A year since my mom passed away, and my Harry Potter wand

So today is the one year anniversary of my mom passing away. I thought I should write something about it though I can’t really think of anything to say.

The day was hard. I got a call from my sister telling me to come from work because she wasn’t looking good. The previous few nights were surreal since she had gone from still able to get around to not eating and being incoherent. On a night I was with her she would ask more than once to get up and be moved to another part of the room. I’d help her up and get her situated on the couch, then she’d want to be moved to a chair, and then just stand and hug me. Once when I was holding her up she seemed to be scraping her fingers on the collar of my shirt. Since even at this point she was still able to joke around I asked her if she was trying to get my shirt off. She whispered no, and said that I was just so big before resting her head on my chest. At one point when she was sitting on the couch and muttering to herself, I went through the barrage of questions relating to her comfort and what drugs she needed. She kept shaking her head. Since I was all out of options I said, “You uh… you want to go outside and have a cigarette?” In a high pitched voice she moaned, “Oh yeah…” and smiled. It was cute. Smoking cigarettes on the floor of the living room while watching Donahue is how I remember her. She would get up in the morning, get ready for work, clean the house, then sit down infront of the heating vent in the living room with her coffee and ashtray to watch talk shows. She was never a believer in turning on lights in the house if it was daytime. So even though the living room was dark she would do everything by whatever shaft of light creeped in through from the kitchen.

When I showed up mom was laying on her side. She was completely out, sleeping quietly. Every once and a while her breathing would slow then stop which was really creepy. I sat on the bed next to her and said hi, stroked her hair, and made some joke about how her favorite kid was here. Judy and her grand daughter were there as well so I talked to them for a few seconds. Then mom stopped breathing. The hospice nurse said that you used morphine to help them breathe, so when she started making quiet choking sounds I told kim and she ran to get the drops. Then she was gone. I can still remember her sleeping face vividly. I can also remember how weak the sunlight was when I went out in the snow to call my dad. I remember the church bells drifting in softly from the main street that it was 2:00pm. I remember the looks on my kids faces as I had to tell them the bad news and explain what angels were. And I still remember how the smoke from her cigarette would swirl around in the ray of sunlight from the kitchen and mix with the glowing dust particles.

Since then I’ve been expecting every holiday to be more and more depressing. Every regular day after her passing felt like she was just out of town and too old to understand how to use email. Since I was in  Pipestone with erin’s cousins for Thanksgiving and in Kentucky over Christmas, it still sort of feels that way. The one thing that keeps reminding me that she’s really gone is when I have to throw out some broken toy or book that she had bought for my kids. I’ll think I can’t believe the kids wrecked this already, Mom only bought it a year ago. And then I realize that all the little things she bought in passing for my kids are slowly going to disappear, because she’s not around to drop off any more new things. So suddenly I feel like I need to hold on to a beat up DVD of “Big Comfy Couch”, or a squirt gun she picked up from Walgreens.

In other news I ordered a Harry Potter wand on New Years Eve. I did it because my niece and I have a Harry Potter thing going, she has a wand and I didn’t want to be left out. It arrived today while I was trying to think of what to write for this entry. I took it out of the box expecting it to be made of real wood, or at least part of it. But of course it’s all plastic. As I was thinking, “well that was expensive for no reason” my sister sent me a text message that buzzed on my desk. I could read it from where I was standing, she was letting me know that at this time a year ago mom had passed away. I looked at my wand again, then pointed it toward a lamp in my office and said in an authoritative voice, “Luminos!” The lamp was already lit. That doesn’t mean the spell didn’t work…

Birthday Party and Minnehaha falls

I’m awkward. When I’m around kids who are in their teens I get awkward, when I’m around people from other countries I’m awkward, and when I’m around Audrey’s friends parents I’m awkward. I think it’s because I feel like I’m being judged, or just really aware of how I come off to people. I have skinny legs and arms, but a pear-shaped body. I’m covered in tattoos and have a bulb-ish head. When I’m talking to someone who makes me feel awkward I’m aware of how my pants hang below my gut and how my t-shirt drapes off my beer tits. So it’s hard to be confident and relaxed when I can envision and feel all this going on simultaneously. That and I refuse to fall into the idle chatter that most parents do when they attend their child’s activities. It’s partly pride, but mostly that I’m really bad at it. I hate sports so I can’t talk about the “Vikings”, and when someone says something about the weather I say, “Yup.” It’s the weather. Were both experiencing it. There isn’t really much I can inform them about it that they don’t already know.

