Rejoice!

The last time all y’all (see, I am becoming a Nova Scotian) came by to chat, I was lamenting the fact that I hadn’t been able to convert my two jedi in training over to the dark side completely.  While they loved video games, superheroes and general geekiness, I hadn’t been able to get them to try a sit down role-playing game with me.  That is no longer a bar to their conversion!

When my fantastic partner and I were in Fredericton to watch the amazing spoken word artist / storyteller / poet / shaman / inspiration Shayne Koyzcan (and that’s a whole other story – that man is awe inspiring) we stopped into a little store called The Geek Chic Boutique. Yeah, the name alone was enough to bring me in, and their selection was interesting enough that childlike squees fluttered about the store faster than I could contain them. We passed over the Star Wars t-shirts, the mad scientist kits, Minecraft figures, Pokemon plushies (which were adorable) and the assorted coffee mugs, Doctor Who equipment and Deadpool wallets, because we found a little game called Adventure Maximus. It was designed by a gamer who wanted to find a way to play with his kids too – to bring them into the fold as it were.  So I could relate, in a big way.

Reading over the rules when we got it open, I was a bit dubious at first, and the kids were confused when we started, but once they got rolling, we had a blast. The padawan gloried over the chance to become Kronk, a hulking minotaur thug with a bad attitude and a penchant for fried pork.  The youngling was pleased as punch to pretend to be a scaled dragonkin priest, breathing fire and smiting his enemies (and allies) with equal zeal.  Even their mother joined in, with her morose goblin warrior.

We’ve had a tonne of fun playing this streamlined and very easy to understand game.  It’s whimsical enough to appeal to the seven year old youngling, interesting enough to keep his ten year old brother entertained, and simple enough that you can play through a whole adventure in an hour or two.  They fight, they dance, they loot, they laugh.  And they let me be the Adventure Master.

Lead and They Might Follow

Until you have uttered the phrase “take that out of your mouth” one hundred times, until you have memorized (and hum in your sleep) the theme song from at least three children’s shows and until you realize you are watching Sponge Bob Squarepants with no children in the room, you will not really understand what I’m talking about here… I hope you read on anyway.

Being a father is the single most rewarding, demanding, painful, thankless, seemingly hopeless and awesome task I have ever undertaken.  My two little Jedi have consistently challenged me, driven me to new heights of frustration (“Stop hitting your brother with dirty underwear!!!”), enraged me to the point where “dad needs some alone time” (as noted by the Padawan last night, and reminded me of the awe that the world once inspired in me. I can’t remember being as excited as my boys are about the new discoveries they make, about the new things they learn – though I am sure I once was.  What I can remember, and it’s easy because it happens daily, is how excited I get watching them have fun, watching them become young men.  Those moments of sheer joy are when our ‘parental batteries’ recharge, oftentimes to overflowing – like Iron Man hit with Thor’s lightning.

Which brings me to my point – my boys are geeks.  They denied it last night when we were discussing it at the dinner table, but when asked to name blasters from Star Wars, they were able to identify several by model number, and held opinions on which one is best for which type of battle.  When questioned about Minecraft, they can go on for hours about the types of buildings they can make, how to use redstone and how to best defeat the deadly creepers. They let me join them in this geekery (though I earned my geek card decades ago) and I revel in the fact that they are so proud of it, and are so happy when I join in – the Youngling was telling all his classmates about how he and I joined together to “defeat an Enderman with only stone swords!” His classmates were suitably impressed.

Both continue to profess their desire to become engineers, the elder to build robots which he can use to take over the world and cleanse it of the humans causing all the problems (the dark side is strong in this one) and the younger to build cars and planes that fly and don’t cause pollution (which he admittedly copied from his brother) or maybe a doctor (possibly one that moonlights as an exotic dancer… yeah, he’s complicated).  We live in a time where their desires to be professional YouTubers (another stated goal for both of them) may actually be a career option. In each of them, their love of technology is helping to guide them on their respective paths.

