Meet Me In Those Good Old Hills Of Home.

In the portrait, taken sometime in the Whimsical 90's, his eyes are a cool cowboy stare, his young gun eyeballs throwing a wad of hot lead into the putz taking the picture in some photography studio at Sears or JC Penny. Regal, poised, the very soul of swagger, his rugged good looks are chiseled into the frame for future generations bounding up and down the stairs in my mother-in-law's house to observe.

And to top it all off, when the picture making went down: he wore a blue bandanna.

Around his neck.

Not a kerchief. Not some silky city-slicker lady scarf that some men choose to wear. Oh no. This was a pure blue badass American bandanna. A biker rag.

Come to think of it, it was the 90's...hell, he might have even been a Crip. That's just how he rolled.

One thing is for sure, though. He was a hell of a dog.

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Legend has it that Spliff sired quite a few offspring in his time. Over the course of his 17 years (thats like 3000 dog years or something), I like to imagine certain scenes...

A man opens his blinds one early summer Sunday morning. He takes a sip of his apple juice and smiles the smile of the truly blessed. Today is the Lord's Day, he whispers to the songbirds twittering in the treetops. He smiles knowing that his family, his wonderful wife and his seven lovely children are down in the kitchen preparing the traditional Before-Church breakfast of Canadian Bacon and waffles shaped like angels. The sun shines its ever-loving light down upon his shaven cheek and he feels the presence of Jesus Christ the Son of God in the warm glow that bathes his chosen soul.

He looks down into his yard, his property. He thanks the Founding Fathers for their strict laws of Liberty that allow him to be able to keep this sacred plot of stone and sod sealed off from the world. It is his, safe from, well, safe from the Mexicans...there: he said it and he feels good about it too, by golly. His eyes circle his yard like prison yard lights. And then.

Dear Jesus.

A white dog, the size of a teenage racoon! And its fucking the shit out of the family Collie. Or Lab. Whatever.

"Stop!," he chokes,"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

But its too late. Breakfast is friggin ruined. The whole holy fucking day is ruined. His blessed eyes are stung with the whipped dust of blatant balls-out Sunday morning dog sex.

His family is devastated. Not just by what has happened, but also by how Dad is handling it.

An hour later, 8 yards away...Spliffer is behind a poodle. The world keeps spinning, bro. Even on Sunday.

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I formed a club a few years ago, before Violet was born. Before we got Milo/Crazy Train/Frat Boy KegStand Labrador. The club was called The Wasatch Mountain Rangers and it had three members. Me, Max (our first lab), and Spliffer. That's it. At our first meeting we congregated around a road-kill the Highway Department dumped on our hill and took an oath to be forever loyal to our fellow members and to always chase deer if deer are around, no matter what.

I spent countless hours then watching up on the mountain side as, at first, a few brown swooshes would burst from some distant scrub bushes (deers). Then, The White Blur (Spliff), followed closely by The Black Smear (Max). I'd see them for maybe ten seconds and then they'd all disappear into another thicket. A minute later, the same scene would play out, except this time they were going back in the othere direction again! It was wonderful, just to stand there, a half mile below, and watch this ridiculous pagent go on and on and on.

Then, after an hour or so, I'd cut the deer some slack and whistle the whistle of The Wasatch Mountain Rangers and both fellas would come slamming down the hill to me, long strings of wild spit hanging from their snouts; their panting perfectly in time with the exploding of their crazy hearts; their eyes sparkling with life's fire.

Then we moved to New York City and I had to leave the club to Spliffer, by his lonesome, because he needed to stay behind in the West.

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Samuel Clemens once told a man that he was lucky Saint Peter didn't have to choose between the man and his dog at the Pearly Gates. If he did, Clemens told him, you wouldn't be getting in.

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He's old now and his eyes are grey and its time, blah blah blah. I hate the goodbye part. I knew this dog when he could run and fuck and eat and shit all at the same time. He would lay in the dark mines beneath the small bed my wife and I shared, for hours. I'd write songs up above, on the surface. And he'd mine dreams of deer down below. Then, at around 3pm, I'd give the whistle and he'd shoot out from under there like a hairy white bullet.

Then, we'd head for the hills. Us Rangers.

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People are gonna cry around here in the next few days. This is a house with a lot of life in it. A baby and two mamas and a daddy and two wack job labs and two Meerkat Manor pups. Someones always barking. Someone's always tracking dirt across the kitchen linoleum. But lately, it aint Spliff. He is tired. Monica brought him home some 17 years ago, a chipper wee lad with an eye for the ladies. And he brought this Butler family a lot of joy, a lot of laughs and smiles.

But, he's tired.

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Looking at the portrait in the stairwell, I have to laugh. With that blue bandanna around his neck and his ears shot up at full attention, he's so handsome and dapper.

He looks like Patrick Swayze. Seriously.

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Goodbye old friend. I hope you had fun chasing deer with me. I'll see you before long and we'll do it all over again.

Love,
Serge (aka: dude with treats)

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.