I was part of a movement of "dinosaur moms" when I lived in Maryland (Astrodon Johnstoni is the Maryland state dinosaur.) Which is nothing more than this -- dinosaur moms delight in the half-feral nature of the beasties they parent, even as they whisper Shakespeare and Kierkegaard in their ears at night.

Friday, August 08, 2008

The Lanyard


And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift--not the archaic truth


that you can never repay your mother,


but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

--------
Excerpted from The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems by Billy Collins

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Blood on the Saddle

As Belle-mere and I were off on a business trip to Flagstaff, Beloved was on point with our two little angels. And it is no comment on his parenting skills that we returned to a scene that evoked a bloody mass-a-kree worthy of "The Country Bear Jamboree". Oh there was blood on the towels, and blood on the walls and, in the words of that celebrated balladeer, Big Al, "A great big puddle of... buh-lood on the ground."

Y'see, Jones used to have asthma. So we moved to the desert for the dry air. And now he has nosebleeds.

Big epic nosebleeds. Entirely my fault, really. Well, or my father's, truth be told. His father's, I shouldn't wonder. Asian nose. Teeny Asian nose. Tinse. It's exacerbated by the fact that he's not very cool about it. Despite our protests, he can't help but hork the whole nasty back up his nose until forced to sneeze a blood-booger-bomb the size of an everlasting gob-stopper onto innocent passers-by, such as, for instance, his mother.

We are comforted by the fact that, alarming as these attacks might be for the innocent passer-by, such as, for instance, his mother, there is no loss of any real volume of blood during a nosebleed. And it's just as well Jones face these inevitable occurrences with good humor.

So, apparently, he got one of these monster nosebleeds during an otherwise uneventful bath. And, being the delightful scamp that we know and love, he decided to make a, well, is there any other word for it than "bloodbath"? Oh, just when you think you have seen everything, that surely there can't be any undiscovered territory of gross and disgusting yet to be explored, "Eureka!" shouts your son.