Sandra Tayler

I didn’t get to drop Kiki off for her weeklong camp because I was in the wrong state. I would have liked to do it, but apparently it was a really good father/daughter bonding experience. Howard wrote about it, but I’m putting it here too:

Seeing Her Off To Camp

My oldest daughter and I came back from the family reunion last night so that I could see her off to camp this morning. Kiki and I got
checked in, got her luggage thrown into the truck, and then stood around with the other families waiting for the “all aboard” call for
the buses.

Kiki wasn’t hanging out with her friends. She was staying kind of close to me. Why? well, mostly I think it’s because she didn’t recognize anybody. All these people were new.

I tried to nudge her in the direction of other girls a couple of times, but she didn’t rise to the occasion.

I told her that one of the skills she could be learning this week was “how to introduce yourself to people you’ve never met before.”

She said “I can’t do that, Dad. I’m SHY.”

I got down on my knees (which puts my face just a little below hers) and said “You’re not shy. Shy would have its face buried in my armpit. You just don’t know how to do this yet. You’ll learn, and you’ll be fine.”

Moments later someone she knew came tearing up to her, and they greeted each other with age-typical giggles and hugs and grabbing. I slipped away while she wasn’t looking, and stood about 25 feet off, leaning on a lamp-post, watching. It took her a good two minutes to realize I was gone. She found me quickly (I wasn’t hiding) and grinned at me. I grinned back.

I let her and her friend alone. There was a quick “everybody-gather-round” assembly, and while most parents stood with their kids, I stood almost completely out of earshot where I could barely see mine.

And then it was time to board the bus. Kiki’s friend (I’ll call her “Abby” because that’s not her name) had a friend (or maybe sister or cousin — I’m not clear on that) who was crying and didn’t want to go. Kiki and Abby bracketed the tearful friend, arms around her, and they walked to the bus together. They all squished into one bench seat (I remember, barely, when my butt was small enough that I could do that with my friends), and before too long the friend’s
tears were gone and the three of them looked ready for the bus to GO already.

That’s my girl. She might think she’s shy, but when she sees somebody who really needs a friend, she’s there in an instant.

She does her Daddy proud, she does.

Today I depart into the land of Family Reunion. 30 people, 1 house, most of the people are children. I love my family. I love seeing my family. But there will be a serious lack of places to retreat into introvertedness. Anyway I’ll be offline for the duration.

There are 6 houses on our cul de sac. In the space of 6 months 4 of those houses have new families in them. In the 8 years we’ve been here only 1 of the houses was sold, and now it’s like we’re getting a whole new neighborhood. Part of me is glad because the people who are moving in are families with children the right ages to play with my kids. Part of me is sad because I have been blessed with good neighbors and I will miss them. Also Howard’s brother just moved to town from California. I’m glad to have more family close by and even gladder for Patches to be able to play with his same-age cousin. So I expect the next few months will be filled with lots more visiting as I’m making friends with these new neighbors and I’m reconnecting with relatives. The turnover has been very good to Gleek and Patches who have both acquired friends. In a month it will be sad for Kiki and Link because they’ll lose a best friend whom they’ve known for most of their lives.

Change is good. Change is bad. Mostly Change is just different.

Last night I dreamed of my Grandpa. He died 7 years ago when Link was a baby. Kiki is the only one of my kids who has any memory of him. She calls him “Grandpa lying down” because She was there the day they brought him home from the hospital on a back board. He was unable to walk from the ambulance to his bed in the house. By the time he died, he’d been bedridden for 5 years and the Grandpa I’d loved was long gone. Howard never got to meet the vibrant, interesting person he was. Howard only met a sick old man too tired to do much talking. I wish my kids had someone like my Grandpa. Grandpa was a tinkerer. He had a huge garage that he’d built himself. It was full of air compressors and table mount vice grips and soddering irons and radio tubes. It was so full of those things that there was only a narrow walkway through them to the workbench. I still remember the smell of that place. It was a strange mix of concrete, grease, and metal. I was only allowed in occasionally and only if Grandpa was with me because there were too many dangerous tools and machines lying around in there.

Grandpa fixed everything. He always had a project and he always involved his grandkids when we were around. With Grandpa I straightened bicycle spokes, sawed through lumber by hand, formed table legs on a lathe, soddered circuit boards, and any number of other things. Obviously Grandpa had no antiquated ideas about “girls work” and “boys work” we all did stuff with Grandpa. He called me his “Gal” with his southern accent mellowed by years of living in California. He’d sit me on his lap and tickle me with his “billy-goat beard” and tell me tall tales about hunting for bears. Grandma would scold him for telling such tall tales, but we all loved them. I wish I could remember the tales, but I can’t. All I can remember is that I loved them and listened to them with a wide-eyed wonder, not sure if I should believe them or not. Grandpa’s hands were never clean, no matter how often he washed them. The grease and dirt was ground in so thoroughly it wouldn’t come off. Those hands were hard and calloused. The hands of a man who tinkered and worked all day every day.