Both are learning to love reading, with the Padawan leaning toward robots and science fiction graphic novels, and the Youngling digging deep into spooky ‘Goosebumps’ books and stories about haunted houses. I keep hoping they will share my passion for high fantasy, and while both love the Hobbit movies (to my chagrin – damn you Peter Jackson!!!) and the Harry Potter movies, neither is interested in the real treat that is a high fantasy novel… but I wait patiently for them.

When asked if he would like to play a roleplaying game with me last night, the Padawan declined – it didn’t sound like fun to him.  I was saddened a bit, the final indoctrination into my geek realm can’t happen until he rolls some polyhedral dice and knows the agony of the critical failure and the ecstasy of rolling a natural twenty.  I want to share that passion with him, but it seems I will have to wait a bit longer yet. 

Above all I’m glad that ‘geek’ no longer has negative connotations, or at least not as negative as they once were.  Where an interest or passion for computers, science fiction or fantasy used to be a one way ticket to social pariah status, it can now be a badge of honor.  And my Jedi in training are many kinds of geeks: video game geeks, technology geeks, superhero geeks, Nerf geeks, Roughrider football geeks, judo geeks and Star Wars geeks.  They are my geeks.

Growing Up

As parents, we always know that our kids will grow up. Which is to say that our brains understand that these small creatures we created are animals and as such they will ingest food which will create additional body tissues causing them to grow taller and heavier, progressing from crawling to walking to running to… well, whatever comes after running.  We know they will grow stronger, smarter and more independent. 

Our hearts on the other hand, don’t have this same understanding. In our hearts, these tiny little creatures are still cute little babies who need us for everything. Our hearts will always ‘know’ that these creatures, regardless of age, need us for everything. They are so small we can carry them in our hands, they have that “new-baby” smell and they need us to comfort them when they are scared or lonely.  They fall asleep on our chests, their wispy hair tickling our chins and their soft pink toes not quite reaching our waists. They look up from our arms with bright eyes, and their little fingers grab our pinkies with a strength that we exclaim over.  Of course, from time to time, our hearts get a shocked awakening to what our brains knew all along.  And it aches when it happens. 

Our eldest celebrated his tenth birthday with a group of his friends yesterday.  A video-game playing, YouTube watching afternoon lead into a quick bite to eat at a burger joint prior to heading off to the movies.  As my son, my tiny little baby, sat with his friends at a table without me, all of them talking and telling stories, joking with each other and having a great time, it really hit home that my baby isn’t a baby any more.  He doesn’t need me like he used to.  I could have left the room and they likely would not even have noticed. 

We’ve seen these signs of independence coming. He’s been riding off with his friends for a couple years now on trips around the neighborhood, and this summer has marked his first forays into going with a friend down to the corner pizza shop for a slice with no adult supervision. I’m proud of his growing independence, and the signs of maturity I am seeing in him. When I look at him now, I see less of a little boy and more of a young man. 

And yet, there’s a small part of me that is sad to see it happening. I know that soon enough, he’ll be driving, then college (or whatever he chooses) and then I’ll be wondering why he doesn’t call more, and will he be coming home for Christmas this year. I know that he will grow up, move out, maybe have a family of his own.  I know that it’s a perfectly natural process – that everyone does it.  I know that, but my heart doesn’t.

Old, White, Christian Men

Yesterday I took my boys out for the afternoon to visit the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, one of three “education-type” places that we hold memberships at.  Don’t tell my kids, but the places they love to visit are the same ones that I want them to go to – they’ll learn more if they think they are having fun!  But before we could begin our day of fun at the museum (snakes and lizards and scorpions oh my!) we had to fuel up.  So we stopped at McDonalds for a bite to eat. 

As we sat, munching our way through the communal pile of tasty french fries (we always just pile all our fries together and share them all), I could not help but overhear the conversation between two older gentlemen.  They started off their conversation talking about the “ladies auxiliary"  at their church, and went on at length about how things were going in the church.  They veered to hockey and football for a time, before one of them pushed the newspaper across the table to his friend, with a gruff “You seen this yet?”  What follows is their conversation, not quite verbatim, but close.

“Nah, what’s it about?”

“New premier of Ontario is a woman.  And she’s gay.”

“Damn.  Pretty soon, we’re going to be the minority around here.”

