I like my life. It’s busy, and it’s full, but, like most people’s, it’s pretty routine. We were headed to hibachi after practice to celebrate my birthday a night early since Thing1 had plans for tonight, but even that seemed pretty routine.
I love celebrating the kids birthdays, but I’m not really big on celebrating my own. I’m not afraid of getting older, but they seem to highlight how unsurprising life has become.
Last night’s birthday celebration turned out to be full of surprises.
We were all surprised when friends walked in after we’d ordered, and we said happy hello. The Big Guy surprised me with a gift certificate for a serious car wash–inside and out (guaranteed to remove that faint smell of spilled milkshake). On the way home the Burlington county sheriff surprised my son with a quick stop to let him and us know that the front license plate was loose, but the best surprise was yet to come.
We got home well after dark, and we knew we needed to get in and let the dog out. The car lights switched off as we exited the car, and realized I’d forgotten to turn on the porch light before I left. It was then that we saw the light on the gravel driveway and path. Surrounded by mountains, we get very little light pollution, so we instantly looked up expecting to see the moon.
Instead, we saw a field of stars, scattered like dust across a velvet sky. We stood in silence. The only sound was the wind moving through the trees, and just before the dog could be heard whining from the house to let us know she really had to go, I was quite sure I heard it whisper, “Surprise!”
Category: Sketches
Growth Spurt
In retrospect, regaling the boys with tales of Summer camp on Lake Champlain highlighted by trips to the original Ben & Jerry’s to tackle the Vermonster with my bunk mates could only have been seen as a challenge by your all-american ten year old.
After all, I only told them about the free T-shirts we got for consuming a scoop of every single flavor Ben & Jerry’s made in 1985 and not about the all night bathroom visits that followed. In the end, I could only blame myself when Thing2 spotted the Ben & Jerry’s store on Church street in Burlington and began mentally planning a scaled down version of the Vermonster for one – after a healthy lunch of course.
But it was vacation — however small, and I let him get two scoops of Fully Baked in a chocolate dipped cone if only to prove to him that, despite the start of a new growth spurt, his stomach hasn’t outgrown his eyes or his imagination.
Love the One You’re With
They say the best camera is the one you have with you. It’s one of the reasons I abandoned my SLR camera in favour of one-handed point-and-shoots while Thing2 still wanted to hold my hand everywhere we went.
I’ve found the same holds true for art supplies. I have a drawer full of watercolour supplies, but lately, it’s the $6 purse-sized watercolour tin and purse-sized journal that have been winning the title of ‘best art supplies’.
More from Less
The Big Guy and I rarely go to movies. It’s too expensive once you add snacks, and since most of the movies geared towards adolescent boys rely on volume to sell their stories, we’re just as happy to let the kids watch them on Netflix with the headphones plugged in.
We are religious about our local theater, Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, however. The title on the playbill is irrelevant. When Hubbard Hall announces a new play, we make plans to see it with and then without the boys.
We were both reminded of the reason why on Saturday night when we went to see Tennessee William’s Glass Menagerie. The most autobiographical of his plays, it depicts the dysfunctional mother and her two dysfunctional older children trying to carve out a living and a life for themselves.
Hubbard Hall is famous for stripping down a play to its bare bones. Occasionally they incorporate elaborate sets into the stage design, but more frequently, minimal props and sets are used. Hubbard Hall has been fortunate to have had a string of wonderful directors and actors, and the less elaborate sets let the audience focus on performances where simplicity works to suspend reality for two hours. It leaves the viewer gripping their seat the entire time as they react to the play and pray for the spell to continue as long as possible.
Saturday did not disappoint. When the daughter Laura’s unicorn and then her heart are broken, I could see other audience members on the verge of tears. When the son leaves and reflects on his abandonment of his family, people next to me were audibly crying.
The play ended almost on a whisper, and, even though it was almost the cost of a movie for four (minus the snacks), the Big Guy and I walked back to the car in awe — as we always are — of how much bang we got for our bucks.
The Extinction of Unicorns
LAURA: Haven’t you noticed the single horn on his forehead?
JIM: A unicorn, huh? —aren’t they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.
