Thursday, June 25, 2015

Dept: Sentimental. Where have they all gone?

Another post I have been thinking about for a long time because it confronts me every day.  

Let me say first off that I am not a pack rat.  I have seen pictures of the stacks rats pack and I can`t believe it. It makes me itchy on the skin because in fact I can`t stand messes.  I would love to have as bare a house as possible (besides for my music collection of course)  That would make me feel better.  

Pack rats are ....  eyow.  All that junk lying around.  

No, my problem is that I am a sentimentalist.  Everything means something to me. Some memory, some feeling is triggered by looking at anything of memento.  A vinyl record, a ticket stub, a child's game, a sock, all stir memories and events in my life.  My problem is my long term memory is lucid and very open to me.  I flow in and out of periods of my life pretty easily in my thinking.  These little pieces of tangible memory are like portals to a past which is readily relivable and retrievable in my daily life in the present.  

(On the other hand, I have a terrible short term memory.  My wife often gives me a verbal beating because I don't remember what she said to me yesterday about where we are going today or what food I should have bought today.   This is a problem too.  A big problem)

My first topic in the sentimental department is rather unoriginal and banal, well aren`t they all?  But everyone has a joke about this.  SOCKS.  The missing socks department.

Where have they all gone?  

The washing machine ate them.  The goblins of the night take certain socks away just to mess with you.  I have heard there is a special place in heaven where socks are and when you die all your missing socks are found and paired back up.  Actually, I just made that up.  In fact that only gets me depressed, that these socks will be alone and unpaired perhaps the remainder of my life and only paired back up in the after life.  See, I told you I was sentimental.   

When we moved from one apartment to another nearly two years ago from this writing, I put all the single socks in a bag and brought them to the new apartment.  The thing is, I am not sure if I have ever unpacked that bag and maybe I have the matches waiting in a pile for me to find that bag now and put them together.  My short term memory lost track after we moved if I really did this. Or not. 

Currently unmatched
The point is, I keep a little box of the single socks in the girls room. After each laundry we go through the box and see if the laundry produced any pairs that weren't pairs


before.  It is a kind of ritual.  In fact each laundry does produce some pairs, but of course the opposite occurs at the same rate.  So there is a continual in and out of single socks in the box waiting for their significant others.  
New batch of singles after laundry.  Peppa pig a loser this time

Some have had to wait a long time.  One year we left some at Grandmas cottage from summer vacation time.  We retrieved them a year later and matched them up when we got back to the home apartment.  Thankfully my Mother had kept them for us.  

There was an incredible find recently when I found a tiny baby Mickey Mouse sock which had been missing for two years.  Of course by the time I found it nobody fit those socks anymore.  But that was not the point. It was the principle of matching the missing socks which mattered.  Strangely though, we lost the same sock a couple weeks later and currently Mickey Mouse is a loner again.  

speak of the devil.  Found this match after writing this post
Yes, in fact, there are some socks which have been lost since baby hood.  I have them sitting in the box by themselves but I cant give up on them.  I wont throw them away because maybe they will be found, behind the washing machine, in the bag of single socks I brought from the other apartment or the bad goblins will have pity and return some of them.   

But I have to face the fact that many  will only be matched .... when and if I get to heaven.  Or they may have to wait even until after my daughters time.  Which means that when I am a Grand Father I ll wander into my daughters` room where my daughters wont be anymore, but the box of unmatched socks will still be there.  I ll look at the baby socks, the toddlers socks, the Hello Kitty sock, pink socks, white frilly socks, and the whole collection of socks which lost their mate each year and I will remember, the life and times of being a Father to my little girls who are grown big now and gone from the apartment. 

 

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

On the same wave length

I first had the idea for this post last Fall when I was walking my older daughter to school with the leaves on the ground all over.  We heard a truck around the corner from where we were and my daughter said, "Daddy, lets not go that way, I am afraid of the truck which is around the corner."   I said, "I know." and she asked me how I knew?

I knew because I was afraid of the same truck when I was small.  
"You are afraid because you think it is a monster," I said
"Yes," she said and looked up at me like I was psychic.  

We walked over to the other side of the street and turned the corner.  There was a street sweeper.  