At this point, I was almost set to interject into their conversation.  That statement, coming from the mouths of able bodied, straight, educated, white males always gets my goat.  But I bit down on another fry and tried to mind my own business.  Partly because I was having a great time with my boys and didn't want to ruin it, but partly because I just did not have the energy to engage in that debate all over again. Either way,  I am damned glad I did keep my mouth chewing instead of talking...

“Maybe that’s a good thing.  We had our chance, and we really screwed things up.”

“Yeah, you’re right.  Time to give the lesbians a chance.”

“Yup.  Don’t understand what everyone is so upset about – it’s just about giving everyone the same equality.”

“Exactly.  People get too worked up about stuff that shouldn’t matter to them.  Hey, you heard that Mike’s kid is going to school…”

I nearly hugged them.  It reminded me of my own prejudices; based on their chatting about their church, their patterns of speech and their age, I had already put them in the “old white Christian bigot” category – a form of discrimination all its own.  It reminded me that we all need to revisit our stereotyping constantly – we all do it, and it’s not a bad thing in and of itself, so long as it doesn’t lead to value judgements.

So to all you old white Christian males out there, I’m sorry for sticking you in a box.  I promise to try and remember that you aren’t all the same, and that many (most) of you are good and decent people, who care about people and their human rights just as much (and often more) as me and my young, atheist, “liberal” friends.  We have a lot more in common than we think, and we have to remember that from time to time.

You spin me right round baby, right round...

Here in Halifax, we recently decided - wait... "we" in this case means the elected officials of our fair city, and "recently" means two years ago (we Haligonians consider anything that happened after the 1917 Halifax Explosion to be recent) - to make the temporary skating oval that was designed for the 2011 Canada Games into a permanent winter fixture.  Tubing and cooling equipment, far to complicated to go into great detail on here (and because I don't have the faintest idea how it works, I think it uses science), make the Oval usable even in slightly above zero weather, which is good, because Halifax "winters" are rarely consistent.

The nicest part about the Oval is that it was kept alive due to the public response to it.  You see, when it was originally constructed back in 2011 for that year's Canada Games, it was left open for public skating for the rest of that winter season, but was due to be dismantled and turned back into the vacant park field that it came from.  But the public responded so positively to its existence, and put so much pressure on HRM's city council, that it was decided to keep it open, and even to slowly upgrade it.

The other nicest part about the Oval is that the city has managed, so far, to keep it free to use.  Despite the assuredly high costs of running it every year, it is free for anyone to head out and skate upon.  It is maintained, and kept in very good shape, throughout its open period by tax dollars and corporate sponsorship (note the name after all, our power company hard at work spending its obscene profits).  So anyone with a pair of skates (and a CSA approved hockey helmet if you are under 12 years of age) can head on down and skate at will (during public skates times of course).

But wait!  The other nicest part about the Oval is that if you don't own those aforementioned skates and helmet (see, I used aforementioned in a sentence, that law degree is totally worth the $40K I paid!), then they will lend you a pair of skates and / or the helmet you need.  Just turn over a piece of government issued picture ID, and the very efficient staff members will get you the gear you need - for free!  And they do it quickly too - a line of about sixty people can be processed in as little ten minutes.

OK, the last nicest part about the Oval though is the sense of community that it inspires.  There is a real sense of small town community, an almost Rockwellian vision.  People are all there to skate and to be part of the larger Halifax community - they help each other up, there are few collisions (and being Canadian, more apologies than strictly necessary), people look out for each other and each other's kids.

But the real nicest part about the Oval is that it gave me the chance to take my boys skating for the very first time today.  They had a blast.  The first lap took about thirty minutes, and Doc wiped out about forty times.  But he kept getting up, kept trying.  Even when I could see he was getting frustrated, he didn't throw in the towel.  Gee on the other hand, rarely fell, due in part to his very low center of gravity, but even more to the bob-skates he was wearing.

Both boys had the time of their lives, red cheeked and covered in snow.  They laughed and grinned with each fall, and Gee made a point of trying to get as far ahead of me as he could.  Doc just kept going, and he swears that many of his falls were not due to trying to impress the pretty girls.  I suppose their proximity was just a coincidence, twenty six times.  What?  It could totally happen.

