Snapshot

We have been passing Bill Bryson books back and forth the past six months, Dad and I.  It began with A Walk in the Woods:  Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, and then I gave him The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid for Christmas.  We continued with Neither Here Nor There:  Travels in Europe, and Dad just finished armchair-traveling via Bryson's memoir of a trek through Australia, In a Sunburned Country, one of his Father's Day presents from me this year.  A Short History of Nearly Everything is on a shelf here too, waiting for my next trip home.  We have both loved the Appalachian Trail book the best--neither of us wanted it to end--and agree that hiking it would be amazing if one could stay safe while doing so.  (I keep it as a "someday" goal, along with hiking the Camino de Santiago.)  Today Dad is alternately reading Bryson's The Road to Little Dribbling:  More Notes from a Small Island, baseball game-watching, and barbecuing with my mom, brothers, and my brothers' wives and kids.  I myself hope to manage to get home both next month and in August for the next two meetings of the Dad-and-Daughter Book Club. 

Home Again

Monday morning, Mom and I drove out to see the house we lived in in the 1980s and the one I always dream of and tend to remember as Home.  What to say except that upon returning here Tuesday, the hometown city council received a note from me with mentions of "houses that look like they should be condemned," "trash and BLIGHT," and "the worst-looking street in town."  Oh, my heart!  

There are only seven homes on the tiny sloped street I grew up on, and mine was the house at the very top.  This Monday, by the time Mom and I reached the house Mom's great-aunt Clarice once called "a doll house--just a doll house, Christine!"--I was so shocked by the appearance of the state of the first six houses, the current condition of my own former home barely made an impression.  Mom didn't even feel safe the few minutes we spent on the street before walking back to where we'd parked the car.

I have already dreamed of it twice since then:  In one dream, there was a sense of danger in the air and I knew something bad was about to happen somewhere on the street, and in the other, Mom and I were sitting where we'd parked the car Monday and seeing our former street as it had looked when the town was first founded.  In that gift of a dream, what is now the literal junkyard at the foot of the street was still all meadow, and part of the creek that winds through town opened onto a pond. 

Seeing it again has made my beautiful childhood there seem even more incredible.  "When my family lived there in the 80s," I recounted to the city council, "It was such a pretty and well-kept little street.  Good people, nice neighbors, pretty houses and yards, roses and Lilac bushes, clean porches. . . .Seeing it this past weekend was truly saddening.  If I had the money to throw at it, I'd love to buy it all up and completely restore it to its 1980s sweetness.  It really used to be a charming little family street."  Oh, truly!  What fun--what glorious FUN--it would be to play Daddy Warbucks and bring the street back to life. . .repair and repaint the houses, remove all the trash and junk cars, redo the landscaping, fix all the broken fencing,  replant the roses that used to separate a couple of the yards. . . .Ah!  I had expected it to look different, of course--twenty-seven years have passed since we lived there--but not dilapidated and depressed.  Maybe someday, it will take a turn for the better.  I have been telling my parents since I was a kid that if our former house ever came up for sale and I had the money to buy it, I would really be tempted, and oh my, yes:  That one and all the rest, by God, so that someday another almost-five-year-old girl could move into a blue "doll house" and sit inside one of her neighbor's heavenly-smelling Lilac bushes with her new friends and use another neighbor's fallen rose petals as faux makeup and pretend her parents' blue and pink gingham front porch is the judges' station she needs to acknowledge before beginning her Olympic gymnastics floor routine.    Oh, beautiful days!  And poor little street.  ♥

I continue to write about it all, still sharing the table with Stuffed.  While home, I told my parents about the memoir project, and they answered a bunch of questions I had about those years.  We laughed Monday night as I read aloud a few of the entries from diaries I'd kept as a nine, ten, and eleven-year-old in that dear little house.  Dad especially enjoyed 1988's mention that "I gave Dad some 'Almond Joys' for Father's Day!"--since I had just, twenty-seven Father's Days later, given him the same thing for the same occasion.  Ha!  Sweet family, year after year.  

