family • aag • Page 2

Small Town

Aug 012011

Almost my entire life has been spent in cities large enough that the freaks, the weirdos and the socially inept¹ can both blend in and find ample company. The exception was the time between my eighth grade and senior years when I lived in a town smaller than some big-city high school classes. This was a benefit in that I could participate in just about every activity I set my heart on; also I graduated first in my class. It was a drawback in that every damn fool had to know every other damn fool’s business; also I graduated first in my class. Small town life in no way prepared me for the rigors of even a moderately challenging state university, and the unwelcoming nature of my particular stretch of the prairie meant that everyone looked the same, worshiped the same, had sex the same. Or at least gave off the appearance of such.

I was taught to hold myself apart from the doings of the town. Other people were trashy, low-class, hillbillies. Slights from decades in the past prevented socialization in the present, and darn near everyone under consideration for my friendship² was found to be sorely lacking. Oh the stories I heard! The tales of cousins’ thefts, of grandparents’ drunkenness, of former-sisters-in-law’s-step-sons’ cheating. It was the stuff of legend and operetta, writ small. I believed every word of it, of course. When the people providing your food and shelter tell you what to think, you think it — or risk going without.

But time passes. People I graduated with have by now carried their reproduction out to the second degree; they show off grandchildren older than my children on Facebook. And in the past couple months the other extreme also has flashed across my screen in the form of a handful of deaths of my classmates’ parents.

It amazes me to see what people say in these situations, which is really just a way of saying that it amazes me how much these dead were loved. Page after page of condolence scrolls by and I marvel at it. Of course we glorify the dead. It’s unavoidable. From the grave they have no more power to hurt; it is therefore safe to speak of their strengths without fear of encouraging their faults. Nevertheless there is a disconnect in my mind between the overwhelming lauds and the messages I remember hearing.

These dead were nothing more than trash to my family, and yet they were loved. They were loved — are loved! — by my townsfolks, who now share tales of their generosity, their kindness, their openheartedness. They speak of them so highly I wonder what I missed in not knowing them more.

And I wonder what I’ll read when my own parents pass. Will they be glorified or ignored? What sort of impression have they, so negative toward most, garnered for themselves? And will it be more upsetting to read of their glory, or nothing at all?

All three groups of which I count myself a proud member [↩]
or more [↩]

Feet First

Jul 272011

We are driving to the swimming pool.

Kid 1: My feet are older than I am.

Me, fiddling with CD player: Mmm?

Kid 2: Your feet aren’t old.

Kid 1 (K1): My feet aren’t old, but they are older than me.

Me: Wait, what?

K1: My feet are older than me.

Me: Do you mean that your feet were born first? That they came out of my stomach first?

Kid 2 (K2): I grew in my birthmom’s stomach.

Kid 3 (K3): Yeah, I grew in my birthmom’s stomach too.

K2: Your birthmom is the same as my birthmom.

K3: I know that. Why did you think I didn’t know that? My birth dad is [xxxxx], but he’s not your birthdad.

K2: I know that. We don’t know my birthdad.

[K2 and K3 bickering continues.]

Me, mentally preparing lecture about typical logistics of birth: Do you mean that your feet came out of me first?

K1: No, gross. Wait, did they?

Me: No, your head came out first.

K1: Oh ok. But my feet are still older.

Me: How so?

K1: Well, my feet grew before I was born, right?

Me: Okay?

K1: And I wasn’t really me until I was born, right?

Me: Oh, I see what you mean. I guess if you count it that way then yes, your feet are definitely older than you are.

K1: What other way is there to count it?

Me: Well, most people who are interested in logic and science say that a fetus turns into an actual baby around the point when it can live independently, outside the mother. Most pregnancies last about forty weeks, but some babies who are born early, at around twenty-two or so weeks can also live. So by your reasoning, your feet are five or six months older than you are.

K1: Well I believe in science and logic, so that’s what I believe.

Me: Yes, that’s what our family believes. But not everyone thinks that way.

K1: Why wouldn’t they believe that?

Me: Some people believe that it’s a baby from the moment the sperm and egg come together.

K1: But it doesn’t even have organs! It doesn’t have a brain, or a heart!

Me: You can see a fetus’ heartbeat by the time the woman is eight weeks pregnant. I saw yours then.

K2: Did you see mine then?

Me: No, I didn’t see yours. I didn’t know N. then. But I saw your heart beating later.