I had the best day I have had in a really long time (and that is out of some pretty damned good days!) watching them, coaching them, and just being their dad.

Thanks for taking me skating boys.  We'll do it again, very soon.

Lessons from the Oddest Places

I've spent a lot of time thinking about being a parent and what that really means to me, and to those like me. I'm a techie, so while I haven't read many of the best sellers on parenting out there, I'm a regular at any number of fatherhood blogs and forums. The advice on them always ranges from the old school "a spanking never hurt anyone's chances in life, and keeps the little buggers on the straight and narrow" to the new age "our children need the freedom to make their own choices and by disciplining them we might stifle their ability to make their choices" and the full gamut in between.

I struggle with making these sorts of decisions myself. With my family background, I am always torn - anger and physical punishment are always my first reaction, and in an effort to not fall prey to those patterns, I sometimes think that I'm not stern enough. But when I do have to unleash "evil dad voice" as I did this morning, I feel guilty all day. Certainly not as guilty as I would presumably feel if I disciplined as my step-father or mother did (you all know that sad tale, so no more details here) but still sick to my stomach with the memory of the reaction my kids have when I resort to yelling.

I recently heard the best parenting advice that I have ever heard - the most non-bullshit thing from the unlikeliest source. While watching an episode of Supernatural (yup, told you it was crazy) one of the main characters said something extremely profound. 'Bobby,' as he lay dying, was having a visit through his oldest and most painful memories. As he faced his alcoholic and abusive father (which resonated with me quite well) his father called him an "ungrateful little bastard" and Bobby replied, "Children aren't supposed to be grateful, they're supposed to eat your food and break your heart." And then he shot his father.

Now, excepting the last part (bullets are too good for abusers, and I won't apologize for that sentiment) I hadn't heard anything that ever summarized what a parent's job is quite so well. Kids love to trot out the "I didn't ask to be born" and they are 100% right. If we, as parents, made a decision to have (or to keep) children, then they don't owe us a damned thing. Some respect would be nice, some gratitude would be fabulous, but at the end of the day, they really didn't ask to be born, they didn't enter into any contract with us, their parents, for anything.

That knowledge, of course, does nothing to help when a six year old is refusing to put on his jacket in the morning, or when a three year old is crying because he doesn't want to go to daycare. It doesn't help when you are at the end of your rope after a long day at work and it sure doesn't do much when you step on a piece of lego at 3 am. But it is something to keep in mind. We owe everything to them, they owe nothing to us.

Family 28 / 30

Tonight is the final installment of the thirty days of writing.  I know – the title says its only day twenty-eight of thirty, but owing to the two days I missed, twenty-eight out of thirty is where we ended up.  That’s better than I feared, but not the 100% I was hoping for.  Still, by anyone’s measure, 93.33% is a pretty good mark.  It is an ‘A’ in any class, and good enough to earn you a magna cum laude in university.  If I succeed at 93.33% of the things in life, I’ll be pretty happy.  So I am content with that score, and happy that I found time, nearly every day for a month, to put some words on ‘paper’ and to make the time, if only a half hour a night, to write.  I showed myself that I have the dedication to pull it off, and I’m going to face my current writing projects with the same dedication – I’ll do it every day, but I won’t beat myself up if I miss a night here or there because something more important came up.

The odd thing is, this whole process did show me a couple things about what is important, and one of those is really standing out for me right now… family.

No matter how you define family, and no matter how you feel about family, I don’t think that anyone can deny that family is the most important thing in most people’s lives.  Sure, there are exceptions, and once upon a time I thought I was one, but I think those exceptions are rare.  Our families give us our sense of connection to the community and greater world around us.  They provide the basis for our morality and our ideology – for good or for ill.  In some families, they provide us with the strength and support we need to get us through bad times, and in others they show us how to look inside ourselves to find that strength when it isn’t offered to us.  They hold us up, so that we can reach higher.  When they hold us down, they teach us to strive even harder.  Even the ‘worst’ family in the world still teaches its members a lesson, how to survive hardship.  And I used the quotes around worst for a reason.

