#280

The kids and I buy used books at Goodwill. Paperbacks are ninety cents. It's so affordable, it feels like stealing. It's unpredictable, exhilarating, maybe like digging for treasure, panning gold, diving shipwrecks, raiding tombs, sifting through the attics of centenarians. None of which I've done except steal. But only small things, like Halloween candy from M 'n' m, and a friend's Cal Ripken rookie card (that was thirty years ago but I remember it vividly; my conscience kicked in and I was sleepless and panic-stricken until I made it right). Sometimes, the Goodwill gives up gems. Other times we leave disenchanted. I use the term 'we' loosely. It's usually just me mumbling, huffing, reading spines with my head tilted gaping at the bookshelves. Meg wanders off looking for crafty stuff. Michael stands around half-interested. If I recommend something, he'll take a look, but he's not wild-eyed and rabid like his dad. (He's very calm in the batters box also, so I let him be him without fussing about it.) Thumbing through books at Barnes & Noble is fun too, but everything's twenty bucks. Even so, we also buy plenty of crisp, shiny, new-smelling, new books at retailers at full price. Karma is important here; we don't want any giants from the great beyond – Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, London, L'Amour, Leonard, Trevanian, Robert B. Parker – pissed at us. So we give real money to books (and presumably authors) on top of our Goodwill habit. And we donate books back, although I underline, highlight, scribble in, dog-ear, and batter most of mine. It kind of renders them permanently under my ownership. Is this purposeful? Only if the books are good. I hope M 'n' m love stories and books as much as they love Minecraft, Xbox, and iPads.

I have a library at home, and I'm willing to share, but if the kids borrow one of my annotated favorites, they better agonize over its care. They better pamper and polish and return it better than before. Naturally, I'm thinking of cars now, and how Michael will drive soon. That's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine. Kidding; I'm more worried about my books.

At Goodwill last time, I saw the title "The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids." I didn't buy it. I didn't even look at it.

If you read only one book in your lifetime, it should be "City of Thieves" by David Benioff. If two, "A Soldier of the Great War" by Mark Helprin.

I don't know if TV news has always been a caricature of itself, but it is today. Interviews can be interesting, and short pieces informative, but outrageousness and negativity dominate so much I wonder how they'll take it further. They will take it further. It's the same in print news. They'll out-do themselves in unimaginable ways I'm sure; maybe our screens themselves will bleed and weep and gasp at every controversy. That sounds callous, but I'd like M 'n' m to see non-dramatized positive news, also. Maybe, by definition, that's not news. Of course, 'reality TV' isn't news either. And sports are sports. I understand the psychology and strategy (for profit) behind over-covering pain and fear. But the unrestraint makes it feel like everything is a bit from 'Saturday Night Live,' 'Ron Burgandy,' or 'The Onion.' It's a Frankenstein now, on steroids, drugs, and edited for maximum shock. I try to minimize my exposure; I skim headlines and avoid TV news altogether. I don't want this to be M 'n' m's serious impression of what 'news' should be; the concept and service has a place in our lives, just not in its current form of sensationalized ridiculousness. I know it's always been lusty for hysteria and destruction and the shattering of heroes, but it seems to be ratcheting up its invasiveness and ubiquity, trying to secure a kind of distorted omniscience. Technology plays a part, obviously. Is there a 'normal' anymore, a safe haven, an outlet for 'just the news?' Of course there is, and there's backlash and always counter-movements for silence, nature, privacy, decorum. This is how it's always been. I'm just getting old and crotchety. But Trump won five more states tonight.

#279

I like to grow things. Children, yes, they're fun to grow. Marijuana, no. Houseplants, yes. Also ficus and citrus trees, coffee plants, and succulents grow nicely indoors. But this year I go big-time, I go outdoors; the new house has a vegetable garden and I'm gonna fill it. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, beets, basil. We also have lilies. The bounty of Mother Nature will come bursting forth! In breathtaking fullness and beauty, as far as the eye can see, which is to the fence, and the ugly escarpment for buried utilities, and the untrimmed bushes and scrubby overgrowth, but everywhere else, I promise you, everywhere else the robins will sing and cardinals flutter, in sunbeams and soft breezes, above sprouts sprouting, squirrels playing, and the tender greenery, stalks, and vines of my plush and perfect plantings. Heaven on Earth they'll call it. The garden of Eden. Before Adam messed it up. Or was it Eve? And that was before they had kids? I'm doing better than Adam, at least.

