My son has started singing and he's just awful at it. Lately I've been trying to teach him to sing "Happy Birthday" for his sister's annual "one-year-older-but-not-much-taller" jubilee. He learned the words quick enough, but there's something about the way he sings them that makes the simple tune sound like an Estonian funerary dirge performed by an in-bred goatherd into the merciless winds of the Baltic Sea. I just look at him and think, Damn, son, you're never going to sing in a rock band. Maybe you could play bass, or become a white rapper named Tône Dëf who gets mocked in the early stages of American Idol, Season 23, but if you ever have any hope of scoring chicks you'd better be athletic. Trust me, the bookish romantic loner thing doesn't work. I'll buy you a case of those Mark McGwire steroids before I let you bring home a volume of Rilke or utter the word "Rimbaud" in my presence. I won't stand for the sighing and mopery, son. You don't want to bring a platonic Mormon friend to prom who's only allowed to go at all because her father can tell just by looking at you that there's a greater risk of her giving lap dances to a room full of LDS missionaries than there is of you moving in for a closed-mouth kiss during the final chorus of Boys II Men's "End of the Road." While everyone else is getting it on post-prom at Andrew Howard's Lake Michigan cottage, do you really want to be at the 99-cent theater's midnight screening of Wayne's World 2 with your Mormon entourage? Don't think I'm buying you a bass guitar either because those guys get laid even less than bookish romantic types. Even less than drummers.

Perhaps you think I'm being hasty. He's only two! you shout at your computer monitor. And you're probably right. But by age two Buddy Rich was already an experienced Vaudevillian (billed as "Taps the Wonder Drummer"). By age two Mo Kin's xylophone lullabies were already luring Kim Jong-il to sleep in his cryogenic chamber every night. And at not much older than two, Tallan "T-Man" Latz was embroiled in litigation over whether hammering Elkhorn Wisconsin nightclubs with the blues was a violation of child labor laws. It's not inconceivable that my little guy could be stuck with that voice forever. Occasionally he "sings" me a mumbly approximation of the first few lines of "Monster Mash" or "Frosty the Snowman." Adorable, true, but if one were to judge the singing alone it is clear he's almost as tone deaf as his sister, who sings almost as poorly as her mother. Not a single member of my tribe can carry a tune in a wheelbarrow. And I'm not exactly Dean Martin over here. The last time I took singing seriously was fifth grade when my hippie-turned-fundamentalist music teacher changed the words in "Kookaburra" from . . .Gay your life must be! to . . .Happy your life must be! and I was all, That's the gayest thing I've ever heard. I sing lullabies. That is all.

People who take singing really seriously in casual situations make me fidgety, like the super-serious guy on our recent Christmas caroling excursion who insisted he couldn't sing "Joy to the World" because it was in the wrong key. I wanted to ask, "What's a key?" but any such query would have been drowned out by my father-in-law singing "Feliz Navidad" like he'd just been punctured by a harpoon. My father-in-law is almost deaf (so he has an excuse), but I don't know what to say about the people responsible for the other half of my wife's genes: an Irish family of eight kids and I've never heard one of them sing. They don't even clap during "The Wild Rover" (though they do plenty of drinking and fighting to prove a rightful claim to their ancestry). At some point her uncle recruited this other local family to sing at all their family events, and these people always come armed with pitch pipes and jazz hands. Truthfully, I would rather suffer a music-less existence with a family that sings like bellicose sea lions than hear that middle-aged couple and their kids sing "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" ever again.

* * * * *

The silver lining of having a child who can't sing is that you will never have to watch him in a vocal jazz performance. While my wife recognizes our son's nascent tone deafness, she keeps some dubious hope that even with this genetic millstone he'll be the musical one in the family. We named him after a musician, she says. We could hire someone to train him. You know, like Sister Maria. I think she harbors a deeper, more sinister fantasy about raising a brood of harmonizing von Trapp-lites. Every year when it comes on network TV my wife insists we watch The Sound of Music and every time we do so it makes me a little more angry.

"I liked this family better before Sandy Duncan came along."

"That's Julie Andrews."

"Who?"

. . .

"Why am I supposed to feel bad for these kids living in their giant mansion in the mountains?"

"Because their totalitarian father didn't allow them music after their mother died."

"I thought Sandy Duncan was their mother?"

"No, she's the nun who takes care of them."

"Those kids better have leprosy."

. . .

