By
admin in
abby letters,
emmy letters on February 29 2008
Dear Abby and Emmy,
I’m sorry!
Being an old man, I’ve heard a lot of apologies in my day, and given more then a few of my own. Since I’m a bit of an expert in the study of apologies, I can tell you with a lot of conviction that the one I’m giving you now is pretty unique. Many apologies are predicated by the belief that the person did something wrong, which I certainly have. Many others are given because they are caught in the act and feel obligated to come clean, and I’m sure over time, my web of deceit will ensnare me requiring explanation and forgiveness. What makes this one particularly unique is not only that it falls in both those categories simultaneously, but that I have no doubt that I’ll continue my actions unabated as long as I can, yet I’ll continue to feel guilty about it. The bottom line is that deception pays well.
You see, I love being a father and I love you both dearly, but it’s also a lot harder than I expected. Fred MacMurray, without a wife and much help from crazy Uncle Charley, always looked in control and at ease. You come home, dish out some fatherly advice, and sit around and smoke a pipe all night. I can do that. It is unfortunate that once again, tv has let me down (the first time tv betrayed me entailed much rubbing on lamps and no Barbara Edens). In reality, being a father is really hard.
Whenever I imply that being a father has any modicum of difficulty, the back of my hair stands on end and I imagine 3 billion women from the around the world simultaneously giving that exasperated sigh that has been a staple of my marriage. I know men have it easier than women, moms work harder than dads, and that home entertainment devices and the complex remote controls that accompany them were developed by males to be keep good women down. I know all that, and I reflexively agree. Let me put it another way; life for men can be harder with kids than without, and as long as I’m the only one who knows how to control the television, the hallmark channel is forbidden in the house.
When I see something that will make my life easier, I quickly move into action. Lifehacker.com is my home page, no informercial escapes my notice on television, and the microwave oven is my constant kitchen companion. So it should be apparent that if I can use deception to calm the din or soothe the soul, I’m ready to put in my bag of tools. And so, hopefully when you finally read this years from now, you’ll have a better understanding of my weakness for deception and give me a little break about it. Perhaps by sharing them with you now, I can help you and future generations keep their sanity during parenthood.
“Strangers on a Bus” Not a Legitimate Gaming Activity
Nothing ratchets up the anxiety level more than driving with kids yelling in the backseat, and you undoubtedly got your loud genes from your mother (silence, by the way, is in my DNA). To combat this, I’ve developed the “concept of quiet” into a game which we call “Strangers on the Bus” or some of it’s variants “Strangers in a Restaurant”, “Strangers in a Hotel Lobby”, and “Strangers in the line at the Post Office”. Strangers in real life aren’t supposed to look at each other so the rules are simple; the person who talks, acts oddly or loudly, or looks at another person first loses. While there is always a punctuated commotion at the end of each round with yells of “she cheated!”, it’s always good for a few minutes of blissful silence during a long car ride.
Car Dome Light Is Not a Backseat Mute Button
Sometimes, “Strangers on the Bus” is not enough, particularly with the “Are we there yet?” mantra emanating from the back seat. At one point, I had the epiphany that what every car needed was a backseat mute button, but since I had neither the ways or the means to build one, I just pretended that the dome light functioned as such. While it takes good concentration and acting to keep the charade going, once convinced, the level of noise from the backseat drops dramatically. At this point, the threat “don’t make me put the backseat mute button on” has some gravitas. I’m hopeful that before you find out that such a device doesn’t exist, one will be invented.
Car Stereo is Capable of Playing Hannah Montana CDs
When I installed my car stereo a few years ago, I chuckled at the remote control that came as part of the car stereo. “Who in there right mind would need a remote control for a car stereo?”, I thought. Who indeed. Once your mother bought you a Hannah Montana CD, it became clear that there wasn’t enough room in the typical automobile for both Hannah and me at the same time. I needed a way to prevent it from being played, and the remote control provided the perfect instrument of trickery. Hidden from view, the remote control, with its eject button, can be a powerful tool against horrible music. “I guess my car stereo doesn’t work with your CD”, I said, as it ejected over and over again upon insertion. Once again, my optimism about the future shows and my hopes are that such a Hanna Montana Free Car Stereo will be invented before you guys figure out that you’ve been duped.
Trademark Infringements On Food Names
Getting you guys to eat food is hard enough without trademark litigation getting in the way, so I figure it has been worth the risk. Many people know about Mickey Mouse Pancakes, but the Barbie Brocolli (aka cauliflower) has a good ring to it, as does Arial Sandwiches (also known as Tuna Melts), Angelina Ballerina Snacks (carrots), Dora the Explorer Fiesta Meals (tacos). Perhaps you’ll grow up to be marketing gurus.
