The LYL challenge today was to write about what I have done that I am proud of.  There is the novel of course, that is a contribution.  It was a lot of work, and I loved doing it. As far as work and contribution go though, there is no doubt my most important job of all time has been being a dad.  I have two intelligent, engaged, beautiful daughters of whom I am justly proud.  And boy was it a lot of work – a lifelong project in fact.  Parenthood is definitely not for everyone, so if you are on the fence, stay there until you read this fairly typical episode of mayhem.

When my kids were small they wanted a horse. Having kids is more work than you can possibly imagine unless you have them, and if you do have them you don’t have time to imagine it. As such I was opposed to taking on what I considered to be unnecessary work – like pets. Pets add an element of chaos to a household which with 2 small girls and all their friends was chaotic already.

Other parents, when faced with the horse conundrum usually have a pretty legitimate out. “We live in a high rise sweetie” or,” I’m not sure horses are allowed in this subdivision.” However, we lived in Arizona, on a ranch, where several people already owned horses and rode them around in front of us on a daily basis. It’s an old dude ranch in fact, turned into an artist colony, about 15 houses on 80 acres with corrals and a tack room. Idyllic really. So I conferred with one of these horse people, KB, who’d been riding all her life.
“KB, How much does a horse cost?”
“Oh it’s not the cost, it’s the upkeep. They eat like horses you know.”
“So, how much a month?”
“You realize you have to include your kid’s medical bills in the budget.”

So I started a campaign to get the pet down to a more manageable size. I may not be a great father but I am a good negotiator. Over a few weeks I got them down from a horse to a gerbil. Then I started delaying the gerbil, hoping the whole thing would go away, but my 3 year old, Lyra, was not to be deterred. She had the most charming speech impediment back then, so she pronounced it gerbbull. “Dad, when can we get the gerbbull.” “Oh maybe tomorrow dear.” The next day, “Is today a good day to get the gerbbull?” “I have to work today, sweetie.” “Dad. When can we go and get the gerbbull?” “I have to cut the cord wood today.” And so it went. One day she was painting with her little easel on the porch and an errant breeze blew her almost finished painting face down on the floor. She balled her hands into little fists and yelled, “I WANNA GO TO TUCSON AND GET A GERBBULL RIGHT NOW. I know when I’m licked. We hopped into our 1964 Plymouth Valiant station wagon and headed off to Petco. A short while later we were the proud parents of Snowflake and Cawnmuffin.

There is no greater love than that of a 3 year old for her gerbbull. She carried it around all day, which made me and Cawnmuffin a bit nervous. Lyra could be a little rough and ready with her affections. I noticed when she approached the cage in the morning Snowflake and Cawnmuffin would run for it, resulting in her grabbing them by their tails. “Don’t do that honey, I don’t think they like it.” “Yes they do dad, they love me.” Hard to argue with logic like that.

Time passed, and Easter came. The girls were going to be in the Easter Parade in Oracle, our local town. Since their mother, Shelley, was more into this sort of thing than I was it fell to her to get them off to the parade. However, being a nurse, sometimes she was called in to cover a shift. Therefore on Easter morning – the only day of the week yours truly could sleep in, he was up at 7 to get the girls to their appointed rounds. I’m not really a morning person, except the part of the morning that falls after say 11, so I wasn’t really firing on all cylinders when I heard Cezanne, my older daughter, scream, “Dad, the gerbil’s bleeding from the butt!” I must have missed the chapter on “Gerbil Rectal Bleeding” in the fatherhood manual. I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee. I went running into the bedroom and the girls were covered with blood. I didn’t know that much blood could come out of a gerbil. It must have been exsanguinated! It was as if Quentin Tarantino had done a remake of ‘The Shining.’ I’m a Pathology teacher and the word “Ebola” wandered around in my head looking for a place to sit down. Can gerbils catch Ebola? Can they spread Ebola? I took the gerbil from Lyra’s bloody little fist and it looked – fine. It looked at me as if to say “What?” A bleary eyed examination revealed nothing amiss. Not a drop of blood on it. It didn’t compute; not at 7AM without coffee. I put poor Cawnmuffin back in his cage, stripped off the girls bloody Sunday Easter costumes, and did my best to clean them up and put new costumes together out of whatever I could find in the room without a crimson stain. The costumes were pret a porter. By this time we were quite late. As I shooed the girls down to the car Lyra said, “What about Cawnmuffin?’ “I’ll give him a transfusion after I get back.” “What’s a transfusion dad?” We roared toward the center of town at twice the speed limit, right in front of the Sheriff.