Judging another’s family is no business of mine.  Sure, there are times when I wonder about the parenting techniques and skills of my fellow Haligonians.  There are times when I hear stories of family behaviour that makes my skin crawl and makes me long to dial 911 to have someone, somewhere, arrested.  But just because I disagree with the way a family conducts itself, with the manner in which they raise their children, doesn’t make my family any better than theirs.  Sure, there are some absolutes – if you are abusing your children or the other members of your family that must be stopped.  But if you don’t show love to your kids they way I do to mine, that’s no judgment on either of our families.  That’s your family, not mine and at the end of the day, how you live together and love each other is none of my damned business.

My family, on the other hand, is my business and I am proud to relate that it’s doing just great.  We walked for a while today on our way to see Sue, whom the boys thought was pretty darned cool.  Griff made growling noises for hours afterward, and Noah is sad that there are no more dinosaurs and wishes they would come back to life.  But on our walk to the exhibit, Noah was lamenting how long it was taking, and asked if we were really going to see dinosaurs.  I joked (and here’s where you should feel free to judge me for my stupid comment) that we weren’t going to a museum, we were in fact walking off into the wild so that we could leave him in the woods.  He laughed, and hugged me and said “No dad, we can’t do that.  We’re a family.”  I damned near cried.  First, because he knew that I was joking, and that told me a lot about the strength of family that Shannon and I are building, but also because he knew, even as young as he was, just how important family is.

My family has undergone a lot of changes in recent years.  Some for the better (hello to all my Koenig family members!) and some for the worse (would have loved to learn about your wedding when it was happening, rather than a year later little brother!) but all of those changes, the positive and the challenging, are just part and parcel of what makes my family what it is.  And I love it just the way it is.

So whatever you are doing today when you read this, find someone who’s a part of your family.  Maybe they’re family by blood, maybe by marriage.  Maybe they are a friend you have come to love as family.  Maybe they fit into your definition of family in a way that I can’t understand, but you do.  Whoever they are, and whatever they are doing, tell them you care.  Let them know, in some way, that you value them and that your life would be less without them in it.  It will make their day, I guarantee it. 

Thanks for reading.  We’ll talk again soon but I gotta go now, I have two little boys to kiss on the forehead while they sleep.

An Ode to George 13 / 30

I changed his name to protect his privacy, but the odds of him even hearing that I wrote this, let alone actually reading it, are about a billion to one, so its probably not necessary.

George is my father-in-law.  He's still on this side of sixty, and he is one of the best people it has ever been my honor to meet.  We'll start with the obvious, he raised my wife, and helped to shape her into the woman that I fell in love with and fall deeper into love with every single day.  For that alone, I owe him a debt.

George recently retired from his job, where he worked for decades doing hard physical labor as a pipe fitter in Vancouver.  For the last few years of his work, he was in constant pain, daily agony from the problems he's had with his knees.  Yet despite pain so debilitating that most people would never stand again, he got up every morning, long before the sun rose, to go to work.  A job where he was respected and looked up to.  By all accounts, he was the de facto supervisor of the crew he worked with, and he was the one who tried to train the younger people coming on to the crew.  He disdained the engineers who would come to the worksite, after trying over and over again to explain to them why their plans wouldn't work, and the crew he worked with learned to take his advice over just about anyone else's.  He was respected and very well liked.

His retirement, I believe, has been hard for George.  He's worked hard, all his life, and he's overcome a lot of adversity in that life.  For him to be idle is a challenge.  And so, when he first arrived here in Halifax, he went through a period of adjustment.  Far from working ten hour days doing hard manual labor, he was now a bit adrift, and got bored fast.  When he noticed that he was putting on some weight, he knew he had to change something.  And so he joined the gym.

The other men at the gym refer to George as "a legend".  He put in three hours at the gym, every day, until he finally got his knee surgery.  His pants fit again and the suspenders he bought have been put away.

