Walking Kid / Towels And Love.

Yesterday I stuck a brightly colored maraca in between the slats of Violet's crib for shits and giggles. Come on, I coaxed her from across the room as she leaned against the glider chair. Come and get that maraca!, I said. I was killing time, man. Whittling daylight.

So I didn't expect her to come pop-locking across the room in full strut. I didn't think she'd pick right then to hit me in the eye with a milestone. But she did. I moved the maraca to another spot and pointed it out to her and she looked up at me with the eye of the tiger and was off. Across the room, her little legs pumping hard and fast, she was a wild turkey chooglin' across somebody's yard. She made it over there, too. My jaw was on my boots. It had begun.

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Its weird to watch your kid walk around for the very first time in her life. What do you do? I pep talked her, but not too much. I didn't want to distract her with praise. And also I was pretty shocked, to be honest. I couldn't really find many words to say. Violet walking across soft carpet without any help from me. I am so proud. But also, to be honest, it sucks a little too. She needed me to get around in this world. Now she needs me a lot less.

Still, I managed to lay in bed last night replaying it all over and over in my head. That sweet little girl, any sweet little kid, taking their first steps...teetering on their tiny feet as the whipping winds of balance try and tear them down...rolling like a Weeble...moving with teeny fast steps towards daddy's open arms...breaking into big smiles, the two of us.

I saw the first real steps. A plump squat set of legs that will someday carry her down the halls of high school, through the streets of Paris, to Mars. Who knows. No one knows. But the possibilities set my banged-up soul on fire.

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On her feet, moving through her room from side to side, 14 Violet Steps this way/17 Violet Steps that way (yeah: I counted), my daughter chases the wooden maraca I tease her with. I stick it in the slats again and then once she gets there I shake it, I let her shake it, then I take it over (4 Serge Steps) to the chair and lay it there, its colors dangling off the edge...calling out her name.

She motors that direction, sometimes stopping for a look-around, sometimes just walking or running the whole room without pause. When she reaches the chair she picks up the maraca in her one hand. In her other hand she has the clabber that came in the same set of kids instruments. She holds them both upon her safe arrival over there and from behind her I rest my eyes upon her tiny figure from behind; her slight arms raise as far above her head as she can move them, the trophies in her hands nothing less than that belt locked into Rocky Balboa's fists as the music begins and the goosebumps cover your skin and your guts and your heart.

At that exact second, I want to fling the window open and reach out and just tear out a fat wad of cloud from the sky and wrap the kid in it. Wrap the little champ in a robe made out of heaven because I love her so fucking much and I don't know what else to do. Wrap her up like Mickey wrapped Rockey after every single round. No matter what happened. No matter how swollen his face was, no matter how battered and broken his body was, there was always Mickey waiting there in the corner for him. Mickey waiting to wipe away the snot and the bloody drool; Mickey slapping Rock's cheeks; Mickey waiting to simply tell his champ that he can do it: he can kick this guy's ass.

I waited all of my life to be that guy, that dude just standing there waiting in the dim corner, with clean towels and love.

The Legendary Lunch Gang Rides Again.

At the base of a massive mountain side, below all the high snow and tired elk and wildcats scrunched down inside sticker bushes beside trails where quail flirt and shit and dream and die, I stand in the apple-themed kitchen of my Mother-In-Law listening to the Sponge Bob Square Pants song and picking apart turkey lunch-meat with my fingers. To my side, my daughter sits in her highchair and switches back and forth,(rather insanely I might add), between wailing like a speared rabbit for no apparent reason and speaking cute baby jabber to me and the cartoon. Outside the day is shit. 600 mile-per-hour winds have arrived from Arizona or Nevada or Idaho, and they seem to be blowing in some kind of smoke. Maybe the valley below is burning to the ground. Whatever.

We have a lunch ritual.

Periodically, throughout my life, I have had lunch rituals. When I worked at the King of Prussia Plaza running a giant ultra-powered vac around the parking lots, sucking up Sbarro's slice containers/ ripped up porno mags/ broken cassettes/ human craps (classy): lunch would find me locked into a utility closet in some distant forsaken loading dock behind the mall. I'd pack my deer antler bowl with crappy shake and get baked in the sweltering darkness. I'd just sit there for like twenty minutes and then when I opened the door back into the world, even the hot summer afternoon felt like an alpine breeze, the sweat on my arms turning to Slurpee when it hit the air. Then, I'd sit down on a parking curb and eat some Doritos and some candy and a Coke. Life was a long fly ball that never landed. Lunch was a tiny summer vacation in the middle of every sticky day.

