Healer
Seems like Corn Dog and I are trading wacky childhood stories. Here’s another . . . kinda, sorta.
As a child, my first love was a woman who imagined herself perpetually on the verge of death. I am not a well woman! she would holler, and what did I know? I believed it.
The irony is, she wasn’t a well woman. Axis II diagnoses aside, my mother was a breast cancer survivor in the pre-chemo, pre-radiation, pre-tamoxifen era. She beat the odds.
Somehow, I was responsible — for the loss of her breast, her health, her youth. You took the best years of my life. Did she say that to me or to my father? Doesn’t matter; four- or five-year-old Doug took the blame.
I woke up early one Saturday morning (kids: in those days, we only had cartoons on Saturdays. I had no intention of missing a single one) to find a hole in our den’s screen door. My older brother woke up soon afterward and convinced me I had done it. It didn’t take much convincing; I felt certain I was responsible for everything. And so I made up a lie to deflect my mother’s inevitable anger.
“It was a bird!” I told her when she woke up and came into the den. “It, it flew in, and then it flew out, and it made that hole –”
“That bird was your father’s fist,” my mother said.
You mean it’s not my fault?
(Smart guy, my dad. A dumber man would have punched the wall and broken a few fingers.)
Yeah, it was all my fault. And I was always trying to make it better.
***
Who would have thought . . .
this
could lead to this
Ignoring that brief Crooks and Liars spike, I had been averaging 300 to 400 hits a day for a long time; and then, the search engines discovered my (wondrous and beautiful) cameltoe post. Now I’m topping 600 hits a day, mostly because of the public’s insatiable desire for more cameltoe.
And what’s not to like about cameltoe?
You know, sometimes I get discouraged by life; I guess all of us do. But when I do, I meditate on the MooreToeâ„¢, and I think, Boy, you’re gonna make it after all.
D.
Karen gets outwitted
Another Jake story, courtesy of the boy’s mom. I’ll tell it as she told it to me:
Why I’ll Never Again Tell Jake I’m Smarter Than He Is
Before Jake turned two, we began struggling over food. I wanted to steer him towards a healthier diet but he objected. He objected by putting his finger down his throat, thus throwing up the objectionable food item.
After a while, he learned he could get his way by faking it. He would put his finger to the side of his mouth, which (at least at first) still got the desired reaction out of me but didn’t have that nasty barf side-effect.
But I figured out his little trick.
“HAH!” I said. “I’m smarter than you. I see what you’re doing — you’re putting your finger to the side of your mouth! Well, it’s not going to work.”
Whereupon he stuck his finger down his throat and threw up all over me.
Behold the face of cold cunning:
D.
Thirteen memories of Jake
I would have posted a lot more pictures, except the HP Scanner Gremlins are disgruntled this evening. Oh, well.
1. Karen was given a “3% lifetime chance” to conceive. In preparation for IVF, she had to get a baseline ultrasound to look for fibroids, etc.
The infertility doc’s partner did the ultrasound. “Well,” he said, “there he is.”
“There who is?” Karen asked in what I imagine was her Must Be Aggressive With Doctors voice.
There was Jake, of course. And there was egg on the infertility doc’s face. Um, so to speak.
2. Jake was a real kicker. Get me the hell out of here! he would scream.
Here’s a picture of Karen and her good friend Kira. Karen’s the pregnant one:
3. Karen had a relatively easy delivery. By the time she asked for the epidural, her doc told her, “Give me another five minutes and he’ll be out.”
Sorry, no crotch shots of the delivery. I remember thinking, No, for the love of God no, get him the hell out of there already. I suspect that was the last time Jake and I ever agreed about anything.
How big? 5 pounds, 2 ounces. For a comparison, this is a normal-sized pacifier:
4. Karen and I are hyper-rational types. We thought of ourselves as scientists back then, even though neither one of us made much dent on the world of science. Imagine our surprise when the post-partum parenting instincts kicked in.
Wow.
We argued over who would get the job of changing diapers — we both wanted to do it. (Yeah, that didn’t last.) We were like toddlers fighting over a new toy.
5. Jake had the best nanny. Julietta had raised three daughters of her own, and she treated Jake as if he were her fourth child. We wouldn’t have survived those first seven months without her.
6. Jake’s first word. Soon after arriving in San Antonio, the three of us were having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. Or, rather, Karen and I were having lunch, and Jake was having a bottle.