"I know another girl who's sixteen, Liesl: her name is Anne and she lives in an Amsterdam attic and your creepy boyfriend is going to keep her from seeing seventeen."

. . .

"Why are they frolicking so?"

"Sister Maria is teaching them to sing."

"'La, a note to follow so?' Rogers and Hammerstein really phoned that one in, didn't they?"

. . .

"I thought if they won the singing contest, Captain von Trapp didn't have to go back into Das Boot."

"No, he still has to go. That's why they're running away."

"They're running to Switzerland on foot?"

"I guess so."

"Next time take some Jews with you, you assholes."

* * * * *

Our neighbors take their daughter to Canada every Wednesday for violin lessons.  While the idea of a weekly poutine run sounds tempting, I do think I'll wait a few years and enroll the kids in ordinary piano lessons or find a pixie-ish postulate from a nearby abbey who works cheap.  As sure as I am that genetics are working against them here, I'm even more sure that they deserve a chance to overcome them. I believe I also owe them the chance to prove their curmudgeon of a father wrong, even if he ends up fidgeting whenever they sing.

In lieu of an actual post, a bit of self-interested promotion: there's a big weekend sale at 20x200 where every purchase over $40 gets a 20% discount. So two $20 prints would be $32 total, the $50 prints are now $40 and the $200 prints are only $160. If you were on the fence about picking up one of the limited edition feral house pictures (Number 7 or Number 13) maybe this is all it will take to sweeten the deal.

Enter the code "RIDONK" at checkout. If you're not interested in my stuff, there are many nice things to buy there and half of the purchase price goes directly to the artist. The sale ends at noon on Sunday.  2:00 p.m. on Monday, February 1.

I have an upcoming post about demolition, and I've noticed that many of the feral houses have been targeted within the last year, including Number 13 (which seems to be a favorite). It even had canal access and a boat slip out back, but now it's gone.

Also, I've donated one of the large prints of Everything is Going to Be Alright for a Haiti benefit auction that Kate Inglis and René of Fruity Fantastica have put together here. Starting bid is $40 and begins Monday morning at 9:00 a.m.

The kid's birthday is in a couple weeks and after several days spent in the fetal position on the floor (more on that later) I recently found myself standing at a toy store deciding where I stand in the great yuppie parent divide between Playmobil and Lego, knowing that once the initial investment is made it's almost impossible to go back. The consequences of this decision felt dire.

Although I was a Lego kid growing up, I ended up going with Playmobil. The Playmobil universe has fewer annoying licensed versions and video games and there seems to be slightly fewer creepy Playmobil websites run by adults with way too much time and disposable income than what's out there for Lego. Further, I like how everyone from the anarchist g8 protester with a gun pointed at his head to the alligator that's about to get shot by a couple of rednecks in a hovercraft seem so happy and vaguely Scandinavian, like they're all fresh from the set of a Mentos commercial. Even the caged zoo creatures and performing circus animals have a pleasant air about them, as though living in miserable confinement or performing demeaning tricks at the crack of a whip somehow isn't so bad. Ultimately I was won over the by the historical collections, which would have you believe that life as a marauding buccaneer, medieval peasant, or imperialist legionnaire was all smiles, all the time.

* * * * *

Heading for the toy store was the first time I left home after I got back from seeing the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's apocalypse novel The Road. I think living in Detroit and watching The Road in the middle of January is not a good idea. It's basically two hours of watching the whole world turned into Detroit in January without any hope of the renewal of Spring (and with cannibal-run human farms instead of crack houses). I could have spent the last few days wondering what kind of global catastrophe would KILL EVERYTHING GREEN IN THE WHOLE WORLD but allow Viggo Mortensen to live, but instead I spent all that time revising my apocalypse notebook.  

I have had an apocalypse plan for as long as I can remember. Early on, things were simple: maintain a supply of canned food and potable H2O; travel before dawn; avoid the dirtbike gangs. When I got married, I added something in there about building a small gyrocopter to transport beloved wife above roving dirtbike gangs if necessary. Now that I have kids, the apocalypse plan is so convoluted and filled with contingencies I'm afraid when the apocalypse actually comes, following the plan is going to be like a group reading of Choose Your Own Adventure: Portents of Nostradamus at gunpoint, with the guns held by a group of burly Visigoth rapists circling us on sputtering motorcycles. I hope, at least, our food stores will last long enough that the Visigoths will have finally run out of bullets and they will be forced to shoot flaming arrows when we make our escape.