K3: Did you see mine?

Me: No, N. was living in [xxxxxx] then.

K1: But having a heartbeat doesn’t mean it’s a person.

Me: That’s what I think. But not everyone thinks that way. Those are the people who believe that every single pregnancy should go to term no matter what.

K1: But what if the mother is, like, twelve years old [She is at this moment just barely twelve years old.] Do they think that mother should have to stay pregnant?

Me: Yes.

K1: But that’s so mean!

Me: There’s a passage in the Bible that says, essentially, that God knew you before you were born; that he knit you together in your mother’s womb. That’s a big part of why anti-choice people say that no pregnancy should be ended.

K1: That’s dumb.

Me: You might think it’s dumb, but lots of people believe that.

K1: But we don’t, right?

Me: Right, we don’t.

[We flash our pool passes at the desk.]

Me: Here’s the thing though. I had tests to check on how the everything was developing when I was first pregnant. If those tests had shown that there were abnormalities, that the baby wouldn’t have survived, or that it would have had a painful, difficult life, I would not have continued the pregnancy.

K1, jockeying for first sunblock-application position: Okay?

Me: But other people in the same position would choose to have a baby like that, and love it and raise it.

K1: Okay?

Me: This is what it means to be pro-choice. Every woman gets to decide for herself.

K1: Mom, I know.

And off she ran on her twelve-year-and-six-month-old feet.

A Changed Boy

Jul 212011

Here’s the thing: He can get up so cranky you’d swear he spent the night being chased by dragons instead of sleeping — and perhaps, now that I think about it, he is. He can come home so overwrought that lunch and a two-hour nap on the couch are absolutely necessary to bring about even a semi-tolerable evening.

And yet when at 10:45am I allow him to strip off his clothes and wriggle into his swimsuit, even if his favorite swimsuit with the green lizards is in the wash and he has to settle for the red swimsuit with the flames, he is a changed boy. He is a changed boy as he waits, patiently even, for his sisters and I to change. With a surprising degree of docility he uses the bathroom and finds a towel and then he stands by the door looking pointedly toward the garage.

Once in the pool the change is complete. He is transported by water; no matter the screaming defiance of an hour prior he grabs my hand and drags me into the water. He begs for a trip to the deep end and as I must tell him no so many other times in the course of a day I couldn’t dream of saying it here. Once we reach the point where his feet no longer touch he lets me loose to paddle around my waist, the fear and thrashing of a month ago a distant memory. He leaps into the water with abandon. He sinks down to touch his toes to the pool’s floor. He’s even mastered the art of backfloating, a trick he performs so often and so loudly that the other children roll their eyes and paddle off, but I stay to cheer on an accomplishment that just a few weeks ago seemed impossible. He takes the praise and otter-rolls over, laughing with pride ’til his head goes under and the noise is cut off in a gulp.

Don’t drink that, I say, but it doesn’t matter. In the pool he is happy.

If you’d ask him he’d tell you that he has a terribly difficult life, what with the impossible expectations I have that he will neither write upon the walls with crayons nor stuff his dirty underwear behind the couch, and the grievous punishments meted out — standing in corners, losing television, not getting suckers after lunch — for infractions thereof. It is usually so difficult! So taxing! So full of pitfalls and ensnarements!

But the pool is easy, and seldom involves time-outs. If he had his way I think we’d spend every day there. I wish I could give that to him.

Slide

Jul 072011

We ought also to take into consideration our own natural bias; which varies in each man’s case, and will be ascertained from the pleasure and pain arising in us. Furthermore, we should force ourselves off in the contrary direction, because we shall find ourselves in the mean after we have removed ourselves far from the wrong side,
exactly as men do in straightening bent timber.

“You should get a pool pass,” my friend said three years ago. “We could go every day. The kids would love it!” And love it they might have but I would have gone into heart failure every five minutes as they pulled their favorite¹ trick: One baby would race to the right to investigate an item of moderate noxiousness; I would give chase only to find the other baby bolting to the left toward something seriously life-threatening. In those years I never had enough hands, enough eyes, enough energy. My friend made her suggestion and across my brain flashed the image of one child flinging herself off the high-dive whilst the other was whisked away by a black-cloaked stranger.

We didn’t get a pool pass that year.

