Irreverance and Derelection

I learned something very important shortly after my  40^th birthday – nearly 6 years ago now.

With only the occasional exception of my Lovely Wife, Nobody’s looking at Me.

I dunno if It's a universal truth for the condition of being male, over 40, in Western Civilization... Or it's Just Me.

This is not a complaint, by any means. It was nearly as freeing 5ish years ago as it was when I made the same discovery of my relative invisibility – at least to my class mates - in high school. My audience will note that one of the most commonly wished-for superpowers is, indeed, invisibility… with Telepathy a close second.

And here it’s innate for me. But it’s problematical. Back after I left high school, it suddenly evaporated completely on me; probably as it was bestowed upon me by my peer group… and I changed peer groups. Now… Now I find it breeds complacency to the point of dereliction.

Best not to ask me about the Telepathy. I’m a Dad. Their mother is even better. Drives our boys insane.

We used to accuse Dad of being… well, at least, dressing… like a Derelict.

Perhaps that seems harsh. Dad liked – when not playing School Principal – to dress strictly for comfort. This worked out to green cotton pants (loose). Pants. Calling them chinos would be excessively kind, and probably historically inaccurate. A sweatshirt of an indiscriminate colour over a plain white tee, his black and grey wool hunting coat, mangled black cowboy hat, and a pair of Greb Kodiaks, unlaced… Insoles hanging out.

Add a shock of Mad Trapper White hair sticking out and a grizzled full beard, and you get the picture.

And Yet.

And yet from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday until 1997 he cut a western-professional impression in a suit and well-shone (but well worn) cowboy boots. He’d come home and hang up the image with the suit, and slip into irreverence. 

Yep, Irreverence. Dad was accused of that once by a fellow he’d met somewhere west of the sticks on some hunting trip or other with his oldest friend from the Old Country. He loved telling that story. 

I think he wore irreverence on his sleeve like a badge of honour – unknowingly at first – but after he was classified that day… with pleasure and a certain aplomb. Hence his out-of-school mode of dress; it was, in hindsight, a complete shucking of civilization for comfort and convenience. He dressed like a derelict because out of school, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and no one to impress, and took very little seriously.

Perhaps subconsciously I have - imperfectly - taken that page from the book of Dad. While at work these days, post forty, in my business-casual corporate culture, I dress like a man in dire need of a monkey and a yellow hat.

So? I like chinos.

It occurs to me that I must more completely adopt the page from the book of Dad, however. Not only do I not Clean Up as highly (ie – no suits, no ties) – but I also may take a few too many things slightly too seriously when not at work… and, thus, my usual decayed manner of dress-off-duty at least all matches, and is indicative of a particular style.

My Lovely wife will tell you, that style – and my favourite summer uniform – the Black shirt with the outlined orange dragon, surmounted from the bottom up in yellow and red flames, with matching flaming shorts – is the stuff nightmares, and she prefers not to be seen with me in public when I’m wearing that.

Perhaps I should rethink this, since nobody’s looking at me anyway. Completely adopt the page, at least the not-at-work part, and descend into irreverence. It strikes me that my Dad was a lot more fun to be around than maybe I am.

Less Harry Callaghan. More Heathcliff Huxtable. 

Couple years ago I'd shop in pjays. Why did I stop that? Nobody's looking at me. Seriously. Who cares?

Maybe I’ve already (finally) started.

Ask Youngest Kid about trolls some time. I need a new Summer Shirt.

 

Kitchens

A couple weekends back was a birthday weekend. My youngest turned eight, and my Sister in law turned… more than eight. We tend to clump them together; it turns out that it’s less likely we’ll gather on a standard grownup birthday anymore; the milestone ones, certainly, but the rest, no. Except, of course, my Lovely Wife - she has a Holiday Birthday; there’s always a party.

Historically, during things like this, I gravitate toward the kitchen.

I’ve always felt most comfortable in a kitchen. Doesn’t really matter whose it is, either. It probably started in the late 70s after we moved to the Sticks.

Interestingly, the Kitchen as the social gathering point was not the case in my ancestral home, growing up. No; our kitchen table was most commonly buried a foot deep in Papers, boxes, knitting, Kitchen gadgets, Placemats, flotsam, and junk – and if you could sit two people on the outside corner to eat – at a table for six – you were pretty lucky.

It was also in the same corner as the Dogs’ dishes, and subsequently where the dogs commonly slept… up until Mom had enough in the mid 80s and they became Outside Dogs.

Relax. We built them a most excellent accommodation, lined with straw, big enough for 2 large… and still let them in when it got cold. But I digress.