♥

Dad and the Val-Mark Corporation

I don't think my dad has ever received a store-bought card from me.  Starting when I was a kid, I've always drawn his card--he's the only one in the family who gets these goofy things--and the tradition continued yesterday with the mailing of his 2013 Father's Day card and care package.  Each year's Father's Day and birthday cartoon reflects some current in-joke or happening between us.  This year's was a depiction of him proudly standing beside the mantel he built for me and Mike.  He is, of course, clad in a Pirates baseball t-shirt and denim cut-off shorts.  (This is what he's almost always wearing in my drawings.  It's part of the tradition.) 

Another--and more integral-part of the hand-drawn card tradition is my tagline on the back:  "Val-Mark:  ♥  When you care enough to make the very best."  I considered that pretty clever when I thought of it as a kid.  Now, it's just tradition, and tradition must be upheld!  Dad knows it will always be there on the back of all of his cards from me. 

This year's card was nestled in a shoe box between a letter and some recent photos, a couple wrapped gifts, and a bunch of edibles.  An Almond Joy or Mounds bar appears somewhere in all his birthday and holiday gifts from me.  Once when I was staying with my grandparents for a few days in the summer, the day my parents were to pick me up happened to be my dad's birthday, and my grandmother asked me as we were out shopping the day before what I'd like to get my dad for his gift.  She just smiled as I went to a checkout line to grab a candy bar, and I overheard her telling my dad the next day, "I asked Val what she wanted to get you for your birthday, and she said she always gives you one of those?"  She sounded bemused, but I wasn't embarassed as I listened-in because Dad's response was something along the lines of a kindly laughing "Well, yes, it's tradition."  ♥ 

Dad's Beagle-and-heart-covered shoe box is winging its way toward him as I type this and should reach him tomorrow.  And until his August birthday rolls around, the Val-Mark greeting card industry has again closed up shop.  ♥

Father's Day from Richard Scarry

These beleaguered-looking pigs played a big part in my childhood, as this story was one of my favorites. I was thrilled a couple weeks ago to track down the book that contained this illustration. The story it accompanies is "The Three Wishes," and this telling of it is found, it turns out, in Richard Scarry's Nursery Tales. I remember my dad reading this to me when I was a little kid, and I had wanted to find it for him for a long time. Something jarred the memory loose and made me think that it was, indeed, a Richard Scarry-illustrated book that I had been remembering, and just like that, the search was over. 

This story of the bickering husband-and-wife pigs and their three wasted wishes always made me hysterical, and these illustrations still got a laugh out of me when I reread the book this month. Look at the angry eyes of the shouting husband-pig above and the way Scarry's drawn him with the accusatory pointed hoof. :) 

And the crazed look in the pigs' eyes here as they try to wrestle the sausage off the wife-pig's real nose? That was the height of comedy to this five-year-old. I tried to get Mike to see the humor in these pages, but I seem to have been thirty-some years too late. Dad, however, should be delighted. I didn't mention in his Father's Day card that I had found it, but this book is one of the little presents I'm mailing him in his belated package tomorrow.   ♥

Dad

My dad has never received a store-bought Father's Day or birthday card from me. He prefers the cards I draw for him, each occasion's illustration depicting our current in-joke. (This year's showed him cheering on his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates, a word balloon over his cap-covered head stating "Look! They're making a COMEBACK!!")

My mom named me "Valerie" because it means "strong one," and Dad liked the name because it was actress Valerie Bertinelli's and he thought she was cute.
 

His days off when I was a kid were Thursdays and Sundays, and he would always take me to the public library after school on Thursdays and proudly announce to my mom the number of books I'd checked out when we'd arrived home with my stash for the week.

When I was into gymnastics as a kid but he and Mom couldn't afford lessons, he built me a balance beam out of wood and leftover blue living room carpet. I would run and tumble in the backyard while he worked in his garden, and I would breathlessly ask him after each move, "What did you think of that?? If you had to give it a score from 1-10 and 10's the best, what would you give it???" He too liked gymnast Mary Lou Retton for her spunk and strength, and when a certain curly-haired figure skater became popular in the 1980s just as I was getting into roller skating, he noted that I resembled her and started calling me "Debi Thomas."