We did, however, engage in swimming lessons — many, many swimming lessons. Eventually both their skill and maturity levels were advanced enough that I thought maybe we could go to the pool without too much bother and tarnation, and so with heart in throat a few weeks ago I counted out the money for a pass.

Given that months have passed since their last bit of formal instruction I should have expected some regression in the abilities of the seasnake-like girl and her penguin-like brother. I didn’t expect a huge regression, but unfortunately that’s what happened to one-half of them. In the winter he’d dive with unrestrained glee — often atop someone already in the water — and paddle around nose jutted barely above sea-level until someone caught him or he reached the side. So competent was he that I could turn my back on him to concentrate on his sisters’ antics. At least briefly.

But throw him in at the start of this summer and he’d thrash and flail, dramatic burbles erupting each time his head bobbed above the surface. This was, trust me, heart-stopping. Not to mention appalling, as the other mothers, the mothers of the good children, turned their sleek heads toward my clan’s commotion.

So we’ve been working, he and I, at regaining his missing abilities. I take him to the deep end and let him dive in, but instead of catching him as he’d like I step back — just a bit — so that he can come to me. I launch him forth with the injunction to go toward the shallow end or the wall, always the shallow end or the wall; when he tries to come back all a’panicked and screeching I put my hands under him, briefly, before pushing him off yet again. I want to say it’s working, but it’s slow going.

What’s not slow going is their absolute adoration of the pool’s complement of water slides. On day one of pool-going’ neither would so much as cast eyes toward their towering terror. On day three they very unwillingly agreed to try the slowest with their sister and her friend. Only one slid down into the water, the other preferring to risk her sibling’s anger and the crotchety glances of the others on queue as she retreated, weeping, back down the steps.

On day seven, buoyed up by the presence of a friend, she decided to try again. She emerged with happy eyes and laughter all around, begging to be set free to go down just one more time. I agreed, then watched from a distance as she went down again and again and again, galloping up the stairs hand-in-hand with her brother and without a single backward glance at me. A year ago — five minutes ago! — I never would have permitted them to roam so far from my sight, but now, if we get there early enough, they choose to spend the entire time on an endless loop of pool-sliding and all I can do is look after them in wonder at how much we’ve progressed, and if I’m letting them have too much leeway in going so far, so fast, so young.

As in so many things, balance is key. To turn out competent adults in eighteen short years, a third of which has already passed for my little ones, the mother must protect without stunting and challenge without overwhelming. In stepping farther away from a wall, in watching the progress up a stair from a distance, do I give them what they need while at the same time pushing them just far enough along? Can someone herself parented so deeply on the side of protection avoid that failing while not falling into its equally bad opposite?

Time will tell.

at that age [↩]

Days

Jun 292011

Twenty-eight days of summer have passed us by. Fifty-one days before school starts again are left.

Somehow, on most of these days I have managed to wrangle three children through their various difficulties, heartbreaks, activities, injuries and super-cool-fun-times while still cranking out a reasonable amount of work.

Today? Today is not one of those days.

At some point in the distant future when these children are grown¹ and I’m enjoying the soothing ocean breezes on the lanai with three other feisty ladies who share my pastel peach-and-blue hued house² I will look back on this time with the utmost amazement that I managed to do all that I am doing without a) completely losing my mind and b) abandoning all pretense of personal hygiene.

I’m doing this — and even I don’t know how. I guess I should give myself credit for keeping most of my balls in the air instead of beating myself up for not doing more.

Right?

If I am fortunate enough to live so long [↩]
So what if my fantasy resembles an uberpopular late 80s television sit com. So. What. [↩]

Note to Self

Jun 272011

Casa de aag is located, believe it or not, directly across the street from a church¹ whose denomination espouses views which are extreme not only in comparison to your humble narrator’s heresy but also when measured against your average brand of Christianity. Nevertheless, I had enough residual religion to summon up the courage to attend a service some decade or so ago. Toddler in tow I received the warmest of greetings by clergy and congregant gathered at the door; in the pew hymns washed me in such nostalgia for the God I knew as a teenager than I resolved to come back week after week. This decision held all the way through the first moments of the sermon, which the pastor dedicated to admonishing those who flaunt God’s rules for the separation of man and woman — specifically the injunction that to be in worship and female one must always and only wear a skirt.

Pants-clad and mortified I slunk away and never went back.