Years later came what I called FRENCH LUNCH. When I was like 7 or 8 I'd watch my visiting French relatives take over our kitchen and sit down to a table covered with cold cuts and cheese and pickled things and wine bottles. Sometimes my burly silent coal-miner grandfather, Victor, would fry smelts on the stove. I'd stand on my tippy-toes to see their tiny fish eyes get sucked back into their faces courtesy of scalding hot oil. Then, like nine hours later, someone would finally start to haul a dish or two over towards the sink. Grudgingly. Lunch had to end, but no one had to like it. Besides, everyone needed a nap before supper, which was to begin in an hour and last well into next year.

Anyways, I learned from the best and made it my own. French Lunch, we called it, although it was not all that French, I guess. It was me and my brother and the other four guys who spent all of our time together, gathered around a table in my Mom's kitchen when my Mom was away for the weekend. We would microwave frozen clamshells stuffed with fake crab. We would eat mozzarella sticks dipped in Ragu. We would cook burgers on the gas grill. We would have made a fucking goose on a spit if we could have figured out how to get a hold of one. And, of course, we would smoke bongs of crushed ice and mouthwash and Christmas Tree bud, and talk and laugh and eat and smoke cigarettes for hour upon hour; as afternoons faded into dream-like evenings in which the entire point of the very creation of all life up until that moment seemed to us right then to have pinnacled with 5 or 6 long-haired dudes listening to the new Led Zepplin box set as sexy delicious girls our own age drove cars down close streets outside our fortress; them not knowing about us and us not knowing about them. They were good lunches, they were. But that was long ago.

I've lunched in truck stop parking lots and legendary bbq joints and in smokey trains plowing across Ireland where coffee and cigs was your meal and you loved it as much as anything you ever ate. I've lunched on ferry boats crossing the English channel and up in jets high above the sea. For months on end, I'd eat three dollar chicken and mushrooms from a metal cart at Temple University in rough North Philly. They were some of the best meals I ever tasted; holding my plastic fork on a wall, alone, my young excitable brain hopped up on the Shakespeare class I'd just come out of as a cold-ass wind came flying down the street out of the ghetto two blocks away. The heat from the aluminum container warmed my lap and then just spread up through me. The steaming hunks of street food were little coals I shoveled into my furnace. But those days are over too.

These days there's this new ritual.

I put down tiny flecks of turkey meat so small that Violet looks at me like, WTF? But, I am a careful daddy who refuses to go through that whole choking thing too easily. I know it'll happen. It always does. Kids eat shit fast and all wrong and before you know it they're gacking away and you have to pick them up and try and save them. What can you do.

I serve thinly sliced meats at my deli. You can see through them. And they are never bigger than a Cheerio because that's what the books about raising kids say to do. I break toddler Cheeto snacks into dust piles. Here, I tell my daughter, have some cheese dust. Try choking on that. If I could slice the milk into slivers, I would do that too. I admit it. So what.

While I feed the kid long meals of small foods, I find some peanuts in a jar. I shovel some of those in my own mouth, and then some raisins from a bag. I wad up a bit of turkey and put it in my gob like old ballplayers used to do with Red Man and Beech Nut. I imagine this, here in the apple-themed kitchen, on this early spring afternoon when the wind blows smoke from God knows where. I imagine I am in the dugout at Yankee Stadium, moments before they call my name on the P.A., and I stick a bushel basket of chewing tobacco way back into my mouth, puffing my cheek out with Jawbreaker puff, the juices seeping into my gums/my bloodstream almost instantly just as they call my name and it booms throughout the midday park, the crowd rising to their feet in a massive show of love for the greatest third baseman who has ever played the goddamn game, I trot out onto that cool green summer grass...

Violet shrieks and smiles at her shrieks and I taste turkey in my mouth. Not Red Man. Not bong hits. Not smelts with hot eyes. Turkey. Sliced so thin, you can barely even pick it up.

And with that, I have my best lunches yet. Me and a kid and a minimum-wage sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea.

Every Day I Pause You And You Pause Me Back.

Yesterday, me and Violet were laying on the floor in her room.