And stacks upon stacks of frikkin newsprint. This was before both Internet-based news sources, and a decent recycling program, so paper was kind of a problem. Dad liked to hang on to some at least; made great kindling.

It got cleared off every now and again; a couple times a year for holiday meals; otherwise for other major productions. Like bottling.

We kept bottles – beer, mostly, but liquor, too - like we kept newsprint – the difference was the bottles were worth something (well… there were a few years where we didn’t have a depot in the Sticks… that was interesting) and we actually had a use for them.

One of the Harbingers of the Christmas season in the Sticks was Mom would pull out a number of bottles – a large number - and start washing them.

The Liquor bottles she would set aside; they were for Kahlúa. The Stubby beer bottles, though – those were for RootBeer.

A single batch of Rootbeer would produce 5 dozen bottles. That made sixteen rootbeers for each of the four kids – but that never worked out quite right. We looked forward to the rootbeer every year, but, if memory serves, it was very often flat, and really not all that tasty… or, occasionally, Rootbeer like. But it was one of the absolute unshakable joys of the approach of Christmas when I was a kid. Eventually, I took over the production of it. I think I was 16.

I love Rootbeer. But I haven’t made it since. 

I mentioned Mom set aside liquor bottles for Kahlúa.  Evidently, Kahlúa is made with Rum – But I remember Mom starting with an awful lot of Rye. It would end up several gallons of sweet coffee liqueur, tho – most of which was slated to be consumed at the nigh-Infamous Black Russians for the Road Party.
 
Aaaaand once again at the risk of mortally offending the BCTF, I’ll leave that one for another time. Suffice to say that those events also were iconic childhood harbingers of the Christmas season for me... and was the annual event that rooted me in my love for Kitchens; during it, I effectively owned the kitchen at our house from the time I was 13. 

It was also usually the only opportunity we got to pig out on Bugles.

Other times of year the empties went toward Dad’s efforts at home brewed beer. He had a large number of specialized one-litre stoppered bottles, and a lot of really good brewing equipment. It didn’t seem to help much. I don’t know why. 

I thought recently that it might be fun to try brewing my own beer. Unfortunately I thought this out loud… and my Lovely Wife kindly suggested that it was a fairly unhealthy decision.

Evidently she heard about Dad’s beer.

Wingin' It

"When have any of our plans ever actually worked? We plan, we get there, all hell breaks loose!"
~ Harry Potter to Hermione Granger, upon her insisting they needed to plan...

Right with ya, there, Harry. Somewhere between Befuddlement and being Somebody Else's Rock, I gave up planning a long time ago.

It wasn't always that way, of course. My jaded acceptance of the Universe as a force for adaptive chaos took a little time to build up.

Dad taught me to drive.

The interesting thing is that professional Driving Instructors will roll their eyes at this as it is commonly stated that this is a sure method of passing bad driving habits from one generation to another.

Not so. I have completely different bad driving habits than Dad did.

Specifically, Dad had a tendency to be more interested on what was on the sides (and, occasionally, behind us) of the road than where he was headed - coupled with an alarming proclivity for steering in the direction he was looking.

Now picture that on a dirt road tacked to a mountainside, with a thousand-foot-drop on one side, and you see why learning to drive was fairly important to my survival development.

I have subsequently taught at least three different people how to drive. Two of them reversed into an obstacle while I was in the car with them... But I digress.

One day, the summer I finally passed my own driver's exam...

Yes, Finally. It turns out that all my practice driving before the first attempt had been on highways or dirt - and then they test your ability to navigate a town. Oops. Try parallel parking a 74 Chev Blazer. There's a LOT of hood in the way.

My second attempt went after several weeks practice within the limits of the District of The Sticks - and while my examiner passed along one or two great truths, his only substantive comment was that I drive a bit too fast because I know what I'm doing.

I'm fairly certain my Lovely Wife won't believe that - but I have, as is my wont, digressed.

One Day, Uncle Joker and Auntie Chef came to visit. Dad took them, and Mom, on a guided tour of Line Creek.

Now, My Aunt an Uncle were - and still are, by most accounts - reasonably sensible folk. They had traveled halfway around the Universe in a little 4-sleeper MotorHome forever - in fact I'm pretty sure they still have the same one. Uncle Joker was a Millwright in his day, and a pretty good one; He'd been know to thoroughly disassemble his children's vehicles and re-machine the pistons. Stuff like that. Auntie Chef is Dad's younger sister.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions on that.

So I'm not exactly sure what the intent of that tour around the mining roads waaaay north of the Sticks was about - but I suspect fishing may have had a hand in it. That's the only reason Dad and I ever went up Line Creek.

