Stitches! Dougnuts! Movies!

Saturday night. It's been a heck of a week. Tuesday night we got a call from Avery's Activity Days leader saying she'd had "a little bit of an accident" on a bike riding jaunt the girls took. We got there in time to see the paramedics loading Ave onto a stretcher so she could be transported to the hospital. Four hours and twenty two stitches later, she emerged from the emergency room with a leg brace and crutches. We're super grateful that things were not worse, but at the same time, I think Ave would agree when I say, the whole situation kind of blows. Ah well, we'll focus on our blessings and not the suckiness of the situation.

We've all been homebound for a couple of days, but today, we decided to get out of the house and went to Clare, MI to visit the famous Cops and Doughnuts bakery. It's about thirty miles away, which is a long way to drive for a doughnut or a cookie, but the drive is nice and the baked goods really are top notch. A visit to C and D was on our summer to-do list as is swimming at the Delta College pool (check), visiting Lake Michigan and Mackinac Island (not yet), and making Jell-o (the girls' idea - no idea why or why they haven't done it yet since it takes five minutes to do). We've made a concerted effort to do stuff in and around the area and to make the most of each day. Suzy and I decided together that we didn't want summer to slip away and for us to feel like we hadn't actually done anything. Winter really did a number on us, and we feel like we need to get the most summeriness out of summer that we can. So it's lakes, ice cream parlors, and bike rides for us until September at least.

My Art of the American Film class starts on Tuesday. I'm organizing it by genre, so we'll spend a week on westerns, a week on crime films (film noirs to be specific), musicals, melodramas, comedy, horror, and sci fi. We'll watch a classic example of the genre on Tuesday and discuss an element of film (mis en scene, cinematography, screenwriting, editing, etc.) and then on Thursday, we'll watch a more contemporary or somehow alternate version of the genre. So, for instance, this Tuesday, we'll watch John Ford's Stagecoach - perhaps the most prototypical western of all time. Directed by John Ford? Yep. Starring John Wayne? Oh yeah. Monument Valley? Duh. Then on Thursday, we'll watch John Sayles' meditation on borders and the image of the Western Lawman in 1996's Lone Star. For musicals, we'll do Singin' In The Rain on Tuesday and Moulin Rouge! and Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog on Thursday. Should be fun.

I'm keeping my expectations very low for this class. I'm not anticipating a bunch of rabid cinephiles. Delta has consistently disappointed me in that regard. I expect a bunch of bored, pretty lazy people who are taking the class because they need three more credits to graduate and then move on to Central or Saginaw Valley to major in business administration or something like that. I figure if I keep my expectations low, I may be pleasantly surprised rather than bitterly disappointed.

Speaking of movies and Clare, Michigan, I am suddenly obsessed with the Ideal movie theater. It's basically just across the street from Cops and Doughnuts and looks like this:

 Or, a little more realistically, this:

But look how long it's been around:

(This movie came out in 1954, but the theater has been open since 1930.)

I think this is the inside of the theater itself. It looks like the church I went to with my grandparents in Pleasantview, Idaho. Or maybe a set piece from Hoosiers or something.

Anyway, it just looks original and untouched, and I think there's something cool and charming about that. Who knows what the actual movie going experience is like? I'd like to find out. The theater is two doors down from this place:

It's tiny and looks greasy, but I think it would feel very summery to grab a burger and Coke at The Whitehouse Restaurant around sixish and then mosey over to the Ideal for an early show of something fun. At the moment, Transformers 4 is playing there. This means I won't be visiting the Ideal until this time passes. Like a kidney stone, like a fever, like a case of the runs, Transformers 4 must also pass. It's three hours long and directed by Michael Bay. As the comedienne Rita Rudner once said, "I don't even want to do anything that feels good for that long." A three hour Michael Bay film is like an seven course meal prepared by Oscar the Grouch. It's a lot but not of anything good, you know? Anyway, I'd definitely like to make one more trip to Clare before summer is over. It will be like going on a date to 1954.

What else is on our list? Plenty. As we get to it, I'll post about it here.

Fathers' Day

Sylvia Plath used to get up at 5 a.m. to write for a few crucial hours before her kids woke up and she had to go about the business of being a mother. She called that period of time "the blue hour" because when she was writing at that time, it was winter in London where she was living and the light she wrote by was blue. That little sliver of time was was when she could get stuff done. When it comes to this blog, my blue hour is Sunday afternoon. We come home, eat, change clothes, and then spend a few hours just decompressing before it's time to get ready for dinner and then bed. Some people nap, others draw or read. Sometimes I blog.