Two years ago and after much impassioned begging I allowed my eldest to attend VBS² with a couple of her friends. She came home unscathed, so far as I could tell, and bearing each night a different variety of sugary treats, the theory perhaps being that hellfire becomes more palatable when served with jellybeans. Upon witnessing this astounding circumstance the little ones extrapolated that going to church was all about candy and thus was born in my preschoolers an abiding hunger for religion.

It’s hard to avoid questions of a theological nature when each and every minivan jaunt takes us past the compound. “Why are all those cars over there,” they’d ask on a Monday.

It’s a school, I’d say.

“Our school?” they’d ask. Their school is adjacent.

No, I’d say. There’s a religious school in the church.

“Why can’t we go to religious school?” they’d say, and depending on their age and the level of patience at that moment I possessed I would explain why that was probably not a good idea.

The rain finally gave up in time for us to hit the pool on Sunday. “What time does it open?” asked my eldest.

Eleven, I said. We should be there when it opens.

“While everyone else is at church, right?”

That’s it, darlin’, I said. And when the time came off we went. Right past the church.

“What are all those cars for?” asked the middle child.

They’re having church, I said.

“Why don’t we go to that church?” said the boy.

Because we don’t believe what they believe, I said.

“Like what,” asked the eldest.

Just for starters, they don’t believe gay people should be able to get married. We’d been talking a lot about this recently.

“Anyone who loves each other should be able to get married,” she said, with surprising vehemence.

They just don’t believe that, I said. She requested more examples. They believe that every pregnancy should go to term, I said.

“Even if the woman didn’t want to be pregnant?” I nodded. “Even if it was by force?”

Even if it was by force, I said. They’d say that she should either raise the baby or place it for adoption.

“That is not right.” Again with the vehemence. “What else?”

They think that the man should be the head of the household, I said. Women aren’t allowed to lead worship. They’re basically seen as less than men.

Saying that they prayed to His Noodly Appendages could not have provoked a stronger reaction. “Why would they think that!” she burst out. “I want to be married to a man who treats me like an equal!”

I hope you find that, I said.

“But why would the women put up with it,” she wondered. “Why would they even belong to a religion that treats them so poorly?”

People tend to believe the way they’re raised, I said. These are lessons they’ve gotten since infancy. They think if they don’t follow the rules they’ll go to hell, and that’s a pretty powerful motivator.

And then we were at the pool. I hastily added, But we still respect their beliefs, even if we don’t agree.

“Right Mom,” she said, then off she went to the slides.

Hours later it came up again. “I just don’t understand why people would believe that,” she said.

“Note to self. Religion: freaky.”

“That’s from…”

I interrupted. Yes, yes it is.

“It sure is,” she said.

Possibly this is what has protected my house from lightning strikes lo these many years? [↩]
vacation Bible school [↩]

Koi

Jun 212011

At some point in the not-too-distant past he would have flung the handful into the water with a shriek and immediately demanded more but the passage of time has put the most subtle whammy on my son to the point that flinging never crossed his mind.

It was an unplanned side-trip that took us past the pond. A decade and a half ago when last I was there I’m fairly certain there were no fish; however, it’s possible that the still-hazy glow of couplehood unimpeded by children put my focus on anything but the water. The mall surrounding the pond — that I remember very well. Hoping with life, every store stuffed with merchandise and people spilling out into the concourse loud and happy and weighed down with purchases, centercourt music blaring, a dozen restaurants offering olfactory inducements to dine and the neverending patter from the young men putting on the fudge demonstration. Fifteen years ago it was stimulation overload and last week I couldn’t imagine dragging three overtired children into such chaos.

I let myself be talked into it, but swinging wide the doors showed a completely different scene. Just one shop in ten stood open, and as we were almost the only ones there I had no fear of my children disappearing into the melee. Their voices echoed, at least until we ran across the fudge shop where the employees seemed unreasonably eager to put on their show even for so small a crowd.

Finally we broke free, their disappointment over the lack of a sale¹ pushing us onward. When we stepped back outside it was far past the little ones’ bedtimes but their joy at having caught sight of a flash of orange meant that I couldn’t make them go home yet. Swiftly was found a machine dispensing tasty fish noms; my purse raided for quarters and divided out amongst four babbling children including my son, who even a few months ago would have been dispossessed of the treats before the others had delivered a single one.