Before he went for his surgery, he started looking for things to do.  And, as our house was a bit neglected by its previous owner, he managed to find a few.  Like digging a three foot deep and thirty foot long trench so that our rain water waste could be properly drained away from the house.  Or doing the same thing in the front yard when he got upset that the walkway stones were heaving too much in the winter.   Then he decided that the deck enclosure needed some work, and fixed that.  Then he was upset that the clothesline frame was too far from the deck, so he dug it up (it was buried three feet down with a big concrete base) and repositioned it.  Oh right, then there were the steps he installed in the back walkway, so that he and his wife wouldn't have to walk up an incline and possibly slip.  Then he removed a completely useless door and frame from the hallway in the basement.  Built a new flower bed for the side of the house... you get the idea.

The truly remarkable part about all of the work that George did was that he found / scrounged almost all the materials from either his other jobs or from materials left over after I was working on something.  Other than some gravel which he had delivered and some wood for the flowerbed, he achieved all his finished products without making even one trip to the store.

For that alone, I admire him.  I can't hang a picture without going to Canadian Tire three times.  But it goes beyond that.

George is a man that my sons look up to and love.  One of Griffin's first words was "papa" and seeing the love that he has for his grandfather makes my heart ache.  When George is working on any project, he invariably has one or both of his grandsons there helping him out.  And with a patience that I can only dream to one day have, he involves them in his projects, letting them help out in whatever small way they can, regardless of the impact of that help upon his final job.  The boys run to him for help and hugs, and he gives them both with a side helping of love.  That my sons have this tremendous man in their lives makes me feel so blessed, both for them and for him.

When I redid the bathroom shower recently, I was at a loss for how to complete the work, once I saw just how bad the rot was.  In a near panic, I asked George if he would come and take a look, and just give me some advice.  He did both, and gave me some help in tearing out the rotten wood.  But once he saw that I had it in hand, he backed away.  I think it was actually hard for him to do so, but I saw two things in him when he did:  first, that he was in considerable pain from his recent knee surgery, and secondly that he saw I needed to tackle the project on my own.  Despite that, he came up a few times to look over what I had done, and made a few suggestions.  And, far more meaningfully to me, he complimented my work.  He told me I had done a great job.

Growing up, I didn't really have a father.  I had a man in my life that had the title, but he was never a father to me.  His disdain for me, and for all that I did, was almost palpable.  I hated him then, and have no use for him now.  But when George told me I'd done a great job on the shower stall, and that he was proud of me, I damned near cried.

I was home today, sick with some odd flu, nausea and nasty muscle aches.  Mother Nature chose this day to drop about a foot of snow in our fair city.  And at about five o'clock tonight, as I was trying to get off the couch and stretch, we heard the scraping of a shovel on the pavement.  There, wrapped up against the wind, was George, shoveling all that snow off our two driveways.  And when I try to say thanks, he'll brush it off and make like he hasn't done anything at all.  But he has.  He, and his amazing wife, have made this house a home for our family, have given our sons a connection to their larger family, and have enriched our lives in so very many ways.

In a very odd way, I discovered my fathers late in life.  For the three decades or so, I didn't have anyone that I wanted to call "Dad" in my life, and now, at age thirty eight, I have two.  Two men who have shown me more about being a man and a father in the last three years, than anyone else did in the preceding thirty five.

So thanks George.  Thanks Dad.

Try Having a Little Fun Sometime 2/30

A good friend of mine posted a great video on her Facebook today (handy little thing that Facebook).  Here's a link to the video.

I have discovered I don’t like actually putting video clips in here - it messes up the scrolling and formatting just a tad too much.  Yeah, I actually am that anal.  So go watch that video.  It is only about a minute and a half long.  I’ll wait.

Back?  Hello?  Hmmm…

Ah!  There you are.  So, great video huh?  Not a bad idea really.  Take a mundane and boring task, like climbing stairs, add in an element of fun, and suddenly people are doing something they used to hate and laughing while they do it.

Does it work in reality?  Sure, the novelty of making music as you walk up the stairs would keep you climbing them for a while, but how long would you really do it?  I hate to say it, but I rather doubt that you would keep it up too long at all.  And you know why?  Because you are an adult.  At least chronologically.  And that is a shame.

You want to watch people having fun doing things that we consider boring?  Find a child under the age of ten.