All this came up like it always does when I dropped Audrey off at one of her classmates birthday parties. It was a situation where the parents could drop the kids off and the hosts would handle everything from there. I was wearing tan shorts and a bright green t-shirt. I had sneakers on with tennis socks (no, they didn’t have little puff-balls hanging off the back of them) and a Summit Brewery hat that says, “Beer is my life”. I was basically the ideal of a suburban dork. That and I had my big camera with me to put the cherry-on-top of looking like a tourist. Erin and I walked in to drop Audrey off and thank God she can small talk like a champ. I floated around practically hiding behind her with a moronic smile pasted across my face until we could leave. We had Margo with us so we took her to a coffee shop down the block. A coffee shop filled with hipsters and rock-a-billies. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the place stopped and looked at us when we walked in. Even Erin noticed it. While we ordered I looked around and saw one guy older than us there, but he was the type that had long frazzled hair, a dirty shirt with some message on it calling out to us from the ’70s, and was angrily banging out some manifesto on his laptop. Of course he fit in where I wouldn’t. He looked insane. When you’re young and you can hang out at a place where the insane reside you’re pretty proud of it. I remember going to Muddy Waters all the time in high school trying to look relaxed with the homeless guys that would come in from the cold. We knew them by name. When they’d shout something for no reason, or smell, we’d look knowingly to each other and say, “Looks like William forgot to wipe again.” We laugh and clink our awesomely dirty and chipped mugs together in a superior fashion.

Then we took Margo to Minnehaha park to find the falls. It was hot. The sun was still over the trees and it lit everyone’s sweat up as they biked or strolled their infants along the trails. I had to drop off Erin and Margo because the little one was going to pee her pants. I was getting crabby because I had eaten leftover pizza before leaving. So I was tired from all the salt, feeling greased, my stomach was rolling around and I was hot, so damn hot. I finally parked and fought with the ticket machine to put in the car window. Some other woman had just got hers and was standing around reading her ticket to make sure it wasn’t screwed up. “You got everything figured out there?” I asked. She said this machine was so weird she can’t figure out how long she can park there without getting a ticket. I hummed and hit buttons randomly. After it ate my dollar it spit out a piece of paper that looked like a receipt. I looked at it. “Christ, you’re right.” I muttered. We made a few jokes as her husband walked up. He looked like he was in his mid ‘fifties and wore a hawaiian shirt. He was balding but made up for it with an enormous soul patch under his bottom lip. The three of us talked and after studying our paper we decided that it looked like we got an hour. The woman made some comment about it ruining my afternoon if I got a ticket. I said I drove here in a minivan, I’ve already hit bottom.

We saw the falls which was ok. Maybe it was my mood at the time but after looking at it for a couple minutes what do you do? Just stand there and keep looking at it? It’s not like it takes your breath away because it’s some awesome force of nature that inspires fear and stirs up some primal urge to run and protect your children. It just sort of spills over as you would expect it to and trickles out into a really shallow stream. I noticed other suburban dads floating around with their cameras (damnit), along with boys in really loud shirts crawling where they shouldn’t and pretty teenaged girls sitting on the bridge doing their homework. That was probably the most annoying. They would sit on the bridge that’s crammed with people and serenely do their homework as if they were sitting at the library. It was the pretty-high-school-girl equivalent of guys who sit in coffee shops reading Kafka, or quietly writing their novels. But more dangerous. What if one of the millions of spazzy kids escaping from their parents knocked one of her books off the ledge? Or one of the boys in loud shirts bumped her as they chased and wrestled? I realized that I couldn’t help her. It’s the circle of life. Girls on bridges will have something land in the water like guys in coffeeshops will have their laptops stolen when the go pee.

As we walked back I counted three families where the father would play music on his iPhone as they made their way through the crowd. Again, maybe it was my mood, but I hadn’t been this annoyed in public in years. It makes no sense. I get it, it’s like carrying a boom box, but it’s not. A tinny string of sound floats out from the small iPhone speaker that no one would decipher unless it’s a song you’ve heard a hundred times, and at that point it’s probably be better just to hum it. And from what I could tell it was hip-hop. So it was even more bizarre since it involves bass. I just couldn’t understand how they didn’t feel silly. But then again, I stood by with an expression of disgust in my beer hat, shorts, and tennis socks while cradling my gigantic camera.

Erin sent me in to pick up Audrey. I was five minutes early, but figured things were already done. To my horror they were still opening presents. I was there with one other parent. We watched from the side with arms folded. She made some small conversation with me about how she tried to read a book at the coffeeshop down the block. I said she probably fit in about as good as Erin and I had. While she talked I saw her glance down a few times at my tattoos. I had spent the day clinging to them as the last proof that I really wasn’t a suburban dad. But as I talked to this mom the realization set in that I’m no different than her. If anything I’m more like the bald guy in the hawaiian shirt with the soul patch. He probably wakes up every morning smiling smugly to himself as he shaves everywhere on his face but there. Sculpting it as he sculpts his pride, whispering to himself ‘I’m not like the rest of the guys in accounting, they look at this thing, this beautiful thing, and know I’m interesting.’

