It's amost that time...

Summer is coming rapidly to a close, and I'm getting nervous about my new job. I have about three weeks (almost four) to get materials together, but I'm still not quite sure what I'll be teaching. I've been assuming 9th and 11th, and perhaps a class of 7th, but nothing's solid yet.

I'm reading several things at once right now, trying to juggle a novel, a collection of stories, a couple of textbooks and some how-to pedagogy books. In training, I suppose.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the last of the summer. Squeezing the last sweet juice of it.

And from Mother's Day

The kids made breakfast and tea.
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In the big bed.
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Summer Pics

I mentioned that we went to the park on Father's Day. Here are some pics:

When we first arrived.
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Five minutes later.
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Olivia hanging out in the Baby Bjorn.
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Grrr.
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Tooth

Sophie lost her third tooth today. New tooth #2 has been working on it for some time, pushing from below. It popped out while we were watching Totoro, as she took a bite into a candy watch. "Daddy," she says calmly, and then "I lost a tooth!"

I had her chomp on a cotton ball for a while. Now she and Emme are sitting on the couch eating pudding and pop tarts. What a nutritious snack!

Wendy's working at the clinic, so we called her and Sophie told her. She's very proud.

4th of July guilt

Last year, we drove to the park and saw the fireworks. We stayed in the car while the stars spangled above us. I believe Emme slept through it. Sophie loved it, though. I wrote down what she said:

"It looks like a powerful rainbow man is coming."

Then, later...
"I want to catch one and put it in the sky over our house."

So, I didn't take her this year, and I feel bad. We'll go at Christmas. I would have taken her, but I had a gig, and I thought it started sooner, but when I got there a band was already playing, and I had to wait to set up, so maybe I could have made it, but I don't think so....

Anyway, so we missed it. And Sophie says, "It's no big whoop."

Forgetting

Not too long ago, I came up with a long list of things to include in a book about being a parent. It seems awfully presumptuous now, but it was a good way to sketch out some things. I'm realizing now, though, that maybe the parenting book idea is part of something else -- an attempt to write, which will become a part of something about the attempt to write it all down, to record it all. Coming up with outlines, chapter titles, advice. No one wants to read that, unless it’s part of something else, something that is about remembering what it’s like not knowing what’s coming, maybe.

Like we felt with one child. Guilty, really, remembering anything before anything that’s happening right now, leaving someone or something out. But I’m so terrified sometimes of forgetting.

I lost a book once that I wrote, a book about some trips I took. It was in my backpack, along with cassettes from the floorboard and an old jacket of my grandpa’s, stolen from in front of a club in SF while we were inside listening to Bill Frisell.

I said something in that book about how it felt going into a Sinclair gas station near Little Big Horn, me and Steve Montgomery, looking for a map. Everyone sort of looking at us, me and Steve with the very red hair.

Also something about the trip back when I stopped by the side of the road because the urge was so bad to write. Something about my point-and-shoot not able to capture what I was seeing, about trying desperately to write it down and failing miserably. So many hours on the road, eating meatloaf by myself in Montana just outside Glacier, almost hitting, or really hitting, an owl maybe. I remember thinking "Shit. Now I’m doomed. I’ve hit an owl on the Blackfoot reservation." That can’t be good.

There was a little church too. That, I took a picture of. I’ve taken a few pictures -- that’s good -- and I have a lot on DAT. The turn signal on my '66 Biscayne, for example. Africa. Still, it’s not the same as my memory. I didn’t take a picture that one time, of the boy by the oldest tree in the world. He was standing there in the red dirt, and I held the camera up and saw him framed and didn’t take the picture. I’m glad I didn’t. I still have it. Same goes for the time in Nakuru when the battery ran down, from too much KBC broadcasting behind the house in Limuru. One kid, one of the oldest, played a song I’ll never remember exactly because it was perhaps the best thing I’d ever heard. I wanted it to be recorded but it couldn’t be. It couldn’t have been.

More recently, I ran across some old DAT recordings, one of an anonymous night at Enoch’s. Kenny Bill was playing, and there -- at the end – was Wendy. Her voice from 1994. Walking up to me, flirting. That, I'm glad I have.

A story about camping

This is a story Sophie told me after we looked up "unicorn" in the encyclopedia:

This is what you have to have: First, backpacks, stitches [matches], rocks, tent, sleeping bags, water, bucket, and hotdogs, marshmallows and soup

First, make a fire. Gather sticks from broken trees or break off little pieces for Sophie to carry. Make sure you have rocks for safety. Make them in a circle. If you don’t it will start raining. And then daddy takes out a stick in the patches, and then rubs it against the metal, then you put it against the firewood, and then you have fire. A big fire. Jesus cuts onions to make the clouds cry, and their children draw colored streaks in the sky.

To find a unicorn, first you go deep into the forest where the monsters jump out and say “boo.” You have to say “boo” back to them to scare them away. And then when you get past the monsters you can go down by the river, maybe around your place where you see, or maybe by the lake, you’ll see a unicorn. (oh and don’t forget to print this out for mommy). And Sophie has to sit down, and the unicorn -- if you are very still -- the unicorn will come next to Sophie, and then he’ll lay down on her lap and fall asleep.

THE END