CUL-DE-SAC

It was nearly ten years ago that my Labrador named Cliff crawled under the dining-room table and died. He’d suffered internal bleeding from a tumor. Now he’s finally been replaced, in a manner of speaking.

Marbles is the name my kids gave to the dog we got a week ago. He’s a four-year old Shih Tzu, which is a small furry lapdog of Chinese origin. It’s about as far from a large, energetic hunting dog as you can get.

Marbles gets washed in the sink.

This wasn’t my idea. We already had such a zoo at my house that getting a dog too must make us seem a little weird. As I was out on the street walking Marbles I told our neighbor, Bob, that the dog was learning to get along with our two cats, a rabbit and the five chickens we keep outside.

“Just don’t get a snake!” he said, kidding.

“We already have one,” I said, not kidding. I forgot to tell him about the Hognose snake and the Betta Fish.

This said, Marbles is a pretty good dog. He’s housebroken, affectionate, and astoundingly calm. My 8-year-old daughter picks him up and totes him around the house with no complaints from the dog. He has a high-pitched yap but rarely uses it.

He’s also decided I’m his favorite, probably because I’m an adult and I’ve had the week off. He follows me everywhere as I wander around the house or go outside.

People joke about having a dog, as if it’s the cliché culmination of domestic bliss. Now that I have a wife, two kids and a dog I guess I’m also housebroken, though in a different sense.

Right now, Marbles is lying at my feet as I type at a computer, woofing quietly while having a dog dream. I just hope this is it when it comes to buying animals.

Clan Rince Float

My wife is Irish-Catholic on both sides: Reilly and Lawrence. Her great grand-uncle was Dave Lawrence, a machine politician who was mayor of Pittsburgh and became Governor of Pennsylvania.

The Lawrence line had some Scotch-Irish members that could have suppressed the faith, though that didn’t prevent my mother-in-law from being baptized while an infant by the Roman church when her Presbyterian mother wasn’t paying close attention. It was a blended family with a mixed history, when it came to the sacraments.

That’s the story leading up to St. Patrick’s Day in San Diego, 2013, in which my daughter Sophie (mother is Karen Reilly) rode on the float of Clan Rince, her Irish dance school. Mind you, in the U.S. the celebration of the patron saint doesn’t have a lot to do with being Catholic. It’s mostly an opportunity to drink and be a fool.

I started the day building the float by stapling a skirt to a long truck trailer and decorating the edges with Styrofoam rocks. All around me, people wore green wigs and T-shirts saying things like “Kiss my Irish ass.” The parade was too long, for one thing. It must have taken an hour and a half for the whole thing to process along 6^th Avenue.

Some things were great. Navy brass band? Great! Shriners in their silly little cars? Great! Irish dancers and floats with rock bands? Great! Carlsbad Fire Department, whose fire truck carried five sexy women wearing tartan miniskirts and halter tops? Great!

But you’ve got to put a limit on the number of influence peddlers riding in Corvette convertibles waving to people on the curb who have absolutely no idea who they are. There also needs to be a quota for beauty queens.

The night before I took Sophie to the American Legion Hall in Chula Vista, where she danced in the bar with the other girls from Clan Rince. The place was filled with men and women over 50 who sat at tables in the full light while the bartender served cheap drinks. The room had a small stage. It was filled with good spirit and the people clapped and hooted.

Maybe it was just the music but it seemed Irish. It looked like a center of working-class loyalty and gratitude for ending up in a better place where you can have a drink and know your grandkids are safe and fed and going to school. You’d go to war and risk death to end up somewhere like that.

At the end a waitress passed a hat saying, “Come on. Pony up!” The money was supposed to go to the girls. It was the day before the St. Patrick’s Day so what the hell.

I worry about my parents. I thought of this when I saw my mother drive down my street and sheer the rearview mirror off a parked car. She did it with her own rearview mirror, which stayed in place. I knocked on the door of the house and Jerry told me that rearview had just been replaced and this was the third time someone had torn it off. I gave him my mom’s insurance policy number.

That wasn’t the worst thing that happened that evening.  A hawk attacked one of our chickens in the backyard. It tried to kill it and carry it away, and it left a scattering of feathers on the upper level but didn’t seem able to heft the bird over the fence. We found the hen down below near the chicken coop with its head torn off.

She was named Katie. She was a bantam Cochin chicken meaning she was overly small and that’s why the hawk went after her. She was the most beautiful chicken we had, with honey-brown feathers and that were marked with black and white spots. She was the sixth chicken of ours that had died.

Katie was the last one whose name we were sure of. She lived with five other birds that were bigger, three of them we got from a chicken farmer who abandoned them because they weren’t laying at a good enough clip. My kids have learned about death by keeping animals.

Molly the cat went out one night and never came back. Did we hear coyotes howling that night? Sophie and a friend accidentally drowned two baby chicks. She and Nicholas sobbed later that night as we buried them in the garden. Neighbor kids watched as we buried Katie in a deep hole in the canyon. Sophie put a stone next to it. She wrote Katie’s name and age on the rock with a Sharpie.