I am not allergic to cats
It’s hard to look in the big beautiful eyes of your four year old who asks, “Daddy, can we have a kitten?”, and not give them what they want. It’s even harder to lie to those innocent eyes directly, but both of those things pale into comparison to actually owning a pet cat. I’ve had a cat, and as far as pets go, the are on the same tier as a poop throwing monkey. And no, we’re never getting a poop throwing monkey either!
I hope that now that I’ve cleared the air, you’ll forgive me for my simple past indiscretions. Hopefully you’ll remember the fun we had together and love I always have had for you as you have grown up. Life sure goes by fast and I hope you remember your childhood fondly and laugh about your crazy dad as opposed to seeking psychiatric therapy.
If it makes you feel any better, I’ll gladly give your own children a poop throwing monkey as a gift, and you can relive with them the childhood you never had with me. You’re on your own though with the Hannah Montana CDs.
Your loving father,
dad
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By
admin in
laura letters on February 26 2008
Dear Laura,
It’s been a couple of years since I wrote you a real letter and likely it would have been a couple more had it not been for a dream I had a couple nights ago. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I don’t want to write to you. It’s just that life is passing too fast these days and what used to feel like a week, usually is a month or more. So in my eyes, I haven’t written to you in 3 “will” months, which isn’t so bad.
So I want to get back to this dream I had, which is not exciting in the conventional sense, but still exciting for me. Usually I don’t remember my dreams, let alone the location of my car keys these days, so that night was extremely unique for me. Of the dreams I do remember seemingly all include some sharp pain in my back, which unlike my dreams, don’t end when I wake up. Both of my kids have a way of slipping into our bed in the middle of the night and while mom gets the smooth cuddly back half, I get the pointy elbows and sharp knees side. The fact that I remembered my dream at all and that it didn’t include agonizing back pain, made it remarkable in itself.
There are people who can vividly recall their dreams as if it were a scene in a movie. I, unfortunately, cannot and the whole dream was fuzzy for the most part. I remember frantically searching my home office, digging through box after box of paperwork, looking in desperation for something I needed to find. That thing, among all the things in my home office (which really should just be called “our room where we put stuff that we never use but refuse to throw away”) was an item you gave to me long ago. It was none other than a Frieda Pet Portrait Poster. In the dream, my efforts were fruitless, and I awoke in a cold sweat, frantic to find it. Not too thrilling of a tale I know, but it has had a lasting effect.
Hopefully I don’t need to jog your memory of Frieda Pet Portraits, but just in case, I think you mailed it to me in the late 1980’s while you were going school somewhere in the god forsaken mid-west, earning a few bucks on the side by drawing portraits of people’s pets. For years it hung in my cubicle wall, next to my beloved Mr. Potato Head (hey, where the hell is my Mr. Potato Head by the way?!) and over that period of approximately 7 years, it elicited exactly four responses to people who passed by. Two people asked me if I owned the pet in the picture, which to my chagrin, I had not. One asked if I actually knew someone named Frieda, a name that invokes a certain imagery. Finally, of all the people who walked by my cubicle, day in and day out over the course of many years, only one person asked me if they could call you to get their pet painted, which does not make for a very effective marketing campaign.
So, based on my calculations, I haven’t seen that poster in approximately 11 years, more or less, yet I had a dream about it just a few days ago. What could it mean? What harbinger could it be bringing me and is Frieda the grim reaper in disguise? I have many questions, but few answers.
I did think about going downstairs to my office and looking for it, but as of yet, I don’t want to tempt fate by re-enacting my dream. I have thought about it often over the last few days though, wondering which drawer it might be in or what box to which it might hide. The fact is, I’d like to think I still have it, as opposed to the alternative, that it might be gone forever, and quite frankly, I like the idea that it’s still down there, trying to sell portraits to people passing by. It’s better than the alternative, being thrown out and turned into a recycled paper mush, only to be reborn as some sort of fast food wrapper helping future generations to become obese.
While the location of Frieda Pet Portrait Poster is an intriguing mystery yet to be solved, one more nagging still is the meaning of the dream. Like the show “Lost, I have many theories, albeit none of which are very likely nor very satisifying. I’m not a big believer in the supernatural, but if I push my biases aside, it still doesn’t get me any closer to an answer.