– The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
Minions Holding the Floor
So Herman the Hermit was discovering his own beauty in the reflective surface of the aquarium, Oscar the Guppy was hiding among the purple plant leaves (apparently nursing some slight from the minions), and yours truly had only enough time for one 3-minute timed drawing.
Normally I don’t ask the minions to pose because they don’t like to hover long enough for a photo. Today, however, they had congregated under the bonsai to hold a secret (and stationary) meeting of the Guppy Poet Society.
Oscar had started the club and invited everyone else (Herman being a Hermit said he’d be happy to make guest contributions) so he felt it was perfectly fair to name it after Guppies. The Minions felt naming the club after guppies devalued their own contributions, and they came up with the idea for uniforms after all.
The water was soupy with drama, and, contrary to popular opinion, drama does not produce poetry.
Oscar and the Minions were still at odds when the 3 minute buzzer went off. The only thing they managed to agree on was to have flakes for breakfast.
Date Night
Last Friday night Thing1 had a hot date, and the Big Guy had a gig playing guitar with his Québécois band at the local country store, so Thing2 and I decided to have Mommy-Thing2 evening.
We got to our favorite pub in Manchester, VT and, after ordering our drinks and appetizers, I pulled out my sketchbook and started sketch the candleholder.
Right on cue — as he does at every art museum or any time I’m sketching on the road — T2 asked if I had an extra journal. For once, i had thought to pack an extra, and the two of us sketched together in silence until our food arrived.
We came up with with wildly different pictures and spent the rest of the meal talking about art, architecture on Mars and art supplies.
It made for a different but quietly wonderful kind of date night.
Ode to a Guppy
I think that I shall never see a tree,
Sweet blue Guppy,
as lovely thee.
Not even that bonsai
that looks just like mine
Is as perfect in my eye.
– written by Oscar the Guppy upon spying the identically colored guppy in the next tank
Nine Minute Bonsai
A funny thing happened on the way to the buzzer. Herman the Hermit was determined to hide behind the bonsai so I decided to draw the tree instead. It was supposed to be a 3 minute doodle, but I kept hitting the snooze button until almost 10 minutes had gone by and Herman was still hiding. Then I remembered there were lots of other fish in the tank and restarted the timer from the beginning.
Oranges and Oranges
Sixteen year old Thing1 got into fitness in a big way last summer. He started working out like crazy. He spent the summer cutting hay (with a scythe) at his girlfriend’s house and jumping in ponds and rivers.
Just about the same time, he began having digestive issues that caused him to lose over 20 pounds in a few weeks — no mean feat for a kid who can seriously endanger the profit margin of any restaurant daring enough to put out an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Thanks to my job, we have excellent insurance, but it still took multiple visits to the ER and the regular doctor, along with a healthy dose of nepotism to finally find us the right specialist to hand us a diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis.
At the time, all I could do was feel eternally grateful for our health plan and angry at a system that would have left Thing1 at sixteen without a colon if we hadn’t known somebody who knows somebody who could make something happen. I was angry for a while at the seeming apathy of the people in the system and not just on behalf of Thing1, but on behalf of the millions of Americans who have bad insurance or none at all. It left me wondering how many kids miss their potential because of lack of access to adequate care.
I still think about that every time we go for a checkup, wondering what we can do — aside from regularly calling our elected representatives — to change things.
Thing1 has clearly been thinking about it too, taking the ‘change the things I can’ approach to a life that now suddenly includes up to 12 pills a day.
At first when I saw his reaction, I thought I was worrying about oranges and he was thinking about apples. While I made my daily calls to my reps, he began researching his autoimmune disorder and adjusting his diet long with his workout. He googled and read. He experimented with different portions of protein and fiber, fruit and starches as he learned what his system would tolerate (incidentally coming up with a unified digestive theory that involves eating whole crates of clementines while simultaneously helping your parents run up a grocery bill to rival the national debt).
At the same time, we’ve started the time-honoured college search. T1 is a math fanatic, so we started looking at math/science schools, but he surprised us by announcing he wanted to study nutrition to help other kids who might be dealing with similar digestive issues. We’ve since signed him up for a course at the community college, and he’s even considering a blog with fitness and nutrition tips.
I finally realized T1 and I really were both thinking about oranges and oranges. We were just thinking up different ways to get to the good stuff under the skin.