream that I was driving home and somehow I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was about to die. So I kept driving home, thinking "Aw man, please let me make it home so I can just see Charity one more time".
So I drove through our gate and up the driveway and I pulled right up to the house. And I got out and started walking to the front door and that's when I woke up. It was just a dream, of course, but I surmised that the point where I woke up was the point that I died. Which meant that I didn't make it inside to see Charity. Which bothered me to the degree that I still remember the dream.
And Rocky not making it to his bed reminded me of that. His bed was like his home and I can't help thinking that he'd have felt safer and more relaxed had he been able to make it there. Probably sounds stupid, I know.
Anyway, he laid there on the floor and never got up again. He started panting a little and we brought his water dish to him, but he didn't drink. And over the next 20 minutes he just faded out. His vet's office is 45 minutes away, so we couldn't have taken him anywhere. We just tried our best to keep him comfortable. The vet later said that he’d probably had a doggy stroke of some sort.
Charity reacted about how you'd expect. Which is to say that she was a basket case for days. It's hard to explain, but he wasn't just an ordinary pet, he kinda represented our family and everything. When Charity and I first "hooked up", so to speak, we both knew that it would be forever. And it was about six months later at Christmas when I got Rocky. And he wasn't my dog or her dog, he was our dog. So to Charity, that was when she knew that I felt the same way about our future as she did. Not that I hadn't told her how I felt, but actions do speak louder than words sometimes.
So he meant a lot to us. Charity used to call him our practice baby, like he was training us for the day when we'd be actual parents to actual babies. If that was his goal, I think he did pretty good. Maybe he agreed and he knew he could go. I'm not sure if that's how it works, but it's nice to think.
It really didn't register much with the girls, though. They're still way too young to understand death and all that. We tried to tell them that he went to Heaven and whatever, but they don't know what that means. For a week or two they would occasionally look for him or ask us where he was, but eventually it seemed like they got used to the fact that he was gone.
And that's the other thing that bothers me, that the girls aren't going to remember him. You don't remember stuff from when you were two. And that sucks because he really loved them. He was a big dog and for several years he had a bad back and a bad hip and had arthritis and whatnot. Just stuff that happens with bigger dogs. But I thought we might have to get him put to sleep back when Charity was pregnant, because he wasn't getting around well and just wasn't having a good time of it.
It was in her eighth month that it got bad, and I remember thinking, man, please don't let this happen now. I knew she'd be a basket case and she didn't need all that in her final weeks of pregnancy. But he made it through. And when we brought the girls home, it was like he had brand new life all of a sudden.
When they were babies, he would sleep outside their door and then run to me or Charity as soon as one of them woke up and started making noise. Which we already knew, of course, from the baby monitors. But he wanted to make sure we knew.
When they were learning to walk, Madison would crawl over to him, grab onto his rolls of skin, and use him to pull herself up to her feet. And he hated being grabbed like that. If I ever grabbed him the way she did, he'd have growled at me. But Maddie would do it and he'd just lay there. Then once she was up, he'd stand up and stay right beside her as she'd try to walk. It was really something to see. I'm pretty sure we have it on tape.
Anyway, he loved them a ton, and they aren't going to have any memories of him. That makes me sad.
To make matters not better, just a few days after that unfortunate event, I found out that my grandfather, Pop of “Nan and Pop” fame, died back east there in New Jersey or thereabouts. A couple years ago – so probably two posts back from this one – I wrote about Charity and I going out there and staying at their house on the beach and everything.
I mainly wrote about my Nana, though, because if you knew both of them, she’s the one you’d spend your time writing about. Pop wasn’t really the type that you’d have a lot to say about. He was mostly just in the background, watching westerns on TV, reading his books, drinking his martinis at 5pm on the dot every day.
He was really into Old West stuff. When I was a kid, they had this great house in New Jersey that they’ve since sold. I loved that house. In one of their bathrooms, you’d walk in and the sink and mirror would be right there. Then there was a doorway leading to where the toilet and the shower were. It was like a two-room bathroom, which is strange.
But they took down the door and Pop replaced it with a pair of old swinging saloon doors. I loved those doors. In the master bathroom at my house, the toilet is set back from the rest of the room, like in its own little nook. I’ve been trying to convince Charity for years that we should get saloon doors and put them there. But she doesn’t listen to me.
You know what kinda sucks is that if you count up the amount of times during my life that either Pop traveled to see me or I traveled east and saw him, it’s not even 10 times. It’s not like we were strangers, because when we did see each other it would usually be for weeks at a time. And I’d talk to him on my birthday and such things. But still, it’s like I just barely knew him.
I have a pretty good pair of bookend memories to remember him by, though. When I was about 8 or 9, my mom and I went to New Jersey and stayed with my grandparents for a while. I was just getting into wrestling real big then, and we went to the video rental place and they had a huuuuge selection of wrestling tapes. Way more than any place had back home.
They had all these “Best of the WWF” tapes that I’d never seen before, and we rented a bunch so I’d have something to do when we weren’t out doing things. So I was in the TV room, laying on the floor, two feet from the TV, watching a tape. I can even remember the specific match – it was the Junkyard Dog against The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase.
Nan and someone, probably my mom, were sitting on the couch behind me chatting while I watched the tape. Then Pop came in and was like “Hey, what’s this?” and started watching the tape with me. He watched the match for about two minutes and then said, I think in reference to JYD, “So why doesn’t he just knee that other guy in the gonads?”
I knew balls and nuts and nards and all that, but the more medical sounding “gonads” was not a term I was familiar with at that particular point in my life. But I figured out what it meant pretty quickly because my Nana let out this horrified shriek of “OH, ERNIE! JESUS!” and leapt off the couch, shooing him out of the room like he’d just said something utterly terrible. His name was Ernie, by the way.
Now jump ahead about twenty years to when Charity and I went to see them at their beach house a few years ago. Charity has been my best friend my whole life, so Nan and Pop knew of her, but they didn’t actually know her at all. Their interactions with her over the years had been very brief, and it was mostly with Nana anyway. I think she’d only met Pop at our wedding.
So those few days that we stayed at the beach house were the first chance they had to get to know her. I think it was our second night there and we were all out on the back patio. Pop and I were sitting in lounge chairs, looking at the ocean, drinks in our hands, the lords of all creation. Nan was preparing food behind us. Charity… I’m not really sure what she was doing.
But she had to go inside for some reason. And whatever the reason was, she must have been well out of earshot, because I took the opportunity to ask my grandparents what they thought of this fine lass I’d married.
Nan was like “Oh, she’s so lovely. Just lovely!” Which sounds nice and all, but a day or two later, I’m pretty sure I heard her say the exact same thing about a cat. Then Pop chimed in. “She’s a very sweet girl. Just a great girl. Good head on her shoulders.”
Then he paused. Took a sip of his drink.
“Got a heck of a caboose on her, too.”
“OH, ERNIE! JESUS!”
That was my grandpa. I shall miss him.
As always, I had some other stuff I was going to talk about, but I think I’m all typed out for the time being. Sorry to spend it talking about a bunch of downer stuff. If you want, I’ll send you a few dollars and you can buy an ice cream cone to make yourself feel better. That always works with the girls.
BYE
