Wedding poems precipitate Waffling pumpkins
Does the concept of ‘parental guidance’ apply when the ‘children’ are adults? Will they read the family blog (www.danmartin.ch)? Is their disposition predisposed by genes and set in stone by the time they can talk?
Flashback
Memphis, Tennessee 1983
“I don’t like you!” Melika shouted.
“That’s fine, Melika,” I replied. “You don’t need a Daddy. I’m just going to leave. What do you think of that?”
“Good!” Melika exclaimed. Then she thought for a few seconds. “Can you change my diaper first?”
End Flashback
In Melika’s case, the case for ‘genes’ seemed strong. But: a few weeks ago, my blog contained the following sentence:
I turned to Melika. “Did you know that the amount of time between the moment I first saw your Mother and our marriage, is much less than the time you and Tom have allotted for your engagement?”
My comments were taken to heart. Destination wedding plans were ballooning in complexity and causing stress. Tom wasn’t making progress in his negotiations.
Wedding Venue “negotiation” (Cancún, Mexico)
“Are you telling me that a wedding beach party has to end by 10:00 PM?” Tom was astonished.
“That is correct, señor.”
“But if we..”
“No. Nunca.”
“Would you be willing...”
“No. no una oportunidad.”
Tom, master of negotiation, was stymied. There were no concessions, no movement, no dialog: the resort representatives were auditioning for Congress.
End “negotiation”
Tom and Melika decided to concentrate on a big celebratory party in Santa Barbara next year. To that end, they got married in a civil ceremony. (They’ll retake the vows at the celebration.) Naturally, Nazy and I gave our blessing. Retroactively.
And, while we’re looking retroactively: Darius, seeing the costumed photos of Nazy and me in the last letter said:
“I get it, Dad. You and Mom went as Tom and Melika!”
Other items as created an exciting Santa Barbara week:
“Rain.” Evelyn Taft, the KCAL9 TV weather forecaster, exclaimed. “Coming up, a special report on how to drive on wet roads. You won’t want to miss that.”
I ignored the ‘threat’. (Exclamation, not accuracy are Evelyn’s strong suit.) Imagine, then, my discombobulated shock the next afternoon: Nazy and I were in the car and the automatic wipers struggled into action. (They had been glued onto the windshield by Eucalyptus sap.) Cars pulled over to wait for the end of the disruptive atmospheric phenomena. I joined them to take a picture of the aberrant and bizarre happenings.
As I stepped out of the car, I noticed a vegetarian poet carrying a sign (Poems written, $1). “The end is nigh!” He yelled.
I replied appropriately:
“Around the bend comes the end,
there is no mend my stubbled friend.
Our kids we send, our hearts we rend
The bucks we spend on poems my friend.”
He tried to hand me a dollar as he said: “The sky has turned a strange color.”
“Those are clouds. Gray clouds.”
“Clouds? Gray?”
This week we also celebrated Halloween. Nazy and I were really excited by...
“Nazy and I, Dan?” What happened to verbal veracity in The Weekly Letter?
“Hmmm,” I thought before taking corrective action. “Nazy was really excited by Halloween. She bought a huge basket of candy and carved a pumpkin. She turned on the house lights and tuned the audio channel to spooky music. But..
“No one came, Dan.” She complained. “We’re finally back in America, but no one came to trick or treat.”
“What did you expect, Mom?” Melika explained later. “You didn’t put out Halloween lights, you didn’t turn your ground floor into a haunted house and you just made a jack-o-lantern out of the pumpkin.”
“A jack-o-lantern is traditional..”
“in Santa Barbara they expect a pumpkin carved into the shape of Michelangelo’s David. They like multiple pumpkins combined to create full sized replicas of Mt. Rushmore. I bet they never did that in Switzerland.”
“Au contraire, my dear.”
We continue our archeological excavations at the storage. Occasionally we actually find something..
“It’s a, eh, the Waffle Iron,” I cried. “No more frozen waffles,” I thought.
Predictably, Nazy was able to locate (instantly) the instructions for using the Iron. She even found the recipes in her completely organized cooking library.
“How does she do that?” I thought the next day when she handed me the allen wrench that I needed to disassemble a bed. “I can’t even find the records required to file taxes.”
And, finally, photographic proof of the Santa Barbara precipitation:
