more normal than not

Our four year old told my wife the other day, “I want a little brother.”

Getting a little sister into the world was an unexpected and physically hard 9 months.

I don’t think that Nate is going to have a little brother anytime soon…or ever.

Unless we adopt.

Hmmmmmmm.

Nahhhhh….I say, “Enough kids around here.”

Enough of that.

When Jenny heard him say that, she decided to kid around with him.

She told him that when his Aunt’s baby was born (they might be expecting a boy), that we could take Sparrow up with us and swap the babies out.

Problem fixed….Nate would have an instant baby brother.

He was quiet for a millisecond and then he burst into frantic tears….

“I DON’T WANT TO GIVE SPARROW AWAY!!!!!!! I LOVE MY SISTER!!!!! I LOVE HER ALREADY!!!!  WE CAN’T GIVE HER AWAY!!!!”

Jenny got him calmed back down fairly quickly, but I think it really bothered him that we could be so cavalier about swapping the babies out.

I think that there must be a fine line between “reality” and “ridiculous” for a child.

He really thought that trading babies might be some weird “adult possibility”.

Thinking about it now, that was like some kind of sick Solomon escapade…like the one where he suggested that the women cut the baby in half so that both could be the “mother” when that was in dispute.

We don’t test our children’s love with sick mind games.

But it’s interesting and gratifying to see how distraught Nate got when he thought we might be willing at the drop of a hat to make a weird trade like that.

“I LOVE MY SISTER!!!!….I LOVE HER ALREADY!!!!”

That’s some pretty heavy and cool information for an early morning revelation.

Nate and his little sister went to Costco yesterday with us.

His big brother went, too.

Sparrow was crying, so Jenny sat out in the car with Nate and Sparrow while my son Isaac and I went in to do a little shopping.

When we came out, the car wouldn’t start.

When you have a four-year-old tell you, “I want to go” while you’re frantically going through the list of possible problems and fixes, it doesn’t help the situation.

“I want to go home, too…” I thought.

I called AAA finally and had a tow truck coming in two hours…and then Jenny said, “Maybe it’s the battery? That’s what it did the last time the battery went bad…”.

I was pretty sure that it couldn’t be the battery.  Why would it work and then not work so quickly? The horn still blew pretty strong…why would it be the battery?

But I listened to her….went back into Costco….stood in line…bought a battery, forgot my PIN for the debit card, started to run back outside to get Jenny’s PIN number, remembered it, went back and finished the transaction, took the new battery out to the car, installed it….and the car started right up.

It was the battery.

So I called AAA and canceled the tow.

Nate loves his sister…and the car won’t run with a bad battery.

I learn something new again every day.

It is cold and windy here.

I can hear the wind chimes on the porch working overtime.

It’s funny how a gentle breeze can produce a beautiful sound…but a gale makes a racket that can be kind of obnoxious.

They should call them breeze chimes…but on the other hand, nobody advertises them as “gale chimes.”

I’ve never seen that.

I haven’t heard the last of our chickens lately.

I don’t mean, “I haven’t heard the last of our chickens lately”….like “YOU HAVEN’T HEARD THE LAST OF ME!!!  I’LL BE BACK!!!”

I mean that he was the last of his breed….the last rooster at our house that was still alive.

Unless he’s lying low somewhere and riding out this storm, I think that the rooster is gone.

I think that a fat coon got him in his hypothermic rooster trance state.

Of course, that’s just conjecture on my part.

I don’t really know for sure…he may be out pecking corn when I get home from work tonight.

You never can tell.

This cold is pretty….cold.

They say on the news that it’s a polar vortex coming down for us.

If I can attach a little bit of science to it, I can let myself know that something a little more extreme than just a cold and windy day is coming down the pike.

“Polar Vortex” sounds a lot scarier than “a cold and windy day” or even a “blustery day”.

“A blustery day”….that sounds like Pooh and Christopher Robin would be showing up soon.

If Pooh was around, you wouldn’t be reading anything about the death of a lone rooster.

I don’t remember any of Pooh’s friends freezing to death in the old stories.

That’s not very kid friendly…whether you call it “blustery day” or “POLAR VORTEX”, it’s not kid friendly to kill off Eeyore with extreme weather.

No matter how many times he moans, “Is it cold in here?….or is it just me?”

But I think this rooster…this last survivor of the group…I think that he’s gone.

He’s gone…or he’s too cold to crow.

I wonder which one it is?

I’ve got a lot more on my plate than sitting at desk and listening for a rooster to crow, though.