Maybe I should have expected it. A few weeks ago I caught him arranging his grapes in order of increasing size around the edge of his plate. This night he bellied up his sturdy little body to the curb and laid out a line of food. Each pellet picked delicately up, each baited over the edge, down close enough that a passing security guard delivered a warning against nibbling fishmouths. He retreated, tossing in the feed from just high enough that none could reach, but soon caution gave way to the tantalization of putting food into individual gawping mouths. He yeeped and giggled each time they got too close and so slowly did he dole out the treats that the other children yawned and begged to go before he was fully done.

Usually it takes such effort to love the boy. This night was not one of those times.

Peanuts, it is always about the peanuts. [↩]

Falling Knife*

Jun 202011

In the almost-seven years I’ve known her I’ve been forced to scale back expectations of my children’s mother’s emotional capabilities. At first I — and everyone else, I think — took her to be only slightly less mature than what was suggested by her chronological age. But the years have not delivered additional advancement and events, if anything, have shown our original assessments to be almost tragically overstated.

This has not happened overnight, nor in one fell swoop. Each year, each baby, each interaction has demonstrated that what we all hoped for is just not there. It sounds cruel to admit but it does no one any favors to pretend. And yet it’s hard to remember her limitations and never more so than now, when after months spent making plans to raise her latest (and last) baby it’s become impossible to ignore how far away she is from being able to meet that goal.

I’ve seen it in the past two months in a hundred different things. She’ll IM me from the only working computer she has access to, which is in the house of the woman who currently has custody of her child. Are you visiting with baby? I’ll ask, and she’ll tell me that the child is fine, is being bathed by her grandmother. Aren’t these visits set up specifically for you to interact with the child I’ll want to ask but won’t, because I know the answer from the grandmother: N. is there in body but in spirit not so much; she’ll hold the child for five minutes until she cries, at which point frustration sets in and the infant is surrendered to more competent arms.

Half the time she arrives late and leaves early. Sometimes she’s too ill or sleepy to provide care. “Just bring her over to me,” grandmother told me she requested a few week back. “I’m too tired to get up but she can lay here in bed with me while I sleep,” and I am thankful, so very, very thankful, that grandmother is wise and strong-willed enough to answer that request, in no uncertain terms, no.

This is not what I pictured. I foresaw that grandmother, hands already full with four other small children, would allow N. unlimited access to her house and new baby. I imagined she’d have N. hopping between laundry dishes diapers bottles all day long and would fudge her hours to the state so that her little helper would not be lost. I thought — and it shames me to admit it — that quite possibly the baby would spend all her time with her mother and would be trotted over to grandmother’s house only for visits from the state.

None of this has happened. Grandmother is taking this very seriously, very seriously indeed — and it shows. The child, along with her four paternal half-siblings, her grandparents, her birthmother, her maternal half-sister and her family, the two maternal half-siblings I’m raising and the rest of my family,¹ all convened here recently for food and conversation. The new child glows with good heath and care. She’s got the charming forearm fat-roll and mushy chin that speak to sufficient nutrition. She smelled reassuringly of formula and diapers. Her head bobbled about, mouth trailing drool around a stuffed-in fist as she followed the antics of her siblings. When I faced her to me she cooed back to my nonsense conversation, breaking into goofy toothless grins at the more scintillating bits. And when that got old (and after a few words of instruction about how she best liked to be held), her nodding off was as swift and drama-free as anyone familiar with the ways of newborns could hope.

She is, in short, reassuringly well cared for. I can tuck away the hotline number and turn my worry — not that it does any good — toward her mother. Would that there were a hotline number for her.

The question is how much further can our expectations fall? And at what point will our hope be only that she can continue to stay alive?

*Falling knife

In case you are counting, this adds up to ten children and seven adults, and that is a whole lotta pulled pork. [↩]

Sickness

Jun 072011

If you have a particularly recalcitrant cyst finally burst, I need to know about it. Surgery after a gruesome injury? I will request every detail. And if you have a third nipple, eleventh toe, vestigial tail, tattoo-decorated scar, teratoma or lipoma, omg show it to me now.

Really. I love that stuff. In fact one of my prized possessions is the image of my fallopian tubes taken by my surgeon just moments after he caused them to cease functioning forever.¹ I love it so. Man I should totally frame that thing.

So it was with the utmost surprise that I read the message from my family wherein it was suggested that the reason they’d kept a certain health concern from me for months and months and months was because tales of sickness made me uncomfortable. We know you don’t want to hear this, the message said, but we need you to know — and then out came a story which, in comparison to exploding infected ears² or the aftermath of childbirth³ was really, really nothing. Nothing at all. Not in the sense that the health concern wasn’t serious⁴ but because it wasn’t troubling to me, and I have no idea where they got the idea that such a thing would be.

