LTDL--Steel Guitar, Adult Swim and Other Pleasures of the Hearth

I ain’t been blogging because I been writing an essay which I hope to submit for an essay contest. Right now I can’t decide whether to write this, which I want to, or to work on that. Think I’ll work on that.

I did and submitted it. It’s bits and pieces from this blog, and I enter it here for those of you who didn’t read my previous blog.

Steel Guitar, Adult Swim and Other Pleasures of the Hearth

Do you know how bored I am right now? Painfully bored. Every night it’s the same old thing. I come home from talking about books and getting free drink refills at the local fast food place with my best friend, Steve, plop on my parents’ loveseat and feel a canyon of boredom in my heart. Shows like King of the Hill, Family Guy, Futurama, American Dad, etc., don’t help much. I even played steel guitar for about an hour. I’m working on "Cold, Cold Heart." But it would be so great to have something really interesting to do—it would be great to have my son Ricky here. Going through a divorce is like becoming single again. Remember what it was like to be single, without kids? Your time is your own. You can watch what you want on TV, without having to censor or turn it over to Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! or Yo Gabba Gabba! You can stroll through stores without having to avoid aisles with candy, toys, sugary drinks or blue cereals. You can have an uninterrupted conversation on the phone! But being a parent is not boring, that’s for sure. You may want to drown your kids and actually think that prison is an attractive alternative to parenting, but you are not bored.
I bought the steel guitar on Amazon. I started out trying to learn it about an hour a day, but it quickly degenerated down to fifteen minutes every few days, after the discipline of practice superseded the pleasure of discovery. But every time I hear good steel guitar or read or see somebody doing something great on film or in print, I get encouraged to pull my otherwise channel-surfing butt up to steel guitar and play. Or when I tell people I’m learning steel guitar, I prove it that night.
Ricky was here for a month—what a miracle that was from beginning to end! Let my people go, Pharaoh!—and she did. See, my business in Poland crashed last year. And Vie—my nickname for my wife Violet because she’s contentious—borrowed money for me to leave, though she wouldn’t lend me money to stay. But I wasn’t going to come here to Arizona unless it was with Ricky. It’s too long to describe how I wouldn’t let her buy me a ticket and her violent freak-out sessions. But finally she agreed for him to come with me for a month; then I would fly back to Poland with him and come back here by myself. The flight here was eventful. He is four-and-a-half and long out of diapers but pooped his pants on the plane. I kept smelling something like a fart and finally pulled his waistband away from his back and saw it. To the bathroom we went. But he’s claustrophobic and didn’t want the door closed and started screaming. I left the door half open, but the screaming continued, to the point of passengers complaining. The flight attendants asked me with pursed lips if everything was ok. I got his pants off and his butt cleaned, and through the ordeal, we started praying, and I kept telling him it was ok to be afraid and that God and Jesus were there. “I afraid,” he kept saying, “I afraid.” I hadn’t brought him any clean underwear, and he wanted his underwear back on. So I had to wash them in the sink and put them back on him. When all this was done, he had begun to calm down. “See,” I said, “now it’s ok. God helped us.” “Thank you, Jesus,” he said. We went back to our seats, where I opened the candy hoard and let him choose.
It beat the hell out of any quiet night I’ve ever had at home, that’s for sure.
When we got to Arizona, “Uncle” Steve had a gift waiting for him—Warren Waters, who looks like the Terminator in something like a space suit, on a quad. In Poland, Ricky had been asking for a robot on a motorcycle and I had no idea what he meant. But evidently this fit the bill--Steve had more or less bought it over another on a whim, uncertain that Ricky would like it and if he had made a good choice. Steve presented it and asked if Ricky if he wanted it or if he should give it to somebody else. He didn’t say anything, just pointed to his chest. You couldn’t get that toy away from Ricky, and I was in a real panic when I started packing a month later and couldn’t find it immediately.
We—Steve, me and Ricky—stayed up every night until about 2 a.m. Ricky and I slept on the fold-out couch. I would wake up first, feeling like the early bird mother, at about 10:30 am. You may think it criminal to keep a kid up that late, and I would not disagree. I tried to put him to bed earlier a couple of nights and he just lay there for an hour and a half, requesting endless drinks, snacks and trips to the bathroom. So from then on he would stay up with us watching Adult Swim cartoons, me trying to edit content by changing the channel or asking him a question or commenting on something he was doing at the controversial moments.
After breakfast—sometimes before—it was time to go swimming, the last thing I wanted to do in 115 degree heat. When we first started swimming, he couldn’t. While here, people kept supplying him with pool toys, all of which helped him. When he had a squirt gun in his hand, he would swim to me, first 10 feet, then the breadth of the pool.
He would not let go of the gun, and he would not swim to me without it. Towards the end of the month, he could swim like a frog the length of the pool. When I told my stepfather about it, he didn’t think it was much of an achievement. Any kid can do that, he said. But I thought it was great. We often swam in the evenings, too.
Afternoons we would do whatever our hands or butts found to do. The first day we went to the local park and he ran through the Rainbird sprinklers—first time in his life.
I flew him back to Poland and stayed there one week closing down my business and tidying up my affairs of ten years living there. That morning, when I woke up at 3 a.m. to catch the shuttle bus to Warsaw airport, I had a distinct desire not to go. It turned into a nagging doubt about whether what I was doing was right. I thought the plane would crash over Germany because God just didn’t support my activity. It was long after I was back in Arizona that I got away from that feeling.
There isn’t anything I miss in Poland that isn’t connected with Ricky. My fondest memories involve things like pulling him to church on a child’s sled then coming home and making waffles with applesauce.
The Phoenix area is great to be back in. I love the expansive blue sky here—most days in Poland are one big featureless cloud. I love the dirty little taco shops here. I like supermarkets, which live up to their name. I like how buildings and spaces here (except the dirty little taco shops) are carpeted, air conditioned, spacious, clean and well-lit. I like being with my family, and if it weren’t for their support of me splitting from Vie, I have no idea what I would do or where I would be. I like people watching. I like the
metro train and other public transportation, which is where I people watch. I like the TV. I like NPR. I like the New York Times and can get it and a good cup of coffee and an old-fashioned doughnut at my supermarket, with a clean, well-lit smile.
I took my wedding band off three weeks ago and at first it felt like my finger was naked. I guess I took it off thinking to hasten the process of divorce. But I’m feeling less and less naked now: I’m going to Poland for Christmas for two weeks, where there will be Ricky. And there will be sleds and church and snow outside as I cook something up inside. And we will talk about Arizona and about sprinklers and about swimming and about Yo Gabba Gabba! and about blue cereals and about doing it again.
Meantime, I gotta go either surf or play steel.

I’ll let you know if I win.