I was just scratching Miss Mia Sopaipilla behind the ears while watching a ladder-backed woodpecker tend to his knothole in the backyard maple and thinking how fortunate I am to have been blessed with zero offspring.
That I am aware of, anyway.
My mother laid a powerful curse on me early on. You know the one.
“I hope that someday you have a son and he’s just like you.”
Ouch. I knew I’d get dealt one of those, too, straight from the bottom of the Devil’s deck.
And by “just like you” Mom didn’t mean a smartass beer-addled dope-fiend college-dropout hippie layabout. No, she meant the exact opposite of whatever it was I had been hoping for, sprinkled with a hefty pinch of my own least attractive qualities, which were numerous.
For openers: A son? No, thank you, please. Smelly little dick-twiddlers who hide nose boogers under every horizontal surface when they’re not busy lighting fires in the crawl space.
Plus you know you’re gonna have to fight him one day, and if you pull your punches the best you can hope for is a draw. Then you have that to think about for the next few years as you try to lay down the law while he mumbles into his plate across the dinner table.
A daughter? Cuter, maybe, at first, but still a hard no. A daughter might not punch your dentures down your windpipe — she’ll be savvy enough to hit you where it doesn’t show — but she’ll have other ways to put you in the hurt locker, and I’ve seen a few of them.
Anyway, boy, girl, they, them, whatever. You feed and water them for a couple decades, try to teach them not to stick their tongues in an electrical outlet or have sex with the vacuum cleaner or just coax them out of the basement and into the sunlight, and one day they turn into Seventh-Day Opportunists or Realtors or born-again vegans or just hack your 401(k) for the down payment on a survivalist bunker outside Road of Bones, Idaho, from which they sell secondhand Chinese-made cargo pants to the Patriot Front.
Whoa. Did I say “you?” I meant “me.” My mom didn’t have anything against you. Though if she’d met you I’m sure she’d have come up with something.
You’re probably doing just fine with your kids. Probably. So happy Father’s Day, you poor, miserable bastards. Miss Mia sends her regards.
Mad Blog Media 
No kids here, either. I like the backpacker’s credo. When you leave, leave no trace.
My old man and I had the near-shootout at the OK corral once when I was in high school. Didn’t have much to say to each other for a good number of years, but you can’t hold a grudge forever. Well, at least we couldn’t. Then when my mom was dying, we suddenly found that we needed each other pretty badly. I guess that was her gift upon sailing off from this world.
My goodness that’s a little dark. Reminds me of a song.
My goodness, that’s a little dark. Get the Roadhouse out, tune it up, play some blues and sing it out. Twelve bars is the healer.
Didn’t think the first comment went. Well, Lennon’s darkness and Mr. Mo’s cure.
Really, Pat. I guess this wasn’t the place to sit down for a cheery, upbeat Father’s Day read.
My first marriage ended before we dropped any kids, which is probably good because I think that one was going to tank one way or the other. I went from Party Animal to Studious Nerd and she became a Republican. Second one has worked out well, although when we were in our thirties and early forties, we were both in the Publish or Perish Mill at the academic ashram. The thought of raising kids while raising funds or creating programs made both our heads explode.
No kids for us either. And, that is an American and world wide trend. Guess we all think the planet has enough occupants.
Yeah, I think the best thing that could happen to humanity is a more lethal pandemic. We are eating ourselves (and every other species) out of house and home.
Whoo, reading too much Cormac McCarthy and Cactus Ed Abbey lately. Both of ’em breeders, but can you imagine their bedtime stories? Cannibal hobos and eco-raiders.
Welcome back from the dark side. 99 in the shade here, and the doves are carrying canteens
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still glad we don’t have kids, if only because we don’t have a basement for them to squat in while they wait for that B.A. in English to dollar up on the hoof.
Meanwhile, 88° here and we haven’t seen rain for a month. I just came back from a short hike and there’s a fine tan powder coating the bottom of my walking stick. You can hear the cacti panting.
One nice thing about a hard science degree is that when I tired of the academic ashram, I could get a job working on weapons of mass destruction. Imagine explaining that to one’s child.
“Dad, what do you do at work?”
“I help build bombs that could turn all of Albuquerque into a mass graveyard in less than a second.”
“Why, Dad?”
“The money is good. And I hate Albuquerque’s traffic.”
There were advantages to growing up in a military family. You were pretty much already an unindicted co-conspirator in the Military-Industrial Complex.
I remember being disappointed that the old man wasn’t Dick Bonging it around the Pacific Theatre in a P-38 until I realized that no matter what a guy was doing over there, from tagging Zeros to delivering Bob Hope to USO shows, he could have gotten his ass shot off pretty much any old time.
Also, I’ve spent most of my life living in a target zone. The greater Baltimore area, Ottawa, San Antonio, Colorado Springs, Tucson, Denver, Albuquerque. I always figured that no matter who made ’em, we’d get a close look at one eventually.
I had one uncle who got safe duty as an aide to Gen. Raymond Wheeler in the SE Asia command, so he was more likely to be seen riding elephants in India than shooting it out with the Japanese Army. My other uncle worked on one of Patton’s railroad reconstruction battalion in Europe, so I figured he didn’t see much hostility. Then he opened up his scrapbook at my mom’s wake, when we were all pretty potted, and said “this is the place where we were taking incoming from German 88’s. The whole scrapbook was filled with pictures of places blown all to hell.