Grandpa was always skinny. The fact that he was missing about half of his teeth might have had something to do with it. Grandma always had to adjust her southern cooking so that there were foods Grandpa could eat. As an adult I wonder why he never got dentures or implants, but he never did. He just grinned his grin full of holes. Grandpa was also deaf in one ear. I think he was hard of hearing in the other one as well. We always had to speak loud and clear so that Grandpa could hear us. He had a succession of hearing aids, including some that he made himself. He didn’t like them much though. He was always taking them out and losing them. It was only years later that we figured out that perhaps some of the “losing” was on purpose so he could pretend not to hear Grandma when the mood struck him. He seemed to like the hearing aids he made for himself better even though they were invariably bulky. He even rigged a hand held speaker to the TV so that he could hold it up to his ear. That way everyone could have comfortable volume levels.

One summer he had all of us kids help him haul rocks to clear the ground for a huge garden. He planted and created sprinkling systems so that the plants would live. We’d come for visits and help with the harvesting. The garden seemed to get bigger every year. Especially the strawberry patch. We loved the strawberry patch. The grasshoppers also loved the strawberry patch. One of our favorite pasttimes was catching jars full of grasshoppers. They came in a startling array of varieties. Grandpa didn’t like the grasshoppers. He was happy that we caught them. Less happy when we released them back into the wild on the other end of the yard. It seemed so far away to us, but I’m sure they were back in the strawberries in less than an hour. An acre just isn’t that far to a grasshopper. Grandpa also arranged sprinklers for Grandma’s flowers and the small patch of lawn. Grandpa tinkered and planted in the garden for years. It seemed like he was always shifting rocks and making it bigger. Then the garden stopped getting bigger. Then the garden began shrinking. The shrinking of the garden was the first sign that Grandpa was beginning to wear out, although we didn’t know it at the time.

In my dream he was the Grandpa of my childhood. He was all the things I’ve told and more that I’m unable to describe. I woke missing him so much that I wanted to cry.

Sometimes my children surprise me delightfully. This morning Kiki decided she wanted to play with Polly Pockets. Since all the Pollys now belong to Gleek, this meant that Kiki and Gleek played together happily all morning long. Let me repeat that for emphasis. Gleek and Kiki spent ALL MORNING shut together in their room without any squabbles at all. I kept close tabs to make sure it stayed that way, but I didn’t need to really. It was wonderful. It was so wonderful that I folded Kiki’s laundry for her (a chore she hates) as a way to thank her for being so nice. Around lunchtime I carefully separated the two because I wanted them to carry away happy memories of the morning.

It worked out well, because at about that time Gleek’s friends started showing up at the door. Within 20 minutes Gleek had acquired three friends to play with. She held court up in her room completely happy to be surrounded by people. Kiki was happy too. She pulled out the art project that she has been working on and kept me company while I worked in the kitchen. Two of Gleeks friends had arrived shepherded by older brothers who wanted to play with Link, so he had company too. Patches played solo for awhile before joining the party in Gleeks room.

The best part for me was that they were all so happily occupied that I was on call even less than usual. While they were all playing I used our very dusty ice cream maker to make frozen yogurt. It’s yummy, but it was lots of work and more expensive than buying ice cream. I’m starting to wonder if I should bother to continue to give cupboard space to the ice cream maker. Whether or not I keep the ice cream maker, it was really nice to be relaxed enough that I was interested in experimental cooking rather than survival cooking.

A couple of days ago I went to the library. Among the books I brought home was The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. I picked it up on a whim because I’d heard of it somewhere before and because it has “mermaid” in the title. I began reading and I have to say that I am very impressed with the power of Ms. Kidd’s prose. She really knows how to create images. Unfortunately the image I was seeing framed was that of a woman with a wonderful life, a beautiful house, and an amazing husband who was disatisfied and didn’t know why. Judging from the cover flap this woman does not confront the “why” until she has torn her life apart with adultery. I didn’t want to read that kind of pain. I flipped to the last chapter where I discovered that she returns to her husband and they rebuild their life together. The protagonist makes clear that the love is different than before, but that she is better able to love because she is her own person rather than an annex of her husband. I can agree with that last bit, but there are so many better ways to find yourself than to damage everyone around you. Particularly when what you are destroying is part of how you want to redefine yourself.

I won’t be reading the middle section of The Mermaid Chair. The first chapter and the epilogue tell me enough story that I feel no need to slog through the painful middle.