One of my first blog posts, entitled “Playing Shovels”, was about the fun that Noah and I have shoveling the driveways of our home.  Hard, backbreaking work that very few people enjoy.  One of those oddballs who does so is my son.  He loves shoveling it, laughs madly while tossing snow, and gets sad when the rain washes it away before he can shovel it.  He’s pleasantly insane, and when I’m with him, sometimes so am I.

Tonight, to test this “fun theory”, and knowing that Noah was one for games and fun, I tried something new when it was time for the boys to do their evening cleanup.  I made it a race.  And Noah, rather than his usual disgruntled compliance, jumped at the chance.  He cheered when he “won” and teased his brother that he would win again tomorrow.  He probably will, Griff didn’t want to play the game and hates cleaning up.

Anyone that has kids can probably relate to this amazing capacity for fun that kids seem to have.   Go to any beach when the water is cold and look at who is in the water - children.  Dozens of them, teeth chattering, fingernails purple and lips blue.  You can see the lips from quite a distance, because they are all smiling and laughing.  Their parents?  Huddled on the beach after putting one toe into the water and declaring “No way!” 

Children find enjoyment in the strangest places and the smallest things.  Hell, banging loudly on a roasting pan can keep Griffin occupied for hours (yes, we spend a lot on Tylenol here), and give Noah a flashlight to play with and he’ll be exploring dark “caves” for days.

I think the real transition from childhood to adulthood is the first time a child utters the words “I’m bored.”

When and why do we lose this ability to be fascinated and entertained by the world around us?  Why do we come to believe we need xbox and iPod and HDTV and thousands of dollars worth of computer hardware to have fun?  When do we stop looking at a refrigerator box as a source of amusement and start seeing it as a nuisance to fold up and take out to the trash?

The when, while academically interesting, is really the secondary question there though.  The why is far more important.  What is it about adults that leads us to be less adventurous, less daring and less able to entertain ourselves?  Is it the knowledge that we’re mortal?  Is it the years of experience in getting hurt that makes us shy to take chances?  Those are likely factors to explain why we avoid the more risky behaviours we might once have engaged in, but they don’t explain why we lose the ability to make everyday things fun.

And when we do these things, when we drive down the street making race car sounds, or fart in the tub just to see the bubbles, we laugh.  Unless another adult sees us, then we blush and stammer and try to change the subject.  Newsflash folks, race car sounds are cool, no matter your age, and farts are funny.  Especially when they make bubbles in the tub.  Most especially when those bubbles are purple.  What????

We’re told all through our late childhood and early adolescence to “grow up” to “stop acting silly” and to “be a big boy / girl”.  Society wants us to be sober, hard-working, reliable, blah blah blah… boring people.  Yet we all have that friend that doesn’t fit the mold.  You know the one I am talking about.  He plays in a jazz band.  She lived in a yurt in Mongolia for a year.  She dropped out of law school to be a street performer in Montreal.  He is a circus performer.  She lived out of her backpack for two years travelling through South America.  We secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, want to be these people.  We dream of what it would be like to do these “crazy” things, to be able and willing to put our dreams and our fun ahead of what society tells us we are supposed to do.  But we have mortgages, families, car payments and pensions to think about.  So we dream and we wonder.

Here’s the thing.  And this is what I thought about when I saw that video.  We can still have fun.  We can still laugh at our farts.  We can giggle like idiots and not feel embarrassed when a stranger on the bus sees us.  We can jump into that icy water and splash each other.  We can remember what it was like to be a child, to face the world with wild abandon and take joy in the mundane – we just have to try a little harder.

Now some of you are thinking “But I already do that stuff!  I have fun all the time!”  Bully for you.  Now go back to the beginning of this, read it again.  If you can still say that it doesn’t apply to you, you’re a damned lucky person and I envy you.  Please tell me how you do it.

For the rest of us, here’s our challenge for the week.  Do something outrageous, something childlike and fun.  Don’t do it because I said it would be a hoot.  Don’t do it to prove you can.. Do it because your soul needs to be reminded it’s alive and well.

The Things My Father Should Have Taught Me...

