Forging Ahead Back In Time

While I was away on vacation, my sister had a baby.

I was relaxing on a small beach in Rockport, Maine, watching a ten-year-old blonde girl stab a hopefully deceased lobster with a stick when I got the typically dry text message from my father:

"NOAH is doing great was born
around 1 today big baby 7 lb 11 oz
everyone is doing great i love you
dad take"

My father's text messages are always the same: factual, uneffusive, grammatically dubious/containing scant punctuation and always, always concluding with one extraneous word. I suppose that, whenever he wants to send a text message, he merely recycles one he already sent, deletes most of it, starts anew, and forgets to delete the final word of the old message. Often I receive texts from him that end in a word having to do with his business-- manufacturing undergarments for sports teams. One day prior to Noah being born, he sent me a text about my mother:

"mommy is a nervous about everything
Now I know where you got it from ha ha ha
love dad phillies"


One thing he has gotten very good at with his phone is taking pictures. My wife and I enjoyed several of them while we were in Maine, sent as attachments to his bizarre text messages ("mom @ noah" [ed: I presume that meant "mom & noah"] "you sister is running away" [ed: the picture that accompanied this text is my oldest sister holding Noah as if he was a bomb slathered in radioactive honey] and, my personal favorite, "mom is high" [ed: I have no idea what the fuck that means.]) It was only upon our arrival home tonight that we were treated to the full barrage of Noah pictures on my father's cell-phone, including two others of my oldest sister holding her new nephew both gingerly and increduously. According to my father, my oldest sister's nose looks inordinately larger in these pictures than it ever has before. He now refers to her as "Pinocchio."

While a new baby was entering my family's life back in Pennsylvania, it seemed only fitting that I should make the acquaintance of an old baby in Rhode Island. Last night, I got to experience my wife as a captivating, newly-minted four-year-old girl, courtesy of some dusty Betamax video tapes, and the perhaps even dustier Betamax player that resides in her mother and father's bedroom and, miraculously, still functions. While we fumbled our way through setting up the Betamax player, which had lain dormat since, I presume, around 1987, when most of those items went the way of the dinosaurs and vinyl bench car seats, I realized that people were more intelligent back when Betamax players were popular. For example, the Betamax video cassette cases were emblazoned with the word "epitaxial." I mean, I can only presume that average, run-of-the-mill 1987 grown-ups knew what that word meant, otherwise they wouldn't buy things listing it as an apparent selling point or virtue. Also, you had to be pretty clever to actually set up the Betamax player, and being Hercule fucking Poirot couldn't hurt if you need to find the tracking dial.

I can't speak for Mrs. Apron but, for me, it was a pretty strange experience, sitting there on the edge of her parent's bed, next to my 27-year-old wife, watching her four-year-old self be-bopping around a totally different world. I mean, there she was, opening up presents that turned out to be not Anthropologie skirts but Babar & Celeste music boxes and puzzles. And, unlike in all the photographs I've seen, this version actually talked! She looked straight into the lens, at me, and she told me about how she went into the swimming pool at the Howard Johnson's and she stuck her head under! I mean-- what a big girl! What a sweet girl. A bossy girl on occasion, but, on the whole, a sweet girl. With her raven-haired father and her smooth-faced mother, clad in the eye-popping duds of the day. Frozen in time and bustlingly alive with motion, all at once. I'm glad the Betamax held on for one more trip down an epitaxial-laden memory lane.

We never had a video camera when I was a little boy. The earliest film of me comes from when I was twelve years old, filming a 6th grade English mockumentary about the Loch Ness Monster in which I played four characters, including the program host, and I referred unknowingly to another character called "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python. Fortuantely, my English teacher refrained from calling home about that. Though it was an innocent faux-pas, the more innocent, earlier years exist only in still pictures, and I think that's actually okay. If I could see my beautiful and energetic mother moving around, devoid of her trigger finger and her arthritis, my robust father with more, well, hair, I just don't know. I don't know if I could sit through that without hot, blinding tears streaming down my cheeks. I don't know how my wife did it. I felt a thickness in my throat last night, and they weren't even my movies, my history. I guess I just look at the world differently than she does, and I think that's okay, too. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and enjoy the world the way it used to be, without obsessing and depressing about what it is now or what it will be in days and years to come.

Well, I suppose it is anyway. I wouldn't really know.