Maybe they’ve finally learned that the chickens can’t be pets. Don’t give them names. We live in a tough neighborhood for pets.

The loft of the dance studio was filled with props, parts and tools. A box of stakes. A box of wood wedges. A collection of theatrical facades made from Styrofoam to look like rows of rocks. I stood halfway up the makeshift stairs to hand it all down, piece by piece, to another parent of a kid of the school

They will use it to make a float for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The kids will dance on a flat truck bed that’s decorated with fake rocks. They’ll staple a skirt to it and put up a short fence to prevent kids from falling off.

I’d agreed to come and help get stuff down from the loft but there weren’t a lot of people there when somebody said, “So when do we need to get this thing ready in time for the parade?” The answer was Saturday at 6 a.m. in Balboa Park. Shit! I didn’t think I’d volunteered for that.

But I’ll be there with my drill, box of screws and a staple gun.

Wisteria blooms in March.

Her ears are soft and red and they hurt when we tried to put her new earrings back in. My 8-year-old girl wants to get big and getting her ears pierced is part of the deal. I’ve watched her sleep while she wore her first ones, cut-glass studs that are supposed to look like diamonds. But we didn’t leave the new ones in last night. She got back from another trip to the piercing parlor and I heard she would have to wear earrings to bed for two years to keep the holes from closing up.

It takes some commitment to become a big girl with pierced ears.

The wisteria in front my house has become a hillside of purple flowers. It’s that time of year. Rains come in winter. Trees blossom and bees descend on them to lend a humming noise. Rainy season will end soon and I pray for more. I was bred in a place where rain-fed crops are the stuff of survival. But in the Southwest water generally comes from pipes, not the sky.

Meanwhile I teach my kids to take the bus. They need to start taking it home from school, and it will just take a little practice. The first time Sophie couldn’t get the hang of feeding a dollar into the bill wringer. She then he tried to stuff five quarters into the coin slot all at once and they got stuck.

The second time I reminded her of that and it made her sulk at the bus stop, crouched against the wall of a shop as she hid her face in her hands. But she did better putting the money in that time. I tell them they have to grow up and become more independent. The city isn’t so scary as long as you know where you’re going and have a cell phone. We’re still working on that second thing.

The bus winds down a hill into a canyon and uphill to the place where (I tell them) they have to pull the cord to request a stop. It’s just a ten-minute walk home, where the wisteria blossoms and I can still watch them fall asleep at night.

A dog like I used to have. An overnight mountain snow lies on the ground and the dog bounds and rolls around in it. His fur is trimmed short and I’m not sure what kind of dog he is, and have to ask to find out it’s a Golden Retriever.

He chases people who slide down the hill in a sled.

In a courtroom she walks before the judge. She has a ruddy face and is using a cane. She’s charged with stealing money from a foundation started by her rich husband. She did it so she could gamble.

Once she was mayor of the city. She was mayor of San Diego back in the 80’s. Before that she was one of a family of 13 kids.

But she never had any kids of her own. What do you do when you’re 66 and in trouble and you don’t have any kids?

Road trips are good even if you’re only going 50 miles. My wife and I were in the front seat and our children were in the back as we drove into the mountains to be in the snow.

The trees were covered with hoarfrost and clouds pressed on them to cover their tops.

Winter is short here and it quickly becomes spring, though spring is not much different from any other time of year. Should I give up dreaming for lent? I wish I could give up the pain in my legs.

Life is long and too much the same. I wish I could be like that dog in the snow. I would love the snow and love knowing that I have kids in the back of the car. Not like that poor woman walking with a cane.

Each day death gets closer to the old man. It’s not welcome but it’s something he asked for, like the stuff that fills up your garage when you live someplace too long. Your walk and your wit take the long way to get places and you stumble over the clutter of memories and even more things that are forgotten, until death takes it all to place where we throw things away.

Her lawyer asked me, “What’s your game?” I said poker. But I had a better hand because I knew I had more that I could gamble and lose. So I never sat in the casino where screens light your face and you push the buttons that are guaranteed to take your money.

What if we never won? What if fools with golf clubs never hit the perfect shot that climbed higher and higher on its way to the green and just barely succumbed to gravity? Winning makes us think we aren’t really losers even when we are guaranteed to be.

Death is guaranteed. We can just do it well.

There’s a blizzard of info-nonsense that blows across cyberspace all day that takes the name Twitter. And I try to monitor some of it with a software thing called TweetDeck. In TweetDeck, I not only have a column that shows tweets from people I’m following. It also has columns that show categories of tweets.

I can search the Twitter universe for certain words or phrases. This can be handy if you’re a reporter who’s waiting for some news to break. The minute some expected event happens – Supreme Court ruling, whatever – somebody out there with an Internet connection will tweet and spill the beans so you can follow up.