So today is Fathers' Day. I have been thinking a lot about Dennis in the last couple of weeks. I still really miss that guy, and I'm sad that Parker will never have any memory of him as her grandpa. I am glad that Maryn and Avery were old enough before he passed to remember him teasing them, calling them "turkey lips," bringing them toys, buying them pie. I miss him for my own sake too. I just miss being able to call him and know that he probably had the answer - to whatever question. I had a builder, a plumber, an  electrician, a mechanic, a financial expert, a negotiator, a professional bargain hunter, and a friend with zero tolerance for BS on call at all times and they were all the same guy. I know I'm a sentimental sap but this video produced by Dove Skin Care of all things just breaks me apart every time I see it. It gets to me because it so succinctly (sixty seconds) summarizes the role that I think dads are supposed to play - they are there to comfort, guide, rescue, help, and celebrate at every turn. The kid on the monkey bars kicks his legs and panics thinking that tragedy is about to strike. His dad comes in and rescues him from his tiny emergency and assures him that not only will things be okay but it wasn't that scary of a thing in the first place. As a forty year old man, I still wish I had that to rely on.

The other side of this is that I am a dad. I get sad that Dennis isn't around any more, but it's important that I don't get caught up in that for too long because me relying on my father is not the point of my life any more. I have three incandescent daughters (the little and the not-so-little), and that opportunity is just the honor of my life. Each one of them is so maddening in her own unique way, and yet when I look past the daily complaints and irritations, I see that each one of them is literally spectacular in her goodness, her creativity, her sensitivity, her capacity for joy, her ambition, her talent, her vulnerability. I just have so much admiration and love for each one of them. I'm just a doof who doesn't feel much wiser than I ever did, but I hope that I'll manage to not blow it as a father and that my daughters will reach adulthood feeling like they have in me someone who comforts, guides, rescues, helps, and celebrates them with love and compassion.

I'm making myself tear up, so I need to move on to another topic.

In other news, tomorrow and Tuesday are my last days of class for Spring semester. It was a quick seven weeks, and it's ending just as I feel we're starting to hit our stride. Ah, well. Week after next, I'll start teaching a twice-a-week summer class, The Art of the American Film. I'm excited because watching and talking about movies are among my favorite things in the world, as you know, but also because I really need a break from teaching composition. I feel like this whole year has been me wandering through the junkyard of every approach and method I've ever been taught and randomly picking up an assignment here, a technique there, and just slapping together some Frankenstein monster of pedagogy. Nothing I've done in the last year teaching-wise has felt complete or unified. I need to take a break for a little bit. I need some time to decompress and think about the best way to move forward in the fall. Teaching normally gives me a lot of satisfaction and purpose, and I don't like feeling as though this important component of my adult life has been shorting out and fizzling for nearly a year. Time to recharge and try again later.

I just finished reading Dave Cullen's book of investigative non-fiction, Columbine. My pal Angela Hallstrom suggested it in a comment on one of my previous posts and since she has excellent taste, I gave it a whirl. I started it partly because I was looking for a new non-fiction book to use in my 112 classes but also because I have always had some kind of investment in that terrible day. My cousins went to Columbine and my lovely cousin Kristin was in the cafeteria when it all began. I remember coming home for lunch and finding my mother standing right in front of the TV watching helicopter footage of kids running out of the school. She said, "I think this is where John's kids go to school." It was a horrible day.

Like everyone else, I've heard every story and myth associated with what happened. The Trenchcoat Mafia, the cruelty of jocks as they persecuted these lonely kids, the girl who wouldn't deny Jesus even with a gun pointed at her face. I wanted to know what really happened. I wanted to understand, if possible, why any of it happened. The book is one of the clearest, most thorough pieces of research writing I've ever read. It clips along, never exploiting or exaggerating, never falling into the potential trap of sentimentality, allowing the drama of the actual events and the power of good writing and research to drive the book like an engine.

It is excruciating to read, and honestly, if I didn't feel morally obligated to finish it, I might have abandoned it at times. One of the killers was an actual psychopath - no real human emotions, no sense of empathy or compassion for other people. The other was an extraordinarily depressed, lonely, impressionable kid who might have either just killed himself or done nothing at all without the prompting of the other one. Their sickness led to an incalculable amount of sadness and suffering. It's hard to read about what those boys thought and felt but harder to read about the normal kids and parents and administrators who had to deal with the aftermath of their choices.