I must have something more vital going on than just doing that.

Good grief, I’m a fully grown man (spelled M-A-N)….I’ve got more going on than just being concerned about a frozen rooster.

I did our taxes last night.

I do them online now.  It’s so much easier than sitting with a pile of papers and a calculator and a sharp pencil.

It’s a piece of cake.

Of course, complicated taxes might mean that our financial situation was bountiful and multi-faceted.

That might not be such a bad thing…to have to say, “Oh, nooooooo…I let our man do the taxes. They’re much too complex…what with the house in Montreux and the Virgin Island shelters. I wouldn’t even know where to start to shelter all the cash we’ve squirreled away.  Do my own taxes?  I wish I could…but they’re much too convoluted now.”

“That’s a little bit above my paygrade, you know?!!! Ha, ha, ha, ha!!!”

I wouldn’t know what that felt like.  It takes me about an hour to do both the returns.

Ah, the simple life.

And I still wonder where that rooster might be

.

“Keep your hands off my football.”

Football is kind of sacred. You don’t mess with football. You don’t say funny things about football.

Football is serious.

I was thinking the other day about how many things are a knife-edge from being something that would kind of bother us if we thought about it in the wrong light.

Like football.

If these big guys were fully lubed well moisturized* and dressed in tutus (that little dress that ballerinas use…how do you spell it? TWOTWOzzzzzzzz?), I think that it would be hard for the generally well-intentioned and mature audience to watch them go at each other.

We’d have a hard time watching that.

What if someone who didn’t know what they were talking about was describing what goes on down on the field to someone who knew even less than they did about the game?

They might say:

“OK…here’s the deal.  You have two groups of men dressed in different colored outfits. From what I understand, both groups of men want the ball.  One of the groups gets it at a time…then the other group has to try to take it away or wait for the men in the striped suits to give it to them.”

“When one group of men has the ball, they might throw it into the air…or they might try to run on the grass with it…or they might even kick it. You never know what is going to happen.”

“One thing that is sure to happen is that if you have the ball, someone from the other group will try and grab you and hold you and throw you on the ground so that they can jump on top of you. Often a bunch of the men in the group without any ball will jump on you also.”

“They will stay on top of you until the striped suit men blow a whistle to tell them to get off of you.”

“Sometimes it takes a while for the whistle to blow. When this happens, the men who held you on the ground will pat your bottom when you get to stand up. They want the ball….but they are still your friends, so they pat your bottom.”

“If something happens that is exciting, the crowd of people watching you hold each other on the ground will yell loudly.”

“People get excited to see other people grab each other or catch the ball before they get grabbed.”

“When the two groups of men stop grabbing each other, and the game is over, sometimes the people in the watching area will run on the grass and pull down the metal posts that poke up out of the dirt.”

“And that’s what we know as ‘football’ ”

And that’s why we only let people who know what they’re talking about discuss topics that matter.

Like football.

Do you see what I mean about it being creepy if the men in groups wore tutus and lubed moisturized* themselves before every game, though?

That would be FREAKING CREEPY.

It would completely change the nature of the game.

It wouldn’t be something to even think about.

It wouldn’t be right.

It wouldn’t even be AMERICAN.

*this is a postscript. “fully lubed” was too strong a choice of language….and prompted some confused and negative comments. It is a potent and scary image, though.  Unless you are talking about automobile maintenance, using the word “lubed” and “man” in the same sentence seems to provoke some strong feelings. I apologize for any psychic trauma my gaffe may have caused.  “Moisturize” is much less incendiary.

“Open up, this is a raid….”

In between my first and second years of college, I had a job driving a beer cart on a country club golf course in Marietta, GA.

Marietta is a suburb of Atlanta. It gets hot in the summer.

My job was to drive a cart loaded with beer and soft drinks, sandwiches…snacks…around on the course and sell the stuff to the people playing golf.

I have a feeling that it was one of the best jobs that I’ll ever have.

It was certainly easy.

I remember this one period…deep into the Georgia summer….when we were having a massive heatwave.

I think it might have been over 105° for a couple of days straight.

There weren’t any golfers out on the course. It was too hot for anyone in their right mind to be out in that heat.

It was my job to be out there in that heat.

So I loaded up, went out in the morning, and parked under a shade tree to wait for nobody.

And nobody came.

For three days, I think I only might have seen a couple of old rich men, too obsessed with the game of golf to notice that the heat was trying its best to kill them, too.

During that down time, I read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

I love that book…I should read it again soon.

