Yesterday, L. went up to the city and the pumpkin and I had a social day. My dad came over early and we made breakfast, bacon and whole-grain pancakes that he referred to as "different" but that he went back to for seconds and thirds. He brought along loads of extra ingredients just in case we didn't have stuff (professional breakfast). It turned out we needed his maple syrup and the oil he'd brought, because the syrup was a distant memory and the canola was down to its last drop. Score one to dad for knowing what he was getting into.
Last weekend the pumpkin and I'd gone over to his apartment bearing donuts and caffeinated coffee, figuring he wouldn't have any. He made bacon and broke out a bowl of strawberries and lit up around the kid, a grandfather learning the joys of that as his son learns what his dad already knows.
The old man is always trying to learn guitar, something surprising but not totally unexpected if you know him. The kid and I sat on the couch and he sat near the back door of his apartment with his back turned to us, plucking the notes of a song in his Grade 2 book called Lullaby . It took him a while to find the notes, but it added to the prettiness of the melody. The phrasing fell by turns to gentle pauses, like a kid trying to wend his way down to sleep, a sequence of cascading waterfalls from one level of alertness down to another. The pumpkin was all eyes.
Yesterday after breakfast was my turn to play my dad something on the piano. I've been taking an initial crack at figuring out Erik Satie's Gymnopédie #1 , a song that sounds simple and enchanting when you hear it, but one that is in fact laborious, subtle, and forever shifting and evolving, a real chore for a hack to muck through. I was worried my dad was going to gather up his breakfast equipment and split in a huff, but when I turned around he was dancing with the kid, who looked pretty interested again, albeit probably in the dancing most of all.
When my dad split the kid and I went to Lois and Chet's and watched football with them and their own little ones all day. Chet is obsessed with Elvis and casually played me these Claymation loops he'd spent the better part of two years crafting, of devotees praying unintelligibly to an angry King on a wide and vibrating altar, grim and menacing portents of a world sliding off its axis that nonetheless each seem to be craning their ears for the first strains of TCB or for some word from the King that will signal that they can stop caring, that they can lay their burdens down and fly into the beyond as free souls.
I leave the room for five minutes to go to the john and when I got back, Lois and her daughter are singing an extended You are My Sunshine to the pumpkin, who seems to be pondering the prospect of in fact being someone's sunshine, then changes his mind and starts crying for food or a pacifier or would someone get him a beer, dammit, just one beer to go with the game.
We walk around all day brimming with songs, looking for the first excuse to share them with each other. I feel like I've got about 58 years worth in there, packed away for winter under a sick-assed pile of depression, bacon egg & cheese sandwiches, and absurd put-downs.