It has always seemed unfair that so many of the skills that will be really useful during Armageddon are not those that most law-abiding citizens ever learn: things like hot wiring cars and siphoning gas and digging moats that will properly retain foetid-corpse water. For years I have been quite certain that my last words would be, But you never know when you might need someone who can translate Xenophon! I have a feeling that whenever the apocalypse hits, a great many of us will be slapping our foreheads wishing we'd taken the time to learn how to fashion wrist crossbows or how to make a nice ragoût out of dog food. I, for one, will be sorry that I pussed out on the Tiger Cubs when I was seven.

I have looked on the survivalists, the millennial fear mongers, the peak oilers, and fundamentalist Christian gun nuts with some degree of sympathy. These are the people who will one day have to show us mercy if they turn out to be right, so it's best, I think, not to be too rude about their beliefs (sort of like extending Pascal's wager to those who have been stockpiling provisions and ammunition rather than worrying about whether their 42" inch plasma televisions are high-def enough or whether that bitch in accounting realizes these are real Louboutins). I've been trying to write this post for days but I always end up down the rabbit hole of survivalist websites and blogs, wondering whether my buckshot bandoleer is big enough, or admiring the ventilation system in someone else's underground bunker, or pricing hand-cranked grist mills. My wife will peek at what I'm doing and ask me, "Have you been watching The History Channel again?" For a cable channel that's supposedly all about history, it sure does focus mostly on its end (seriously History Channel, wtf?). Recently they had some show on called Apocalypse Man in which this asshole shows you how to survive in an urban environment after the inevitable global meltdown.  It was all filmed here in Detroit, of course, and he did some goofy parkour nonsense to get inside and install a radio antenna on top of an abandoned skyscraper I can see from my bedroom window. I wish the History Channel would stick to actual history make a show about how awful life was for the vast majority of people for hundreds of thousands of years so that if the apocalypse does come, at least we'll be able to say, "Hey, we've been through worse."

* * * * *

I was finally able to emerge from the funk caused by The Road after reading this funny bit in The Guardian. I looked at my own kids and thought, God, why bother surviving the apocalypse if these picky eaters will just end up killing me with ingratitude?

"Here, eat this delicious dried-out cicada husk."

. . .

"Sweet! A packet of duck sauce!"

. . .

"We might find some peanut shells in the dumpster behind that burnt-out Lone Star Steakhouse."

. . .

Either the ingratitude will do me in, or the inevitable whining when they realize there is no cheese pizza in post-apocalyptic Detroit. 


* * * * *

I stand before the Playmobil universe amazed at all the different scenarios, but wishing they made a post-apocalypse line. I imagine you could cobble one together between the pirates, poachers, police, city life, and barbarian sets: a blacksmith fastening armor from scrapped aluminum siding; a guy using a bicycle pump to pilfer diesel fuel from an abandoned gas station; a smiling family surrounded by guys in Viking helmets riding ATVs; even smiling urban farmers growing kale and raising goats to feed the rest of us. In the Playmobil apocalypse, everyone would be smiling.

With bifurcated fist gripping bifurcated fist, we'll get through this without complaint. We'll get through this together.

I am walking to the pizza shop in our neighborhood to buy a two liter of diet soda for two dollars when a homeless man stops me to ask if I've seen any bottles around. There are four inches of snow over everything so I nod towards the footprints I've just made and say not back there. He segues into a typical request for funds and for once I can tell the truth: I've only got two dollars in my pocket and I'm going to spend them over there. Still, I don't tell him those two dollars are earmarked for diet soda. On my walk back the two liter is cold and heavy in the waist pocket of my Barbour coat and he's sitting there on a park bench and I ask if he still wants bottles and he sure does so I tell him to wait there for five minutes. I walk into my warm home, past my wallet full of money without taking off my expensive boots (a purchase I justified because they were MADE IN THE USA), leaving a trail of snow from the treads and the cuffs of my jeans down to where we store the hidden shame of my addiction to diet cola. Getting to the store for the ten cent returns in our tiny car is often too much of a hassle so I let the empties pile up. I'm actually thrilled to hoist a garbage bag filled with at least a hundred bottles and cans onto my back and head right back out into the cold where I drop them at the feet of the homeless man. It's all Coke or Pepsi products, I say, none of that off-brand shit, so they shouldn't give you any trouble over returning those.

"What time is it?"