It's okay, though. There are always new memories to enjoy, to someday join the old ones. There may not be Betamax films to preserve in a layer of dust-bunnies, but there are text messages, like the one my father sent me on Tuesday. He's been on a mad dash to find my sister, her husband, and their brand-new baby a house, seeing as they're rapidly outgrowing my sister's one-bedroom apartment. He sent me a text to inquire about houses for sale on our street:

"We just saw a twin near you the
realestate kathleen stupid blond told
me twice on the phone 185,000 i went
there at 5 to c it she said sorry mistake
its 285,000 i almost toppoled her out
the fucking window"

Gas Leak

One of my worst fears came true last night.

(No, the Monkees are all still alive and I don't have AIDS. Try again, please.)

We had a gas leak in the house.

Mrs. Apron called me at work at around 5:50pm, her voice quiet and shaking:

"When are you coming home?"

As soon as I walked in the front door, the odor almost knocked me down. I could taste it.

I called the PECO emergency number, and they were knocking on our door eight minutes later.

Sidebar: I find it amazing/appalling that PECO can have a truck to a residence in eight minutes for a gas smell, and the Philadelphia Fire Department has problems getting an ambulance to a residence in under forty minutes for a cardiac arrest. End of soapbox.

The PECO guy carried a device that looked like a game-boy attached to a dildo and he stuck it inside our stove, oven and all around our boiler, our hot water heater, and all along the pipes leading to the washer and dryer. Mrs. Apron and I stood in the basement and I held her close as the dil-boy contraption made ticking and clicking noises and then, when he would put it by one of the pipes leading to the dryer, it made a noise that sounded like an air-raid siren mated to a freshly-raped cat.

"I guess that's the bad noise, huh?" I said to the guy.

"Yeah, that's what all the customers say."

Oh. Pardon my lack of originality, the house we just bought is seconds away from becoming the next Hindenburg.

Of course, I shouldn't be giving the guy such a hard time. He did, after all, prevent us from dying in a way that would have made Hitler smile had such a tragic demise occured. After identifying the source of the gas leak, he isolated it and shut off the pipe leading to the dryer, and so our avacado-green Lady Kenmore had the night off.

I then made the mistake of contacting my parents for help. All I wanted was the phone number of a general contractor to replace the pipe fitting. My mother answered the phone.

"Hi. Everything's fine, okay? (pause.) We've had a gas leak in the house."

Fortunately, I didn't hear the dreaded thud on the other end of the phone signaling that my mother had just collapsed like a bulldozed tree in the rainforest. After I explained everything and asked for the phone number of a general contractor she says,

"Talk to your father."

"But, I don't want to," I whined. Ah, how quickly we regress. Twenty-eight years old to five-and-a-half in under 3 seconds.

I told him what happened.

"Well, mummy, you know, this is not something you could have predicted. It's okay. These things happen-- I mean, shit-- if you'd bought our house, you would have had some big problems, too. So, you know-- don't feel bad--"

"Dad?" I interrupted, seeking instant clarification, "I didn't call you because I need a pep-talk. I called you because I need the phone number of a general contractor who can fix our fucking pipes."

My father decided that you do not call general contractors for this kind of job, you call a plumber.

"But the PECO guy said--"

"FUCK HIM, OKAY?! Let me tell you what a general contractor does, you idiot! He comes, looks, and he says, 'Oh, well, fuck! I can't do all this.' And he hires a schvartze plumber who comes and does it, and then you get TWO fucking bills!"

He told me he would find the name of a plumber, and then he hung up on me.

Four minutes later, I get a text message from my father:

"Call us thanks dad c"

We were just on the phone together-- why is he texting me? And what is "c?" My father's text messages always contain at least one extraneous character, usually a full word, that has absolutely no relevance to the preceeding text message. It's a mystery, just like everything else about him.

I called him back.

"Do you have a phone number for me or a pep-talk?"

He had the number of a plumber. He charged $39.00 for a house visit, but then he applies that cost to whatever work he does.

Sure you do.

"Old pipes leak, the way old people do," my old landlady once told me, while thoroughly intoxicated. She was undoubtedly speaking from experience, on both counts, being the owner of a 122-year-old house and the owner of 67-year-old internal waterworks. The plumber who came to our home this morning showed me some very old pipes, corroded like a Chrysler product from the 1970s. Four pipes and their connectors had to be replaced, as did the antiquated and now illegal plastic connector for our clothes dryer. He was there from 9am-1pm, and the bill was painful, but now my wife and dog and I aren't all going to die together in the home in which we plan to live together for a long, long time.

While the plumber was hard at work, infiltrating our pipes and bank accounts, my phone buzzed. It was you-know-who.

"Hi r the gas pipe
fixed? Love dad mcnab"

I think I'm going to start calling him that from now on. I kind of like it.