I thought about my cousin Kristin, her siblings, my Uncle John and Aunt Alanah a lot throughout the book. Even though the book actually made me sad and blue for much of the time I was reading it (and believe me, reading the book does not make teaching at a community college any easier or comfortable - also, it is definitely not the book to be reading when you are having trouble with your kids), I think now of the last time we were in the West. We stopped in Logan, Utah to see Suzy's old stomping grounds. Kristin lives in Logan with her husband, and we went out to dinner with her at a restaurant called La Tormenta. It was loud, crowed, chaotic, and not what you might call super-sanitary - but the food, oh my, the food was wonderful. And so was Kristin. She is smart and lovely and funny and good. According to the book, the majority of the Columbine survivors have moved on and are happy, healthy, well-adjusted people. They're bored with talking about that day in April. It's the past and they are busy living their lives. That gives me hope. Kristin in that loud Mexican restaurant gives me hope.

Well, the blue hour is over. Kids are in the kitchen staring into the fridge and, as a good dad, I have to go intervene before they spoil their dinner.

72 Hours

Sunday night. It's been an intense couple of days, so the girls are all in bed and Suzy and I are sitting here feeling the steam slowly rise off our foreheads.

Friday, Suzy and I spent the day prepping to go on a camping trip with some friends from our former ward. We haven't been camping since Maryn was less than a year old. It was an overnight trip to Massacre Rocks with my brother Jason's family and my parents. Maryn screamed from about 11 p.m. until about 2 or 3 a.m. so it was miserable and we haven't done it since.

So this was our first foray back into the world of wood smoke, Deep Woods Off, and s'mores. My friend's dad is the CIO (Chief Information Officer) for Dow Chemical, and so happens to own about a hundred acres of woods outside of Sanford, Michigan where he's built a pole barn and dining pavilion, a lake, a shooting range, and a camp clearing with four little shed cabins. Every so often, my pal David invites friends from the ward or work or whatever to do a overnight camp out on his dad's property.

So we bought a tent, packed some food and clothes, bought some serious bug spray (apparently, mosquitoes find Suzy absolutely delectable - but then, I know how they feel), and after the girls got home from school, we met up with the other families who were invited and drove out.

It was fun. Everyone got along, there was plenty of food, and the weather was perfect. Parker in particular had the best time. There were plenty of other kids to watch out for her and so she basically got to wander around the clearing with a flashlight and ride the Gators and just have an adventure-a-rama without a ton of parental interference. She was in heaven.

Sleeping in a tent, even on an air mattress, is lame. It's cold, uncomfortable, and you wake up damp no matter what. It's the part I like least about camping. Everything's fine and good until you wake up in the morning and realize you slept like crap and you're stuffed up and moist. If there's a specific reason why I don't like to camp, that's probably it.

Anyway, despite that, we had a good time and Parker had a full-on freak out when it was time to go. She just wants to live at the camp site for the rest of her life, port-a-pottys be darned.

After we got back from camping, we unpacked, cleaned up, and decompressed until it was time to go to the evening session of Stake Conference. The youth of the ward were invited to this meeting so Maryn was coming along. Avery stayed behind and had her first real paying babysitting gig watching three of our neighbor's kids along with Parker while the parents attended conference with us. She managed just fine.

Then today, in the afternoon, we wanted to get out of town (again, I guess), so we took a Sunday drive to Saginaw Bay/Lake Huron and picked up shells and waded in the water for a while. It was powerfully hot but fun to see something new. We haven't been up to that part of the area yet, and I always like seeing new things.

We couldn't stay long, however, because we had been invited to dinner at a member of the Bishopric's house. They're a lovely family with four daughters and a boy, two horses, a dozen chickens, a few pigs, rabbits, newborn kittens, turkeys, and one goat named Gertie. The dinner was nice and they're fun, engaging people to talk to. They lived in Bangkok for a couple of years, he reads a lot of history books, she ran the Boston Marathon while on a break from radiation therapy for breast cancer - they have lots of interesting stories. Once again, getting Parker in the car following a bonanza of fun involving animals and a seemingly endless supply of kids to play with was a chore.

It goes without saying is that, at the end of a day like today, everyone was filthy. Showers for everyone and then bed. I'm sure they're all totally passed out by now because it's been a busy 72 hours, you know? Me? I'm exhausted, but the season premiere of Food Network Star is on tonight and I have to keep my priorities straight. I do have 14 papers left to grade, but there's always tomorrow, right?