I pointed at a young couple at a neighboring table: 20-something gal in short-shorts, guy with handlebar moustache and baseball cap. “Bubba,” I said to Jake. “Buh . . . buh.”
“Bubba!” said Jake, who had never before uttered a syllable.
“Great, Jake!” we said. “Do it again! Buh . . . buh.”
Nothing.
Nothing at all for another two years. Now we can’t shut him up.
7. When he was about eighteen months, we took him to the San Antonio mall to buy new shoes. The saleswoman was a Hispanic gal with a low-cut top and ample cleavage. Karen and I watched open-mouthed as Jake grabbed two handfuls.
I imagine he was curious, never having seen anything quite like that before. The saleswoman laughed it off and seemed a whole lot less embarrassed than Karen or I. Afterwards, I told Jake, “You know, once you turn two, you won’t be able to get away with that anymore.”
8. Before he turned three, he figured out how to do things with the TV remote that we couldn’t do. Not content with Total Control Over Television, he tried to use the remote to shut off the room lights and the swamp fan. Then he pointed it at us, hit the off button, and laughed maniacally.
9. The kid has always had an amazing mind. You know that game, Tower of Babel? That’s the one with a stack of seven disks, one smaller than the next. You’re supposed to transfer the stack from one post to another, one disk at a time, never putting a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Unbelievable would have been if he’d figured the puzzle out at age 2. Sorry, he’s not unbelievable. Amazing, however, was watching Jake play with it for two hours nonstop. Most adults don’t have an attention span like that.
10. And then there’s that puzzle with pegs and holes. You’re supposed to put the square pegs in the square holes, round pegs in the round holes, and so forth. Before he was one year old, he figured out how to do it the right way, but he did it that way only once. Forever after, he kept trying to figure out how to get the pegs to go into the wrong holes.
If we hadn’t seen him do it right that one time, I suppose we would have been pretty worried.
11. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? I do. For two or three nights, I took Jake outside, put him on my shoulders, and pointed out the comet to him. I doubt he remembers this, but at the time, it seemed like an important thing to do.
12. Early religious instruction. One of the San Antonio synagogues had a fair — a Purim fair, if I remember correctly — so I took Jake to the fair to soak up some Yiddishkeit.
To this day, I regret not having a camera. They had set up a Jonah and the Whale ride: little kids climbed into the whale’s mouth, bounced around inside his stomach, and then slid out . . . well, you can guess how they slid out.
13. Twelve memories, and we haven’t even scratched Jake’s fourth year. I wanted to close on a recent photo, however. Here’s Jake, today, practicing Tae Kwon Do at the dojo (do they call ’em dojos?)
You know what to do. Leave a comment below and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Next week: Thirteen Things I Learned from Cosmo, Part Quatre.
Lyvvie? Gene Tierney. Definitely Gene Tierney. (Not Lyvvie’s most recent post, but how could I resist?)
Pat goes a-voting (don’t you Canadians know the election is in November?)
See Dean choke the bald giraffe
Darla introduces us to author Jim Butcher
Placate May’s screaming dreamer
Trish’s Thirteen Ghosts of Toronto
D.
Best picture ever.
Click on the photo to see the full-size, full-color pic.
We took this photo in April, ’96, at Huntington Gardens, one of the nicest places in LA (and about the only redeeming feature of the notorious robber baron’s villainy). Karen looks so happy in this, and Jake has such a precious “WTF?” expression, as if he were debating the wisdom of this whole life thing.
Had another cud-chewing memoirist bit in mind today but then I thought, Eff it. What’s really important? These two are really important.
Today is Jake’s day. No homework, except we’re “making him” watch Scotland, PA. (He read Macbeth earlier this year, so this movie should be a nice tie-in. Plus, it’s funny as hell.)
Afterwards, we’ll pick up cat food, make a run to the bank (the kid never spends any of his money. He likes to say he’s richer than we are. He certainly has less debt), and buy fudge.
And for once, tomorrow’s Thursday Thirteen is a chip shot: Thirteen Memories of Jake — with more photos.
D.
Cobwebs in the attic
My mom wouldn’t take my dad’s word for it.
“Lift Dougie up,” she said. “Let him take a look around.”
Okay, fine. I was game for it. I’d had dreams of a sunlit attic, plush carpet wall-to-wall, toy firetrucks and stuffed bears and a ten-inch-tall girl who had led me up there by playing on her tiny piano. Also, my grandfather claimed he kept a monkey in his attic; maybe we had one, too.