“Could Laura be dead I wonder?”, I think to myself, thinking perhaps you have sent me a sign from the great final unknown. Quickly I come to the conclusion that your death would be highly unlikely. First and foremost, the life expectancy of laid-back hippy artists are pretty long with the lack of stress and the organic diet (steel coat oats are life’s elixir so I hear), so I rule out the typical lifestyle diseases. Traffic accidents in New Mexico, if there are any in such a remote region, must be few and far between, so I also rule that out too. That leaves the bird flu, which I would have likely read by now on CNN.com, or a tornado ripping you apart limb by limb, yet I don’t picture you in a mobile home, drinking Jack Daniels and smoking unfiltered cigarettes for recreation. “Nah”, I surmise, “Laura is not dead”.
My second line of thinking revolved around you getting back in the pet portrait business, which in my mind, may be a high growth occupation these days with all the childless boomers reaching retirement. I quickly googled “freida pet portrait” as fast as my forty year old fingers could fly, and for a brief moment, I thought I had my answer; the first result was Billy & Frida Studios Pet Portraits and Greeting Cards looked promising. “Thank you, Mr Google”, I thought, having simultanesously clicked on the link and quickly woven a love story in my mind of an artist finding their soulmate artist in the classified ads, both arriving at the exact same time to a potential pet portrait purchaser, first viewing each other has business adversaries, only to eventually fall in love with each other and form Billy & Frida Pet Studios. That tale ended abruptely however, when I looked at the web site and couldn’t find any indication that you may be involved in the enterprise. “No”, I think, “this, like my once doomed internet venture PetAssassins.com, is likely a dead end.”
I then decided to look at the obvious clue, the name Frieda Pet Portrait, working through each word as if it were a highly intricate Search-A-Word Puzzle, which in my local paper, is very close to the Family Circus cartoon. “Oh Billy, you kids can say the darnedest things”, I often ponder, but even with the complex diagrams of a kid’s meandering, dotted line path that so often show up in the Family Circus cartoon panel could not prepare me adequately for the task I had at hand.
I pursued the pet angle, which then gave rise to fear that my beloved hunting dog, Lucy, may be close to death. Sure, she’s old and infirm and has horrible, old dog, breath. It’s true that she recently changed status last year as an “outside dog” after one too many biological indiscretions on the hall carpet, so it is very likely that she won’t going off to college with my now 6 year old. However, I doubt highly likely that the dream was warning for Lucy.
So now that I rule out any supernatural message, I’m left with only my id and ego to blame. When it comes down to it, as a man, I don’t like to look inward, so it’s not a surprise I left that area well enough alone to find my answer. Perhaps Frieda represents my mother when I was a child, preventing me from having the dog I always longed for. It sounds plausible; yet I had a dog when I was a kid, so it’s kind of a stretch.
Maybe it has to do with the way I perceive how time passes. Perhaps it’s my subconscious clinging on to the past trying not to let me forget what life was like before I had kids, mortgages, and middle age. I’m not as lighthearted as I used to be, a little more jaded, and a hell of a lot more decrepit. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like all that much time has gone by. Perhaps I’ll have a panicky dream eleven years from now, wondering where my daughter’s stick figure drawing is on my current cubicle wall is and wonder where all the damn time has all gone. Has it really been 20 years since we graduated from college?
On that grim note, it’s time to get back to my current life and worry about that damn Pet Portrait Poster later. Perhaps by the time I find it, I’ll have forgotten I was looking for it in the first place.
Have any pet portrait tales of late? Any good organic recipes to increase my longevity? Is life good?
From one middle ager to another,
Old Man Will
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My Dear Will:
I hope this is the correct way to “write you back”, as you subtly suggested I do in the email you sent letting me know about your site and the heartfelt letter to me contained therein. Herein. Since I did not see a button that said, “Where Laura Can Write Back To Will,” I pushed the unglamourous “Comment” button, hoping it will deliver just as well.
Firstly.
Where the hell is my Christmas letter??!! I mean, your kids are adorable and all, but I want my Wagnerette, or whatever it was called, complete with articles, pictures, and predictions!! I rely on your annual publiction for plagarization during the rest of the year. It’s only March… now get busy!!
Secondly.
I am utterly flattered that you kept one of my 8 1/2″ x 11″ Frida’s Pet Portrait flyers as your cubby “poster” for so many years. I was only in business for about half of those years, thanks to my sudden relocation to Albuquerque. More on that later. Frieda’s enjoyed relative success in Chicago, helping me pay the bills while I was in school and affording me a mild buzz within my own community. I simply flyered local cafes and grooming shops and schzam! The calls came trickling in. I met some very interesting people thorugh the endeavour, including a fabulously wealthy (married) physical therapist MD who wished he was me, citing, “I hate what I do for a living. You get to make your own schedule, use your talents, meet people like me and have fun. You’re the lucky one!” Meanwhile, I daydreamed about what it would be like to pay all my bills at once or open a bottle of wine like he had, without checking the price sticker.