Anyway, one of the main thoughts in the book is the idea of timshel ( I linked to the passage in the book that talks about the concept)…”thou mayest”.

I wrote about this already a while back…a post called, with great imagination, “timshel”…so I guess I’ve covered all this “Steinbeck/beer cart/Atlanta heat” ground already…and this post isn’t really only about timshel…so I better get to the point.

I heard an interview with Mavis Staples yesterday…and she was talking about this album that she made with Jeff Tweedy, the frontman for a band called Wilco.

She talked about what a fun, family oriented experience it was…band member’s kids in the studio, lots of love and laughter.

Jeff Tweedy wrote this song for the album…I guess he kind of wrote this song for Mavis.

“Open up, this is a raid…”

We are frequently given the opportunity to be confronted with the “message”.

Sometimes it’s beautiful and subtle…a sunrise or a kind word at the right time, a caring effort when that effort makes all the difference in our lives.

Sometimes it’s boneheaded and awful…a stumbling anvil to the side of the head, a screaming face spewing out reminders of just why some make the decision to never take the “message” to heart. There’s a saying, “don’t kill the messenger…” but sometimes you just want to knock them out to put yourself out of your misery.

The “medium” makes a difference. The message is always beautiful.

Through it all, it’s our choice to accept or reject…or even consider.  It’s our choice.  That’s a beautiful thing.

Like a parent watching a little child…watching the child in their wildness…saying, while they’re waiting for the “prodigal come-around”, “no…just wait a minute…they’ll be alright….just give them a minute.”

“open up, this is a raid”…but when the door is busted down, the choice is still there.

What kind of deal is that?

I have no earthly idea what the word “constancy” really means…so I guess I haven’t figured “the deal” out yet.

We’re down to one rooster now.

Something ate one of the chickens when they were all in the relative safety of the coop, and I guess they all stopped trusting the efficacy of the sanctuary.

The chickens flew the coop.

And then the polar vortex blew into town, and one by one, the chickens and remaining rooster herd fell prey to the environment and a really fat raccoon.

There isn’t much that won’t eat a rooster given the chance.

I might even eat a rooster…given the chance.

This raccoon, I saw him on the porch, reaching up for the remaining rooster, but he sauntered off when I turned on the porch light.

He sauntered off slowly, glancing back over his shoulder as if to say, “We’ll finish this later. You haven’t seen the last of me…”

So now we’re down to one last rooster.

Now we’re down to the tough guy bully of the bunch.

The one who chased the sweet rooster off the porch railing when all the other chickens relocated.

The one who sent sweet rooster to his death by abducting his throne.

So the one who is left…or was left, I haven’t heard him crow this morning…is/was, we’ll see…both smart and scared.

He knows/knew (we’ll see) what’s coming for him.

It’s a slow-moving coon who understands the limits of a rooster’s night vision.

It’s a slow-moving coon who said, in best Terminator Coon fashion, “I’ll be back”.

He’s smart …and he’s scared…but I think that the proportions have blown way out of whack.

He’s more scared than smart at this point.

I left the door to the lower porch open a couple of days ago, and when I came back inside, the rooster was up on the washing machine.

(Our laundry area is on the lower enclosed porch.)

When I went to grab him to put him back outside, he defecated.

That the main problem with that rooster. I don’t mind him being on the porch occasionally, but I don’t like the defecation part of the deal all that much.

I can’t have a bunch of rooster defecation where we do the laundry.

I can’t have any rooster poo where we do the laundry. That just won’t fly with me.

We have a new baby….I don’t want to have to clean up rooster defecation all the time….too.

Anyway, the point of the story, and I got sidetracked with the rooster poo stuff, is that, although he’d come into the laundry room before, he’d never worked at carving out his territory like he did that day.

He’d never asserted himself by flying up on to the washing machine like that.

I believe that his fear made him assertive.

From what I gather, a rooster isn’t really all that smart. I don’t believe that their little rooster head holds a very powerful brain.

I don’t know how to find out how smart a rooster is. I “can’t know” if a rooster thinks about much.

Knowing “how smart a rooster is” is above my pay grade. I don’t think that I can even “google” it and get a definitive answer.

But this rooster seems to have a plan.  He’s going to ride this whole coon thing out in the relative safety of an enclosed laundry room porch…get up high on the washing machine, sleep in safety, terrorize the cat, and avoid that fat raccoon every night until another morning comes and he’s safe in his solitude once again.

Every single one of his “purposes” is gone now, though.

What’s he got to live for, anyway?