It is getting late. He doesn't thank me. I watch him calculate a route through the darkness and snow to the archipelago of bodegas and ghetto grocery stores that impose limits on how many bottles one man may return to deter men like him from returning anything for the meager cash this labor provides. There's a plastic bag wrapped around one of his ratty tennis shoes. The old man hoists ten dollars worth of aluminum and plastic onto his back with the promise of malt liquor or a hamburger or whatever the hell he wants spurring him away from me, and I can't remember the last time I felt this ashamed.

We were all by ourselves at dusk along the river, just a few blocks from home. We'd walked as far as the path would go, and there we saw a place where a field had flooded and frozen and I went out to investigate the ice: just a few inches thick, but wide and unscarred. I could smell memories: the inside of hockey gloves; inevitable hot chocolate. We came back the next day with our skates.

 

The boy is still too small for skating, so the poor thing had to settle for scuttling along in his boots, and those moments where I'd scoop him up and charge across the ice, setting his feet down to glide while he cackled.

No one hassled us; we didn't see another soul. We've gone to the public rink downtown several times, but with gangling teens learning to skate by gripping the boards and swinging their blades face-level to a four-year-old, this trespass was markedly safer. It's one of the benefits of living here: sometimes there's just nobody around to say you can't do something.

After an hour or so, the girl could have kept going, but the boy had fangs of snot and a strong case of not fair. The virgin ice was scarred with all our fun, and a thermos of hot chocolate waited by our boots.

The buildings in our neighborhood aren't lit; instead security lights shine outward all night, towards the grounds and sidewalks, illuminating bushes and corners to deter would-be burglars, muggers, and rapists. Move along muggers, rapists: you'll find no cover here. 

With all this light, it's become clear the neighborhoods rabbits propagated well this year, their peppery coats even more obvious now against the snow. There is almost always one out there at night, but even in daylight we see them. I also keep seeing possums, and twice that old raccoon. In the morning, the prints in fresh snow show the exploits of this wild syndicate during the hours we slept. The dog, I think, sleeps with one eye open all night, watching their muscles twitch in the cold and dreaming of opened doors.

* * * * *

There's a trail of blood in the park where I bring the dog each evening, right under the trees where he harasses the squirrels. As the neighborhood's self-proclaimed #1 menace to small mammals, I naturally suspect him. "What did you do?" I ask the mighty hunter, but there's an innocent look to his eyes and the short trail leads to the silent corpse of a small rabbit, pristine but for the cavity in its chest where all its slithery guts were yanked out in a hurry. The next day I bring the kids to the park and the body is still there, a bunnysicle, and we stare at it, speculating about the culprit. "Was it Wendell?" my daughter asks. "No honey, it was something else," I say, and we move on.

* * * * *

I get a call from one of the two saints who live next door and suffer all our family noise. "Have you seen the fox?" he asks. He describes several red fox sightings. We saw him chasing something along the sidewalk; and we saw him a few days later on the other side of the neighborhood. I begin to ask everyone I run into on the sidewalks, "Have you seen the fox?" And tales begin to emerge: I was running along the river and saw a pair of them standing out on the ice; I opened my front door and there he was, darting across my path. Finally, at dusk a few days later, I glimpse him myself.

There's the culprit, I think, and wish him luck on further hunts. To a poultry farmer, he might be a menace. But here, in the heart of the city, he is a most welcome murderer.

* * * * *

I drop the girl off at school and her classmates are not on the playground. We spot them across the street, in a vacant field wandering among the shards of a great fallen tree. "We saw a pheasant on the playground," her teacher explains. "We followed him over here."

Half an hour later, the boy and I are out with the dog as usual, all bundled up, searching for fox tracks in the field not far from where I spotted him. We see squirrel prints; rabbit; Bichon Frise? We find suspicious paw prints under a female gingko, passing among the fallen fruit that smells like rancid cheese even now at 20 degrees. I want to find his den. A couple of neighbors walk past, the same couple we see out there every morning, and I ask them if they've seen the fox. "No," the man says, "But look up there."

He points high in a bare honeylocust, where a massive red-tailed hawk is perched and curiously watching my toddler stomp around in the snow. A few silent seconds later, the bird swoops down out of the tree towards some distant part of the field, where he scoops up a fattened black squirrel in his deadly claws.