58º and we hadn’t see the sun in a month!
Finally got a break this weekend, looks like the mushrooms that sprouted these last few weeks will have to find someone else’s shit to sprout in.
We are glad as well. Andy and Liz are our “kids” and friends. So, we are lucky times two.
We never had kids either, not for lack of trying in our early 30’s but… Then a soon to be single mom moved in next door with a 1 yr. old about 6-1/2 years ago. We started watching her daughter a few months later then a couple of years ago she decided her daughter needed a sibling so she went the AI route and didn’t bother with a man. Last fall, after my 71st B’day, we had to learn how to care for a 3 month old!!! Talk about a learning curve.
Holy moly! Good on ye, Bob ould scout. We’ve provided some light assistance to the couple next door as needed, and even that requires some serious mental gymnastics. Their two girls are old enough to sass us back, which makes it sporting; they may have the edge in terms of energy, but we have decades on them in the wiseass business.
Patrick, where some see darkness in your post I see illumination of a sturdy, brilliant thread connecting to the greatest of Foaming Rants and my introduction to your inimitable style!
Happy Father’s Day to those who celebrate!
Whah, thankee, Miz Libby … I was kinda pleased with it myself. As you observe, it’s something of a throwback to the days when I had deadlines to meet at a couple-three different outfits and had to keep sweating over the grill like a short-order cook in a tanktown diner. “Order up!”
The lede and the basic structure came to me as I was (wait for it) “scratching Miss Mia Sopaipilla behind the ears while watching a ladder-backed woodpecker tend to his knothole in the backyard maple and thinking how fortunate I am to have been blessed with zero offspring.”
The rest of it just jumped aboard like hobos hopping a freight. Mom really did say that. Dad and I threw hands once. I’ve heard tales of daughters out for blood that made a little father-son hand-to-hand sound like badminton in the park.
But I don’t know anyone whose kids had sex with vacuum cleaners, sold real estate, or hawked baggy Chinese chinos to wannabe Nazis. That there is what we pro scribes call “artistic license.”
I definitely had a big smile on my face and was giddy with delight at your eruption!
The cat connection was especially welcome for this “cat mom”.
Herself realized this morning that Miss Mia has been with us almost exactly half of our married life together. What a fine kitty, and still full of surprises at age 16.
Here’s a Blast from the Past: Miss Mia from 2007, shortly after we brought her home from the B-burg Humane Society.
Right you are Libby. That is the second “duh” moment I’ve had this week. This post is a top drawer rant!
A delight!
There’s no such thing as a foolproof contraceptive, and sometimes that’s a good thing.
We lucked out with a 2lb preemie, who is now a successful, self driven molecular biologist married to a high school teacher who graduated cum laude. I claim no responsibility for the positive outcome, as she was an easy kid to raise. I recall standing in the grocery checkout line when she picked up a candy bar and asked what it was. I told her and asked if she’d like to taste it. Nope, she calmly put it back.
Wow. A two-pounder? Chihuahua. And smart, too. Never eat the grocery-store “chocolate.”
Now, me, I was a seven-pounder and dumb as a stump. I would eat anything and often did. This explains much.
Two smart lads once sang, “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.”
Turns out, memory is fleeting and the road ahead doesn’t stretch out as far as we thought, as far as we had hoped.
“Two of Us.” Haven’t thought about that song in a while. It was one of my favorites off the “Let It Be” album. I liked “One After 909,” too, because it sounded so old-school compared to most of the overproduced studio bits the lads had been cranking out.
Late to the discussion here, but I always thought the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” was “Survive, reproduce, and die.” ????? 🙂
Again I’ll recommend Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
I thought it was “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
Whoops, nope, wait a minute. That was Conan the Barbarian’s take on what was best in life. He was a tad single-minded and right-of-center for a governor of California.
I’d pay a dollar to see Arnold thump the dumpster. Somehow I think there would be no lamenting, by women or anyone else.
With what is left in the windshield ahead, good on you no qualms about the mileposts to the rear. Jus’ sayin
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” — Satchel Paige
As we’ve previously discussed, Northern Exposure isn’t easy to find on the web, thanks to various licensing issues. But there’s an NX reference for everything, and I wish I could find the clip of Holling Vincoeur telling Shelley that he didn’t want kids because he came from a no good line of ne’er do wells that needed to end with him.
Maybe someday in an alternate universe Northern exposure will be as ubiquitous as, say, The Friends Show
You can get the complete series on DVD at Target for $40. We bought one last year. We also bought the complete series, including the movies, of Columbo there again on DVD.
Speaking of “Northern Exposure,” Graham Greene, who played Leonard Quinhagak, will be joining the cast of “Reservation Dogs” when the new season kicks off in August.
I think that might have been during the second season. I recall an episode where Shelley believes she is pregnant and I believe Holling discusses with her the issue about his background. I’ve got the DVD’s but I don’t have the season 1 & 2 discs so I can’t confirm it. Funny, I like the show but as an Alaskan, it gets under my skin that it utilizes Alaska as the setting and story line. People in Alaska are less dramatic and use less makeup. But oh! That’s right. It’s a TV show.
As for Graham Greene, I just saw him last evening in the last episode of 1883 that I was watching. He was one of the better parts of what I thought was a series that could have been a lot better than it was.