That in itself is kind of cool because it isn't lost on me that in a few more years there will be no more of that horse shit allowed. Don't get me wrong: I'll try; when V's girls are all over after school and they're all jammed into her bedroom giggling and squelching, patting each others cheeks with strip mall rouge under posters of bands/unicorns/vampire romeos, I know I'll do one of those KNOCK-KNOCKs where you actually knock while you say "KNOCK-KNOCK" but in reality you were already inside the room with darting radar shooting out of your entire face long before the first vocal "Knock" was anywhere near complete. Then, I'll try and be the "cool" dad and sit down on the floor with the gang and start laughing at whatever it is they're laughing at already, even if I know deep down that, well, they're actually laughing at me...the TryHard in an XL Monsterface t-shirt.

(For those of you who just can't manage to see the future of music before it happens: in 2022 the music world is taken slightly by surprise when the batshit crazy delinquent and one-time teen idol flash-in-the-pan, Justin Bieber, joins forces with the re-re-re-resurrected singer dude from Stone Temple Pilots to form Monsterface, a band whose debut album, DIRTY UNCLES, features a kind of Chris Whitley-ish bluesy undercurrent along with piping hot Les Paul crunch and two lead vocalists singing out the conceptual parts of a filthy detestable uncle (STP) and his choirboy-gone-mad nephew (Bieber). And sometimes there's a dobro and no one anywhere in any facet of culture or the business of culture has any fucking clue what to do with it. I end up wearing the shirt, I reckon. Don't ask me why: it sounds abysmal.)

Anyway.

Violet's eyes will no doubt become weapons at that point, with poison darts emerging from her eyeballs at the rate of a billion per second when I plop down in her room. I will try not to notice. I'll try and be cool, reserved. No hokey stories of my "days in the band". Or my "years on the road". Or the "things I've seen". Nope. Instead, I'll try and just be chill and sip from my bottle of SmartWater (healthy-cool).

It won't work though, I know that. No self-respecting 12 or 13 year olds want to chillax with their fat dad when their friends are all over. Or even when they ain't. So after a few incredibly awkward moments of nervous eye darts and post-nuclear disaster silence, I'll get up and waddle out.

On my way out, I'll ask if anyone wants to see my new Target Bobby Flay gas/charcoal grill. No one will respond or even look at me.

When I close the door behind me, there will be a moment of pause...like in the seconds after a church bell chimes down the alleys of Florence on a spring Sunday morning...and then squeals of appalling laughter will be fired at me from behind the walls of a sacred castle in which I have no place. The sting will be the sting. There is nothing you can do, really.

So, it was with genuine delight yesterday afternoon when I popped down with 14 month old Violet on the mauve carpet in her pink and green room and put on YOU'RE A GOOD MAN CHARLIE BROWN on the DVD. We watched together for a while, her resting her head on my chest now and then (melting my cold steel guts!), and sometimes wandering over to pick up the metal triangle or the lummy stick in the corner before coming back for more cartoon. Then, at one point,almost unconsciously, I happened to push the little round PAUSE button on the DVD while my daughter was holding onto my hand.

Her eyes got big. Something sparked.

She squeezed my finger hard. Then again. She moved my finger away from the button.

Then, quickly, she pushed it back to the DVD. I hit the PAUSE. Charlie Brown continued his talk. She couldn't believe it. I was magic.

She moved my finger. I paused the film.

Her face grew more intense. She moved my finger again, as if she were leading an elephant across the lane.

I unpaused and the action kicked in. She did it, two/three/fourty times . Faster now, repeating the motion of pulling my finger to and from that one button over and over and over again with desperate rapidity, each time staring at the screen with bugged-out eyes, trying to fathom that it was all true indeed! That her daddy was controlling the universe in which one Snoopy existed! I was mesmerized too. I was witnessing my baby's brain at work. Even if she had a glass-bottom head, it couldn't have been any cooler, any sweeter.

Then, after fifteen minutes or so of the discovery being tested and re-tested, I started to think that I must be close to breaking the DVD player. There was no way it was meant to be fucked with like that, at that magnitude or at that speed. I ended the game with a series of Martian type tongue rolls that I do. It creates a clicky GodAwful sound that never fails to ruin all fun at any given moment. It worked of course, and the moment straddled a sunbeam and rode off into the late afternoon sun.

Then we went down to the kitchen to eat some cheese chunks and maybe some toast and maybe some juice.