My Own Personal Superhero

Dear Dad,

You probably don't know this, but when I was little, I thought you were magic.

Ok. It's not terribly surprising. I had, as you know, what might be termed an "overactive" imagination. I was sure there was something that lived behind the woodpile in the basement that would jump out and grab my ankles if I had to go down the stairs in the dark. I thought that Lucille Ball was actually Grandma Diane, and that everyone else had just forgotten to mention that to me. And I knew, just knew that you had magical powers.

I suppose lots of kids think their parents are in some way, magical (mom could definitely see through the back of her head, for instance) but this was different. This went beyond the preschool belief that the coin dad pulled out from behind my ear really came from my ear.  This was not blind belief that my father could solve any problem. You could, of course. But there was more. Because you, dad were not far off from Superman.

Not only could you do amazing things like ride you bike with no hands and fix broken toys and find my missing, precious, blanket when it went missing. There were several indicators at your work that you were, in fact, a superhero.

For example, the fat, waxy pencils that magically sharpened themselves when you pulled on the string that protruded off the side, causing layers of....something that was not wood...fall away to reveal bright red or deep black lead. Or there were the machines that turned a full sized, pasted up version of the newspaper into a tiny metal version of the newspaper which were then turned, somehow, into the newspaper. You could type on a typewriter with a cat balanced on your shoulders. I had seen the photo! And the line tape, although not really magical, was really cool. I'm not sure if you ever noticed, but I plastered the underside of your desk with it every time I spent visited you at the paper.

And then there was the magic portal. A tiny round room into which people (sometimes you!) walked, sliding the door shut behind them and then they were gone! It was better than a magician's trick to see you evaporate into the darkroom, especially before I knew it was just a light block to keep the photos from being exposed during processing. Although even after I realized what was beyond the magic door, I still thought you had superhero like powers. After all. YOU COULD TURN A PIECE OF WHITE PAPER INTO A PHOTOGRAPH DAD! No matter how hard I tried, I could never replicate the spell in the sink of my toy kitchen. (That is how, you might recall, I almost torched the house, trying to recreate the powers of the darkroom by draping Strawberry Shortcake's red dress over the bare bulb in my closet. The red light, after all, might have been the missing ingredient to make the spell work.)

There came a point, inevitably, when I realized that these mysterious and wondrous things were standard newspaper procedures. That the door revolved, developers and negatives were responsible for photographs and those awesome peel-away marking pencils were, well they were still pretty awesome, but not magic.

It didn't change the fact, however, that you still had superhero-like qualities. That you still DO have superhero qualities. I mean, you should listen to your grandson tell other people about the GIGANTIC fish his poppa can catch or how you once rode in a car with that guy who made chili and fast engines and he drove so fast that your face nearly peeled off (except it didn't, because, duh, even Carroll Shelby couldn't peel the face off a superhero. By the way, did you tell him that story? Because he tells it to EVERYONE).

So Happy Father's Day, Super-Dad (aka Super-Poppa) Not everyone get's to have a superhero for a dad. We all love you so much, me most of all.

                                                                  -Gillian

The Sledding Hill

So many of my childhood memories blur together in my head. Summer is one long camping trip where we fished in a river in Montana in the morning and got chased by water moccasins in a Texas lake after lunch and visited the Trail of Tears museum before dinner. I have a hard time separating out what happened when or even where. I see it in my children too. It's the reason that Briton will occasionally start a sentence with, "When we lived in Paris...." We didn't live in Paris, we visited Paris when we lived in Dublin. But to Briton, at 3, a week in a tiny apartment in Paris with his beloved Thomas trains covering the carpet was not very different from every day life in a tiny apartment in Ireland where, again, his trains took up all the available floor surface. Paris, Rome, Missouri, Dublin, Portland... it all kind of blurs together for him, the wheres and the whens.

Like summer, my childhood winters blurs together into one, long, Beverly Cleary-eque day. I don't remember feeling cold or wet from the northern Idaho snow. I don't remember my mittens growing soggy with caked ice or the exhahusting task of keeping the sidewalk of our corner lot shoveled, although now that I've lived in snow country as an adult, I can imagine it. I don't even remember feeling stir crazy with too many days indoors, waiting for spring. No. Winter was all about sledding, and did I ever sled.