One search term I have programmed into TweetDeck is “light rail.” I’m not expecting any big news, necessarily. But I figured I might hear about some interesting studies, stories or developments that I can turn into news.

It turns out the stuff I got in my light-rail column was a lot more interesting.

It’s not news. Far from it. It’s a collection of gripes and trivial observations made by people who use light rail. The first thing I learned as I started to look at this stuff is people really do call light rail light rail.

I thought that was an expression only academics and transit wonks used, while real people called it the trolley, the train or something like that. Nope. The people who ride it call it light rail, and when they complain about the loud drunk they had to sit next to as they were headed downtown they talk about the guy on the “light rail.”

Not all of the tweets are from San Diego. They have light rail in Minneapolis, Denver, Boston, Sacramento, Phoenix, Portland, etc. Most of the time I can’t tell where these people are. I just know they’re using light rail.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

–Oh god someone just brought delicious smelling curry onto the Light Rail train! Just remind me how hungry I am, Indian Diaspora! Thanks! :p

–@Ned_Miller some random nigga who got on the light rail lol

–Barely made the light rail and accidentally left 50 cents at the pay station. I prolly just made a hobo’s day today. #GoodSamaritan **

–Why is this lady cussing her reflection out on the light rail? #werido

–On this ghetto light rail with crack heads and ratchet children. Smh

–We are riding the light rail for the first time!!! http://t.co/zDjXnGAT

Every day brings a new collection, all of them connected to a photo of the correspondent. And while the details change the substance remains the same. I sometimes wonder why I keep the light-rail search tag. Why do I enjoy reading these pointless, aimless, often-profane tweets?

Maybe it’s the beauty of small talk. Somehow, it’s comforting to hear people broadcasting their small rants, stories and enthusiasms.  Put it all together and it paints a perfect picture of everyday life.

And… come to think of it… life is the very thing these tweeters are observing. I’m sure I’d be less interested to read the tweets of people who rant about something they saw on TV or something they read in a magazine. But put someone in the midst of humanity, riding in a light-rail car? Now THAT’s something I might want to hear about.

Meanwhile I’ll try to tweet more. I guess someone out there will be interested in hearing what I have to say, as small as it may be.

It helps when the weather tells you it’s Christmas. This year we had temperatures into the 30s at night and a week of rain, on and off. In Southern California, wet and chilly conditions give a sufficient feeling that the weather had become bracing, and it’s driving you inside a comfortable home that’s colored by a Christmas tree.

In my family, the holiday comes with a blizzard of gifts, thanks to some compulsive shopping and numerous grandparents buying for not many grandkids. The streets of my neighborhood had a generous offering of Christmas lights. There are displays of elves, reindeer and Santa wearing shades as he rides in a hot-air balloon. These blowup figures sound like vacuum cleaners as you walked by them.

A few blocks away, one house has a statue of the Virgin Mary with a halo that lights up at night. It’s not bad, but you can’t see the figure too well when it’s dark so it looks mostly like a stray circle floating in front of the house.

We decided this year to buy a Christmas tree from a tree farm in the country… something we’d never done, and it turned out to be a mistake. It started with long arguments about what kind of tree to get, and ended with us buying the worst Christmas tree I’d ever owned. It had many gaps in the foliage and fungus growths on the branches, and it was so lopsided it broke my tree stand.

The next day I bought one of the trees in the parking lot at the mall.

This Christmas I received a historic gift: A bike. OK, to say historic is laying it on a little bit thick. But seven years ago I also got a bike as a Christmas present, which, a year-and-a-half later, got flattened by a car as I was hit on the way to work. I wasn’t flattened but ended up in the hospital with TBI and had to go through three months of rehabilitation.

I had barely ridden a bike since then, the one exception being a cheap folding bike I briefly had. It was falling apart and got stolen from the front of Von’s at my urging. See this blog post from a year ago for more on that story.

My son has an active fantasy life about living in a place that has cold and snow. So for Christmas he asked for (and got) a sled, snow pants and winter gloves. Strangely, his dream came true on New Year’s Eve when we drove 50 minutes to mile-high Laguna Mountain. We found several inches of snow had fallen and there were plenty of hillsides to sled on.

I worked during Christmas week, though like Bob Cratchit I had Christmas Day off. The holidays were otherwise similar to ones past, with visits from in-laws and nagging children to write thank-you notes.

Finally my wife and I are mailing Christmas cards, covered with photos of the family. This is when we try to recall whom we’ve known over the years and to also remember the last time we’ve gotten in touch.

It’s a sad exercise that reminds me that friendships are not forever and they fade with time spent never seeing one another. Do we send a card to Jeff, whom we haven’t spoken to in God knows how long, or would that be ridiculous? Maybe one of these days I’ll look for him on Facebook.

Christmas is great and it’s a hassle, and now it’s done. On Saturday I’ll leave my two trees on the curb to be picked up as green waste. I’ll pull the Christmas lights off the roof gutters and put them back in a box. The days are short, spring is a long way away and it’s time to get back to ordinary life.