He was the one who tried to comfort me when I missed the New Kids on the Block concert when I was 12, and I don't remember how young I was when his appreciation of Neil Young became my own.  Young's "Heart of Gold" always reminds me of him, as do the songs "It's Baby's First Christmas" and "Blue Christmas" sung Elvis-style. I think of Dad as quiet and reserved, but he'll also be silly--he sings a few lines of those songs over the holidays--and in this way, I take after him him. (A willingness to dance in public is, alas, not something we share. My brothers agreed that the highlight of my older brother's 2002 wedding was watching my dad gleefully do the "Macarena" at evening's end. )

When I was 24 and my soon-to-be first boyfriend brought me flowers at my workplace, Dad smiled while I bashfully told him and Mom about it and just said, "Ohhh, Dolly Donuts," a nickname he has had for me since the day I was born. He also calls me "M&M Eyes." 

Every Sunday my miserably homesick freshman year of college, he would write me a long letter telling me of the week's news and ending with Dad-isms like "Pacienza, Val!" a reminder to be patient that his own grandmother would exclaim in times of stress. He sent me and my husband a letter just last week that teased Mike about possibly wanting to change favorite baseball teams from the Yankees to the Pirates and ended with the words "You two take good care of each other." When we were at the flea market together last month, Dad helped me get my beloved antique green table and chair set loaded into the car and back home and also bought an Alex Rodriguez baseball card for me to bring back for Mike.

He has always encouraged me in my efforts at running and writing, two activities that have meant a lot to him in his own life, as well. The past few years, as I have kept up with the running more seriously than in previous attempts, he has bought me running shoes for my birthday. I regret that I was not into running while Dad was still a runner.  Whenever I mention a writing project, his eyes twinkle and he quotes "John-Boy Walton's" dad's line from the Christmas movie The Homecoming: "I don't know much about the writin' trade, Son. But if you're going to take it up, you'll have to give it your best."

He taught me how to fish and drive, tried but did not succeed at teaching me how to swim, and made up bedtime stories for me about a mischievous pig he called "JoJo." After I'd mentioned how I loved rhubarb and pestered him to plant some the next year, he spent that season trading lettuce from his own garden for rhubarb from an elderly neighbor's for me.  Dad had never met this person before.  He had noticed a garden along his morning walk that had a big rhubarb plant growing in it, and on his next walk, Dad stopped at that house with a bag of lettuce from his garden in his arms, explaining to the man who came to the door that he'd be willing to trade him for some rhubarb for his daughter.

On my visits home since my last move in 2007, Dad and I have watched The Muppet's Christmas Carol together, made a trip to a cemetery to find my great-grandmother's headstone, and played cards. 

Once when I was a little kid, Dad held up his can of Genesee-brand beer with his thumb covering the last two letters and told me it was named "Gene's" beer after him, and I believed him. (Mike sighed when I admitted this today.) When I was maybe five years old, I was asking my parents about a rock we, for some reason, had in the living room, and Dad told me it was a moon rock, and I believed that too. I remember thinking, "Well, he was in the Air Force, so I guess. . . ." Air Force? Astronaut? What did I know?! He told me when I was 18 not to be so gullible, worried when I moved to New York City at the age of 23, and as someone who had once wanted to become a Spanish teacher, before Vietnam and then married-with-children life unfolded for him, he cheered me on when I moved to Baltimore to teach Spanish in one of the city's public schools when I was 24.

When I called tonight to wish him a happy Father's Day, Dad said he'd cooked a spaghetti dinner for the rest of my family today, was watching a ball game on TV, and had already read most of the book I'd mailed him as one of his presents last week. And he enjoyed my handmade card as always, he said. I will see him in two weeks when I go home for my younger brother's wedding. His shy daughter will not be joining him in the Macarena that evening, but I'm sure the visit will somehow give me fodder for his August birthday card. ♥