My dad lifted me up on his shoulders so I could look around. No toys, no monkeys, nothing but rafters and cobwebs.
“Look for wires,” said my mother.
No wires.
I told my first grade teacher all about it. My mom thinks there’s wires in the attic. She thinks people are listening to us and watching us.
She asked my parents about it at open house and they denied everything. Just Dougie making up stories. God knows I made up a lot of stories back then, so my teacher never doubted my parent’s version.
Back home, my dad said, “You don’t tell anyone what happens in this house. No one. Do you understand?”
You’re probably wondering why my mom thought people were listening to us and watching us. Sorry. I’m not supposed to tell.
D.
Doing my bit
It’s a google bomb extravaganza. This explains it (kinda sorta).
Review of Helix SF, Issue #2
Here’s my review. If you’re feeling particularly lazy, my favorites were the stories by Jay Lake, Vera Nazarian, and Jennifer Pelland. Enjoy.
D.
The Five Truths Meme
This meme comes from Pat, to whom I say: five truths? Only five? Hey, this is like a Thirteen, only 62% easier. Or something like that.
Before I give ya five, don’t forget: the Blogwhorgy is still going hot and heavy, and the sperm-swallowing contest is open, too. Just scroll down the page.
List five truths. Five things that are on your mind. Good, bad, it matters not. Lift some weight off.
1. In one form or another, love is the most important thing in my life.
2. To all those geezes who complain to me, “The Golden Years? Meh. They’re not so golden,” I say this: being alive to bitch about it sure beats the alternative.
(I think I’ve blogged this conversation before, but it’s worth repeating.
Me: So, how are you doing today?
My 80-something-year-old patient: I woke up on this side of the dirt, so I’d say I’m doing pretty damned good.)3. There’s only one form of afterlife that’s guaranteed: the bits of ourselves we leave behind in others. And no, I’m not talking about STDs or unwanted pregnancies.
4. You know that injunction, primum non nocere? I realize that no matter how hard I try, I’m going to hurt a few people in my life — strangers, patients, loved ones. I might know this but I still try my damnedest to avoid it.
I’ve built it up into a neurosis, I think.
5. Here’s what blogging means to me: some of my best friends are people whom I’ve never met in person.
Damn, that was tougher than it looked. If I had to do thirteen, I’d plotz.
Then pick five people to do the same.
Aw. You would have to make me tag people.
How about Michelle, Dean (or SxKitten, I’ll let you two fight about it), Corn Dog, noxcat, and Kate.
D.
Blogwhorgy. Right here, right now.
Karen thinks I should try not be so heavy for a change. This is a humor blog, after all. Kind of. Sort of. Mostly.
“So, I shouldn’t edit that long piece I wrote last week on my patient who died when I was a resident?”
“No.”
And I suppose those ruminations over the Jewish concept of an afterlife should stay ruminations. And Karen’s thoughts about getting through chemotherapy, well, maybe turning that into a Thursday Thirteen wouldn’t be such a hot idea.
Stop. Just stop. Or as we say in (now, what country is this?), DUR.
(Thought I’d sneak some Random Flickr Blogging in on y’all. This comes from eclipse watch.)
Instead, how about this idea: in the comments, please hype a post of yours you have written recently (I’ll let you define ‘recently’), one you’re proud of, one you would like to see read far and wide. Blogwhore away, my friends! I’ll also put up links below this paragraph, just like I do for the Thirteen. And, of course, I’ll be sure to read your posts and comment, too, if I can manage to say anything that isn’t, well, DUR.
Have at it! Hope you brought your own condoms.
I’m going to kick things off with a shout for Shelbi’s surefire orgasm machine. It doesn’t get much more blogwhorgicological than that.
The ever-fascinating Suisan gives us Tiger Lily! Poignancy! And demanding moms!
Pat gives us five truths (and one great viddy link).
If you haven’t seen Renee’s stuff yet, go see, and make her shiver with XXXXXO while you’re at it. And her friend Carla? Just gimme some hot chocolate and maraschino cherries. I’ll bring my own whipcream.
(Um, was that too gross?)
Dean’s post about the pleasures of older women. I’ve hyped it before, and I’ll hype it again.
Here’s Generik on Staying the Course.
D.