When I was small I hated them, because they were like a monster.  They would come and grab you and sweep you up into its hold with the rest of the leaves and small garbage in the gutter of the street via its menacing rotating brush.  But when I was small they  

were much more scary with a big white unconventional square body which had a huge compartment for the refuse.  But you didn't stay in the compartment with the rubbish, you got swept up into another dimension, the garbage dimension.  Then you were gone.   

The one we averted was much smaller with a compact orange body.  But it made the same sound and had the same round circular, rotating brush.  Hence, still a monster.
  



But the point I wanted to make was it got me to thinking how many other similarities I had with my daughter and how many would become apparent through life.  I already knew about the ketchup/condiments connection.   As I wrote in a much earlier post, she loves ketchup.  She can put it on a lot of stuff from hot dogs to eggs to fish and chicken.  I don't use it so liberally these days ("es ist verboten" said my wife), but I know why and when my daughter will use it.  Of late she has discovered barbecue sauce.   Yeap, that one is on the agenda too.  Still to come:  mustard, mayonnaise and much later, probably after she is a teenager, vinegar and or balsamic vinegar which I only discovered ten years ago, but can`t eat a salad without it now.  And last but not least, really spicy sauces like Tabasco sauce.  I put that on my egg in place of the ketchup.  Yum.  

In my mind I started to extrapolate on the logic of the potential similarities.  Maybe I could really help her out in life.  "No, no, my little girl, you don't want to try that out,  trust me, there is no point" And, "You know, you should really take physics because if you don't you are really going to be sorry about it for the rest of your life.  Yes the rest of your life.  In fact I am going to demand that you take that physics course. You will thank me."  And the clincher "No, you don't want to start a relationship with that boy.  Don't even start it, no don't even go to the movies with him.  No, I'm telling you, it will end in tears.  How do I know?  Well, because I went out with the girl equivalent of him umpteen years ago and ... it ended in tears.   You remember that street cleaner you were afraid of when you were six years old because you thought it was a monster?  Well, its the same thing.  He will suck you up and spit you into the garbage dimension."    

Well,... I guess we have to learn some things ourselves.  And she will have to learn, often the hard way too.  Hopefully she will learn from her mistakes.  Often we don't.  I know that too.  Uh, don't ask how I know that.  

I guess I cant "cheat and kibitz" for her all the way through her life like telling her what to discard at a poker game.  But it must be fair game, it has to be part of parenting (I think it is in chapter 5 of "Parenting for Dummies") that we impart our general knowledge and experience to our offspring.  I mean we can`t have learned it all for naught.  I think it is sensible that we tell them in advance that if you mix drinking wine and beer you are going to end up anywhere and you wont know where except that it will be face down, and other such gems of wisdom.  

And I hope I am around to push her through and out of quickly a rather brutal period of mid life crisis which will entail static nothingness and very bad laziness and lethargy possibly extending upwards of five years.  If she experienced that phase I would certainly give her a good kick up the arse every day to keep her moving and progressing and DOING, otherwise, ... well its a long, sad story which I will spare you and I pray I can spare her too.  

Suffice to say, she WILL be taking the physics class in High School.  I have always regre,... I mean she will regret it if she doesn't.  I KNOW!  

A last message for Fathers:  Pay attention to the details of your children.  Revel in the similarities and smile when you see yourself in your children as if you were looking into a time machine mirror.  Play along.  Understand.  Remember what it was like.  It was only yesterday.  


A couple end notes:

http://www.discogs.com/Godflesh-Streetcleaner/release/73735
I will only add the link to the album by Godflesh called "Street Cleaner" as the cover might offend some people religiously and it is not my intention to offend in my posts, or at least warn first.  It is a very disturbing album also, but mostly from the instrumentation.  I dont even listen to the vocals or know what he is saying.  Anyway, when it came out (1989), it had a big effect on me.  

And here is the complete short video which goes with the picture of the street sweeper above.  It seems to be a home video.  It captures well the sheer monstrosity of the old Street Sweeper.  

http://www.ovguide.com/flemington-borough-police-department-9202a8c04000641f80000000074c9c1c