One kid sits in the backseat and tells her parents it won't be winter until there's snow on the ground. "I can't make it snow, kid," her dad says. Having grown up with the constant annoyance of lake-effect snow, even if he could, it's unlikely he would. They are driving west across the state, back to where he grew up, and when they cross that line where the snow stops and starts, where the grass in the highway median disappears and the pine boughs are draped with the last hurrah of the latest storm, the boy in the back seat (who has no memory for snow) looks out his window and says: ice cream.

This is what it means to be a bit shy of two: the world is still amazing enough that you might suddenly find it covered in ice cream.

* * * * *

For a lark he snaps up some mistletoe at the farmer's market. He ties it just above the third step of the staircase, telling his daughter, "When you stand under the mistletoe, you have to let someone kiss you." Just shy of five, she misinterprets this to mean she cannot pass under it without a kiss, as though the sprig were some enchanted object right out of her fairy stories. For a week, she will not go up or down the stairs without pausing there under the mistletoe, waiting for someone to notice, silent, longnecked, lip-pursed, anticipating the kiss that will grant her passage.

* * * * *

The snow finally sticks around their house on the sun's shyest day. By the time they're all swaddled in snowsuits and wool, the sun's long gone so they wander around their neighborhood by streetlight, looking for the best Christmas display. Though the salted sidewalks are clear, both kids choose to walk off the path, the snow crunching under new boots, the dog's tail swatting their polyester armor. More snow is falling and people like this might forget that the winter is long, and cold, so long as there are moments like this to help them survive it. "Watch it, Red," he says to the woman who has pelted him in the back with a snowball, her arm cocked with another. His daughter, cackling, attempts to throw a powdery clump that turns to snowdust before leaving her grip; still, he spirals backwards and feigns injury. His son piles on top of him, and their laughter cleaves the silence of this night.

This year we really had it together (and by we I mean my wife); in the past, December would sneak up on us and we'd rush to take a bad family picture and then print it off quickly at the nearest chain drug store to get something in the mail before the holidays. This year my wife saw the doodle Samantha Wedelich at dwelldeep did of me holding the kid after she fell asleep at a dinner party back in August and hired her to do the art for our 2009 holiday card. They corresponded for a few weeks and we sent Sam a dozen family photos (including the dog). This is what she came up with, and we were blown away when we saw the final artwork back in November. We asked Sam to do the text on the inside as well. Isn't her handwriting beautiful?

She added the boy's beloved coonskin cap (from Fort Ticonderoga) and the girl's Pegasus toy. When we received the finished product in the mail last week, we were blown away all over again. Sam did the printing and it's exceptional (and the kind of thing I would have done cheaply by myself, so I'm fortunate to have a wife who controls the purse strings and makes unmiserly decisions sometimes).

Next week we'll share the handmade presents we're making for the kids.

[The artist Sam does have an etsy shop and today is the last day for shipping before Christmas. Buy something from her before she realizes her prices are too low!]

This latest book to rise to the top of the thrift store discovery pile is a heartwarming little self-published (but underwritten by an insurance trade group?) tale of a boy who discovers that his father's career selling insurance is much more exciting than he previously thought. In the original version, the father is there to save the day wherever tragedy strikes, sort of a superhero in Stafford slacks. In my parody version, he's more like a bloodthirsty pirate in Stafford slacks. The truth about the insurance industry (I learned after years of litigating bad faith insurance case) probably lies somewhere in between.

Click here to see the whole book. 

Thanks to everyone who entered the Shutterfly Contest this past week. I was supposed to announce the winners yesterday but I spent all my free time looking through all the wonderful books that were submitted. It was obvious that you guys put a lot of time, thought, and talent into those books and I know that if you win or choose to order them they will be treasured for a long time.

There were 64 submissions. I generated five random numbers between 1 and 64, counting up from the first book submitted:

The winners are as follows:
Metamora, by LauraB451 (7x9 photo book)
January to June 2008 by  JanaT30 (7x9 photo book)
Thirty Acres 2009 by JenniferS3524 (25 Greeting Cards)
Yellowstone by Megan E (25 Stationary Cards)
Faces of a New Family by Karen M (Photo Calendar)  

I am also giving away the code that Shutterfly gave me for the book I made (I paid for it out of my own pocket), and the winner of that 8x8 photo book is The Ashland School 2009-2010, by SarahA511). The winner of the gift basket of Michigan products from R. Hirt Jr (a $50 value!): One Sunday by WendyR857.  

Winners contact me as soon as possible for your prize codes and thank again to everyone who entered.