Weekends with Dad

Saturday, September 2, 2005

My parents woke me up this morning calling from their cellphone that they never use, from an airport. They are flying today to Denver to visit my sister and her family in their new home, in a new state. This is the "in case we die in a fiery plane crash today, we are calling to tell you we love you" call. Considering they've beaten all death odds with good 'old love, I'd say the likelihood of them crashing today are pretty slim, but I'm touched, considering I'd just talked to them 48 hours ago.

A typical Labor Day weekend at home for me, as a kid, consisted of nothing but helping my father do chores. When I was very young, this entailed knowing what various tools looked like and their one of a dozen locations they might be. There's a hammer, adjustable wrench, flat-head screw driver, Phillips head screw driver, needle nose something, wire, string, and of course cold can of beer. If he needed something...he'd ask me and then time me. "Run Forest Run!" You get the picture.

There was always a ballgame on the radio somewhere and if he took a break to get his own beer, I was in charge of listening to the game and filling him in on what he missed when he returned. One time I told him "DAD, the Tigers retired!" Convinced the Tigers were no longer a team. By the time I was a teen, it was no surprise that I was obsessed and in love with Mark "The Bird" Fidrych. (A lot of you were not even born when this phenomenon pitched for the Detroit Tigers. Google.) My dad took me to the home games that he was scheduled to pitch and bought me anything and everything with his picture on it. I loved him because I thought he was cute and had hair like a Californian surfer, plus, he would get down on his hands and knees and move the dirt of the pitching mound around with such intensity; you couldn't take your eyes off him. While my friends were dreaming about Donny Osmond and the Monkeys, or maybe Shawn and David Cassidy, I was dreaming about kissing Mark behind the dugout and marrying him in a huge baseball themed wedding.

Years later I was flipping through a People magazine and there was a picture of Mark, retired from baseball due to injury, standing up to his knees in mud surrounded by pigs. Mark Fidrych became a pig farmer. This reminds me of a scene in the classic movie "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) when Natalie Wood's character, Deanie, is released from the mental hospital and goes to visit her high school love, Bud, played by Warren Beatty, years later. She should have called first. Bud, the heartthrob in school, is now a farmer, covered in mud (I sort of remember bib overalls with no shirt) and is living in a shack of a home with his barefoot and pregnant wife who is the spitting image of Deanie. That is how I imagined Mark from that point on...Mark as Bud and me as Deanie...never to be.

August 31, 2006

Give Stormy a carrot, or apple, or a palm of beer and he'd give you this.

Our real trouble maker was a horse named Stormy (I still have a portrait of him in my office/dining room). Stormy spooked soooo easily..I was thrown off him once a week...the most notable was while I was riding him on our dirt road which was dug into hills, so if a car came you had to dash up a drop off and sometimes I would just stop him and let the car pass, the entire time yelling at the approaching car to slow down. Well, one car was not slowing down and the drop off was too high to get him up. I don't know if all spooked horses act the same way, but Stormy always, at a strange angle, stiffly trotted TOWARD what was scaring him. So he heads for the car, sideways.....I've got my hands up and screaming for the driver to stop until I could get him under control and Stormy, with me still on his saddle, LIES DOWN on the hood of the car and then gets up and runs home, leaving me looking at the driver through the windshield. He was a loner too, couldn't be paddocked with any other horse. When I came home for Christmas break in my first year of college..Stormy and I had been together over a decade...I went straight to see him and he turned his head away from me, wouldn't let me touch him...he was mad that I had left him. When my parents retired upnorth, Stormy was our last horse and had been with my family 21 years. My dad gave him to our shoer on the condition that the shoer (who looked like Elvis) never mention Stormy to him again. My dad didn't want to hear that Stormy had died etc...he just wanted to remember him as a great horse. I want to add..doesn't falling off a horse and surviving give you that little rush, first fear and then WOW...that was a close one?!

Friday, August 18th, 2006

Taylor takes in pit lane, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, May 2006
I love this photograph because she is wearing a 25 year old Genesis concert shirt that I packed away and never wore.

Shout out to the 50 new student drivers at the high school and the buses stuck in traffic because of them. ;) Is 16 too young to drive? I'm guilty of putting off my teen's driver's education because she still lives like a giggly, wiggly, frolicking puppy. Our conversations lately start out like this:

Teen: "Mom! Guess what! You'll never believe it.... (at which point I interrupt.)

Mom: "Stop (cool and slow like staaap.) Pretend you are behind the wheel of a car, having a calm conversation with your mother who is your passenger."

Teen: "Ok..Mom...something beyond belief happened to your off spring today." (said in the monotone of Steven Wright.)

I don't think she is hyperactive...she's just too damn happy to drive. I've told her a million times that driving is a huge responsibility and that her mother became the queen of stoic accountability the moment she got her license. I'm basically the same person I am now that I was at 16. Serious...aware. I quiz her constantly on her directions. She's doing her homework at the dining room table. "Quick...what direction are you facing?" She slowing lifts her head like a bloodhound sniffing the air. "East" "Noooooo! Are you kidding me?!" (She's facing straight west...the sun is even setting.) Forget trying to make plans with her friends. It takes hours to plan the same amount of hours. What is she going to be like at an intersection?