I am starting to come to terms with the idea that I am not a "man's man". No, nothing to do with my sexuality, though that has been questioned many times (including one rather embarrassing discussion with that aforementioned father of mine). But rather that I appear to have a complete lack of mechanical or technical training, which I have been assured by many of my friends, is something they learned at their father's side. The more I thought about this, the broader the scope of it became. It was soon apparent that it was not limited to the appropriate names for saw blade types, nor how to clean a carbeurator.

Now, my father and I did not have a good relationship. That's an understatement actually. I was hospitalized twice and still have some scars due to our lack of a good relationship. He is my step father, and we never saw eye to eye on pretty much anything. Of course, he's recently divorced my mother, and I learned that he had never formally adopted me, so I suppose calling him my father is no longer accurate, if it ever was.

It seems to me however, that many of my friends are in similar circumstances. Things that we should have been taught by our parents were somehow left out of our childhood educations. I know I am not alone in feeling somehow left out or set aside by my parents, its pretty much a generational thing as I see it. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it is not limited to just mechanical things... its deeper than that.

Our fathers (or step-fathers, or whatever male role model was in our lives during our childhood) were reared at a time when paternal love and interaction with children seems to have been at a low ebb. I have no idea what the actual cause of that was, likely something to do with the wars that preceded them, and the turbulent times of change that resulted. Not saying that to make excuses for them, if they even need those, but to ponder what happened, and why. At any rate, many of those I talk to in my age bracket all report similar experiences. Dad was there, we knew he loved us (well, some of us) but he wasn't really all that involved. He didn't show us his love and affection, he never even used the word love.

Now that I am a father, this is the sort of thing that is praying upon me. Each time I bump into a conundrum of how to interact with my children, or how to dispense wisdom, love, affection or discipline, I don't have a model to work with. I resort to asking "What would Bill Cosby have done?" - on his show, not in real life of course. :) I find it more and more upsetting that I don't have the training and skills that a father should have. That a provider should have.

So... what should my father have taught me?

If you say you are going to do something, then you do it. Don't back down from your responsibilities, both the good ones and the bad.

If you love someone, tell them. Tell them often and loudly. Nothing goes further or deeper than the words "I love you. I need you."

Let your children know that you are proud of them. My son hugs me so hard when I tell him that he's done something well. No matter how small, no matter how mundane, its still a victory, still a step he has taken toward becoming the man that I hope to one day know. And I am so proud of him.

Learn to work with your hands, but keep your mind sharp. Bug loves to help me with his tools, and loves to fix things with me. If I am doing a job, he's there, hardhat on, tool belt full of plastic tools, smiling to raise the sun. And we talk about what we are fixing, and how to fix it, and how it got broken in the first place. We talk about the plans you need. We talk.

Create. Anything at all, but create. Men can never know the feeling of creating life, but we can still be great creators of other things. Art, music, poetry. Piles of snow in the back yard. Houseplants, bookshelves. Families. Love.

Don't be afraid to cry. And never hold back a laugh. Your feelings are valid, you are important and you do matter. How you feel reflects who you are. Its OK to be mad, its normal to be sad sometimes.

Be honest with yourself. Be honest with those who ask your opinion. Truth is powerful, binding and amazing. You never have to worry about getting caught in the truth.

Use the right tool for the right job. If you have to cut down a tree, don't use a hacksaw - get a chainsaw. If you need to level a floor, don't try to do it with a 12" level. When you have a friend who needs you, don't use email - be there. When you feel pain and loss, a shoulder is the right place to let it out.

Be thankful. No matter how hard your life is, no matter how low you sink and no matter what trials you face, there is always something to be thankful for.

Have faith. Not necessarily in God(s)(dess), or even in a higher power at all. Have faith in yourself, your family, your friends. Have faith in humanity, even though it can be hard sometimes. Have faith in a better future, have faith in the power of love. Have faith that you can do it, and you will.

Be yourself. And know that I will be there for you, no matter who you are, because you are my friend, my family, my child. Don't let anyone, not even me, tell you who you are, how you feel, what you should do or what you should wear. You are unique, powerful and wonderful. Never forget that.