It's best to be humble about having boy geniuses

I was chopping wood and Quin came out with a piece of paper in each hand. They were drawings he'd done at school, and one of them was for me. I know children's art can be questionable, but when it's for you, well then it's a masterpiece.

What really struck me about his latest work, is that overnight he's been able to draw people. I'm not talking about Norman Rockwell here, but the early circle-with-arms-and-legs humanoids that come with a kid's artistic progression. He handed me my copy and said, "Dad, that's you." And there I was, a wobbly brown circle with four appendages. To my son, I look like a damaged potato, but I hope he could tell how proud I was.

From l to r: daddy, daddy and daddy.I do get excited about these things. Some of it, at least a little bit, is forced upward into the proud-o-sphere. I'm not saying it's forced into existence, but what's there I kick a little higher. I can feel myself doing it--actually I see myself doing it in this kind of awkward out-of-body scrutiny. You'd think that would stop me, but I have this fear that if I don't glow with immense pride the boys will grow up with as many doubts about their ability as I have. I mean I could do something, and do it well, but upon recognition, deny I ever even did it. And then tell the recognizer they really have no idea what they're talking about.

So I hear myself proclaiming greatness and stacking even more greatness on top of that, and then, in realizing it could be dangerous letting the boys think they're already geniuses, I add a "you need to keep working at it" on top of the serenade sundae.

I held Quin's crayon version of me and blinked it into my reality. I was amazed that a kid who was drawing scribbles yesterday was handing me renditions of people today. He was pretty confident about it yet not at all acting like it was a huge leap in artistry. I asked him, "Since when have you been able to draw so well?" and he replied, "I do it at at school."

Of course he does. He does everything at school and we never hear about it. He's already the teenager who says "nothing" when we ask what happened during his day. His time in the brightly colored learning institution surrounded by play structures, crowded with children and teaching professionals, and billions of years of organic progress thrusting upwards past lava, meteors and ice selves and into the smooth little hand of a kid with a writing utencil, and "nothing." 

"Anything else?" we ask hoping for a revelatory statement about his academic advancement and/or a glimpse into what could be a lucrative talent that could lead to his parent's early retirement, and he replies, "I played."

I felt something though on a warm September day when he gave me my portrait . I could complain that it lacked detail, but I liked bold strokes of ambiguity. Sure, the circle with the sticks could be anybody, but the artist proclaimed it to be me, and so far I like his confidence. I could spend years chiseling a wood likeness of Jesus and then insult his judgement when the King of Kings came down to witness it. I was happy when Quin handed me the piece, and then dropped an unceremonious, "This is for you," as he spun away, whirling with better things to do the green grass of the back lawn.

You know your trip to NYC is doomed when...

You start by missing your flight.

Then you get there and your 400 dollar-a-night hotel room smells like meat and doesn't have Internet.

You wake up early to get video of a conference but the light is low and the sound is crap. And the one guy of all the guys you're supposed to meet has his flight accidentally cancelled.

Your supposed to take and upload video, but the Microsoft building where they're holding the event doesn't have Internet (really Bill?)

Your trip to find a coffee shop that has Internet is thwarted by sheets of a pounding rain.

You offer to help set up the afterparty and get lost carrying a box of party supplies in New York City. 

You wake up weary and ready to go home, only to find you booked a flight for Sunday, not Saturday.

The bastards at United Airlines charge you 150 dollars to change your flight.

Your seatmate is a dog, which is neat, but it's a nervous, gassy dog. 

Oh, there was the one good thing when you met someone with whom you could share a cab to get to LaGuardia and you saved twenty bucks.

You get to the Denver airport and get on the bus to the satellite parking. Only to find out it's the wrong bus. The bus driver is really cool and goes way out of his way to get you to the right parking lot.

You feel compelled to tip him twenty bucks.

It was a Friday

There's this thing called death that ends the road for something or someone. I know you're familiar with this, but the road metaphor is important because you're stuck looking in the rear view hoping you don't move too far away from how things were. You have this idea that time won't sweep you down the river (roads, rivers...just think of perpetual forward motion but with your aorta snagged on a tree) but it does because that's what it does. That's the point of funerals and pyres and scholarship funds: you hope to have something big and bright to mark the moment so when you move on you can always look back and see something--hopefully a big mountain that never gets any smaller--as you drift away.

I snapped awake this morning and, as per usual, wondered if it were real. That's the worst part of the whole deal. The part where you actually think for a bit that your kids are going to meet their grandma. You have this moment, right before you get punched in the face, where you think just maybe you're lucky enough to have dreamed the whole thing. And then it hits, the numbing shot to nose. There will be no trips to the playground like the one you can still hear in your head. The one when mom took your sister's kid to the playground, and you were so relieved that over-sized three year old had someone so gentle in his life.

I lay in bed this morning, and in a macabre way thought about how I was lying right about where she died. Exactly really--I was in the exact spot. To exacerbate the rapid ascent from her ashes, we remodeled shortly after she died. Now the little room she had in our house has had walls knocked down and new paint and new doors and is a small version of a master suite. I lay there and looked at the ceiling and tried to imagine everything as it once was.

Luckily, everything as it is gives me a reason to grin. She'd be thrilled that I'm pinched between the world's most loyal dog and a four-year-old boy who can fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes. Most impressive though, is that somewhere on the other side of the bed, Sarah is still there, too. Even after having to live with her mother in law for two or so years.

Breathing is important. I kind of laugh about that epiphany, but it's something you don't think about until a few minutes after you're crushed by realization. You inhale full of the resolve to make the best of it. To play like a madman with your kids and to follow up on that late night when you groped through a gumdrop of snot, tiredness and tears to hear her tell you that you'd be fine if you followed your heart.

It was as cliche as that. She was tired anyway. Hospice told me to tell her everyone was fine. A lie, I think, but she knew that. Hearing me make something up to comfort her probably let her know that everything was normal. Then, at some point after I collapsed on the bed, she sneaked out of her skin and into the night.

Of course she thinks it's hilaroius that I've got it so wrong, as she leaves behind such heavy things, the top down and rear view in check.

September

Oh September, you dog you. You big behemoth of disappointment and relief, sadness and newness. August is the Sunday of the year. Sure it's still summer but you can't stop thinking about September. This doorstep into the cold.

Your chill is so damn sudden. I was just complaining about summer heat and you were like, "OK, don't like it? Here." Slap on some frost and bring a shudder of high school football pracitice. Those chilly mountain mornings doing pushups in frozen grass. I remember grunting against the ground and wondering about one blade of grass. What would I be doing when it's cut and gone? I would think, actually hope, I'd be something better than a cold kid with football coach yelling at him.

Where is that grass now? Cut, dried, stomped, rotted, regrown and back under the gaze of some nervous kid pushing away from the world. 

I don't have many specific memories of September, just a feeling about it. It's ominous, I don't know why. I haven't had to go back to school for fifteen years. I still feel it though, something about change, I guess. And I look down at the ground, and wonder where we'll be the next time you come around.