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising. We are living in different dimensions, my parents and I, dimensions that only very rarely intersect, and the rarity is increasing as everybody ages. I say one thing and they hear the opposite. I write words as carefully as I know how and they read ones that were never on the page. Things spring into being that were not intended to be born. And everyone ends up at odds, estranged because no matter how precisely we speak or how loudly we shout the meaning goes astray. The center has never held for us and I know it never will.

I can forget, briefly, for a while. I can pretend like maybe someday we’ll get it right. But every example like the one above rolls out reminders of the thousand that came before. There is no way to ignore it.

Pictures of your gory surgeries gladly accepted at the email address listed just to your right. [↩]
Yes oh yes this did happen to me. [↩]
Do not ask about the brown jelly-like gloop that showed up six weeks post birth. Just do not even ask. [↩]
It was. It is. [↩]

For Whatever Other Reason

May 272011

For whatever reason would someone bear-and-or-acquire three children other than to raise up a small army of subsidiary house-cleaners, laundry-folders and cooks? It’s not like I haven’t toiled in servitude to them for twelve long years now. It’s about darn-tootin’ time they started giving back.

To that end, and also because I am haunted by the fact that she is technically two-thirds of the way raised and only approximately one-twenty-fifth of the way imbued with common sense, I have made it my summer goal to teach my eldest to cook. By the time I was her age I’d been entrusted to inhabit the house by myself in the hours between arriving home from school and my parents’ return from work; also I was expected to prepare at least the beginnings if not the entirety of dinner for the family. For at least a year. Five times a week. And don’t think I got a pass on dinner-duty throughout the weekends.

That’s not to say my offerings were always a success. I’m still teased about the time I misunderstood the “t” notation in a recipe and produced something with approximately three times the necessary salt. Or the time I turned the oven temperature dial but not the on-off dial. But those and many other failures eventually produced an adult who can, most days, assemble with a great deal of speed and not much fuss something that’s nutritious, attractive and palatable to all but the pickiest of my little eaters, who is, as you might imagine, the eldest.

She is also the most resistant to change, so when I told her of my scheme I expected a very great demonstration of angst. She did not disappoint; in asking her to find a suitable pot with which to boil water I effectively ruined her life. In demanding that she snap the green beans I was the cause of an almost broken finger. And it all, all of it, everything served to upset the calm she seeks to cultivate in the pursuit of such soothing-to-her activities as reading a book while cuddling the cat while listening to Taylor Swift, or scootering while listening to Taylor Swift, or gazing off into the distance while listening to Taylor Swift.

But I am nothing if not a dreadful witch and the destroyer of every joy my children might find¹ and I will not relent in this pre-teen’s education. We’ve already tackled scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, bacon², biscuits and muffins from a mix, fresh fruit salad, pasta and lettuce-based salads. Additionally all of the little darlings can help themselves to the makings of a decent breakfast — yogurt, toast, cereal, fruit, milk — as well as sandwich fixings for lunch.

In other words, I could be stretched out cold on the living room floor with the cats eating my face and my offspring would not starve. This is a start, right?

Why I bet with a little dedication by the end of the summer I can have them trained as follows: A cooling selection of fruits, meats and cheeses will be artfully arranged upon a platter by the eldest child while I lounge upon the porch with a book in one hand and in the other a sparkling beverage prepared by the middle child. Palm-frond fanning will be supplied by the youngest child.

Anyone want to join me?

Ask them, sometime, about how I force them to maintain clear pathways between door and bed! Or about my demands that wet towels be hung up rather than stuffed into drawers! Or about the rule that sheets must be laundered at least quarterly! [↩]
In the oven, which is to my mind the only civilized way to make it [↩]

Older Entries Newer Entries

Small Town

Feet First

A Changed Boy

Slide

Days

Note to Self

Koi

Falling Knife*

Sickness

For Whatever Other Reason

Archives

Links

Twitter

Meta

Buy Me a Diet Coke (or some Pjur)

Meta

Find Me Here

Receive Updates Via Email

Archives

Categories

Links

Meta

Buy Me a Diet Coke (or some Pjur)

Meta

Find Me Here

Receive Updates Via Email