“What was that word you said, dad?” “Never mind honey.” But as I passed the patrol car I noticed that the Sheriff was shoving his interestingly clad kids into it. He didn’t care how fast I was going as long as I didn’t get in his way. We sped off to the staging area for the parade like Smokey and the Bandit, screeching to a halt in a swirl of dust. As I got out, the float started to move down the street. This parade is not passing me by! I grabbed one kid under each arm, and ran down the street with the law right behind me. We tossed our respective kids into the float, as nonchalantly as possible, and shook hands. The float glided away five whole feet and stopped. For 45 minutes. It was just getting into position. But then the parade finally started. I picked the kids up on the other side of town, about 100 feet away.

By the time we returned to the scene of the crime Shelley had returned from the hospital, Cawnmuffin seemed no worse for wear and that left us with a mystery. Whence came all that blood? But we had little time to ponder because the Easter egg hunt was about to start.

The ranch we lived in was a genuine art commune started in the 1960’s so many of the kids who grew up on the ranch had kids of their own by now, and they usually all came back for the Easter Egg hunt, traditionally held in the barnyard. One year we had a freak snow so the Easter egg hunt was held in the largest house on the ranch called the lodge. Arnold and Marilyn were very gracious to host it, being Jewish and all. But this year it was already hot, and would be in the barnyard. Putting eggs and chocolates in various hiding spots in the desert was a bit tricky. The fire ants were very fond of chocolate, and the hunt didn’t even count if somebody didn’t get stung by a scorpion. Mind you, that whole thing about scorpion stings being fatal is really overblown. Lyra was fine after a short hospitalization, but that’s another story. As Shelley observed, a scorpion sting isn’t that much worse than a wasp sting, and she’s right, considering the local wasps are the largest in the world. They’re about as big as a small plane, and for fun they beat up tarantulas, paralyze them, drag them back to their own dens, and leave their eggs on the paralyzed body to feed on. Being stung by a wasp like that is memorable.

So I was girding myself up for a late morning of dealing with scorpions, tarantulas, tarantula hawks, fire ants and guests. To fight off the guests I was preparing a pitcher of mimosas, and of course sampling generously to be sure I got it right. That’s when I heard THE SCREAM.

I was a pretty experienced dad by now and quite familiar with the cornucopia of screams that my kids, and everybody else’s could make. Sound travels quite well on the ranch. I could be sitting on the deck with a glass of Bordeaux, enjoying the sunset, and collecting screams, much as a birdwatcher might record a great blue heron or a yellow bellied sapsucker. “Oh that’s Nick. He hurt himself. Not too badly.” “Wow that’s Eva. Nobody screams like Eva. She’s mad at her sister.” “Oops. That’s one of mine. Sounds borderline.” To my experience, only one scream in 5 really needed intervention.

But this was a scream like no other. An emotional keening that made the hair go up on the back of my neck and over the top and down the front. It perfectly communicated that there was a crack in the firmament. Santa Clause shot god. Something unimaginable must have happened, and it did. Before I rounded the kitchen counter, Lyra levitated into the room. I don’t know for sure if her feet were touching the floor the way she moved, it was like an apparition. Anyway I was looking at her hands not her feet. In one hand was Cawnmuffin and in the other was his tail. Lyra was vibrating from head to toe so I handed her off to the nurse and took the other victim and his tail. Ah but his tail was still attached, it was his tail pelt, the tail cover, the tail end so to speak that I held – at a distance – in my hand. Cawnmuffin looked at me with such reproach I was compelled to say, “I didn’t do it.” But now the light dawned. His tail, cartilage and bone, was still very much attached, it was simply denuded. Lyra must have torn the skin this morning, which explained the blood, then one more pull on returning from the parade finished the job. Shelley and I exchanged victims. She disappeared into the bathroom and I took Lyra. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t speak. She was in shock. “It will be ok honey, I told you not to pull on his tail,” Wrong thing to say. Revved her right up again, now with guilt added; it’s that old Catholic touch. After a few minutes I got her down to about 120 decibels and her mother came back with a restored gerbbull. She had worked the skin back on and taped it together. She held her creation up to Lyra and I said, “That’s never gonna work, you should know that you’re a nurse.” Wrong thing to say again. It’s called diplomacy – that talent that I don’t have. I was right of course, the graft fell off, leaving him with a stump too short to grab. On the bright side Cawnmuffin survived.

He was a tough gerrbull who had many more adventures. Lyra learned the hard lesson of action and consequences at a tender age, and I learned that no matter how many gray hairs fatherhood can bring, you can always get more.