After I graduated from school, my roommate had moved away, I had no legitimate job and many of my good friends were gone. Hence, at that point it seemed logical to move back to NM where family and friends still awaited, as did the black vortex that I unwittingly married one year later (but that’s not a story worth retelling). So, I packed up the Datsun 210 with my belongings, two parrots and a friend, and hit the road. (Our encounter with “Grandma” as two parrots walked around on a table at a Grandma’s Restaurant in Oklahoma is worth telling, but we’ve only got so much time here.) Frieda’s, I decided, was coming too, sure to be my initial job in Albuquerque, if not my long-standing career and portal to city-wide celebrity.
So, I arrived home and immediately set about getting new brochures and flyers made with all current info. I hung them in every vet office, groomers, Stata Fair stall, horse show and cool cafe I could find. Guess what happened next? Absolutely nothing. In a strange parallel of your experience with one of my flyers in your cubby–only one person of hundreds who’d seen it ever expressed an interest–Frieds’s was dead in the water. I had people ask [insert Southern twang] “Why’d I wont a paintin’ when I cud jis take a pic-ture? Whose Free-duh?” Having just come from a wonderfully art-rich, art-savvy, creative populace in Chicago, I was now up against the dangerous and exasperating opposite–povery comingled with ignorance, particularly regarding art. It proved lethal to Frida’s; crestfallen, I discarded all of my sales materials, started calling myself Laura again, and moved on.
I ended up in the sporadic but more lucrative film and TV industry, where I made good money working as a set/signage painter. Highlights included travelling all the way to the Grand Canyon where the Charmin people, in a supreme waste of time, money, and materials, spent thousands upon thousands on a 30 sec. toilet paper commercial. The tp was raced against a scientist on a burro, with mystery and intrigue building as the viewer guessed, “Which will get there first?!” Like every commerical, it would air for 2 months and then be replaced with the next one, which created a moral dilemma for me. Anyway, that work lasted until The Repressed Years (see: ‘marriage’ above), from which I emerged a broken but learned individual with a baby in my arms.
When Isabella, my dear saving girl, was 8 months old, I took my first clay class. From there I developed a painting/raku combo technique that was apparently unique enough for me to get into galleries and make a living. More or less. During that 10 year journey, I was juried into a show in San Francisco through Funeria.com, who specializes in artist-made objects for use as cremains containers. Through Funeria, I now have urns in funeral homes thoughout the country and possibly Canada in the near future. Occassionally, I do receive requests for, guess what, in a comedic nod to the past: pet urns. In fact, when I received your first email, I had just finished painting a teeny-tiny cat on a small lidded jar, where someone’s cat’s ashes would be forever held. I guess past expereince pays off after all, and I could probably make a fortune with pet urns– synthesizing the $3 billion pet industry with the $10 billion funeral industry–if I were inclined in that direction, which I’m not. Frieda is dead.
Isabella and I live happily in a 1922 bungalow in Downtown Albuquerque, one block from my parents’ house where we eat meals 4-5 times a week. My studio is the remodeled detatched garage next door. It’s a wonderful thing to grab a cup of coffee and walk across the driveway to work. What I do can be seen at laurabruzzese.com, but it’s almost never updated with brand new pictures, or even decently sized old ones, because I don’t have the time.
I am glad to read that you are happy and healthy and continue to enjoy fatherhood. This surprises me a bit(the healthy part) in light of your college eating habits as I remember them. In fact, I can’t even comment on your cafeteria behaviors, because the whole memory is eclipsed by another, much stronger image: You lying sideways on the floor, just finishing a Diet Coke. You crunch the can and throw it over your shoulder, where it lands in a heap of hundreds more just like it. True, this image was your idea for a Diet Coke commercial, but still; you and your affection for the poisonous serum is one of my strongest visuals from that time period. That, and your extraordinary humor, which I continue(d) to enjoy through letters for years afterward. I still think there might be a book between us, or at least a collection of good short stories.
Write back and I can give you advice on Curbing Kids’Pet Cravings, The Rat Died, Dealling With The Feels-Funny, What To Do When Your Kid Goes Vegan and Stops Wearing Leather, and many other sophisticated parental territories that, having a 10 yr old, I have already charted. More or less successfully. Thank you again for including me in your virtual memoirs-in-the-making… what a great idea!
Still waiting for my Chrismas newsletter–
Laura