A word on bunnies and edible vegetation: I hear Bunnies are tireless, gluttonous trespassers and devastators of gardens. Fuzzy and insatiable. Total disregard for property lines and ownership. They don't care that I pay taxes. The so-called deterrents are ineffective. Marigolds and human hair? They laugh like the raccoons in 'The Great Outdoors.' Megan loves bunnies, so I can't shoot them. People used to eat bunnies; Papa Mike says they taste like chicken. I won't yak about when I was a kid, but when I was a kid, Grandpa Swede shot a rabbit in their garden, and I thought he killed the Easter Bunny. A serious charge. I was very upset. Will I have to battle rabbits? Bugs Bunny comes to mind. Also Carl and the gopher in Caddyshack. I don't want any trouble with varmints. Varmints? Varmint: noun, a troublesome wild animal. Okay.

This is supposed to be a portraiture of M 'n' m. Not so much a vault for random thoughts and my bullshit. But I'm a parent, human, and Cyclone fan in frequent existential crisis. Especially during football season. And when I talk to adults who were once kids (it's remarkable, every one of them was once a kid), they wish the photos and mementos from their childhood were less focused on them and more focused on their parents. Interesting.

#278

I told Megan, "The best thing about you, Megan, is that you're Megan." She looked mildly offended – a practiced expression – because she didn't understand. I barely understand. We just live it, and feel it, the force of it all, being parent and child. And Megan prefers a more lustrous specificity when I say something good about her. I prefer that too. Parents love their kids powerfully. What can be added? Some say the emotions and instincts are only evolutionary for species propagation, protection, and development. I think that's unimaginative. It discounts many things. Being a dad is incredible, wonderful, perplexing, and ponderous. It's simple and not simple. Daughters don't have to 'earn' their daughter-hood. Meg doesn't. What about dads and dad-hood? Could I be a better father? Oh God yes, I let Meg walk all over me; it's preposterous at times and entirely not healthy. But we move forward and do better. I hope. We learn and improve ourselves. I hope. We have fun and laugh at stupid shit to preserve the fragile sanity we possess in the moments we aren't over-busy or fussing or freaking out. We get along very well, actually. I know relationships can be strained, soured, even ruined. My wish is that Megan and I always treat each other with love and respect. Simple and not simple. Meg didn't appreciate the unspecific, un-awesome 'best thing' I said about her, which was basically: "You're Meg, I love you, you can't really top that or take away from it." I wasn't being disingenuous, of course; or silly, shallow, distracted, or dumb, surprisingly, if you ask me. (No one asked me.) Meg will be a parent, aunt, teacher, coach, counselor, caretaker, friend-of-babies – something – someday that will likely make this resonate a little more.

It would be interesting to leapfrog to spiritual parallels, and consider the simple and un-simple in that realm, but nothing there intellectualizes at all as simple to me. I suspect my puny human brain is lacking some power, perspective, or dimension to grasp any of it. I do intuit, however – poorly and incorrectly I'm sure – that a similar dynamic exists between Creator and created (similar to parent and child), that nothing has to be 'earned' in any kind of typical human contract or construct. 'Profess this, do that,' and so on. I'm rooting for goodness, but also more profundity. I have a headache now.

#277

When I was a kid, we had a magic, moving-picture box called a television. It wasn't thin. It was fat. It was big with big parts that warmed and hummed and blasted me with hungry, arcing static whenever I touched it. To turn it on, I had to touch it. To change the channel, also. To turn down deafening white noise or turn up campy dialogue and singing. And the dust. There was a static-held, ever-present layer of dust on the TV. Thick dust. It snapped, crackled, and shocked the shit out of me every time I ran a finger through it. It was impossible not to run a finger through it. I did it often and now have many tics. I don't believe television hurt my vision, though. I knew it was better to stab myself in the eye than sit too close to a TV. Every adult said so and I believed them. A few years later I heard something similar about eyesight and masturbation. I was 20/20 until I was a teenager. Anyway, moving on. The television picture was grainy and fickle, and tended to scramble if the weather was bad (a perfect time for TV), or something good was on, or the antennas were unskillfully pointed, bent, or broken. Every adult was an antenna expert with wire hangers and Reynolds Wrap. As furniture, TVs were a focal point, a centerpiece, and this demanded design. Makers like Zenith tried wood finishes, ornamental edges, and so on. None of it worked. Neither did the buttons and dials. Or rather, some were useful, some were functional, but few were both. Many times, I saw televisions without color. No kidding. Think of black-and-white photography, but blurry, and always Western-themed. Movies were at theaters, not on TV. Except for "The Wizard of Oz." There were three networks that went by similar, three-letter names. Now they remind me of the Jackson 5, peacocks, and stupid amounts of CSI. Today, of course, other channels and services for the same thing (television content) exist by the thousands. ESPN and MTV launched when I was a kid. To my generation, this has the gravity of, "I was a kid when Kennedy was shot." And then it faded. Not the television picture, that was always crappy. I mean the golden age; it ended. Remote controls, for example, appeared and with them a deluge of unfunny jokes in every Father's Day and birthday card for dads. But there was a time when TV was a kind of awkward adolescent, and we loved it.