We stood around for a while. Some dad wearing a Vikings jersey walked in and instantly struck up a conversation with the host-dad about the game that apparently had happened that day. I listened to them for a few moments. I could feel my beer tits resting on top of my folded arms. I turned to the mom next to me, “Really hot out.” A smile snapped on her face. “I know!” God help me. “I was out at Minnehaha falls with my wife and daughter and man, it was really hot.”

Great, Great, Grandpa John

This is my Great, Great Grandpa John Beyer, and from everything I can gather from this photo he’s fucking tits.

Fist off he’s short. A tiny, little, grumpy man. He’s frowning and looking like he’s annoyed he has to sit and pose for this new-fangled camera thing when he’d rather spend this time standing in the middle of his corn field with the same expression, staring off into the horizon. He looks like the kind of guy that came from a world where if you wanted a farm, you had to walk up to one you liked and overpower the previous owner to claim it for your own. And when some young jerk does the same to him he wouldn’t mind, because he is aware of the circle of life.

Look at how he’s dressed! This photo was taken because of some official announcement about an improvement in his town that he was a part of. According to my dad he was considered wealthy and an ‘figure of note’ in that society. But look at him- he’s dressed like he’s carrying a huge hunting knife under that jacket. And the other guys are wearing fancy hats and fur coats, but not my Grandpa. That mother fucker is just wearing a stocking cap, and a mustache that he’s too busy to trim like those other dandy fops. If they were all on a trip and their horse cart flipped over, stranding them in the middle of a snowy forrest, the others would whine and huddle together for warmth while my grandpa would slip off into the woods at night to kill a buck with his bear hands- springing shirtless from the trees, wild eyed and yelling. Then he’d sleep in it’s carcass and eat the beasts flesh from the inside…

And then I put down the camera and declared it the ‘thunderdome’…

Yeah, that’s me on a toilet, taken by my wife. I don’t have any relevant pictures to put on  here and Kathy said it’s probably the best I’m ever going to look in a photo, so here you go.

Not a whole lot going on this week. I’ve been working at my new job and really liking it so far. I get to focus mainly on design and less (pretty much no) building out of sites. I’ve had to get used to waking up before the sun and drinking break room coffee again, but it’s actually good break room coffee. The offices are kind of in the middle of no where, so I’ve already picked out my daily lunch at the cafeteria- A salad with cheese, blue cheese dressing, black and green olives, more cheese and onions. Yeah. I eat that. Don’t you judge me. Erin says I’m basically just eating cheese for lunch. I don’t care. I also don’t care that people clearly can smell the onions on my breath when I talk.

I’ve also been trying out all types of men’s fragrances. It started out with Old Spice, but after the success of their commercials I felt like they didn’t need me anymore. I’ve taken them as far as I could, and it was time for me to move on. But since then I have been wearing English Leather. Erin can’t stand it. Especially since I put on a ton because if I can’t smell it, then why am I wasting my time. So, in keeping with the theme of old cologne, Erin picked up a bottle of Eternity for me. At first I didn’t like it. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but it smells like I lost a wrestling match with a woman sporting mall hair. But the bottle came from Costco, so it’s gigantic and I can’t just not use it. I’m getting used to it.

My sister had a birthday last Monday. She was feeling down because it was the first birthday she was going to have where mom wasn’t around. I feel the same way, except that my birthday was never really a big deal for me. I’m going to be more bothered by holidays like Halloween where she would bake pumpkin cookies and help us carve pumpkins. I had mentioned it around Audrey and Margo, and Audrey said that she wanted to get Kim a present. Margo wanted to as well but she also wanted to throw Kim a surprise party. So the plan went into action. Audrey wanted to get Kim a mug that she could draw on, and Margo wanted to get a locket with a photo of mom on one side, and Margo on the other. We picked them up and contacted Emily and Brian about when we could sneak in to decorate their house and hide for the surprise.

But kim, con-sarnit, decided to take us all out to dinner and ruined our chance to surprise her. Margo was really excited about it so we had to think of something else. Erin thought up the idea that we could put all the decorations on the kids and have them walk in shouting happy birthday and holding gifts. I asked Brian if we’d be able to sneak the kids in through the back door while Erin and I came in through the front claiming to have a baby sitter for the night. It worked. We dropped the kids off in the alley and dressed them up in balloons tied together with floss, and had them hold a “Happy Birthday” banner. Emily guided them into the back door to hide in the kitchen. And no sooner had we lied to kim about out kids where abouts than they jumped out screaming. It was pretty cute. We ate at McCoy’s in St. Louis Park and had a balloon competition afterwards.

The balloon competition was something Brian started years ago during Emily’s birthdays. He would bounce it and the goal was to keep it from touching the floor. Kind of weird, but it entertained us for hours on end. We did that with the kids and the whole family got involved, except that we were all trying to keep multiple balloons up in the air at the same time. After getting it on video I put my camera away and shouted that this is a balloon thunder-dome, and the penalty was death. The kids screamed and had fun. It was nice. It felt like the old days when we would all get together with mom.

Margo talking to Kim and a CPAP