My friend Molly lived at the top of the best sledding hill in town and since I spent my afternoons at her house until my parents were done with work, I had the advantage over almost every other kid at school. Apart from Molly and her many brothers and sisters and Hannah, who lived across the street and therefore also had a full time sledding wonderland just out her front door, I got the most sledding hours per day of any kid I knew. We would rush home from school, toss our homework onto the table, gulp down a bowl of ramen noodles from the steaming pot that seemed ever present on the stove at Molly's house and be back out the door before the prime spots were taken by the other kids.

We became experts in reading the iciness of the street, too fresh of snow and the runner sleds, though faster and more controllable, were abandoned for the thin plastic sheet sleds or if we could find one, a smooth bottomed toboggan. Both were alright, but the runner sleds were best. With two or three kids packed on, the pilot holding firmly to the rope with her feet wedged onto the steering bar, the rear position rider would give a good push and then jump on, arms wrapped tightly around the waist in front of them if they were lucky, or sprawled out on the snow as the sled careened downhill away from them if they were not. The road dropped sharply downhill for a block, evened out as it crossed another street and then dipped again until it leveled out finally another block down. More often than not, a run would go awry and dump you into the snowbacks somewhere along the first block. A good run would carry you across the first cross street and you'd crash somewhere in the second block. A great run, only achieved if you started dead center in the road, if your runners were sharp, your passengers well balanced and your aim true, ended in an Olympic ski run finish, slowing to a perfect stop in the flat of the second cross street, arms in the air in triumph. Those were rare and wonderful moments, but they could be achieved. And then, no matter where you ended, the long slog up the hill to start again. A lesser run made acceptable by the fact that you only had a short distance to go to be back at the top, a great run made easy by the lingering triumph of making it to the bottom without a crash. Up to the top, and down again, over and over until the afternoon light faded into darkness and the street emptied until the next day. An eternal winter's afternoon.

                                                       - Gillian

Huey Lewis and Whistle Pops

It’s raining buckets here in Portland. We lucked out with several unseasonably warm and dry weeks in January and now, as the weather gods are wont to do, we are being made to pay for it with that particular kinds of bone chilling rain that seems to define winter in the Northwest. And so, of course, I’ve been dreaming of summer.

It’s the rain’s fault, really. Although not in the way you might think. You see, normally, I ride my bike as much as possible. To work, to school, to the store. But after getting a thorough soaking yesterday on my way from work to the bus stop to pick up one of the kids, I decided all further transportation this rainy week would take place in the car. And in the middle of driving through this morning's onslaught, Huey Lewis and the News came tumbling out of the radio speakers and despite having to squint out the window to see, even with the wipers going full blast, it was summer.

A summer evening, to be exact.

I don’t have a lot of memories that are linked so firmly to music. Probably because I am the world's worst music identifier. The standing joke in our house is that any time I’m asked “Who sings this?” I answer “Hall and Oats.” Because, hey, it might be Hall and Oats. And if it’s not (well, even if it is) I don’t know.  But Huey, Huey Lewis I know.

I would have been about eight or nine, right about the age Evelyn is now. Old enough to come out on the boat with dad while mom stayed home with a toddling Garrett. Old enough to sit on the deck of our cabin cruiser, my skin prickling with that too much sunshine feeling that my children will probably never feel since now-a-days, parents have to be sunscreen Nazis (with good reason), and watch the wake from our boat turn from foamy waves into soft ripples as they splay out behind us on our way across the lake.

There are all sorts of associated memories that pop up in my mind when I remember those evenings. The sugar sweet strawberries and cream taste of a Whistle Pop suckers from the marina gas station. The thrill of fishing the cherry out of the Shirley Temple I would get if we made it across the lake to that bar, the one with what seemed like a zillion steps leading from the dock to the dining room. The smell of the water after a hot day, not fishy or stinky, but planty, and green. A great blue heron standing in the tall grasses along the shore, watching us, watching him. The scratchy feeling of an old beach towel, the game of watching for the "Sea Pig" to cross our path. All tied up with Huey Lewis crooning in the background.

I can’t remember what the boat looked like. I don’t recall what was inside the cabin or what color the hull was. But I remember how much I loved being there. Adding layers over my swimsuit as the sun set and the wind picked up on the water. Seeing the lights of town twinkling in the distance on our way home, starting out like a shimmery mirage and then growing larger and brighter and more familiar the closer we got. I remember Huey Lewis singing “Happy to be stuck with you” on the beat-up black radio and thinking, “Yep, me too.”

                                                                                                -Gillian