There is a spot you have to ford the river. Now that's not as big a deal as it sounds like, It's only about fifty feet across at the ford, because it shallows out quite a bit - say fifty centimeters - that's about 20 inches deep for our American friends.

Uncle Joker was driving - It was his truck, after all. He had a mid 70's Chev Blazer alot like Dad's - the one I drove  - with a couple of seriously distinct differences.

One was that it was, comparatively, immaculate. Mind you, that's not saying much; anyone who saw the Rusted Hulk I was driving in my seventeenth year was likely astounded by my evident bravery, the fact that I had not yet gone deaf, and that actual parts were not actively falling off the thing.

The other seriously critical difference was that Uncle Joker's CB Radio handle was Two-by-Four... because his Blazer was a low-slung Two-wheel Drive.

I had had no idea you could have a truck without ground clearance.

I mean seriously. What's the point in that?

And off they went. I stayed home and hung out with my cousin, Mr. Melancholy. Yes, he kinda was even then.

Early that afternoon, the phone rang. It was someone calling from Elkford, relaying a message they received via CB Radio that 2X4 was stranded up Line Creek, in the ford.

Heh. A Chevy stuck in a Ford. Heh. Never thought of that before.

I dunno how many links were in the chain that got that message to me, but given 1984 technology, it was pretty impressive. I leaped into action.

I put our tow chain in the truck, and asked Cousin Mel if he was up for a rescue. He decided, why not, the paint he'd been watching had all dried anyway, so we jump in my battered warrior of a 4 Wheel Drive, and roll out.

"Uh oh," I said.
"What?" answers Mel; perhaps mildly alarmed at the possibility of actually seeing the road through the floorboards at some point - which of course would be an improvement, given the opacity of the cracks in the windshield.
"You happen to have any cash on you?"
"No, Why?"
"Uh... Nothing. We'll wing it." I decided, eying the fuel gauge and doing some math.

I had learned a couple weeks prior that, when you are driving, passengers are best not to have all the information you have - and that an easily understood, workable falsehood is better than a complex, incomprehensible truth.

And that's definitely a story for another time.

I had Cousin Mel running the portable brick CB Radio Dad had picked up for group travel - especially with Uncle Crazy Legs. They liked channel 37, so I had Mel set it to that.

The ford at line creek was about 60 km up the Valley from the Sticks. The last third of that is on dirt, so it takes a while. I knew we wouldn't be able to raise them on the radio until the last 10 km or so, so I'd told the guy on the phone I was on my way, and trusted the chain to get the message back.

To be honest, I was half expecting to meet them coming out, having already been rescued by passers by.

No such luck. Worse, I wasn't 100% on how to get there and took a left on a dirt road where I should have gone right. By that time, we had radio contact.

"Blue RustBucket, this is 2X4, come back"

I thought it was fairly uncharitable for Dad to be slighting his rescue vehicle in such a manner, but I kept it to myself.

After a short discussion about my current suspected location versus theirs - and my almost hearing Dad roll his eyes over the Radio - we were turned around and headed right when I decided I'd let him in on the other little situation I had.

You know; 20 miles from anywhere, needle somewhat below E, lost in the bush...

That time I couldn't hear his eyes rolling over the stream of commentary into the CB airwaves. That was Okay, as Cousin Mel did it himself so that I wouldn't miss out. I did remind Dad about FCC regulations about broadcast language, although my timing probably wasn't great.

Interestingly enough, we found them still perched halfway through Line Creek. I prudently shut down the truck until absolutely necessary, and we assessed and chained up the 2X4.

Mom and Auntie Chef had been stuck in the back seat of the 2X4 watching the carpet soak beneath their feet for about three hours, and were pretty glad when my old Wreck fired up and pulled the other truck handily out of the drink, in spite of Dad calling it Dirty Names.

Dad handed me a credit card as we looked over to see a Cutthroat trout flopping around on the shore - It had nestled into the wheel well of the 2X4, certain it was going to be a permanent fixture in the ford.

"Go fill up. We'll follow you - just in case," he said, flipping the fish back into the creek.

I kinda felt like consequences had suspended themselves in my favour in order for me to complete the mission. What a SuperPower that was!

Maybe, I decided it was a worthwhile exercise to manage on wits and observations alone. keeps you sharp. I even stopped wearing a watch about 25 years ago.

I swear, smart phones and GPS units are gonna make us all dumb.

Dad, of course, was much more impressed with the truck catching a fish.

Since then things have proven to just work themselves out their own way anyway, no matter what I plan. So usually, I don't.

Well, that's not exactly accurate. I do plan - but I only plan for the unexpected. At the very least I have Maps and a half tank of gas.

And a Credit Card.